erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
See also The Mortal Instruments, which was adapted from the author's earlier Draco Trilogy.
In a sane world, writers could just publish their fanfic commercially and send a royalty check to the copyright holder. But we do not live in a sane world.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
See this is a problem with markets. Markets just aim for profits, that's what they're for and all they do. If you want anything more than profits (increasingly often highly short-termist profits), you need a non-market solution. We want deep, long-term investment and expansion of housing stock. That's good for the economy in the longterm, enables population growth, mobility, agglomeration effects. But you can't get there by just naively relying on markets to do their thing, that's how you get rentierism and ridiculously high property prices.
...no, you literally just have to remove the zoning restrictions on building housing and the market will trip over itself to build more housing until the price of rent collapses. Then you simply remove prohibitions on racial discrimination so that people don't have to use unaffordability as a way to keep out the underclass.
This whole mess is caused by the government refusing to let markets solve the problem.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
Austin, Texas empirically shows that it is possible for rent prices to go down as long as you build enough housing. Whether people are still treating land as an investment or not is academic at that point. The important thing is to lower the value of houses.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
Does 50 Shades belong in the romance category?
...Yes?
The romance genre is just the female version of pornography. Much like purpose of porn is to stimulate male reproductive instincts, the purpose of romance movies is to stimulate female reproductive instincts.
The difference is that men and women are attracted to different things, so instead of men watching an endless stream of videos depicting naked girls who moan a lot, women consume an endless stream of stories about billionaire athlete demon pirates kings who declare their undying love for the audience surrogate.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
If you liked that, then you will love Scott's paranoid rant (that time he got drunk and said everything he really thinks about the Cathedral and the blue tribe) and his leaked e-mail (that time his ex-girlfriend's husband decided to post Scott's private correspondence describing his relationship with the far right).
This is a recipe for never getting married, because the kind of guy who enjoys nerdy infodumping considerably outnumbers the kind of woman who enjoys listening to nerdy infodumps.
Your wife doesn't have to share your interests, be your best friend, or anything like that; that's what your male friends are for. She needs to be good at the sorts of things a wife should be good at.
erwgv3g34
6mo ago
That's just religiously-flavored wireheading.
Average guy on here, if you had fifty women throwing themselves at you, would you pick the top ten most attractive ones or would you sleep with all fifty?
I'm asking because I see a certain amount of resentment in comments (not necessarily on here) about women being too picky and they get loads of matches on dating apps and they only reply to the most desirable ones. Well, if you had a selection of possible sexual/romantic partners vying for your attention, would you reply to Number Fifty on the list as well as Number One, or would you just select out Numbers One Through Ten of the ones you personally find hottest and ignore the rest?
I'm not trying to gotcha anyone or point fingers, I'm honestly curious.
This is the plot of basically every harem anime out there, or at least the plot of every harem anime made after the realistic social, legal, religious, and economic constrains that forced the protagonist to choose a single girl to wed gave way to the pure wish-fulfillment fantasy of polygamy. And the revealed preference of men is, overwhelmingly, to keep them all.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
This, but unironically.
(It's been noted that talking to a therapist about your problems is just the modern version of going to a priest to talk about your sins, but at least the priest doesn't ask to see your insurance).
What is worse: to have a few fallen women designated as prostitutes to allow young men to blow off steam and gain experience without spoiling the nice girls they will eventually marry, as we did in the past? Or to allow every young woman to become a whore and make a Pikachu face when it turns out that most of them embrace the offer with open legs arms, as we do now?
I know what I pick. Better to live in Omelas than in Sodom and Gomorrah.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
He means get her contact information, not steal her contact lenses. What PUAs call a number close (distinct from the k-close, which involves kissing, and the f-close, which involves fucking).
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
(OT: If I start a line with 2., the preview will turn that into 1. Do we really need the editor to count for us? Relevant quote: He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.)
Comments are parsed in Markdown, which is translated to HTML. By writing "2.", you are creating an ordered list, which is an HTML object that always starts counting from the beginning.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
The images in the post are no longer available as it's from 2016 but it doesn't matter much.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
If you leave any virgins around, they are not going to be virgins when you come back; they are going to get popped by some other cad. So you might as well take what you can get. Like unto a communal plate of French fries; such is the tragedy of the commons.
To solve the problem, need to privatize the commons.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
We have seriously gone from "it's not a big deal if she's not a virgin, bro" to "it doesn't matter that she had gonorrhea, bro". The debasing of marriage (or hoeflation, as the kids are calling it these days) continues apace.
