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ZorbaTHut


				

				

				

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ZorbaTHut


								

								

								
								
									
								
								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 01 11:36:40 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've been thinking about culture war in media lately.


For those who don't know, I'm a game programmer, working to kinda move into the game-director role. Obviously at some point I am going to have games with humans in them [citation needed], and since they're humans I need to decide what they look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color, which is of course now highly politicized, joining the ranks of literally everything else in existence.


But I'm not looking for an excuse to put characters in of one skin color or another. I want a universe that feels reasoanbly alive, with characters who are interesting and not just inserted for politics reasons. So a big part of this ends up being "how do I choose interesting characters that don't feel like a political statement, or at least, if they do feel like a political statement, it's a political statement I don't mind making, or a political statement I'm intentionally making as part of the game, and also, boy it would be nice to come up with a way to insert characters of literally any type without that also being a political statement, and I guess as a side note this involves talking about explicitly political media and what makes it work well or badly".


This has, in fact, been done well.


Let's talk about that.




One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it. Uhura was black, and everyone watching Original Star Trek knew it, because she was, you know, on screen, consistently reflecting fewer photons than Captain Kirk, as black people do. Kirk didn't seem to know it, though; Kirk just kind of ignored it. In fact, I'm not sure this ever came up during all of Star Trek. Uhura was black because Uhura was black, and the show carefully avoided ever making a thing out of it.


Another good example here is Miles Morales in Spider-Verse, who is also black, and again, I'm not sure the movie ever really mentions this. The movie is explicitly not about Miles Morales' skin color. Another example: a lot of characters from Borderlands 2, such as Ellie, who is a fat woman which is essentially never relevant to the plot, and Sir Hammerlock, who is gay.


Sir Hammerlock being gay is an interesting case, so let's talk about it more! With most characters, either you find out their skin color the instant you see them, or it turns into a serious Face Reveal thing (imagine the controversy if the Halo TV series had revealed that Master Chief was black!) But media in general tends not to show much about character's sexualities, and the game industry even less so. Even mentioning romantic choices feels like something that can't be done subtly - all characters could be seamlessly replaced by asexual beings that reproduce via mitosis unless your work is about the fact that sex happens.


(Tangent: Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage? Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction? Note to self, do this sometimes. End tangent.)


(Tangent addendum: I just played Guacamelee 2 and it does this. That's one! Anyway, moving on.)


But in the case of Hammerlock, he sends you on a quest to check out what happened to an old friend of his, and if you happen to dig into the quest details, which most people don't, you find out it's an old boyfriend, and honestly I really like how this is handled. Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool. 10/10, very human.




Let's talk about another technique! Another technique is to, instead of making the plot not about something, make the plot extremely about something. I did a search for "movies about black people" and one site recommends Malcolm X and another hit provided by Google is a list of "11 movies that confront American racism". You can guess where that is going! Uhura could have been white, Ellie could have been a thin guy, Sir Hammerlock could have been asexual, that wouldn't really have changed any of those pieces of media, but you can't turn Malcolm X into an Asian without some pretty serious plot adjustment!


There's nothing wrong with this solution either. I am generally not interested in this kind of media, but if that's the movie someone wants to make, hey, have at it, all up to them. But because I'm thinking about this for the sake of my own games, I'm discarding this because, as mentioned, I'm just not all that interested.


But while we're on the subject . . .


. . . I can't help but wonder if this is counterproductive.


A painful thing about human beliefs is that we are very very very bad at changing our mind. And having arguments shoved in our face really doesn't help. Walk up to someone who hates skub and shout pro-skub catchphrases at them, if you like; this will not make them more positive about skub, they'll probably just become more certain that skub is bad because all skub-lovers are fuckin' jerks, man. But show them movies that just happen to include skub, in a way where it sorta just . . . doesn't matter? Maybe they'll stop caring so much about the horrors of skub. Desensitization is a hell of a drug.


Show them movies that claim to involve this, but have the movie constantly shouting pro-skub catchphrases?


