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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4360 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Test post pls ignore

Also testing. Just made an account.

Can the user name length rule be expanded to 35 characters?

I'm testing it out in the UI and honestly 25 characters is already a bit longer than comfortable. I think I'd prefer to stick to 25 characters.

Maybe someday this'll become a Trusted User thing.

Okay. I had a really good username that exceeds 25 characters. But this will do.

Also thanks setting this up, coming from a long time pre-Motte culture war roundup poster.

Edit: 2 posts in an someone's downvoting everything. Both of us are at zero. Please consider abandoning reddit voting. Having an option to downvote at all is too much for most.

Edit 2: Someone sent me the reddit suicide report message. From 'System', so they are abusing baked in features. Really off to a dramatic start.

Edit: 2 posts in an someone's downvoting everything. Both of us are at zero. Please consider abandoning reddit voting. Having an option to downvote at all is too much for most.

Someone downvoting everything doesn't change the relative position of anything so it doesn't really matter.

My first instinct was to give "reddit gold" to give a weightier kind of upvote, then I realized how messed up it is that reddit lets you buy influence directly.

I may be missing something, but I can't tell if people replied to my comment and cannot follow a chain of discussion from that, Am I missing something?

Okay.

How do you all plan on using your new found freedom?

I have already said (((nigger, faggot, tranny, retard, groomer))) in another comment, but I will do it just one more time. What a world to live in, finally can at least mention words !

Jokes aside, other than the commonly discussed pitfalls of infinite freedom (7 gorillion witches and all) , how do you think non-witchy discussions are to change now that AEO isn't breathing down everyone's necks?

Reading the CW thread, it seems to me people are subconsciously talking as if the threat of AEO still exists.

Hopefully we will get rigorous discussions on race and behavior/IQ. With western demographics changing quickly and equity being promoted, it’s important to understand the consequences of racial diversity.

What's the point of all that IQ if you have set your entire civilization into the population collapse funnel due to maxing out the intelligence section and single child resource focus segment of your cultural system?

Slow population decline wouldn't be a problem at all if IQ grew.

What do you mean by "collapse"? IIRC only South Korea gets somewhat close to 1 child/woman.

I'm hoping very little.

I think there's a lot of people who think that we were hamstrung by Reddit, and we were always just waiting for our chance to show our true colors. I don't think that was accurate. The issue with AEO wasn't that it was actively preventing us from doing what we wanted to do, it was just making things slightly but increasingly difficult; it was a slow pressure threatening to squeeze the community into dust.

But practically speaking, we already weren't censoring ourselves much. We already had roughly the community I wanted, and I was worried about the future, not the present.

So I'm hoping things just continue along in roughly the same way they were before, except with, y'know, less comments removed for using specific parenthesis.

I mean sure as far as content was concerned there wasn't much self censorship.

But there still was plenty in the form of obfuscation. Even aside from the AEO threat, other redditors were a threat. Many professed complains about not being able to say what they want in the simplest of terms because they fear getting into an argument later in another subreddit and that resulting in someone going through their post history and causing a stink about wrongthink. I consider the elimination of that nuisance a massive positive side effect.

It will be easier to "speak plainly" now. Instead of saying "a certain demographic in the united states tend to cluster around a lower mean in psychometric tests" one can just say "African Americans as a group have lower average IQ scores". Shitty example, ik, but gets the point across.

I think just being able to speak plainly, for real this time! will produce some interesting posts. Yes there are a lot of failure modes, and are still ultimately constrained by "the Rules" but I'm keen on seeing how things pan out.

I'm actually worried that's gonna turn out to be a negative :V I think there's value in people kind of talking around the hotbutton issues. People often have real kneejerk responses to common phrasings, and you can avoid those by using a different less-common phrase.

But I have no idea how to, like, legislate that in rules, so right now I'm just gonna keep an eye on things.

Not exactly related to your point but have you thought about adding the slur filter that rdrama uses? I think it’d be a good idea to have it on for logged-out viewers, at least for certain words

Oh man I would be like a thousand percent tempted to start putting in troll slur filters.

Hmm.

Part of me thinks that isn't a terrible idea, just to get people reading the site and kinda, y'know, ease them in.

But another part of me thinks that this comes across as being ashamed of what we're posting, and I'm just not ashamed of it. I'd sorta rather look people in the eye and say "yes, we are debating controversial things, deal with it".

I'll keep this in mind but my current feeling is that it's not worth the downsides. I'm not entirely convinced by myself yet, though.

"Speak plainly, but not too plainly" ????

Yeah, that's a tough one. But I don't think kicking the can down the road really doesn't help all that much, those destined to have that reaction will have it eventually and will probably flameout and get banned in short order.

I don't see the utility in taking the responsibility to spare the feelings of people who are incapable of not having their feelings hurt. Nth order effects be damned?

Keep in mind that our goal is to be a discussion site for people with differing opinions. Nothing there says we need to coddle people, but it also doesn't say we shouldn't coddle people; if asking that people tone down their most extreme opinions gets us more of what we're looking for, that's actually a good thing.

And there are many many many people who have kneejerk reactions to things.

Yeah I understand that, but "speak plainly" is so self evidently correct/good/useful (imo), that I can't come up with any justifiable reason at all to not do that. Or any excuse good enough to give up a little bit of that.

Speaking plainly. For whom speaking plainly will cause them to have a kneejerk reaction; probably lack the epistemological foundations to be the kind of person you want to visit the motte anyways. I am sure as a mod you have plenty of datapoints to assert that I what I am saying is at least, directionally true.

I am not discussing the legislation, I am discussing your vision for the community. But anyways, I will make an CW post on it later, I think you are chasing a white whale.

Reading the CW thread, it seems to me people are subconsciously talking as if the threat of AEO still exists.

Well, here's my personal view ( @ZorbaTHut can chime in, I think we're all kind of getting used to the "new normal" and will be for a while):

Yeah, you can use all the no-no words that risked getting you admin-banned back on reddit. Go ahead, retardniggerfaggottranny it all out of your system.

That being said, we don't want threads full of retardniggerfaggottranny. The Motte never has been and hopefully never will be that kind of place.

You want to call something retarded? Fine. You want to talk about the word nigger or quote someone else's use of it? Fine.

Actually referring to people as niggers or faggots or trannies is not fine.

As for all those sizzling hot topics, like Holocaust denial and whether trans women are men (or groomers) and whether HBD says blacks are too stupid to ever build rocketships, yeah, we can have those discussions now without worrying that AEO will come and put a boot on us, but we still expect a reasonable attempt at quality discussion, not just manifesto-posting and baiting.

We don't have emote reacts yet, but if we did, I'd be putting a "+1" emote on this post.

Uh... have you considered to possibility we act the way we do, because we want to, not because we're subconsciously threatened into it?

I don't know about this "we" but I have been posting in the motte for over 2 years now (various usernames) and have skirted around saying things plainly many times because of reddit associated nuisances (read my other comment on this post).

So I am pattern matching and assume that a lot of people speaking like I do, are doing it that way for the same reason I spoke that way.

