sohois
8mo ago
Yes, this site is built on rdrama code. You can tailor it exactly to your liking. The purpose of all that action is to scare off users who can't figure that out
sohois
8mo ago
I enjoyed The Leftovers but also find it to be a bit overrated. Perhaps my view is in part influenced by the foreknowledge that this was a show from Damon Lindelof, writer of Lost, and seeing people claim that the show "fixed the problems present in Lost" and was Lindelof redeeming himself with a well-handled mystery.
Except it wasn't at all. Where Lost struggled mightily to give answers to every little crazy incident, often to no benefit, the approach of The Leftovers was just to abandon the majority of mysteries every season and never mention them again. This meant it avoided lots of trite explanations or dumb exposition, but I wouldn't call it resolving the problems that Lost had by any means.
I suppose the answer to Leftovers' strong reception is in the idea that "it's really about the characters". After the Lost finale, this line was trotted out a lot to defend the show, that it didn't matter that the mystery box was unsatisfying because actually you just wanted to see what happened to the characters. To an extent you did care about the endings for the characters in Lost, but really it was much more about the mystery box. With the Leftovers, you could actually claim that it was really about the characters, and being an HBO show with a fine cast and big budget, its character stuff was really strong.
Nonetheless, I was disappointed to go in expecting a satisfying mystery box and not getting that. (I'm also expecting the exact same thing to happen with new mystery box show Severance)
sohois
1yr ago
I'm actually going to argue against slatestarcodex, despite it being the genesis of this place. /r/SSC was very intelligent, but I think a number of factors have drastically dragged down the level of discussion there.
One is just size, with the subreddit having grown rapidly as Scott's following has grown, and that will always bring down an average. And there is the problem of the motte itself: a lot of good commentators might have started at /r/ssc, but ended up migrating most of their comments to here, or to DSL, or even to lesswrong or the ACX open threads.
The somewhat directionless nature of the subreddit is another problem, since the early selection effects of the subreddit have now faded away, bringing in a lot of random commentators.
I'll still go there regularly, but nowadays it seems like only 1 in 10 comments is worth bothering with, compared to a much higher proportion before.
sohois
8mo ago
Whenever I've seen opinions on the wider Elder Scrolls series, it has always been that the most recent edition has been a tragic dumbing down of the series. People who played Daggerfall find Morrowind to be a mass market, lowest-common-denominator mess. People who played Morrowind think the same of Oblivion, and those who played Oblivion find the same issue with Skyrim.
I've only played the last two, but from what I've seen of the other games there is certainly some truth that the series gradually became simpler, more accessible - but perhaps at some cost. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar plan was in place for Fallout, until New Vegas came along and ruined any chance of people looking positively at the others.
sohois
1yr ago
It's entirely because they have the World Cup. You don't see anyone really going after the likes of Kuwait or the UAE.
sohois
8mo ago
One thing with housing is that we have examples of localized unaffordability that are much more extreme than most national housing issues, so the local response should give us an idea of what a nationwide response might be. Think of areas like San Fran, Vancouver, London, or most notably Hong Kong. These are often areas where there is some control over house building rates or other local powers that could swing things.
Hong Kong is both the worst in terms of affordability and the one with more control over local issues, but what have we seen there? The only protests in recent years have been from pro-democracy groups. The residents have just accepted worse and worse housing. Even if you believe the CCP's control is a unique situation, it's not like we've seen differently in other overpriced metros.
sohois
1yr ago
"Do you agree with [professor]" is the subject of every university-level exam.
sohois
1yr ago
People seem to credit him for inventing rationality and AI safety, and to both of those I can only say "huh?".
This seems pure pedantry. Obviously, the concept of rationality and ideas around optimizing for truth or utility have existed for a very long time. And there is plenty of science fiction which featured dangerous AI.
But I really can't imagine anyone even vaguely familiar with Yudkowsky or AI alignment or the rat-sphere would struggle with the claim that Yudkowsky "invented rationality and AI safety."
Capital-R Rationality is the modern groups that formed around the Bay-area subculture which Yudkowsky largely founded. It is MIRI, CFAR, Effective Altruism. It's Yudkowsky, Scott Alexander, Julia Galef. It's LessWrong, SSC, and even this very forum.
And AI Safety? Yes, the concept existed. But the entire modern edifice of AI alignment all arose from Yudkowsky's initial writings on LessWrong. He was responsible for drawing attention to it, he lead MIRI for a while, he set down a great deal of theory.
I'm really struggling to believe someone smart enough to post on TheMotte would so easily be confused by this.
sohois
1yr ago
There's actually a far more interesting example than Boris: Kwasi Kwarteng, the recently departed chancellor.
