roystgnr
2d ago
Why does it seem impossible for Hollywood to write stories about people? Regular people, working-class salt-of-the-earth human beings?
The theory I've heard is that they can't sell the stories afterward.
Currently they're making their profits off blockbusters, where after putting a quarter billion dollars into production and marketing you've got too much on the line to risk your dialogue not being trailer-worthy and lowest-common-denominator approved, and if you know your best sequences are going to be CGI kaiju fighting, why would you shorten those just to buy time to make a side character slightly more well-rounded? But mid-budget films, the ones where they used to spend a few tens of millions of dollars to get back a few more tens of millions, aren't working out so well as they used to ... and yet it's the mid-budget range that used to occasionally spiral into massive box office successes and Oscar takeaways for the biggest winners, because they were in the sweet spot where they were cheap enough for directors to take risks, too cheap to replace characterization with special effects, and yet expensive enough to exhibit real production quality behind the risky ideas that worked out.
I have no idea whether this theory is actually true; there doesn't seem to be nearly as much overlap as I'd like between "people who actually know something about the movie industry" and "people who back up their theories with quantitative analyses".
roystgnr
2d ago
and it's a very short story.
It's a collection of ridiculously short stories. Designing for open-world play maximizing player freedom means having lots of independent quest lines, none of which can be hastened by a training montage or a time skip. The power-fantasy "Chosen One" trope means that many of those arcs are expected to scale from stranger-off-the-street origins at the beginning to change-the-world consequences at the end. Designing for the player to get to experience all those quests means they need to be individually short enough that the game as a whole can be considered "completed" within 40 or 50 hours. And yet this is a game, so even with fast travel the vast majority of those hours are going to be gameplay.
Put that all together, and the next thing you know your axe-wielding barbarian who learned a few spells is getting made the Arch Mage, and your suspension of disbelief is shattered.
roystgnr
3d ago
"Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country" was McCain's version. I'm finding claims that it was Romney who turned that into "gas station with nukes", though not particularly mocking of McCain, and that Obama's contribution to Putin's seething was to call Russia "a regional power".
Although, apparently this sort of metaphor is way way older than that. "Upper Volta with rockets" was the phrase coined (possibly by a British journalist) in the 80s, updating the German "Congo with Rockets" from the 70s and "Genghis Khan with a hydrogen bomb" from the 50s, and all of this dates back as far as a sentiment from the 1850s, popularized by Tolstoy after Emperor Alexander III's counter-reforms in the 1880s,
"It was not without reason that Herzen spoke of how terrible Genghis Khan would have been with telegraphs, with railways, with journalism. This is exactly what has happened in our country."
Research by Russia Today, so they make it clear from the title onward that these are all variants on "a lazy Russophobic slur", but frankly I'm still impressed they didn't kill the article outright.
roystgnr
3d ago
Add ocean fertilization and enhanced weathering to your list, assuming future research doesn't have any surprises and they really are reasonable ways to sequester carbon in the medium-term and very-long-term respectively. Even if plants don't notice a drop in sunlight (or they notice but are happy enough about the extra CO2 to be fine anyway), we're already about 20% of the way from pre-industrial CO2 levels to "people complain about stale air and drowsiness" CO2 levels outdoors, and indoor air relies on CO2 diffusion to outdoor...
But frankly I'd wait before starting anything. In the US the biggest obstacles to doing anything are: (1) about a third of voters don't think climate change isn't yet causing any harm and (2) phasing out fossil fuels is going to be a massive challenge, both economically (it will be a third phase of history, where the first two were "underpopulated and dirt poor" and "burning fossil fuels") and technologically (we need a massive expansion of fission and/or massive improvements in grid battery costs), so we're probably going to need a stronger political consensus. If we go for the geoengineering too early then that consensus is always going to be split between "we fixed it" and "no, the priests just sacrificed a virgin and pretended that that's what made the drought end".
roystgnr
2d ago
Yeah, "assuming future research doesn't have any surprises" was a predicate here, not an actually-safe assumption. Sure would have been nice if we hadn't stopped the research a decade ago.
roystgnr
10d ago
Can't we just get along...by going to Mars or something?
That's a much better idea, I have to admit.
And we do have a massive humans-to-Mars project getting underway, so a quick examination of the public discussion of it will surely reveal just the culture-war-free cameraderie we're looking for. Let me do a web search now, right after taking a big sip of water...
roystgnr
14d ago
I miss when Free Speech was a heavily left-wing-coded principle. I expected more right-wingers to start adopting it as they realized they were losing control of the culture and could no longer be confident of not getting the short end of the stick, but I was way too naive about how many left-wingers I expected to avoid doing the opposite.
roystgnr
2d ago
On #1: try the second button from the top on the right of the gas pump's screen. It's almost never labeled as such, but it's usually set up as Mute. I've heard of one pump brand that uses top right instead, but never encountered it myself.
roystgnr
14d ago
nit-picking about whether I'm being 'fair' to Rowling
Is that a nitpick?
