faceh
19hr ago
I don't think he ever used his marriage as a selling point for his books, did he?
In the way that any dude having a hot girl on his arm is using her as a 'selling point' just by showing her off, I'd argue.
I just recall a period of time where she was showing up in his posts with semi-regularity in a kind of "Look at what I got fuckers" context. Can only find this one piece of evidence left, though. Wait, here's another.
Nobody owes anybody to be anybody's role model.
Slight disagree, only insofar as someone who actively chooses to convey advice and represent themselves as a person worth emulating... you kind of do owe it to your audience to be very open about failures as well as successes.
Or if you don't care to advertise failure, don't seek the audience.
But that much I will 100% say: he never, ever did grift off his audience. No crypto schemes, no scammy seminars or conferences, no shilling for sketchy brands or gambling sites (that I recall).
(I'm not counting his failed entrepreneurship attempts as scams because part of the reason they failed is he plugged them earnestly.)
What Scott's obituary does seem to acknowledge is that Scott WAS living life on his terms, and there's beauty in that, but he argues he kind of let that get swept away when he got a taste of true 'influence.'
I grappled with my self-identification as a 'nerd' for a while before mostly just leaving it behind a while back.
I like nerdy things, and was unapologetic about this. But to identify as a 'nerd' meant making certain things a facet of my identity. Which made me uncomfortable because I was really just into these things because... I found them fun, challenging, and weird in a pleasant way. Tabletop gaming is an amazing social activity, and I don't find most sports to be compelling enough to follow, so not a surprise where I gravitated.
Like, okay, I'm into outer space, rockets and scifi, I am really into computers, I think the 'internet' as a technology is cool, and I like gadgets. I feel an affinity for hacker culture and I play video games as a hobby...
But I also don't feel a need to dump copious amounts of disposable income into proving my credentials and keeping up with 'fads'. Don't really treat it as a lifestyle that requires certain commitments to fit in and buying lots of CONSOOMER goods as a prerequisite.
Hmmm. Maybe that right there is the factor. I dislike the culture the instant it becomes a pure status competition, and the status climbing becomes the point more than the factors that made it an attractive, enjoyable collection of shared interests.
Something something Geeks MOPS Sociopaths.
faceh
20hr ago
Right, but "take what you can get" is not the ethos he was trying to embody, I think.
"Follow all this advice and read my books and you too might be able to marry a hot single mother for a couple years" is not a massive selling point on its own.
I'm being a tad uncharitable, but I just find it interesting how Adams was able to maintain an image of his prowess that seemingly exceeded the reality of his capabilities.
I just have a larger amount of respect for Bill Watterson, who ALSO published a beloved, wildly popular comic strip. But he ended it while he was on top, disappeared from public life, does whatever it is he enjoys doing, and has eschewed any and all attempts to merchandise or monetize his characters (this appears wiser and wiser every year).
This gets towards Scott's other aside about various intellectuals who he seems to think have beclowned themselves in moving beyond the areas that they achieved their original insights and following.
Knowing when to exit before you crumble your own legacy is a talent very, very few exceptional people have achieved. Scott would like to be one of them, I'm sure.
faceh
20hr ago
"Its okay to be a mediocre businessman."
"Its okay to be childless."
"Its okay to have a singular crowning achievement that defines your success."
Its specifically the non-spectacular aspects of himself that he seemed to want to avoid acknowledging.
faceh
1d ago
The best part of my job is that I have significant autonomy to select the clients I accept. And if one of them has an "interesting" legal problem to solve and they are willing to pay for the work, I can take on those jobs to keep things fresh.
Thats how I became probably a top 10 expert in a very particular area of Florida construction law.
The drudgery pays the bills, the occasional novel matter keeps me from bashing my head in.
Embrace the suck. Then you'll have more power to achieve success on your own terms.
The only insight I have on the porn issue is that I found that back when I DID have a partner, and I was getting laid with some regularity, the urge to pull up porn just evaporated.
Whatever it is about that urge, for me, when I feel secure that I'll be sating it in the near future (even within a day or two) with an actual human, I feel no need to settle for a simulacra.
Compare it to resisting the urge to snack on junk food during the day because you know you're having a steak dinner later.
Oh I saw it, I'm just not convinced it was a clear L for him.
There was some back-and-forth (particularly from Jeremy Kauffman) regarding how much actual discipline you can and should impose on your toddlers.
