GBRK
6mo ago
I don't disagree with signaling, I just disagree with the particular signals I get from literary agents. I would still love to be able to signal that I am not just a writer, but an Author; I want the cachet that comes with being able to tell people to look for my writing in their local bookstore.
... and also, this is entirely petty, but I have to defeat my nemesis. I have a (2nd or 3rd degree) cousin who is published, does make their living writing, and has their book in my local Barnes and Nobles. (They live in another country entirely). They're also about my age. So despite the fact that they have no clue I exist, and that at a glance I don't have any problem with their writing, I've determined that they're my rival and made it my life goal to surpass them. (Only partially kidding.)
As for a vanity business... probably never. I'm either going to approach the problem with killing intent or not at all; if I just want status and creative freedom without regard for income I can go write fanfiction.
GBRK
6mo ago
Please, for the love of dog, actually fucking write this. I NEED to see the Burger Xianxia cinematic universe.
GBRK
6mo ago
Naomi Novik
also helped code AO3 and still writes fanfiction under a pen-name. Plus her fairy-tale retellings and scholomance series were very solid reads, if undeniably girl-coded.
She's like the spiders georg of female-author-male-appeal. Legit built different.
GBRK
6mo ago
I'm surprised and pleased by how philosophically coherent this move is. If the government is going to give out industrial subsidies, why not get something in return? We all know the big corporations will dodge any tax we throw at them, but trying to get around paying dividends risks pissing off their own power base.
That being said, I'm very bearish on the chances of this particular administration doing anything productive and socially useful with additional industrial control. Probably it just goes toward enriching the Trump empire with corruption.
I already have 30th percentile income and wealth. Making an extra 10k or 20k a year would be nice, but I could earn that for less effort by focusing on interview prep and certifications for my profession. That's why my utility curve is logitic in this case. If I get published at all, I get an initial surge of utility just from the status effects. Then there's a long doldrums of, "I'm happier the more money I make, but this doesn't seriously change my life." Then there's the jackpot of, "getting famous enough to do nothing but write." I've already taken most of the low-hanging fruit for improving my live within the confines of my current circumstances; setting a new utility basepoint would require dramatic changes in capabilities beyond what I already have.
Your best bet is to go indie. If you absolutely must attempt traditional publishing, skip the agents and try submitting directly to Baen.
Good point, I should be thinking about direct-submission places too... I have a pretty limited view of the publishing industry because frankly I mostly just () books. After a brief look I've already found the litRPG publisher Aetheon, and I think it's pretty interesting that they phrase their inclusion statement as
***Aethon Books is committed to the publication of works by writers of all genders, ethnicities, color, orientation, nationalities, and religious or political beliefs. We are concerned only with the quality and commercial viability of the works submitted to us, and not on the personal backgrounds of the authors.
... which is implicitly meritocratic. Ironically, I bet that their output is far more varied ethnically than the bigger publishers. (Some of those Indians CAN write, haha. And they're doing it on royal road instead of kindle unlimited.)
I'm willing to serially publish in principle, but this book in particular isn't designed for that; it's too short and dense to be serialized, so instead of butchering it I'd rather start from scratch.
GBRK
6mo ago
right-wing Catholic epic fantasy (I know that is not how you described it)
TBF it's not "right-wing", but "catholic epic fantasy" is close enough to the mark. I knew exactly what I was doing with the scene where the main character consumes the blood and body of an undead demigod.
But yeah, I'm aware that "quit my job" money is a long shot. My mindset is that each book is essentially a lottery ticket. The EV is <1, and it's even lower if I go for trad publishing over self publishing. But my utility curve isn't linear with respect to income here: I see the biggest bumps at, "convince a small number of dedicated people to invest a lot of effort into understanding my book" and "make enough money to quit my job." In-between, there's not a whole lot of difference between making 5 or 10 or 20 thousand dollars.
I AM interested in your experience shopping your books around. Are there any (politics-independent) tricks you picked up querying or submitting to contests?
GBRK
6mo ago
Trad pub has a much higher risk of failure, but if you pick the right lottery numbers it massively magnifies your success. That's why even the most popular selfpublished works eventually get aquired and sent down the traditional route-- because they know they'll benefit from the investment of institutional resources.
If I wanted side-hustle money, selfpub would be better. But I'm aiming, however foolishly, for quit-your-job money, which is a much higher bar since I'm already well renumerated. To that end, I'd much rather have 10 trunk books or flops trying to pen a bestseller than 10 books that get a modest audience but require a permanent time commitment for marketing, events, merch, kickstarter, etcetera. I'm not interested in the fate of all selfpublishing authors I know in my local writer's groups. Death or glory. Nothing else.