Are people sentimentally attached to the motte logo? I don’t recall seeing it much under the old.Reddit layout. Might this be a time to switch? I generally don’t love modern aesthetics, but I imagine someone could come up with something a bit better that still retains the motte and Bailey imagery.

Also the name itself. Through it's definitely too late to change this.

Scott himself, in the post where he introduced (popularised?) the term, said

This is a metaphor that only historians of medieval warfare could love, so maybe we can just call the whole thing “strategic equivocation”, which is perfectly clear without the digression into feudal fortifications.

There's a motte logo? Is it the weird liquid metal-esque image at the top of this site?

At the top of the page I see liquid metal. Scrolling down I see a drawing of a medieval fortress.

The image of a “motte and bailey” that reminds me of the box art from Castle II: Seige and Conquest.

I am looking for a good spy thriller / political thriller. I loved Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. The Minority Report series was also ok. I have no stomach for woke lecturing, so that must be absent. Any suggestions?

The Day of the Jackal is one of my favorites. The movie is great too.

Day of the Jackal

I'll check it out, thanks!

Have you read any Tom Clancy? Cardinal of the Kremlin is a good one along those lines.

In that case, The Americans is worth checking out. It's a multi-season series about deep cover KGB spies operating in 80s America. More accurate than most regarding missions and tactics, though a bit over the top on violence. It also depicts a mission substantially more elaborate and effective than any real KGB operation actually was. Good entertainment IMO though.

(Advance disclaimer: I'm new to The Motte, so this may be more appropriately posted elsewhere - please feel free to provide meta-feedback and advice for navigating this forum.)

I'm wondering about how this site is funded. Assuming enough volunteers with technical skills, the only cost would be that of hosting, which is presumably not much considering how cheap cloud infra is nowadays. That said, it's still nonzero, and I have the feeling that in order to protect the site, more scaling and hardening will be needed. I'd be happy to donate - I think this could be a great opportunity for financial transparency and an open discussion of money as it is used to support a truly non-profit tech endeavor. That said, there definitely may be drawbacks I'm not aware of.

A related question, are there any concerns over site integrity that we as the rank-and-file can help with? I assume reporting bad actors and using the vote system responsibly are a good start.

The full server infrastructure right now is around $50/mo, which I'm just paying out of pocket. I do plan to set up a donation system at some point, but 24 hours ago I couldn't - Reddit doesn't allow it - and I suspect I'm going to have more important things on my plate for a while.

A related question, are there any concerns over site integrity that we as the rank-and-file can help with? I assume reporting bad actors and using the vote system responsibly are a good start.

Yep, definitely a good start :)

If you're a coder, or visual designer, joining the development server and contributing would be helpful. Otherwise, post stuff that's good. The site doesn't work without people, and people don't show up without content.

If you want to go the extra mile, try posting links to the site, ideally to specific relevant posts, in communities with a similar tone. We really do need a source of fresh blood and that's going to be our biggest long-term struggle, I think.

Sounds great; happy to continue to engage and conscientiously socialize this forum's existence in other spaces where appropriate. I do software engineering and DevOps both at my day job and as a hobby, so I'd love to jump in and contribute to the development, but I'll have to check my contract first to make sure there's no virus in there for things I touch.

Anyone else feel like they are addicted to grand theories of everything? Anytime I get two minutes to myself to sit down and think I can't help but have my mind wander in the direction of psychohistorian style bullshit. Grand theories explaining the arc of history, of wokeness, or of financial booms and busts. Its all so enticing to me, but I'm pretty sure most of it is just a bullshit feeling that my mind spins up.

I had a phase like that.

I already found the one grand theory of everything I’m pretty much planning on sticking to. It helped return my mental health, it taught me about music theory and politics, and I don’t believe I can see the world any other way now that it’s so deeply ingrained.

Triessentialism is the theory that there are three fundamentally different types of things, and fractally reiterates.

Me and you both brother. After a lifetime of observation it feels like a unified theory is finally coming together. Things are starting to make sense. My very first lectures in linguistics in undergrad were bafflingly opaque. Unlike hard science we couldn't observe and measure anything physical, (well, phonetics aside). You can't see a noun. We (the humans) had to build up the concepts of syntax, morphology, phonology and so on. What we're describing has always existed but bringing it into conscious awareness and true definition meant seeing way beyond the fact that what goes up must come down.

So much of human behaviour is mystifyingly illogical yet mystifyingly consistent. Like linguistics, you can't see moral righteousness, you can't measure who whom. But we see these concepts in action consistently. We, the animals with the impulses driving this behaviour have had to step back from it, while practicing it, to watch it enough, understand it enough to crystallise it into something as easily digestible as: he is being domineering, they are being bullies, I am being assertive.

There's no Galileo of human behavior to hand these concepts down from on high. We're putting it together ourselves on the fly, right now, in this century. It's very exciting. In hard science they say there's no low hanging fruit left but the social sciences are nowhere near that. Scott, big Yud, they're the backyard scientists of yore. Psychologically we're still in an age where grand discoveries can be made by laymen.

Mainstream psychological understanding is still somewhere near where biology was with Spontaneous Generation theory: a total guess taken as fact for 2000 years.

I feel it too.

Perhaps it’s easier to see in others, and easiest to spot in the sort of policy wonk most likely to write an elaborate justification.

But it’s a real, seductive feeling.

I just try and hold on to Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors.

I have an ambivalent stance of loving a "good" (as in: intuitive) grand theory but also having been trained by endless tearing apart of those theories by historians combined with just a general distrust in my own knowledge and ability to judge between them.

But they're so much more...fun than the narrower works that historians actually respect!

Newton was 'addicted' to grand theories, too! "Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy". Also a religious heretic, believing all sorts of random christian things.

Grand theories are fine, if they're true. If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue. Read some science, history (although the former - physics, chem, bio, etc - is more uniformly reliable than the second), speak to/read from all sorts of people, and come up with the useful ones!

If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue.

Yeah, but I think that's the problem - grand theories usually have a ton of exceptions, enough that using them in grand fashion will give you quite a few answers. In Tetlock's work on superforecasters, he found foxes beating hedgehogs (one summary here - https://www.themotte.org/post/1/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-04/587?context=8#context). The grander the theory, the more likely that it's got flaws that will result in poor object-level predictions.

Is there any reason why one is called the fox and the other the hedgehog?

I have absolutely no idea. Good question.

Eh ... there are a lot of 'grand theories' that aren't grand in retrospect. Like - wow, everything is on a computer today! Proposing that in 1900 would've certainly been "grand", yet it happened. And narrow theories can also be very wrong too!

It ends up declaring - "ambitious theories are wrong". Which is often true, but ambitious theories are also useful if correct, so you shouldn't give up trying them

For forecasting - well, isn't "forecasting is a useful methodology in general" a grand theory? I think what Tetlock's seeing is -

I guess there's also a bit of "if you aren't being serious, it's incredibly easy to make a fake grand theory by just claiming things at random" - but unserious narrow theories aren't better than unserious grand theories. That might be what's causing the thing - historians do narrow work on the travel time of mail carriers in Derbyshire in 1750, some blogger declares all the world's problems are because of rent control. but the blogger isn't going to be more correct if he declares something about mail carriers in derbyshire.