You started out by complaining about slander. Was that because you think slander is a serious, non-nit-picky thing, or was that just rhetoric targeting all the people here who do care about slander? Hopefully it's the former, but then since making untrue accusations of Rowling is slander, shouldn't you be horribly upset by even the possibility that you've committed it unwittingly?
Amping up the level of seriousness, you continued by complaining about blood libel ... but let's go back and look, and ah, there it is, "eradicate trans people". Either Rowling does want to eradicate trans people, or you personally have just committed blood libel. It is in fact a very important thing to determine whether you have done something so horrible or not - not a nit-pick! If it still feels like a nit-pick, which does seem like a potential consequence of the attitude of "frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this", that's not an excuse for evil, that's a confession of evil, but whether or not you strongly care about blood libel, you really shouldn't be surprised when other people do.
Even if you haven't committed blood libel, if there's some hot mic recording where we can hear Rowling talking about how she totally wants to murder all the transpeople, it would still be wrong to make the accusation against her in the awful, no-evidence-except-false-evidence way you have. The Boy Crying Wolf is not actually acting to protect people from the wolf! The next time your readers see such an accusation, even if the new accuser provides better evidence behind it, you've made "dive into the evidence, that won't be a waste of time" a slightly less safe conclusion for them to reach.
sure, whatever, Rowling is a perfect angel who has never done anything wrong, if that's what you want to believe
Has anyone actually said they believe that, or are you now putting words in their mouths too? Wasn't this a big part of the vicious cycle that eventually got Hlynka permabanned? When you find that making up strawmen is the only way to feel like you've brought your interlocutors down to your level then it's time to consider climbing up to theirs instead.
if I thought that would get anywhere
This is another confession, though framed as an attempt to blame the victims. You aren't supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because you expect to gain something out of unnatural self-restraint, you are supposed to avoid telling falsehoods because avoidance of evil is worthwhile for its own sake! And then, if you are incapable of that, the blame is entirely on you, not on any people who might not have rewarded you as much as you would have wanted otherwise.
the interesting issues are the larger factional concerns.
There's a naive-utilitarian inside me that's tempted to agree! On the meta level alone, this thread is a fascinating microcosm of them, even! We can see how factionalism gets exacerbated by outgroup homogeneity bias. We can see how our faction's noble goals get used to excuse harsh tactics while our enemies' dirty tactics reinforce our disdain for their hypocritiical goals. And when we zoom out far enough, we come to perhaps the most interesting question: isn't it at least sometimes okay if we "don't give a fuck about one person"? If with such an eagles-eye-level view we learn something helpful to a hundred other people then we're still ninety-nine in the black, and that sounds like a win, doesn't it?
And yet ... do we actually have an eagles-eye-level view, just because we'd really like to have one? Here you are, purportedly trying to get people to care about slander and blood libel, while you're in the middle of committing it and trying to make excuses for it. You don't help even the victims you do care about by trying to normalize the crimes being committed against them! Letting this kind of rhetoric slide wouldn't clearly be sacrificing one person's reputation to save 100 others, it might just as likely be sacrificing one person's reputation to harm 100 others!
Since we're this bad at trying to figure out all the second-order and third-order effects that a non-naive utilitarian would need to consider, maybe it's just time to back off and look at virtue ethics instead?
There's a quote from Dostoyevsky dialogue that comes to mind here:
"...the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams, I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. ... I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me."
From a moral standpoint, it's very dangerous to lose love for individual people but then hope to make it up to humanity in volume. A lot of people who decided to care about fighting "principalities and powers" at the expense of mere "flesh and blood" just ended up shedding a lot of blood without actually improving any balance of power - we easily promise to repay today's certain nearby moral debts with interest after tomorrow's vaguely-expected distant moral credit comes in, and yet that ends up being an excuse to increase the debt, not a real plan to make good.
But even from just an epistemological, pragmatic make-my-ideology-win standpoint: a "faction" isn't a smooth undifferentiated mass that you can stuff a bunch of people into to avoid having to look at each one's particular flaws and virtues. The more details you ignore, the more mistakes you're going to make! If you do the rhetorical equivalent of air-striking a wedding party because you're certain there are terrorists nearby, don't be surprised if you end up creating more enemies than you neutralize!
