gattsuru
11mo ago
There's definitely a lot of waffle.
I'm not convinced it's empty, underneath, though. There's a lot of overlap in the actual exercises here with tulpamancy, though a few parts of the surrounding framework (eg 'must delete agents after task completion') would have the two perspectives at each other's throats, and you don't have to spend too long talking with practicing tulpamancers to see sometimes radical changes in behavior or personality. Tearing out the mysticism and rankings and obfuscation would give a description that's a lot less interesting (and might still come across as a self-improvement cult), but it'd still involve testable predictions of whether certain meditative practices change your own behaviors. The extent psychonauts want (maybe need?) to imply some broader metaphysical impact can and should raise alarm bells, but it doesn't make the actual claims undisprovable.
((This is separate from whether it's a good idea: tulpamancy scares the pants off me, or see some of Scott's discussions on the Dark Night for traditional meditation. I have done some therianthropic practices, and there's absolutely a version of it that's completely stripped of mysticism or spiritualism, and can still give you phantom limb syndrome or put you into a short duration fugue state, and some level of quadrobics seems a) unavoidable and b) Not Great for certain tendons on your legs. And as dumb as 'astral doppelganger' sounds, it's still not as bad as phantom-shifting.))
There are some usual defenses of the waffle. "Wait, were all the nouns in that paragraph synonyms for each other?” faces the possibility that they aren't, and as much as the author here tries to draw links between different religious meditative practices and their own, practitioners would be horrified if someone used their name for the root chakra to describe the crown chakra. The Third Eye is a goofy metaphor, but there are reasonably well-established (if not especially well-understood) mechanisms where practicing repeated visualization exercises improves ability with their broader class, as any Factorio player will tell you. Scott compares classical meditation enlightenment to low-grade bipolar disorder, and that's not wrong, but it's an awkward fit, and as a naive non-psychologist it seems like it'd be useful to distinguish even in a non-therapeutic context.
But I think there's a more fundamentally weird option. In the same way that the Dodo Bird Verdict implies that a lot of psychology is less about what's being done, and more that something is, the (claimed? but the psychonauts don't really claim it) overlap between wildly disparate spiritual practices suggests that it's more important to have weird terms than what exactly those weird terms are. They may not describe a real thing -- I absolutely don't buy that the Brodmann Area claims for the Third Eye metaphor correspond to physical behaviors in any sense but the dead fish fMRI -- but by presenting a set of descriptions and behaviors with a name and explanation (even a wrong one), you get a more effective way of thinking about the matter and training yourself into whatever the end goal is.
(Again, for better or worse.))
Among therians, there were some people successful using boring and prosaic frameworks, but at least back when I was able to follow those spheres, it was very uncommon for people without some degree of spiritual or metaphysical structuring of their beliefs to get a lot of the more immediate and controllable results. ((VR may change or have changed that.)) Even prosaic stuff seems to run on this sorta problem: there's a lot of problems with True Believers in outreach organizations, but it's not rare for them to have more insight. Maybe the arrow of causation points the other direction -- it's quite possible that only people open to the waffle have the right neuroplasticisity -- but I'm skeptical, especially given how readily people with strongly tuned anti-waffle instincts struggle with 'mainstream' problems of belief.
gattsuru
11mo ago
From A Certain LiveJournal:
In the treasure-vaults of Til Iosophrang rests the Whispering Earring, buried deep beneath a heap of gold where it can do no further harm.
The earring is a little topaz tetrahedron dangling from a thin gold wire. When worn, it whispers in the wearer's ear: "Better for you if you take me off." If the wearer ignores the advice, it never again repeats that particular suggestion.
After that, when the wearer is making a decision the earring whispers its advice, always of the form "Better for you if you...". The earring is always right. It does not always give the best advice possible in a situation. It will not necessarily make its wearer King, or help her solve the miseries of the world. But its advice is always better than what the wearer would have come up with on her own.
It is not a taskmaster, telling you what to do in order to achieve some foreign goal. It always tells you what will make you happiest. If it would make you happiest to succeed at your work, it will tell you how best to complete it. If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.
The Book of Dark Waves gives the histories of two hundred seventy four people who previously wore the Whispering Earring. There are no recorded cases of a wearer regretting following the earring's advice, and there are no recorded cases of a wearer not regretting disobeying the earring. The earring is always right.
