naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
14hr ago
The Wikipedia article suggests it was named after a Sesame Street character based on its physical resemblance, but I kind of love the analogy not only to the appearance of Snuffleupagus, but to the fact that this fish also remained of uncertain existence for an extended period of time. The character was originally Big Bird's "imaginary friend"--so-called because no one else in Sesame Street ever saw him. That lasted from 1971 to 1985, at which point it was decided that adults not believing a child (Big Bird is canonically 6 years old) was sending the wrong message to viewers, and "Snuffie's" invisibility went the way of Grover's Monsterpiece Theater pipe. The existence of the fish was, likewise, apparently a bit of a question mark from 1993 until today.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17hr ago
I don't think there's any problem with leaving it as is--plus it has already generated some perfectly acceptable meta discussion. I just thought I had better lampshade the fact that this is the Fun Thread before anyone else decided to make any substantive commentary on what I wrote! (And I probably wouldn't have mentioned it at all if we hadn't had some recent boundary-testing of the Fun Thread.)
Probably my favorite post I've ever written was my Junebug Review. There are a lot of movies I would like to give similar treatment, but I happened to have the time and the inclination to write that one, and it just came together so well.
So I'm impressed with your ability to continue writing at your Substack. You don't have a lot of posts, but you continue writing them; it seems like most of the Substacks I see fizzle in less than a year. Sometimes I think I should blog, but... insert excuses here, I suppose. I find this kind of writing easier to do in a forum than from my own platform, for whatever reason.
naraburns
nihil supernum
19hr ago
I'm glad it continues to serve you! I put a lot of thought into it.
Can I ask whether something prompted this callback? It's a pretty CW review so maybe this is not the right thread for discussing it on those terms. But as an educator I think (or hope!) that some aspects of education do belong in "Friday Fun."
naraburns
nihil supernum
19hr ago
Yeah, the site has already lasted longer than the subreddit (3.5 years), which lasted (a lot) longer than the containment thread on the SSC subreddit (~2 years, I think?). One of these days I'm going to find a sufficiently nerdy hydrologist who is willing to help me understand whether this metaphor is any good, but I've started thinking of internet communities as islands of sediment in a branching river... the same forces that build us up also tear us down, and moving off of reddit slowed our "deposits" but also slowed our "erosion," in many ways.
Good post, and doubly good for inspiring the linking of the "Galbrush Paradox" below--which I had never encountered, but which I love both because it is absolutely correct and because Guybrush Threepwood is one of the greatest video game characters of all time. (Heh. Rubber tree.)
What your post mostly made me think, though, was--yeah, as it turns out, people don't usually identify and discuss problems because they are interested in obviously relevant solutions. They identify and discuss "problems" as a negotiating tactic for getting whatever it is they actually want--usually, greater leverage or control over whoever it is they're complaining to.
To give a very simple example, I was subjected to this once as part of a hiring committee. We were going over god-only-knows how many resumes from grossly underqualified applicants, and I would say "let's toss this one out because X." And someone would respond, "wait, though, X isn't necessarily the problem you're making it out to be." Then we'd come to another application with X, and that very same someone would say "let's toss this one out because X." Then I would say, "I thought you didn't think X was a problem though" and I would get kind of a nasty look, followed by vague irrelevant platitudes--not even hair splitting, just straight up gobbledygook. This is from fellow tenured faculty, by the way, PhDs the lot of them, but it became quickly clear that for at least two members of the committee, there were no real standards of evaluation in play--just "say negative things about the ones I don't like, and positive things about the ones I do." Pointing out their inconsistencies was met with dirty looks or accusations of being unnecessarily aggressive about the process.
Actually I once got a similar criticism from a law professor when I was involved in a mock appeal. I threw everything I had into giving the most thorough arguments I could, and my peers were clearly frustrated by the amount of work that created for them. The professor had to step in and give us all a "remember this is just an exercise, we're not actually deciding a case here, no need to put so much into it..." Decades later, I'm still kind of cross about it!
This is like maybe the original sin from the perspective of the contemporary Rationalist movement, which Scott Alexander has done a lot of good work articulating with his culture war writings on social signaling. Most people are not making arguments, because most people are not usually reasoning at all. They're playing a hierarchy game, and complaining is a way of subordinating others. Their arguments are trash qua arguments, but it's a category error to even evaluate them that way. It's like watching someone flip a chessboard and then patiently explaining to them that flipping the chessboard isn't a legitimate move.
I apologize that this is pretty meta but the disconnect I see in so many people between identifying a problem and considering actual solutions is something I think about a lot. There is of course a gender stereotype here ("men, stop trying to solve our problems, that's not why we share them"--"if you don't want me to solve your problem, there's not really any point in listening to you talk about it"--"I'm just talking to show that I care!"--"I'm solving to show that I care!"--"if you really cared then you would stop trying to fix things!"--"okay, I guess I can't fix this relationship then, we're done"--"not like that!"). But while men and women often approach it from different angles, I've had just as many problems with men doing this sort of thing, as women. Most recently, I had a colleague come down with a serious case of AI psychosis (we should definitely start calling it cyberpsychosis) and completely lost his ability to engage with me on substance. Every disagreement we have now turns into him burying me under reams of ChatGPT-generated bullshit; when I pick it apart on substance, he says "okay I'll get back to you" and then ghosts me long enough for the discussion to go stale.
(To avoid having it suggested that I'm doing exactly what I'm complaining about, here, I will respond more directly to the substance of your post with an observation: possibly I don't hang out with the "right" kind of men, or maybe I hang out with the "wrong" kind of women, but in real life I have heard many, many women talk about their own breasts using descriptors like "perky" (or "tight" or "saggy" or "flat")--and almost never heard men speak of women's breasts that way outside of movies. I feel like "real women don't examine, describe, sexualize, or even notice their own breasts, that's something only thirsty lecherous male authors make badly-written female characters do" is the kind of egocentric misconception a teenage boy might have about the virginal purity of women. Women are of course not a monolith, probably not all women do this, but most of the women I've known in my life have been pretty casual/unconcerned/vaguely raunchy when discussing their "boobs" (the word I hear deployed most often, though maybe that is a generational thing). Sure, it's not always handled well in literature, but in reality the only people I know who are more obsessed with female breasts than young men, is young women.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
We know this forum...
...does not allow consensus-building language, especially when it is about "this forum." This comment is also bad because it is antagonistic and perhaps sarcastic. You have already been warned to speak plainly. Now you are getting banned for a day. Engage in thoughtfully good faith or that will escalate quickly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
First, this topic goes in the CW thread.
Second, the way you've written it is light on evidence and heavy on generalization. Write about specific rather than general groups whenever possible. Bring evidence proportional to how inflammatory your claims are likely to be read as. There are interesting things to be written about social contagion and its relationship to sex or gender, but it's going to take more effort than this.
It is rage-inducing trying to use reddit on my phone. If I stay in the browser, it wants to kick me to the app. But the app is trash for search, and won't open properly to the thing I've searched for via hyperlinks in my browser... I hate "apps," and I increasingly hate reddit. The enshittification is real.
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