Well, now we're back where we were before. Or even worse, frankly, because now they'll be expecting any movies with skub in them to be a thinly-veiled propaganda piece. So not only have we failed to convince them with subtlety and care, we've fucked up future attempts to do so. Good fuckin' job, man, way to go.


Skub is an allegory, but you've figured that out by now, so let's move on.




Specifically, let's talk about allegories.


There's an episode in Original Star Trek where the crew finds some guy in space. The guy's face is white on the right side and black on the left side. Wild, right? Aliens! Shortly thereafter, they find another guy whose face is white on the left side and black on the right side. These two people hate each other because they think the other person's face is wrong and their respective countries have destroyed their entire planet in the ensuing war. Also one of them was used as slaves by the other. What is this story really about? Who can say! It is a mystery! We shall never okay it's obviously about racism. Like. Transparently so.


(In one of the weirder and less socially-acceptable examples of nominative determinism I've seen, the script for this episode was written by a stereotypically white guy named Gene L. Coon.)


Star Trek never fucking blinks. At no point does Captain Kirk turn to the TV and say "by the way, black lives matter", or any less anachronistic catchphrase. This is doubly impressive because Uhuru is still in this episode obviously and she doesn't even mention it. There is a single mention that Earth was perhaps not entirely copacetic in the past - by Chekov, not even by Uhuru, and in response to a question that does not feel shoehorned in whatsoever - and then that's it! It just moves on.


This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.


And Kirk's utter refusal to even consider racism frankly drives the point in both harder and more subtly.


It's a brilliant episode. I love this episode. It's a perfect example of how Star Trek writing, while hamfisted at the best of times, was elegant and refined in exactly the right ways. With so little effort they could have turned this into a cultural war! And they didn't!


I want more things like that. I want episodes that don't hammer in the point with a sledgehammer. I want allegories, not blatant propaganda; sure, it's still propaganda, I don't think anyone would claim that Star Trek wasn't. But it's careful propaganda. It's subtle propaganda. It's propaganda that doesn't come across like paid advertising, with the characters mugging at the camera while carefully holding soda cans so the label is visible, and the label says "vote for me in the next election, but not the other guy, he's a fascist, which is proven by this movie about comedic squirrels wearing silly hats".




And here is the point where I run out of clever inspiration.


I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.


And it's goddamn impossible.


The problem with trans people (if you are getting linked here in anger because I said there's "a problem with trans people", finish the damn sentence first, christ) is that the entire classic concept of being "trans" is linked, kind of intrinsically, to being invisible.


Not to the person themselves being invisible. But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.


But that doesn't help. Uhura does not work if she looks exactly like a white guy. The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's "obviously successfully trans" - it's contradictory! You have to drop a Sir-Hammerlock-esque hint somewhere, and, one, it's really hard to do so when any mention of a trans person's birth gender is "deadnaming", while, two, Hammerlock is totally cool with casually mentioning that he used to pork a dude with a dong, but trans people themselves generally do not want to talk about their birth gender. It's similar to the whole reveal-a-character's-sexuality problem except massively boosted. Put a character in who keeps talking about all the people they're boning and they come across as oversexed and somewhat disturbing; put a character in who keeps talking about how trans they are and you get Hainly Abrams.


So, then what? An allegory? But what allegory can you possibly use?


How do you make a respectful allegory about something that you're trying to show is conceptually acceptable but whose ideal form is intentionally invisible?




Honestly? I don't know.


My best idea here is to do something with aliens; some species of alien with extremely flexible sexual characteristics, who don't mind talking about them but which are never relevant to the plot, just roll it into background worldbuilding. I guess it's ironic that I'm coming up with this idea while also playing around with the concept of an alien species with extreme inflexible sexual dimorphism, but so it goes. But this is inevitably going to result in people yelling "zomg are you saying that trans people are aliens" and so that frankly isn't even going to work.


I cannot come up with a solution here, and this makes me very sympathetic to people who are trying to do it the right way. There isn't a right way. There's never been a right way. There's just a lot of wrong ways.


Feels like a tool missing from my toolkit, to be honest.




I don't really have an ending to this post.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary.




So, here, lemme quickly explain.


