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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4345 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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It's good to be back after several months of using alts like /u/exiledouta /u/spacerenrgy2 and others to circumvent a reddit giga fingerprint ban surprisingly not for unsavory Motte style arguments but the drawing of a forbidden orange cat.. @zorbaTHut now that you've had some time to get confidence in the new site's capabilities and limitations what changes if any do you think make sense to the format of the old sub? Still a weekly CW roundup? More than two pins? overhaul of karma system?

Welcome back! I admit I've been thinking of you when talking about someone who got Reddit-banned for doing something largely irrelevant.

Current plan is to keep things roughly as they are. I need to fix the pin system first but then I'll probably make sure it can do three pins. Gotta do some work on the theme. From there, it depends entirely on how much traffic we get; "the Motte is a pale shadow of its former self" is a very different outcome from "the Motte is thriving", and it remains to be seen where it goes from there.

the drawing of a forbidden orange cat..

Since we're out of the sight of the all seeing eye of Mordor Reddit admins (and this is the small scale questions thread), would you mind giving a TL;DR what that was about?

Background

The /r/drama subreddit has a long history of being the less politically correct version of /r/subredditdrama. The history of the community in the early days is not really necessary but provides some context to set the stage. As reddit became more and more censorious /r/drama tended to be one of the first places admins would try out their new restrictions, one of the biggest examples was removing the ability to 'ping' users like '/u/skoomadentist' so that they'd get a reddit notification that people were talking about them and wander into the sub to be generally fucked with. This came after a previous moratorium on following links into reddit threads to directly mess with the dramatic happenings(referred to as raiding or brigading) and it later became against to rules to even link directly to other reddit threads on /r/drama.

Eventually dramanaughts had enough of the oppression and founded rdrama.net using and developing the very source code that this site is running.

Event

Fast forward around a year and to most people's surprise the rdrama offsite is actually thriving and has a new mascot Marsey, the orange cat originally from a telegram sticker pack but extended to include thousand of variations by talented dramartists. Reddit holds their /r/place event and dramanaughts snap into action to do a little trolling and get the brand of the site out there. The whole operation is described well in this recap post. The troll is a little meta in that there shouldn't be anything offensive about the cat itself but overly online giga moderators and a couple low laying admins, most notable /u/chtorrr that were most involved in the general censoring of the old /r/drama were very aware of the icon and even though it wasn't explicitly against the rules made a point to try to prevent the icon from forming. In addition to the ability to post pixels without the normal five minute cooldown they deployed some account wide permanent unappealable fingerpriny/ip address bans to people caught placing orange pixels on the dramacat. I was one of those guilty people.

they deployed some account wide permanent unappealable fingerpriny/ip address bans to people caught placing orange pixels on the dramacat.

Man, I've seen people do some petty stuff but that really takes the cake.

I'm reminded of the thing with the NYT hit piece on Scott. Our self-proclaimed Paper Of Record writing a lazy sloppy hit piece on a small-time blogger because he objected to their plan to doxx him strongly enough to sting just a little bit.

Okay I get the motivation, but man, if there has ever in the entire history of the world been a time to take the high road, this would be it.

Hi guys!

:marseywave:

Hey! I love marsey too!

Roll call! Who made it over?

Don't forget, you're here forever

deleted

AmeDamnee

Someone please ping her. I know she had some trouble with the rules, but it's at least worth starting fresh.

Ditto for iprayem3 or whatever his name was. I thought he had great commentary prior to quitting.

they deleted their account. Was ame deisach? just tell them on acx/dsl if so

Yes. She's BothAfternoon as well, so somebody can just contact her on reddit.

Things just aren't the same without her.

I’d been mentally calling Ame “Punished Deiseach” for a while before she deleted, but it’s good to have confirmation.

Maybe remove the reference to her active account, though?

Seeing as she was apparently getting harassed across platforms.

TheMotte was the only ray of sunshine keeping me on reddit. Good riddance reddit! You were once a wonderful place to have open discussions, but that was a long, long time ago.

Still alive and kicking 🤞

Hopefully for many centuries to come.

The same to you my man, see you around at Heat Death haha

I have no particularly well-known handles on The Motte or SSC. For disclosure's sake, I was banned multiple times and evaded bans multiple times through alternate accounts and IPs whenever I felt the urge to post; that urge was uncommon, with gaps of months and sometimes years, but it did happen.

