site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30791 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom New Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Now available in Substack form!

Last week there was an interesting discussion about a brewing backlash against polyamory in rationalist circles. I theorised that this was an inevitable result of the rationalist movement growing to the point that it included many “normies”, and that while polyamory might work pretty well for the first-generation rationalists who were abnormal on one or more axes (gay, trans, asexual, autistic etc.), it will probably not work for people who are comparatively normal: just because something works well for oddballs, that doesn’t necessarily generalise to it working well for the more conventionally-minded. Specifically, I think that polyamory is unlikely to work well for anyone who experiences a typical amount of sexual jealousy, a category that asexual people almost definitionally do not fall into (or so I assume).

This got me thinking about Rob Henderson’s theory about luxury beliefs. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective signalling mechanism that a person is a member of the elite (when cars are so expensive that most people can't afford them, owning a car is a costly signal that you are rich; when they become so cheap that everyone can afford them, the only way you can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda isn't half as distinct as the difference between have and have-not). As an alternative signal of how cultured and educated they are, elites instead promote outré-sounding ideas which sound crazy to the average person, but putting these ideas into practice has devastating consequences for anyone who isn’t an elite. The reason these ideas aren’t devastating for elites is either that:

  • while they promote them in the abstract, they don’t practise them themselves e.g. Ivy League-educated people talking about how marriage is an oppressive patriarchal construct and praising people who experiment with “alternative family structures” – while they personally waited to get married before having children, and have a family structure which would seem unsurprising to a time-traveller from 1950s America; or
  • they do practise the ideas themselves, but their wealth insulates them from the consequences that would befall a poorer person who practised them (it's easy to be an advocate for defunding the police if you live in a gated community)

Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept (I know that @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts, vociferously disagrees with the entire framing), the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example. Essentially, it boils down to alternative social practices or lifestyle choices that share the following traits:

  • if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo
  • if practised by a person who is comparatively normal, it will be disastrous compared to adhering to the status quo
  • weird and abnormal people start doing the alternative lifestyle choice, find that it legitimately works great for them (much better than the “normal” thing they were doing before, or could have done instead), and become proselytizers for the cause, effusively telling everyone they know how much the alternative lifestyle choice has improved their lives and encouraging them to give it a try (optionally being a bit more cautious and responsible about this, admitting that it might come with downsides or acknowledging that it may not work for everybody)
  • the alternative lifestyle choice takes off in popularity, but some people quickly find that it isn’t improving their lives as much as they were promised, or may be actively ruining their lives
  • but because our society glorifies being weird and different, and scorns being conventional (using terms like “normie”, “basic” etc.), lots of people refuse to admit that the reason the alternative lifestyle choice isn’t working for them is because they’re a relatively conventional person, and keep trying to “push through” their initial discomfort in order to reach the point at which the lifestyle choice actually will improve their lives. This quickly leads to a sunk-cost fallacy, and by the time they realise they’re a normal person for whom the alternative lifestyle choice simply doesn’t work, the damage may be severe and irreparable.

Offhand, I can think of a few alternative lifestyle choices other than polyamory which I think meet this description:

  • Gender transition: In spite of my undisguised incredulity towards gender ideology and towards the hysterical claims about how medical transition is “lifesaving treatment” (and hence that denying it to someone who wants it is no different from denying chemotherapy to a cancer patient) – in spite of all that, I do believe that there may be rare cases in which certain people stand to benefit from medical transition, and may see an attenuation of mental distress and improved quality of life as a result. The operative word in that sentence being “rare”. In the West, the rates of people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria have skyrocketed over the past two decades, and even medics who work in this space are belatedly coming to recognise that, for many of their patients, medical transition isn’t the silver bullet they advertised and may even exacerbate their suffering (a realisation they are struggling to rationalise away). Eliza Mondegreen catalogues some of the mental gymnastics said medics will resort to, along with heartbreaking examples of people who’ve undergone some form of social and/or medical transition and found their dysphoria worsening and their psychic distress increasing – but when they turn to communities of like-minded individuals for help, they are inevitably gaslit about how it has to get worse before it gets better (and how detransitioners are traitors to the cause upon whom death is wished – you wouldn’t want to be one of those people, would you?). I am comfortable saying that, for the majority of people who have medically transitioned in the past two decades, their quality of life has probably disimproved, whether marginally or drastically; while a minority has seen their quality of life improve.
  • Sex-positive feminism: Closely related to the original polyamory example, there is a widespread set of cultural messages which present casual sex, kink, group sex, multiple concurrent sexual partners etc. as the path to female empowerment, and which encourage young women to experiment with them on that basis. While I have no objection to women engaging in these behaviours on moral grounds, and don't doubt that there are some women out there who derive just as much pleasure from casual sex as the modal man – nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his. But because so much of sex-positive feminism explicitly or implicitly tells young women that being uninterested in casual sex is indicative of prudery (a message reinforced by every horny young man in their vicinity) and that regretting a one-night stand is indicative of “internalised misogyny” or whatever, many women continue practising casual sex long past the point at which it’s obvious that it’s making them miserable, as sadly documented in this post by a young Arab-American woman who avoided losing her virginity in college, while all of her female friends were repeatedly used and cast aside by their male peers. As much as I might deride the silliness of the term “demisexual”, I do understand that it might be the only way in the current cultural climate that a woman can express her preferences without being accused of being a “bad feminist”, or of slut-shaming her peers by implication.2
  • Drug liberalisation: I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of luxury beliefs, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole. But our society shamelessly glorifies drug use as exciting and transcendent, so lots of people who should know better keep doing drugs long past the point at which they know they’re in the normie camp (and it’s not just the usual physical and psychological addiction causing them to stick with it, but also a whole host of modern messages about how drug use is the way to open up your third eye, that people who aren’t “420 friendly” are squares etc.).
  • Therapy: A hobby horse Freddie deBoer has been beating for years. Ever since Freud, therapy was generally understood as medical treatment, and going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick. But in recent years, the idea that everyone should go to therapy, regardless of whether or not they’re in acute mental distress, has been growing in popularity. Hand-in-hand with this idea is the more or less explicit denial that therapy can ever result in iatrogenic harm, a concept that everyone understands perfectly well in the context of any other kind of medical treatment: “either therapy will help you,” these people argue, “or at worst it will be ineffectual”. (I’m sure some people in the “everyone should go to therapy” camp would flatly deny that there exists a person, anywhere, who isn’t mentally ill: after all, if everyone has trauma, then by implication everyone experiences post-traumatic stress and in turn suffers from [complex] post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be a weakman but it is not a strawman.) In my opinion, we were right the first time around and therapy should be understood first and foremost as medical treatment for people suffering from mental illnesses (even being in mental distress isn’t in and of itself evidence of mental illness, as anyone recently bereaved can tell you, and the mental health industry’s casual conflation of the two is irresponsible and appalling). For those people, therapy may be hugely beneficial. Most people, however, do not suffer from mental illnesses as generally understood, and hence do not stand to benefit from therapy. If you’re one of the many people who doesn’t suffer from mental illness, therapy is likely to have either no impact on your life at all (aside from being a huge waste of time and money), or actively detrimental to your well-being (obsessively analysing and ruminating on all the things in your life that make you unhappy doesn’t sound a great recipe for happiness) and/or the well-being of people around you (e.g. narcissists who go to therapy and learn lots of handy tricks and terminology for how to manipulate the people around them and rationalise away their own bad behaviour). But because our culture shamelessly glorifies mental illness3 and heavily implies that people with mental illnesses are more exciting and interesting than people without (the new term for people with autistic traits is “neurospicy”, for fuck’s sake), lots of people keep going to therapy long past the point at which they should know full well that they’re not mentally ill and are just an ordinary person with ordinary problems.
  • “Follow your dreams”/do what you love: Sound advice, if you’re one of the tiny minority of people talented and/or attractive enough to make a living from acting/writing/music/sports/video game streaming/modelling/influencing etc., for whom working in a regular job would probably be a lot more frustrating and dissatisfying than it would be for a normal person. For most people pursuing careers in these areas, the erroneous belief that they are one of these rarefied individuals results in them neglecting to develop productive life skills which would serve them well in the event that they turn out to be a normal person with normal (i.e. unremarkable) levels of skill in one of the aforementioned domains. But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer. As documented in The Disaster Artist, there are few things more heartbreaking than a talentless wannabe actor still pursuing a career as a leading man well into his forties – and unlike Tommy Wiseau, most such people don’t have millions of dollars from real estate investments tucked away. This one is particularly interesting in that, unlike the previous examples, it has the appearance of a zero-sum game, and as such one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more. For years I’ve been convinced that this may be a contributing factor to the recent “body positivity” trend, which I may write a separate post about.
    • OnlyFans: Sort of, but not exactly, a sub-point to the above – I doubt there are many women for whom making a living from amateur pornography is their first career preference, or who would say they love making a living from pornography – but certainly there are lots of women who’ve been sold a bill of goods about how making a living from amateur pornography is much easier and more lucrative than doing so via a more conventional vocation, and being able to say that you're attractive enough to make a living from your looks is certainly a bigger flex than making a living from working in accounts receivable. In the case of women who forgo developing real professional skills in favour of setting up an OnlyFans account under their own names, the outcomes can be particularly disastrous. Not only do they quickly realise it’s a much more labour-intensive job than they were led to believe; not only are they quickly subjected to the rude awakening that they’re nowhere near as attractive as they thought they were (and therefore that all of their friends telling them that they were 10/10 bad bitches were just yasslighting them); not only are they quickly made aware of the diminishing returns inherent in the fact that a woman’s attractiveness is heavily determined by her youthfulness; not only do they quickly learn that the more attractive women have the vanilla corner of the market stitched up, and hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts – but on top of all that, images of their rectum paired with their name are now splashed out across the entire Internet effectively forever, potentially curtailing both their professional and romantic opportunities for years to come. (To note: I’m not disputing that this latter point may also be true of women who succeed in making a living in pornography. Just because there are some women who make bank by so doing, doesn’t mean that it’s globally a good decision even for them. My point is only that there’s no way someone like Lily Phillips could hope to have made nearly as much money from a more conventional job as she did from her pornography career, and hence that, from the narrow perspective of remuneration alone, the alternative lifestyle choice was better than the conventional one for her.) But because almost everyone thinks of himself as above-average in attractiveness, women continue trying to make OnlyFans work for them long past the point that they ought to understand that they are rather mid in appearance, and hence earning somewhere near the middle of the OnlyFans monthly income distribution, hundreds of dollars below even the lowest US minimum wage.

Any other examples come to mind? The more I write about this, the more trite and obvious it sounds, making me wonder if I’ve put a foot wrong somewhere.

One point that occurred to me immediately after posting this: this framework is distinct from the luxury beliefs concept insofar as not everyone who stands to benefit from the alternative lifestyle practice is an elite, and not everyone who stands to suffer from it is a non-elite. There are many women from working-class backgrounds who could stand to make a great deal of money from pornography, and many women from wealthy backgrounds whose reputations would take a hit were they to do the same. There are many people from working-class backgrounds who might benefit from therapy, and many people from wealthy backgrounds for whom therapy would only serve to make them more neurotic than ever before.

1 Not intended as a criticism or insult: per the expansive definition I’m using here, it includes people who are unusually intelligent, talented, physically attractive, fiscally responsible etc. but also people who are diagnosably and severely mentally ill.
2 I must here mention a favourite anecdote from Holly Math Nerd, who learned the term “demisexual” in a university lecture and explained it to her therapist:

Me: “Today I learned that I am deeply and profoundly oppressed by my status as a sexual minority.”

Therapist: (raises an eyebrow).

Me: “I in fact fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. A is one of those extra letters, and I am in fact a type of Asexual.”

Therapist, laughing: “What?!”

Me: “I am, I’ll have you know, an oppressed demisexual.”

Therapist: “What does that mean?”

Me: “A demisexual is someone who only experiences sexual attraction when they have formed a close emotional bond.”

Therapist: (nods, several times, thinks for about thirty seconds.) “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”

3 No doubt there are many who come to believe that they are mentally ill in part because they are seduced by the idea that it relinquishes them of being held responsible for their bad behaviour, along with providing them with a convenient excuse for why their lives didn't turn out the way they hoped. Regrettably, I speak here from experience, certainly on the latter point if not the former.
4 Based on a study which, like everything else in the ideologically motivated social sciences, failed to replicate. One can only assume the notoriously scummy and dishonest David Graeber was putting his thumb on the scale somewhere.

"Legalized prostitution is good"? For every independent escort charging rich businessmen $5000 for a dinner and a gentle romp there's multiple women turning tricks for their pimps in exchange for a small cut of the profits and a daily dose.