Kwarteng has a double first & a PhD from Cambridge, and was a Kennedy scholar at Harvard. Unlike Boris and most other politicians, his degrees weren't in PPE and other broad subjects, but in economics, so he should have been primed for a position as chancellor. He even had relevant experience in hedge funds, rather than just being a former journalist, again like so many other politicians.
Kwarteng might well have the most impressive academic achievements of anyone in the House of Parliament today. And yet he blundered terribly with his mini-budget, seemingly unaware that the markets would not look kindly to low-tax and high-spend in the middle of major economic turbulence.
How exactly did someone who is probably top 1% in intelligence and in a relevant area for his skillset perform so poorly? At least with someone like Robert McNamara you can point to the Vietnam war being a very complex and difficult issue.
sohois
1yr ago
That's just the subreddit though. ACX isn't mentioned anywhere, though I'm sure that the open threads contain plenty of things that could be deemed objectionable
sohois
1yr ago
Rationalism has a big overlap with EA, but EA does not have a big overlap with rationalism. EA has grown significantly beyond its origins in rat-spheres
sohois
1yr ago
Kiwifarms has posted extremely convincing evidence of Keffals being at best a dangerous person for children but much more likely a paedophile. And it had no effect at all.
I can't imagine a tactic of burying them under annoyances would help much at all
sohois
1yr ago
Unless you have Japanese levels of public behavior and honesty, you're going to keep getting violence, filth, and corruption.
I've used public transport systems across European cities for long periods of time (i.e. natives are <75% of the local population) and have generally had pleasant experiences in all of them, so I don't know that this statement holds up.
sohois
1yr ago
I think the characterization of those opposed to the sale of the club to Qatari buyers is a drastic simplification. The moral factor is one element of opposition, but I think it is one of many and not necessarily the major factor or even something people believe in beyond being used as a stick to beat their opponents.
Rather, there are several points that are likely to be important:
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The fact that the Qatari ownership at PSG and the Abu Dhabi ownership of Manchester City are rampant cheats, and the suspicion that Newcastle's Saudi owners and Man Utd's new owners will soon follow suit, ruining the credibility of the game.
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A more general distaste for the fact that football will be reduced to a proxy battle between middle eastern states. This will particularly be the case for local United fans, who are likely to see many of the supporters for the buyout as distant, 'fake' fans who have no real connection to the club.
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A distaste for the overall financial health of the game that has seen money become an overwhelming factor in success.
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Downplaying the moral element as mere "LGBTQ unfriendliness" is also deeply uncharitable. I can't speak overmuch on the Qatari government, but the ills of Saudi Arabia are very well documented, while there is strong evidence that the Abu Dhabi ownership of City engage in murder, torture, and slavery.
sohois
1yr ago
I just cannot believe any studio would be so careless as to commit such a serious misfire.
How so? The history of production studios is littered with big bets that turned into disasters. Streaming services especially have had hundreds of hyped failures in their recent pasts. Plus, it is not as though RoP is actually a Waterworld or Heaven's Gate or similar; as you say, the perspective is that it isn't a "ground breaking masterpiece".
And how hard is it to make a ground breaking masterpiece? If we again look into film and TV history, the only thing we see from massive budgets is a tendency for productions to look expensive. There has never really been a way to guarantee high quality just from pumping money into something.
The so-called Golden age of TV appears to largely be creator driven if anything. But that's not really a guarantee either. Assuming that you could even convince a David Milch or Matthew Weiner to come and spend years on your Lotr indulgence instead of something they find interesting, there aren't really safe bets there. Both the above had recent flops, Weiner for Amazon Studios in fact. Even if you made the argument they could just hire Peter Jackson, one only needs to look at the Hobbit films.
I believe there was an article linked here which spoke of one of the big issues in current TV - not enough show runners. Streaming has become so voracious that everyone who has the skills to make TV is already locked into contracts. So maybe the relative no-names that Amazon hired were simply the best available? I'm sure there was a stringent enough interview process for them. Perhaps they hoped that they would grow into the role, and it didn't work out?
sohois
1yr ago
Maybe I'm missing your point, but I'd imagine all the people worrying about AI art are not thinking of GPT-3 and stable diffusion. They are thinking of GPT-4/5 and stable diffusion 2. With the rates at which the models have been improving in recent years, it hardly seems fanciful that the next generation of these language models and image generators will be human or super-human level, not sub-human.
sohois
1yr ago
So your homeless shelter doesn't get built near your neighbourhood, or anywhere else in your city. Now what? You've addressed the point that such shelters will impose externalities on those living near them, but shelters themselves are not the cause, the homeless people are. And the lack of shelters will not actually remove those homeless people.
Perhaps they simply congregate in your city centre, making it increasingly unpleasant to be in as happened in many major American cities. Maybe they just start congregating in a random place, pitching their tents in some neighbourhood for no apparent reason - and perhaps they pick your neighbourhood, and you've got the problem anyway. What's the solution to this?