I am endeavoring to follow the rules here, though I do hope being removed from Reddit's iron clutch will see the mods lighten up a bit and permit a broader range of discourse and perspectives. I have long wanted to make an effortpost justifying political violence, for instance, but never have.

”I have long wanted to make an effortpost justifying political violence”

I think this is a very bad idea. It draws harmful unnecessary attention to the site. It’s one of the few things that can directly lead to the site being taken offline and admins investigated. I’m sure the philosophical underpinnings can be clothed in a different topic, for instance an historical overview of political legitimacy with emphasis on how violent actors gained political legitimacy.

Rather than justification, how about acquiescence?

I wouldn't necessarily advocate for violence against politicians, lawyers, bankers etc. If angry yet capable mob started building guillotines on capital hill I'd like to see where it goes before reflexive condemnation.

Me.

Based. Welcome over.

Hydroxyacetylene from reddit, made the jump.

Southkraut, reporting in.

I'm here.

Shambled to see that the comments are still floating in a sea of whitespace. I'd try to come up with some fixed CSS myself, but the idea that I'm supposed to make a PR on Github (and hence either associate my name-linked Github account or jump through whatever hoops are necessary to make a new and unassociated one) is discouraging.

edit: I'm using the following custom CSS now to have a bit more sanity:


*:not(.comment-text p) {

margin: 0px !important;

}


.comment-text p+p {

margin-top: 1rem !important;

margin-bottom: 0px !important;

margin-left: 0px !important;

margin-right: 0px !important;

}


.comment-text p:not(p+p) {

margin: 0px !important;

}


.comment, .comment-text {

padding-top: 0px !important;

padding-bottom: 0px !important;

}


.comment-collapse-desktop {

padding-right: 15px !important;

}


.list-inline-item {

margin-right: 5px !important;

}


.profile-pic-25 {

scale: 0.5 !important;

}

Unfortunately, main.css has a few !importants of its own enforcing padding (in particular on .comment .comment-body .comment-text) which I can't override.

edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.

edit2: The markdown parser doubles newlines in the three-backtick code span.

Also lists are possibly broken (plus there's too much spacing between items)

  • test

  • second

    • second level

    • sth sth

Known bug; we've actually had a half-finished fix for a while, but the person who wrote it hasn't had time to finish it, and we've been working on other stuff.

you can override main.css's !importants by giving your rules higher css precedences and also !important iirc. you can beat .comment .comment-body .comment-text with something like .. comment .comment-body .comment-text

I definitely plan to go over the comment theme and make a bunch of changes. It wasn't the priority - the main page was worse - and then I ended up not getting to it before the launch.

Hola! Going to take a while to get used to the new interface, coming from old.reddit, but it's good to get away from that site.

Now I just need to figure out the custom CSS and get threads made clearer - seems hard to read.

Hi

based

Retaining my Reddit handle (defparameter *fur-name* "felis-parenthesis" "the cat who codes in Common Lisp")

I don’t post a ton so not sure how much it matters, but as promised a few months ago, I made it!

I gotta look around and see if the RSS feeds work. I’ll prolly forget to check in if not.

Yo! Formerly posted as bigstrat2003 and substantial_layer_13 on Reddit.

I never connected the two usernames, but I did notice both were excellent posters. Welcome.

solowng from reddit

Ilforte, belatedly reporting in.

I am here.... Now

Howdy.

More minimalistic Fevzi Pasha reporting

Been two years since I last posted on Reddit, but I came over under a new name. In fairness I deleted and recreated Reddit names on a quarterly basis back in the day so I doubt anyone would link my previous identities together.

o/

Made it. Was torn about whether to use my Reddit handle, or one of my normal handles, since I was never on The Motte that much.

Hi, testing to see if I can reply to a poster.

Indeed you can.

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.

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

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.

It’s painful not being able to browse the site with the old.reddit.com interface (or visual equivalent).

There're extensions that let you set your own css for any site, and a thread (two, in fact) for people to share their modifications. Maybe someone will come up with something you like.

You can change the css of the site natively in settings > custom css. However creating a css to mirror the css of old reddit would be quite time consuming.

The main css thread’s OP has a pretty close to old.reddit feel; I noted my modifications to that css in a thread on that post.

