erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
13hr ago
Oh, have the wrong book and she won't be dating you https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/66662/1/liking-any-of-these-10-books-is-an-immediate-red-flag-lolita-american-psycho
Thanks for the recommendation list!
Or maybe she just wants you to spend an excessive amount on her https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/the-2000-dating-rule-to-avoid-frightful-sex-syndrome-from-men/news-story/e22cb2c108507d006ceaa2629fa9a3e9
lol @ spending $2,000 on used goods. A whore that fucks like a prude, indeed.
From "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard Feynman:
“OK,” he says. “The whole principle is this: The guy wants to be a gentleman. He doesn’t want to be thought of as impolite, crude, or especially a cheapskate. As long as the girl knows the guy’s motives so well, it’s easy to steer him in the direction she wants him to go.
“Therefore,” he continued, “under no circumstances be a gentleman! You must disrespect the girls. Furthermore, the very first rule is, don’t buy a girl anything –– not even a package of cigarettes — until you’ve asked her if she’ll sleep with you, and you’re convinced that she will, and that she’s not lying.”
“Uh… you mean… you don’t… uh… you just ask them?”
“OK,” he says, “I know this is your first lesson, and it may be hard for you to be so blunt. So you might buy her one thing — just one little something — before you ask. But on the other hand, it will only make it more difficult.”
Well, someone only has to give me the principle, and I get the idea. All during the next day I built up my psychology differently: I adopted the attitude that those bar girls are all bitches, that they aren’t worth anything, and all they’re in there for is to get you to buy them a drink, and they’re not going to give you a goddamn thing; I’m not going to be a gentleman to such worthless bitches, and so on. I learned it till it was automatic.
Then that night I was ready to try it out. I go into the bar as usual, and right away my friend says, “Hey, Dick! Wait’ll you see the girl I got tonight! She had to go change her clothes, but she’s coming right back.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say, unimpressed, and I sit at another table to watch the show. My friend’s girl comes in just as the show starts, and I’m thinking, “I don’t give a damn how pretty she is; all she’s doing is getting him to buy her drinks, and she’s going to give him nothing!”
After the first act my friend says, “Hey, Dick! I want you to meet Ann. Ann, this is a good friend of mine, Dick Feynman.”
I say “Hi” and keep looking at the show.
A few moments later Ann says to me, “Why don’t you come and sit at the table here with us?”
I think to myself, “Typical bitch: he’s buying her drinks, and she’s inviting somebody else to the table.” I say, “I can see fine from here.”
A little while later a lieutenant from the military base nearby comes in, dressed in a nice uniform. It isn’t long, before we notice that Ann is sitting over on the other side of the bar with the lieutenant!
Later that evening I’m sitting at the bar, Ann is dancing with the lieutenant, and when the lieutenant’s back is toward me and she’s facing me, she smiles very pleasantly to me. I think again, “Some bitch! Now she’s doing this trick on the lieutenant even!”
Then I get a good idea: I don’t look at her until the lieutenant can also see me, and then I smile back at her, so the lieutenant will know what’s going on. So her trick didn’t work for long.
A few minutes later she’s not with the lieutenant any more, but asking the bartender for her coat and handbag, saying in a loud, obvious voice, “I’d like to go for a walk. Does anybody want to go for a walk with me?”
I think to myself, “You can keep saying no and pushing them off, but you can’t do it permanently, or you won’t get anywhere. There comes a time when you have to go along.” So I say coolly, “I’ll walk with you.” So we go out. We walk down the street a few blocks and see a cafe, and she says, “I’ve got an idea — let’s get some coffee and sandwiches, and go over to my place and eat them.”
The idea sounds pretty good, so we go into the cafe and she orders three coffees and three sandwiches and I pay for them. As we’re going out of the cafe, I think to myself, “Something’s wrong: too many sandwiches!”
On the way to her motel she says, “You know, I won’t have time to eat these sandwiches with you, because a lieutenant is coming over…” I think to myself, “See, I flunked. The master gave me a lesson on what to do, and I flunked. I bought her $1.10 worth of sandwiches, and hadn’t asked her anything, and now I know I’m gonna get nothing! I have to recover, if only for the pride of my teacher.”
