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MathWizard

Good things are good

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MathWizard


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Good things are good

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 14, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's still connected enough that it does not count. In my opinion, part of what makes a slur a slur is that it's a version a label that carries unnecessary negative connotation when one could just as easily use a label without that connotation.


"Whore" is a slur while "prostitute" or is mostly not, because whore is used very frequently in a derogatory way, especially against non-prostitutes in an attempt to tarnish them with the shame of the occupation. "Lady of the night" is definitely not a slur despite referring to the same label, because it's deliberately euphemistic and trying not to convey negative connotations.


The actual N word is a slur because it's generally used to refer to lower class or misbehaving black people, while "black people" is not a slur because it's just referring to the group of people with no negative connotations besides those that a racist listener might already have in their mind.


Importantly, these are slurs whether you use them against the correct categories of people or not. If you call a prostitute a "whore" it's still a slur, even if the label is true. They're likely to be offended, because it's not merely that you're accurately labeling what they are, but that you're deliberately choosing a derogatory way to do so. You are labeling them AND judging them poorly. Calling someone the N word is a slur no matter what race they actually are, because you're either labeling them as a black person in a derogatory way, or you are implying they have the same negative traits that you think black people have.


Nazi can be used in a slur-like way, but as actual Nazis exist and there is no other way to refer to them, it's just a label. It does have negative connotation, but broadly those negative traits are inherent to actually Nazism. A real Nazi will not be offended when you call them a Nazi, because they are not ashamed of it: they think they are right. The offense comes primarily from normal people who hate Nazis just as much as everyone else being unfairly accused of being the thing that they hate. It's a false accusation. Just like "rapist" or "murderer" is not a slur, and yet do carry negative connotation. If you publicly accuse me of being one I will be offended. Not because I disagree with the negative connotation or think you're being rude to rapists and murderers, but because that is not what I am and I don't want to be tarnished with sins I did not commit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Ironically I put Clair Obscur on pause when Silksong came out because I got excited by new shiny (and I kind of needed a break). Definitely a fantastic game, but the combat and timing things seems to stress/tire me out more than RPG combat usually does and I have to be in the right mood for it, and can't really binge it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have not gotten stuck yet (though I don't remember the names of all the sub areas in the Citadel, so don't know if I've cleared that one yet or not). Without any spoilers, I'd recommend spending a bunch of time doing sidequests and/or exploring old areas since a lot of new stuff seems to have opened up in the Act 1 areas after you reach Act 2 and do some stuff there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm mid Act 2, and got distracted by tons of sidequests and new areas in old areas that got opened up by some upgrades I recently got. It feels like the game started pretty linear but has continued opening up and branching more as I go. Very much enjoying myself, even if I'm sometimes frustrated by what feel like unfair difficulty spikes on certain bosses.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Meh. I can try to imagine it would be funny if you were a leftist and actually believed people it was parodying existed. But comedy needs to be relatable in some way, it requires some level of suspension of disbelief, and all I see here is playing into stereotypes the left has about the right with no bearing on reality.


But even then, I'm not convinced it's all that good even if you did believe the right were crypto Nazis. Like, watch something by Babylon Bee. They do stuff like this all the time mocking the left and even when I agree with them in principle they're not funny. It's very low-brow humor to take something someone believes at a 3, dial it up to 11, and then make fun of how ridiculous and extreme it is at 11. It's not clever, because you're just beating up strawmen.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They aren't monsters. They're just regular people who actually believe what they're told, and who take seriously what they have been taught is the most important matter in the world.




This makes them monsters. At least the extremist subset of them who have drunk the Koolaid enough to literally believe this enough to celebrate violence. A monster does not need to be sadistic and take joy in doing evil, sometimes they are uncaring and hungry: acting on instinct rather than reason. Sometimes they are heroes in their own minds and do monstrous things in their futile quest to enact their utopian vision. There are many different types of monster.


The classical logical chain, Modus Ponens, goes "If A then B. A is true, therefore B." A is "my opponents are Nazis", B is "violence is justified to stop them". You've identified that the leftists are correct about "If A then B" but this is only half of the picture. The leftists are half correct and half wrong, and therefore reach a wrong conclusion and behave monstrously. And it's not some minor detail that they get wrong. "My opponents are Nazis" in the strong sense required to justify violence is a bold claim. It would not be sufficient that they wear swastikas or Heil Hitler: the part of the Nazis that justifies violence against them is the violence and genocide they use. This requires strong evidence. You can't just "be taught" that my opponents are evil and blindly believe it and start attacking them. The only way to look at the world we live in and come to the conclusion that right-wing people are literal Nazis to the level of deserving political violence is to practice sociopathic, monstrous, willful ignorance. To vilify such obvious non-villains is exactly what the Nazis themselves did that enabled them to commit so much evil.