"Unions are evil"? For every successful independent contractor making big bucks there's multiple average guys who are only average at their jobs and need the union to maintain a living wage on a 9-5 job instead of being forced to participate in an Amazonian warehouse rat race.

The first example is spot on, and it's pretty much the same as the OnlyFans one (very attractive women stand to gain, others less so).

My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether the modal worker stands to benefit by joining one or not.

My opinion that unions are evil is largely based on the negative externalities they impose on society, the distortionary effects and inefficiencies they wreak on the economy, and their strong and not-at-all-coincidental historical affiliation with organised crime.

But how much of that is intrinsic to unions, and how much is a result of a specific implementation of unions, under which they are immune to antitrust laws while companies are not (1 2)?

The fact that similar patterns are visible in other countries with a strong union tradition (e.g. France, UK) but without legal analogues to the American antitrust legislation you cite.

I suspect most countries now have some form of anti-trust legislation. Wikipedia has some details on the price fixing page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing However, there may have been periods of time where countries had strong unions but no anti-cartel legislation. I think Australia only cracked down on price fixing after 1974.

The Motte doesn’t like unions because most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley where until recently individual employees had an unusually large amount of leverage. In five years when they’ve all been fired they will probably feel differently about the idea.

most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley

Citation needed.

Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.

Best I can do you is to say that I don’t live in Silicon Valley.

I'm pretty sure some of the Indian caste dynamics people are in actual India.

I, @FarNearEverywhere and @Tollund_Man4 are Irish and live in Ireland, the former two residing there and the latter in France. @self_made_human and @mrvanillasky are both Indian, with the former residing in the UK.

As for the claim that the only people who care about those topics are people who live in Silicon Valley: have you not noticed that the entire world has been talking about AI nonstop for the past two years? Have you not noticed what a hot-button issue the trans stuff is in every Western nation, to the point that Trump signed an executive order banning men from competing in women's sports, and the UK Supreme Court recently had to rule on the definition of the word "woman"? Indian caste dynamics are of profound import to the 1.5 billion people who live in India (even if only 1% of those people express an opinion about caste dynamics, that's still five times the population of Silicon Valley), never mind the diaspora. There's been a nationwide campaign of arson against Tesla because of the outsized power Musk wields (wielded?) as part of DOGE.

Of the items on your list, polyamory and Aella sound like the only ones to me which are uniquely Silicon Valley-coded.

@Tollund_Man4 are Irish and live in Ireland

I left for France two years ago. But to add to your point I don't work in tech and have never even been to the United States.

Second @FtttG here, the only person who posts about Indian caste dynamics is yours truly, and only do so top provide context for Indian issues. I posted recently because of the likelihood of war, and before that, due to the caste census, an evil that most should be aware of.

My posting history is sparse. I did not post at all on the CW thread until a few months ago, as I mostly used the Wednesday threads to document my life. The caste posting here is pretty much non-existent. This place has a Silicon Valley bend, nothing beyond that. The evils we see with Bio Leninism and the ever-expanding centralising powers of states are meant to be warning signs about what heterogeneity looks like once it is accepted as the "new normal". A lot of the Irish CW posting, otoh sheds light on issues they face that do not get much attention despite the world being a place oversaturated with "news media".

I keep my India posting to a minimum and don't post as much general culture war stuff as I am not on Twitter as much nowadays, which is how I posted about James Lindsay's meltdown and how stupid the woke right is.

Themotte is still mostly Western, specifically US-centric, which is a good thing given the US is the most important nation of our times and the place where the largest number of users reside.

More comments

Two thirds of the top level posts are about some combination of AI, HBD, Trans weirdness, Indian caste dynamics, Elon Musk, Polyamory or Aella gangbang dialectic. Nobody outside of Silicon Valley talks or cares about any of that stuff.

I'm in tech, but I've never even been to the Bay Area. I'm just part of the rat adjacent diaspora, living in a landlocked state.

Most of the polyamory/aella gangbang posts are from christians/social conservatives saying polyamory and the sexual revolution have failed, fun is bad and you'll pay.

Normal Christians outside of Silicon Valley wouldn’t even know who Aella is, or that polyamory is a thing.

More comments

I've seen proposals for tech worker unions. It's mostly about social justice and workers refusing work due to ethical concerns. As though a union could block a corporate contract with the Israeli government or the US military. As though less work is good for us.

Another main issue is making it harder to fire tech workers. It being easy to fire tech workers is a good thing. Driving out weaklings is obviously good. It makes the rest of us more valuable.

The one defensible point they make is regarding number of hours worked. I understand why some people don't want long hours. I'm still against the proposals since hiring more people to do the same amount of work would probably result in a decrease in compensation per person.

The above points are pushing for more people and person-hours with less work. That should result in a decrease in total compensation per worker. My entire concern is total compensation. Their concern is progressive culture warring and an understanding of workers' rights that amounts to encouraging mediocrity. Our values are incompatible and I don't want a union forced onto me. They would be taking my dues and spending them on progressive political lobbying while working on goals that would decrease my total compensation. In every way bad for me and opposed to my values. And then people act like "techbros" are fools working against their own interests.

They want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and tell me it is for my own good.

As someone that's worked for a FAANG for just about two decades, yes, everything about the above. The tech workers that most want to unionize are the ones that most want to wield that union in the service of extreme progressivism. The venn diagram of tech workers who have their pronouns in their signature and have at least once in their lives shouted "from the river to the sea" unironically, and those that are organizing unionization efforts in tech is indistinguishable from a circle.

It's possible that unionization could make life in software consultancy sweatshops like Deloitte somewhat better. As a FAANG employee, I do not feel that anyone on the tech side is being taken advantage of, and would much prefer fewer protections for the employees that cannot stop their fucked up psychological problems or childish entitlement to a job from causing constant strife at work.

"Legalized prostitution is good"? For every independent escort charging rich businessmen $5000 for a dinner and a gentle romp there's multiple women turning tricks for their pimps in exchange for a small cut of the profits and a daily dose.

This sounds like a strawman. What about the middle of the curve—the prostitutes who are neither desperate streetwalkers nor luxurious escorts, but merely work for reasonable wages in clean, legal brothels?

How can we determine what the modal prostitute is like?

I don't have any statistics in front of me.

Wikipedia cites studies showing that 90 percent of the prostitution in Nevada (including Las Vegas), USA, is illegal, and presumably most of that is streetwalkers. But on the other end we have Victoria (including Melbourne), Australia, where there are zillions of legal brothels that even are allowed to advertise their services online. Is it reasonable to say that the typical prostitute in those locations is a streetwalker? I don't know, but I feel doubtful.

Most US prostitution is not streetwalker (estimates range from 10-20% streetwalkers). The dominant forms of prostitution are call-girls/escorts and pseudo-brothels (e.g. massage parlors, etc.). Both claim the fig leaf (with varying seriousness/success) that the payment is nominally for other legal services and any sex is just happenstance.

Oh gosh, years back I read something about a woman returning to prostitution because it was a good way for her to make a living, and she discussed working in one of the legal brothels in Utah Nevada (I think). She was one of the prostitutes who didn't mind taking black clients, so she was always able to get customers. I think she preferred to go independent if she could, because the brothel takes a cut of everything by charging for laundry, condoms, etc. on top of the cut they take from the transaction, so they nibble away at the fee the prostitute gets from the client. Which is why a lot of prostitutes try to arrange "and if you want, I'll do X for Y charge cheaper" with a client without the house knowing, so they can make more money.

she discussed working in one of the legal brothels in Utah Nevada (I think)

But the situation in Nevada, where prostitution is restricted to sparsely-populated areas and is largely drowned out by the illegal trade in Las Vegas, presumably is a far cry from the situation in the metropolises of Melbourne and Brisbane.

She was one of the prostitutes who didn't mind taking black clients, so she was always able to get customers.

According to forum discussions that I've seen, many Australian prostitutes refuse to serve Indians.

presumably is a far cry from the situation in the metropolises of Melbourne and Brisbane.

Possibly. This was years back and I'm nowhere near familiar enough with how legal prostitution works. But the impression I carried away was that brothels will nickel and dime the prostitutes, because it's a business and it's all about making the maximum profit for the owners (same with strip clubs where the dancers are encouraged to get the marks to buy overpriced watered-down alcohol and to spend on buying lap dances etc. because if you're not turning over as much money for the owners as possible, you're out and a new dancer gets her chance).

I have never understood why some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women. The real money and profit and power accrue to the owners and operators of such businesses, who generally are men not women. Sure, the strippers and prostitutes get to manipulate the johns for money, but the pimps/madams/owners get to manipulate the prostitutes.

some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women

Perhaps the most obvious conclusion is that they're genuinely asexual (or just uncritically repeating asexual talking points), so sex work to them is legitimately not meaningfully distinguishable from any other work.

This doesn't prevent them from responding to other incentives, of course- for instance, a prostitute might prefer prefer porn be banned if they believe it would lead to greater demand for their services. Whether or not they're aware they're prostitutes is another matter.

The way I've seen it presented is "hah hah I am using my sexuality to manipulate men, these suckers pay me lots of money and I don't have to do anything except jiggle my tits in front of their faces" (though if they're prostitutes, they do have to perform the acts requested). They present this as "I'm in control, I know what's going on, nobody is using me" (except, as I said, the majority of owners of brothels and strip clubs and so on are men, and they are the ones getting the profits). And this selling of sex only is possible so long as they're deemed attractive and youthful enough to get high prices; as they get older, their options also dwindle unless they're smart enough to get out early and find a line of work to go into.

Look at Stormy Daniels. What is her career now? Mostly trying to squeeze the final drops of blood out of the turnip of "I had an affair with Trump" by peddling her story to whoever will pay to broadcast it. Without that link, she's just another former porn actress who aged out of the industry. Whatever money she first got paid off with, clearly she blew through it and needed to get more by the traditional "mistress/whore of famous man tells all" method. Then she got cheated by Michael Avenatti, so you can't really take her career as one of "powerful strong independent woman uses and discards men", it's really the other way round.

I have never understood why some women go on about how sex work is empowering for women.

Presumably, as a luxury belief.

I imagine this is likely to come from OnlyFans-type sex workers, who have a different dynamic to brothel employees and club dancers.

"Unions are evil"?

Unions came into being in a world where there were the typical industrial workplace had work rules that could, by virtue of the nature of the work, only be negotiated explicitly and collectively, and which were very visibly matters of life and death. That world is a better world if institutions exist such that work rules can be negotiated collectively. (Historically, there were a lot of small strikes over safety issues, but few large ones).

In the world of 2025, more people have jobs where individual negotiation (including the implicit kind) just works better than collective negotiation, because every worker and every task is different. Also most of the life-or-death workplace practices (and a good many that are not) are governed either by explicit regulation or by implicit regulation by lawsuit and insurance company. That is a world where there is no pro-social work for unions to do.

It is an interesting question whether the negative side effects of unions or health-and-safety regulation are worse (I favour putting it to the test by allowing union-negotiated, but not individually-negotiated, contracts of employment to contract out of employment law and most of workplace safety law). But the world where neither existed was not in a stable equilibrium.

I like meta behind the "unions are evil" example: It is the only example luxury belief that is right coded, and it's also the only belief that has a number of posters explaining why it's not actually a luxury belief but a "true fact about the world".

If the idea of luxury beliefs really has explanatory value as a model of the world, I would expect all political ideologies to have them in some capacity. So I would like to see more examples of these right-coded luxury beliefs.

I think this question came up before, and I suggested hard-line anti-abortion. It's easy for a wealthy conservative man to proclaim that no one should ever have an abortion, as by virtue of his wealth, he and his family are insulated from most of the "use cases" in which an abortion might be preferable to carrying a baby to term. Whereas a working-class woman who gets pregnant unexpectedly might find that carrying the baby to term is financially ruinous.

there's multiple women turning tricks for their pimps in exchange for a small cut of the profits and a daily dose.

You seem to be reasoning on what legal prostitution is from a (probably inaccurate) view of how illegal prostitution works.

Only 6% of private sector workers are unionized, so the hellish vision of everyone forced to participate in an Amazonian warehouse rat race is how it already works in the richest society known to man.

Great post!

I don't have any problem with the idea of "luxury beliefs" in the sense that some beliefs appear to indeed be things that it is costly to believe, and that some people are able to bear the cost while others are not. I think that what makes them tricky is that the costs themselves are arguably grounded in what other people believe. Where "luxury beliefs" get controversial seems to be when it is a matter of controversy as to whether the costs are themselves a consequence of the belief, or a consequence of e.g. social norms.