Fuck this gay earth.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
From "Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell" by Scott Alexander:
Would the Czar be corrupt and greedy and tyrannical? Yes, probably. Let’s say he decided to use our tax money to build himself a mansion ten times bigger than the Palace of Versailles. The Internet suggests that building Versailles today would cost somewhere between $200M and $1B, so let’s dectuple the high range of that estimate and say the Czar built himself a $10 billion dollar palace. And he wants it plated in solid gold, so that’s another $10 billion. Fine. Corporate welfare is $200B per year. If the Czar were to tell us “I am going to take your tax money and spend it on a giant palace ten times the size of Versailles covered in solid gold”, the proper response would be “Great, but what are we going to do with the other $180 billion dollars you’re saving us?”
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
Blacks are bigger, stronger, faster, and more aggressive than whites. In a one-on-one fistfight, they win.
Which is, of course, why you never let it get down to a one-on-one fistfight. Move to a gun-friendly state and carry daily. Organize crime watches. Avoid black neighborhoods.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
It was very prominently displayed on raikoth.net, along with a picture of himself when he still had hair.
Though, personally, the first time I found it was when he posted "The Parable of the Talents". The paragraph about his brother was easy to google, which gave me Scott's brother's last name, which is obviously the same as Scott's last name. And since he never made it a secret that "Scott Alexander" were his real first and middle names, that's his full name right there.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
Some other Scott quotes. From "Book Review: Good Calories, Bad Calories":
The failure of small dietary changes to produce major changes in weight suggests something more complicated is going on.
Nutritionists tend to scoff at the idea that weight is anything beyond a simple calories in - calories out balance, and for understandable reason. The First Law of Thermodynamics, that mass/energy can neither be created nor destroyed, means that food mass/energy has to go somewhere. If you put it in your body, either you burn it for exercise or it stays in your body and becomes fat. This is why smug people sometimes say that they're following "the physics diet" of eating less and exercising more as opposed to thinking diet pills or fad diets can do much good. Fancy biochemistry stuff has nothing to do with it, mere sophistry on the part of people who claim to have "bad metabolisms" in the same way people used to say they were "big boned".
But even my limited amount of medical knowledge is enough to know this isn't true. There are a bunch of diseases - Prader-Willi Syndrome, hypothyroidism, hypothalamic lesions - that cause obesity. There are even drugs you can take that cause obesity - some of the antipsychotics are famous for this. And by playing around with mice genes, you can get anything from disgusting spherical mice to mice that look like they just got out of a concentration camp, even if they're all feeding out of the same bowl of Mouse Chow.
The book's solution - which I think is pretty standard now - is to say that yes, fat has to follow the laws of thermodynamics, but thermodynamics doesn't specify what is controlling the equation. It could be that your diet and exercise are controlling the weight gain. Or it could be that some innate tendency to weight gain is controlling the amount you diet and exercise.
And it seems to be some combination of the two. Realistically, I know not everything is determined by some mysterious inner process - sometimes I just see a cupcake, and want it, and eat it, and I know my having eaten it is determined completely by the fact that I happened to come across it at that moment and no one was watching (obviously a mysterious inner process could have prevented me from eating it by making me feel really full, but that's different). On the other hand, I accept that a lot of the time I eat things it's because my body is telling me I'm hungry, and a lot of the time I don't eat things it's because my body is telling me I'm full, and a lot of the time I exercise it's because my body is telling me I'm antsy, and so on.
So the idea is of an obesity set point. If you get fatter than your body's hidden set point, it makes you a little less hungry and more willing to exercise until you get back down. If you get leaner than your body's hidden set point, it makes you a little hungrier and more tired until you get back up. It is subtle, complicated, and more than enough to sabotage the diet plans of nearly everyone.
Taubes' work supporting the concept of an obesity set point is really spectacular. He talked about both terrible-sounding studies where scientists forced people to subsist on starvation diets, and fun-sounding studies where scientists forced people to eat as many sundaes as they could stuff into their faces. In both cases, people went to desperate lengths to return to their previous weight, and felt absolutely miserable when denied the opportunity (these studies disproportionately came from the military - in every other setting, people just gave the scientists the finger and broke the study rules after a few days). And this happened whether or not the subjects were fat or thin - it wasn't like being fat provided a "buffer" where you were okay with a semi-starvation diet while your fat burned, you were just as desperate to return to your (high) set point as your thin friend was to return to her (lower) one.
This was accompanied by fascinating animal experiments where they would try to trick rats. Suppose a rat usually ate a 10 calorie diet. They would try to trick the rat by giving it a food that looked and tasted exactly like its old food, but was ten times as calorically dense; the rat would eat a tenth as much food and maintain its weight. If they gave it a food that was only a tenth as calorically dense, the rat would eat ten times as much - and maintain its weight. If they surgically stuck food into the rat's stomach, the rat would eat exactly as much additional food as was necessary to maintain its accustomed caloric input and its weight.
So people (and rats) are really good at maintaining their obesity set point. How come some people have higher set points than others, and why does this change over time?