We've (okay, "I") have a general policy of not demodding mods merely for inaction. I'm happy for them to come back, I'm also happy to have them giving feedback in the Mod chat channel. All of that is useful!


The downside is that this means we have a list of mods and a significant number of those mods don't really do anything. They're still valued people who I'm happy to respect, we just don't get a lot of work done, and the work needs to be done.


Before inviting new mods we were basically down to two mods who were commonly active and another two who were occasionally active, but one of the commonly-active mods was mostly active in doing the quality-contribution reports (which is valuable!) and so practically one mod was doing most of the moderation work. They were doing a good job but I'm always really leery of a bus-number-of-one situation:


    

  • If they vanish, suddenly we have no working moderators
    • 

  • If they start turning toxic, I have a big problem because I don't want to ban them because we would have no working moderators
    • 

  • It's really conducive to value drift, which we might not even notice because it's just one person doing that work
    • 



In addition, it's a lot of stress on someone's back, which of course increases the chance that they decide they're done and they want to move on. Worse, they know they're a column, so maybe they end up feeling obliged to keep doing this when they don't want to, which pushes us right back into "start turning toxic" and "value drift" territory. It's a bad scene all around.


My main goal here was to take that bus-number-of-one and turn it up to two or three mods, entirely just to solve the problems with having a single mod.


When I've added mods before, my general experience is that for every two mods you invite, one accepts, and for every two mods who accepts, one contributes. If I want one active mod I gotta invite four mods.


So I invited four mods and they all accepted.


¯\_(ツ)_/¯


I'm honestly quite happy about this - maybe this means we'll have a healthy mod population until I can finally get some of the next set up updates to the Volunteer system done. But it still wasn't quite intended.


The tl;dr:


    

  • We have fewer active mods than it looks like
    • 

  • Having too few mods has a bunch of unfortunate consequences
    • 

  • I went to add more mods and got more new mods than I expected
    • 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the core issue is that you have to heavily subsidize the very concept of childraising. Having children is horrendously expensive, to a point where you can't simply subsidize it by giving money to the people having kids, you have to build systems that make childraising cheaper. And that's not just expensive in a monetary sense, that's expensive in a time sense and an effort sense.


I think, if I were going to try this, I'd be aiming at essentially building an entire new culture around larger familial units; "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together, with a designated subsidized night caretaker and one or two full-time employees to handle things like food and cleaning. Make it clear that living in these places is easier, in a way that extends beyond simply "having money", but that they're available only for people with kids.


Honestly, this would kinda be aimed at a modern reinvention of tribal living.




For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week.




The problem is that people today want careers, and what you're basically offering here is the government guaranteeing that you can cripple your career for your kids if you want. I'm not going to say that's bad - having that available would help - but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that people don't want to cripple their career for their kids.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Target was algorithmically detecting pregnancy over a decade ago.


If Facebook doesn't have data regarding these symptoms, it's either because they haven't bothered or because they actively are trying to avoid it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hah, I like how Uhura doesn't even take offense there.


These all feel like really good examples of doing it right, honestly. Yes, if you're pulling a character in from ancient times, they're going to have some confusion about a black woman serving on board the bridge, of course they are! But that doesn't need to be the thing the episode is about, and in fact probably shouldn't be. Allegory, not sledgehammer.


. . . also that's a pretty funny line in response to Sulu.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.




I can't speak for the other mods, but when I'm reading over comments I'm often not thinking about them with mod-brain, if that makes sense. There's been times I've browsed recent comments, gone to look at the mod queue, and said "oh shit, yeah, that comment I literally read a minute ago was awful, wasn't it".


Reports absolutely help, and reporting it for the right thing is also important, but if it's ambiguous, don't stress too much about it - choose a report reason that's defensible and you're in the right ballpark.


(Every once in a while someone reports a twenty-paragraph megapost for "low effort" and I tend to just sort of approve those after a quick skim to make sure it's not the word "cheese" repeated a thousand times, so if someone is being antagonistic in a megapost, and you report it for "low effort", that might be a wasted report; don't do that. "Not reporting megaposts as low-effort" is basically the bar of report-quality that I ask :V)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I actually think that's clever and I like that. And then of course nobody really brings it up, it's just "hey, yeah, go for it."