The earring begins by only offering advice on major life decisions. However, as it gets to know a wearer, it becomes more gregarious, and will offer advice on everything from what time to go to sleep, to what to eat for breakfast. If you take its advice, you will find that breakfast food really hit the spot, that it was exactly what you wanted for breakfast that day even though you didn't know it yourself. The earring is never wrong.
As it gets completely comfortable with its wearer, it begins speaking in its native language, a series of high-bandwidth hisses and clicks that correspond to individual muscle movements. At first this speech is alien and disconcerting, but by the magic of the earring it begins to make more and more sense. No longer are the earring's commands momentous on the level of "Become a soldier". No more are they even simple on the level of "Have bread for breakfast". Now they are more like "Contract your biceps muscle about thirty-five percent of the way" or "Articulate the letter p". The earring is always right. This muscle movement will no doubt be part of a supernaturally effective plan toward achieving whatever your goals at that moment may be.
Soon, reinforcement and habit-formation have done their trick. The connection between the hisses and clicks of the earring and the movements of the muscles have become instinctual, no more conscious than the reflex of jumping when someone hidden gives a loud shout behind you.
At this point no further change occurs in the behavior of the earring. The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family.
When Kadmi Rachumion came to Til Iosophrang, he took an unusual interest in the case of the earring. First, he confirmed from the records and the testimony of all living wearers that the earring's first suggestion was always that the earring itself be removed. Second, he spent some time questioning the Priests of Beauty, who eventually admitted that when the corpses of the wearers were being prepared for burial, it was noted that their brains were curiously deformed: the neocortexes had wasted away, and the bulk of their mass was an abnormally hypertrophied mid- and lower-brain, especially the parts associated with reflexive action.
Finally, Kadmi-nomai asked the High Priest of Joy in Til Iosophrang for the earring, which he was given. After cutting a hole in his own earlobe with the tip of the Piercing Star, he donned the earring and conversed with it for two hours, asking various questions in Kalas, in Kadhamic, and in its own language. Finally he removed the artifact and recommended that the it be locked in the deepest and most inaccessible parts of the treasure vaults, a suggestion with which the Iosophrelin decided to comply.
Niderion-nomai's commentary: It is well that we are so foolish, or what little freedom we have would be wasted on us. It is for this that Book of Cold Rain says one must never take the shortest path between two points.
gattsuru
11mo ago
A story can be written with roughly the same plot except you have a human to guide you and answer questions. Would that still be a fearsome proposition, the existence of wise mentors and teachers and guides and parents?
Yes. Teachers and mentors can be useful only to the extent they're moving you to be able to make decisions and understand problems on your own. Otherwise, at best they're just moving you from place to place, more often just babysitting you. Outsourcing your ability to evaluate evidence is costly no matter who or what is doing the evaluation; outsourcing the process of doing evaluation is impossible and is just simplified badly in this thought experiment.
A reply on that blog says that they wouldn’t use the device because they love the freedom of choice like in a good video game. But video games do not give you freedom of choice. They are designed by experts in fun mechanics to give you the right amount of guidance within a finite set of rewarding choices.
Depends very heavily on the environment and game. I've gotten the GregTech bug again, and in one sense, yes, there are a limited number of options, and the worst of them are still not going to reach out and club you in the head, and broader modpacks can make that even more varied. There answers are available, but even the most hand-holding of modpacks won't run you through the full process, and outside of skyblock most can't.
Okay, that's an extreme case, and most games aren't Minecraft-likes. We're looking at 2012, so what about Mass Effect? There are build options, but most of them suck, and you can still beat the game with a bad one. There are choices, but most of them are wrong, and you can still make bad choices and win. And by Mass Effect 2, a lot of the 'bad' decisions were just delaying, like trying to do literally anything with the stupid scanning mechanic. You can't choose to survive schtupping Morinth Because Radical Freedom, and often the dialogue options were extremely constrained. (Indeed, some explicit advice from the in-game advisor is wrong, in ways that kill the character giving the advice..