Post-WWII, American culture underwent a radical shift. Progressivism to that point had mostly been about the perfectibility of mankind through social programs--public education, proper nutrition, clean water, etc. were things that many American communities still lacked circa 1920. In the century from 1870 to 1970, the percent of illiterate white Americans over the age of 14 dropped (PDF) from 20% to 1%; the percent of illiterate nonwhites dropped from 80% to around 4%--and those percentages went to about 0.5% and 2% in the ten years following. Similar strides were made in nutrition, hygiene, clean water, etc. and we were exporting these advances, too--engaging in imperialism modernization efforts around the world.

But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked. Of course new children are still being born (for now...) so there's always more work to be done, but the extent of visible progress achieved by the progressive project within living memory circa 1995 was unprecedented and jaw-dropping. We'd conquered nature so thoroughly that the only thing remaining to hinder our own progress was... other people!

Prototypical progressive thinkers--I'm thinking specifically of John Stuart Mill, here--were very interested in the idea that we should all have maximum liberty, constrained only by the compatibility of that liberty with everyone else enjoying liberty in similar quantities. "My right to swing my fist ends where your right to swing your fist begins," I suppose, though there is probably a more pithy version of that floating around somewhere. At the root of this is the idea that we are all the best judges of our own flourishing, provided we start from a place of adequate education.

So here in the 21st century, we have responses to your identified categories.

  • Gender transition is a way for people to flourish by breaking the bonds of restrictive social constructs. The only costs are those imposed by transphobes.
  • Sex positivity is a way for people to be honest and open about what actually brings them pleasure. The only costs are those imposed by slut-shaming.
  • Drugs are a way for people to pursue their interest in feeling certain ways. This is more complicated and may not apply to certain highly lethal drugs, but the costs imposed on e.g. marijuana or nootropic users are predominantly imposed by moralizing busybodies.
  • Psychotherapy is a way for people to flourish with the help of trained professionals. The only costs are those imposed by... psychophobes? Do we have a neat slur for people who think therapy is for the stupid and the weak?
  • "Do what you love" may be the single most obvious good that any human could choose. If you read Freddie deBoer's manifesto, his whole "imagine a world where..." is a story about people being free to just do what they want, when they want to, without any consequences being imposed on them by society--indeed, with all possible consequences being absorbed, costlessly and without a single judgmental comment, by society.

I think that some of the rising conservatism I see in today's young people--which of course the Cathedral has already tarred as right wing extremism--is a growing suspicion that these claims about the source of oppression being socially constructed, which it may have been understandable for people to believe as recently as 50 years ago, no longer plausibly hold water.

  • Gender is more than just a social construct, and a true sex change operation would involved extensive (impossible at current tech levels) brain surgery, to say nothing of the endocrine system. Sorry, you're going to have to wait for better tech.
  • Sexual feelings are more than just a social construct; pair bonding has biological roots and slut shaming is a defense mechanism against defections from the stable equilibrium of general monogamy.
  • Psychotherapy might be beneficial for the truly damaged, but most likely you're depressed (or whatever) as a result of trying to believe things your biology tells you that you shouldn't believe. Psychotherapy is a way to maintain in humans the view that their inability to thrive in the new progressive world is their problem, not the progressive world's problem.
  • If we all really did what we love all the time, we would all starve to death in short order. Or if we really did manage to make robots do everything for us, our antifragility would lead to widespread psychological breakdown due to a universal crisis of meaning. Humans are evolved to do the work of humans, not to perpetually enjoy only the enjoyment of humans. Loss of the latter means the extinction of the former.

I'm intrigued by the fact that these are all actually fairly empirical disputes--they're just not the kinds of questions it is easy to get clear answers on. Sociology is tricky even when you don't have political activists thumbing the scales, and these days the scales are so covered with thumbs as to render the payloads utterly invisible.

This all applies, I think, to polyamory as well. I can imagine a society in which humans were more like bonobos--where we had sexual interactions as part of all of our social interactions. The first step, I suspect, would have to be the eradication of sexually transmitted disease! But psychologically this would require a transformation that seems to run deeper than culture. Sexual jealousy is universally attested. There are apparently people who can make polyamory work, and for whom it arguably works very well (though a question arises--if you have to make it work...). But for those for whom it doesn't work, I don't think the problem is poly-shaming or other cultural roadblocks. The problems seem more biologically grounded than that. My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs.

(In particular--the sneer faction of the ratsphere has always been comparative conservatives about polyamory, and yet they are if anything more progressive than the modal rationalist when it comes to, say, transsexuality. I notice that I am confused.)

Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.

You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.

Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man

Vaginoplasties are only undertaken by a tiny minority of MtF people. The vast majority of MtF people have fully intact penises.

I meant it in the figurative sense (a man turned transwoman does not present as traditionally masculine anymore), not in the sense of actual amputation.

The trans women you've met must pass a hell of a lot better than the ones I've met, or seen photos of.

I suspect you may be letting your feelings about transwomen ("gross, obviously masculine"?) cloud your understanding of the word. If you search for combinations like "work emasculating", you will see an abundance of discussions where people consider as "emasculating" things that include being called "cute" by older female coworkers, doing any desk work at all, being involved in childcare and having your wife earn more than you. I have also seen discussions of children's propensity to insult less assertive peers as "gay" as emasculation. Surely putting on a dress and trying to speak in a high-pitched voice on a regular basis is more of whatever is common to all those scenarios; and if your understanding is that being considered cool and imposing by women, doing physical labor, leaving housekeeping tasks to women and being a dominant provider who is definitively not at all gay is bad, then being far removed from those ought to be a good thing.

Well actually my point is that there are plenty of self-identified trans women who don't even put on a dress or try to speak in a more high-pitched voice.

Some of them do. I think the very online types we see are the ones who pass the worst, which is a whole other kettle of fish. I think some/many/a lot of the 'ordinary' MtF may not pass 100% but since they're not trying to look like an anime waif or an OnlyFans model, it's close enough to let pass without comment for the sake of peace and politeness.

The rather unfortunate case of the "It's Ma'am" person, which did blow up, or the person who deliberately goes around to restaurants and cafés so they can be misgendered by the ESL waitstaff and then make little TikToks about how this was a dagger through their heart are the ones who don't pass and who make the big deal out of it.

hypermasculine alpha nerds

Asking for a friend, can you steer me towards any pictures of these hot chad nerds? Because the photos* of real life guys in that scene I've seen, I'm sure they have lovely personalities 😁

*Such as the ones attached to dating docs, quite a few of which have made me draw in my breath and go "Oh dear, why did you pick this photo?"

But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked.

One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution and the uncorking of more and more energetically concentrated fossil fuels. When the quality of the gas stopped getting better and better all the supposedly related social improvements suspiciously stopped.

One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution

I mean, this is pretty much Marx's whole schtick, isn't it?

My own view is that ideas and material reality are mutually intertwined, but I doubt "it's both, really" is a position that will raise anyone's eyebrows. The hard part is explaining exactly how each influences the other, and I've never encountered a fully satisfactory approach to that question. Clearly, sometimes people think new thoughts and do new things. Clearly, sometimes their success in doing so depends on the conditions of material reality. And equally clearly, sometimes the conditions of material reality are the result of people thinking new thoughts and doing new things.

But mostly, Nothing Ever Happens, which makes the fact that anything has ever Happened at all, all the more puzzling. This is at heart the same argument Parmenides ("change is an illusion") had with Heraclitus ("sameness is an illusion"), which Plato "resolved" by saying--of course--"it's both, really."

The sneer faction are blue-tribe/academic turbonormies. The contrast is no more confusing, and to some extent explained by, AOC not saying anything about poly.

if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo

See here's the thing... I don't even think it works better than the status quo for almost anyone. I strongly believe if these poly people had good marriages, a tight knit community, and children, they would be happier and better off.

Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life. I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue? Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better, but follow that line of reasoning far enough and you'll find yourself arguing that every man should have sex with another man just so he can be absolutely sure that he's straight and not just a closeted gay/bi.

I know poly isn't for me, but if someone says it works for them, who am I to argue?

Many people claim things are good for them that self-evidently aren't. Whether this is one of them or not isn't easily answerable, but you don't actually have to accept a junkie's claim that he just really enjoys the freedom of living in a tent.

Maybe you'd argue they should give monogamy the old college try so they can make an informed decision on which suits them better

Given the predominant cultural messaging, it can be safely assumed that even among the Bay Areans they did give monogamy the old college try.

Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins. He still finds poly a net-positive to his life.

Difficult to separate? He has all of those because of poly, and being extremely high status (within a limited scale) he's going to have way above average success for a poly male (if he so desires). Not exactly someone I'm going to turn to as a replicable example.

@TheDag as well- Eons ago I commented on the phenomenon of a non-zero number of poly EAs claiming also to be asexual, and I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends," since for some noticeable fraction the addition of sex to the calculation does not play a major role.

I blame social media as well for putting the final nail in the meaning of "friend," but like marriage it was already down the slope of not meaning much.

I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends,"

Related.

I dunno, though. Everyone intuitively understands the concept of an emotional affair, and a lot of women (and probably a lot of men too) would see it as a betrayal if they found out that their spouse was sharing intensely intimate thoughts and feelings with another person of the opposite sex, even if their spouse hadn't yet fucked (or even kissed) the person. I don't know what Scott's love life is actually like, but to me it sounds like he has a wife and also a "harem" of other women with whom he has emotional affairs, achieving a degree of emotional intimacy greater than mere friendship, even if there's no fucking. I could be wrong, though: maybe what he calls his polycule is functionally indistinguishable from a dude who has a wife and a bunch of female friends, who treat him almost like their honorary "gay best friend".

Scott, by his account, has a good marriage, a tightly knit community and a pair of twins.

Which is what he chose when he decided to settle down. He decided to get married before having kids, his wife converted to Judaism, they're raising their kids in his family faith/ethnic tradition, and whatever arrangements on the side they have (which is their own business) he very much did not go the "it takes a village to raise a child, my polycule are all co-parents, nobody is married except the metamours" route of the Bay Area bubble. So I think he's poly despite, not because, all that, if he's still poly at all.

As of February last year he is still poly.

Well, I don't feel comfortable speculating about the details of anyone's romantic life, so we'll leave it at that without going into "Does he have a harem?"

He decided to get married before having kids, his wife converted to Judaism, they're raising their kids in his family faith/ethnic tradition, and whatever arrangements on the side they have

Does this even work? I thought Judaism was transmitted(?) through the maternal line.

Children of mothers who converted to Judaism are Jewish, by Jewish law.

Interesting, good to know.

I think maternal conversion is considered legitimate.

But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer.

Most people trying to make it as rappers and streamers probably don't actually have a powerful skill set that could be swapped out for a strong income elsewhere, so the people I feel really bad for are the postdocs plugging away in research labs well into their 30s, making a pittance and crossing their fingers that they'll finally get an academic offer. Academic research isn't quite as extreme of a rockstar profession as rapping, but it is actually a gamble with enormous opportunity cost relative to other options that high-IQ people that are willing to work long hours can take.

The biggest piece of advice I can give to talented young people is to stay flexible, that you don't actually know what your dream career is when you're choosing the starting path as a teenager.

Agreed, tenure-track professorship is a high-risk, high-reward strategy.

I agree that most of the people trying to make it as rappers or streamers would probably not be able to carve out an impressive income elsewhere, but I imagine most of them, if they really applied themselves, could probably work their way up to being a supervisor at a big box shop or similar, a far superior outcome than squandering your twenties on a futile quest to get your mixtape out there and still being an unemployed nobody with no assets at the end of it.

I would push back on therapy being grouped with the other things. Therapy, broadly speaking, covers an extreme range of practices and modalities. I mean sure, if you're going to stick with DSM-V definitions (which insurance surely requires), those are meant to be more clinical and cleanly defined. This is dysfunctional; that isn't dysfunctional.

But people seek therapy for lots of reasons. Do you consider a life coach a therapist? How about someone to help you get over your fear of public speaking or someone to help you better organize tasks? I'd wager just about everyone has something they wish they were better at, some lack that they feel in their life. It can be hard to match up someone with the right therapist, the right intervention, but when it's successful it's absolutely worth seeking out.

So yes, I would bite the bullet and say that absolutely everyone could benefit from therapy, in the sense that we need someone outside ourselves to encourage, validate, motivate us and point to helpful tools and resources. For many people this is religion. For many people this need can be filled by a close network of friends or family. Those people have a natural, organic source that meets this need, but many other people do not. The need for validation and accountability is nevertheless, I would say, nearly universal.

Perhaps more clarity is called for. I'm using "therapy" to refer specifically to psychotherapy. At least in Ireland, "psychotherapist" is a protected term. Life coaches are hence definitionally not therapists, as no qualifications are required to call oneself a life coach. Nor are public speaking coaches.

"Everyone could benefit from guidance and mentoring from a third party" and "everyone could benefit from psychotherapy" are two very different claims.