I doubt kids that have his genes will turn into uncontrollable feral monsters.
It was all about how he'd seen kids like me before, who were never properly challenged and developed poor study habits. That if I didn't reform my ways, I'd either flunk out of college or flounder professionally.
I could have used one of those. Mostly for the wakeup call of "everything is intuitive and easy for your now because the training wheels are on, and your intelligence is covering for your shortcomings in discipline and work ethic."
Law School was the clear inflection point there. Turns out you CAN pass tests by pulling all-nighters to cram the entirety of the coursework the day before the Exam. But when you're graded against people with more consistent habits and effective strategies, you can only hope to keep pace by sheer desperate improvisation.
I didn't really learn the right lesson, though.
This period:
came back around by embracing the 'suck' and interrogating myself honestly about my 'shortcomings' and inflated self-expectations and worked on calibrating my goals to what would be truly achievable
Was when I finally got on the right track.
"Work smarter, not harder". But then they melt down in seething rage when someone works smart and hard and utterly mogs them on their own turf.
lol. "I'm not lazy, I'm just more productive with the time I DO use for work."
"Ookay, well I'm approximately as productive as you with my time, and I spend more of it working... what now?"
That said, the extreme other end of that mentality is the "Sigma Male Grindset" approach where effort is all that matters, whether that effort is spent on something useful and important? Who cares! Getting paid is the only metric that registers.
Thankfully I now have a boss who tolerates my quirks well enough as long as I close enough files to keep the cash flowing.
Maybe the lesson is to line yourself up before 50, to make the glide onto the landing strip as graceful as possible.
I think that's all you can do under current tech constraints.
lol now I'm wondering whether kids in the future will be dealing with a 120-year-old Bryan Johnson who can't accept future social rules b/c he's 'stuck' in the 2030s mentally, despite having the body of a 30-year-old.
For my case, I'm just trying to create habits now that seem to correlate with decent neuroplasticity later. Martial arts and hard exercise, learning languages, good quality sleep, and playing with kids and friends all seem to help.
faceh
2d ago
He makes a few references to Adams' potentially getting too mentally calcified with age to maintain his contradictory ideals and personas and just lost self-awareness of what parts of the joke he was supposed to be 'in' on, and who was laughing with him vs. at him.
I now do wonder how Scott expects to avoid this particular outcome or if he's accepting it as probably baked in and just wants to make sure he leaves the greatest possible legacy he can, on top of his kids.
Great stuff though. One thing that deflated Adams' image in my mind was when the gorgeous Instagram model he married in 2020 divorced him about two years later. Like, if you're going to advertise as this professional persuasive hypnotist guru... and you can't 'persuade' the young hottie to stick around in your life for more than a couple years, I suggest that your skills are overstated. Indeed, this sure reads like he got hypnotized into a situation by some of the oldest persuasive tools in human history: a woman with an hourglass figure and decent makeup skills.
Think its fair to say that his overall impact has been positive by any utilitarian calculation.
The bit just before that, man.
Every nerd who was the smartest kid in their high school goes to an appropriately-ranked college and realizes they’re nothing special. But also, once they go into some specific field they find that intellect, as versatile as it is, can only take them so far. And for someone who was told their whole childhood that they were going to cure cancer (alas, a real quote from my elementary school teacher), it’s a tough pill to swallow.
Reaction formation, where you replace a unbearable feeling with its exact opposite, is one of the all time great Freudian defense mechanisms. You may remember it from such classics as “rape victims fall in love with their rapist” or “secretly gay people become really homophobic”. So some percent of washed-up gifted kids compensate by really, really hating nerdiness, rationality, and the intellect.
Literally my course from high school valedictorian, to 85th percentile college student, to barely-above-average law student.
Then I kind of came back around by embracing the 'suck' and interrogating myself honestly about my 'shortcomings' and inflated self-expectations and calibrating my goals to what would be truly achievable (funny enough Slate Star Codex was a major influence in that period!).
Also, this line is an insanely deft cut to the jugular, holy cow.
Adams was willing to sacrifice everything for the right to say “It’s Okay To Be White”. I can’t help wondering what his life would have been like if he’d been equally willing to assert the okayness of the rest of his identity.
faceh
2d ago
Oversimplifying the question, it really does have to be "great long term rewards are completely contingent on cooperating with others repeatedly."
