popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
Reading people's personal accounts on Hacker News and elsewhere lends credence to the existence of bad genetics, such as men who consume far fewer calories predicted by calculators but still obese or overweight. Metabolism varies greatly among individuals even controlling for factors like age, height, sex, lifestyles, etc.
Anecdotal, and people are terrible at estimating their own consumption unless they're weighing everything they put in their mouth. The variation of metabolism is not completely insignificant, but not enough to explain the obesity crisis. An extremely cursed person in the 99th percentile might have to consume about 400kcal/day less than average (assuming 160kcal stddev) which does not explain the obesity crisis. Your run-of-the-mill unlucky person complaining of a "slow metabolism" has to consume the equivalent of two fewer apples a day.
The main way in which obesity is genetic is behavioral. People with a satiation reflex that does not activate as quickly, whose hunger is stronger or self-regulation is weaker, who are inclined to sedentary activities and don't walk as much. But these factors of genetic variation often reflect poorly on the character the obese person in question, so they prefer to focus on a supposedly unbelievably efficient metabolism.
Bad genetics can explain a fixed proportion of the population being obese even in the 70s, 60s etc.
A new environment can expose genetic variation that was invisible before. Vulnerability to drug addiction is also genetic, but there were no fentanyl addicts in the 60s or 70s.
popocatepetl
23d ago
+1 on the 12 Miles Below rec.
I enjoyed 12MB, but mostly because of the unique setting. The protagonist lucks into all the things that give him power progression, as opposed to planning, training, or using his own unique cleverness to problem solve. IIRC, despite being characterized as a brainy engineer, his major contribution to his own success is using a few Bash commands.
popocatepetl
23d ago
Could we be seeing the beginning of the end of the Chiefs dynasty?
As a Patriots fan I certainly hope so. It would be very annoying in retrospect if we secured consensus for Best Dynasty of All Time, Best QB of All Time, Best Coach of All Time, etc around 2017 only for the title belt to be lost the minute after the band broke up a few years later.
popocatepetl
23d ago
It's true I rarely give him much of a response anymore because he always posts the same things and when people do tackle his specific claims, he fades and comes back a short time later with the same arguments pretending the previous conversations never happened
I think this would be the reason to ban an account rather than single-issue posting. Posting gish gallop manifestos and then retreating into the shadows when someone takes the effort to debunk, only to reappear when the coast is clear, is bad faith participation. Focusing on a single issue, on the other hand, is something you could accuse many people here of.
popocatepetl
23d ago
It's a very entertaining video but the logic of the multipliers and their weights is poor. A data scientist or even just a reasonable person would look at the results that the most cowardly punts resulted in a win, realize they fucked up and recalibrate. Instead he just plows ahead with a dumb model based on nothing but his gut and acts like it's a huge mystery he got dumb results.
popocatepetl
24d ago
Mother of Learning by Domagoj Kurmaic. Very good overall. This is the first time I get the appeal of rational fiction. The premise is recognizably Harry Potter, but with infinitely better worldbuilding, and Harry Potter is a useless jock so Hermione uses her looper watch to counter Voldermort instead.
Pro: The protagonist unravels a single fantasy mystery puzzle over thousands of pages, with each step being purely logical. Minimal asspulls. Despite the web novel origins, the author seems to have planned clockwork details from the start. Side characters are funny and have surprisingly heartwarming backstories.
Con: In the early chapters, the protagonist acts like a teenager. A real one. He's not as bad as the fandom warned, but you'll have to overcome a cringe curve here.
Neutral: There's an almost total lack of descriptive language. If a character pulls into a impressive train station, the author just says the character is impressed; he doesn't describe how the benches have Baroque Rococo gold-trimmed marble or whatever. To my surprise, the straightforward delivery doesn't bother me, and more paragraphs of scene-building would just distract. If you like buttery delicious prose, you won't find it here.
Yeah, I don't think the dialogue was particularly good, but the world-building was. The quests, the books you could find, all the little details scattered around the map... it was all very well done.
Seconded. The purpose of NPCs in Morrowind is admittedly to be walking lorebooks and direction-givers. The only character you can have in any way a dynamic conversation with is Vivec. (Which, hey, he achieved CHIM, so...) But Morrowind didn't focus on character relationships, so judging it by this rubric seems to miss the point.
Morrowind's writing is good in the same way of Dark Souls or Outer Wilds. It isn't about the interaction of characters. It's the process of collecting shards the backstory in your mind, and eventually piecing together truth out of fragments.
Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with.
What is good for goose, is good for the gander. I support free speech of those who support free speech. Those who support censorship, deserve to be censored. "Pronoun policy" which penalizes people for speaking what they perceive is true, amounts to censorship.
The Motte also has a code of manners that others find stifling. Is that censorship? Many an outsider has come here and said "@some, you're a nazi" or the like, believing honestly that you're a nazi and thinking they had good factual reasons for thinking so, indeed, feeling a moral duty not participate in the social fiction you're not a nazi. They got modded. Instead they had to rephrase their ideas in an abstract, motte-friendly way.