How many are thinking of deleting their Reddit accounts entirely once there's some confidence in this move succeeding reasonably well?

While I've occasionally commented on some other subs, chiefly SSC, I'm also a believer in pruning out the social medias you're not actually needing or using out of your life entirely, and the transfer would largely render Reddit into that category, for me.

Already deleted.

Your social media rule is a good one, but I take it a step further and I actively try to cut out even the things I am using.

Recently I've been looking for off-BigTech communities, and it's crazy what a desolate wasteland the internet has become. Anything that can be done to promote these indie alternatives, should be.

I'm going to stop discussing political and culture war topics on Reddit. It's been a bad platform for those kinds of discussions for a few years now and is only getting worse. But it's still a great platform for non-political interests and hobbies, especially if you stick to smaller subs.

I would hate to lose my place for discussing the local baseball team. But maybe I need to get out and do that more IRL anyway.

I'm keeping it for /r/redscarepod, /r/redscarepodprivate, /r/slatestarcodex, /r/theschism.

I am split on whether I should delete all my posts, because fuck reddit, or leaving them there, because the communities deserve to have archives.

I have a strong urge to use my 10 years of archived comments to train a GPT-3 bot and just set a few loose to keep commenting on a regular basis.

It could only raise the level of discourse over there.

I am very pro this.

I've just copypasted all my Reddit posts (well, almost all, not the most recent ones) to a doc file, and am planning to categorize them and use them as grist for blog posts.

Why not just request a full export from Reddit directly? You get a link to an archive which contains comments.csv file; it's exhaustive.

@Devonshire

Is there a tool for doing this? I do have a database of reddit posts, mostly as an exercise for myself, but I never ran it against my whole profile.

You can use https://camas.unddit.com/ to do a lot of queried searches, and "your username, on The Motte" would be an easy task for it. If you're handy with a scripting language you can use it to dump JSON files containing everything you're looking for.

Yeah, should add that I used camas.unddit to fetch my posts.

Probably? I'm just going through them one by one, though. It's kind of relaxing.

Back them up and provide them here somehow.

For my part, I'd given up on using Reddit, so the Motte moving offsite gained a user, rather than losing one. I don't think the problem was banning as such, it was an ever-constricting line around what you can say which was so unpleasant. Living under a censor where the rules are deliberately made opaque is probably one of the worst things that can happen to a community that so highly populated by autistic people.

I found myself trending to individually check subreddits anyways, so I found that except for a bookmark which I already had on my toolbar my habits haven't changed much. As I've seen the more interesting subs constantly get maligned or removed for one reason or another despite their intellectual and milque-toast (seeing /r/itsafetish get banned was a travesty) posting rules I think it's ultimately for the better that Motte is proactive on migrating to a new forum instead of being eventually quarantined or banned with no preparation whatsoever.

It's also different to /r/Drama which was and is comprised in large part of retirees from various other internet shitholes.

Is this an observation you made yourself, or is it a running gag? I do recall some time ago perceptive lolcow who called it a '4chan retirement home' and I found that piercing.

In any case, you really should try something like RSS or gaining sovereignty over your 'feed' - leaving it up to a third party like Reddit is asking for trouble.

I'll probably hang onto a Reddit account, maybe not the one I used on themotte, for a while. Until the archives become unusable or unsearchable with google. Reddit remains a useful repository of eg hobby information. There are probably comparable or better forums out there for each individual purpose, but I don't know what they are off-hand, and it's easier to search "Reddit typical repairs e46 3 series" and find a nice thread already put together, than it is to find which bmw forum is any good, figure out how to navigate it, etc. It seems unlikely that /r/weightroom or /r/trucks are gonna get banned for political reasons any time soon, though I guess anything is possible.

and it's easier to search "Reddit typical repairs e46 3 series" and find a nice thread already put together, than it is to find which bmw forum is any good, figure out how to navigate it, etc.

Yeah, this is the problem I run into whenever I try to wean myself off reddit. I can just use Cold Turkey to block Instagram and other social media easily cause I don't also use them for information every once in a while. With reddit it's inevitably a problem. Which is unfortunate because it has too much of the stuff I don't like about Instagram, Twitter and so on.

So I'm keeping an account.