But Mass Effect's designers don't know what would give me the most fun, and not just in the sense that they eventually dropped the ending to ME3. A lot of people loved the Vanguard charge builds, and other people (myself included) found them absolutely obnoxious to play. Some people like having all the morally-cleanish people on their team with all of their Personal Issues being solved, and other people like to intentionally make non-optimal decisions because they say better things about the story.
((In my case, I'm trying to automate a GregTech skyblock factory solely using Create for long-distance item transportation. ngmi, but I find it fun.))
If you're referring to his comment, Douglas Scheinberg was comparing the earring to video game walkthroughs, and that's got meaningful difference. The exact point where this hits varies from person to person -- there are people who don't like mechanics spoilers as simple as 'wiremill or plate bender' for gregtech modpacks, while other people are fine with getting romantic advice for their GarrusXShepard playthrough -- but eventually you've gone from guide to backseat driver.
They like the act of finding and choosing objects from a set of choices, but only with a predetermined set of mostly positive choices that lack real harm (as their prehistoric ancestors would do according to their tradition of eligible foods). They like the act of trying something and anticipating the result, but only in contexts where there is probable gain and no real harm.
I think this is not wrong, but it's incomplete. For most people, there is a necessary component of variation and surprise that is vital to make something feel like entertainment rather than chore.
There are a few things I've seen under this slogan:
The Body Integrity and Self-Determination argument is more what you'll see as an outsider.
There are a wide variety of genetic or other medical conditions that, originally falling under a variety of now-disfavored terms like hermaphroditism and now moved to a spectrum of specific diagnosis and weird acronyms like DSD (Differences of Sex Development). Right now, the standard of care in almost all cases (by definition of them being recognized as medical conditions) involves medical intervention toward a more 'normal' presentation: this can be as minor as hormonal supplementation and/or talk therapy, or involve long sequences of pretty invasive surgery. Some of this has medical justification, but a lot of it's operating more under a theory of ability to operate within society.
The motte is where a child is born with ambiguous genitals. Either genetic, congenital hormone exposure, or other causes give something that wouldn't show up in your Human Physiology 101. It's hard to get exact numbers, since this isn't some strict definition sort of thing, but somewhere between 1-in-200 and 1-in-5000 looks plausible. There's actually a really morbid overlap here with the social conservative fear of doctors forcibly transing kids that you absolutely will not see formally spelled out: a lot of the surgical interventions focus on very young children that clearly can't consent, there's a lot of pressure at parents talking up how refusing early intervention doom the kid's chances of romantic or sexual success as an adult, some unknown number of interventions happened without good (or even knowing) consent from the parents, the medical science itself is really lackluster, and there's even a really lackluster underlying set of medical evidence coming from a sketchy-ass doctor. These early interventions were favored because recovery is much harder at later ages, but it's far from clear that the entire class a) actually succeeds or even has a theoretical underpinning for success (eg, the surgical intervention for clitoromegaly is about what you'd expect from the name, and often has to be explicitly excepted from female-genital-mutilation bans), or b) is necessary as compared to better normalization of this variation.
But there's a wide variety of other conditions that only express during puberty (although they can be increasingly detected earlier with genetic testing) or young adulthood. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is the most common, and often what lies behind of 1-in-100 or 1-in-50 estimates for prevalence of intersexuality, followed by sex chromosome atypicalities (such as XXY or X sex chromosomes), and then varieties of Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). These have a variety of more or less subtle results, but hormonal intervention is common and surgical intervention (eg, removal of male breasts) is not unusual. Most of these patients can meaningfully consent by traditional definitions (eg, they're at least old enough to talk), but there's a wide variety of interventions that range from 'you will 100% die if you don't do this' (treatments for salf-wasting CAH), 'this can have major negative ramifications for your long-term functioning', and purely aesthetic stuff, and for medical regulatory reasons they're all sold pretty similarly.
((Some jurisdictions also require certain surgical intervention to change registered sex, which can be... messy.))
The argument is that : some of this stuff isn't broken and doesn't need to be fixed. While individual concerns may require a medical framework, treating mere presentation as intersex under a medical framework encourages or mandates interventions that some portion of the targets would not accept otherwise, both through direct pressure and by making any refusers so weird that they must struggle to work within society.
The more internal debate variant is What Is Intersex to even start with.