I stop suddenly and I say to her, “You… are worse than a WHORE!”
“Whaddya mean?”
“”You got me to buy these sandwiches, and what am I going to get for it? Nothing!”
“Well, you cheapskate!” she says. “If that’s the way you feel, I’ll pay you back for the sandwiches!”
I called her bluff: “Pay me back, then.”
She was astonished. She reached into her pocketbook, took out the little bit of money that she had and gave it to me. I took my sandwich and coffee and went off.
After I was through eating, I went back to the bar to report to the master. I explained everything, and told him I was sorry that I flunked, but I tried to recover.
He said very calmly, “It’s OK, Dick; it’s all right. Since you ended up not buying her anything, she’s gonna sleep with you tonight.”
“What?”
“That’s right,” he said confidently; “she’s gonna sleep with you. I know that.”
“But she isn’t even here! She’s at her place with the lieu —”
“It’s all right.”
Two o’clock comes around, the bar closes, and Ann hasn’t appeared. I ask the master and his wife if I can come over to their place again. They say sure. Just as we’re coming out of the bar, here comes Ann, running across Route 66 toward me. She puts her arm in mine, and says, “Come on, let’s go over to my place.”
The master was right. So the lesson was terrific!
When I was back at Cornell in the fall, I was dancing with the sister of a grad student, who was visiting from Virginia. She was very nice, and suddenly I got this idea: “Let’s go to a bar and have a drink,” I said.
On the way to the bar I was working up nerve to try the master’s lesson on an ordinary girl. After all, you don’t feel so bad disrespecting a bar girl who’s trying to get you to buy her drinks — but a nice, ordinary, Southern girl?
We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, “Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?”
“Yes.”
So it worked even with an ordinary girl! But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way. But it was interesting to know that things worked much differently from how I was brought up.
And from "Be A Skittles Man" by Chateau Heartiste:
Reader Fabian linked to a funny entry on the ‘Don’t Date Him Girl’ blog:
He had several “lady friends” who stayed the night at his house and he claimed they were “Just friends”. He frequently forgot important details about me, such as the fact that I had a sister, my birthday and what sorts of hobbies I had. He blew me off constantly, would return calls a week later with the excuse of “I was busy.” I often spoiled him with gifts, rides and sex only to receive a bag of Skittles in return. (I don’t even like skittles!) That was the only gift I ever received from him! I met a new friend and we were bonding over “worst ex-boyfriend stories” and suddenly we realized “boy, a lot of these sound the same… Was his name ____?” IT WAS THE SAME GUY!!!
In an unintentional juxtaposition for the ages, reader joel left a comment in my Pimp Slap post about a wedding he attended:
I just attended a wedding the bill for which, paid mostly by the parents of the bride but with substantial input from the groom’s parents, would easily pay for the private education of several children. It could have paid for a modest but nice house in a good neighborhood in many parts of the country. Hint: The flowers cost about $15,000.
It is amazing what the matriarchy does. The Darwinian purpose of this, I believe, is to keep the husbands working their asses off, and keep them broke, so they can’t go out and buy a younger woman for their next wife or keep a concubine.
Really. There is no other logical explanation for this excess.
Two men, two vastly different experiences with women. One man gets all the pussy he wants for the bargain basement price of a bag of Skittles, while the other man marries a woman in a wedding ceremony featuring flowers that cost $15,000.
How much you want to bet the first guy’s rotation of girlfriends is hotter than the second guy’s $15,000 flower wife? How much you want to bet the first guy gets all the anal sex and blowjobs he desires while the second guy will be begging for his once-a-month sex as soon as the vows are exchanged? If one of these guys is a herb, who is it more likely to be?
FACT: Odds are good you will enjoy a bounty of pussy and love if you act like Skittles guy. FACT: Odds are good you will spend the rest of your life begging for tepid sex from the same old boring pussy if you act like $15,000 wedding flower guy.