Roughly how many users have migrated so far?

700 total registered users. I have no idea how that compares to Reddit's 19,000 subscribers; some of the tools we have now are providing a rather interesting look into the internals, and there's a lot of users whose names I have never seen at all who are dutifully upvoting things that are good and downvoting things that are bad. I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.

(Hi, lurkers, if you're out there!)

Also, those 19,000 subscribers probably included a lot of dead accounts, Reddit never pruned them at all. So we were never going to get anywhere near that number.

The stats I have also say that we have 150 active users on the site at this very moment, about half of which have registered accounts, but it's hard to say how this compares to the Reddit numbers (currently 2500); the concept of an "active user" is inherently very subjective and we never knew what the hell Reddit was doing anyway, every few months it would jump up by an order of magnitude for a day and we never had any idea why. I always assumed Reddit's numbers were garbage or at least garbage-adjacent.

(Hi, lurkers, if you're out there!)

Hi to you, too! I've been lurking since the SSC subreddit days, just never registered because I didn't want to get involved with Reddit.

One thing I've noticed since the move is that there seems to be heavy cross-pollination with /r/drama. This seems odd to me; I wouldn't expect there to be much overlap between the two communities. Is there any reason other than the commonality of Reddit diaspora?

It's actually reassuring that I'm not the only one confused about that! Not that I'm assigning any particular positive or negative valence to it ... they seem like a lively bunch ... I just wouldn't have guessed.

Does it have to do with us building the site out of their codebase or is the relationship an old one that I've just never noticed?

There's also been a somewhat-substantial userbase overlap even before this, from what I remember. Can't say I really understand it, myself, because it seems like it would have to be an absolute Jekyll-and-Hyde thing, but I suppose people are multifaceted.

We forked their codebase; they’re talking about us because they think that’s interesting.

Speaking of user statistics, I wonder about those moments on the subreddit where the number of active users spiked into the thousands - like, uh, seems to be happening right now, if my memories of normal activity levels are correct. My guesses about why those happened before were that something from The Motte was linked in some high-traffic thread on some high-traffic subreddit, but was never able to find any proof of that happening whenever I checked, and didn't notice any influx of new posters going "what's this about" at any point, either.

If there's a lot of attention on the subreddit right now, I think it's pretty obvious why that is, but we've never fled the platform before. But of course, knowing Reddit, I wouldn't expect the mod team could have any more insight into whatever was generally going on than I, a random hitherto-lurker, would.

So that's a totally reasonable guess! But . . . as near as I can tell, it's wrong. Or something's wrong. Mods actually do have some info about subreddit traffic - there's a page with traffic graphs - and we've never seen any significant jump in traffic while one of those spikes was going on. Including right now, in fact, this is pretty much normal for this time of day (which is in itself confusing?)

Either something else is going on there, or the traffic graph is the one lying to us.

I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.

Ohai. I was never subscribed, but despite that I was a frequent reader I think I was effectively invisible to moderators. I have cycled through various reddit accounts over time but in the past the "you are a member of [...] therefore you are [...]" dynamic seemed best avoided and I avoided controversial memberships. (Ironically I've recently reached the "actually I don't care anymore ban me whatevs" point, but I also feel like reddit may be about to implode as a useful resource thus rendering it all moot.)

You could try to invite the intellectual userbase of rdrama. That's how I ended up here. Some guy messaged me and told me I would be more appreciated here.

Agreed. Haven't had to report anything yet.

I think we did pretty well.

:marseydoubt:

They aren't really trying to actively troll you. Individual morons coming in so far.

I think we may have a ton of imported lurkers who were always just invisible before, and I'm glad at least some of them have chosen to come along.

Where else would we get our reading material from? I usually don't post much because I don't particularly enjoy writing like people here do, and I usually feel more pain than joy when I do post. I do mostly enjoy skimming every weekly culture war or small-scale questions thread, and also the other non-weekly random topic threads.

Good to hear that we have a large amount of folks already here, day two (one?) of the official move. Personally I'm a long-time lurker who didn't post out of a combination of fear of reddit admins/old health issues, and this move has changed my mind on posting. My favorite internet community facing an existential threat has given me enough motivation to get over the hump, so to speak.

I've seen a similar sentiment elsewhere already, and I like to think many quality posters who held back in the past for some reason will come in out of the cold and help us keep this place alive, and high quality.

Imported lurker who was always just invisible before, here to confirm we're here.

I never committed to making an account on reddit, but I've been reading and keeping up with the Motte for quite a long time now. Came through the usual slatestarcodex route (is it even the usual route these days?) but I was never too engaged with the SSC subreddit's general flavors of discussion.

It's a challenge to imagine myself as an effortposter by any stretch, but I'm really keen on what this community is all about and I'm happy to be here anyway.

Going from pure lurker to attempted effortpost-er can be intimidating if you aren't a natural writer. But if you have a subject that you are passionate about then that passion will carry through even if you find the idea of be awarded an AAQC to be challenging to imagine.

it was suggested that we have a cute animal mascot. I propose Quincy the heavily armed Quokka standing atop a castle’s battlements.

How about this for a mascot?

https://www.deviantart.com/klaatu81/art/Cartoon-Chess-Pieces-596793102

Any community I see with that as a mascot I would get an automatic instinct to bully.

I mostly jest but I think we need something more.....less cartoony.

This was like my second try with Stable Diffusion. What a time to be alive.

/images/16624181379188077.webp

I love that his rifle is sprouting mini-mottes -- we have more mottes than you can imagine, motherfucker.

Yep, that’s what I was imagining. I’m making it my “site image” in my settings, thanks!

What is the plan if no one posts here? Would it make sense to announce an impending shutdown of the subreddit so that people actually move?

Tomorrow I'm posting a new "Culture War thread" that links to this site. I also haven't had time to do this yet, but I'm going to be closing new posts entirely on the subreddit.

Basically it's going to have one or two stickied threads and a bunch of increasingly-old non-sticky threads.

Might be good to have an official move date, so everyone has some warning and it doesn't feel abrupt.

Not sure if it’s the right place to post this, but I noticed the new site does not hide the upvote/downvote count for 24 hours like on Reddit. Was that instituted on Reddit to discourage hive-mind behavior? Was that effective? And do we want to bring it here?

That's a good question!

Part of the reason I did that is because it was the most I could do. Reddit's vote system is kind of terrible and I really wanted to just disable it, but that simply wasn't possible on Reddit.

Here, I can just make the vote system less terrible. So I'm probably going to be aiming in that direction.

Expect something to show up in a few weeks on that :V

So, what are you reading?

I'm starting Minsky's Society of Mind, a classic AI text about building minds from smaller, mindless components. The current zeitgeist seems to be moving away from classic AI, but eventually we'll need better understanding of where precisely our machine-learning models fit in the broader scheme of knowledge. "Shut up and scale" doesn't seem entirely satisfactory. Maybe going over some slightly dust-covered ideas might spark some useful thinking. The book itself seems like a mix of aesthetic quirks and precision, and I seem to be in the mood for that.