The term "therapy" has its physiological parallel in "physical therapy." Physical therapy is universally understood to be a means getting part of the body back to a normally functioning state, or as close to possible. Something went real wrong, we gotta fix that.

Physical training is when the body is more or less functioning normally, but you want to improve performance in some dimension.

Your examples of public speaking, personal organization, etc. is much more in line with the "physical training" concept. You want to improve performance and you have a specific and measurable goal towards which to progress.

"Everyone should go to therapy", in my opinion, is literally implicitly stating "everyone has something mentally and/or emotionally wrong and not normal about them and, therefore, we should all commit to professional support for an indefinite period of time."

Everyone does have something mentally and emotionally wrong with them. Not because they're not normal, but because they're normal. It is not the capital T trauma of the ptsd variety because clearly most people don't get that. Not the small t trauma of having a hangup from having had an occasionally mean parent or something either. The software we're all running an almost identical copy of, the mind, is deeply deluded and filled with greed and hatred. It tells itself and others that it has got a CEO inside, someone reasonable and competent who makes informed and free decisions before doing anything and everything. It rationalizes post hoc, constantly spinning a story.

The average therapist is of no use for the problem though. They just want you to be/appear "normal", to check some boxes for outwardly appearing behaviors, and off you go, problem solved.

There's a lack of ambition in society, and a conceit, in thinking that the "normal" person is somehow healthy and optimal. Just fit in with the other fools; live and die in the same deeply sub-optimal midwit manner, and you'll have done what society expects. Pat on the back.

Most people don’t need to be validated. People need to be told how to fix themselves. And that’s part of the problem with therapy culture, is that it discourages actually trying to solve object level problems instead pushing just feel better about it.

It’s really quite narcissistic; don’t worry about it, you’re perfect. Yeah, sorry, no you aren’t.

I'd even go so far as to say - if you're seeing a therapist in hopes of receiving validation, therapy is almost certainly going to make your life or the lives of people around you worse.

Therapy in general has done a lot of damage as it’s become more “normalized”. A big problem is that as the mental health industry has pushed itself forward, it’s convinced society that pretty much everything negative that happens to you is traumatic in some way. This is a huge problem as it creates glass brains that simply cannot handle normal life. When you raise several successive generations in this way: teach them that life is traumatic and that they need to ruminate on their feeling, you end up creating an entire culture that simply cannot handle normal life. I believe honestly that Gen Z and Gen α are the first generations raised completely by a culture that’s bought into therapeutic models of living. They’re also a complete wreck, needing support at every turn, unable to handle negative emotions or thoughts.

it’s convinced society that pretty much everything negative that happens to you is traumatic in some way.

This is not the fault of the "mental health industry." Ask any clinically practicing therapist, social worker, or psychiatrist what they think of "little t trauma" and they will BITCH.

The problem is some combination of wokeism/snowflakeism/safetyism/influencer culture etc.

You will find professionals supporting this kind of garbage but it is more often non-clinical/non-practicing people.

You will find that people in mental health find the current paradigms on these matters to be extremely deleterious to human development and flourishing.

Additionally, something that often gets missed when therapy is mentioned - the goal of therapy is to stop therapy. Competent therapists will emphasize this early and often and actually do it.

You will find that people in mental health find the current paradigms on these matters to be extremely deleterious to human development and flourishing.

Just because the people who work in the industry think that these paradigms aren't conducive to human flourishing, doesn't mean the paradigms in question didn't ultimately arise within that industry. I'm sure there are Catholic priests who have misgivings about this or that component of Vatican doctrine, or people who work in the gambling industry who feel guilty about how they've been complicit in ruining so many lives.

Competent therapists will emphasize this early and often and actually do it.

Of course, but lots of therapists are incompetent and aren't weeded out quickly enough, if at all.

I like Holly Math Nerd, but she's got... some issues (as she readily admits). She insists that the number of women who enjoy sex for sex's sake and will not be damaged by having sex without an emotional bond is nearly an empty set. I... have enough experience to believe that is not the case. I absolutely believe Women Are Different and that most women need/desire an emotional bond in a way men generally do not. But there totally are women who enjoy being sluts, and I don't think that number is so very small (though they may come to regret the physical and social costs of their behavior later).

"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.

nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his.

Tangentially (and fitting my theme of Literary Snobbery), a while ago we had some Discourse about Tony Tulathimutte's The Feminist. I just got done reading his complete collection, Rejection. It's very good, though very Online and Of The Moment. The first story is The Feminist, but the second story is basically a gender-reversed version, with a female incel who goes completely off the rails after an ill-fated one-night stand with her best friend. I think the whole collection is fun reading, and rich Culture War fodder. Tulathimutte, being a Thai-American Stanford grad and feted Literary Author, both capitalizes on and leans into/satirizes every stereotype and assumption you are projecting onto him, in a much more clever and intellectual way than, say, Rebecca Kuang's entertaining but subtle-as-an-anvil-launched-by-catapult Yellowface.

I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.

I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.

Thanks for the link - missed it when you posted it before. I have added my own thoughts there.

I agree "demisexual" is probably a reasonable description for the modal woman, just that there is more variety in the female experience than a lot of men (and women like Holly) want to acknowledge.

I'm a man, I would consider myself having high libido, and still I have noticed more than once that a female acquaintance becomes more sexually attractive as I get to know her better as a person. And from what I've heard, men in general are attracted to women they love.

Perhaps "romantic/personal attraction enhances sexual attraction" is somewhat universal for humans, and a lower baseline libido just makes the effect more pronounced.

Is this irony or are we really this lost?

Rat Award 🏅

Demisexuality should really be confined to those instances where the usual sexual attraction/arousal/hormonal impulses are lacking or very muted, and only arise after the emotional bond is formed. Unlike the general run of sexuality for both men and women, where libido, desire and arousal are independent of being attached to any one particular individual and can be experienced before any attraction to a particular person is experienced (e.g. going out on the pull which both men and women engage in).

"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.

"Demisexual" is a nearly perfect term for a "normal" woman to use, though; you just buried the lede as to why.

If it is in the interests of Most Women to assert a need for an emotional bond[1] before sex, but market conditions (where the marginal value of "seeing a woman naked" has dropped to zero, so it is simply an expectation that women offer sex to men up front rather than exchanging it for commitment as their biology and instincts are screaming at them to do) contradict that, then it is only natural that they'd seek to hide behind the framework of sexual identity as a bargaining tactic ("you should pay more because I'm Special, also other people will think you're lesser/bully you if you don't buy into my brand"[2]). Asexuality is used in the same way, by the same sorts of people, for much the same reason.

Furthermore, it is in Most Women's interest to deny that liberated women who aren't quite as encumbered exist, because from this socioeconomic standpoint, they function as strike-breakers in comparison to the emergent collective bargaining of Most Women (and it is beneficial at the margins since 'man's willingness to risk -> break pointless rules' is generally attractive to women in itself).

The first story is The Feminist

It occurs to me that in a recently-established environment of equality we should expect mothers to [not necessarily intentionally] sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works. Uniquely, men are evolved to do this with their daughters with respect to male sexuality because up until about 150 years ago the inequality tilted that way- since this is a new requirement for women, an outsized proportion of mothers will fail to do this (and will then hide behind "social justice" as a means to escape blame for that failure).

[1] More cynically, this is "before the man has offered the desired price [in commitment] for the sex; the emotional bond is instinctual after that".

[2] Pair-bonding/dating is inherently a market negotiation; "all marriage is just prostitution" is the correct framing so long as you give prostitution a neutral moral valence (furthermore I assert that when people don't, it's also just basic instinct- a company seeks to protect its trade secrets, and both Men, Inc. and Women, Inc. don't like it when you reveal relationships follow market dynamics and/or resent being a slave to them).

I'd point out that a belief that "all women want sex, they just act coy about it" is going to get you straight into the old path of "no doesn't mean no, it just means she wants you to push harder to make her say yes" which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble.

There are women who act coy about it. There are also women who genuinely don't want sex, or not casual sex, or who don't experience "oh my god I'm so horny right now I need to jump on the first guy I see" at all. Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman. Agreed, not everybody who claims the label, but we can say that about autism and ADHD and the rest of such self-diagnoses, which does not mean that autism is not a real condition.

we should expect mothers to ...sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works.

Well, when you figure that one out, tell me because I've been a woman all my life and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men. If you mean the simplistic model of "women want meat, men want sex, swap one for the other" good luck there honey. "Your meat is not good enough" - harsh truth or women just being bitches?

I'd point out that a belief that "all women want sex, they just act coy about it" is going to get you straight into the old path of "no doesn't mean no, it just means she wants you to push harder to make her say yes" which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble.

There are women who act coy about it. There are also women who genuinely don't want sex, or not casual sex, or who don't experience "oh my god I'm so horny right now I need to jump on the first guy I see" at all.

Do you see what the problem is? If there are women who say no because they don't want to have sex, and there are also women who say no but are just acting coy about it, then the only way for a man to find out which is which is to keep pushing and see which ones give in and which ones put up real resistance. Any man who stops the second a women lets out a token "no" (or, worse, believes in affirmative consent) is never going to get laid, because that is simply not how women work. Modern notions of consent make a rapist out of every sexually successful man.

Seems to me like this is the fault of women, not of men.

Avoiding sexually harassing people is more important than "getting laid" because it causes a lot of harm.

Having to harshly reject advances every once in a while is less harm than never getting laid, according to my calculation.

This is a false dichotomy. I don't see why someone would never get laid just due to affirmative consent. Also, not getting laid is not a harm, it is at worst missing out on something great.

"Your meat is not good enough" - harsh truth or women just being bitches?

No, it's just sellers being sellers (and yes, every seller does this- talk to some salespeople sometime, they'll have plenty of examples). Buyers can deal with that in constructive or destructive ways. I'm more interested in the dynamics between the two.

which will get you, and any young men you teach about 'what women really want', into trouble

Sellers have a vested interest in frustrating price discovery.

Sociobiologically/evolutionarily speaking, you are the seller (and were not only quick to claim yourself as such, but you also mocked/confuse me for being one of those damn low-ballers) so naturally, you'll tell me that price discovery is dangerous- you're simply following your incentives to do that.

I assert that treating your [hypothetical] sons the same way, and telling them that lie rather than the truth, is net-negative; both because "yeah, actually, prospective sellers really do work like that", and because by not doing so you choose to make your [child] sacrifice to the social religion of "seller good buyer bad" (or "capital good labor bad", or "woman good man bad") rather than the actual truth. Same thing with fathers and daughters, though the incidentals are slightly different.

And it's not like it's bad to follow those incentives, but my entire point is to use simple market conditions as the framing, not whether or not it be morally better to be a buyer or seller (or the moral questions of buying or selling); this is the point of disclaiming "but buying/selling sex is just prostitution" as morally neutral even though that is completely 100% descriptive of what happens.

Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman.

Yes, it is; the problem with the label is that it once used to describe a real thing (and by the few people who actually speak both honestly and more self-awarely about it than others), but it has been appropriated by marketing/sellers to achieve a better negotiating position.

and I'm damned if I can work out why some women do what they do when it comes to men

Like what? The "battered housewife" is explained spectacularly; a seller who has priced themselves too low or has an overactive instinct to sell in this area. This is also why, as the price of women increased due to their economic situation improving through technology, wife-beating and spousal abuse has declined: husbands simply cannot afford women that will permit them to do that (and that's ignoring minimum-wage and employee protection laws, which age of consent and anti-marital rape/no-fault divorce/abortion laws serve as, respectively).

Oh yeah, and trophy wives are Veblen goods.

The "battered housewife" is explained spectacularly; a seller who has priced themselves too low or has an overactive instinct to sell in this area. This is also why, as the price of women increased due to their economic situation improving through technology, wife-beating and spousal abuse has declined: husbands simply cannot afford women that will permit them to do that

This has got to be the craziest explanation for domestic violence I've ever read, and I'm following a current murder trial where the guy who killed his wife is plainly lying through his teeth about everything that led up to the murder, as well as the murder itself, and the aftermath of the murder, including allegations that he was a victim of long-running domestic violence (but never told anybody because well he didn't like them to think badly of his wife).

This has got to be the craziest explanation for domestic violence I've ever read

The question I think about is "why would a battered housewife not only stick around, but defend her husband's actions?". There's no rational reason for that, so this has to be a function (or malfunction) of some basic instinct.

I posit the basic instinct is "sell sex in exchange for resources", and that violent men tend to, for some women, result in the seller perceiving that the price the buyer is paying is high enough to labor as a very literal punching bag. Which also explains a few other weird things, like "women obsessed with serial killers".