I don't believe that ignorance or stupidity justifies evil behavior. Ignorant and stupid people still have to take responsibility for their own actions. If you lack the levels of intellectual sophistication required to parse the truth in the modern media landscape then it is your duty as a good person to practice some epistemic humility. Someone who says "I think right wingers are bad people because the news told me they hate minorities and that's wrong." Is a good person, even if they're wrong on a factual level. Someone who says "Right wing people should die because the news told me they want to kill minorities" and sincerely believes it rather than merely exaggerating for rhetorical effect, is a monster.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But I have idea who the hell coats raw vegetables in syrup. That sounds disgusting.




I believe that was intended to be a disparaging euphemism for salad dressings.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Some discretion is okay. But too much creates a lack of feedback. If you have a terrible law that is stupid and leads to bad results and then enforce it 1% of the time, then it becomes a tool of tyranny for corrupt administrations to selectively persecute people they dislike for other reasons and use the law as an excuse. And the average person who keeps their head down won't get targeted, won't complain, and might not even notice. If a terrible law were enforced 90% of the time then people would realize it's terrible and throw a huge fuss and the democratically elected officials would be forced to fix it. If it's almost never enforced it can sit on the books unnoticed until it can be weaponized. There are way too many laws, nobody knows all of them, and the majority of law knowledge comes from word-of-mouth. Congress could have passed a law in 1982 saying "It's illegal to own a rubber chicken" and then literally never enforced it and it's just sitting in a book somewhere waiting to be weaponized. Would you know if they had done that? Or they passed a law saying "It's illegal to own an object with these properties:" and there's some hundred paragraphs of convoluted nonsense which eventually translates to apply only to rubber chickens if you're a legal expert. I suppose if you're a company trying to start a rubber chicken factory and you hire lawyers to go over all the laws the lawyer might notice the law and tell you about it, but they'd also tell you that it's never enforced or interpreted that way and all the other rubber chicken factories ignore it, so you're fine.


But it's a weapon, and it exists because nobody notices or cares because it's not enforced. A principle that laws should be enforced most of the time prevents these weapons from sitting around at the enforcer's convenience. We should not live in a world where everybody breaks laws every day without realizing it, but selective enforcement allows this to persist. The failure modes of too much enforcement are temporarily worse than too little, but it brings transparency and forces the lawmakers to fix it, making a better long term scenario.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not going to praise Trump for his commitment to equal enforcement of laws. But the problem is not the enforcement here but the lack of enforcement elsewhere. The problem is the past decade of non-enforcement giving the company an expectation that the laws were a formality that they shouldn't take seriously, and giving all of the other companies a free pass so that they all have to skirt the laws to remain competitive.


I agree that this is a problem, but the solution is more enforcement (and more predictable enforcement), not less.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Does nobody have respect for the rule of law? This seems related to the concept of incentivizing lying that came up again in the recent ACX review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase


If you have rules and laws and you consistently don't enforce them, then you reward and incentivize rule breakers and liars. We have immigration laws. First and foremost, we should enforce the immigration laws. Then, after doing so, if we find out that we don't have the optimal level of immigration then we should change the number of immigrants we allow.


If foreign manufacturers are forming plans to build facilities in the United States, they should form their plans with the intention of hiring primarily locals, with whatever management or trainers they bring in having legal visas. These plans should involve carefully screening hired laborers to make sure they are legal. If their plans have already factored in plans to hire illegals but are worried about getting raided and choose not to, then good. They should either reformulate their plans to follow the law, or take their business elsewhere.


If we establish a precedent of enforcing immigration laws, then investors will take them into account and the economy will equilibrize accordingly. If we then end up with more American factories, or foreign factories with American workers because a hole was opened up for them to fill, then good, and we have more jobs for Americans. If not, and there ends up being a shortage of factories because we genuinely need the foreign expertise, then we'll be able to observe that and stick some more visas in the immigration budget. And then they'll be legal, and we'll have control over how many there are.


In no world is "make harsh laws and then fail to enforce them because they are too harsh" the correct decision.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for September 5, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just got it today. I don't normally buy games when they first come out because $60 is a lot and I want to wait until they go on sale, and get enough reviews to know if it'll be worth it. But $20 for a game I'm nearly guaranteed to enjoy given how good HK is? I'm in.