Still on my second reading of Moby Dick, but made little progress. Not the book's fault. Also watched the 1956 movie, which was a pleasant surprise. Obviously it severely cut down the source material to fit within two hours, but it deviated very little and even lifted most of its dialogue verbatim from the book. They even let Ishmael do some narrating, rather than to cut the narrator and try to do without as most films-of-books do. The acting was decent, though somewhat unlifelike. Though the movie was entertaining overall, I gained absolutely nothing from it but I am pleased by the faithfulness of the adaptation.

Edit: This post had an image attached to it via CTRL+V, but it's not showing up. Trying again.

I gained absolutely nothing from it

What could you hope to gain, and could you gain it from the book as opposed to the movie?

I made that statement too brief - I gained nothing from watching the film that I did not already gain from reading the book. The film is superfluous to me.

The film offers a plot, characters, themes, imagery, actors, dialogue and music. The book contains most of those in greater depth and detail. What the film has that a book cannot was alright, above complaint, but not a significant gain.

I have been trying to get into Persuasion by Austen, after realizing that I'd never read a single Jane Austen novel. So far, funnier than I expected, but I'm missing a fair bit of context. There's also a lot more "tell rather than show" than I would expect, but that may just be the first few chapters.

I've been reading Stoic philosophy lately, and also Neuromancer. The latter has been a wild ride. I knew that it was the progenitor of cyberpunk, but I didn't realize how thoroughly other cyberpunk works rip it off. It's kind of hilariously shameless.

Currently trying to work my way through 'Topology Without Tears'. I was working through a functional analysis book, but I found the proofs to be beyond my current capability. This topology book seems to have a smoother increase of challenge in the exercises, at least for the relatively early parts I've gotten through.

I think scaling is good enough for a lot of things we want AI to do, but I wouldn't be surprised if it starts having issues eventually. I think our current problem with most models at the moment is lack of control:

Such as generating an image with stable-diffusion and then doing slight modifications (different clothing, facial expressions, or backgrounds with the same person). This is possible through piecing together multiple models (I think people tend to use DALLE-2's outpainting, and maybe img2img?), but seems unsatisfactory and less powerful than it could be.

Text generation also seems to have similar issues, where NovelAI works surprisingly well for writing, but I've also had a lot of trouble with convincing the language-model that a character should have certain personality/behavior constraints. This also means NovelAI would struggle for doing something like dynamically generating a choose your own adventure story (where you can type in arbitrary things), since you can't get consistent constraints on character behavior or the setting they're in.

I think AI-safety would probably benefit from a designed AI 'core' which uses weaker ML modules, and then hopefully you can prove things about it. Though this is mostly because I consider interpretability to probably not reach a point where it is good enough.

So, how many people registered here until now?

  1. I'm unsurprised that the registration has died down; I also need to send out the mailing list blast, I have no idea how many people registered on the mailing list and aren't aware of the new site yet.

oh come on do I really need to do Reddit-esque tricks to keep it from turning leading numbers into bullet points

Fine. 912. Take that, you parser.

I swear I'm turning this into a unit test once we start fixing up the parser issues.

Why don't you try inviting people over from other "intellectual" communities of reddit.

We don't want to just go straight-up spamming people. If there are communities you think would be receptive to a sidebar crosslink, I'd be happy to contact them.

Slatestarcodex, lesswrong.

912\.

912.

Hah. Well, alright then. Fine.

Thanks :D

How many comments did the average culture war thread get by the end of the week on Reddit? Want to compare to comment counts here

Not removed! My general target was 3000, though a lot of recent ones dropped down due to various topic-specific megathreads. Manifold Markets doesn't seem to be working right now so I can't point to the market, but 1500 was the target I set for The Changeover Is Successful.

Ty!

Have you discussed moderation somewhere already? Have any moderators agreed to follow us here? Also I am grateful for the worked you've put into making this possible.

We've actually got all the active moderators moved over. I admit I'm expecting one or two of them to decide it's not worth the time investment and drop out, but they're here!

At some point I'll probably end up doing another Doge Moderator Choice, although I don't know how that's going to work in the absence of a (terrible) chat feature.

This (1) post makes me think there should be research into a Dunbar's number for internet communities. Anyone know of interesting writing on the topic?

1 - https://old.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/l8id4/did_digg_make_us_the_dumb_how_have_reddit/

Dunbar himself is still kicking, btw. Moreover, he's producing papers at an insane rate (number of Dunbar's articles about Dunbar's number). Here's the paper from 2016 on Facebook and Twitter, but they used rather old datasets -- 2009 and 2012 resp -- which reflected social media interface at that time.

Social brain hypothesis, which he's been studying, is about existence of several layers of contacts within any social communities. 150 is a size of one of the layers. After clustering social media data he found similar layered structure:

Quite remarkably, the mean rates of contact in each layer are extremely close, especially for the Facebook datasets, to those found in (and, indeed, used to define: Dunbar and Spoors, 1995) the different layers in egocentric offline personal social networks (Sutcliffe et al., 2012). This suggests that the online environments may be mapping quite closely onto everyday offline networks, or that individuals who inhabit online environments on a regular basis begin to include individuals that they have met online into their general personal social network, treating the different modes of communication as essentially the same.

I read about this experiment from another author, who said similar results were obtained in online game communities. But he was rather skeptical, saying that the data is limited and there are many built-in artificial structures, forcing certain clusters. Those clusters might be stretched to fit the hypothesis.

Wow thanks for the link, had no idea that Dunbar was so prolific. This is interesting, I would definitely need to do some more reading before I could judge whether it was accurate.

I'm quite curious to see how online communities are different from physical communities. I wonder if VR will have a noticeable effect - I could see communities shrinking again due to the somewhat 'in-person' nature of VR.

he's producing papers at an insane rate

Are big name researchers like him actually doing any of the grunt work or just get handed authorship for having answered one question asked by a PhD student?

Yeah yeah not all researchers, but in the ML space I usually see some very big names appear as 5th or 6th authors in inconsequential papers and am left wondering, why are they even there?

The biggest contribution might even be "asked one question answered by a PhD student" rather than the other way around. My first original math discovery as a grad student turned out to be an idea that was published before I was born, but was just esoteric enough that I hadn't heard of it. My third was something that I got beaten to, because I didn't realize the problem was that interesting (I thought it was just another test case for my second) and I blabbed about it at a conference to someone who turned out to be 10% closer to it than I was but who just hadn't considered using his research on my question before.

I eventually learned to run more by my advisor. Having someone who's been in a field a few decades to tell you what's more or less worth working on is invaluable. Even just having someone who knows what to look for and where to look can be useful. I taught a student once who invented a numerical method I'd never seen before, one with just the right mix of "tricky enough that it might have been missed" and "valuable enough that it ought to be published", but by this point I knew which book to pull off the shelf and which chapter to hunt through to find the prior discovery without having to spend days on the literature search.

This might be a topic better suited for the culture war roundup thread, but here goes:

The red tribe largely considers AR-15's a status symbol. In part this is because building/customizing AR-15's is a popular hobby for high IQ red tribers with a bit of disposable income, and no doubt this plays a role in the way both side talk about assault weapon bans.

