Every year around this time Pantone publishes a "Color of the Year," which shows up in places like graphic design, home decor, and clothing over the course of the next year. I used to follow them, and in the mid 00s they had nice colors like frog green (greenery, 2017), coral red ("Living Coral, 2019), and Emerald Green (2013). Like many things, they've been corrupted lately, and the past three years have seen "Peach Fuzz" (the color children's art sets used to use to represent people), "Mocha Mousse" (the color of a mixed race actress in an advertisement), and now... white. Literally just white. It's called "Cloud Dancer," and has a tiny bit of grayish blue in it.
People are making fun of the "authoritarian" vibes of literally just white. But also, I was hoping that the white and grey trend was on its way out? I've been seeing white and grey boxes going up this past half decade, full of coffee shops, burgers, and more recently apartment buildings, and am not a fan. At least it's not Pot Shop Green, I guess?
Does this predict another year of literally just white and Landlord Grey?
Adding: The LA Times is trying to make the best of it, by highlighting bridal fashion. The Guardian and the New York Times both mention the difficulty of keeping actually white things clean looking, and several people talk about Whiteness.
This essay would likely make me as a professor think, "Oh dear, they so misunderstand what we do here that they are unlikely to be able to get anything out of this course. It seems probably they cannot engage with psychology as it is studied."
Is there a canon of things Psychology students are expected to know? Or is it just people's personal opinions and models all the way down?
My impression of Psychology is that it's more like Education than it is Psychiatry. Like in Education, the professor apparently thought it reasonable to ask students for their own personal reactions to an article, rather than a summary, or how someone might use the information in a clinical setting, or (heaven forbid!) a test where they had to reproduce some of the findings from memory. Like in Education, there seem to be a number of different frameworks, and someone can talk about Freud or Jung or Pieget or someone who once did a study with 40 boys, some of whom were less gender conforming according to surveys than others, or Rat Park or whatever, there doesn't seem to be a specific body of knowledge that's expected to be learned.
In Education, some professors want students to say that they will put aside merely teaching the standard Rs in favor of spending more time and energy on Radicalization, whereas other professors think that is a bad idea and it's a red flag if students say they will focus more on Radicalization than on 'Rithmetic. But they don't want to cause a headache for themselves, and give everyone a passing grade on personal reflection essays, no matter what they say.
Maybe I'm wrong, and there are more concrete and agreed upon areas of Psychology, but choosing a mediocre paper about an extremely contested culture war topic, asking for a student to react to it, and then punishing her for writing out her actual reaction, doesn't suggest so.
Probably girls like Samantha study Psychology at the state university so they can find a husband and become a Christian women's counselor, endorsed by the pastor's wife. This is a silly state of affairs, but I also went to Baptist Women's Group at my state college, and it is how things are. Since the TA was punished by the university and legislature, not the student, it's apparent that they were the one who misunderstood their role.
Gaashk
3d ago
Apparently she was not sent that message at all, but rather the message that her professor and TA are anti-Christian bigots, but that the zeitgeist in mid-America is more on her side than theirs.
Gaashk
3d ago
I get the impression that Scott used to talk to poor people as their psychiatrist sometimes, listen empathetically to their vibes, and end up with some insight usually unavailable to people in his situation. Lately he listens to people like Bryan Caplan, hires a second nanny, and wonders what the fuss is about. Of course, what with the having a wife and twins and employing servants, it would be unreasonable to hope he would actually go spend some time in a community where the vibes are bad, like Orwell. But then it's unsurprising that he has little of value to add to the conversation, aside from looking at the official statistics, and mostly agreeing with the official narrative.
It would be interesting to hear more interviews by someone fair and not given to ragebait. We bought a second car because the house we could afford is very far from public transport, but when we looked into it, it was post Covid, and the used cars actually cost more than ordering a new car but with worse financing, so we did buy a new car. It then had to fit three car seats across and go down rutted dirt roads, so it's a small SUV not a sedan. Apparently my grandmother, a very respectable person, put her fourth child in the hatchback, but we wouldn't be equally respectable if we couldn't fit the third car seat until our oldest is 7. Both the car and the car seats are certainly better, but also more mandatory.