There's a list of people who are, were, or could have been subject to the various medical interventions listed above. It's (mostly) uncontroversial to call them intersex. That's not too tricky. What about the rest?
There's a wide variety of conditions that are related in a lot of ways, and only really get chased down or result in interventions if someone involved tries really hard. There's a lot of partial CAH or AIS that just shows up as being kinda awkward, or infertile. Do they have to chase them down to count as intersex, even if they have the same underlying physical thing going on?
Does someone stop being intersex if they were born in an environment that didn't care? That happens, both historically (medical interventions for most intersex conditions basically didn't exist pre-1950) and even today (allegedly guevedoces are pretty accepted, though I don't trust a lot of the literature on them). Does the intersex community no longer exist if they achieve their political goals? Do they disappear over a generation?
What about people who are what I've called whiptail- or hyena-nonbinary, who were 'born that way' at most in the sense that they've had an interest in the matter, and sometimes had to put pretty serious effort into becoming that way?
For this question, 'medicalization' is used in the sense of requiring an explicit diagnosis, and often an early or serious one. This is... messy, in both a coalition-building way and in a hard what-do-words-mean one. Note that this can be in direct conflict with the other use of the phrase.
You can plausibly do a first run to the Ender Dragon and End Cities in 20-50 hours, but yeah, 100+ for a typical player isn't unreasonable, and multiplayer worlds will often have different and more ambitious targets that are much more time-consuming. And modpacks can be far longer-term investments: even outside of nutty variants like GregTech New Horizons (estimated minimum time: 4k hours) or SevTech: Ages (500ish hours), Regrowth and Blightfall were probably 200+hour games that were pretty engaging throughout the process.
Rimworld is probably only 20-50 hours for a map before you're just watching a killbox fill up, but there's a lot of reasons to run multiple maps.
FFXIV is probably around 300 hours to get the MSQ to the end of Endwalker, and that's skipping a lot of side content that has its own (or related) story. There's definitely some rough spots (and it's something like 70 hours of voiced cutscenes even before the last expansion), but it's pretty engaging for the overwhelming majority of it.
gattsuru
11mo ago
gattsuru
11mo ago
I'm not sure the polling was wrong, rather than the situation changed, often dramatically. A significant portion of the running politicians dropped out, with instructions for their voters to support other candidates, sometimes candidates that normally would not be obvious second choices.
gattsuru
11mo ago
It's possible, but you have to put a ton of effort into it, and most kitchenware today is microwave safed by including microscoring to avoid that sort of problem. And if you're not sure, throwing anything like a wooden kitchen utensil (or a toothpick) in will completely eliminate the risk.
That said, tea purists will absolutely dump boiling water on you for doing it, though.
gattsuru
11mo ago
I'll caveat that there's moderate overlap between furries and otherkin (or therianthropes, which was kinda a furry-specific variant of otherkin): furscience gives somewhere around 5-10%+ of furries identifying as therians or some related category, and while the higher estimates are usually coming from convention-specific surveys that have a pretty hefty selection bias, the lower ranges are not implausibly high.
But agreed that it's a different identifier, and I don't think there's any good numbers the other direction: there definitely are otherkin that aren't furries, and nobody knows what percentage of otherkin/therian/whatever they are.
That said, a significant number of therians didn't experience species dysphoria, or experience something that they don't categorize as dysphoria (eg, intentionally triggering phantom limbs for limbs they never had, but liking it), at least when I was able to follow the group in the 00s. Dunno what the internal frameworks are now; a lot of the matter has been driven off the open internet.
((There was historically more going on with the 00's-era 'lifestyler', both in philosophy and behavior, but the group that was distinguished by those differences is pretty much extinct today.))
gattsuru
11mo ago
I still don't get that glossary page. I have seen 'bonus hole' used in the wild in trans-adjacent spaces, but entirely porn ones, and usually ones that are pretty clearly kinking off the whole 'it's Very Manly to use the crudest and objectifying language possible'. BonusHoleBoys (unfortunately now defunct) was about the most humanistic take on those tropes (cw: though still extremely gay), and it was still very heavily set around how hot the subs were rather than how hard they could be used.
Compare c---boy, including the bit where that's being increasingly driven out from more general-interest communities (so much as furry porn sites can be general-interest) in favor of more clinical terms.