So, what's the blue tribe equivalent of that phenomena? I'd say it's travel, except travel doesn't seem to be any kind of culture war flashpoint. I'd also say pet ownership, except that high IQ hobbies associated with pet ownership(dog training, for example) are probably associated with the red tribe more than the blue tribe. The closest thing I can think of is what I'd call fruity literature- novels or short stories with lots of superfluous gay stuff shoved in or outright centered around homosexual themes.

I'll join the crowd picking at whether AR-15s as a class are status symbols or even largely purchased as status symbols. Individual sellers can be expensive or extremely expensive, but for the most part they're a fairly standard and fairly accessible centerfire rifle. Of course, when you see someone with a high-end reflex site and no cleaning kit, then 'status symbol' is one of the more charitable options.

((And a lot of this stuff is at least partly about deniable and even self-deniable 'stores of value'.))

Blue Tribe... depends a bit on the subculture. Honestly, more than the political alignment. I think Blue Tribers are a lot more likely than Red Tribers to focus on custom plastic or cloth trinkets, where Red Tribers might be more likely to spend on custom woodworking and large metalworking art, but to the extent that's even true, it's only true statistically and it's easy to come up with fairly simple outside causes.

Blue Tribe has an anti-conspicious consumption bias, partly for Gaia-worshipping, and partly because flaunting wealth is very Trump and anything that can be remotely considered to be Trump is bad.

But surprise, surprise, that doesn't stop anyone from using wealth to flaunt status! You may notice a certain lifestylism by those who proclaim themselves liberal and socialist and egalitarian. Hobbies like travel, as you said, can cost an absolute fortune, while the person in question looks like a scruffy pleb. 'Minimalist' lifestyles that rely on the labor and effort of a half-dozen people, behind the scenes. Showing off the install of the solar panels on your house. Long hikes on the Appalachian trail (with equipment worth thousands of dollars.)

It turns out it is quite expensive to look authentically working-class. Blue Tribe elite try their darndest to not look like what they really are but like everything that exists, it is a commodity, sold at Whole Foods, the North Face, and your local gastropub.

I think the AR is a really good tribal identifier, I wouldn't say status symbol any more than any other gun is, because it's a moderately priced buy in and it can serve a number of other purposes (checks boxes for theoretical "home defense," many hunting purposes, target shooting, TEOTWAKI, etc). It's a platform you can get into for $500, and it's a platform you can spec out for $10,000, and we've decided to call them all ARs as a concept and talk about them as one category. The AR branding/memeplex is the key here, it could just as easily come out very differently if more gun enthusiasts identified themselves by gun make rather than by gun category.

International travel is definitely both a similar tribal signifier and a minor culture war flashpoint, though typically more in the positive than the negative sense. I recall hearing at different times some version of "X% of Americans don't even have passports, how can you be so sure about the world if you haven't even seen the world?!" from different Blue Tribe cultural outlets. Having traveled abroad is an important Blue Tribe cultural signifier, the same girls I can picture saying they'd never marry a man who owned an AR would probably also say they'd never marry a man who didn't have a passport, who didn't want to go abroad to learn and experience. Of course, the magic of confirmation bias is that most people go overseas just to tell you what they already thought was true at home because they heard it on Twitter is now true by lived experience.

Nothing else is quite like an AR, in terms of commitment level and universality. Bad haircuts, tattoos, piercings used to play a similar role, but are largely irrelevant now, style is largely uniform across tribal lines. Food items and stuff like name brand waterbottles are good tribal signifiers, but a little more transitory/cheaper/lower cost signaling.

I'm not so sure about the premise that red tribe sees an ar15 as a status symbol, they're not really that expensive, one can be had for a couple hundred bucks which is within reach for basically any gainfully employed American so long as they can get past the legal hurdles. Blinging one out may be a kind of conspicuous consumption that is right coded and sends some kind of red tribe virtue signal. As a parallel to that I think you're looking in the right direction with pride type stuff. I'd say the ar15 of the blue tribe is probably something like drag queen story hour. Red tribe is vaguely against drag shows in general but is aware their critique of the general concept is not popular enough so they contain their push back to only against these less defensible(but still defendable) incarnations. And this push back induces even more demand for it from the opposing tribe.

Funko pops and hot sauces

Never heard of AR-15s being a status symbol. It’s just a tool to most people. I’m not sure people who customize their guns beyond optics are even red tribe. Seems more like a hobby for libertarians with disposable income.

The true red team status symbol is the Ford F150. Seems like every oil worker or other well-paid blue collar job blows their first paycheck on a down payment for a huge truck.

I would put both pickups and rifles as tribal signifiers, but in turn the items become status symbols from the bare bones to the customized to the collectible, delivering both superior function and conspicuous status signaling.

The hugeness of new trucks is likely driven by fuel standards, or lack of them based on wheelbase.

Many of us would prefer smaller light pickups that are no longer manufactured.

Not an actual question, just a minor announcement that I am hh26 from Reddit. In case anyone has paid enough attention to notice or remember me. I figured the migration was a good opportunity to change names. "hh26" was originally intended to be a throwaway account when I started casually participating in pro-trump subreddits, to keep my main from getting banned or tarnished by leftists reading my comment history. I eventually got bored of most of the mainstream subs and ended up using my main less and less, so I haven't posted on it in years and hh26 became my main, (I also eventually got bored of the fanatical devotion of the explicitly pro-trump subreddits, slightly before they got banned, and ended up mostly here). But I also got stuck with the name hh26 which is kind of silly and unmemorable.

Additionally, this being a new site without all the usernames claimed means I can claim something relatively normal looking like MathWizard.

I don't especially have a lot of direct relationships here, but post semi-regularly and occasionally get Quality Contributioned and would like to carry forth whatever good will and reputation I may have with me. I look forward to more interesting discussions and not being awful to each other.

Also took the change to change my name; never really liked "blendorgat". I used to use a random phrase generator for all my usernames, but my paranoia levels have decreased somewhat. (Which is to say, I'm still using a randomly generated phrase, but not distinguishing between sites anymore...)

Oh hey, I didn't even think of using flair for that. That's pretty convenient, I'll probably do that for a couple months.

Roughly the same for me. I was /u/MetroTrumper on Reddit. I like Trump, but I don't find it particularly interesting to participate in the "24/7 Trump rally" culture of those subs, posting low-effort comment memes constantly. So it became more of an account for posting about politics in ways that might be controversial. It felt somewhat less thrilled with the name, and might have switched over to a new Reddit account if we weren't switching to a whole new site.

You were MetroTrumper? Holy shit.

Lurked there. Will generally lurk here. Looking forward to the discussions.

Newcomer here, what is the reason behind the mega threads? What benefit do they deliver vs. having independent threads for each topic?

So the historical reason is that we did this because that's what the Slate Star Codex subreddit did and I didn't want to rock the boat.

But I actually think this may be an accidentally brilliant choice. The problem is headlines. If you see a row of headlines - which you do on a front page - then you naturally gravitate to whatever you're most interested in. I know you've skipped headlines when browsing Reddit, right? You say "that looks interesting, that doesn't, that doesn't, that does!" and click on things based on that.