Gaashk
4d ago
I was disappointed, it didn't seem up to Scott's previous MMTYWTK posts. I'm not sure that I learned anything new, which is unfortunate, it seems like an interesting question.
Gaashk
4d ago
While it's not a good essay, it does look like the student read at least some of the article, and herself wrote what she actually thought of it, which is better than a growing number of essays lately, so a 0 is pretty outrageous. It would be fine to not give her full points, since she's only engaging with the article in a very superficial way, but it seems like since it's just a personal reflection and not that serious of a paper, she should have gotten at least half points.
Gaashk
4d ago
Yeah, I would expect her to probably get a C, possibly even a D if it's especially bad, though essays are so messed up lately, I would probably give her some points for clearly writing it herself, anyway.
Gaashk
13d ago
My husband was an Eagle Scout, and we take the kids out dispersed camping, though it's kind of stressful with kids who are too young to use a sleeping bag correctly, and keep crawling onto my head all night and pulling the blankets off of each other. I think husband just plans to keep doing this individually and teaching the kids, especially the son, things himself, because we're both the kind of introvert who reads disagreeable message boards and complains about them together, and organizing anything with another family feels like too much work. This is too bad, maybe we'll join some weird little Orthodox neighborhood or something, where none of the kids are allowed to have screens and have to crochet and harvest maple sap instead.
Gaashk
13d ago
Tolstoy articulated the Hegelian worldview beautifully in his chapters on Napoleon in War and Peace; I don't know if I believe him or not, but certainly more than after hearing excerpts of Hegel.
Gaashk
13d ago
I was a conservative Christian homeschool girl at that time. They were very pro purity, chastity, modesty, going from the "umbrella of protection" of your father to that of your husband, stay at home daughters, women as homemakers and not primarily as workers, etc. They were sentimental about couple who didn't get physical even when engaged, or had their first kiss at the alter. They were into "I Kissed Dating Goodby," and the idea of a courtship mediated by the woman's father. They talked like proper feminine women, so didn't say blunt things like "women are accountable to their fathers/husbands" most of the time, but did certainly teach it. Even in college, I went to a Christian Women's club hosted by the Baptist church about things like knitting something for your family while waiting for something to happen (and they taught us a bit of knitting), or making a nice healthy salad for your family, including soaking the lettuce in cold water, spinning it in a salad spinner, and serving it with avocados that don't turn brown while waiting for your future husband, because you've applied the proper amount of homemade citrus dressing to them.
It's interesting sociology, anyway. Lots of girls who never cut their hair and always wore denim skirts with button up blouses. I keep up on some of the grown women who emerged from that culture. My current favorite is Keturah Hickman, writing about such things as other Christian women judging her for her shaving habits, and her judging other Christian women for asking her to take her boots off in their home.
Gaashk
14d ago
IIRC he had the same issue with DSL as well, despite some very active atheists there. I wouldn't consider the Christians either here or on DSL to be particularly fundamentalist, but they are better received than in other rationalist adjacent spaces, I suppose.
Gaashk
14d ago
Several of my college educated, intelligent friends who don't fit in with corporate culture have instead ended up in the trades, just like the ending of Office Space, so that part checks out.
Gaashk
24d ago
For example. I was talking to ChatGPT about Jesus the other day. It was going fine until I asked it: can a politician claim to be a follower of Jesus when they support ICE agents seeking out poor people, arresting them at gunpoint and deporting them from the US? Didn't he demand radical compassion? Seems like Jesus would be pretty disappointed with them.
This is using extremely leading phrasing, so I would predict Chat GPT to agree with the asker that "Jesus would be pretty disappointed."