"Mr. Elliot Page, all transmen are women" is perfectly comprehensible.
Of course, places with pronoun policies also tend to censor the ideas themselves. But in principle requiring he/she is no more censorial than what we do here.
popocatepetl
30d ago
My impression from talking to older people is that the severity of, and violence involved in, school bullying has declined significantly over the past hundred years.
Like @jeroboam, I suspect there's a important difference in the way we're using the word "bullying". Let me share an anecdote from Rachel Simmon's Odd Girl Out: The hidden culture of aggression in girls which I got via Joyce Benenson's book on male v. female friendship.
Brianna and Mackenzie were the queen bees, and they presided over the seventh grade. Brianna was the prettiest, Mackenzie the best at sports. Their favorite hobby was having a boyfriend. Jenny [a transfer student] wasn’t really interested in a boyfriend, but she still like hanging out with the guys. Mostly she liked to play soccer and basketball with them after school. She liked to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of make-up and miniskirts.
She had barely introduced herself when Brianna and Mackenzie gave her a code name and started calling her Harriet the Hairy Whore. They told everyone Jenny was hooking up with the boys in the woods behind the soccer field. Jenny knew that being called a slut was the worst thing in the world, no matter where you lived. No one was even kissing yet. It was the lowest of the low.
Brianna and Mackenzie started a club called Hate Harriet the Hore Incorporated. They got every girl to join except two who didn’t care. All the members had to walk by Jenny in the hallway and say “Hhiiiiiii...”
They made a long sighing noise to make sure she knew they were sounding out the initials of the club: HHHI. Usually two or more girls would say it and then look at each other and laugh. Sometimes they couldn’t even say the whole thing, they were laughing so hard. It seemed like Mackenzie and Brianna had suddenly made it their goal in life to ruin her.
[...]
There was no way she’d tell her mother, and certainly not her father. She felt nauseous just thinking about telling her parents she was such a reject.
Every day was an endless battle. She was exhausted trying not to cry, stiffening her body against the hallway attacks, sitting through lunch after lunch alone. There was no one else to be friends with in the grade because everyone, the few that there were, was against her.
One night Jenny’s sadness left no room for her fear, and she picked up the phone. Jenny called Brianna, Mackenzie, and a few other girls. She asked each of them, “Why do you hate me?” They denied everything.
“But why are you doing the Hate Harriet the Hore club?” she pleaded.
Their voices were light and sweet. “We don’t have a Hate Harriet the Hore club!” each one assured her, as though they were telling her the earth was round. They were so nice to Jenny that for a second she didn’t believe it was really them. Then she could almost feel her heart surging up through her chest. The next morning, she actually looked forward to getting out of bed. It would be different now.
Then she got to school.
“Hhhiiiiiiii...!”
To me this is bullying, and the psychological content received by Jenny is equal to that if it were 1923 and MacKenzie and Brianna instead took her out to the woods, stuck a bonnet in her mouth, and strapped her with a branch. Or if it were 1963 and they circled around her and screamed SLUT to her face. Social disapproval and assertion of dominance, when it comes to bullying, are the essence; violence and open confrontation but delivery mechanisms.
So, yes, we have created rules that limit beating a kid up or yelling slurs in their face. That doesn't mean bullying has decreased, it's just become harder to measure.
popocatepetl
30d ago
I disagree with your premise that childhood bullying is less than before. Bullying is a universal feature of children's culture (and arguably, human culture) where low status outsiders are ritually demeaned and excluded by the mainstream. If violence is allowed, violence will be used; if not, the bullying will express in other ways. It's just that the people you think should be bullied are no longer outsiders; they are the mainstream, doing the bullying.
I also see a small spike around May 2020. I wonder did this coincide with the "protests are bad because they'll spread Covid (unless they're pro-BLM, in which case they're fine)" flip-flopping from public health officials?
This would be a good explanation if the spike didn't peak the week before George Floyd died. I think it must be general disdain for Covid conformism, or for democrats becoming the most strident proponents for NPIs after opposing anti-Covid measures as xenophobic up until February.
The 2020-2022 period was full of these sorts of War with Eastasia/Eurasia heel turns from the tastemakers, which is why the meme emerged then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPC_(meme) the term was first used in a political context in 2018, it predates Covid.
I checked the Google Trends data. "NPC" had a spike in 2018, returned to baseline, and then was revived in late February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and has been double to triple baseline since.
It's a bit like how "gaslighting" originated from a 1938 play. The term was lying around dormant and picked up later. In the case of NPC, it was the mass fast turn of online progressives from talking about covid vaccines to talking about Ukraine.
INTJ, I would guess it’s INTJ’s that are overrepresented in here. Judgers are more systematizing than Perceivers, no? But the last letter isn’t as relevant as the first 3 anyway.
I'd be surprised if this forum weren't half INTJ+INTP, if not more. A Scott poll from the good old days had us 10x overrepresented in his readership IIRC.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Yeah. I'm sure you've heard this before, but you're overfocusing on negatives to the point of insanity.