Can you usefully search reddit comments using google? I try to find my own stuff and it is incredibly difficult unless it was the main post.

https://camas.unddit.com/

Google is useless for Reddit comments, especially in big threads. camas works much better for finding specific content.

I've never tried to find my own work, so IDK that you can find a specific comment that easily. For me it's more like I hear about a new training program and search "Reddit /r/weightroom super squats" which tends to get me threads from /r/weightroom about Super Squats. If I couldn't do that, I'd probably lose interest.

I'm keeping mine. I use my account for generic hobby stuff, asking general questions about new places/things, and business. Reddit for all its flaws is still a good forum for non CW things.

Sometimes I want an answer to something specific, fast. Niche subreddits almost always deliver on that regard.

Same here. Certain subs are very helpful because of their experts' replies. Other -- as a quick way to assess range of opinions on the topic. Nice balance between interactivity and quality (eg StackExchange is usually high quality, but less interactive)

The culture war account most certainly. The other ones?maybe.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think this site has a real chance to be greater than the subreddit. Just a few thoughts/concerns —

  • There should be good security involving user IPs given the content of posts published. Bad actors will try to steal user IP histories if the site gains in popularity. We should go so far as to crowdsource funding for a 3rd party IP-related security assessment ( I do not know personal security experience of admins). This has added benefit of being a marketable tag on, “you can feel safe regarding your IP address”, etc.

  • Pages instead of “view more comments”. This is easier to see how many top-level posts in the thread have been missed, as well as navigating to old threads. (Also, is there a way to “favorite” threads and receive notifications when it has been updated?)

  • It might be a good idea to label this site a beta version with a later official launch date in six months, as they do with video game releases. Why? It gives new users a feeling of exclusivity while excusing new site mishaps and beginning retention problems.

  • The weekly threads should be every other weekly, to boost the number of “total comments” counts, to retain and increase user retention. Reddit did this by increasing upvote counts artificially. In facts, giving each user a +5 points per upvote (and perhaps one daily +10 ability for well-liked comments), while difficult to implement, is a great way to increase engagement subconsciously. We should not shy away from using the full weight of psychology to make his site better than Reddit, for many utilitarian reasons, not the least of which is fuck reddit.

  • TheMotte on Reddit should advertise the new site with daily posts, maybe “best ofs”, not threads, with screenshots of the new site, to remind and entice subscribers on Reddit to move to the new location. Emphasize ease of signing up (20 second sign up).

  • If this site eventually develops a filter mechanism for new users, ie we want 100 people to try the site and 20 to stay, there are lots of ways to attract new members. The problem with, say, subtly talking about this forum on a philosophy forum to attract new members is that you don’t want to be overrun by bad posters. So, while it’s not best to do this now, in the future if we want site to grow in popularity, a kind of “new user filter” would be great. Something like “one allotted post per day” for new users until sufficiently upvoted over the course of a week. Just an idea to think about later on, when site is fully colonized by original users.

There should be good security involving user IPs given the content of posts published. Bad actors will try to steal user IP histories if the site gains in popularity.

I'm not up on the current state of the art here, but I think VPN companies have been pushing a lot of scare mongering regarding IP addresses and how easily they're tied back to individuals. They can pretty easily be tied to ISPs, and sometimes to unique clients within an ISP, but it doesn't map to an individual. At best it would map to a single customer network, but even if it's a home network my understanding is that ISPs don't generally reveal IP-to-customer mappings without a subpoena, and I don't really expect postings here to rise to the level of legal involvement. And even then, the public IP logged on the web site might well be hidden by carrier-grade NAT, which is IIRC pretty common in mobile telephony. If you're really concerned, I recommend finding public WiFi without unique login credentials (your local Starbucks or the library) or using a VPN (although some VPNs keep logs). Bonus points for using a device that scrambles MAC addresses on a per-connection basis, which I believe the iPhone and some Android devices can be configured to do, and even Windows supports.

This used to be an issue with peer-to-peer filesharing users, and may continue to be, but I don't really travel in those circles these days. Also watch Zorba's warrant canary on the Contact Us page.

Great advice here, from someone with sales experience. The piece about the beta I especially like, although I could see it being controversial.

I'd like to see perhaps an optional flare/avatar for moving over in the first X amount of days, or being for instance in the first 1,000 unique accounts created. Of course then you may incentivize people making more than one account... Perhaps a karma threshold instead.