GBRK
6mo ago
I'm a big fan of serial novels, and I've previously written (fanfiction) serially before. But as an art form, it's like comparing a TV show to a movie-- for all the things that are similar, there's still plenty of things that change. For example, I'm committed to polishing to book to a mirror finish, which means obsessing over line-level prose, snipping dangling plot threads, and cutting out fat like I'm sculping a character from greek myth. But all of that goes directly against the grain of serial fiction, which favors expansive plots, slower development, excessive-- almost extraneous-- detail, and update rate over polish.
I'm not going to rule out publishing serially in the future, but this book specifically would only work as a traditionally published work
So I'm starting the search for a literary agent for my fantasy adventure novel. I haven't sent out any queries yet-- I've got at least one more round of beta readers and I still need to perfect a query letter-- but I've been looking through manuscriptwishlist and querytracker for prospective agents. Now this didn't come as a surprise or anything, but the ratio of female to male agents is something like 7:1. And making some assumptions based on biographical elements, I'll wager that the ratio of female to straight male agents is something like 15:1. And despite the fact that as a catholic I'm already pretty redpilled culturally in spite of my neoliberal principles-- wow is the performative support for alphabet + "marginalized" (read: nonmale, nonwhite) identities off the charts. It's genuinely pretty disheartening.
Now I could, in principle, present myself as exactly the kind of person these agents want: a brown author with a story set in a non-euroamerican inspired fantasy and female gender-non-conforming main character. (She actually conforms pretty well to the gender norms of her own culture, but I made a concerted effort to have all my cultures be strange and bizarre.). I even address a "socially relevant cause" (immigration) as a secondary theme. But the idea of contorting myself into their box disgusts me. And besides that, my treatment of the theme draws intentional parallels between immigration and imperialism, and poses the question of tradeoffs: security vs prosperity, the right to preserve your culture vs. the need to enforce uniform standards of good behavior, the interests of the immigrants vs. the interests of the locals, etcetera. And also the main character is genuinely racist. I don't think that'll go over well with the kind of people who "care deeply about supporting marginalized voices" and specify, "NO MORE BORING CIS WHITE GUYS" in all caps.
Despite that, I'm still going to go through the submission process. I'm not going to cope about sour grapes-- most probably, if I can't get an agent, it'll be because my manuscript just isn't good enough. Or, even if it is, it might just not be marketable enough, for reasons completely unrelated to politics. I was this close to listing "made in abyss" as a comp title; my level of politics-neutral degeneracy is high enough that I'll be genuinely surprised to earn out an industry-standard $10,000 advance.
But still-- if anyone can point me to resources for finding agents who aren't NPCs, I'd appreciate that. I'm also thinking about direct submissions to conservative-leaning mid size presses but worry those will just pose the equivalent-but-reflected problem.
GBRK
6mo ago
I hate to concede this because /u/The_Nybbler behaved in such poor faith, but on the basis of your critiques of the model, and the study you linked about the food wasting question-- you have successfully convinced me that school lunches are not a net economic benefit. I went to the trouble of finding the source, and you eventually went through the trouble of looking through it to point out the problems therein-- just as I'd asked. I can't find a counterforce with better quality evidence, so you win.
Did we really have to go through the whole rigamarole of you insisting that any source that disagrees with you can be dismissed because it's leftist propaganda? We're on a debate forum. If someone posts a glen beck video as a source the correct response is to counter it on its merits and only then dismiss, ignore, and ban the poster if they continue to be an idiot.
GBRK
6mo ago
Building a wall is a little silly. I'm pro-immigration, but in this case that l means I think the amerian military should immigrate into ottowa and annex it. Canadians are very aware that they aren't a real country-- this is the obvious solution to that.
GBRK
7mo ago
anti-dan already attacked your source.
No, he didn't. He attacked the people responsible for the source, and acted like that was sufficient to dismiss the source itself. That's a textbook ad hominem.
Buddy, I am really not asking for much. I'm not asking you to make an hour-long takedown of the study's contents, I'm just asking you to find a concrete problem with it or find a contradictory source. Take my response to the CATO article as an example: I didn't go in and question every single stat, I just raised a single, salient problem.
You don't have to find the perfect source or argument, you just need to do a little bit better than I did. I probably won't be convinced on the spot-- but it'll force me to either give up on convincing you or do even better. In the latter case, even if neither of us ultimately manage to convince the other, at least we'll both have better knowledge of the subject that's tested against oppositional analysis. Which is still a pretty great outcome, for anyone who believes in the value of reasoned, good-faith debate. And if you don't believe in that value, why are you on the motte? If you just want people to agree with you without regard for truth value there are other, better platforms.
(also I just realized that you and anti-dan aren't the same person. Which is honestly kind of sad. You have the energy to dogpile me, but not the energy to find a single source to the anti-school-lunch position?)