From the tone of your writing, you'd think you were a middle-aged castrated cripple living under a bridge in a small town where everyone knows you as a registered sex offender. The facts of your situation that bleed through your wellness posts do not agree with the level of despair, at all.
Given this, improvement in your life situation will not improve your emotions. They're unmoored from one another. Seek help and/or try new medications.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Someone whose views are the average of the media they consume or the friends they keep. They do not seriously evaluate a given topic or problem and come to their own conclusion on it, instead preferring to delegate to trusted figures of authority.
This definition is inadequate because it describes everyone. Do you think it's an accident that 99% of your objective beliefs and moral opinions are those of a 21st century educated westerner rather than, say, an 8th century BC Scythian herdsman? Did you personally validate your belief that Jupiter is a gas giant with several moons or did you trust an authority figure? Are you an NPC because you did?
IMO the litmus test of NPC is receiving "updated information" from trusted figures that contradicts previously received beliefs/values, and not experiencing any kind of cognitive discomfort. The 2020-2022 period was full of these sorts of War with Eastasia/Eurasia heel turns from the tastemakers, which is why the meme emerged then.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
But it’s remarkable to me that no one seems to have given the original meme meaning someone who does not possesses an inner monologue.
I think that's implied in many of the definitions I've read.
That said, slurs have a gravitational pull towards incoherent raw disdain. Karen went from "Entitled middle-aged woman who abuses lowly customer service employees because she thinks she's important" to "Woman I don't like" in a couple months. NPC is well on its way.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I check in on the branch covidians at places like ZeroCovidCommunity from time to time, but my emotions towards them have softened over time from disgust to pity.
I guess that now their faction is out of power and not actively trying to degrade my life, I don't really bear any hostility to them... but if they started gaining power again I'd probably revert to hate.
The people in those spaces are not the same people you were disgusted with three years ago. Be careful not to succumb to outgroup homogeneity bias. The people who still take Covid seriously in July 2023 are in many ways kindred spirits to those who were done taking Covid seriously in July 2020; they applied their own reasoning to the problem and came to a conclusion that, right or wrong, they'll cleave to whatever society says. Wearing a mask and social distancing is low status, where before it was high status. Covid Hawks of current year are admirable even though imo they're wrong.
By contrast, some of the people occupying the same space in 2020 were (a) parroting high status positions (b) looking for an excuse to hate the outgroup (c) looking for an excuse to exercise petty authority (d) authentically responding in fear to a perceived crisis by looking for a witch to burn or Jewish quarter to loot. Now that those groups have moved on to something else, they've left the principled core of the pro-lockdown movement behind.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Ever since Scott ran an article on social contagion in anorexia and how anorexia wasn’t common at all until females herd about it.
He didn't make the connection explicitly, but transgenderism was surely on his mind when he wrote it. "Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. [...] He who has ears to hear, let him listen."
It's disappointing how chickenshit Scott has become in his ACX days. He's effectively cancelproof so there's no need to be this cagey.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
I don't see it on Bump sort (my default), but do see it on New and Hot.
popocatepetl
3mo ago
I'd guess some moderators, at least, would have noble aims of service and making things better/keeping things running in mind, motivating them more than the feeling of being in power?
For a real community, like here, there will be people who love the forum and want to maintain it.
A place like /r/pics, on the other hand, is not a community, it's a dumping ground. Anyone selfless enough to do the thankless work like curating it out of pure civic mindedness would have glommed onto a worthier cause instead.
TheDonald and, sigh, watchpeopledie.
Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network
Took a look at all of these. They look to be pale shadows of their former lives as subreddits. The Motte has taken a hit but at least still gets comparable weekly comment numbers to a year ago. I don't think you can cite any of these other four as success stories.
popocatepetl
3mo ago
Why does a bunch of subreddits going private for a few days prove that it was a good decision
Personally I question whether I could bring myself to use Reddit (and by extension /r/themotte) if the official interface were the only option. I suspect the axe will fall on https://old.reddit.com next. So you'd be deprived of my company for whatever that's worth.
But yeah, as far as I can tell, censorship was the first, second, third, fourth, and only reason we left. This cringe compilation tier revolution and insta-capitulation by reddit mods is amusing but ultimately irrelevant to us.
popocatepetl
3mo ago
But freedom requires virtue, and the particular virtue it requires of you right now is the virtue of mercy and forbearance. Ancient Athens could do what it did because it was geographically and spiritually right on the productive edge between the German barbarians on one side and the decadent Oriental despotisms on the other. We’re trying to do the same thing here, surf the tiny space between civilization and barbarism where freedom can flourish.
This sounds right, but from what I've read Athens didn't have freedom in a sense an Icelander or most moderners would recognize. Freiheit of the German warband is about individual autonomy, libertas of classical civilization about group autonomy. The latter would look at the Puritan colony with its rigid social regulations and say they were free. Athens sounds like a regimented society that happened to be democratic.
The quote is more apt for our present situation. Behind, poverty so vast that only the nobility had freiheit. Ahead, Moloch.
To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?
The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.
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