It also explains why the modern women is choosier: on an intellectual standpoint/when women have other options, the odds they'll be selling sex for anything resembling a reasonable price is lower and they'll only consider lower prices when the "Reproduce Now" instinct turns on[1] (the flipside, of course, is that higher-quality women are now available at a bargain price if you're willing to look for them, which is to a point why so many software guys marry Asians[2] when they hit 30). The selection effects on the sexual marketplace are simply downstream of this; the reason men who can't pay as much still get laid regularly is because not every woman is Homo Economicus, and even when they are they aren't that way all the time.

The men and women who lack the instinct to min-max this way, or perceive the requirement to either be very muted or only have the cosplay of buy/sell on their minds? Those are the real "asexuals". They lose because they just want to be left alone and do their weird thing where they constantly fuck around.

[1] Buyers call this the "beta bucks"/"once she's had her fun" phenomenon; sellers usually just call it "settling".

[2] Their genetics predict a superior product even if their cultural outlook was more hostile to men on average, and it isn't... unless you also happen to be Asian.

Asexuality is a genuine thing for both men and woman.

I suppose so, in the sense that both men and women can be paraplegic or born blind or whatever.

The ADHD comparison falls apart in that when someone claims to have ADHD they're trying to get the treatment for ADHD (meds, extra exam time) to get an advantage. People who claim to be asexual claim don't want to be treated for it at all.

People who claim to be asexual claim don't want to be treated for it at all.

Oh, I don't know about that. You get enough attractive young women together, along with perhaps a cute twink or two (just for variety), who are all extremely intent on trying to cure my (crippling?) asexuality? I'll absolutely submit to that conversion therapy, in earnest.

People have written many books describing this stuff, or so I'm told.

There's a difference between people with low libido, who find this distressing and alienating to partners, and who want to have more sex and be more interested in sex, and so they seek treatment, and people who are asexual, happy about that, and don't want to change.

The self-diagnosed online types who have a laundry list of illnesses from the physical to mental, to prove what sensitive little flowers they are and how you cannot be mean to them at all, are the ones who may latch on to asexuality/demisexuality as another way to burnish their resumés, as it were: now I'm queer as well (if I can't manage to be trans or gay or lesbian or bi) so if you say anything at all that I disagree with, I can now accuse you of homophobia as well as the rest of the list of your crimes against the differently abled.

There's a difference between people with low libido, who find this distressing and alienating to partners, and who want to have more sex and be more interested in sex, and so they seek treatment, and people who are asexual, happy about that, and don't want to change.

I disagree that the second group of people exist, or should exist. Lacking a libido isn't a natural and full category of human, it's a moral, emotional, and physical cripple incapable of basic human functioning. Extremely low libido should be distressing and will always be alienating to partners, it isn't an "identity" that society should be acknowledging as a point of negotiation.

"Wifely" or "Husbandly" duties are a basic part of marriage, sexuality is a basic part of humanity.

We need to reject these kinds of ideas root and branch, they are essentially anti-human.

t's a moral, emotional, and physical cripple incapable of basic human functioning.

See, here is where our opinions sharply diverge. I don't want to fucky-fucky like a rabbit in spring? Well gosh, then I'm not a real human! Asexuality does not mean incapacity to have emotional and relational bonds with others, it just means 'no sex'. It doesn't even mean 'no romantic love', that's aromanticism!

Taking a look at the news pages about the people who do experience sexual arousal and so are not 'moral, emotional and physical cripples incapable of basic human functioning', what do I see about these paragons who have the fullness of erotic desire?

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/tv-radio/2025/05/14/fred-and-rose-west-a-british-horror-story-review-a-chilling-gaze-into-a-monstrous-soulless-void/

Serial killer couple from decades past. They were in love and sexually functional, you know!

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39x1ggj3e3o

Man murders his daughter by deliberately running over her. If he had a wife and family, he had normal sexual and romantic human relationships, unlike those soulless asexuals!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/14/prison-officer-came-in-on-days-off-to-have-sex-with-rapist/

Female prison officer attempted to get pregnant by convict. They're so in love, your honour! Okay, the guy is a convicted rapist, but that just means he is so overflowing with normal human attraction to potential sexual partners that he shares the love vigorously!

I can find a lot of stories of that type, if we want to argue about moral cripples.

Dude that's not even "Hitler was a vegetarian!"

This is like saying "Hitler had legs."

Hitler certainly fucked.

People who don't have the full range of human emotions and experiences are cripples. That doesn't make them morally bad people, sure, but it's wrong to pretend they aren't cripples. Being deaf is substantively worse than not being deaf, and deaf "activists" who want to lobby against cochlear implants are insane.

More comments

I directionally agree, but the wording seems too strong. IMO asexuals aren't exactly a menace to society and we needn't worry overly much about them. OTOH of course they can't expect to have normal relationships with regularly-sexual people.

Asexuals existing off on their own aren't any threat to society, asexuals advocating for asexuality as normal are.

Just as people in wheelchairs are no threat to society, unless they start crowing over the moral superiority of being crippled, and heathy people start cutting off their legs.

More comments

Would you consider priests, monks, nuns, and other people who have never engaged in romantic relationships throughout their lives because they had a different calling to be a group of people who shouldn't exist? I think it is clearly wrong. Just because it isn't how most humans function, doesn't mean that these people are any less human.

People who choose to live in a certain way in accordance with their beliefs != People who lack fundamental human feelings

People who have urges to sin and resist them != People who lack urges

Gluttony is a sin. Someone who has no hunger, no urge to eat and no pleasure in food, is crippled and missing a fundamental human experience. A monk who chooses to live on a scanty diet of bread and water is making a choice for piety, a choice that is meaningless if he was born with a generic dysfunction that prevents him from feeling hunger or enjoying food.

Wrath is a sin. But someone who feels no anger, no urge to revenge when wronged, is missing a fundamental part of human experience. The nobility of choosing to turn the other cheek is meaningless if one simply lacks the neurons that fire that way for revenge.

So on and so forth to Lust.

More comments

It occurs to me that in a recently-established environment of equality we should expect mothers to [not necessarily intentionally] sabotage their sons romantically by failing to explicitly point out how and why female sexuality works. Uniquely, men are evolved to do this with their daughters with respect to male sexuality because up until about 150 years ago the inequality tilted that way- since this is a new requirement for women, an outsized proportion of mothers will fail to do this (and will then hide behind "social justice" as a means to escape blame for that failure).

Why should we expect evolution to push for ‘getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible’? This is not an offspring maximizing strategy(for humans early and stable marriage is the fertility minmax).

Why should we expect evolution to push for ‘getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible’?

You misunderstand- the thing mothers are failing at is not "getting your kids laid with as many partners as possible" (though admittedly this is more likely to happen given a proper education in these matters), it's "your son dies childless because he was too busy Respecting Women(tm) to ever get successfully laid even once".

In an environment of equality mothers have to look out for their sons' sexual interests (where they enable/encourage them to go from 0 partners to 1) just as much as fathers do for their daughters (and enable/encourage them to go from many partners to 1).

Before everything had to be broken down into sixty-seven degrees of "this is the label for my set of special circumstances that fits me and only me", I think 'demisexual' was a useful term. There are asexuals who have no sexual attraction or arousal at all. There are those who generally are not interested in sex but who are interested in romance, and if they are in a romantic relationship may engage in sex (mostly as part of what you do to keep a relationship going, and to make their partner happy, and they may even enjoy it but not necessarily want sex or initiate it otherwise) once they have that close emotional bond and only after that close emotional bond is established.

Then like all somewhat useful terms it got over-used and flogged to death and now means "yeah I have sex like ordinary people but being straight isn't cool enough, you have to be some variety of queer nowadays, so labelling myself demisexual works for me".

(The irony being that I remember the fights over "are asexuals queer enough, or indeed queer at all? if you're not also trans or gay, you can go to hell straight invader of queer safe spaces" in the early days. Apparently we're all queer now, Father).

She insists that the number of women who enjoy sex for sex's sake and will not be damaged by having sex without an emotional bond is nearly an empty set. I... have enough experience to believe that is not the case. I absolutely believe Women Are Different and that most women need/desire an emotional bond in a way men generally do not. But there totally are women who enjoy being sluts, and I don't think that number is so very small (though they may come to regret the physical and social costs of their behavior later).

This is unrelated to the broader discussion, but I have a feeling that the women who enjoy being sluts enjoy being sluts in the moment. I believe that overtime, they experience a sort of unconscious strain that builds up with each casual sexual encounter, that worsens their mental health, separately from the regret they feel due to the aforementioned physical and social costs. I'm curious to know your opinions on this view? I don't really have much of first-hand experience to verify it.

I believe that overtime, they experience a sort of unconscious strain that builds up with each casual sexual encounter, that worsens their mental health, separately from the regret they feel due to the aforementioned physical and social costs.

Of course. After all, who would want to buy goods from a seller that casually exposes their ware(s) to hazardous, ionizing XXX-rays?

But really, this is just "buyers being buyers", in the exact way that "sellers being sellers" is. You instinctively negotiate- used items are inherently worth a little less than new items, it's best to have a service history and low mileage, shops that take care to polish and present their merchandise command higher prices from you just based on the confidence it demonstrates in the product, etc. etc. blah blah blah.

Or is there some other reason I'm not anticipating why you'd believe this is true in the absence of evidence? You can just say "I don't want to spend the money", lol; that's just as morally neutral as sellers who say "that is not enough money".

That was more or less the conclusion of the link I shared in the paragraph about sex-positive feminism: that a lot of women experience regret after one-night stands. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't enjoy the experience in the moment. In contrast, most men seem not to regret one-night stands and presumably enjoy them in the moment too.

I think some of it is how polyamory is crossing over to the mainstream. It's been written by/about the type of upper-middle to upper class people who in the past would have been having ménages-a-trois or discreet affairs or French-style "well of course you have a mistress and I have a lover" arrangements, or swinging, or acknowledged 'open' marriages, but all done within a specific framework of discretion, no bastards (or not acknowledged ones), and no divorces to go running off with the new model spouse. You might bring your mistress to certain events, but not in a style that could be seen as parading her about, and never humiliate publicly your spouse.

So, rather in the same spirit as the articles about "will gay marriage teach straight people new ways to handle relationships?" were written before it all became legal, with an air of "gays are not monogamous they're monogamish, will we finally get straight marriage that permits cheating?" about it, now we're getting the polyamory stories.

And for the upper-middle to upper class types, who have a rule book about discreet affairs, it works (until it doesn't). For the weird, the ones who set up all the definitions and sub-definitions and rules and diagrams around poly, it works (until it doesn't). These are the people who put the same effort into working out relationship statistics as other stattos put into sports.

The third set are the people who are fat, ugly, disabled, poor, queer, etc. and who can't get or have a traditional, stable, committed relationship so who put together some kind of support system for sex, love, domestic support and the likes that involves a group of people who can contribute bits and pieces of time, attention, money, space and energy but not a whole-time relationship (and again, that works until it doesn't).

The problem is trying to mainstream it, for the ordinary people who don't have the upper-class resources about managing an affair (or three), the people who aren't living in Park Slope and having glowing reviews of their memoirs in the NYT, who are going to run into the problems of jealousy, trying to juggle time and space between partners, and the fear of being replaced. Of being told that the cultural moment is ethical non-monogamy, and if they're not poly then they are missing out (on all this hot sex and fizzy new romance). You don't want to be boring, do you? Whitebread conventional cis het?

And those are the people who are going to blow up their lives, and who are maybe now starting the backlash about "this wasn't what I was promised and it didn't happen the way I expected".

If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective signalling mechanism that a person is a member of the elite (when cars are so expensive that most people can't afford them, owning a car is a costly signal that you are rich; when they become so cheap that everyone can afford them, the only way you can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda isn't half as distinct as the difference between have and have-not).

So does the existence of beliefs that are Veblen Goods imply the existence of beliefs that are inferior goods in the economic sense? Beliefs that, like canned green beans, one consumes more of as one's income (or status otherwise for beliefs?) decreases. What do people believe more when they are poor than when they are rich?

This occurs to me because I was wondering to myself whether streaming platforms behave more like normal goods or inferior goods in a recession. I'm of two minds. If I had to cut my budget, Netflix seems like a pure luxury, I could cut the expense and still have more movies to watch on antenna, old DVDs floating around, or streaming free/illegally, than I could watch if I was unemployed and watching 8 hours a day. That's before one even gets into the free entertainment I can get from books and emulators etc. So it's an easy one to cut. On the other hand, if I were down on cash, I can save a lot more money by not going out to dinner, not going to concerts, not going on trips, so I might hang onto streaming as something to do at a relatively low per-hour entertainment cost.