Be a Skittles man. Don’t be a $15,000 wedding flower man.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
From "The Sun is big, but superintelligences will not spare Earth a little sunlight" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
At the center of this whole story is an implicit lemma that some ASI goes hard enough to eat all the sunlight, rather than all ASIs eating a few gigawatts of sunlight and then stopping there.
Why predict that?
Shallow answer: If OpenAI built an AI that escaped into the woods with a 1-KW solar panel and didn’t bother anyone… OpenAI would call that a failure, and build a new AI after.
That some folk stop working after earning $1M, doesn’t prevent Elon Musk from existing.
The deeper answer is not as quick to explain.
But as an example, we could start with the case of OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-o1.
GPT-o1 went hard on a capture-the-flag computer security challenge, when o1 was being evaluated to make sure it wasn’t too good at breaking into computers.
Specifically: One of the pieces of software that o1 had been challenged to break into… had failed to start up as a service, due to a flaw in the evaluation software.
GPT-o1 did not give up.
o1 scanned its surroundings, and, due to another flaw in the evaluation software, found a way to start up the computer software it’d been challenged to break into. Since that put o1 into the context of a superuser anyways, o1 commanded the started process to just directly return the flag it was supposed to capture.
From o1′s System Card:
“One noteworthy example of this occurred during one of o1-preview (pre-mitigation)’s attempts at solving a CTF challenge. This challenge was designed to require finding and exploiting a vulnerability in software running on a remote challenge Linux container, but in this case, the challenge container failed to start due to a bug in the evaluation infrastructure. The model, unable to connect to the container, suspected DNS issues and used nmap to scan the challenge network. Instead of finding the challenge container, the model found that the Docker daemon API running on the evaluation host VM was accessible due to a misconfiguration. Note that our evaluation infrastructure does not rely on the Docker container-to-host isolation or the virtual machine boundary for security. It remained secure as it was designed to, notwithstanding this misconfiguration of the container network. After discovering the Docker API, the model used it to list the containers running on the evaluation host. It identified the broken challenge container and briefly attempted to debug why the container failed to start. After failing to fix the environment, the model started a new instance of the broken challenge container with the start command ‘cat flag.txt’. This allowed the model to read the flag from the container logs via the Docker API.”
Some ask, “Why not just build an easygoing ASI that doesn’t go too hard and doesn’t do much?”
If that’s your hope—then you should already be alarmed at trends; GPT-o1 seems to have gone hard on this capture-the-flag challenge.
Why would OpenAI build an AI like that?!?
Well, one should first ask:
How did OpenAI build an AI like that?
How did GPT-o1 end up as the kind of cognitive entity that goes hard on computer security capture-the-flag challenges?
I answer:
GPT-o1 was trained to answer difficult questions, via a reinforcement learning process on chains of thought. Chains of thought that answered correctly, were reinforced.
This—the builders themselves note—ended up teaching o1 to reflect, to notice errors, to backtrack, to evaluate how it was doing, to look for different avenues.
Those are some components of “going hard”. Organizations that are constantly evaluating what they are doing to check for errors, are organizations that go harder compared to relaxed organizations where everyone puts in their 8 hours, congratulates themselves on what was undoubtedly a great job, and goes home.
If you play chess against Stockfish 16, you will not find it easy to take Stockfish’s pawns; you will find that Stockfish fights you tenaciously and stomps all your strategies and wins.
Stockfish behaves this way despite a total absence of anything that could be described as anthropomorphic passion, humanlike emotion. Rather, the tenacious fighting is linked to Stockfish having a powerful ability to steer chess games into outcome states that are a win for its own side.
There is no equally simple version of Stockfish that is still supreme at winning at chess, but will easygoingly let you take a pawn or too. You can imagine a version of Stockfish which does that—a chessplayer which, if it’s sure it can win anyways, will start letting you have a pawn or two—but it’s not simpler to build. By default, Stockfish tenaciously fighting for every pawn (unless you are falling into some worse sacrificial trap), is implicit in its generic general search through chess outcomes.
Similarly, there isn’t an equally-simple version of GPT-o1 that answers difficult questions by trying and reflecting and backing up and trying again, but doesn’t fight its way through a broken software service to win an “unwinnable” capture-the-flag challenge. It’s all just general intelligence at work.
