RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
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User ID: 2051
For Mother of Learning, the worldbuilding is imo one of the best, most internally consistent fantasy world. Slower isn't worse, and likewise for the fights being more methodological. Less fanservice is, frankly, 100% a positive.
Worth the candle, I'll agree with the others that it's just not very good. It tries to be deep and subversive, but the author clearly has a very shallow worldview himself, so it just ends up cringe. It would have been better if he had stuck to a straight fantasy story, some of his ideas like the thousands of hells and the soul mechanics were very interesting. It was just hard to continue caring with his ridiculous meta-commentary and horrible character work. If the author himself doesn't take his own story/world serious enough to just let it speak for itself, why should I bother?
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
5d ago
Sure, you can fuck up everything. As noted in the wiki entry (presuming it's correct), there was no problem with formal proofs; The problem was first going for informal arguments (the start of the slippery slope, though as so often it worked fine-ish for awhile) and then lowering the standards until anything goes. I also think it's notable that the majority of mathematicians has so far refused to accept the Mochizuki proof until it's understood more widely. Both were also mostly localised incidents.
Admittedly I've always been on the more informal end of math myself as well (back when I did research in a field that could be described as mostly-theoretical math), but even there I could simply double-check my conjectures with simulations, which is just yet another way of a feedback with reality.
I think you underestimate the power of proofs. If you make a conjecture, try to write a proof, and not just fail, but you find obvious counterexamples, there just isn't much left to salvage. Or the other way around, if you find multiple different proofs to arrive at the same conclusion and nobody you meet can generate any counterexample or find a clear hole in the proofs. It's true that there is some social element, it would be silly to claim otherwise, but proofs aren't just arbitrary arguments at triviality, either.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
5d ago
I actually had the string theory folks on my mind while writing this, whether I should put a caveat there. There's always a "but". The key to me is that with almost everyone I've talked with who is sufficiently familiar with physics, they mention string theory, and they always clearly acknowledge their lack of predictions is bad. At least some number of those theorists tried to find something testable. And as you imply, it seems to be on the downturn in funding (unsurprising, the EU tries to pick up the slack somewhat, they certainly have impeccable timing). Altogether, that's good enough for me.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
5d ago
Imo one of the core problems with wokeness is that it generally elevates symbolic above substantive behaviour. Under wokeness, a person who has never lifted a finger for a single black person in all their life is still fundamentally better than a mildly racist old coach who has not only trained, but also helped countless young guys to stay on the straight path in their personal life. Even (arguably, particularly) if those young guys were black.
Unfortunately, I'm cynical enough to think that this is a feature, not a bug, of wokeness.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
5d ago
Together with the Arday scandal, social science is really having a bad time right now. The killer is that these are not just random researchers, but professors, and not just professors, but celebrated stars with multiple books, regular media appearances and political contacts. They are likely to impact actual policy and general large-scale decision-making. And to add insult to injury, it's getting increasingly obvious that a) competent fabrication would be undetectable in practice, especially this much later and b) nobody actually cares enough to check in general. They were just both incompetent enough and people pretty much stumbled over it.
I'm unsure whether social science in its current form is salvageable. It comes down to feedback loops: Math has a direct feedback loop with reality through the structure of proofs. You can set up implausible assumptions, yes, but since you have to state them clearly you can always be called out on it. And it's still relevant information that, if the assumptions are true, it follows whatever you have shown in the proof. In physics, you usually can turn a model into predictions which will eventually be measurable, even if through rather elaborate channels such as measuring red shifts of far-way celestial bodies or by ramming very small particles into each other.
And so on further down the line; My own field, medical genetics, is a lot worse than those as well but we also have at least some points of connection with reality; IF I find a variant that is plausibly connected to a serious disability, and IF there is a medication that can effectively bypass that variant (for example, producing the protein that became malformed), we will usually see a noticeable positive impact on patients, even if it does not fully cure them.
But social science? Almost any result can be interpreted in almost any way one may choose; Surveys and closed, short-term experiments are possibly more connected to social desirability bias than to anything else, real-life cohorts are probably mostly selection effects, and controlling for them is usually somewhere between illegal and impossible. There is not zero good research, but it's completely drowned out by the bad, and even where people attempt to do it well, it's hard to say; For example, I like discontinuity design, and it imo works well for entry tests (barely made it into an university vs barely didn't make it), but exactly the same design for school area impact is probably nonsense bc people can deliberately move into those neighbourhoods so barely inside vs barely outside of the area is again mostly selection effects.
In such an environment, and given considerable pressure on them to deliver convenient results (again, unlike math and most of physics) which also results in substantial rewards outside academia, social science predictably devolves into near-pure high-school style popularity contests.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
For mother of learning, FWIW I enjoyed the audiobook.
Are web serials for people that read a lot and like reading the same thing?
I remember very well the discussions of procedurally generated game (civ/xcom etc) style gamers vs well-crafted short story (say, portal) style gamers. It's a mentality thing; I can understand both of them very well.
If you've found a world you like, then why not try to enjoy as much content as possible inside of it? This is especially true for cozy-fiction, where you not just not expect, but not even want complex plots and dark, irreversible developments. I think a lot of people could basically go their entire life listening, say, an hour each evening set in a cozy-fic universe that appeals to their personal taste.
The opposite, a serious story with a clear beginning and end, high stakes & drama, is of course also very appealing. But by its nature you can't just relax and get that every night; At some point it's over and you have to find the next story. Often, you'll have to pay new money, start a new story with lots of promises, spend mental capacity to learn the world, but in the end it does not deliver and you get the worst of all worlds.