Preliminary opinions are similar to yours. It feels a bit more streamlined in a way that makes it more convenient, but kind of loses some of the mystique. Same with Hornet talking instead of being a silent protagonist: it makes sense lore-wise, and might allow more options for the story to deliver, but it gives a very different feel.


It's fun to play so far though. I hope it ends up even better than HK, but even if it's slightly less good it'll still be worth the time and money.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The issue is that the pushback is elastic: if it has enough momentum it can go far beyond the equilibrium before it gets pushed back. I don't think the social justice mobs are going to end up strong enough to push forth a violent revolution and take over the country, but if they try they might kill dozens to hundreds of people before the national guard cracks down on them hard enough to stop them (and possibly hundreds or thousands die in the ensuing chaos).


Likewise, someone who thought that Trump was an actual fascist and would try to coup the government might fear that hundreds or thousands of people would die in the ensuing chaos before enough legal force got around to stopping him.


The damage is bounded, but it's a high bound. I don't want hundreds or thousands of people to die. I don't think either scenario is especially likely to get that bad, but part of preventing it from getting there is starting the push back via complaints, critiques, and votes, before it gets there.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm fairly certain Boltzmann brains are unfalsifiable. Under the theory, you think that your experience is mostly ordered only because you have randomly configured into a brain with false memories of an ordered experience.


That said, it should be treated with the same level of seriousness as other unfalsifiable theories like an invisible intangible dragon in your garage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.




Setting the Trump issue aside, this seems overly naive to me. Laws are exploitable. Many laws are designed to be exploitable. Gerrymandering, lobbying, pork barrel spending, filibustering: these were all created by finding a tiny crack in the wording of a law that was intended for normal common sense behavior and then bending the interpretation and exploiting it towards some obviously unintended but technically legal end. Heck, 90% of the federal governments actions are "constitutional" only on the basis of deliberately misinterpreting the Commerce Clause. As long as they can convince a judge to sign off on it, literally anything could be considered legal on the basis of literally any existing law.


The law is not automatically moral, or just, or well-designed. Broadly speaking we should have respect for it and follow it because that creates a predictable and orderly society. But that's while keeping an eye on it to make sure it leads to good outcomes, and the instant it stops doing that we ought to have an emergency scramble to fix the loophole before people get used to it and think that's normal. Not that that's what they usually do, usually half the politicians are the ones exploiting the loophole and block any attempts to fix it by the other party. But that would be an appropriate response, rather than shrugging and saying "if it's legal it's intended behavior." Politicians are too good at deceitful word games for that to be true.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The officially declared estimate is somewhere around 6 million Jews being killed via all causes, including shootings, gunshots, and concentration camps.


There were around 6 million members of the Nazis.


The genocide is supposed to have taken 4 years.


So each Nazi needs to kill an average of one Jew over the course of 4 years.


On a mathematical and physical level that seems trivial. ONE. It's not Hitler driving around with a gun trying to shoot everyone himself (which would require three kills per minutes without stopping or slowing down). It's the entirety of the Nazi party with weapons and organization vs the entirety of the Jews who are fleeing and mostly not fighting back.


I want to be clear, I am not making the argument that it did actually happen: I have no special expertise, insight, or evidence beyond parroting what other people claim and taking them at their word. But




It's mathematically impossible to do so, physically.




is such an absurd exaggeration that I feel compelled to object. You either need to study your math, or your physics, or your rhetorical honesty. You're already fighting an uphill battle by going against the mainstream consensus, you're certainly not going to convince anyone to take you seriously if you're not even trying.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think we're 90% in agreement on the broader framework. My primary objection, first and foremost is your leap from "this is strongly hereditary and these people are scum" to "this is 100% genetic". Aside from this being a scientific and biological claim about reality which is demonstrably false, it suggests that the problem is fundamentally unsolvable. If this level of criminality were actually 100% genetic then the only options would be to either tolerate it, or exile/genocide people who have it so they can't make more.


I'm not claiming that I have a grand plan for how to cleanly and reliably solve all of these issues on a society-wide scale, just that such interventions could have an effect, and on a case-by-case bases clearly do. While I don't think it's either physically or politically realistic to identify degenerate scum and confiscate their children to raise in better homes, many instances in which we can legally confiscate children from degenerate scum via CPS do result in better outcomes for the children and a partial improvement of their overall life outcomes compared to children who get stuck in an equivalently bad environment without being noticed. This is actionable. It's not going to solve the entirety of the problem, but in marginal cases confiscating degenerate scum kids who are being abused helps not just them but our entire society by making things just a little bit less toxic. If it were 100% genetic then this would not be the case.