GBRK
7mo ago
You are wasting so much time attacking my source in principle instead of just addressing it directly. Either put up or shut up. I'm not asking you for blind faith, I'm asking for you to put as much effort into a counterargument as I put into my argument. If the only method to mantain intellectual hygene is to dismiss opponents out of hand, then symmetrically I should do the exact same thing for any evidence conservatives propose to me-- including any evidence about institutional capture. But I don't believe in that, and I don't think you do either, because we are on a discussion forum. So, discuss!
GBRK
7mo ago
Replying here to both your comments.
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are inherently worse than India despite the only major difference being lack of Hinduism and castes.
This is a big claim when from my perspective the historical performance of pakistan and india have been pretty similar in terms of GDP per capita. The main reversal has come only recently, which seems like it would directly counter your complaints about indian society becoming more dysgenic. And saying that there's not a lot of differences between those countries-- and that those differences are shared with countries that perform both better and worse than india on an IQ and economic basis-- indicates that those differences are not decisive in increasing indian IQ.
India needed castes to create smarter outliers at the cost of dumber underclass which is a better deal than Bangladesh.
Elites are smarter than their underclass everywhere. You don't need castes to do it. Rather, the evidence is that creating caste-based elites makes your nation underperform relative to other nations with similar capacity for elite formation. Consider Mexico, which got mogged by brazil and the US in the 20th century at least in part due to political instability caused by the remanants of its caste system. Consider how recent european history is basically just relatively meritocratic states stunting on relatively aristocratic states. Picking smart people to form your elite just works better in every way that picking an elite and trying to make them smart.
This is simply untrue, these exams are the reason why French revolution happened
source? And what does that have to do with my argument about selecting for IQ? Even if you're right, it seems to fit pretty smoothly into my model of, "create intermarrying genetic castes -> castes put on bottom have a rational reason to revolt".
and also why you see Asians represented disproportionately in places as their society lives and dies by exam conferred status.
And this counters my argument how?
Did China or Korea produce anything resembling what Indo Europeans did until the 21st century?
Um, yes? From here:
For the Roman Empire ca. 165 CE we accept an estimate of a total population of 75 million and of an imperial income per capita of kg750 of wheat equivalent...$900
For the Han Empire ca. 2 CE we accept an estimate of a total population of 57.7 million and of an imperial income per capita of 1.88 times the subsistence minimum, or $750.
Also relevant,
1.72 subsistence minima ($690) recently estimated for the Aztec Empire ca. 149211. For the Byzantine Empire ca. 1000, an income level comparable to the Aztec has been proposed38.
It's not an exact match, but considering that rome then proceeded to collapse and never re-unite while china had long stretches of stability, it's fair to say that European and Chinese civilization were probably fairly comparable at various points in history.
The world has natural order which wants the blue blooded to be with the blue blooded, the son also rises as they say. Why are castes bad? Do you prefer a slightly higher median with a way fewer smart people. Castes are religious but I'll only defend the sociological factors here.
You foundational assumption-- that castes increase the total amount of very-smart people-- is wrong. India has the same normal distribution of IQs as everyone else. If you were right, India would have a right-skewed distribution. The caste system may or may not provide IQ benefits to the elite castes (I'd guess "not" looking at how the Indian elite underperform relative to the european and chinese elite), but it definitely fails to provide that benefit to society at large. At best, castes don't do anything except split India into a variety of fueding interest groups. At worst, they reduce global selection pressures for IQ without actually doing much to improve outcomes locally.
GBRK
7mo ago
Are you a poor or rural republican? Your logic makes sense, but I'm looking for insights specifically into their psychology.
GBRK
7mo ago
has made such "poor form" necessary for intellectual hygiene
That's cope and you know it. Either address my point or concede it. I'm not doing a gish gallop; I made an argument around a single point and provided concrete evidence to support it. I'm not trying to troll you-- or at least, as per the rules of the motte, you should assume in good faith that I'm not, and you should report me if you find evidence otherwise. It's fair to say that on the internet you need to be wary about expending way more effort than an opponent who just wants to provoke a response, but it should be obvious that that's not the situation you're currently in. You put in some effort to make an argument. I put in some effort to counter it, and a little on top of that to find a source. You can surely afford to put in a little little more, knowing that if I fail to respond after that point I have effectively conceded the argument.
If someone sincerely believed in the benefits of smoking and took the effort to post a source in support, the least I could do is post a single study countering.
GBRK
7mo ago
How is it going to impact your state Motte users?