((Though I have seen trans men more comfortable with the c-word than with 'vagina' IRL. And it's not like 'front hole', for a more common one, is better in terms of mouth feel or specificity.))
Maybe in the specific context of gyno checkups trans men are more comfortable using that sort of terminology? I have no idea what norms in that sort of medical environment are like; the cis male equivalents are... uh, weird to use as analogy.
gattsuru
11mo ago
It seems somewhere like autogynophilia. There's definitely people who suddenly have Revelations about their gender -- even in trans communities, 'cracking the egg' is a metaphor for a reason, and before the 2010s people with long histories of gender stuff realizing that it's even a category -- but just as AGP-as-a-theory is more than 'some trans people get off on dressing up at some point', ROGD-as-a-theory is more than 'some people become trans rapidly'.
Exactly what it is, well, that's harder to nail down: there's no ROGD-Blanchard or ROGD-Bailey, even pointed to literally Bailey gets you kinda vague mutterisms (about cults, because he's nothing if not unpersuasive). That people who come out as trans in younger generations tend to have a lot of other trans people in their social circles and either did not have or obfuscated a lot of gender stuff before identifying publicly as trans is pretty uncontroversial; that they're doing it because of those social circles is really hard to measure and the data is messy; that it's just a phase for a large portion and they'd be happier not transitioning or likely to detransition (which not all ROGD advocates are suggesting!) may not even be measurable in a perfect world.
gattsuru
11mo ago
I played DA:O and DA:I. DAII is on my to-play list, though I'll admit it's been there for a while. DA:O was the one I played the most, if with pretty normie gameplay decisions for most runthroughs and complaining about The Deep Roads pacing every fucking time. As gameplay matters, both are very happy to let you take subobtimal decisions, but it's also far more punishing than Mass Effect: most of my runs used Arcane Mage approaches, because I found that origin most interesting, but Arcane Mage could faceroll hard and readily challenge nightmare difficulty where Shapeshifter-only struggled on medium and even easy, especially with some of the unavoidable fights. And fights were long enough that struggling was less fun.
While DA:I suffered a bit from throwing in random game mechanics to fill time, it really built on a lot of the setting ideas. Cole explores a lot of the spirit world stuff better than Wynne did, imo, and as much as Iron Bull (and the game in general) suffers from the Drizzt problem where every named member of a race is explicitly defying the stereotypes (and explicit rules, given the Qun!) rather than just being more complex than the stereotypes, he was still executed as well or better than Sten as someone you'd actually want to work with. Actual combat gameplay was a lot more even, both in highs and lows, and there's a bit more handholding for character builds.
It's good to hear that DA4 hasn't been cancelled, since it'd been pretty much incommunicado for a while now, and there's definitely some interesting balls left in the air after DA:I that would be pretty frustrating if they never land. The series has been a lot less than Mass Effect, for better or worse -- I don't think anyone expect the Big End Game Decision from DA:O to mean the last game in the series will want your save file, even if that necessarily cuts off a large portion of the lore and characterization space (eg, warnings that killing all the Archdemons will cause an apocalypse don't work great if one of the archdemons is in a Schrodinger's cat, Cole's loyalty quest limits what DA4 can do with him short of declaring one choice canon). But if that means the game also doesn't devolve into choosing between three big lights at the end, I'm willing to accept weird retrocanon.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Running a single fan over a long belt like that is slower for cooking than the traditional lava ring fed by smart chutes, but if you're already throughput limited elsewhere (in this case, both the press and the burners for the steam engines are pretty slow), this approach is a lot better at limiting unnecessary entities. Not sure where I first saw it, probably someone's Create:Above and Beyond play?
Create is an absolute blast of a mod for having little options like this, and for having most of them simultaneously be very hard to guess would work from scratch and obvious at a glance after it's been done Oh Of Course. Using Item Drains as one-block unpowered belt alternatives is one that I only learned about just a couple months ago, dropped offhand by Beardstone in the middle of an otherwise very typical build, and it cleans up so many builds.
gattsuru
11mo ago
El Goonish Shive is a long (loooooong)-running transformation and especially gender-transformation comic. The character on the right has spent a little over a year in-universe and around twelve years real-world being declared Just That Girly and having access to a magical (well, alien magic science) transformation gun regularly used to change gender. This was a bit of a Genre in that era of the internet, complete with sometimes not-exactly-kosher-by-modern-progressive-standard jokes. Unlike most of that Genre, the same comic has continued mostly uninterrupted for the whole time.