So what beliefs resemble an Inferior Good? I can think of a few:

-- Cynical Suspicion of Salesmen; "Everybody's trying to screw me!" If you are objectively stupid, and lack the ability to distinguish a good sales pitch from a scam, the adaptive strategy becomes to assume everything is a scam, the false positives cost you less than false negatives in the short term. "It's all a scam!" because everything ends up being a scam if you screw it up: if you invest in the wrong things investing is a scam, if you pick the wrong insurance then insurance is a scam, if you handle your divorce poorly then divorce is a scam. This often lapses into racism against market dominant minorities or social classes...

-- Tribalism; "You can only trust your own kind..." If you are a low social capital person, you want your immutable traits to be what gives you value. No matter how many stupid mistakes you make, you never stop being black or white or Jewish.

But pretty quickly I find I can make the opposite argument, that each of these is an elite "luxury" belief as well. So I'm not sure what to do with all our just-so stories.

Richard Hanania is constantly beating the drum about "low human capital" people believing in conspiracy theories, which seems like the most obvious example. Working-class Dale Gribble voters believing in the New World Order, UN black helicopters, microchips in Covid vaccines etc. are so common as to be a cliché; the rare elites who believe in conspiracies are "man bites dog" stories.

and lack the ability to distinguish a good sales pitch from a scam

What is the difference between a good sales pitch and a scam? As far as I can tell, nothing about the pitch itself, only the product. Certainly, it takes intelligence to understand those products, but discarding the sales talk is just correct. Salespeople are trying to screw you.

An intelligent person reacts to this by selectively ignoring, filtering, and rounding-down the sales-talk as the salesman is talking to you. You ask specific questions in such a way that he can't fudge it, you focus on specific concrete facts.

A stupid person reacts to this by refusing to interact with salesmen at all. He is incapable of filtering in real time, so he just shuts the whole thing down.

And, to a large extent, just as advertising budget is actually correlated with product quality in most cases, a professional sales presentation is correlated with a high quality product in many cases. Refusing to engage with salesmen opens one up to a different sort of self-scam I frequently see the proles around me fall for: the bargain that is a money pit. They buy a series of broke down cars out of someone's driveway because they don't trust stealerships, they buy a "fixer upper" house because they don't trust realtors, they half ass and jury rig all kinds of stuff around their house because they don't trust contractors, etc.

They can in fact fudge anything that isnt legal writ, and sometimes also not stuff youll notice within a week or so of buying it. Asking question can help when youre buying something like insurance, which was your example above, but for most stuff its "as seen".

Refusing to engage with salesmen opens one up to a different sort of self-scam

"The salesman himself is radioactive" seems like a different thing that youre tacking on there. But if youre selectively ignoring the supermajority of what they say, that is "cynical suspicion" by any reasonable use of the word.

hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts

AI video fixes this. There is no way for women to compete against the outright physically impossible fetishes and perversions you can find on the /gif/ threads. Nor can they compete on convenience, speed or price when it comes to video/photos. Much of the 'texting/relationship simulacrum' stuff is outsourced to the subcontinent anyway, it can easily be outsourced to AI.

Relevant: https://youtube.com/watch?v=isafYIg0o3c?si=Ag1feI3cQNjZ8ZQM

I don't know how good AI is at generating a video of a woman pissing into her own mouth but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

Drug liberalisation: I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of luxury beliefs, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole.

To the contrary, there are many who can experiment with alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana without becoming addicts. This isn’t true for fentanyl, but illegal fentanyl is so dangerous that the only people who use it will be stupid/impulsive, so you can’t draw conclusions about the general population from them. The % of people whose lives will be ruined by experimenting with drugs is a minority, though it isn’t a tiny minority and prohibitionists are right to note that drug use is a big social problem. But the options aren’t drugs or no drugs, it’s how much drugs will cost and how easy they will be to acquire. Making them cheaper and easier to acquire via legalization will probably lead to more use, but this must be set against the costs of the drug war, such as the money spent on enforcing it, negatively polarizing people against policing, making it harder to get pain medications people actually need, and making drug use more expensive and dangerous for people for whom it's a net positive. Plus, the drug war is fostering a culture of helplessness that is particularly harmful to the lower class: https://www.themotte.org/post/1850/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/322160?context=8#context

Think about it, what’s the cultural messaging from drug prohibitionists? It’s all about blaming “chyna,” “the border,” or “the Sackler family” for people’s decisions to inject themselves with dangerous substances. Never do they acknowledge that the addicts bear any blame, it’s all about wallowing in collective victimization and helplessness. And now we’re having a trade war, putting hardworking people out of work, for the sake of this biotrash. Drug prohibition needn't include this element, old-school conservatism was much better.

Never do they acknowledge that the addicts bear any blame

Wasn't that pretty much the entire point of that paragraph of my original post?

I'm talking about the attitude of the MAGA movement, which is basically the Republican Party now. People here do not speak for it.

This isn’t true for fentanyl, but illegal fentanyl is so dangerous that the only people who use it will be stupid/impulsive, so you can’t draw conclusions about the general population from them.

Fentanyl is often laced into other illegal drugs to make them more addictive — or in other words people are being poisoned with it without their consent. A lot of the moral panic over fentanyl is about that aspect.

I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly. Is your contention that we just didn't try hard enough, that we just never had anything as persuasive as "You'll Cowards Don't Even Smoke Crack"?

I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly.

Your memory is at least partially incorrect; drug use fell precipitously during the peak of the DARE era:

On the question of drugs themselves, it seems like Americans, especially teenage Americans, really did change their minds about how dangerous drug use was. Gone were the days of cocaine paraphernalia on magazine covers. For example, high-school seniors (the group for which we have the most data) in 1979 were relatively sanguine about cocaine: only 32 percent said there was “great risk” in trying it. By 1994, that figure peaked at 57 percent. Support for drug-law reform also sputtered out. In 1977, 28 percent of Americans said marijuana should be legal, a 16-point gain over the preceding eight years. In 1985, though, support was back down to 23 percent, and it rose only barely to 25 percent in 1995. The dream of marijuana legalization was dead for a generation.

Initially, the War on Drugs also had a remarkable effect on the total number of people using drugs. The share of high-school seniors using any illicit drug peaked in 1979, at 54 percent. It then fell more or less continuously for the next decade, bottoming out in 1992 at 27 percent. The class of 1992, in other words, was half as likely as the class of 1979 to use illicit drugs. Similarly heartening trends obtained in the adult population. In 1979, there were an estimated 25 million illicit drug users, including about 4.7 million cocaine users; 4.1 million had ever used heroin. By 1992, those numbers had fallen to 12 million, 1.4 million, and 1.7 million respectively.

This was a response to @cjet79:

I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.

But I decided I would make it a top comment, because it's my second favorite subject after sci-fi bullshit: literary snobbery with a side of AI.

First, I like AI. I mean, I like it as a tool. (And yes, I know that "AI" is still a misnomer, I understand that LLMs are just token predictors, and I think people who believe that any neural net is close to actually "thinking" or becoming self-aware, or that really, what are we but pattern-matching echolaliac organisms? are drinking kool-aid). I've used ChatGPT to build applications (I don't do "vibe coding" but I have found it increases my productivity because with the right prompts it helps me use new applications and libraries faster than I could by going through tutorials and manuals). It cannot build a fully functional application (beyond the simplest) by itself, though. It often goes back and forth recommending obsolete or unavailable libraries or suggesting moving a line to the wrong place, then recommending I move it back in the next iteration. It's smart and often makes very good recommendations for improving and optimizing code, and it spots subtle bugs and typos very easily. It's also stupid and often makes terrible recommendations that will break your application.

On the hobby side, I've been making AI art, building Stable Diffusion on my PC and even training some LORAs. The vast majority of AI art is, as they say, "slop" and very recognizable as AI, but that's mostly because the vast majority of AI art is "Type a few sentences into text box, copy picture that results." "A cat making a face." "A cute catgirl with an assault rifle giving a come-hither look to her incel AGP fetishist fans." You will get a picture that meets your requirements, but will be very obviously plastic AI digital slop, like a Walmart t-shirt or a Subway sandwich. If you take the time to learn about inpainting and outpainting and ControlNet and upscaling and advanced prompt engineering and model selection and what all the parameters actually tweak, you'll get good pictures, pictures good enough to win Scott's various AI challenges.

Are they good enough for an AI to become a renowned professional artist with a unique and recognizable style? Not yet. But artists are rage-coping hard insisting they aren't good enough to replace the vast majority of commercial artists who just need to draw hamburgers or cars or Corporate Memphis HR posters, or commissioned MCU fanservice. The sticking point now is no longer extra fingers or shadows going in the wrong direction (though most AIs will still make little mistakes that are tells for the observant- but these can be easily repaired!) but just the fact that it's still painful to go back and forth to get exactly the pose, position, expression, color shade, background, accessories, species of flower, that you want. With real artists you can talk to the artist, and the artist can do rough sketches and ask clarifying questions. With AIs, you generate 100 images, let GPU go brrrrr, and maybe you get one or two that are kinda close and still need extensive inpainting and photoshopping. Conversely, though, I have commissioned some artists in the past and while I was generally satisfied with the results, even a human will never be able to really represent the picture that's in your head. Enough time with Stable Diffusion and some photoshop ability will often actually come closer to the mark. AI art is getting better all the time, but IMO, it is not close to replacing truly talented high-end artists, just as AI is not close to replacing actual rock star programmers and innovators.

It is close to replacing the print shoppers, the commercial graphic arts majors, the SEO optimizers and storefront webapp builders, though.

So, can it write?

Yes and no. I've tried out some of the NovelAI apps and gazed upon the sorry state of Kindle Unlimited, already flooded with thousands of subpar self-published romantasy-written-while-fingering-herself slop and power-fantasy-written-while-jerking-himself slop, and now that has been multiplied seven and sevenfold by AIs churning out the results of all those Udemy and YouTube courses promising you can now make a living on Amazon without actually writing anything. Throw a million books out there with pretty covers and even if you make pennies per title, it adds up. AI has been devastating the short story market for a while now.

If we get to the point where AI can generate good stories, then... I guess I'd be happy to read AI-generated stories? I think we are a long, long way from there, though. And I have experimented. LLMs can generate coherent stories at this point. They have a plot, and some degree of consistency, and I suppose they have all the traditional elements of a story. I am not sure if they are up to generating an entire novel with one prompt yet - I haven't tried, but I know there are tools to let you coach it along to get a whole novel out of it.

But everything I have seen so far is crap. In fairness, most of what's on RoyalRoad (and Wattpad and A03 and Scribd and all the other open platforms) is crap, but you can still tell what's human-written crap and what's AI slop.

I may be in the minority here; it often seems readers just don't care much anymore and want to consoom entertainment units. But waving my snooty literary tastes here, I sometimes despair at the writing some people think is good just because it tickles their fetishessweet spots. Some genres (progressive fantasies, litrpg, a lot of romance) are written so, so badly that if they aren't AI generated, they may as well be. An AI has no prose style except very poor mimicry of other styles; it has no ability to truly craft words and turn a phrase in a way that makes you say "Ah, yes, that is totally how that author writes." It has no way to embed themes and metaphors that echo throughout a book, it has no thematic consistency (often not even tonal consistency). Character arcs, such as they exist, are flat and linear; LLMs cannot grasp "character development" or complexity or nuance in any real way.

If you want a book that's mental bubblegum, a linear power fantasy about a guy getting ever more powerful and punching bigger villains in the face, or a hot chick being fought over by two smoking alphas, and nothing more to it and not even any clever writing to sweeten the experience, just "thing happens and then thing happens and then thing happens" and maybe some purple descriptive modifiers mimicking a high school creative writing exercise, I suppose AIs can do that now. But nothing that even approaches the most derivative pastiches of true classic novels.

And that's just to produce one book. How about a series, a multibook arc preserving plot threads and MacGuffins and character development from one book to the next? An AI cannot do that, and I doubt their ability to do that any time soon.

If you're not really a reader and consuming stories is like popping open a beer and you don't care how it tastes as long as it gives you a buzz, maybe AIs will fill that entertainment need. I sometimes put AI-generated soundtracks on as background music, and while the first few minutes can be okay, after a while it sounds very samey and droney and repetitive, even to my extremely unsophisticated ear (and my musical tastes are, in contrast to my literary tastes, utterly banal and horrible).

I don't doubt AI will continue to improve and eventually we'll have the first award-winning novel completely written by AI that even experts agree is actually... kinda good. But I am skeptical. I think it will take a while. I think even when we get to that point it will be a very particular kind of novel that uses some tricks (like being a surrealist or post-modern experimental novel or something else that avoids the usual conventions of narrative structure and story development).