I appreciate you coming here and representing locally-unpopular points of view, even when you're getting dogpiled for it, but can you imagine the damage if your readers started to assume that everyone who might be considered part of your "faction" or "people like" you was guilty of the same logical and moral flaws you've exhibited in this thread? At least try to imagine, and then consider what you could change to moderate their future reactions accordingly? Outgroup homogeneity bias is a common human failing, and I doubt I've managed to even cure you of it in the space of a few paragraphs, so I surely haven't cured most of the people with that failing who don't see themselves in you and don't realize how much of these warnings might apply to them too. Now might be a good time to show them that their outgroup can admit mistakes and do better. The psychological foibles that sadly lead us to factionalism and division are indeed an interesting object of study, but if you really want to be sure you know a subject, then the most important part of studying isn't the reading, it's working the exercises at the end.
roystgnr
14d ago
You tell an entire people, "Sorry, you're not smart enough for tech or law. Have you tried the Foot Locker?"
What "entire" people? The most black-pilled anti-woke "IQ fits these shifted normal distributions and has unavoidable effects and measures all forms of intelligence and is entirely genetic" theory still only has about a 1SD racial difference, so it makes predictions like "there are only 6 or 7 million African-Americans smarter than the average white person" (41e6*normcdf(-1) in Octave) and "there are only 2 or 3 million African-Americans smarter than the average tech or law worker" (41e6*normcdf(-1.6)). Admitting that those numbers aren't nearly as high as we'd like them to be, so even if we observe them we should really be open to other explanations ... would that be the end of the world? Let's imagine that the most black-pilled pro-woke "Everybody needs role models who are specifically of their own ethnicity" theory is also true, simultaneously ... and we're still generally left with millions of good candidates! Not with the full ten million we'd have liked from a population that size, but it's at least an adequate fallback, no? Even at the top of estimates for college professors an IQ-based meritocracy would give us tens of thousands of high-end African-American candidates, way lower than we'd have liked, but still enough that there'd be no need to tell smart African-American kids aspiring to quantum physics research "try Foot Locker"; you could still just tell them "oh, you mean like those guys? great!"
roystgnr
1mo ago
White Protestants
The two top SF authors of all time are arguably Jules Verne, Catholic-raised deist, and Isaac Asimov, Jewish-raised atheist.
two White men
Juan Rico and his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez?
roystgnr
24d ago
But no one in academia officially uses the term Critical Race Theory.
Google Scholar reports 4,000 citations from the 20th century, which hopefully is an old enough cutoff date to clearly precede the current backlash, and another 200,000 citations since, which probably aren't all part of the backlash to the backlash.
It sounds a bit cringe when Republicans say they want to ban CRT, because officially it doesn't exist.
Wow, that takes me back down memory lane. I never understood how this sort of historical revisionism was expected to work, when we don't actually have a Memory Hole to drop actual history into, we have an Internet. But if the first history you see on the internet is still the revisionist one, it's hard to fault the revisionists for their choice of tactics. Perhaps someday even still-problematically-factual summaries will also learn to love Big Brother.
It's tempting to wonder whether the enraging pattern of gaslighting isn't to persuade, so much as deliberately to enrage. But that's unfair; to the people who actually complain that we aren't all jogging along the euphemism treadmills as fast as they demand, the complaint appears to be a mix of standard attempts to rebrand themselves to avoid "scorn and sarcasm", just combined with very non-standard attempts to condemn anyone who doesn't immediately keep up with the rebranding.
roystgnr
17d ago
At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else.
This definition changed more like 150 years ago than 15. Webster's dictionary lists rape as "In law, the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will" in 1828, but as "Sexual connection with a woman without her consent." in 1913.
I do think it's a better policy in general to make up a new word when you need one, rather than overloading an old one... but more than a century?! At some point thou movest on.
roystgnr
21d ago
That is, to say the least, unusual among modern ethnoreligious memes.
Looking at Wiki's examples of ethnic fusion ethnoreligions, other than Jews, I'm seeing 10 Christian sects (i.e. other people who believe Moses was a prophet of God), 4 Islamic (likewise), 1 Jewish-but-distinct (ditto). That still leaves a few Sikhs, Mandaeans, and Zoroastrian sects, but they seem to be outnumbered about 3 to 1 (by sect count) or 1.5 to 1 (by population). Ethnoreligions which don't treat the Book of Numbers as scripture are the unusual ones.