To put it in a metaphor: you're out here claiming that heart disease is 100% genetic and any treatments or scientific research into it is pointless. And then using the fact that we don't have a reliable general purpose cure for it and even people who go to the hospital for it just die anyway as evidence for this basis, and extrapolating this to suggest that a cure or even interventions to reduce risk are completely impossible. And while obviously there is a strong genetic component to heart disease and we can't just snap our fingers and magically fix it, there are surgeries and medications that help reduce its probability and its impact. It's a combination of genes and environment both, and an understanding of it is incomplete without considering both.


I don't have an infallible and reliable cure for curing all degenerate scum behavior. I'm just refuting the idea that one cannot in principle exist because the problem is literally unsolvable. And, more practically in the short term, assert that marginal changes have marginal effects. Even if we lack the omnipotence to solve 100% of incidences, a weak 1% intervention which reduces degenerate scum behavior by 1% is actually thousands of people. It would improve thousands of lives and prevent murder and suffering. Or even on an individual level. If you or someone you know saves one person from a childhood of degenerate scum parents and that has a 50% reduction in the chance of them becoming a degenerate scumbag then, in expectation, that's a meaningful improvement in not only their own life but the lives of everyone they ever interact with. If it was 100% genetic then this would not be the case and the intervention would be pointless.


That seems like an important distinction to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
LLMs are like 90% useful, depending on what domain you're trying to use them for. They generally give the right answer for simple questions, and flub things that are more complicated or just randomly. So when using them you need to externally apply a lot of epistemic humility on their behalf: take everything they say with a grain of salt because they might be hallucinating. This makes them especially useful for creative/inspiration ideas where truth doesn't matter "I have halloween decorations including a witch, a ghost, and a vampire. What are other things I should include?" or things you probably already know but can't quite remember "what's the name of that common tall ovally fruit that isn't an apple?" where as soon as it says an answer you're like "oh yeah, duh" and can verify it's correct independently.


I am hacking my way through getting better at python and am finding it to be wonderful help because it knows all sorts of methods and syntax that I just don't know exist. Or it can quickly scan through a hundred lines of code and find a stray comma that I accidentally typoed and was causing a weird bug that I'm sure someone more experienced would have instantly recognized as being caused by a stray comma, but I'm used to Java where that would have just refused to compile and shown up red in the IDE rather than compiling but doing weird stuff.


Even though 10% of anything tells me is wrong, usually because it can't keep all of the code in its head simultaneously and sometimes spontaneously misremembers the name of something, the ability to test and verify what it's doing while still using it to discover things and offer suggestions or alternatives is very useful. Because 90% of the time it's right, and any time it's wrong I'm not much worse off than I would be without it. As long as you maintain skepticism and don't just blindly believe it then you're fine.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Pretty much all of your post can be true except the second paragraph which is an orthogonal claim. The culturalist claim that I mostly believe (my ballpark estimate is that this sort of thing is 80-20 culture vs genes) is not that Raja is a normal unbroken person and if you put him in a good environment he would suddenly start acting like you or me. The claim is that he was not born this way. It was not inevitable, it was instilled into him slowly over the course of decades.


It should be obvious that there is a non-neglible influence of culture by considering the limiting case. If a toddler were left in an empty room with literally no parenting other than support robots that kept it physically alive but provided no socialization, they would end up completely feral and with all sorts of psychological issues. The child raised by wolves. Even if you later introduced them to society, they would almost certainly never reach the same level of development or civilized behavior.


And this is a continuous function. If you take an uncivilized half-animal man and he has a child and raises them that way you'll likely end up with an uncivilized half-animal person. If you have a mostly civilized but not quite man who has a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked, they're likely to raise children who are mostly civilized but not quite men who have a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked. Heritability is not synonymous with genetics. It can simultaneously be true that Raja is, in his current state as a 25 year old, an insurmountable and unfixable failure. But it was not inevitable. He was not born broken, he was slowly twisted and mentally disfigured into this state over the past 25 years. All you have to do is look at minorities who get adopted by functioning civilized people and oh hey, 80% of the problems magically go away. Some of them don't, and it's a little tricky to disentangle the genetics from the trauma of whatever caused them to be adopted and being temporarily parent-less as an infant. But the reason I think it's 80-20 as opposed to 50-50 or 20-80 is because the majority of adopted minorities I've seen emulate the culture, behavior, and civilized behavior of their adoptive parents, not their genetic ones. Maybe slightly less intelligent, which does correlate with criminality, but only weakly. And if you look at middle or upper class minorities who live in mostly white areas and act like them, their children usually end up middle or upper class and act like their parents too, because that's how they were raised.