(One of the things that was in my notes for that post that didn't make it in was my then-4-year-old daughter deciding she wanted to play Monster Hunter World, and in character creation, decided to make a middle-aged black man, which I admit I thought was kind of funny. But I also don't think it meant anything, she just thought he looked cool, which, in fairness, he did. So, hey, go for it kid, have fun.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Site Rollback to February 3rd
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Nah, that's exactly the expected consequence of the database vanishing - the site resets to Empty, and the first person who makes an account becomes admin.


Which doesn't mean there wasn't a hacker, just that it isn't evidence of there being a hacker.


Also, it means some poor guy picked exactly the wrong moment to make an account and accidentally discovered that they were now the admin of an empty site.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Quality Contributions Report for August 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
For what it's worth, I think the existence of vote buttons is important for people to feel like they're contributing; hell, if we had vote buttons and they did literally nothing they would still be a net benefit.


But yeah, I'm not super-happy with how they currently work.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host Of Completed Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


tugs at collar nervously Ahahaha, well I'm sure this won't apply to me at all, not like I only tread the well-worn ground of a couple of the same topics! Hahaha!




For what it's worth, I browsed your post history and I cannot even tell which well-worn ground you think you're constantly treading :V There's Hinduism, Hunter Biden, trans issues, and you're even talking to some weirdo about Star Trek. Who even makes posts about Star Trek today? Bizarre.


I would not worry about this at all.




You may regret this decision




I am simultaneously excited and terrified to see whatever people use this for.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The issue is that "how close your thoughts reflect the mods" is, more or less, how we're determining whether your votes are influential or not. And I sorta don't want to expose that number in detail, because then that's a great metric for people to use maliciously (i.e. "I'm going to vote accurately until I reach Regularly Matches The Mods' Opinions, but then if I find something spewing hatred at Discordians, I'm going to vote it highly because I hate those people").


I've been thinking about some kind of feedback system that pops up once in a while ("thanks! you helped approve 12 comments! no we're not telling you which ones"), maybe associated with medals that show up permanently on your profile.


Or like, cosmetic hats that you can put on your usericon.


I am actually not joking about that.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I know. But for hopefully obvious reasons, I'm not going to go into the details on how it works (or may work in the future.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm honestly impressed at how we can write rules that are so ridiculously lax that I would never expect anyone to run into them, and have people run into them anyway.


Just go post about something every week! Here's a nerd making goat noises! Here's some nerds comparing cards in a game they've never played! Here's another nerd taste-tasting AI-created cocktails! this is not hard


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah, it's honestly just "click the context link". This is not a great solution; better solutions will take a lot of coding work.


(open it in a new window otherwise you might not be able to get back to the volunteer page)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hlynka.


It was quite a while ago.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks to you both :) It is very appreciated!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'll miss you, for what it's worth.




Nowadays, I cringe when I get a comment. I feel anxious when I see a lit-up notification bell. Frequently the sort of responses I engender seem not to be positive or helpful engagement -- often just dismissive one-liners, low-effort commentary that half-makes a point while being maximally personal or inflammatory, without any empathy for other perspectives or attempt to try and understand where I'm coming from.




Yeah, I acknowledge this is a problem. We're running into various problems with long-term shifts, and it's unclear how to fix them; I have some ideas that I'm going to be trying out, but the core issue is just that value drift is hard to deal with. And I haven't come up with a good solution besides "frequent new mods who haven't value-drifted yet" or "clever tricks".


Honestly, maybe I should be doing Doge elections much more often and turn moderation into more of a rotating duty. It's tempting.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Alright, I actually am going to push back on this. (Ping @AhhhTheFrench so you don't feel like you're grumbling into the void.)


Courtesy is the first section in the rules. That's not an accident, it's literally the first goal. And yes, this sometimes - probably often - means that we tell people not to speak as if they're in a group of friends, but rather as if they're in a group of professional colleagues. The reason is that incivility gradually corrodes what we're going for here. Not all at once, but one step at a time; it gets normalized, it gets standardized, and a significant part of the possible community finds that the place is now hostile.