Although... why should we limit our numbers here to ethnoreligions? If I meet an Asian guy who thinks Jeffrey Dahmer had some great menu ideas, I'm not going to think "well, at least they're not the same ethnicity!", I'm going to smile non-confrontationally and back away slowly. Most religions with murderous scriptural lessons tend to downplay or backpedal from them a bit, but that goes for most Jewish believers as well. The "Genocide is good when He orders it" message is in the Bible and the Quran, with billions of followers. The killer is calling from inside the house!
roystgnr
29d ago
People work 60 hours a week instead of 40.
A few of them, sure? 5.6% of workers averaged 60 hours or more last year, according to BLS. People who worked under 15 hours a week were nearly as common.
You might be in a bit of a bubble. There's a lot of variation between industries (full time mining, quarrying, and gas workers average 48.3 hours, so you know there's a lot of 60 hour stretches; my mother quit her veterinary career after a decade or so because the local "60+ hours or don't bother" jobs available were too much with a kid), and variation between companies and subsectors within an industry (I'm told the AAA game developer work ethos is something like "you can sleep when you retire"?). Perhaps you're in one of the worst of those?
They live minimalist spartan lifestyles to not spend money. It’s a bank number, nothing real.
And yeah, I empathize with this. People were shocked when "The Millionaire Next Door" talked about how many people with 7-figure net worth were driving 20 year old beat-up cars, but that's a goal I started aiming for! I still remember my mom trying to explain to toddler-me that Happy Meals were too expensive right now (soon after she quit her job, my dad lost his...), and enjoying fewer luxuries now seems like a more than worthwhile price to pay for never having to do that with my own kids later. But again, is this the median American, or are we in cultural bubbles? People have spent more on restaurants than on groceries for most of the past decade. Even when my parents found stable new careers it was a treat to visit a buffet every couple weeks.
the obvious way in retrospect to add systemd logging would be to implement the interface from the scratch instead of including a bloated libsystemd
I have to wonder whether we're sure this wasn't the obvious way with foresight, too. The top comment on Hacker News claims the from-scratch option is to simply send a systemd notification by writing to a socket, with a dozen lines of code that don't link to anything beyond libc, no need to apply a non-standard patch to openssh to link it to libsystemd instead. In the context of a years-long many-pseudonym social-persuasion-filled attack it might not be too paranoid to find out who persuaded Debian etc. that linking was the way to go here.
Or if we want to go too-paranoid, systemd itself is an utterly massive pile of privileged C code that took a lot of persuasion to be accepted...
And if we want to go Full Tinfoil Hat, how'd we all end up on this "Linux" macrokernel, anyway? Minix could have been easier to secure...
roystgnr
30d ago
I almost wondered if he was trying to goad the government into claiming that it actually has the same right to bully and coerce news outlets.
It would be in character, right? I guess it was too much to hope that we'd get another win that easily, though.
"You can't handle the truth!
Son, we live in a world that has mass media, and those media have to be guarded by men with banhammers. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Justice Alito? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for the publisher, and you curse the Congress. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know -- that chilling effects, while tragic, probably saved elections; and my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves elections.
We use words like "fact-checking," "regulation," "trust." We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line."
"Would you order the book ban?"
"I do the job..."
"Would you order the book ban!!?"
"YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I WOULD!"
roystgnr
24d ago
I've yet to hear a convincing argument for why it's a good idea
I'm mostly in the "Doomer" camp (not because I think it's more likely than not, but because I think russian roulette is an even worse idea if the odds get above 1-in-6 and the downside gets way above a single death), but even from here: I've yet to hear a convincing argument explaining which non-zero regulation suite is likely to do more good than harm. At this point I've seen too many bipartisan "War On Bad Things" initiatives that didn't actually reduce the bad consequences of the bad things and too many "GoodPerson Act" laws that didn't actually seem to be the product of good people, and I'm going to need to hear actual specifics of any proposed regulations before I can judge them.
And good (bad) news! We've got some specifics from the EU now:
The AI Act lists a bunch of special-purpose can't-possibly-go-"foom" tasks as their "high risk" targets, and then as a sop to people worrying about actual existential risks (sorry, they can't even bring themselves to say that; let's go with their phrase "systemic risks") we get "transparency obligations" for models exceeding a roughly-GPT-4-level training budget. "Providers of models with systemic risks are therefore mandated to assess and mitigate risks, report serious incidents, conduct state-of-the-art tests and model evaluations, ensure cybersecurity and provide information on the energy consumption of their models."
So ... basically do what you were going to do anyway, hope that's enough to prevent human extinction "systemic risk", and also in the same breath we're equally super worried about GPUs causing a tiny bit more global warming.