Obviously, with the homeless there are non-housing related options: you could try and simply ship them away to some other area, or have the police be much harsher on vagrancy and imprison many of them. In the first case, what's to stop these other areas from sending them back, or the homeless themselves from simply returning? Will you end up in an expensive cycle of carting the homeless back and forth? For the second, what about prison capacity? I can't imagine prison construction is any more popular than shelter construction, so where do you plan to build the extra prisons needed for the homeless population?
Admittedly, this example only applies to homeless shelters, and there are other examples like loud or foul smelling factories which might be better.
Let's turn to the housing question instead. As many of the other replies have noted, there is nothing wrong with wanting a nice neighbourhood, filled with familiar people. A lot of poor people are just unpleasant to be around and bring issues with them, and high housing prices do act as a barrier. But I think nimbys making this argument are not being logical or following the idea through to its conclusion.
I assume you're a homeowner in Madison, right? Maybe your house is worth $1 million or something. But I'm also going to assume that this is not a particularly large or impressive house, given the pressures on housing costs you mentioned? If we remove those restrictions and start heavily increasing density in the area, then perhaps your area will become less pleasant, with more bad people around.
Except: you'll still have the capacity to afford $1 million in housing. That's not going to vanish just because there are more houses in the area. Even in the yimby paradise of Japan, they succeeded in keeping property prices at the same level for ~20 years, not actually in lowering them - and if there was some unprecedented success in lowering housing costs, this would almost certainly take many years to accomplish, given existing homeowners time to realize value.
So now, instead of living in your $1 million 3 bed suburban house surrounded by other $1m suburban houses, you move to a $1 million 6 bed McMansion, surrounded by other McMansions. Your ability to spend money to preserve a certain living situation has not changed. What that money can buy has improved.
There is an argument that this only applies up to a limit: if you're already wealthy and can afford a 20 room mansion, there's no real room to move up. But putting aside the fact that this is a tiny niche of the population, if you have that kind of money there is already a solution: just buy land. Give yourself a couple of acres around your house. Don't want an apartment complex to block your view? Buy the land there, pay an appropriate fee to cover the loss to society.
sohois
1yr ago
I think if there is any sign of growing anti-monarchy sentiment, Charles will step aside.
sohois
1yr ago
I feel this is a bit harsh on Cummings; certainly reports on his time at No.10 suggested he largely left matters of the economy to Sunak and his team. And he has always emphasised investments in productivity through science funding, education, etc. His focus is on the civil service because that's where his specialism is, where he can actually influence things.
sohois
1yr ago
The Broken Earth trilogy is quite a bizarre read from a cultural perspective because of how it mangles its messaging despite ostensibly being very progressive. A straussian reading* of the book would have you thinking that eugenics is good and correct and racism is absolutely the right choice. But Jemisin's public notoriety clearly rules out that she's trying to do something like that, so you have to assume she is just really incompetent at creating a consistent political message - except that the books themselves are still really good, so I have no idea how it ended up so muddled.
*So the book is about a world that is riddled with massive, years-long natural disasters. Human towns are all organized by caste, with people set apart as good workers or breeders or administrators and so on. The towns are advised to maintain good ratios of these castes and to encourage breeding that helps this. This is never described as eugenics or really discussed within the books, it is just accepted as the right thing.
The main characters of the book are from a race blessed with magical, geomancy-like powers. This race is discriminated against harshly and called "roggers" or something obvious like that, I can't remember exactly. However, because of their power, every member of this race is basically capable of slaughtering entire towns, and children often have very little control over their powers and are shown accidentally killing other children. In this context, the fear people have of them is clearly the correct stance and in most cases it would be wise to avoid the geomancers or require them to be closely controlled.
sohois
1yr ago
At that point, why even bother with a reddit-like design? We might as well have migrated to DSL and just become a regular old forum
sohois
1yr ago
What binds the 1% together as a military force beyond wealth? Who says that the forces of a Musk would align with a Bezos would align with a Gates would align with a Soros?
sohois
1yr ago
LoL doesn't involve any physical exertion, nor does it rely on reaction time or fast twitch movements like many other competitive video games. There is 'micro' involved, but all the top players will have equivalent skills, meaning everything comes down to macro gameplay. Just because it is a childish game with a toxic reputation shouldn't blind you to the fact that being good at it requires mental skill more than anything else.
sohois
8mo ago
I think that this works for some aspects of the show but not all of them. The Guilty remnant, for example. didn't need an explanation - you can just assume that they were a weirdo cult capitalizing on a tragedy like plenty of other weirdo cults. But IIRC there were a number of other bizarre occurrences and red herrings thrown out that couldn't just be handwaved away and seemed like audience hooks that never got resolved.
I came here to add the same, although you will also need to pay for hellochinese
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