So if your life is already pretty busy, your money is constrained and you just want to relax anyway in the afternoon/evening, this kind of content - web serials, ultra-long tv shows and procedurally generated games - starts to become more and more appealing.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
6d ago
That's not gossiping, though? Gossiping is the careless sharing of (usually slanderous) rumours, with little concern to their accuracy. What the slave is doing here is conscious, malicious trickery.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
9d ago
Yes. The most sensible definitions are, in my view, that conservatives are the ones keeping the ship running, which includes a lot of doing, just no changing. They are overly pragmatic and have difficulty improving anything substantively. Progressives are the ones who want us to change for the better, which is laudable, but who have a tendency to be impractical and insufficiently concerned with function, often making things outright worse.
This definition also has the advantage of making clear why we need both. The problem is, taking this definition seriously, we'd have conservatives and progressives all over the place along the political landscape. Arguably, the center left is the primary contemporary conservative element.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
11d ago
Unfortunately, as far as I can see these activists are the ones actually doing the thing they claim the police is doing. There certainly will be always be a small number of misreports, especially due to unfamiliarity, but it's in practice quite easy even for a non-expert to recognize pit bulls. As breeds go, they have very obvious features, you really don't need to be an expert. Obligatory Cremieux post.
On the other hand, activists consciously and deliberately mislabel closely related breeds, strays and other mixes to "protect" pit bulls. I've seen more than a few articles where everyone is totally surprised by an attack coming out of nowhere from a "loving family dog", and if there is an image, every single fucking time it's an obvious pit bull mix.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
16d ago
except romance novels: my mom considered those trash and off limits to me as a youth
lol, based mom. It's interesting how, again, these things have changed; At least from my impression, most women believe that male-targeted stories (action, basic genre fantasy, etc) predominantly appeal to the lower instincts, if not being complete trash, while they idealize their thinly-veiled romance slop novels as high literature. Not to defend stupid action and self-insert power fantasies, but I've found little difference in the sophistication of male vs female-targeted literature, they're just (un-)sophisticated in different ways.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
17d ago
I can understand it. HBD has a few unfortunate implications and in many ways I'd wish it wasn't true, but as a white guy from an entirely white family in a predominantly white country, it's also true that for me, personally, it's not so bad. Whites are pretty middle-of-the-pack-to-upper-middle in most attributes, particularly IQ, so learning that these attributes are less socially changeable than one might want them to be kinda sucks conceptually, but "my people" are already in an OK place.
Now I imagine being a bright-eyed, above-average (whether IQ/conscientiousness/etc.) black guy, who learns the history of Africa, who may think that, well, they have still a long way to go, but fundamentally we just need to mirror the western approach and over time we will get to a comparable place. It's going to be hard, no question, but it's definitely doable, and basically just a question of time.
Then you learn HBD, get convinced, and suddenly all of this is an open question again. Sure mirroring the west to some degree is probably good, but it will not get them to the same place. It's unclear whether it's even doable at all. Possible solutions all sound awful, whether eugenics or de-facto non-black governance or just simply accepting that black-run countries will be consistently worse.
Personally, I think we just need to accept the bullet of genetic engineering, but I know a lot of people feel very squeamish about it, especially when applied to humans, and it's at least understandable to feel that way for historic reasons.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
20d ago
It's really weird how different experiences everyone seems to have. The 2000 words when 200 would do seems to me like a general AI issue and if anything it's worse with Claude when I'm using it. Claude is less sycophantic, but I've had the opposite problem with it: It told me an approach wouldn't work because of a problem, that later Chatgpt found out was wrong - the approach did work as intended, and Claude was just being faux-critical for no reason. Admittedly it's partially bc of advice from my wife who is a very heavy AI user, I've started to remind every AI to be critical ("please look over this proposal, tell me potential problem fields, and critically evaluate it from the perspective of a domain-expert evaluator") to get around the sycophancy, which seems to work better with Chatgpt. It's nowhere near perfect and still operates at the level of an early PhD who still makes plenty of mistakes, but it's still amazing to get instant feedback with a decent accuracy rate for only something like 20/month.
RenOS
Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints
26d ago
I've always liked books, but looking at the younger guys and boys I know, it's mostly video games. Men want to act, and the medium of video games is just infinitely more appealing to them by its basic nature. Contrariwise, girls are really into the fantasy of being (and being seen as) an educated, classy lady, and reading books is a mandatory accessory. Even those that are neither, which can lead to some hilariously non-self-aware selfies with books of questionable renown.
There is also a noticeable element of top-down woke/feminism/DEI in video games as well, but it's substantially tempered by the 90%+ male audience in many (sub-)genres, and usually they have to keep the core gameplay and basic story intact to make the game sell.
That said, there definitely is a strong feminist strain in contemporary writing. I'm currently reading various adventure stories to my kids, and it's quite noticeable how much of a switch happened from almost entirely male protagonists to an outright female bias. And this is excluding the already-female dominated genres like horse/unicorn/fairy etc. stories.
It's not entirely bad - my wife definitely remembers the time when she was forced to read stories with basically 100% male protagonists bc she simply enjoyed the adventure genre. But I do get the feeling that without the reciprocal process happening to the female genres, there probably is a bias of 80%+ or so female protagonists in contemporary kids' stories.
Interesting, my wife is a city girl and I'm a country boy. We met in the middle and now live in a medium size city. But both of us miss our respective backgrounds.
That said, she has also mentioned big cities feeling increasingly hectic.
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