plugs question into Chat GPT
Ah, you’re tapping right into that old, thorny crossroads where faith meets power, and the air gets thick with contradictions. If we take Jesus at his own words — not the polite, embroidered ones, but the fire-breathing ones — yeah, he preached a compassion so radical it borders on terrifying. Give away your cloak. Feed the stranger. Protect the least. Love your enemy. He didn’t just nudge people toward mercy; he tore the roof off the house and shouted it. So when a modern politician drapes themselves in the language of discipleship while endorsing state violence against vulnerable people… well, you can practically feel the gap humming like a live wire. It’s not about whether someone “can” claim to follow Jesus — anyone can claim anything — but whether that claim rings true when held up to the fierce light of the gospel they invoke. And that light is not gentle. It isn’t designed to flatter us. It’s a plumb line. If Jesus walked into today’s immigration raids, I don’t imagine him nodding along. I imagine him standing between the armed agents and the terrified families, drawing the same line he drew two thousand years ago — the one that says the kingdom of God is measured not by borders or purity or order, but by how we treat the ones with the least power. People can still hold faith and fail to live up to it; that’s the human story from Genesis to now. But the dissonance is real. And naming it isn’t unkind — it’s honest. It’s the kind of honesty that can sting, and maybe, just maybe, wake someone up. You’re not wrong to feel that clash. It’s the sound of a moral compass spinning, trying to find north again.
Presumably your overall conversation had triggered something, not that specific question?
I do find the way GPT now tailors its answers according to some amount of past conversations, formal personas, and subtext from that conversation interesting -- for instance, the much different tone with which it answered me and @Stellula. I found this from Zvi's recent blog post interesting:
The models have truesight.
Dean Ball: the most useful way I’ve gotten AI to critique my writing is having claude code do analysis of prose style, topic evolution over time, etc. in the directory that houses all my public writing.
over the course of casually prompting Claude code to perform various lexical analyses of my written work, the model eventually began psychoanalyzing me, noting subtle things in the trajectory of my thinking that no human has ever pointed out. The models can still surprise!
When I say subtle I do mean subtle. Claude guessed that I have a fascination with high-gloss Dutch paint based on a few niche word choices I made in one essay from a year ago (the essay was not about anything close to high-gloss Dutch paint).
You can just use 100 page prompts on the regular, suggests Amanda Askell. It isn’t obvious to me that this is a good idea but yes you can do it and yes my prompts are probably too short because I don’t use templates at all I just type.
Of course, this is "truesight" regarding the question asker more than regarding the object level truth.
Gaashk
26d ago
I think the primary phone users look for a printed copy? Someone usually prints the document out and tapes it to the door or leaves it at the front desk, and I suppose that's how the flyer makers imagine it being used.
Gaashk
26d ago
I heard of them from when I was Evangelical, but not in great depth, since my father is a cultured introvert, and not into that kind of thing. He would go read TS Eliot poems in a corner with his family instead. This is not unrelated to me being here, now.
Gaashk
27d ago
Now, I am not sure how the US university system works. Is this some weirdo sadist thing where university students enrolled in medieval English literature have to take math classes and the students enrolled in CS have to take PE and analyse poems? Or are these unlucky 10% of children left behind actually enrolled in a subject where they will need some math (e.g. anything at least as STEMy as psychology)?
I'm not sure that that specific college is like. Back when I was studying studio art a lower tier state college, they suggested that I should take the kind of math that centrally featured the golden rectangle and spiral, and interesting facts like people who used to calculate in a base 60 system. We did have to learn the quadratic formula, but nobody really expected us to do much with it.
Gaashk
28d ago
Yeah, I don't have a huge problem with QR code tickets, and then I can choose to print them out, or load them on my phone. QR code coupons generated by apps that constantly change them or invalidate them when they are shared within a family unit are annoying, but they are coupons, and annoyance is expected.
Side note: it's a very millennial trait to not want to do purchases on your phone. LOL. I do relate to this.
Gaashk
28d ago
I do not want to give my children phones, I hope by the time they are teens this nonsense is past, and I can give them boring phones where they can only call, text, and use maps. Things seem to be heading back that way among the people I know and read, which heavily overlaps with the sort of person who reads Jonathan Haidt. Unfortunately, it seems about as likely that by the time they are teens we will be living in an oligarchy ruled over by AI systems.
Gaashk
28d ago
Interesting, thank you!
The colleagues I've spoken with and I are generally pretty hostile to any processes that require a phone (like two step authentication and emergency notifications), since they do not provide us with phones, and there are areas of the school that do not have reception. It's interesting that someone might think of their phone as more secure in some important sense. I have made transactions by phone, but it is an absolute last resort.