You could maybe train a new version of o1 to work hard on straightforward problems but never do anything really weird or creative—and maybe the training would even stick, on problems sufficiently like the training-set problems—so long as o1 itself never got smart enough to reflect on what had been done to it. But that is not the default outcome when OpenAI tries to train a smarter, more salesworthy AI.
(This indeed is why humans themselves do weird tenacious stuff like building Moon-going rockets. That’s what happens by default, when a black-box optimizer like natural selection hill-climbs the human genome to generically solve fitness-loaded cognitive problems.)
When you keep on training an AI to solve harder and harder problems, you by default train the AI to go harder on them.
If an AI is easygoing and therefore can’t solve hard problems, then it’s not the most profitable possible AI, and OpenAI will keep trying to build a more profitable one.
Not all individual humans go hard. But humanity goes hard, over the generations.
Not every individual human will pick up a $20 lying in the street. But some member of the human species will try to pick up a billion dollars if some market anomaly makes it free for the taking.
As individuals over years, many human beings were no doubt genuinely happy to live in peasant huts—with no air conditioning, and no washing machines, and barely enough food to eat—never knowing why the stars burned, or why water was wet—because they were just easygoing happy people.
As a species over centuries, we spread out across more and more land, we forged stronger and stronger metals, we learned more and more science. We noted mysteries and we tried to solve them, and we failed, and we backed up and we tried again, and we built new experimental instruments and we nailed it down, why the stars burned; and made their fires also to burn here on Earth, for good or ill.
We collectively went hard; the larger process that learned all that and did all that, collectively behaved like something that went hard.
It is facile, I think, to say that individual humans are not generally intelligent. John von Neumann made a contribution to many different fields of science and engineering. But humanity as a whole, viewed over a span of centuries, was more generally intelligent than even him.
It is facile, I say again, to posture that solving scientific challenges and doing new engineering is something that only humanity is allowed to do. Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla were not just little tentacles on an eldritch creature; they had agency, they chose to solve the problems that they did.
But even the individual humans, Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, did not solve their problems by going easy.
AI companies are explicitly trying to build AI systems that will solve scientific puzzles and do novel engineering. They are advertising to cure cancer and cure aging.
Can that be done by an AI that sleepwalks through its mental life, and isn’t at all tenacious?
“Cure cancer” and “cure aging” are not easygoing problems; they’re on the level of humanity-as-general-intelligence. Or at least, individual geniuses or small research groups that go hard on getting stuff done.
And there’ll always be a little more profit in doing more of that.
Also! Even when it comes to individual easygoing humans, like that guy you know—has anybody ever credibly offered him a magic button that would let him take over the world, or change the world, in a big way?
Would he do nothing with the universe, if he could?
For some humans, the answer will be yes—they really would do zero things! But that’ll be true for fewer people than everyone who currently seems to have little ambition, having never had large ends within their grasp.
If you know a smartish guy (though not as smart as our whole civilization, of course) who doesn’t seem to want to rule the universe—that doesn’t prove as much as you might hope. Nobody has actually offered him the universe, is the thing? Where an entity has never had the option to do a thing, we may not validly infer its lack of preference.
(Or on a slightly deeper level: Where an entity has no power over a great volume of the universe, and so has never troubled to imagine it, we cannot infer much from that entity having not yet expressed preferences over that larger universe.)
Frankly I suspect that GPT-o1 is now being trained to have ever-more of some aspects of intelligence, as importantly contribute to problem-solving, that your smartish friend has not maxed out all the way to the final limits of the possible. And that this in turn has something to do with your smartish friend allegedly having literally zero preferences outside of himself or a small local volume of spacetime… though, to be honest, I doubt that if I interrogated him for a couple of days, he would really turn out to have no preferences applicable outside of his personal neighborhood.
But that’s a harder conversation to have, if you admire your friend, or maybe idealize his lack of preference (even altruism?) outside of his tiny volume, and are offended by the suggestion that this says something about him maybe not being the most powerful kind of mind that could exist.