Bad parenting doesn't fall out of the sky by chance. It's cultivated in a chain reaction over generations, as bad parents beget bad parents beget bad parents. But that doesn't force it to be genetic, and doesn't force it to be immutable. The majority of mutability happens while they're children, but that's not some magical things about race: all children need to be raised properly or it will cripple them psychologically and leave them horrible mangled monsters. Even if it's too late to fix Raja now, he could have become a better person if he had been raised better.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The police have issued a statement, and the BBC, in a notably careful choice of words, clarifies: “BBC News understands that officers have found no evidence to substantiate claims being made online the youths were at risk of sexual assault.”




This is one of those non-substantive claims. It offers nearly zero Bayesian evidence of anything, because what would evidence look like? What evidence does "threatening sexual assault but stopped before contact via intimidation" leave behind? There would be no physical struggle, no wounds, no semen. All this means is that the incident was not caught on camera and it's entirely a "he said she said" situation. There's no evidence to substantiate these claims, but there's symmetrically no evidence to in-substantiate these claims. My prior is that both hypotheses (pervert immigrants or delinquent teens) are plausible, and the police or media saying what they said does not shift these priors in either direction, because this is exactly what I would expect them to say in either scenario.


Given a complete and utter lack of evidence, everyone is going to stick to their priors and this is the rationally correct response.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
My guess is that they're being attracted to the silliness part of it and attributing the lack of intelligence as a cause of the silliness. Which potentially has some merit: I think there is a negative correlation between intelligence and silliness on average. I could be wrong, some people do just want to be way smarter than their partner, as some combination of pride and the ability to win arguments and control things, but I think most of it is correlations and stereotypes connecting intelligence to other things. If I had to choose between an intelligent bitter feminist constantly comparing everything I do to a historical dictator, and a sweet highschool dropout country girl with rocks for brains and a heart of gold, I'd choose the latter. If for some reason I was convinced that intelligence inevitably produced the former and wasn't aware of the exceptions I would have been tempted to join more unintellectual activities to try to find unintelligent women. Or just despaired and given up because I don't think they would like me even if I did like them.


The point being, I think some men do think this way. And I think statistically they're partially correct but missing plenty of exceptions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In general I think AI content belongs in separate designated zones. If not its own website, at least a dedicated section. AI fiction should be found in the AI fiction section, not mixed with the regular fiction. AI art belongs in the AI art section, not mixed with the regular art. AI non-fiction... probably doesn't need to be posted anywhere. It's going to end up some combination of wordy filler and stuff that's already been said somewhere else. Basically a super fancy version of a google search. If you're not prompting it yourself such that you want a super fancy version of a google search, reading essays someone else told an AI to make is unlikely to provide value.


A general exception to this is AI content which is supplemental in support of a greater creative work. If you're designing a game and the primary design and development is original work, but the art assets and/or music are AI generated that's probably fine. They're there to maintain immersion for the game. Or if you're writing a novel and the cover art is AI generated. I think this is an excellent use to allow AI to cover for your weaknesses so that you can play to your strengths. If the majority of something is AI generated then it belongs in the AI generated section so that people can voluntarily choose to engage with it with that in their mind.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The best partner is both, imo. Half my jokes are silly stupid nonsense (I can't even count the number of times my wife and I have accused each other of being a "Sneef Snorf") and the other half are clever and elaborate constructions designed to sound like something reasonable and/or intelligent until they think about it for several moments and untangle the hidden meaning: which turns out to be silly stupid nonsense. I once wrote a two page short story with seemingly arbitrary fantasy and fairy tale features all to build up to the conclusion which was a sentence consisting of weird typos my wife (then girlfriend) had sent me while drunk the previous night.


I suppose someone less intelligent could still have appreciated the goof, but probably not to the same extent. Or wouldn't have taken the teasing in as much fun, as part of the embarrassment at her misspelling is because she ordinarily spells things correctly while sober. And someone less intelligent probably wouldn't have been able to respond to my hack MSPaint "photoshops" of our cat's head onto movie characters with an even higher quality photoshop of her own. And someone who took themselves seriously just wouldn't have appreciated the goofs at all.