These are the people you want to give a monopoly on AGI? At least the current group of people who might kill us with it seem vaguely aware that that's a possibility to watch out for.
roystgnr
29d ago
I think there were also post-sex scenes in both Iron Man and the first Guardians movie
The post-sex scene in Iron Man was preceded by a more graphic (though still PG-13) pre-sex scene, even. I don't think they were even aiming the MCU at kids until they realized what a cash cow it was going to be; otherwise they'd have toned down the bloody opening scene a bit, or at least given it more of the cartoonish flavor that later MCU battles are full of.
The sex stuff in Guardians was much more clever; kids old enough to understand why he forgot that lady was on board his ship are old enough to watch it, and if there are any kids old enough to understand the "under a black light this place looks like a Jackson Pollack painting" joke then they're old enough to shudder at it.
Of course, with Eternals they were more clever still: if nobody can muster up interest in the movie for long enough to get to the adult elements, then they don't have to worry about exposing kids to adult elements. I'm not even kidding here; I tried to watch that movie and I tuned out before making it that far. I had to hit up YouTube just now to see the (not even prelude-to! thrusting! the only non-R-rated thing here is the camera angle!) sex scene.
roystgnr
7d ago
Is sleep deprivation low-risk? There are major negative long-term mental and physical consequences of chronic sleep deprivation, and there are wild (like, 3-4 days in is when the hallucinations usually begin) consequences of acute sleep deprivation, so while I don't know if there are any studies showing long-term consequences of acute sleep deprivation it's definitely something I'd look into before trying out a multi-day stretch.
roystgnr
22d ago
Some of your other links aren't really about CRT?
That's the point, though, not a mistake. As the saying goes, "once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action". If "No, that's not Critical Race Theory; don't you realize how cringe you're being!" had been a new sort of claim to me, I'd have been inclined to take it seriously. But it's just one more instance of an increasingly predictable pattern of the modern left trying to disavow their own endonyms as soon as they're subjected to cross-examination, and I'm getting increasingly tired of it.
Even if their actual ideas are total nonsense, they're going to win if you fight them there.
Nah. Their home turf isn't wordplay, it's institutional support. Hence the current panic over the right's discovery that they still have control over a few institutions (some state legislatures and governors) that at least nominally have authority over the local left-controlled institutions. Indiana can pass a law about "no saying one race is inherently superior" and the media can blatantly lie to turn that into "they're trying to prevent students from learning about Black history!", but if the law passes anyway then it's not going to be a journalist's (95%-left) opinion that matters, it's going to be a judge's (maybe 50%-left, and also often more serious about their honesty than their ideology).
roystgnr
1mo ago
Though I agree it comes from people generally associated with the right the actual policy feels very liberal to me.
It is very liberal, philosophically; it's just not inherently left-wing.
Principled right-libertarians exist (though in insufficient numbers...), and many other modern right-wing people have been pushed to adopt liberal philosophies, at least out of expediency, since liberal philosophies are the ones that still let you coexist when (like the modern right) you're not powerful enough to expect to come out on top in an illiberal system. @ArjinFerman is probably correct below when he writes "Politics is not about policy as it relates to various philosophies, as nice as that would have been." I fear many supporters of school vouchers would never give the idea a second glance if only control of their public school systems was still in their allies' hands rather than their opponents'.
Politics have strange coalitions I guess
There's this too. Schizmogenesis is a powerful force. I never imagined I'd see leftists defending the unimpugnable integrity of pharmaceutical companies and voting machines, or rightists becoming pro-Russian tankies, but maybe that's just what happens when the vibe of "not only am I not like Them, I'm the most not-like-Them it's possible to be!" gets socially rewarded.
roystgnr
13d ago
The theory's not bunk, it's just obsolete. Even the upgrade from binary scores to continuum scores just isn't enough to catch up to something like OCEAN that generates bases for continuum scores via PCA rather than Jung+guessin.
roystgnr
19d ago
That the pivot to Ukraine when the covid thing became too embarrassing was pure coincidence? That the pivot to Israel was also pure coincidence?
Since those "pivots" had their timing fixed by Putin's invasion date and Hamas' massacre date, and since I'm very confident the US Deep State or whoever isn't collaborating with them, I'm going to have to go with OF COURSE. Putin's "de-Nazification" excuses were a cover for "I want conquest", not "I want to do Biden a solid".
Good luck to you. I'm as big a Deus Ex fan as the next guy, but actual paranoid theorizing about how the world is controlled by a giant conspiracy against you is a really hard epistemic failure to break out of. Meds can help, but of course that's what They would want you to do...
Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?
She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.
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