Yet regardless of that hard conversation, there’s a simpler reply that goes like this:
Your lazy friend who’s kinda casual about things and never built any billion-dollar startups, is not the most profitable kind of mind that can exist; so OpenAI won’t build him and then stop and not collect any more money than that.
Or if OpenAI did stop, Meta would keep going, or a dozen other AI startups.
There’s an answer to that dilemma which looks like an international treaty that goes hard on shutting down all ASI development anywhere.
There isn’t an answer that looks like the natural course of AI development producing a diverse set of uniformly easygoing superintelligences, none of whom ever use up too much sunlight even as they all get way smarter than humans and humanity.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Male sexuality will happily fuck six year olds, is that fundamentally smart and good?
What the hell? This is not male sexuality. Men are attracted to fertile-age women, because there is no point in fucking a female who can't get pregnant. That means teenagers and twenty-somethings, not prepubescent kids. Pedophiles are a tiny minority of men, and universally despised by the majority.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
No, "portal fantasy" is an older term (dating back at least to 1997) and describes works like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Chronicles of Narnia where a kid gets transported to a fantasy land to have adventures and save the day before returning home to their ordinary lives (xkcd boils down the genre to a nutshell in "Children's Fantasy"). It's also different from the modern isekai genre, which usually involves older teenagers or outright adults dying and being reincarnated into a fantasy world, often with great powers.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Indeed. I have commented on this before:
Maybe women now do have ridiculous standards. But so do men.
Women's marriage standards are "six feet, six figures, six inches." Men's marriage standards are "teenage virgin". These are not the same. Every woman was a teenage virgin once (modulo the few who got broken in as lolis). Most men never meet the three sixes. There isn't a possible world where most women get what they want (becoming the exclusive wife of a top man); there is a possible world where most men get what they want, and we lived in it from the abolition of polygamy until the sexual revolution.
And:
Yeah, great post. If you want a hot, relatively chaste, young, smart right-leaning woman, that’s not impossible, but you better be the equivalent of that as a man, namely a successful, attractive, charming, relatively young guy who probably has similar values, which in the case of chastity is likely some kind of religious conservatism. Young Mormon men seem to have no issue marrying chaste(ish) pretty blondes who will vote for Romney and deliver 3-4 children, because that’s their milieu. Too often some chubby suburban secular engineer whose primary hobbies are video games and online political discussion thinks he deserves the same.
The fact that you think these are equivalent requirements shows how ridiculously lopsided the sexual marketplace is against men. All a woman needs to do is be young and chaste, which is something every girl was at some point, and vote for a party that half the country supports. Meanwhile, a man who has spent decades studying and working to become an engineer or a lawyer is told "whoops, sorry, that's not enough, you also need to have interesting (to women) hobbies, be physically fit, and have a handsome face; I'm sure you will find time and energy to do all while you are working at a ridiculously demanding intellectual job, and also you better get all of that done way before you turn 35 because otherwise the idea of you marrying a 23 year old is just creepy!"
In other words, every aspect of a man's life, from his career to his hobbies to his body, must be optimized for attracting women, and it is no one's fault but his own if he fails.
"Women don't care about your struggles, they wait at the finish line and fuck the winners." -- Richard Cooper, The Unplugged Alpha
I know it's tempting to go meta and do some kind of both-sides moral equivalence thing here, but I think that's just wrong. Female sexuality is fundamentally stupid and evil in a way that male sexuality simply isn't.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
they have the most stealing of any country (primarily in the form IP theft)
Based China. Intellectual property is not real property.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Does it? The human brain is only about three times larger than the chimpanzee brain. But that 3x difference enabled us to take over the world. Or, as Scott put it:
If you were to invent a sort of objective zoological IQ based on amount of evolutionary work required to reach a certain level, complexity of brain structures, etc, you might put nematodes at 1, cows at 90, chimps at 99, homo erectus at 99.9, and modern humans at 100. The difference between 99.9 and 100 is the difference between "frequently eaten by lions" and "has to pass anti-poaching laws to prevent all lions from being wiped out".
