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VoxelVexillologist

Multidimensional Radical Centrist

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joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC 

				
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VoxelVexillologist


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Multidimensional Radical Centrist

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Shakespeare didn’t write one hundred plays and then choose the best few dozen to publish.




Some writers, Stephen King comes to mind first, are famous for writing prolifically and then substantially editing down their products.  Although maybe not quite that ratio.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IIRC humans can get theobromine poisoning, but the required dosages are such that it's a non-issue outside of small children and the elderly binging on chocolate.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Temperance




If you mean "temperance" as in "Women's Christian Temperance Union", I recall reading that Biden and Trump are both teetotalers, and that W. Bush stopped drinking before he ran for president.


Sadly, your conclusion about the other virtues seems well-founded.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I feel like one of the pitfalls of eugenics (then and now) is an assumption about what good genes even means (beyond Sydney Sweeney, apparently).  There seems to be a lot more agreement about bad genes:  see general consent on the borderline-eugenics of genetic counseling for various diseases, or the general acceptance of anti-incest rules.


You're probably right that Nazis lost out by dismissing a bunch of human capital and (over?)valuing blond hair and blue eyes, but I can't avoid thinking that statement is smuggling in some value judgements about what we should consider the ideal human form.  Sure, intelligence is generally valued, but I see a rather open-ended question about the relative merit of maximizing paperclips chess scores, baseball ability, or height that I'd personally prefer to defer answering.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I sometimes feel like we over-medicalize things in modern society: we want to defer "hard" ethical decisions to "experts", and doctors are some of our favorite experts.


I noticed this acutely when I was called for jury duty a while back (I was not selected), and voir dire included some questions about considering about applying a legal label ("sexually violent predator") that does have a very loosely defined medical component, and I could tell a tangible number of potential jurors really wanted to hide behind "what does a/the doctor think?" in terms of something the legislature, in it's great wisdom, deserved a jury trial rather than a medical panel.  Frankly, given the weight of the decision, I see why: there are plenty of horror stories of doctors involuntary committing people, and a jury seems a potentially-preferable way to evaluate such status.


There were also quite a few jurors that questioned their own fairness on the topic of heinous crimes.  I didn't get selected (the defense busted the panel, as it turned out), but am I weird in thinking that sometimes "fair" is, after carefully weighing the evidence of guilt, "throw the book at them"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Rwandan genocide managed a comparable body count with mostly machetes.  It seems more a matter of whether the regime's forces (who I'm sure have enough small arms) are choosing to use lethal force, either as a top-down policy or more local spontaneous decisionmaking.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I read this one recently: I liked it overall.  Without spoilers, I thought it interesting that the plot twist, to the extent there is one, struck me as very "of it's time" in how it reflects on the human condition, but in a way that I don't think could be written today because waves at culture war, nor would the conclusion be deemed quite as satisfactory in that light.  At the time, it was pretty well received by critics, too: an interesting display of shifting political winds.


I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts, though.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


is weak evidence towards that possibility,




My intuition is that "intelligence" actually has theoretical bounds we just haven't derived yet.  We haven't, IMO, defined what it is well enough to state this easily, but information theory broadly defines some adjacent bounds.  Also that real humans require orders of magnitude less training data --- how many books did Shakespeare read, and compare to your favorite LLM corpus --- which seems to mean something.


Also that at the scale of economics, "singularity" and "exponential growth" both look darn similar in the near-term, but almost all practical examples end up being the latter, not the former.