The timeline for the comic is weird and kinda alternate universe, but it's probably set somewhere between 2005 and 2012, with a world mostly like ours, but where magic is weakly available. While there are a lot of other bigger questions that the availability of magic set up, though, that alien magic science transformation gun is a little unusual in-setting for having both extreme reliability, mass production, and having some real-world uses, without being especially dangerous in terms of side effects or weaponization. (The gun itself can make disguises, but a stripped down version that just changes primary and secondary gender traits can be produced in minutes.)
Which produces a problem because it's something the character basically never considered, even as the author was increasingly getting bombarded with questions about why he wasn't actively working toward it, because after the first decade of a gender transformation comic you tend to pick up a trans fanbase, and the comic as a whole was and remains pretty unusual for almost everybody being mostly sane, reasonable, and compassionate.
The explanation that people didn't realize that was a possibility handles at least part of that, albeit by making the question suddenly relevant. And, indeed, the author didn't know, back in 2003 (cw: bad art).
((The character on the left is a lab experiment who escaped after a superpowered nutjob who may or may not have been a competing test subject took over the lab, but there's plot reasons she has surface-level familiarity with the topic.))
gattsuru
11mo ago
I get that I'm throwing stones from inside my glass house, here, but this is neither related to the topic at hand, nor a particularly apt summary of the old disagreements, in ways that undermine any serious discussion of that old disagreement.
gattsuru
11mo ago
It's an interesting piece. I'll repeat from twitter that a few of the flirting-with-salacious bits detract and distract from the central story, even compared to writing out their long-form version (eg, "hosted LemonParty" might well unspool to something like 'archived a whole bunch of sites from a defunct host, which included some shock sites like lemonparty', though I can't find enough information to confirm that).
I didn't think of Sandifer's ban from Wikipedia as the radicalizing point for him, but it's plausible. On the other hand, I'm not sure the timeline quite works out: Sandifer was banned (and the whole Manning rename snafu happened in) October and November 2013, and Manning was first publicly known as trans in August 2013. Gerard was still posting through it on LessWrong proper into 2014, and while it sometimes touched, he was still engaging (cw: the linked story is deadfic, though it did get to a reasonable End of Book One point) with people with opposing viewpoints (if often smearing them elsewhere) in a way that, say, his later tumblr persona never did.
Compare 2013 twitter to 2016. He definitely hadn't gotten to the point where he'd imply his political opponents would be "legally able to administer roofies to female patients", yet, in 2016, either, as close at PigGate got.
((tl;dr of that: It's quite possible that PigGate never happened, and the only evidence in favor was a second-hand story by a man who pointedly separated from David Cameron's political faction over Cameron's support for gay marriage, and coincidentally did he mention it that Cameron allegedly put his todger onto a boar's head roast. But no one liked David Cameron, so who cares if the allegation is being laundered by a homophobe!))
I know that an alternative explanation of 'it's just everything all together that did it' -- increasing frustration that all the insight in LessWrong couldn't dissuade crypto buyers or 'Roko's Basilisk' or neoreactionaries or Rationalist Dark Arts practitioners, the replacement of Palin-like social conservatives with the Trumpist-populist faction, the Kids-and-Boomers Eternal September of mobile smartphones, the collapse of the twitter ratsphere, trans stuff becoming politically centralized, Eugene_Nier and the broader soccon right's disavowal of whatever free speech interests libertarians might have once had -- is kinda meaninglessly vague and far less interesting of a story. And the "it worked, didn't it" answer, where gay marriage won by punching homophobes and the next fights weren't willing to punch hard enough is... personally tempting for me, but probably no more right to Gerard's internal model. And we might not be able to get the real answer anywhere but straight from his mouth, if then, and I don't seem him willing to give either of us the time of day.
I agree that it's not a smear or technically false, I just think the likely full explanation is probably so much more boring than the summary one -- even going from your summary to his we go from "it meant playing host to one of the internet’s most infamous shock sites" to him being one of the two sysadmins on the box and the only one who bothered logging into it -- that it seems weird or off-theme to throw in.