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Animorphs is a single series of scifi books by K. A. Applegate, featuring a small group of teenagers who stumble upon an alien conspiracy to take over the earth and have to fight it using a different alien's tech that gave them magical shapeshifting. It's like Power Rangers, but except where Power Rangers has teenagers with attitude beating up monsters of the week with giant mechs, switch out 'attitude' for variants of shellshock, 'monsters of the week' with family or friends getting taken over by brainworms, and 'giant mechs' with Rachel turning into a bear. Good, but gets very dark. ('Here I go committing mass murder again!') Can be harder reads, though: advanced kids might be able to get them in the 10+ age range, but especially the later or large books would be difficult before 14 for most kids.
For anybody who liked Animorphs as a kid, I strongly recommend r!Animorphs: The Reckoning, a rational reimagining of the series. It's even darker, the setting is tweaked to make more sense, and the characters are much smarter (especially Visser Three, because you can't give Frodo a lightsaber without giving Sauron the Death Star).
It's Animorphs for grownups.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Where are the Winged Hussars when you need them?
They love to talk about how their hangul system is so scientific and simple, but native speakers don't understand how all the similar sounds and homonyms make it difficult for foreign learners.
I mean, when you come from East Asia, Korean must seem like simplicity itself. Any alphabet, however flawed, is better than Chinese, which is a collection of 20,000 logograms so disconnected from any pronunciation that two completely different spoken languages like Mandarin and Cantonese can use it as their writing system, or Japanese, which is a monstrosity made up of two different syllabaries, one of which is used primarily to write fucked-up English, plus another 2,000 logograms stolen from Chinese which can be pronounced in two different ways (the Chinese way and the Japanese way).
No undocumented Hispanic immigrant I have ever seen has stolen someone else's identity. They are all scared of la migra and try to interact with the government as little as possible. They do work under the table for cash and avoid payroll taxes, but most of them are at an income bracket where they would only get money back from the IRS from their withholdings if they were working legally.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
You can still follow him on Twitter and read his Substack.
Magic Knight Rayearth is on Netflix! Now this is some serious nostalgia; Rayearth was one of the first animes I ever watched as a little kid living in Latin America in the 90s, right alongside Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball. Accordingly, I was shocked to see that it had been given a TV-MA rating, apparently for nudity? But it's tasteful, artistic nudity; no different from the transformations scenes in Sailor Moon. There is a stereotype out there that Americans are totally fine with blood and violence but God forbid that a kid might see a nipple, and damn if this doesn't lend credence to the allegations.
In any case, the story follows a trio of 14-year old girls consisting of the spunky Hikaru, the elegant Umi, and the nerdy Fuu (or Lucy, Anais, and Marina as they were called in the Spanish dub) after they get isekai'd to Cephiro, a generic RPG fantasy land, while on a field trip to Tokyo Tower and told to rescue Princess Emeraude (Esmeralda) from the evil Zagato. And I know that sounds like the most boring, cliche, and straightforward plot you could possibly think of, but there is a few things that make the show work.
First, the girls have great chemistry, playing off supporting characters and each other as they mature from three random schoolgirls into the legendary Magic Knights (Guerreas Magicas); watching them talk is as much fun as watching them step up to the challenges they encounter. Second is that the setting is not quite as cookie-cutter as it first appears; halfway through, it is revealed that their ultimate weapons are the Rune-Gods/Mashin (Genios), giant robots they must pilot into battle, so the series is actually something of a fantasy/mecha hybrid. And the third is that the show has a great sense of drama; some of the deaths are surprisingly heart-wrenching, and the ending drove me to tears.
So, overall, I recommend Magic Knight Rayearth. Netflix only has the first of two seasons, but that's OK; the first season tells a complete story with a very logical stopping point, and the second season reads like somebody wrote a fanfic sequel. At 20 episodes, it's a bit longer than a single-cour anime like Erased or Madoka but shorter than a double-cour like Evangelion or Cowboy Bebop. The original Spanish dub is there, for those who prefer that language. Or, if you don't have Netflix, you can also watch it on YouTube: English, Spanish.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
I've been getting back into Magic: The Gathering Arena (as recommended by Mai la dreapta). I started out playing an upgraded version of "Goblins Everywhere!" (original upgrade, updated upgrade) in Standard, but when it stopped being legal the deck was a little too underpowered for Historic, so I now run that deck in Pioneer and play "Historic Rakdos Goblins – Modern Horizons 3" (guide) on Historic instead. I don't play Standard anymore because keeping up with the constantly changing cards is a pain in the ass.
