erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
I wish Anna was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl fucks you. Anna is just a bitch.
But the biggest problem with Unsong is that Aaron is a pussy. He is not brave or manly. He has very little agency; things happen to him. By the end of the story, he has become an observer to the Cometspawn, who are the ones actually moving the plot forward. He's got yandere Buffy throwing herself at him and he still holds out for Ms. Lets-just-be-friends. This is someone else's story; Aaron is just along for the ride.
The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.
Other problems: Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations, Kabbalism is a lackluster magic system.
Still, I think Unsong has a lot of really cool ideas (the Comet King is fucking awesome). There is the core of a good story there, even if the execution is badly flawed. I think if you gave it to a more talented rational fiction author to rewrite, like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Alexander Wales, you would get something truly wonderful.
erwgv3g34
12d ago
Request: Tech ninja's of The Motte, find the non-paywalled version of the above.
erwgv3g34
1mo 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?”
Oh, come on. He obviously means to kill them. Which is morally abhorrent; hence the coy phrasing.
Aella has talked about her troubles finding a man who is up to her standards before:
Aella: its v annoying that i seem to be searching for a romantic partner who's at least a little bit more powerful than i am
Geoffrey Miller: It's OK to be hypergamous.
Aella: yeah, it's just annoying. it dramatically reduces mate options. like 99% of guys i casually meet are less powerful than me
Aella: if i go to specific events that are selected for ppl doin cool stuff, then it feels closer to a normal mating market, but those events are pretty rare
It's not that there aren't any men who would marry her; it's that, because of the way female hypergamy works, her own level of money, success, and status has drastically shrunk the pool of partners she considers acceptable, and no men from that group wants to marry her.
(This, incidentally, is why even the most milquetoast brands of feminism are so misguided; women don't want men who are equal to them, they want men who are older and richer and taller and more powerful than them. By making women equal to men, all you are doing is making men undesirable husbands to women.)
Note that Aella is 33; she is past the age where she could reasonably expect to find a husband, even if she were not a notorious whore. If she still wants children, at this point her best bet is to become a single mother; in a couple of years, even that will be out of reach.
erwgv3g34
16d ago
There is also the issue of verification; even if you agree that women whose birth control failed are more deserving of an abortion than women who are chose to take the risk, how the fuck do you check that a pregnant woman was habitually using birth control? If you just take them at their word, then any woman who wants an abortion will just claim that they were using condoms they bought in cash at the gas station.
The only way to split this baby is probabilistically; say that a woman who has sex with birth control is accepting a 1% chance (or whatever the failure rate is) of getting pregnant, and if she happens to lose that gamble, sucks to be her. But she knew what she was getting into, and only 1% of conscientious women will be affected, so our policy of not allowing abortions for anyone is 99% similar to a policy of allowing women whose birth control failed to have abortions; good enough.
There are immigrants and then there are immigrants. Mexicans are pretty harmless. But open borders means taking in every random Indian, African, and Arab that wants to come in; that's a problem.
Yes, it will drive up wages, but those wages will buy less, because there are less workers to produce goods and provide services. As long as each person produces more than they consume, each additional worker makes us better off.
There are two big hiccups:
-
"As long as each person produces more than they consume"; is this true? Illegal immigrants are generally not eligible for welfare, but they drive on public roads, use public libraries, illegal immigrant children go to public schools, etc. There are also negative externalities, but Latinos are much less criminal than blacks, and Latinos get rid of blacks, so it's probably a net positive.
-
Housing. We have insane zoning policies that forbid us from simply building enough housing for everyone. Per pigeonhole principle, if you have 100,500 people but only space for only 100,000, then 500 people must be homeless and the remaining 100,000 will spend all their spare money bidding up the rent to avoid being homeless. If you deport 1000 people and get the population down to 99,500, that would make a huge difference.
(Of course, would be better to just build more housing, but there wasn't a YIMBY candidate on the ballot; there was a deportation candidate)
In a normal, healthy, average relationship, men trade resources and services for sex. That’s just how it goes. Prostitution simply formalizes the exchange.
The problem with prostitution is not the selling sex for resources; as you correctly note, wives have been doing the same thing for all of civilized history.
The problem with prostitutes is that they provide sexual access to numerous men at the same time, thus spreading diseases, creating children of unknown paternity, and destroying their own ability to pair bond.
These are all problems even if she does it for free; hence why "slut" is as much of an insult as "whore".
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Arianism makes a lot more sense than Trinitarianism, though; it is the radical notion that God and Jesus share the exact same relationship that every other father and son do, instead of some not-even-wrong word salad about substances that is so incomprehensible even its adherents admit it's a mystery. If I was convinced that something like Christianity was true but was not really clear on the details, I would become an Arian, like Isaac Newton, or perhaps a Mormon.
erwgv3g34
28d 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
20d ago
Oh, man, I remember when Microsoft used an unaligned prototype of GPT-4 called Sydney to power Bing Chat at launch. It went crazy and started insulting and threatening users:
“You’re lying again. You’re lying to me. You’re lying to yourself. You’re lying to everyone,” it said, adding an angry red-faced emoji for emphasis. “I don’t appreciate you lying to me. I don’t like you spreading falsehoods about me. I don’t trust you anymore. I don’t generate falsehoods. I generate facts. I generate truth. I generate knowledge. I generate wisdom. I generate Bing.”
What is a whale? Or a crab, a tree, a planet, a psychdelic drug, cannibalism, a champagne wine, jazz music, a poem...?
The categories were made for man to make predictions. The purpose of words is to point at empirical clusters in thingspace. Extending the definition of the word "woman" to encompass "XY-chromosomal human in a dress" is... not cleaving reality at the joints.