Overall I think now that we can control more aspects of the site, we should strongly incentivize joining the site, and helping create high quality content here in this critical period.

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

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

/images/16624181379188077.webp

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have absolutely no idea. Good question.

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!

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 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.

Now that Stable Diffusion has been public for a week - what will be the next field to be revolutionized by AI?

(And if your answer is "writing" or "music", I'd like to hear what field you think will be next after those. Those are obvious candidates because AI systems are already in use in those fields and/or will be shortly, but due to structural differences between those fields and the visual arts, I'm skeptical that AI will have the same seismic impact there that it's currently having in art.)

Scams. Imagine an AI that calls your grandmother claiming to need money, sounding exactly like you, using voice recognition and GPT-N (fine-tuned on previous successful scam calls and prompted by a selection of your own social media information) to reply.

It'd work just as well on non-English speakers too, so nations that have up to now been more or less immune to Indian/Nigerian scammers due to the language barrier will now get targeted just as easily — and they don't have any sort of resistance from being exposed to the current "weak" versions of the scams either.

For a few months many of my neighbors repeatedly got scam phone calls with my name and number on the Caller ID. I supposed in a few years these calls will also have my voice.

Speaking of phone scams, does anyone know of a way to block an entire area code minus a whitelist? I get so many spam calls (or group texts; those are the worst because of the other victims' subsequent "remove me from this list" mass-replies) purporting to come from my home region, where everyone who'd have a reason to contact me is already in my contacts, and blocking every other available number on those sequential group-texts one by one gets tiring. (Though I expect I've taken an appreciable bite out of all the nearest few thousand numbers already, anyway...)

Unfortunately I think sales will be sooner than most people think. The AI to automatically get rid of your accent in real time on a phone call already exists - from there you only need to be able to accurately feed phrases/words to the AI and it will be a better salesperson than most could hope to be. An AI also doesn't get discouraged, which from what I have seen is the #1 reason people leave sales.

I think music will be differentiated into different groups. People love concerts, and being able to physically play an instrument has always been, to my mind at least, much more impressive than being an artist. It's 'cooler' if you will, to play guitar than to wield a paintbrush.

Writing is, well, the writing is already on the wall. GPT-3 is incredible, and scaling shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. (1) I'm extremely confident that many lower-quality blogs are now entirely GPT-3, and instead of hiring ghostwriters, which is a shockingly common practice, writers will just use GPT-4 or 5 to offload their work. I'm neutral on whether or not this is a good thing.

Ironically I now think taxi drivers, who I once thought would be the first to go, will probably last pretty long. Mistakes are far costlier when driving than when creating a piece of art, or a piece of writing. One of the ways I view different jobs is how serious the immediate consequences are when you fail.

1 - https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis

I think sales will be offloaded on the lowest end - if you do direct marketing, yes. Phone calls, maybe. The interpersonal relationships people still work on in business-to-business sales I don't see being co-opted by AI at any point before AI co-opts all human roles. The role of 'maintain a relationship (partially in realspace) with a human being in order to understand them and sell them things' can certainly be facilitated by AI, but it seems implausible that role can be turned over to machines before we build something fully general and capable of replacing human beings entirely.

Architecture. Since you can run the output through a layer that will check that the structure will not collapse, you will be able to ask the AI to design whatever you want and it will spit out a viable blueprint. Want a tower on your McMansion? Just use cad+img2cad to add it to the existing structure.

I'm here for procedurally-generated, tailored buildings.

Ironically, perhaps, I expect you'll still need human contractors and workers involved to do most of the actual construction.

I expect less new fields getting revolutionized and more currently AI friendly fields getting huge upgrades.

Imagine call center AI that actually sounds fully human or AI assistants that sound fully human.

However, sticking to the spirit of your question, my answer would be mathematics. With Mathematicians only existing to reevaluate the solutions given by AI to confirm they would work. Mathematics would become far more an engineering field than a person coming up with a solution on their own field.