That means people go to the things they find most interesting, which also means the things they already have the strongest feelings about. And I think that's a positive-feedback effect that causes people, and communities, to hyperspecialize around points of anger and disagreement.

In this case, you can't do that. You skim, and maybe you find yourself reading an effortpost on a random fight in the Irish Troubles. You wouldn't have intentionally chosen to read that, but, well, now you're reading that.

I think this may both reduce the anger-pressure-cooker effect and encourage people to branch out into other posts.

Sometimes people put headlines at the top of their big posts and I've honestly considered banning those entirely. I haven't done that, but I've thought about it.

Interesting. I admit the threads do seem more like reading a paper or a newsletter vs. typical posts in that sense. I found it initially cumbersome but they are definitely forcing me to look at topics I’d normally skip.

But I actually think this may be an accidentally brilliant choice.

Nope, it was very intentional. Reddit political echo chamber dynamics are well-understood, and we doubled down time after time on the megathread format because it introduced friction in those dynamics the way you describe.

Neat, I honestly hadn't realized it was intended!

Have you done anything recently to increase the amount of love in the world?

I started working out. Self love is still more love in the world hombre.

Yes.

I continue to visit my family three sundays a month for a family dinner, they're my favorite people and it keeps me grounded.

Not a lot, got a load of problems to deal with. I'm sincerely polite and nice to people I deal with? I try to keep my marriage affectionate even when its sorely stress-tested? I somewhat regularly check up on family even when I have little time for it? Feels more like love damage control and love maintenance than love expansion.

Nutted in a chick, now I love her.

I met some guy at a gas station who had Phocomelia in both of his arms. (The thing that makes your arms look like baby arms) I asked him if I could buy him a drink, and he said a mountain dew, so I bought him 2 dews and a bag of popcorn.

Never knew such syndrome exists; reminds me of T-rex jokes... sad

Polygraphs are really unreliable, you can fail them pretty easily. Usually they take a baseline reading before asking the tough questions but sometimes even that doesn't work. Imagine how bad it would be if your friend was telling the truth and the polygraph said they were lying.

Is it possible you can get over this issue some other way? If this is really serious enough that you want a polygraph why are you trying to stay friends at all?

Can't help you on the truth-detecting end, but it sounds like you already realize you cannot trust this person. That doesn't have to get in the way of being friends going forward. Just...don't trust him with anything.

I would caution strongly against using a polygraph if you have any regards for the person being interrogated at all. It is by no means a pleasant experience, physically or psychologically. This is by design, since the point is basically to make you uncomfortable and play mind games with you until you admit the thing that the person ordering the polygraph wants you to admit to (or whatever other secret it happens to flush out) or the interrogator runs out of tricks.

I feel like it's time to stop and think about the nature of your relationship if that's where it's going.

Decide how much you trust/distrust him without external help and go from there. Social intuition is a wonderful tool, and if you get it wrong you'll learn from the experience and get better.

It's too involved of a relationship.

That pattern sounds dangerous, both in this specific instance and in the more general case.

You can definitely take "trust but verify" too far, especially with friends and romantic partners (rather than professional associates).

Haven't done a deep dive, but one of the reasons the IC still uses polygraph tests for clearance is that most people aren't extremely skilled liars, or sociopaths. If someone does a polygraph and isn't either extremely good at lying or is highly emotionally detached, just observing their behavior should be enough for you to tell.

This of course assumes you're somewhat good at or confident in your skill of reading other people.

ETA: All this being said, I would recommend trying to reconcile with the person unless there's a lot at stake (ie. serious financial or legal repercussions)

Polygraphs are basically pseudoscience. Their real utility is not any actual lie-detecting ability, but rather as an interrogation tool used by the police that provides pressure and acts as a form of manipulation for the police. Most people believe that polygraphs work and even those that don't at least have some niggling doubt in the back of their mind.

You're going to have to solve this the old fashioned way, through sleuthing if at all possible. Otherwise you're just going to have to take things on faith one way or another.

No idea where the name came from, but it was/is a scare group for anti-trans activists.

Post all your worst excesses here, etc. etc.

To add on to what others said, their culture around "lowcows" has become really toxic. You could perhaps describe the userbase as looking for blood rather than milk. Many famers are downright hateful to the lolcows. The alternate crowd (like rdrama) is more akin to watching wierd and bizarre indie movies: It's wierd, but in an interesting or morbidly facinating way.

It's a forum for doxxing mentally ill overly online types. Their basic aim is humor value in these people's often seriously screwed up lives.

Given the overlap in groups, it should come as no surprise that their targets are disproportionately trans(and specifically trans activists), which is where the headline news controversy comes from. I'm not going to say it's uncontroversial when they just go after random schizos, but it doesn't make the news.

You know any kids who would taunt their crazy neighbor or a mentally unstable hobo to provoke a tantrum? KF is these kids, but on a global scale.

Kiwi Farms is basically a gossip forum about internet personalities. They have a surprisingly high share of female users and even a sub-forum to discuss cosplay/makeup content creators, fat acceptance activists, trans people, and other girly things.

Originally, the site was called CWCki Forums, and they focused on documenting and discussing the life of an individual known as Chris-chan, or Christian Wenston Chandler (CWC), author of the Sonichu webcomic and prone to many hi-jinks. In the beginning of 2015, it appears they moved to the domain kiwifar.ms, and eventually to kiwifarms.net.

In Kiwi Farms, they have a term 'lolcow' for people that are walking disasters and that are 'farmed for endless lols'. These are the people that they initially focused on discussing, but as the community grew, they moved on to discuss online personalities and online communities more widely.

The owner of the site appears to be some degree of free speech activist. The posts on the site are allowed to include slurs against various minority groups. On the site, it's allowed to doxx the individuals that are discussed, as in release identifying information about them. More infamously, Kiwi Farms were one of the few sites not to take down the footage from the Christchurch massacre.

Kiwi Farms also has a reputation for being a platform for anti-trans activism. They harbor a number of TERFs and other people against trans rights activists or trans people in general. More recently, this lead to the #DropKiwiFarms campaign in response by trans activists, and this eventually lead to Kiwi Farms being dropped from Cloudflare. This lead to the migration to the URL kiwifarms.ru and a Russian DDoS protection service. However, this service caved under the network load.

Currently, Kiwi Farms is only accessible through Tor at http://uquusqsaaad66cvub4473csdu4uu7ahxou3zqc35fpw5d4ificedzyqd.onion/

If you were in charge of setting high school fiction reading curriculums, what books would you choose? I think Dune holds up, maybe Blood Meridian? But I’m not as well read as some of you

Rule 1 - no series

Rule 2 - A book that an avid book reader can finish in a day to two at most.

Rule 3 - It should be older than 30 years in age and it's value should already have been noticed by society rather than the teacher giving their own value score to a random book.

Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's literary enough to hit the checkpoints, and the story just rocks. Plenty of essays to be written about what it all means, especially during its reading before it all comes together.