Some mechanic like "if you successfully complete one dungeon with a given team, you can all choose to roll the rewards from the win into an 'investment' in the next dungeon run that will increase overall payout for the next success, and you can keep rolling those wins over until certain special items/top tier loot are available."
And then defection has to have a decent chance of severe and lasting punishment.
There is the paradox, though, when you have PvP games with Factions, the players want to fight other players, other factions, so you can't make your game too utopic or the fights won't happen, at least not as often as you'd like.
And on that note, the whole issue is that a game is (supposedly) optimizing for 'fun' for the players (and money for the devs) and players will have divergent ideas of what they find 'fun.' Many will find griefing others fun, some will find it fun to play a lone wolf, some just want to kill things. I don't know if its 'possible' to design the game from the ground up such that cooperation is consistently the most fun thing a player can do most of the time.
I've sometimes thought about game design where the factions aren't just different aesthetically or with different perks, weapons, powers, etc., but they are also different ideologically, in a way that is enforced by the game's code.
You can have the Capitalist faction where players are free to trade with their fellow players, enter contracts determining how to split loot in advance, and accumulate unlimited amounts of resources to yourself.
The Communists where there's an 'equality of outcome' mechanic so that everyone gets rewards divided up "according to their need" to equalize everyone's capabilities and wealth, and presumably a HARD cap (voted on by players) to the max wealth any one person can ever get.
Monarchists where all rewards belong to the 'King' and he bestows them as he prefers (unless deposed by an underling, I guess).
Fascists who can each control their own wealth but the wealth can be seized or a player 'executed' for the good of the faction.
Pure Democracy where every player gets a vote on every decision, and none are allowed to opt-out.
Gerontocracy where the most 'senior' players get to have outsized political and economic power.
Technocracy where players with the highest skills points in certain areas get to make all decisions regarding those areas.
Hell, have a Degenerate Gamblocracy where all loot and rewards are divided solely by games of chance.
I feel like there's probably a Minecraft mod out there that does something like this.
Thing is I think they are all mostly right (for now).
AI can get you a very good rough draft that reads as subject matter expertise once you guide the AI through some adjustments, but is still pretty hard to work with when it comes to the final refining and polishing, the little details here and there, and particular word choice, design, choice, and formatting choices, as well as something like the 'taste' of a true expert judging the finished product.
I could have it draft legal documents that would absolutely pass muster in Court, but don't quite meet my standards for work product I want to sign my name to.
Maybe this say somewhat more about the standards of the practitioners/artists being 'too high' for day to day work, or its the fact that the audiences in question just don't care enough about the quality differential.
For most purposes, if I'm a non-expert relying on the AI to fill in skill gaps, I'll presumably do fine, but still fall short of the output quality of a dedicated team of experts.
faceh
3d ago
I don't understand what you think normally prevents drivers from fleeing traffic stops.
Normally?
A respect for the concept of 'law' as a foundational social good that is generally best to comply with even when its not in your immediate best interests.
But in reality, the cop shooting the driver would not normally prevent him from being run over, and it would also be a crime for the driver to run him over (in addition to the crime of fleeing). So there is plenty of deterrent. The police do not need an infinite level of deterrence capability to protect themselves against minute risks, which seem to be regularly exaggerated.
Look... we actually saw what happens when the police are pulled back from enforcing basic rules. You can get CHAZ/CHOP.
Famously, the rate of automobile-related deaths for Black Americans shot up in the wake of George Floyd riots.
Deterrence clearly has an effect. And of course if the risks are 'minute' that doesn't inherently mean they're not put in risky situations without much notice and thus need to have the ability to respond proportionally.
I ask you seriously. If a police officer is justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately swinging a knife in his direction (and actually cuts him, nonfatally)... is it hard to see why he might also be justified in shooting a woman who is deliberately driving a car in his direction (and actually strikes him, nonfatally)?
How much 'risk' is he obligated to tolerate in either scenario?
I don't get what you're saying here. Doesn't that quote show how the supposed incentive you're alleging doesn't exist? Why would anyone make that trade off?
Because they are a criminal with poor impulse control and foresight and in their mind, being arrested means going to jail and driving away, even if it hurts a cop, means maybe not going to jail.
Or they're a protestor who has been convinced by activists that a particular law enforcement agency is a force for evil and if they arrest you they'll shove you into a black site and torture you for resisting the regime and its better to 'resist'.