EDIT: but yeah, that's a nitpick.
gattsuru
11mo ago
The Steven Universe and Buddhism ones are newer, but yeah, the schism's not got a ton of activity.
I expect Trace means more healthy in terms of community norms than community, and in that sense, the people there probably do more closely match the approaches to discussion that he wants.
gattsuru
11mo ago
... I won't be so optimistic as to say no one would applaud it, but I think you're underestimating the number of people here with at least some interest in truth, especially given that there's people here already pushing back about false or misleading citations about Trace.
I'd be less disappointed given that I have (perhaps wrongly!) higher expectations from NYT than from Crazy Internet Karen LLoT, but there's a lot of active harm in throwing out this sorta stuff.
((And as professorgerm and gemma pointed out the very first time you made this comparison, Trace did not say during the Texas Bounty Hunter Thing that he was personally involved in setting up the trolling operation. I'm kinda hoping he wasn't!))
There's definitely overlap in framework that they're all pissing in the drinking water, so to speak, but I think there are layers of issues, here:
- Sokal's hoax was pretty self-evidently not real, and the editors, at least theoretically, had the capability to check that. Even if they didn't, they could have asked almost anyone with a physics background for a sanity check. There's little, if any, evidence they felt it necessary.
- (Sokal also published under his own name, and while that was part of how he exploited Social Text's vulnerabilities, it also meant that he was somewhat more vulnerable to counteraction: had Social Text noticed the paper was bunk and either reported him pre-publication or published with a disclaimer of some kind, it could have absolutely wrecked his career. Sokal Squared and Sokal III didn't, and at least a couple of the Sokal Squared articles weren't clearly wrong so much as just stupid, so I'd put them lower down the scale.)
- The LoTT hoax was not sufficiently supported by the evidence. Trace's cover story could provide quite a large variety of explanations why any gaps or weirdness in the existed, but could not provide any way to confirm the story. To a rationalist should be a very good cautionary tale! And I'm absolutely an advocate of validating information no matter how expert the speaker is! But it's also a high standard in a context where a) it's very likely that a 'real' story would have been extremely hard to verify or disprove, b) his coexperimenters further provided support for his claims in ways that would have made even that marginal. (The cover story and rdrama community's laissez faire approach to preregistration of experiments also made this vulnerable to publication bias.)
- Gerard's work here isn't really about testing the institutions, and to a much larger extent about making the checks not exist; checking his work was not just hard, unlikely, or practically impossible, but impossible at a logical level. At most, someone opposed to his edits could argue that he shouldn't be the one posting them (WP:COI) or try to argue that whole sites are unreliable. Wikipedia's tools for handling bad or marginal sources are ad hoc and kinda the crux of various contradictions between WP:OR and the impossibility of outsourcing evaluation of evidence, and in many cases Gerard had a pretty heavy thumb on the scales for those backup tools, too. That's... not just a difference in quantity, but of quality.
I'm not a fan of any of them -- I've pointed in the past to nydrwaku as an example of trolling aimed at people I hate that I still think is pretty damned bad for mainstream discourse, and I pushed back on the LoTT hoax contemporaneously -- but I think Sokal is less bad, and Gerard more so.
gattsuru
11mo ago
I'd quibble with DuplexFields about how common dysphoria is among otherkin or therianthropes, barring definitions that require it, but it's definitely something that happens. Duplex compared his version to feeling like wearing a shirt inside out all the time (uh, in now-banned subreddit, sorry for not linking), and while that's an unusual explanation, it's not a particularly extreme one.
Optimistically, if you offered a whole bunch of therianthropes a magical potion, I'd hope some of them would ask for caveats about things like lifespan or opposable thumbs or social integration in their new shapes or pants (cw: no nudity, but might not be the best thing for DuplexFields to binge read), but at best at least some would quite happily jump in after that.
The lack of such a magical solution short of a singularity doesn't really change whether people can feel it: it's a sensation, not a realpolitick'ed set of political philosophy. It changes the degree you can seriously respond to it. There's some socialization stuff that could be relevant on the edges as policy questions -- some therians do feel a lot more normal with prosthesis like tails or ankle braces, which are also socially stigmatized in ways that make them highly impractical outside of Ren Faires -- but there's also reason that it isn't a philosophy with a lot of policy proposals.
gattsuru
11mo ago
100% conflict theory and 0% principled objection.