I'm with Pirsig on that one: I would make them write fiction, not read fiction. You can't really appreciate things until you've tried your hand at them. Food, furniture, fighting, fucking and yes, fiction.

An excerpt from Anna Karenina, Heaney's translation of Beowulf, the Scarlet Pimpernel (worth the inevitable pimp jokes) and an abridged Great Expectations, a good translation of a straightforward section from La Comédie humaine, Maccabees, Pride and Prejudice, Anabasis (extra credit for Watching the Warriors), same for Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now, 1984. Some short stories from Guy de Maupassant and maybe Philip K Dick.

I wouldn't think either of those books are really that suitable. Dune is a bit pulpy and is on the fantasy side of sci-fi that uses technological premises to justify cool fights and exotic intrigues. Sci-fi that is more rewarding for in-class exploration focuses more on the social and philosophical aspects, imo. Blood Meridian is just far too bloodthirsty.

An English curriculum's canon wants do a few things (ideally all in the same book):

  • Introduce readers to culturally 'important' texts without which they would lack important context for a lot of other media

  • Exhibit technical expression in plot, prose style, tone, characterisation, and other unique devices, etc. that is legible enough to be useful as a tool to discuss these elements and their execution

  • Provoke the reader to consider broader ideas they may not have considered before

  • Actually hold a student's interest

Some texts hit on all of these points very well, which is why they're a mainstay in schools: Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Steinbeck's stuff, for example. You can also see the failure modes of some curriculums in trying to pursue one point at the expense of all others (it is easy to imagine someone fixated on the first point wanting to teach 12-year-olds Chaucer or the second point wanting to teach Joyce or Calvino without care for student interest, or conversely erring in the other direction and serving up the shallow YA lit of the day).

I think showing a range of techniques and big ideas is more important in the limited time you have, so my ideal English Curriculum would be heavily weighted towards shorter stories that could be consumed and dissected in a week or even a single lesson. Calvino is a lot more palatable when writing his cosmicomics, for example (the Distance of the Moon is keenly stylistic, heartbreaking, and poses interesting questions about sci-fi as a genre). DFW's Incarnations of Dead Children has a frenetic, heart-in-mouth pacing that deserves close attention (and god forbid you propose 8th graders read Infinite Jest). The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is both an important cultural touchstone and provokes questions that young readers latch onto hard, and it can be consumed in a half-hour. The Yellow Wallpaper, Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, maybe some of Saramago's absurdist stuff would also be on my ideal list.

(The other nice thing about short stories is that I can link to most of these online, and the short length is less intimidating for even adult readers to dive in and get something out of them)

The Northern Lights (American: The Golden Compass) would be great for middle school, as it is about standing up to groomers and keeping your integrity even when it's inconvenient. The strong gypsy representation and relative antagonism towards religion are both bonuses in my book.

Roald Dahl's The Witches is a good children's book about dealing with difficult changes, so put that in as well. Add The Chronicles of Narnia as well.

For high school... my school had a heavy focus on stories of disprivileged people, which I found helpful. One of the options was The Notebook by Agota Kristof, which is a great little read in spite of the beastiality and gang rape. We also had to read at least one book that reflected traditional life and culture in our region, which is something I think every school should do.

Ideally you'd want the kids to be exposed to at least one work of genre fiction and at least one work of literary fiction. At least one work reflecting liberal values, and at least one work subverting or critiquing liberal values. A few book-length works, and a few short stories.

I'm excited to see what the other posters come up with.

I'd stick with the best of this particular "genre", so things like Animal Farm, 1984, etc.

The books you're recommending are good and I'm a fan of both, but they are well above the level we're talking about.

The Screwtape Letters, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Gig Economy.

Blood Meridian is the best novel I ever read, but it's also a hard and unrewarding read for most people. I doubt it'd be suitable for highschoolers. If you want them reading McCarthy, then I think the Border Trilogy - either of the first two (All The Pretty Horses and The Crossing) or the whole trilogy - would be much better-suited on account of their more personable protagonists and less violent plots.

Dune I'm similarly not sure about. There are lots of people who just refuse to take Sci-Fi seriously. Maybe Dune can overcome this to some degree thanks to its fame, maybe it'll just cause a bunch of culture warring due do its mighty whitey plot, hard to say - but it's also been around for a long while; surely teachers somewhere must have experiences on how students react to Dune?

Definitely not Wuthering Heights. It's already hard enough to make kids read. Can we please stop giving them the impression that reading is painful?

If there are any English teachers in our ranks, one thing I'd like to know before making suggestions is: what are the ostensible goals of the books in a high school fiction reading curriculum? Are we trying to have our students gain proficiency with certain types of language, or learn to interpret various kinds of story, or learn about the history of literature? Or something else? There are a lot of different ways you could answer that question, which would influence the books you'd select.

Anybody know if /u/self_made_human or other transhumanists made it over to the new site? I know it's a small part but the transhumanism discussion here has been one of my favorite aspects of the community.

Have we figured out robot hearts or lab grown hearts yet?

Didn't Jarvik make a robot heart a few decades ago?

Doesn't count as "figured out" until we make a robot heart that doesn't suck. Making a working pump isn't hard, but making one that won't clot blood and won't trigger immune rejection (and won't limit mobility and won't fail to deliver enough O2 when you exercise and won't be too big and won't ever break and...) seems to be much harder.

There are certainly people trying, this study from 2015 claims to have grown 'functional human myocardial-like tissue of multiple complexities.' (1) Not well read enough to comment on the accuracy, but the field is certainly advancing.

1 - https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circresaha.115.306874

You know I just had a thought bubble. Perhaps the reason societies used to seem far more stable in the past is because anyone who acted outside the system or had such tendencies used to die out, but in modern times for the first time we are keeping all personality types alive and functional in a society.

So we have extreme traditionalists and futurists existing within the same system to extremes that wouldn't have been possible in the past.

Nice. I look forward to perfected body replacements for every single part of the body.

Liver replacement business would boom.

I'm touched to be called out by name, and am certainly more than happy to remain one of the resident transhumanists!

Anyone have good fantasy or sci-fi recommendations? I have read a ton of speculative fiction and am always looking for more good, completed series. I tend not to read something if it's ongoing. Sadly the subreddits I've found for fantasy don't tend to skew towards my taste.

Some examples of more obscure fantasy series I've enjoyed:

  • Malazan

  • The Traitor Son Cycle

  • The Black Company

  • The Second Apocalypse

  • The Inda Quartet

  • Chronicles of the Black Gate

  • Mother of Learning

  • Commonwealth Saga

  • Night's Dawn Trilogy

  • The Void Trilogy

  • Diaspora (Greg Egan)

  • Aching God Series

  • Annihilation

  • The Broken Earth

  • Memory, Sorrow, Thorn

  • Book of the New Sun

  • Otherland

  • Gravity Dreams

  • Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

  • Magician series by Feist

As you may be able to tell I prefer my series to be somewhat morally gray, and at least try to have a system of magic/technology that makes internal, consistent sense.

I've heard Worth the Candle is good but haven't gotten around to reading it. Any other suggestions in line with the books/series I listed above?