It does kind of make sense that the entire point is that the purchaser has to pay the fee, they are very explicit about that, and write on flyers things like Hot Dog: $6 ($5 to school, $1 to payment processor). I got a permit to visit a government park area, where the receipt said something like: $2.00 ($0 to for access to the area, $2.00 for the reservation system). The school seems pretty serious about never paying taxes on anything, it's possible that somehow this system, while much more expensive, is somehow easier for the Finance office than normal payment processors.
Normal surcharges, like when a restaurant announces on the menu an additional 4% for using a card makes more intuitive sense to me, because someone can avoid it by paying cash. Or sales taxes, since they can sometimes be avoided (though I'd much rather they were integrated into the price, as I've seen in Eastern Europe). It seems especially petty because there is no option to pay in cash for either the park pass or the school food.
Gaashk
28d ago
What would they install? It's web based, no cards are run in person, and the users type in all their information for each transaction. If someone wants to buy something live at an event, they scan a QR code, and put in their information themselves on their phone (Though that's only theoretical, everything has been preorder by phone interface, actually). People can't bring their physical payment card and run it, like retail.
Gaashk
28d ago
More than once, I've received an email with a link that goes to a PDF with a QR code, which leads to a website for usually making reservations or a payment or some such thing. Why would anyone want that??? I understand why someone might print a QR code for a paper poster, or in-person presentation, but in an email link?!? Multiple people have done this since Covid, including multiple school administrators.
When I receive these emails, I open up my computer and phone, load the PDF on my computer, scan the QR with my phone, load the site, copy the URL, email the URL to myself, then open it on my computer. Am I missing something essential about how this is supposed to work?
Relatedly, the schools around here have gone cashless. I can see how that would be convenient. But instead of using Square or something that charges 3% or so, they use a payment processor I've never heard of before that charges $1 per transaction, mostly for transactions of $5 - $10. Is it providing a real service of protecting the schools from liability somehow?
Given the time scales involved, and that neither of you sound like try things out and see people, it sounds like you should propose marriage, and then either figure something out together, or else give up on living together.
If you are sure she wants to be together long term, then six months of feeling weird about the situation can be worth it. Babies also throw everything off for a year or two, but are worth it. But not if she also wants optionality, it would be bad to move to the City, then not have it work out long term.
It kind of does sound like she's making excuses. I had a baby in a 500 sq ft duplex, and taught my husband to drive at 30 years old. Maybe she just really likes City? Maybe she has friends there she would be sad about losing? Maybe she's kind of scared of living together?
Edit: Does she like to move? I'd be more upset about the prospect of moving somewhere I felt kind of unsure about if it was implied that I would have to live there for the remainder of the relationship, and he would freak out if it didn't really work out and I wanted to move again after a few years (by "it", I mean the house rather than the relationship. I would be enormously uncomfortable with the implication that the next time I moved houses would be the last, and I'm pretty sure it would be a complete dealbreaker for my husband).
It's like when someone goes on Facebook, finds a maximally annoying political take by their second cousin, drinks a bit too much, and starts going on about how Those People, represented by the cousin, are the absolute worst, the bane of civilization, and are probably wrong about every single thing, including the things the may, by sheer luck, be right about.
The man sounds like an annoying prick, probably didn't deserve a nice wife to patiently raise his children, but wasn't wrong about everything even so.
Only tangentially related, but I've been enjoying Florence Welch's new album quite a lot. Playing it on repeat in the car, with the volume up. It's unfair, weird, and a bit unhinged, and her defense is that she was writing it shortly after suffering a life threatening ectopic pregnancy. Something off about the hormones, humors, and phosphates, so she read a lot about witches while recovering. It's somewhat a sequel to "King" from Dance Fever, where the refrain is "I am no mother, I am no bride, I am king," and then she did still try to be a mother, and it ended quite tragically, but she sings it with gusto.
Ha, yeah.
I think people are looking for something to say about it, since it's usually a fun thing to put into some designs or write a little article about, and Literally Just White gives them so little to work with. It seems like a manifestation of anxiety over "screw it, LLMs are probably going to do all the designing soon enough anyway."
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