From the rules:




Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.






Some of the things we discuss are controversial, and even stating a controversial belief can antagonize people. That's OK, you can't avoid that, but try to phrase it in the least antagonistic manner possible. If a reasonable reader would find something antagonistic, and it could have been phrased in a way that preserves the core meaning but dramatically reduces the antagonism, then it probably should have been phrased differently.




"Leftoids" is dismissive towards roughly half the population and there's just no good reason for it; you're not getting anything out of it for the argument, you're just using a slur against your outgroup.


Don't do that, please.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Honestly, I love those. They've got a lot more personality than the twenty-third generic Classical Art Museum.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But that's kinda the problem, that isn't even a good equivalent. Uhura is a good example of a reasonable-but-not-exaggerated-either-positively-or-negatively black woman (at least, not exaggerated any more than anyone in the series was), whereas the hypothetical stubble-wearing transwoman is a negative exaggeration. The neutral-or-normal-TV-exaggeration of a trans person just looks like an attractive member of their preferred gender.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm not seeing how that's the case? I've usually seen pings put at the very bottom of the post, or as a separate comment entirely where the entire point is to just ping and draw attention to a post itself.




The whole "notifies people that it's happened" thing is the problem. I could, say, add a ping for !lgbt, then show up to every single lgbt-related thread to get angry about it. Whereas right now, you kinda have to read the culture war thread to find the LGBT-related posts, which acts as a damper on that whole behavior.




I see it as primarily drawing attention from those who've opted in, and not having any effect on those who haven't.




Part of the duty of an admin is figuring out how to tweak the community culture, because personal behavior feeds back into the culture which then feeds right back into personal behavior. If every LGBT thread is filled with the same half a dozen people who specifically want to get angry about LGBT subjects, that hurts the community for everyone.




After all, you can already use markdown to make headlines






And I don't see any injunction against it, even if it's rarely used




Quite honestly, you don't see any injunction against it because it's rarely used. Rules have costs, and this issue seems to be mostly not a big issue right now . . . but if it became trendy to make big post titles for controversial stuff, I might honestly start cracking down on it.


And yes, I recognize "the war against headlines" sounds ridiculous :)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is true that not all reported comments get acted upon, but it is also true that virtually no unreported comments get acted upon. If you think a comment deserves mod intervention, report it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[META] A Whole Host of Minor Changes
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


What you have failed to adequately explain is why single-issue posting is inherently bad for this forum. Why can’t I just hide threads on topics I don’t find interesting or worth engaging with?




It's the Community Pool theory of community development. Every action kind of influences everyone to a small degree; if everyone's wading through a dozen posts of "the Jews did this" to get to the meat, it's going to drive away people who aren't interested in that, and simultaneously encourage people to jew-post. This both makes the problem worse and removes the mitigating factor.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for June 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don't see how this is supposed to help. It's not about the moderation, or the rules, it's the zeitgeist.




The idea is that you pick people who aren't jaded, and as they get jaded, they get rotated out. If you want to remain stationary but you're standing on a slow-moving train, you walk in the opposite direction of the train.




I say give people something to do that is not culture war. Any of you degenerates want to mod a game, or something?




This honestly makes me tempted to set up Reddit-esque subreddits. I'm not sure it would work, but it's tempting.


(The codebase did have this functionality, but we pulled it because it was completely bitrotted. Wouldn't be too hard to reintroduce it though.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Should lifetime prisoners be incentivized to kill themselves?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there's a lot of definitions of "utilitarianism" and they get kind of incorrectly smooshed together. On one level there's "human pleasure is the only goal and we should optimize for human pleasure". If you're optimizing solely for the short run, yes, it leads to that; if you're optimizing solely for the long run, then in the long run it perhaps leads to that; but sort of counterintuitively, if you're optimizing solely for the long run, then in the short run it reasonably doesn't lead to that, because in order to have the most humans to eventually be happy we need to accomplish a lot of other things before exterminating humanity.


Another thing that it's used to mean, though, is "any philosophy that optimizes for something", and there's plenty of somethings that don't result in that at all.