Diaspora was so good, I've read it three times.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

Three Body Problem trilogy by Cixin Liu

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

A Deadly Education is probably right up your alley: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50548197-a-deadly-education

Looks good, but like I mentioned I have a pretty strict rule about only reading finished series.

The last book comes out this month, if that helps.

House of the New Sun

Did you mean Book Of The New Sun by Gene Wolfe? Because the only thing I found on google for HotNS was a reddit post by a user named "VerbalAcrobatics".

Ahh yes, thank you. I was going partially by memory.

The Culture should definitely be on your list. Player of Games and Excession are total bops

I have also read it, and love it. This list was a bit rushed I see now!

  1. Brave new world is my favorite sci-fi book (a classic which has actually aged well)

  2. revelation Space is superb hard sf which centers around the Fermi paradox (while revelation space is great the rest of the series is disappointing). The characters are definitely morally grey although it’s usually more a case of being unable to identify what is actually good. Alistir Reynolds is my favorite contemporary author, he has written many short stories if you wanted to get a sense of his style (Troika is my favorite)

  3. Passage at arms is another one by glen cook. It’s a sci-fi novel which is easily described as Das Boat in space

It's Das Boot.

How dare you get your German wrong!

Have you read anything by Guy Gavriel Kay? He writes mostly standalone fantasy novels, often with little or no magic and sometimes veering close to historical fiction, but with an epic scope. My favorite is Tigana, which is inspired by medieval/renaissance Italy and has a comparatively large amount of magic. Another good one is The Lions of Al-Rassan, which is inspired by medieval Spain.

I would also recommend The Iron Dragon's Daughter and The Dragons of Babel by Michael Swanwick, They're very well written, weird and grim novels set in a steampunkish fantasy world.

If you liked Diaspora by Greg Egan, I'd recommend his short stories. He has several really good collections (I've read Axiomatic, Oceanic and Luminous), but I think he has many stories available on his website. This is one of my favourites: https://www.gregegan.net/MISC/MORAL/Moral.html

If you read Magician series by Feist, did you get to the Empire series, that he wrote together with Janny Wurts? It's more political and a bit of a precursor the Game of Thrones, and I liked it a lot more than the main Magician series.

Thank you! Yes Kay is incredible although I've only read Lions and the Sarantine Mosaic. I should check out more of his work.

For epic/classical fantasy, I always recommend Patricia McKillip’s Riddle-Master of Hed trilogy. It’s my ur-example of how to worldbuild outside of a Tolkien nation war/angel war or D&D adventuring party in a land of many gods context. It’s at once the most personal and the grandest story I’ve read in fantasy, operatic in scale and tone.

I also recommend Matthew Woodring Stover’s SF / fantasy series, the Acts of Caine. Starting with Heroes Die, we follow the son of a failed freedom radical on a cyberpunk dystopia world, an actor with a brain implant which allows his studio bosses to stream his adventures live to the world’s paying customers in full five sense VR. He travels through a portal regularly to an alternate Earth where magic is real and there are various Tolkien-esque/D&D-style races, and commits acts of destabilization (assassinations, starting and ending wars, etc.) to keep the masses entertained. The novel’s trouble begins when the cult of a strange new god captures his ex-wife, a river goddess and an actor herself. Where this novel shines is the visceral descriptions of bodily combat; the writer is a martial artist. It gets more philosophical in the second and fourth novels, and delves more into worldbuilding in the third, but the first novel is one of my top five books of all time. Once I reach the 2/3 point, I can’t put it down until I finish it, even if that’s 2am.

Riddle-Master of Hed is so overlooked. It should be in top 10 lists.

I will check out your 1st recommendation, I've read acts of caine and I actually shouted it out in the book thread.

Feist has more books set in Midkemia that are worth reading if you haven't already. The series Shadow of a Dark Queen > Shards of a Broken Crown is particularly good.

Yup I've read all 12 (?)

You've probably tried it, but how about The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan? I recommend this because I like it, and I also liked Malazan, The Black Company, Mother of Learning, and the Magician series, so it's possible that you might also like the series.

Unfortunately wheel of time is just one series I could never quite finish. I read the first 7 or so books but really lost steam around there.

Have you tried any Brandon Sanderson? I enjoyed many of the books on your list and also love his books, many of which are standalone or in completed series.

I enjoy him but most of his plots are a little too small scale, I will say that storm light archives is pretty awesome so far but I quit reading it because it will take so long to get finished.

Blindsight, by Peter Watts.

Not sure if it'll be up your alley based on what you liked so far, since I haven't read almost all of them, but I really liked The Golden Oecumene trilogy. It's set in the very far future, in what I'd call a trans-humanist utopia. It's hard to describe without spoiling it, so I'll just quote the plot introduction from Wikipedia:

The author's first novel, it revolves around the protagonist Phaethon (full name Phaethon Prime Rhadamanth Humodified (augment) Uncomposed, Indepconsciousness, Base Neuroformed, Silver-Gray Manorial Schola, Era 7043). The novel concerns Phaethon's discovery that parts of his past have been edited out of his mind—apparently by himself.

Added to my list thanks.

Larry Coreia's Son of the Black Sword and Richard Morgan's The Steel Remains are both interesting intersections of Fantasy and Sci-Fi, and I'm still not entirely sure which side of the line they're on.

They both have a lot of fantasy tropes: disillusioned anti-heroes, talking swords, divine messengers, etc

But they also have suggestions of inter-dimensional travel and UFOs that may or may not suggest the setting is a computer simulation.

I've read the steel remains and quite liked it. If you like those stories the acts of caine sounds pretty similar.

I have been enjoying Pact and Pale. Its magic system is internally robust and well-developed, in my opinion. Sadly, it doesn't quite meet your criteria three times: its system has baked-in morality (though it's not linked to contemporary morality and it's one of the core conflicts of the serials that characters don't always agree with it), it is more like TVTropes than science, and Pale is ongoing.

Wildbow is great, really enjoyed worm. I can usually tolerate baked in morality if it's written well, but the ongoing nature of the story is usually a dealbreaker.

Pact is finished.

Didn't know this, thanks.

If you haven't read The Expanse, give it a go. It really is exceptionally good. Comparable to A Song of Ice and Fire, but tighter, and it sticks the landing. The worldbuilding is very strong, the plot is intricate and internally consistent. There are a few weaker points around characterization, particularly female characters, but overall one of the better works of fiction I've read.

I'll second The Expanse, and recommend The Dagger and the Coin and The Long Price Quartet by (half of) the same author[1]. All three fit your criteria of having defined (if imperfectly understood) magic/tech and focusing on the conflicts between somewhat-sympathetic groups.

If I were to blurb all three series at once, it would go: People are meddling with forces they don't understand. You, as the reader, get a better view of the upcoming disaster than any individual character, but they really should have known better. The disaster causes drastic changes that nobody was adequately prepared for, and everyone has to readjust to the new world before the next thing happens.

1 "James S. A. Corey" is Daniel Abraham and Ty Frank. Those two series are by Abraham.

Good lord how did I forget about those two series, Long price especially is an incredible series and one of my favorites. The magic system and cultural world building is unparalleled.

Also read the expanse and loved it.


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