I think it will be a long, long time before we have an AI Stephen King or Kazuo Ishiguro or Margaret Atwood. But I think we will have AI "authors" doing a "good-enough" job for the proles. Whether the slow-motion death of traditional publishing is a good thing or not I guess depends on how much you hate traditional publishing. I think gatekeeping is good, and that's what traditional publishing does. Publishers put out a lot of books I am not interested in and even think are very bad, but I can at least tell from the cover, the blurbs, and the author if it's likely to meet my minimal standards of readability. It's not like sifting through sewage for something sparkly. More like picking a few good apples out of a bin of mostly rotten ones.

I celebrate the flourishing of platforms for anyone to put their work out there and a handful of indie authors are killing it on Amazon, but increasingly they are no different from the handful of authors who make it big in trad publishing- there are a handful of big winners, but most earn below minimum wage for their efforts, and now many thousands who basically earn beer money if that are competing with LLMs who can scratch the same itch they do.

It often goes back and forth recommending obsolete or unavailable libraries or suggesting moving a line to the wrong place, then recommending I move it back in the next iteration. It's smart and often makes very good recommendations for improving and optimizing code, and it spots subtle bugs and typos very easily. It's also stupid and often makes terrible recommendations that will break your application.

I agree.

AI is indistinguishable from a junior dev.

While I do agree with everything substantive and specific you wrote, I think the framing falls into a trap common to a lot of thinking about AI. Specifically, that AI will simply extend or accelerate a given domain and technology. In this case, publishing and fiction.

There's not going to be an AI written book that wins any prestigious award. This is because it would be foolish to simply have an AI write one immutable story. Instead, "AI writers" will be either fine-tuned or wholly trained models that people use to write stories on the fly that still adhere to a central plot, world, and character collection.

To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)

Now, you're creating new content that still stays within the "world" of GoT. And it works at innumerable levels of detail. The casual consooomer will write one sentence slop generator stuff - and love it. The aficionado will create complex subplots and tweak small elements of character profiles to see how these reverberate throughout the grander story. I predict that once the cost of GPUs gets low enough (or models get efficient enough) people will literally be writing and producing full scale movies at home.

Instead of human authors and writers being the nucleus of "art" it will be a constellation of models, with humans recombining them ad infinitum. I look at this as a good thing. You can un-cancel your favorite show (The Wire!), Hemingway becomes immortal and produces infinite books. Unlimited GoT fanfic erotic (......yay?)

I know this will happen because I'm already doing it. My mental bubblegum is hardboiled neo-noir paperbacks. Think something in the vein of The Last Good Kiss. Over the course of a dozen 2 - 3 hour evenings, I've put together a GitHub repo of characters, settings, themes etc. I've used an AI toolchain to develop scenes. I then line edit them mostly for continuity issues (which AI still stumbles on) or to make a sudden plot twist because I feel like it. I am not doing this to publish a book. I am doing this because I genuinely find it far more entertaining and exciting that Netflix scrolling or re-watching the actually good stuff. And it's low stakes. I don't really care if the plot doesn't quite hold together. I don't care if a character's motivation self-contradicts after a while. It's fun. It's unlimited fun. Over the 40+ hours I've put into it, I've probably spent $100 in API credits. You can definitely argue that's actually quite a bit less cost effective than Netflix etc. But I believe the received value is excellent.

AI will not be a linear extension of current industries. I'm not saying it's a step-function for everything either. It will simply be a very hard to predict tangent. In many cases, this will be absolutely good for all parties. In many cases it will be a massive tradeoff and shift in the "center of gravity." I think there are only a few cases I can see where it represents a system-breaking potential.

Anyways, I'm off to writeread about Detective Jar-Jar Binks' latest case involving Anton Chigurh.

You may be right that AI basically creates a new sort of entertainment experience (e.g., tooling together a pipeline to create your own homebrew fanfiction). And there is nothing wrong with just doing what's fun. My reaction was mostly just, I guess, a defense of actually caring about literary quality. Not that everything you read/enjoy has to be high quality (I like my litrpgs and cheesy space operas too.)

Oh, I think you were right and have a very valid point.

In regards to "high art" literature, I think we're going to see a revenge of the typewriter. Writers will make a point to not only not use AI, but to disconnect entirely and write only from inside their own brain. I earnestly believe some will even resort to using typewriters again as a verifiable medium - there's no way I AI'ed this. Hell, maybe some will even return to longhand.

And this will create both excellent literature, and a snobbery class of weirdo "purebread writers" who still turn out slop, but they do it with artisanal pencils and free-range raised tree paper.

Tree paper? Like the stuff you wipe your ass with? I only read works scribed on vellum.

My use case is similar to what you describe. A gacha that I play has 300+ playable characters, that’s 50k of possible interactions just one-on-one (100k if you care who’s on top, har-har) — forget official writing, there are not enough fanfic authors for that. DeepSeek might not get what I’m going for with an experiment victim who retains emotions but has trouble expressing them, and a guy with literal emotion transceiver as a race trait who just doesn’t have many emotions, but after pointing it out it can write a passable scene between the two.

I’d be surprised if none of gachas are working on officially integrating such generative functionality already.

I predict that once the cost of GPUs gets low enough (or models get efficient enough) people will literally be writing and producing full scale movies at home.

I'm willing to predict a >50% chance that some guy in his basement (okay, maybe expand it to a "dedicated team of five or fewer people") manage to produce a feature length (90 minute) film that is completely AI Generated and, to the general audience's view, is on par with a mid or low-budget Hollywood fare, in terms of 'quality' of the end product... by the end of THIS year. Its already been 1 year since I saw the Shadowglades 'trailer' which, despite being just 2 minutes of disconnected imagery, portrayed a world I would really like to enter and set stories in. And just today those folks put out a new trailer that is just as visually interesting, and much more dynamic and coherent! I can tell who the protagonist is!

I'd predict it WON'T be an action movie because no video AI I've seen can produce a legible fight scene, plus all the model restrictions on depicting violence. Not Scorcese quality for sure, and it'll play to AI's strengths and eschew its shortcomings, but it will be coherent visually and plotwise.

But even if that basement guy started TODAY, if he can produce 1 minute of usable footage a day, on average, it'd be 90 days to get the footage, which leaves another 90 to edit, adjust, produce (AI generated) soundtrack, and fine tune actor performances and 'line reads'. Doable for a dedicated enough, decently talented enthusiast with enough money to burn on the credits. And that assumes someone isn't already halfway done with one already.

I'm already champing at the bit to start work on the pilot episode of an anime adaptation of one of my favorite books, and the early results I've been getting with just the free options available have convinced me I could pull off producing a ~20 minute episode in about 1 month if I were able to fully 'lock in' to doing it. I won't lock in, life just won't allow that right now but it'd be such an invigorating project that, like you and your pulp novel generator, I'd be willing to spend like $100/month or so just working on it for the sheer pleasure of seeing the end product, even if its never published or enjoyed by anyone else.

How much are you willing to wager on this claim? What are examples of a baseline of mid-budget Hollywood?

"Mid-Budget Hollywood" would be approximately any recent A24 film..

With stringent enough definition and an agreeable arbiter, I'd put up $500 in favor of it, at even odds.

Note I'm NOT saying the film gets a theatrical release or gets published on a streaming platform, just that someone releases the movie for the viewing public, even if its just a random download link, and an average American citizen could watch it and NOT immediately guess it was AI-Generated. Doesn't have to fool a film buff, but also could fool an adult, not just a kid.

I'd also still consider it a win if the film were less than 90 minutes long, but that's the fairish benchmark for 'feature length' that would differentiate it from a TV episode.

@faceh @phailyoor It wasn’t done with AI, but one guy in Latvia already managed to effectively make an academy award winning box office success from his basement. It’s called Flow

Yes, it is already happening, and it was even before AI. Entertainment media can be provided bespoke - that's exactly what artists working on commission do. For a whole lot of people and purposes, the quality/price curve is or very soon will be in AI's favor. I have a couple hours of music about wizards drift racing and I am eager for the moment I can poke at an AI for a bit and receive custom made retro game bubblegum tailored to my exact whims.

The problem for writers is that outside of really amazing talents, 99% of it is some flavor of bubble gum. You don’t need to create award winning stuff.

Take science fiction. A lot of it is some form of retooled space opera. If I took the basics of such a story — a story set in space, space battles, robots, and so on — I’d probably be able to prompt a LLM into producing a decent first draft of a space opera. Taking story elements and recombining them is how the shelves of barns and noble get filled. Yes, most of it, from a literary standpoint, is crap. I don’t think most people who appreciate good literary fiction are going to dispute that 99% of the stuff available is even decent as literature. It’s only better than trash TV in the sense that it requires you read the story yourself rather than having actors read the story to you. But then again that’s what the public generally wants in entertainment. They don’t want to have to think about what they’re reading, they don’t even really want to notice any particular literary quirks of the author. They want to mostly escape the world and for the most part be able to congratulate themselves for reading instead of watching a video or playing spider solitaire on their phones.

To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)

I feel like apps like Infinite Worlds are already tapping into this kind of thing. It's a relatively decent AI Choose-Your-Own-Adventure website that allows for a human creative to set up "worlds" with set plot points or details for players to play through. It's not as good as my favorite AI-powered game to date (the sadly defunct Medieval Problems), but it seems to have taken a writing forum I frequent by storm.

I lament the continued decline in quality for modern media, particularly in writing and pacing. A part of me hopes studios start using AI so it either blows up in their faces and they start valuing quality again, or it creates so much slop some of them focus on quality to stand out.

In somewhat similar vein I care not a zilch about some acquaintances’ complaints about AI coming to music and overriding everything with slop. From my point of view that already happened 25 years ago, only with human slop (aka modern trends) not just overwhelming quality stuff in volume but outright putting it in front of execution squad and pulling all the triggers at once to ensure none of it remains except as old recordings.

I am getting pissed off with the AI assistant crap being suggested to me at work (no, Adobe, I do not need the inbuilt AI assistant to "simplify this document for me" when I'm reconciling a blinkin' bank statement) and I think much of the enthusiasm over AI is because it's all software engineering.

It seems to be useful (not perfect but useful) if you're writing code. Or if you're dumping your homework on it to write your essays and cheat your exams for you. But for use by ordinary people otherwise? Apart from the slop art and extruded fiction product you mention, I don't yet see it doing anything useful.

I don't need it to write a shopping list and order online for me, just in case someone wants to use that as an example. That's for people who only buy the same things over and over and have more money than time.

If anyone has an example of "this is how I use it for work/at home and it really saves me time and mental energy", I'd be glad to hear.

I occasionally find it useful for queries that don't work well in ordinary Internet search engines. Here's my Gemini history.

Write an initial inquiry email asking an architect about the feasibility of building a small custom house.

What is the legal doctrine under which, if a law was passed but was never made available for public viewing, then the law is not valid?

Has a law firm ever been sued for monopolistic behavior?

What is the purpose of a living room? Is a table useful to have in a living room?

Is there a specific name for guns that store the magazine in the handle?

Is AV1 better than HEVC?

In booking an international flight, is it reasonable to prefer domestic airlines?

Imagine that a book has section 1, and within that section both text and section 1.1. Is there a standard method of referencing the text in section 1 without referencing the text in section 1.1?

In making a website, is there any reason to refrain from using XHTML?

If anyone has an example of "this is how I use it for work/at home and it really saves me time and mental energy", I'd be glad to hear.

I don't, but I have a related observation. Because there are differently capable LLMs available, we have not a "one screen two movies" a situation but reverse, "nominally same movie in two screens". One screen is 4k ultraHD and other is camcorded VHS tape. In this thread and other forums, savvy people truly test this shit, constantly trying out which is the current state of the art, and enthusiastically adopt it, and report amazing results. I almost believe it is that good. Meanwhile, at work, my coworkers are not savvy at all yet enthusiastically adopt the default-tier ChatGPT. Which is shit. I call it ShitGPT.

I have watched how "senior" engineer who used to bit perhaps above his skill level but quite okay starting do quite stupid stuff, like in live code review call call copypasting ChatGPT outputs without looking at it, including the time when ShitGPT decided it wants to write the answer in C# instead of C++. Another engineer caused a week of mayhem because he uncritically trusted ChatGPT "summarization" of library documentation, except halfway the ShitGPT had stopped summarizing documentation and switched to hallucinating, causing the most curious bugs.

If anyone has an example of "this is how I use it for work/at home and it really saves me time and mental energy", I'd be glad to hear.

I wanted to make slow-rising pizza dough from scratch. The online slow-rising whole-wheat bread recipe I liked gave all proportion in weights. I don't have a cooking scale. So I uploaded it to Claude and asked it to convert the recipe to cup measurements. I noticed the water-to-flour ratio has changed, so I had it explain why, and learned quite a bit about the role protein plays in dough. Then I had it re-do the recipe, substituting semolina for a quarter of the flour. Finally, I had it scale the recipe for two particularly sized pizzas I planned to make. Time: about 10 minutes, because I side-tracked into the protein thing and had to check it out elsewhere.

