erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
17hr ago
If they looked like essays I've written, then she deserved the zero. If they all sound like that but said gender is socially constructed, she didn't deserve a zero.
Interestingly, this implies that the purpose of a grade is to rank a student among their cohort rather than to an objective standard; that if you throw a bunch of morons into a university-level class, you curve scale and give an A to the best of them rather than just fail them all.
Empirically, this seems to be exactly what happens, but it leads to grade and credential inflation as ever more unprepared students are sent off to college; just another institution to spend 4 years doing pointless busywork until you get a piece of paper, high school 2.0, except that now you are four years older, 5 figures in debt, and there is not a virgin girl left among the graduates.
erwgv3g34
19hr ago
I will never, ever, forget how much this story about a University essay crushed me: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/teen-accepted-stanford-after-writing-blacklivesmatter-100-times-application-n742586
So basically just Zhang Tiesheng, but for wokeness instead of communism?
erwgv3g34
3d ago
It would almost be easier to list examples of the things Scott didn't change in "Archipelago":
Archipelago diff:
Oh holy shit. All sorts of changes.
- Nuked sections I and II
- Purging lots of "left"/"liberal" in section III->I, either removing the references entirely or changing to "modern"/"individualist"
- Removed worldbuilding in V->III, removed or reworded all references to "World Government" with "united government / UniGov"
- Section VI->IV, removed this section entirely:
This is pretty funny, because the idea I’m pushing is rather explicitly reactionary. Like, I think it would be fair to call this the single core idea of reaction. All that stuff about kings and gender roles and ethno-nationalism is to some degree idle speculation about what kind of Archipelagian community would end up most successful, in the same way transhumanists sometimes speculate about how things should be run after the Singularity.
Yet I think its liberal credentials are impeccable.
Yeah, a purge of the neoreactionary stuff.
He claims to have done it because the piece got popular and he was embarrassed that so many people were reading about his conworlding, but replacing the rich mythology of Micras and Pelagia with literally "a wizard did it" still robbed the piece of much of its pathos and gravitas, and deleting all mentions of Mencius Moldbug and Patchwork was an act of cowardice unbecoming of a scholar.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Scott Alexander wrote something about this tension.... (TL;DR version: limited central government enforcing very robust exit rights.)
Please, please link to the original version of "Archipelago", not to the (horrible) revised edition.
Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.
Don't forget about reverse mortgages! Basically, boomers sell their houses while continuing to live in them, use the money to go on cruises, then when they die the house goes to the bank and their kids get nothing. I see tons of ads for them whenever I watch OTA television.
They truly are the locust generation.
erwgv3g34
5d ago
You may enjoy some of his other glowfics; I really liked "but hurting people is wrong". There's also the conspiracy world, a series of stories set in an alternate Earth. And the Masculine Mongoose trilogy on Tumblr. But, yeah, he mostly does one-shots.
"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions" by Zack M. Davis, a devastating takedown of Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories".
"Changing Emotions" by Eliezer Yudkowsky approaches transition from a transhumanist angle.
Not a deep dive as such, but I also enjoyed AntiDem's "On the Creation of Unicorns".
erwgv3g34
6d ago
Just looked it up; cute passage:
Merlin and the Director were meanwhile talking in the Blue Room. The Director had put aside his robe and circlet and lay on his sofa. The Druid sat in a chair facing him, his legs uncrossed, his pale large hands motionless on his knees, looking to modern eyes like an old conventional carving of a king. He was still robed and beneath the robe, as Ransom knew, had surprisingly little clothing, for the warmth of the house was to him excessive and he found trousers uncomfortable. His loud demands for oil after his bath had involved some hurried shopping in the village which had finally produced, by Denniston's exertions, a tin of Brilliantine. Merlinus had used it freely so that his hair and beard glistened and the sweet sticky smell filled the room. That was why Mr. Bultitude had pawed so insistently at the door that he was finally admitted and now sat as near the magician as he could possibly get, his nostrils twitching. He had never smelled such an interesting man before.
"Sir," said Merlin, in answer to the question which the Director had just asked him, "I give you great thanks. I cannot, indeed, understand the way you live, and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it: a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded taper; but I lie in it alone, with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh, but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there is warmth and softness and silence that might put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord nor a hermit. Sir, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. Now that none hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres, it is time that we should open counsels to each other."
Reminds me of this scene from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (published in 1859, but the scene takes place in 1780):
Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning’s chocolate could not so much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four strong men besides the Cook.
Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur’s lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.
erwgv3g34
6d ago
With that kind of money, you could afford to live fulltime in a nice 1950s hotel, certainly nicer than an Airbnb.
But if we are talking equivalency, yes, either a boarding house or a single room occupancy (e.g. Judy's apartment in Zootopia).
lol, reminds me of my year as a math teacher. Halfway through, I went from "I want right answers to these homework questions" to "I want to see that you tried" to "just turn in something so that I can give you a grade". That's about the time I gave up on teaching and focused on surviving until summer, when I got nonrenewed.
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