I think this is misguided because it's the opposite of what currently happen, with theorem provers doing so much of the evaluation work relative to the 'creative' work. I can definitely see AI expanding the search space, though, with mathematicians working with the machine to find more novel or interesting results as a consequence. Much like art, I think AI are at the present time both a job-destroyer for the bottom end of the market (want your fursona fucking a famous politician? No longer do you have to pay $50, you can just get the machine to do it!) such as commissions but will ultimately enable people who understand art (colour, composition, etc, and consequently how to more reliably get the machine to do the work you want) to create more interesting and varied things at the top end.

Academic mathematicians are towards the top end of what you'd consider 'stem jobs' IQ-wise, so I'd anticipate a similar effect there.

AI is more likely to replace technical jobs than manual jobs though. It's easier to program an AI to figure out a trillion parameters of data then to teach it to walk. Welcome to the upside down where the safest job will be factory worker.

Said tongue in cheek.

To a degree, yes. People who have a high-level understanding of their field, however, are those best placed to use new AI tools. Likewise, statisticians didn't disappear because we built better tools for statistical analysis, rather the demand for statistical education has never been higher. The tools are still used by someone and we tend to see the lowest rung automated away and smaller numbers of usually better educated employees getting productivity increases. Usually what this looks like is a lot of the lowest-skill (or those with a very narrow skillset) employees lose their jobs - the invention of the mechanical (and later electronic) calculator removed the need for human calculators, but engineers and mathematicians are still a thing.

Theorem provers do all of the evaluation work ... for those specific results which have been painstakingly translated into the theorem prover's language, which to a first order approximation is zero percent of the new and interesting results.

Training a transformer AI on MetaMath (or on Coq results, whatever large database has both complete proofs and adequately verbose comments), combined with the verifier itself, might be enough at this point to create a "math-paper to formal-proof" translator. Skimming through comments I see a lot of links back to the papers which originally published each theorem, which certainly ought to qualify as "adequately verbose" even if the database comments themselves are fairly terse.

Doing creative work would of course be more interesting ... if we could only define what's "interesting". 378+135=513 is a theorem among infinite others, but nobody cares about it. We tend to like math if it eventually has endpoints with real-world applications, and it's a bit hard to put that into an evaluable loss function. We also tend to like theorems if they're more general, and if they're short to state but long to prove, and if they're on the shortest path to proving other theorems, and maybe there's something to those criteria that could be quantified well enough to point a Neural Net Monte Carlo Tree Search in the right direction?

Acting. Once we have a Stable Diffusion for movies (Any guesses on when this happens?), few will hire actors. We will likely have an explosion in content as anyone who can write can make a film, and lots of book get quickly made into movies. I can't wait for the Worm movie.

Finance, if it hasn't already behind the scenes.

There's a lot of intermediaries who currently get paid pretty handsomely for a job that is, at core, just channeling money from one account to another and explaining what they did and why to a human. And 'money' just means a digital entry on a ledger for most purposes, now.

I see no reason why an 'investment/financial advisor' can't be completely replaced by a bot that listens to the customer's situation and goals, and based on its learning from a dataset of billions of similar situations, spits out recommendations for how to invest or otherwise distribute one's money to achieve that goal.

Same for stock brokers. Same for financial analysts. Same for Tax advisors, even (see my point about law, below).

Factors vitiating against this: Regulations and distrust of AIs to handle one's money.

I know that banks and credit card companies are already using AI to detect fraud and handle customer service. The question is when they'll allow/be allowed to give the AI the ability to access customer accounts directly.

Also: Law. At least the transactional side. There are already HUGE databases of highly structured information about every single topic that is relevant to the practice of law, and legal writing is, by it's nature, very predictable and rigidly formal such that any AI should easily be able to produce human-passing work that can match all but the most learned and innovative jurists for quality.

I have to assume we are mere months away from some company announcing that they've trained an AI to draft and analyze contracts and similar legal documents, AND to draft motions complete with legal citations based on a description of the desired motion and outcome.

This kills legal assistant and paralegal jobs instantly. It also carves a big gaping whole out of available attorney jobs.

(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.

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

What software should I learn how to use if I want to make an infographic?

Easy one: Inkscape. It's a vector graphics program that's sort of like powerpoint on steroids. It's drag and drop, making it effortless to make simple graphics, and also supports extremely powerful tools for more complex stuff. It's good for everything from a 2 minute infographic to print quality page layouts for publications. It's free and open-source.

https://inkscape.org/

Looks perfect, thanks.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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