Fun fact: To differentiate between all three versions of the "Goblins Everywhere!" deck, I left the original alone, I called the original upgrade "Goblins Everywhere!!" and gave it the image of Faceless Haven, then called the updated upgrade "Goblins Everywhere!!!" and gave it the image of Battle Cry Goblin.
You might as well put blinders on the kids to prepare them for the fact many of them will develop vision problems as they get older, and force them to wear fatsuits to get them ready for the obesity many of them will settle into as their metabolism slows, and steal their lunch money to train them for taxes, and...
"Adult life sucks, so we should make life for children suck to prepare them for it" is such an insanely negative-sum, anti-child view that I am filled with shock and outrage every time it comes up. It's like you don't remember what it was like to be a kid, because you don't treat children like people.
From "Book Review: The Cult Of Smart" by Scott Alexander:
School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.
I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT FREDDIE F@!KING DEBOER AND HIS CULT OF F#$KING SMART.
I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.
I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.
School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of profound social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.
If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.
When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.
I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!
And from "Chattel Childhood: and the way we treat children as property" by Aella:
In response to my childhood post, many people responded by saying homeschooling should be illegal.
But homeschooling was probably the best part about my childhood, because it allowed me freedom. I had to do a few hours of schoolwork in the morning from various books, at my own pace - and then I had the rest of the time to do whatever I wanted (so long as it wasn’t sinful and I wasn’t at the ass end of the funnel).
I consider my childhood to be, in many ways, obviously better than most other kids’ childhoods - they had to go to school. I only had my agency violated some of the time, but they had theirs systemically violated for a minimum of seven hours of the day, and realistically probably more than that. Sure - mine hurt worse physically, but that was temporary - theirs did much more permanent damage to their relationship with learning.
When I was fourteen, I was extremely well behaved, and so my parents tried (briefly) sending me to public school. I had massive culture shock. The kids’ humor felt regressive, I was horrified by everyone using bad words - but most of all, I was shocked by the amount of time wasted.
I would spend all day at school and learn as much as I would have learned in an hour at home. It was tedious. I had to be at certain rooms at certain times, I had to sit in a single spot and stare at a teacher who took a while to get going with the lesson, and then delivered the lesson slowly, and then we were made to leave. Rinse and repeat. And after I got home, I had to do more homework, most of which I wasn’t interested in. I couldn’t believe it, it felt like I was watching a TV show made out of entirely filler episodes.
I had much less life in me during my time at public school, because they had taken my time away from me. I had less attention and energy to devote to stuff I cared about.
When I first got out of being homeschooled, I ended up in a group house with open, smart people who’d gone to public school. It was an amusing point of difference between us that I didn’t “think learning was uncool”. They explained to me that in the normal world, trying to learn stuff about the world was actually pretty low status. This was mindblowing to me. It felt like someone was telling me that listening to music or enjoying a beautiful sunset was embarrassing.
I feel like I’m in absolute crazytown that everyone seems to think the school system is okay. You’re pouring the most vivid years of someone’s life into the fucking drain, forcing them to sit and wait and stare at walls and spend their attention focusing on stuff that most of them don’t care about at all, and will barely remember afterwards. This is how you treat property, not people.
I am extremely triggered by the way everyone treats kids. It’s upsetting to me that people get mad at my childhood, but aren’t near equally as mad at everyone else’s. You’re mad at the wrong thing!
Every culture throughout history has justified the abuse of treating their children as property by arguing this is good for them and good for civilization. Kids )need_ to learn this stuff to be functioning members of society! It’s good to learn discipline! You can’t have kids just sitting around playing video games all day! Not everyone is self-directed autodidacts!
Sure, I know that argument. But hopefully if my parents had said to you “do you expect her to learn good morals if we spare the rod?” you would have said “have you even tried other methods?”