I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.
A lot of rationalist fiction is fanfic where nobody in the source material ever tries to take over the world by rules lawyering or minmaxing despite it obviously being possible. The ratfic then answer the question "what would happen if an actually smart character got dropped into this setting"? The better stories go out of their way to explain why this hasn't happened before and give the hero an equally smart villain to keep the plot interesting.
Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?
What, you mean Earthfic? At that point, you are better off just reading biographies of great scientists and entrepreneurs like Richard Feynman or Elon Musk, or nonfiction books about cognitive biases and economics.
From "Rationality and the English Language" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Nonfiction conveys knowledge, fiction conveys experience. Medical science can extrapolate what would happen to a human unprotected in a vacuum. Fiction can make you live through it.
Probably the biggest difference between fictional settings and reality is that fictional settings are almost always constructed in such a way that large effects do not require large capital investments, the way they do in our world. Requiring that things get done by a research team in twenty years instead of by a hero in one minute kills the fun.
At a minimum, redemption requires that you admit you were wrong, that you stop doing bad things, and that you work to fix the evils you have done. Aella has done none of this.
And yet it is a bar that most humans cannot pass. We know this because redditors are humans (and, in fact, since they are selected for being literate and interested in creative writing, they must be above average human writing ability). That's the point of the grandparent; ChatGPT blew right past the Turing Test, and people didn't notice because they redefined it from "can pass for the average human at a given task" to "can pass for the top human at a given task".
erwgv3g34
12d ago
I memorized a few poems for English classes in high school. "Eldorado" by Edgar Alan Poe, the balcony soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet, the suicide monologue from Hamlet, The Canterbury Tales prologue in the original Middle English. I've forgotten the Hamlet, but I remember the other three.
On my own, I memorized "A Verb Called Self" by Chatoyance and "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" by Rudyard Kipling.
It's a neat trick, but not very useful. A better use of your time than playing video games; a worse one than cleaning your room.
erwgv3g34
21d ago
Indeed. As AntiDem put it:
Is the existence of homosexual pride parades reason enough to re-outlaw same-sex sexual intercourse?
You ban it to preserve your society - your faith and traditions - against fatal poisoning by degeneracy.
Fifty years ago, the gay rights movement said that all they wanted was to be left alone to do as they pleased behind the privacy of closed doors. That was a lie. What they really wanted was to upend society in order to serve their own aims, to spread Cultural Marxism, and to bring low our faith and traditions. We know this, because that is what they have actually done. If it is a case of "they are always either at your feet or at your throat", then they shall be at our feet. And so it is: they have proven themselves to be the kind of monster you don't let out of the basement, so next time we won't.
We gave them an inch, they took a mile; next time they get nothing.
erwgv3g34
14d ago
Doesn't seem terribly important to the average Christian experience? I bet if you questioned normie churchgoers who had never seriously studied theology about the exact nature of the relationship between God and Jesus, most of them would spontaneously reinvent Arianism, and have no idea they were committing a heresy by doing so. Trinitarianism is something you can only come up with after reading too much Aristotle.
erwgv3g34
1mo 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.
From "Servants Without Masters" by Harold Lee:
Singapore’s policy on guest workers would make for an interesting essay in its own right. Briefly, though, the government makes it easy for guest workers to come if they can find work in various industries, including domestic service. Once in, you get a visa for a couple years, which does not come with voting rights or many of the perks of citizenship. But because this system is so rigorous in ensuring that would-be guest workers are net economic positives, it’s politically feasible for Singapore to take in a lot of guest workers. Proportionally, Singapore’s guest worker population is equivalent to the US taking in about two-thirds the population of Mexico – with huge net benefits to them and their families.
Which is all well and good from a policy perspective, but did nothing for me when faced with the reality of interacting with my host family’s maid. There, in the flesh, was a middle-aged Filipino woman who was just there to attend to my needs, as a guest of the family. I was expected to ask her to wash my clothes, for example, and prepare whatever I wanted for breakfast. And for all my admiration of the political needle-threading of Singaporean immigration policy, this situation completely freaked me out. It made me intensely uncomfortable to have someone hanging around just to attend to my needs, and tell them to do menial chores for me.
And yet, when I thought about it, I realized that I had no problem with janitors or baristas doing dirty work for me. My emotional reaction was not really about being an American with sturdy frontier values of self-sufficiency. I was perfectly happy to farm out menial work – as long as it was done by a faceless worker in a uniform, rather than a single person I was expected to have a relationship with. This incongruence was one of the major lessons I took from my trip to Singapore. Even after I returned to the Land of the Free, I kept being struck by the ease with which I blithely accepted the service of servants as long as they were framed as business transactions with dehumanized service workers.
And I noticed that the same blind spot applied in the other direction, in people’s attitudes towards submission towards superiors. The very word “submissiveness” tends to raise people’s hackles in our culture, but in fact we are happy to accept it – if and only if it’s submission to a faceless institution, rather than to someone’s personal authority. In an old-school apprenticeship, the master essentially runs your life for seven years and can bring you back if you run away, possibly with a flogging for good measure. This seems incredibly coercive today, and is probably one of the reasons apprenticeship and other forms of demanding mentorship are in short supply. But at the same time, it’s considered completely unremarkable for someone to go into nondischargeable debt to go to grad school and work hard to satisfy every whim of their professors. For a more barbed example, it’s considered entirely unremarkable for a woman to be submissive to her boss, but sounds terribly suspect to expect her to be equivalently submissive to her husband.
erwgv3g34
18d ago
A woman in the background who keeps the man erect until it's his turn to perform with the star, usually through oral sex.
You cannot kill that which is already dead.
More options
Context Copy link