As usual per republican policy, it'll probably affect poor areas more than rich areas, and rural areas more than urban or suburban areas. Can any poor or rural republican reply if they think otherwise? I can understand why most republican policy is in the best interest of republicans, but I'm honestly stumped on this. Is it legitimately just ideological consistency? A willingness to suffer to Do The Right Thing?
I posted a source. Dismissing it on its face is extremely poor form. You can criticize the modeling assumptions, or go and find a countersource, but it is frankly bad faith to say, "that's cool but I don't believe you" without even specifying a threshold of what you would believe. Why should I make the additional effort to find a high-quality unbiased source when what you've posted here makes it seems like you'll dismiss any contradictory source as leftist propaganda?
You're correct that simply posting a a few countersources won't be convincing, but only because I would then look for the counter-counter-sources that I'm sure are out there, but am unwilling to pre-emptively expend the effort to track down. But if I fail to climb the escalation ladder-- if it terminates well below where I expect it to rise-- then I guarantee you that I will become less sure of my position. That might take the form of me saying, "I'm unconvinced of your point," rather than a full capitulation, but anything short of, "I remain completely convinced in my position" should be a win for an anti-free-lunch partisan.
edit: and if you want a specifically conservative source, I think it's interesting that cato institute's takedown of the institution completely fails to address the central claim of these pro-free-lunch studies: that they provide a net profit per dollar. Absence of evidence/evidence of absence, and all that, but it's telling that they talk a lot about cost and yet never actually come out and claim that the return on investment is less than one dollar per dollar.
GBRK
7mo ago
The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor.
The problem is that the Brahmins created their own poor. Enforcing a caste system is intrinsically anti-meritocratic; it's not a surprise at all that the various castes specialized culturally for space-filling internal competition rather than competition across the entire breadth of the roles available in a society. It's accurate to point out the high performance of indian elites exported elsewhere, but compare the relative performance of the exported euro-american middle class, not even the elites, over the 19th and 20th centuries and even today. The british soldiers that conquered india weren't from a special military caste, they were farmers and the urban poor. Britain had an ingrained system for assigning social roles by ethnicity, but by its permeability succesfully channeled the impulses of its poor toward competing within rather than against the system. India, meanwhile, is caught in a power struggle. If every caste somehow agreed to stop viewing itself as a unitary cultural group overnight it could make much more progress; as it is, I find it unlikely to settle down until either interbreeding becomes commonplace or another coalition of castes finds themselves on top.
GBRK
7mo ago
If you can't throw an apple and peanut butter sandwich in a bag how are you even considered a parent?
Why are you framing this as being about the parents? School is an investment in the children. Society benefits from well-educated children, regardless of parent quality. Society benefits from well-fed children in much the same way. I doubt you would have any problem with the government feeding children in orphanages. Just extend that logic to children unlucky enough to have shitty, but still-living parents.
The food is either not healthy
This is the fairest critique of school lunches. But here the problem is pretty clearly the lack of health, not the presence of lunches. If only Michelle obama was president...
or not eaten by the target audience.
School lunches still have an empirical net benefit in spite of that. And frankly, you're probably underestimating their reach, since the linked report estimates that they made up 50% of children's daily calories on average. Anyway, if this is an issue, it's probably downstream of the above problem.
It's dysgenic in that the more blue blooded simply let the underclass run wild due to cheap labor, now that we are in a democracy, the extant of that damage is incredible.
It's incredibly unlikely that the effect of government policy post-independence has had more of an effect on local genomes than the effect of literally thousands of years of caste-based rule. If you have less smart people now, it's because of the castes. And in any case, while I'm inclined to doubt IQ research in general, even if I were to accept it, IQ looks like it's basically just correlated with cold weather, and high-iq countries almost invariably lack castes. Actually, if I was going to bet on anything increasing IQs, it would be the existence of longstanding meritocratic civil-service exams tied to a powerful, well-renumerated bureaucratic class. Tying wealth and therefore reproductive fitness directly to a measure of analytical fitness seems like it would apply the most powerful selection over the broadest possible pool of candidate genes.
Also, England didn't replace their underclass. It did literally the exact opposite-- replacing celtic with roman with germanic with norman nobility. The underclass sticks around and interbreeds with the newcomers every time, both accepting "fallen nobility" but also producing its own occasional homo novus granted land and titles. Honestly, if you want a genetically elite upper class that's just objectively the sane way to do it-- instead of assuming prima facie that your ancestors 3,000 years ago had the very best genes and you're going to preserve them forever, just continuously skin the cream off the top while siphoning the congealed milk off the bottom.
My grandpa mentioned her-- he keeps track of all the successful people he's related to/otherwise knows in order to flex.
I plan to reach out only after getting published; it would be intensely gauche to show up like someone pretending to be long-lost family of a lottery winner when I have no similar accomplishment to call my own.
More options
Context Copy link