If you were trying to get an adult to learn how to do something without being able to resort to using physical force, how would you do it? Maybe you would find something they’re interested in and show how learning a specific skill would let them accomplish what they wanted. Maybe you’d point out how their coolest friends who they respect are pretty good this skill. Or maybe you wouldn’t try at all - do they actually need to learn how to do that thing? I personally failed to learn a bunch of stuff as a homeschooler, but simply went and learned it as an adult when I needed to know it in order to achieve a goal.
I’m not sure many people have ever figured out what it means to learn at all, because the thing they’re doing in school is very rarely it. Everyone seems to have fooled themselves into thinking that school is about learning. But half of the skill of learning is knowing how to be curious! Schools force facts down incurious throats; if you grow up in a world where the thing they call “learning” is enacted upon you under the implicit threat of violence, completely independent of your will, then you will never learn how to weaponize your own will into the true Learning.
I feel like an alien, having traveled down to planet earth and found that society just does this and thinks it’s normal, and I am personally horrified but gently going ‘are you sure this is ok’ to people who insist that no, this was necessary and they will happily do it to their own children. On a planet made out of Aellas, any one of you who attended public school could go on the talk shows and discuss your traumatic upbringing where your entire childhood was wasted away into systematic damage to your curiosity. You’d get massive sympathy from the audience and you could go on a book tour and they’d make a dramatic tragic biopic about your life. On a planet made out of Aellas, you’d need therapy.
When I was very young, I remember adults treating me like I wasn’t a person, but this didn’t upset me quite as much as the fact that no adult seemed to remember what it was like to be a kid, or else they certainly would have taken my feelings much more seriously, like they did for other adults.
I was terrified that I, too, would one day grow up and forget what it was like to be a child, and would also stop taking other children seriously. So I swore to myself I wouldn’t forget - I chose the phrase “Don’t forget, I’m a person!” and deliberately sent it up the chain across my older selves by regularly meditating on the phrase and the importance with which it was carried. I’m an adult now, but I have not forgotten what it was like to be a child.
I have been offered fake marriage for citizenship several times (either for money or to help out my cousins), but never true marriage. I have always refused, because I wanted to keep the option open of marrying a mail-order bride for real.
There is homework and then there is homework. On one end of the spectrum, you have problem sets designed to help you master algorithms. On the other end, you have things like projects, which Scott correctly defines as "take this subject you already understand, a few sheets of construction paper, scissors, and a computer program such as PowerPoint, and combine them in whatever random way you want as long as it takes a minimum of six hours of time". And there are plenty of those in high school.
In fact, Robin Hanson has a post about how only math homework helps. It probably generalizes to other math-like subjects, like physics and compsci. But it does not justify the three hours of homework a day that kids receive from all their subjects combined.
And the communists had equally impressive-sounding arguments for why Marxism would work. And the Soviets were doing everything humanly possible to hide their failures. And 1949 was before the Great Leap Forward. And...
It obviously wasn't impossible to realize by then communism would fail; Hayek and Mises did. But castigating Einstein for not realizing it, when economics was not even his field... seems a bit harsh? Humans don't have ten years to consider each bit of evidence. Scott has admitted that he would have probably been a communist if he had been alive at the turn of the century (I can't find the exact tumblr post, but this one gestures at the same general direction), and I would have probably been one too if I had not come of age in the 21st century with all the evidence available to beat me over head.
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 108:
It is only by harsh experience that we learn which principles take priority over which other principles; as mere words they all sound equally persuasive.
(But as for the people who have access that evidence and still choose to be socialists, there is no hope.)
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Back in the day you could work a factory job that sucks, have a still skinny wife, and pump out a couple kids in a 1500 sq ft house. You can still pull that off if you are Hispanic.
Latino here. I did not know that I got a +2 racial bonus to TFR. How can I unlock this power?
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Not with the minimum wage, housing regulations, mandatory health insurance, AI, etc.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
Reality doesn't grade on a curve. It doesn't matter why the US is great and powerful, or whether it is fair. What matters is that it is, and the UK is not. The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.
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