I don't think this is anywhere near a fair formulation.
gattsuru
11mo ago
Technically, the mildest version would be some variant of the Curtis Culwell Center attack. If the malefactors in that case hadn't gotten shot red-handed on-site in a way that shut down the center of a small city, they'd have been incredibly embarrassing for the feds to pursue in court: encouraged toward attacks and their specific target by a federal undercover agent, armed with a Fast and Furious gun, and literally tailed by FBI agents who were apparently dressed up like Team America extras but did not provide aid to those under attack.
We don't, tautologically, know of any situations where this sort of embarrassing attack happened and the feds just shrugged their shoulders about it (... probably), and I'd like to think that 'found the pipe bomber' would outweigh the 'took an embarrassing and hard-to-solve case' bit, but it's at least plausible that they exist.
That said, I think the null hypothesis is still more plausible than most people think. DC police and surveillance just aren't that good, and while opsec is harder than a lot of people think, sometimes even mediocre opsec won't necessarily drop a case into your lap. There are some details that leave me suspicious enough that the more dire options aren't implausible, but follow enough crime investigations and you do occasionally see people caught on HD video with no masks, who drove past a couple LPRs in a bright painted weird car, and who left ammo cases at the scene, and months later no one can find or ID the fuckers.
gattsuru
11mo ago
For multifactor authentication, specifically:
- The gold standard is a Yubikey, but this is obnoxious to setup and maintain, so you probably can't unless it's your full-time job.
- For everyone else, virtual key-based two-factor authentication, either tied to your physical phone or running on an (ideally not-device-you're-logging-in-on) computer. Authy is the Google version, there's a bunch of free third-party ones that are pretty not-awful. (If you use an Android phone, avoid sideloading onto the same device as your 2FA app, and limit browsing/weird app installs from the stores if you're paranoid).
- Most have an online backup option. Whether you want to use it depends on your threat model -- having a fast backup option from 'phone exploded' is nice, but compromise here is pretty bad.
- When you set up key-based 2FA for important account, you should get some number (usually 3-5) 'emergency codes'. Print two copies out: put one with your birth certificate, and one off-site (safe deposit box, friend's house, among your personal effects at the office).
- Avoid giving phone numbers to vendors whenever possible; even if you don't use them as a 2FA setting, businesses will almost always treat them like one, except going through their tier 1 tech support instead of an actual process. Unfortunately, not possible for a lot of things like business/bank accounts.
- If your account is high-risk or high-profile, try to contact your vendor ahead of time and specifically disavow phone-based account recovery. Probably won't work, but can be worth trying.
For passwords :
- The Standard Advice is to use a good password manager. Firefox and Google have built-in options, as does the iPhone, but 1Password has some nice benefits in terms of Just Working. If you're willing to do the synchronization yourself, or only have a couple machines you login from, KeePass. Use them to autofill password forms; if they don't, check for likely compromise of the site (though there are a few other possible causes). Make sure your login passwords for these tools are unique, long, and memorable, and harden the password store against external attacks.
- Whatever tool you use, make sure it's separate from your 2FA app, and that your password store isn't getting backed up to the same place your 2FA backup.
- ... the non-standard advice is to have a unique, long, and memorable password for every major site that you memorize. This can be a very useful skill if you might need to log in at arbitrary locations from computers that you don't have a lot of chance to set up, but most people can't do it, and you're slightly more vulnerable to simple brute force attacks than password managers.
More generally:
- Get and use an ad blocker. Because of the iPhone, piHoles are the best option, but if you mostly browse from a desktop uBlock Origin works well enough. Ads are an attack vector.
- HTTPS-everywhere (now default in most browsers) is nice. If you're tech-savvy, knowing how to tunnel both DNS and HTTP(s) to a server you control can also be nice, especially if you're on the road a lot. The former is more realistic a concern for more threat models, but a surprising number of important but small sites will not support HTTPS.
Biden can pardon Hunter whether he wins or loses; it's not like there's takebacks on November 20th.
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