You need both.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would broadly agree that glory as a motivation is easier to follow, as it's more inherently rewarding. While love for others is less inherently rewarding and thus a larger sacrifice. Which in turn is why it is MORE good. It is... easy is not the right word... easier to follow glory, to do good things which will give you glory, than it is to do good things which will merely help others but not yourself. Someone who is filled with a desire for glory but not a love for their neighbors might do all kinds of things, and only by sheer coincidence will those things be truly good, while someone who is filled with a love for their neighbors and no desire for glory will live a humble and self sacrificing life doing small amounts of good. Although someone with both will do large acts of good that help many many people, and thus is even better.


A motivation for glory is a smaller, easier stepping stone to reach. A motivation of love for humanity is a greater goal which is much much harder to attain but of greater value if attained.




If Christ’s motivation was glory, both for his Father and for his divine family and for himself, then we would likewise imitate this, and this would lead to glorious moral acts. But if Christ’s motivation was pure and uncorrupted “love for humanity”, then we will only feel a gnawing discomfort at the impossibility of our ever replicating this motivation in any legitimate sense.




It's axiomatic that no human can possibly reach the true goodness of Jesus. We are imperfect sinful humans. So you have to figure out how to not despair at never reaching the goal, and do your best anyway. Again, I think that on a fundamental level there isn't truly a distinction between actions which glorify ourselves, actions which glorify God, and actions which show love to humanity. They're the same actions. There are things which people might define as "glory" which harm people like being a murderous conqueror, but don't give true glory because they are evil and sinful. Ultimately true glory comes from doing the most good. So you don't really have to choose, just do all the good things for all the good reasons. But I think love for humanity, although harder to attain, is harder to corrupt once present. Still possible, but harder. There are fewer examples of actions which superficially seem loving but are actually evil than there are actions which superficially seem glorious but are actually evil. But in the end I think Jesus was motivated by all of them, so imitating him by yourself following all of the motivations seems like a more robust way to do good than following one of them to the exclusion of the others. You're more likely to notice when you're being led astray when the motivations appear to diverge instead of converge like they're supposed to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 17, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Maybe this is just the consequentialist in me, but it seems like love for humanity and the enabling of their salvation has to be the overriding one. Suppose that you literally had to pick one:


1: God will get glory equal to saving all of humanity, but you will not be gloried, and humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell


2: God will not get glory (at least, not any extra from your decision), but you will get glory from God as if you had saved humanity, but humanity will not actually be saved and they'll all go to hell


3: God will not get any additional glory, and you will not get any personal glory or credit, but humanity will be saved (or at least, have the ability to repent and be saved if they so choose)


Setting aside the inherent contradictions (because it would be unjust for God not to glory you or himself for saving humanity) for the sake of the thought experiment, it seems to me that the actually most good action would be 3: save the people. And this is in line with everything else Jesus preached.  You do good works, even at the cost of your own material well-being, and then this automatically glories God and yourself automatically as secondary effects. But you have to actually do good.


Now, in reality all of these are inextricably linked: God only gives commands iff they are good iff they benefit people iff they glorify Himself iff they glorify the person who does them. I think that on a fundamental level there isn't even a meaningful distinction between "doing good" and "glorifying God", otherwise God would have said different things until they became the same thing. So I strongly suspect that Jesus had all of them as equally strong motivations because they're all the same thing if you have true understanding (which he did). But in-so-far as you consider them to be distinct, I think the saving of humanity was the primary motivation (but this might just be my perspective as a selfish human who loves being saved more than I love glorifying God)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for August 15, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
See, that would have made sense. Assuming the magic sex change spell carries fertility with it (not sure how that interfaces with chromosomes, but maybe you can handwave magic that), I can easily imagine oppressive social norms that forces everyone to do like a clownfish thing. They have to be female in their late teens and early twenties to have a bunch of kids and then when they get older they turn male and go off to war to protect the society, with the most successful (and surviving) war heroes getting rewarded with breeding the younger females. Oppressive and constricting to be forced into as a citizen, but super beneficial for the society and the people ruling it since you get the advantages of both sexes, and maximizes chances of survival against an enemy force that outclasses you. (It especially makes sense in a LitRPG context where you can do easy fights and level up while young and will be multiple times stronger when you're older)


I'm not saying the author needed to make it be a rationalfic and actually do that. I can suspend disbelief enough for them to have a relative normal medieval culture or something close. But it makes no sense to make everything about the world gritty and harsh except for their gender norms.