And from "Contra Hallquist On Scientific Rationality":
Taubes believes the human body is good at regulating its own weight via the hunger mechanism. For example, most Asian people are normal weight, despite the Asian staple food being rice, which is high-calorie and available in abundance. Asians don’t get fat because they eat a healthy amount of rice, then stop. This doesn’t seem to require amazing willpower on their part; it just happens naturally.
In a similar vein is one of Taubes’ favorite studies, the Vermont Prison Experiment, where healthy thin prisoners were asked to gain lots of weight to see if they could do it. The prisoners had lots of trouble doing so – they had to force themselves to eat even after they were full, and many failed, disgusted by the task. Some were able to eat enough food, only to find that they were filled with an almost irresistible urge to exercise, pace back and forth, tap their legs, or otherwise burn off the extra calories. Those prisoners who were able to successfully gain weight lost it almost instantly after the experiment was over and they were no longer being absolutely forced to maintain it. The conclusion was that healthy people just can’t gain weight even if they want to, a far cry from the standard paradigm of “it takes lots of willpower not to gain weight”.
Other such experiments focused on healthy thin rats. The rats were being fed as much rat food as they wanted, but never overate. The researchers tried to trick the rats by increasing the caloric density of the rat food without changing the taste, but the rats just ate less of it to get the same amount of calories as before. Then the researchers took the extreme step of surgically implanting food in the rats’ stomachs; the rats compensated by eating precisely that amount less of normal rat food and maintaining their weight. The conclusion was that rats, like Asians and prisoners, have an uncanny ability to maintain normal weight even in the presence of unlimited amounts of food they could theoretically be binging on.
Modern Westerners seem to be pretty unusual in the degree to which they lack this uncanny ability, suggesting something has disrupted it. If we can un-disrupt it, “just eat whatever and let your body take care of things” becomes a passable diet plan.
I sometimes explain this to people with the following metaphor: severe weight gain is a common side effect of psychiatric drug Clozaril. The average Clozaril user gains fifteen pounds, and on high doses fifty or a hundred pounds is not unheard of. Clozaril is otherwise very effective, so there have been a lot of efforts to cut down on this weight gain with clever diet programs. The journal articles about these all find that they fail, or “succeed” in the special social science way where if you dig deep enough you can invent a new endpoint that appears to have gotten 1% better if you squint. This Clozaril-related weight gain isn’t magic – it still happens because people eat more calories – but it’s not something you can just wish away either.
Imagine that some weird conspiracy is secretly dumping whole bottles of Clozaril into orange soda. Since most Americans drink orange soda, we find that overnight most Americans gain fifty pounds and become very obese.
Goofus says: “Well, it looks like Americans will just have to diet harder. We know diets rarely work, but I’m sure if you have enough willpower you can make it happen. Count every calorie obsessively. Also, exercise.”
Gallant says: “The whole problem is orange soda. If you stop drinking that, you can eat whatever else you want.”
Taubes’ argument is that refined carbohydrates are playing the role of Clozaril-in-orange-soda. If you don’t eat refined carbohydrates, your satiety mechanism will eventually go back to normal just like in Asians and prisoners and rats, and you can eat whatever else you want and won’t be tempted to have too much of it – or if you do have too much of it, you’ll exercise or metabolize it away. When he says you can “eat as much fat as you want”, he expects that not to be very much, once your broken satiety mechanism is fixed.
Taubes is wrong. The best and most recent studies suggest that avoiding refined carbohydrates doesn’t fix weight gain much more than avoiding any other high-calorie food. However, the Clozaril-in-orange-soda model, which is not original to Taubes but which he helped popularize, has further gained ground and is now arguably the predominant model among dietary researchers. It’s unclear what exactly the orange soda is – the worst-case scenario is that it’s something like calorically-dense heavily-flavored food, in which case learning this won’t be very helpful beyond current diet plans. The best-case scenario is that it’s just a disruption to the microbiome, and we can restore obese people to normal weight with a basic procedure which is very simple and not super-gross at all.
erwgv3g34
7mo ago
Prediction markets were probably viable as soon as the first stock exchange was established in 1602. But Robin Hanson did not invent them until 1988, and they are still mostly illegal. If humanity ever gets it act together, we are going to be kicking ourselves for a long time.
(Okay, yes, the idea relies on the efficient market hypothesis, which wasn't really popularized until 1970, but people had already noted that the market was unpredictable as early as 1900. The core insight of "market movement is unpredictable because the current price of an asset already incorporates everyone's best guess about its future value" took a surprisingly long time.)
As far as historical examples, we can add the printing press (much better than scribes), the codex (much better than scrolls), Arabic numerals with a dedicated zero symbol (much better than Roman numerals), and the alphabet (much better than logographs; looking at you, China).
If you ever change your mind, you can still find it in the archives.
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