These are possible answers to that question.
Why do you think Cops carry guns at all?
We could eliminate almost all police shootings by simply disallowing them from carrying weapons on their persons.
I think we're in agreement that there's a medium ground between "cop can never fire their weapons except in the gravest of circumstances" and "cops should be able to gun you down if they feel the smallest threat."
I'm simply suggesting that "police officers can treat moving vehicles like other deadly weapons" is a generally good, stance. I know for sure that if somebody was apparently trying to run me down with a car, I would consider it justifiable to shoot at them. I do not think reasonable people need a 'deterrent' to not run down people with cars... but unreasonable people might.
I don't think it makes any sense to say "we can't know if the danger to the officer was real unless they actually get run over."
Yeah you bring up the point that people will get up in arms about someone else using Generative AI in ways they disagree with. But everyone will have some use of generative AI that they either partake in themselves or approve of generally.
Hence why Pro-AI forces will win in the end. An artist who is up in arms about being out-competed by Slop will probably use an LLM to complete some task they consider 'beneath' them and/or not worth paying money for someone else to do. Its just too useful across too many different tasks.
I do not think we're at the literal cusp of superintelligence... but I do think we've passed a point where the cutting edge LLMs are now smarter/more capable than the median human, even the median American in purely 'mental' tasks.
Sienna Rose
If this were the culture war of 4-8 years ago, there'd probably be multiple articles about digital blackface given that the AI product is presented as a black woman's voice and image.
faceh
3d ago
Yeah. Its like, unless you're being paid pretty handsomely, or defending your life or a loved one against an unavoidable attacker... why do you ever want to fight?
Break a limb and now you've got a medical bill and lost work, and that's assuming no permanent complications. Concussions suck. Brain damage sucks worse. To not even talk about para or quadriplegia, which we aren't yet able to really treat.
I could curmudgeonly blame the movies that VASTLY understate how much damage it takes to incapacitate a human. But it really must come down to people RARELY encountering physical violence in their life unless they're in a profession or lifestyle that demands it.
Fewer people working in factories seeing dudes get dismembered by heavy machinery. Drunken bar brawls are rarer, I'd wager.
Cars are safer, too.
White collar/service jobs really insulate people from this particular facet of reality.
That said, some of us grew up with access to liveleak.
Violence is an inherently high-variance activity.
This does seem truly hard to grasp if you've only ever experienced physical violence in the abstract. i.e if you've never been punched in the face.
Even if you watch professional fights, the rulesets in those arenas are optimized to avoid the actions that can cause instant incapacitation or grievous harm/death, and the competitors are fighting with less than lethal intent.
Take away the refs, rules, and moral restraints... any given strike COULD be a life-changer or life-ender. Quadruple that if weapons are involved.
For me, and I think most 'right-thinking' humans, this means you avoid violence as long as possible because you mostly lose control of the outcomes once it comes to that.
And on the flipside, it means you don't let opponents implement violence unilaterally, both for the deterrent effect and to prevent your side from being the sole recipient of the the consequences.
But there is as you say a group of people who see this reluctance to get violent as an exploitable 'weakness'. Push the line to force some violent response and then hope for those fat-tailed outcomes to result. Then claim the fat-tailed outcome was SOLELY the fault of one side for acting out.
And it is a lot easier to implement this strategy if you can convince your low-agency ideological followers to become human fodder.
Even 'violence' against property carries this risk with it. One image that stuck with me from the BLM era is the protestor getting clobbered by a falling confederate statue.
Its a very, very stupid thing being done, on so many levels. This is fucking around with the laws of physics and finding out quite immediately. One second you're celebrating the fall of racism with your buddies... the next you're in a vegetative state.
But the human body is indeed resilient so he survived... for some definitions of that term.
Here's a terrifying line that I hope is never written about me:
Chris is blind in one eye and lost his hearing in one ear, but he’s making progress. He’s learning how to eat and walk again, and his speech is slowly coming back.
In some very similar timelines that guy is just straight up dead. In some he's grievously injured but not traumatically brain damaged. And in a few he dodges fate by a few scant inches. High variance indeed.
Incidentally, this is why I think the saying "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" is an extraordinarily bad sentiment to believe in the context of physical violence.
faceh
6d ago
I'm not so certain that's true.
At least in a couple cases it would also be irresponsible for them to break up their extant lives in the U.S. to go over and maybe die for a regime change.
