Gaashk
18hr ago
This is trivially true, but unimportant.
American blacks with racial consciousness have started calling themselves Black, and so that's what people call them, unless it's completely laughable like Meghan Markle. If someone with very dark skin comes over from some monastery in Ethiopia and doesn't do any American Black things, and doesn't teach children to whine about someone else getting opressed several generations ago, then even the racists don't complain about them.
Gaashk
22hr ago
I wasn't enjoying the comments about women all that much either, but shrug, people here are interesting. They often say interesting things. I can just not read the threads that are mostly complaining about large groups of people.
Gaashk
21hr ago
I'm going to go ahead and support the metaphor.
Consider ailanthus. Imported to New York when air pollution was so bad and green spaces so rare that almost nothing else would grow (c.f. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). Now it's endemic throughout the country, integrated into a ton of rather harsh towns, cities, and as roadside hedges, and it's not going to be eradicated. Even if it could be, people would be upset about it, because it's providing privacy and shade.
Consider the Siberian elm. Planted during the Great Depression to provide shade when, outside the river valleys with high water tables, it was pretty much the only tree that would grow. And it's edible! Now there are canopies in the high desert with nicely kept, mature elm trees, but also weedy wild elms. They aren't going anywhere. People would be upset if all those old, shady elm trees disappeared, though the roadside volunteers aren't always welcome.
Now consider malaria and heatstroke in the old South...
Gaashk
22hr ago
Third rate universities have programs like lumberjacking, which do require manual labor. My father got an English degree from a third rate university, then went on to become a cook for the next decade, like his father. He worked on the campus grounds crew, and pointed out various dumpsters when I visited. Then he went on to teach high school when the kitchen became too Spanish heavy and they stopped paying for cooling or letting them take breaks because the illegals would put up with that crap.
It's pretty permeable.
- There are positives and negatives. The people who enjoyed the benefits were allowed to bring them over, and even if the negatives eventually become more obvious, there's no going back on a country wide scale.
- It's reasonable to warn people about planting them in their own garden, on purpose. They are not well behaved plants that will do what you want!
- Even is Siberian elm and American elm were technically the same species, and had hybridized by now, that's not really the point. If the native Americans had been able to resist the religious zealots from England and Spain they would, of course, have been right to do so. Even today, they're allowed to keep people they dislike, who don't respect them, off their reservations. Would you be happier if it had been a bulldog vs golden retriever analogy? It looks like it was based on the OP's "planting trees"
- But, yeah, it was rude and, yes, NotAllGhettoBoys
Gaashk
19hr ago
You are mostly talking about Big 5 trait agreeableness. There's a good Jordan Peterson lecture about it from before he became politicized. It's convenient for a person's managers, husband (if they're into that), and infants. It's more of a mixed bag for the people possessing it, as you mentioned.
These are almost universally positive traits unless you happen to enjoy arguments and rambunctious trouble-making and think such a person would be boring.
Two highly agreeable people together can be quite annoying. They don't get high quality feedback about each other's preferences, and end up playing guessing games about what the other person wants. They have a bad time raising older children. I can't remember it well enough to find it, but there was a Less Wrong post about how it is actually an onerous imposition to one's host to flaccidly say that whatever they want to do is great, they're totally happy with anything, because this makes more work for the host -- maybe they don't like making a bunch of decisions.
Gaashk
1d ago
Some people I know have been trying to foster and/or adopt, because they're unable to have biological kids, and it is super difficult and uncertain. The system will often find a relative after several years, then spend a long time placing the child with that relative, sometimes a sibling when they come of age, and sometimes the teen just absconds because they don't like being parented all that much.
Maybe you should do it, good foster parents are great, but don't go into it assuming that you'll get a kid who will choose to stay with you until they're 22, or will listen to your good advice, and follow your sensible rules.
Gaashk
2d ago
Yes, I think that's pretty much it. The modal <50th percentile woman seems to be a heavy single mother, who will bring a lot of drama into her boyfriend's life.
In my experience, it's not even that they have to be making $70k now, either, but more like that they clearly would be able to buckle down and do it if they ended up having kids together.
Gaashk
1d ago
To be clear, neither my mother, nor I, nor the friends I can think of married a man who had, from the start, what you would call a career, or was making that kind of money. My mom's mother gave them money for a down payment, because my dad was never going to have it himself.
Ultimately, I think it's more important to signal potential love and commitment, but that's more subject to specific circumstances, and making more money is also nice for other reasons, so it's a safe thing to focus on.
Gaashk
8d ago
I agree with this take.
In my experience, the people who are really worried about decaying former company towns are also worried about places like Detroit, which used to have a higher proportion of functional, employed black men with families (they say, I'd be open to an argument that this is a myth I suppose).
The people who are really worried about good New York schools crowding out white and Asian kids in favor of racial quotas because of disparate impact are different people, much more likely to go on about "HBD," but they're probably just as upset about being yelled at on the subway by black, white, or hispanic druggies. I think these are the ones who are tired of trying to solve the druggies' problems for them, and would like them to be locked up or denied expensive, repeated medical care, and would be completely unsurprised at the stats about their average demographics.
Gaashk
8d ago
It's a really dense mishmash of a bunch of different things, any one of which might be interesting to explore, but together just kind of form an overcooked soup.
It would be much, much better with one or two concrete rightists as a foil, especially since the people who are worried about disparate impact keeping their kids out of medical school or Yale or something are in a coalition with, but distinct from, the people who are worried about their depressing rust belt family members failing to #learntocode. An adversarial but earnest take on Vance, for instance, would be more interesting.
Gaashk
8d ago
I'm pretty sure there are a few Jewish Mottizens, since it's a spinoff of SSC, and also people occasionally mention Jewish stuff, though more likely to be American.