In one case, though, the guy is single and otherwise not attached to much and owns a decent number of guns.
faceh
6d ago
Definitely a worrisome failure mode there.
I just like the idea of demonstrating the impotence of an authoritarian in such an embarrassing manner.
What I also find amusing is that if you yoink the current leader without killing him, suddenly their 'replacement' has a dilemma. They can either try to seize power for themselves and supplant their predecessor... at which point the U.S. can force a legitimacy crisis by returning the previous one, or the new leader can insist he's just a placeholder until the return of the captive leader... while admitting his own inability to effect that return.
I feel like this sort of thing happened semi-commonly in Medieval Europe when King got captured and held for ransom.
Seems completely unprecedented in the modern era though.
faceh
6d ago
Incidentally that would be why I DON'T expect Trump to pull something audacious and highly risky, since he's presumably sensitive to how a failure would crack his popularity and image. He has been VERY blessed in the success of his deployment of U.S. forces into dangerous situations. Hasn't had to reckon with a version of the Benghazi or Black Hawk Down situations, let alone the Iran Hostage Crisis. Biden even did him the favor of a hasty Afghanistan withdrawal in the interim.
I'm still in awe of the Venezuela gambit, he must have been assured there was such a disparity in capability (or they had SO MANY insiders to help out) that it would be virtually impossible to truly fail.
I'm not exactly sure what sort of material support for the protestors is most likely to help them succeed, but I do like that this tangibly reduces the likelihood of a real boots-on-ground invasion, from my perspective.
faceh
6d ago
If Trump sends in Delta force and they manage to successfully yoink the Ayatollah with minimal casualties, I will buy $15,000 worth of Raytheon and Northrop Grumman stock.
Toppling the regime may or may not play out in the U.S.'s favor, but supporting the protestors in some material way also seems like an obvious win. I'm not sure what other leverage Trump can gain over Iran that doesn't involve another 'kinetic' action.
And I'm also unsure what 'Carrot' can be offered to the current regime to somehow play nice after like 50 years of entrenching as America's biggest hater.
I do know that of the few friends I have who feel strongly about the situation (because they or their family is from Iran/Persia) they are pretty vehement that it'd be worth significant amounts of death to remove the existing regime.
faceh
6d ago
Work to build trust in the community and communicate with residents like other police forces do.
-Work in collaboration with local law enforcement and if they don't want to, take steps to understand why and what can be done differently.
How does one counter the literal government of the state suggesting that you are unwelcome?
Is arresting state officials who are making your job more dangerous on the table? Can you target those spreading the sort of claims that make civilians treat you like an enemy?
We do remember that people have literally set up armed ambushes for ICE, right? They're objectively at risk of being shot by random civilians.
My exact compromise suggestion was "let the Minnesota authorities carry out the arrests safely" so we don't get Feds in the neighborhoods.
Is there any particular reason this wasn't feasible? (Rhetorical, we know they would refuse).
And if their reason for refusal is "we don't want Federal Immigration law enforced" then what exactly can you then do in response? Federal Law overrides state law under our current Constitutional setup!
"Try not to walk in front of vehicles" doesn't work well if the protestors are willing to physically obstruct things with their vehicles.
If you really want to get further and further back to the core causes, I'd point out "Don't allow unchecked illegal immigration when you have the power to prevent it" solves this entirely but that was a decision made WELL above the pay grades of those involved in this altercation.
its my same issue with regard to the demands for "Due Process" for immigration detainees. "Process" wasn't followed when these folks were entering the country, which necessarily makes it harder to provide process when removing them. There's now millions of them running around the country, so a massively increased LEO presence is the only way to make any headway for removal.
And more to the point, all the "We're playing nice and friendly" approach was pretty much how things were during most of Obama and Biden's terms, and THEY WERE STILL DEMONIZED. The 'Border Patrol Agent wielding a whip" framing happened during Biden's term.
So I'm all for accountability for Gov't agencies... but that has to go both ways. If elites and state official don't want immigration law enforced, and they aren't using the standard governmental process to change the law, it is not very reasonable for them to act in ways that gets regular people involved in conflicts with Gov't agents. They should put some of their own skin in the game.
Hence why I find myself with quite a bit more respect for Bill Watterson.
Go out on top, then do things you want to do without the eye of the public following you everywhere.
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