In general, I think the moderation here is fine. It doesn't have to be all things to all people. It is true that "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion" doesn't always happen, but the mods do generally remind people about it.
Gaashk
9d ago
It's probably related to attributes of people who do go to movies in the evening, pay full price, and don't sneak food in for cheap in their backpacks. I'm not sure I know anyone like that, so I can't say what they're looking for in a movie. Personally, I haven't seen a movie in a theater in about a decade, and even then I went about once or twice a year (but would go when convenient and buy some snacks when I did). So the companies don't have to consider my preferences, or the preferences of people like me.
Who went to Mufasa opening weekend? Why did they do it?
Brandon Sanderson occasionally comments a bit, cautiously because he does actually want Mistborn movies, about what it's like trying to work with a big film studio, and it sounds like normal, decent, popular writers have a great deal of trouble interfacing with them, mostly because the studios change things for reasons that are their own, unrelated to the writers or audience members. There are too many fingers in the pie. That shows up when they do try to adapt popular recent franchises -- I watched Good Omens, Sandman, and The Wheel of Time, and enjoyed many things about them, especially costuming, music, credits sequences, and some of the acting. But it's really hard to keep things on track when there are so many people making decisions, some of whom care about aesthetics, and others care a lot about casting disabled angels, stuffing even more queerness into already very queer friendly franchises, getting more screen time for their boyfriend (WoT specific?), and all sorts of other things. And then maybe they get cancelled at an inopportune moment.
Gaashk
20d ago
I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:
- The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
- The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
- The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
- They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
- The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
- Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
- I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.
Gaashk
8d ago
I didn't report it and have mixed feelings about the ban, but it wasn't a good top level post.
Gaashk
4d ago
This was the philosophy of the church I grew up in as well.
It was full of conscientious middle class families, and the working class ones were the sort who owned a small landscaping company or something.
Even among people sort of average in conscientiousness but a bit odd, it didn't completely work. The talent my father brought to the chili cookout was... reading T S Elliot poems in a corner. He had previously worked in a restaurant, as the person in charge of soups. So I'm not sure why we didn't bring any chili, now that I think of it. Maybe he doesn't like chili. I did enjoy the TS Elliot more than the chili, but we were the only ones.
We are the sort of mildly chaotic people who need a monthly Clean the House Day, where everyone stays home and cleans the house, otherwise it will just become increasingly filthy forever.
hydroacetylene's community sounds even less conscientious than my family. Some people will decide drinking beer and playing video games are their vocation unless firmly directed otherwise. Even the ones who think it's their vocation to keep taking college classes as long as the government will keep lending them money, with no plans for using the knowledge productively, sometimes need to be told that it's a bad idea.
A lot of those jobs being unusually terrible is historically contingent. Being jobs at all is historically contingent.
Much has been said about how low status it is to be a stay at home wife lately, but these are often the jobs being taken. It's nice and high status to have a Mexican maid clean one's house, hire a Guatemalan landscaper, get cheap ethnic take out, to just buy new clothing whenever there's a tear, and that all chickens come pre-plucked and gutted. Gardening, cooking, picking berries, and sewing are not necessarily good candidates for industrialization. Mass produced strawberries and chicken was probably a mistake.
Also, bras are a terrible undergarment for fat women. Bring back the chemise and stays.
Gaashk
8d ago
Edit to add: the title of the movie was pretty awful as well. Like who (or what) the hell is “Elio”? It gives you absolutely nothing to work with, nothing about space or aliens or anything. So matching that up with the bland art and the minimal marketing gives no hook at all to actually want to go out and see it.
I don't necessarily think that was a problem, considering how well liked Coco is, but Coco has a much better hook. There are school field trips to see live musical performances inspired by Coco, for instance, which they organize around Day of the Dead.
Luca was at least very summery, and came out when the art style was a bit fresher. I thought it was cute, and my four year old liked it a lot.
Gaashk
8d ago
Luca, Brave, Up, Elio, and Coco are the opposite: about humans exploring the inner world.
I felt like the biggest problem with Brave was that it didn't lean fully enough into being a Disney princess animated musical -- it needed more songs, and the relationship with her mother was a bit off somehow; she needed to talk with her great great grandmother, spinning the threads of fate up in the tower or something. Old Disney might have integrated some actual Scottish fairy tales, which were my absolute favorites growing up. The Golden Key is especially excellent.
Personally, I usually enjoy the Disney musicals more in general -- Encanto and Moana were quite fun (though I hear Wish fell flat, and haven't bothered watching it).
It would probably have worked to make a Pixar version of Stitch, that could be a lot of fun -- make it like Monsters inc, with more emphasis on Stitch and the aliens.
Gaashk
14d ago
I think disability actually does work that way, but suffers from benefit cliffs that disincentivize some people from doing the work that they're able to do.
Gaashk
22d ago
Even more than in her previous essay, she doesn't seem to actually like any of her "friends." The men are all cads, the women all fools, and she feels like talking to her female friends about their lives is "emotional labor." Is she also suffering from "dark triad" behavior, and honest, emotionally stable people keep their distance?
Gaashk
20d ago
In addition to what others have said, hormonal birth control is, indeed, under explored and under discussed. If you go to a doctor and ask for birth control, she won't necessarily talk about the psychological side affects of it, and it can cause changes in sexual preferences related to hormonal cycles.
That's literally how invasive species work. If rabbits had been able to swim to Australia unaided, they wouldn't be invasive, they would be part of the natural ecosystem. Like the French and Spanish in the Americas. Do people even bother calling rats invasive? I suppose the British are the rats in this analogy.
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