Two days later, I get two delicious pizzas.

I noticed the water-to-flour ratio has changed, so I had it explain why,

I would love to hear more.

Higher-protein flour absorbs more water, and that protein is what makes the dough elastic. All-purpose flour is 9-11% protein, bread flour 11-13% (depending on brand), semolina 12-13%, whole-wheat 13-14%. Recipes with the higher-protein flour will need more water.

I have learned, through trial and much error, never to make bread either from all-purpose flour, or from 100% whole-wheat.

Also, it seems that bakers really do rely on ratio-by-weight, rather than ratio-by-volume. When I asked Claude to convert the recipe from 1000 grams of "Typo 00" flour to have a quarter of it be semolina, it gave me:

  • 750 g Tipo 00 flour (W300) [6 cups]
  • 250 g semolina flour [1½ cups]

Noticing that the cups did not add up to a quarter of semolina, I asked it to re-check its calculations or explain its results, and it did, explaining that semolina is denser.

I've used AI to write cover letters on job applications. One of those applications got me a teaching job which paid $20,000 more than what I was doing before, so if the cover letter made any difference ChatGPT Plus has more than paid for itself.

On the same job, I used it to generate a slogan which the administrators liked, and some images including the school mascot which had a very positive reception.

Sadly, it didn't save me from getting fired at the end of the year for failing to control the kids.

I've fed prose I've already written into it to make refinements or check for quality. I just wish you could get it to stop glazing everything put in front of it.

I prompted Deepseek with:

In your criticism, be direct and even-handed, do not provide boilerplate politeness and compliments.

and it replied dryly enough, although don't quote me on the quality of its advice.

The sticking point now is no longer extra fingers or shadows going in the wrong direction (though most AIs will still make little mistakes that are tells for the observant- but these can be easily repaired!) but just the fact that it's still painful to go back and forth to get exactly the exactly the pose, position, expression, color shade, background, accessories, species of flower, that you want.

This feels like MOSTLY a solved problem with ChatGPT's o3 image generation capability.

You can feed it a few reference images for what you're trying to get to, including poses and background with a sufficiently precise prompt you WILL get something very, VERY accurate to your intentions. It does NOT do a great job on making precise adjustments from there, and currently it doesn't do inpainting but take the image it produced and running it through Stable Diffusion or just manual photoshop gets you to the finish line.

One thing its is actually very good at is feeding it an image representing a tattoo you're thinking of getting, feeding it an image of your bare skin in the area you want that tattoo, then it can produce an image showing you what that tattoo would look like. And THEN you can pay a human artist to hopefully execute on that vision well.

I have had annoying problems where it remembers something you asked for earlier and keeps including that in the image even after you tell it to move on or forget, but that's fixed by starting a new window with the most recent output.

I don't see how a human artist can outcompete this on cost or time. I CAN see how you might still pay a human to actually do the work of interacting with the AI and modifying outputs to get close to a particular vision.

Similarly, SONG PRODUCTION is now just about indistinguishable from full human now. To me, a decently done full AI song will have almost zero tells unless the creator set out to make it obvious.

I don't doubt AI will continue to improve and eventually we'll have the first award-winning novel completely written by AI that even experts agree is actually... kinda good. But I am skeptical. I think it will take a while.

Betting against the AI capabilities approaching peak human is probably a losing proposition unless we ARE very, very close to the plateau of what can be achieved with the current paradigm.

AI is now better than the best chess players, and better than the best GO players, and while Novel-writing is a different combination of skills and intellect than either of those, the AIs have already learned to write coherently and so I expect tacking on the additional capabilities will scale the machine into Stephen King territory pretty quickly.

This feels like MOSTLY a solved problem with ChatGPT's o3 image generation capability.

My understanding is that o3 image gen is identical to the regular chatgpt image gen (famed for the ghiblification wave). Both cases call out to gpt-image-1 which to be fair is much better than dalle and stable diffusion and the like at following prompts.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-image-1 https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/o3

Unless we ARE very, very close to the plateau of what can be achieved with the current paradigm.

This is actually a very defensible position

This is actually a very defensible position

It was a very defensible position every time, then some new advance blew past it.

I'll listen to the defense, but I'm not placing my bets on that side.

And yes, I know that "AI" is still a misnomer, I understand that LLMs are just token predictors, and I think people who believe that any neural net is close to actually "thinking" or becoming self-aware, or that really, what are we but pattern-matching echolaliac organisms? are drinking kool-aid

I am kind of in the middle ground between "they are just stupid stochastic parrots, they don't think!" and "obviously they will develop super-intelligent subagents if we just throw more neurons at the problem!", while I suspect that you are a bit more likely to agree with the former.

The latter case is easy to make. If you train a sufficiently large LLM on chess games written in some notation, the most efficient way to predict the next token will be for it to develop pathways which learn how to play chess -- and at least for chess, this seems to mostly have happened. Sure, a specialized NN whose design takes the game into account will likely crush an LLM with a similar amount of neurons, but nevertheless this shows that if your data contains a lot of chess games, the humble task of next-token-prediction will lead to you learning to play chess (if you can spare the neurons).

By analogy, if you are trained on a lot of written material which took intelligence to produce, it could be that the humble next-token-predictor will also acquire intelligence to better fulfill its task.

I will be the first to admit that LLMs are horribly inefficient compared to humans. I mean, a LLM trained on humanity's text output can kinda imitate Shakespeare, and that is impressive in itself. But if we compare that to good old Bill, the latter seems much more impressive. The amount of verbal input he was trained on is the tiniest fraction of what an LLM was trained on, and Shakespeare was very much not in the training set at all! Sure, he also got to experience human emotions first-hand, but having thousand of human life-years worth of description of human emotions should be adequate compensation for the LLM. (Also, Bill's output was much more original than what a LLM will deliver if prompted to imitate him.)

Of course, just because we have seen an LLM train itself to grok chess, that does not mean that the same mechanism will also work in principle and in practice to make it solve arbitrary tasks which require intelligence, just like we can not conclude from the fact that a helium balloon can lift a post card that it is either in principle or in practice possible with enough balloons to lift a ship of the line and land it on the Moon. (As we have the theory, we can firmly state that lifting is possible, but going to the Moon is not. Alas, for neural networks, we lack a similar theory.)

More on topic, I think that before we will see LLMs writing novels on their own, LLMs might become co-authors. Present-day LLMs can already do some copy-editing work. Bouncing world building ideas off an LLM, asking 'what could be possible consequences for some technology $X for a society' might actually work. Or someone who is skilled with their world-building and plotlines but not particularly great at finding the right words might ask an LLM to come up with five alternatives for an adjective (with connotations and implications) and then pick one. This will still not create great prose, but not everyone reads books for their mastery of words.

I am kind of in the middle ground between "they are just stupid stochastic parrots, they don't think!" and "obviously they will develop super-intelligent subagents if we just throw more neurons at the problem!", while I suspect that you are a bit more likely to agree with the former.

I think this falls into the "shoggoth wearing a smiley face mask" meme that came about last year.

Its very clear to me that there's something in there that we can consider "intelligent" that is performing "reasoning." (I avoid the terms "cognition" and "consciousness" or "qualia" here).

It takes inputs, performs some kind of calculations and produce an output that is meaningfully derived from the inputs and this means it can do useful 'work' with that info. Inferences, formation of beliefs, and possibly analyzing the truth value of a statement.

But the processes by which it does that DO NOT resemble human intelligence, we've just made it capable of accepting human-legible inputs and expressing its outputs in human legible form too.

So expecting it to think 'efficiently' the way humans do is missing the forest for the trees. Or perhaps the brain for the neurons.

Hell, maybe it never really masters novel-writing before it gets smart enough to kill everyone, but it got good at the set of skills it needed while we were trying to teach it to write novels.

If you train a sufficiently large LLM on chess games written in some notation, the most efficient way to predict the next token will be for it to develop pathways which learn how to play chess -- and at least for chess, this seems to mostly have happened.

Yeah, but surprisingly poorly. 2024-era LLMs can be prompted to play chess at amateur to skilled amateur levels, but to get to the superhuman levels exhibited by doing move evaluations with a chess-specific neural net, you need to train it using self-play too, and to get to the greatly-superhuman levels exhibited by the state-of-the-art chess neural networks of several years ago, you need to also combine the neural nets with a framework like Monte Carlo Tree Search. Just pushing human data into a neural network only gets you a third of the way there.

I'd guess that the "just pushing human data into a neural network only gets you a third of the way there" rule of thumb applies to a lot more than just chess, but it's a lot harder to "self-play" with reality than it is with chess, so we can't just make up the difference with more core-hours this time. Using "reasoning" models has helped, a little like how tree search helps in chess, by allowing models to try out multiple ideas with more than just one token's worth of thinking before backtracking and settling on their answer, but with a chess or go tree search there's still a ground truth model keeping things from ever going entirely off the rails, and reasoning models don't have that. I'm not sure what the AGI equivalent of self-play might be, and without that they're still mostly interpolating within rather than extrapolating outside the limits of their input data. Automation of mathematical proofs is perhaps the most "real-world" area of thought for which we can formalize (using a theorem language+verifier like Lean as the ground truth) a kind of self-play, but even if we could get LLMs to the point where they can come up with and prove Fermat's Last Theorem on their own, how much of the logic and creativity required for that manages to transfer to other domains?

with a chess or go tree search there's still a ground truth model keeping things from ever going entirely off the rails

MuZero would like a word.

At one point during training, the training environment was needed to keep MuZero from going off the rails and making illegal moves. Once it learns the rules of the game well enough, though, the policy network becomes sufficiently unlikely to output illegal moves that I expect it would continue to improve indefinitely through self play without sampling any illegal moves.

I do wonder if anyone has tried that experiment. It seems like it gets at the core of one of the cruxes people have about recursive self improvement.

My full original comment:

I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories.

I haven't tried too hard to generate my own. But if one of the stories I was following on Royal road turned out to be an AI story I wouldn't be unhappy except that most of them have a release schedule that is clearly within human abilities, and I'd want more. Once they got revealed I'd expect them to stop sandbagging it.

My limited attempts to get AI to generate interesting stories have kinda sucked. In one instance it took my writing and declared it too adult and I legitimately wasn't sure what the hell it was talking about. Those were early chatgpt days though.

I still have this unverified sense that AI can produce pop, but not jazz. Meaning average mass appealing stuff, but weird individuality is harder for it to generate.

Re-reading my first sentence as standalone I guess it could be interpreted one of two ways:

  1. I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, as they are now.
  2. I am willing and happy to read AI generated stories, if I could not tell the difference between them and human written stories I already enjoy.

I meant it in the second sense. I definitely think the AI stories right now are a lot of hot garbage, for all the reasons you've mentioned.

I think I'm a little bit broken in my set of preferences for certain art forms. For a long time I've lacked the ability to understand and explain why. Video games have helped, but music might have the best metaphor, even if it doesn't apply to me.

First, imagine that there is an objective ranking for how good a piece of music can be. The ranking stands regardless of individual preferences. More sophisticated listeners who can appreciate music better will have their preferences more in line with this objective ranking.

Second, imagine you have some unique ears, and the sound of string instruments just really bothers you. So you prefer any music without string instruments.

Most of the best music includes some string instruments, so you end up not liking most of the "best" music. The best rating doesn't require string instruments, its just that it makes some things easier in the course of crafting the music. A theoretical best song could be crafted that has no string instruments, it would just be much more difficult. Your tastes end up looking very unsophisticated. You gravitate towards an amateur community of song writers that share your hatred of string instruments, and some of them are just bad at writing any songs with string instruments. They write songs that are relatively bad on the objective ranking, but it removes string instruments at least, so it becomes more tolerable than mainstream stuff for you.

Something like this has happened to me in regards to reading and literature. There are common story elements like certain foreshadowing techniques and certain character development tricks that really grate on me. And there are story settings that I dislike, mostly modern and non-magical settings are boring to me.

I've ended up in a weird spot, like the stringed instrument hater. I can only really enjoy the other authors that also hate stringed instruments, or the amateurs that can't even write stringed instruments into their music. I am probably reading stories and literature that is "objectively" worse on some cosmic literature scale, and I'm well aware that it makes my tastes look unsophisticated and "bad" to the elites of the literature world. But I can't stop and won't stop, because I have some subjective preferences that entirely override the importance of the objective scale.

That's interesting, any examples of what literature elements you don't like?

A lot of foreshadowing techniques. It takes me out of the story when I see it, because I'm strongly reminded that it is a story with an end destination in mind by the author.

Certain ways of handling characters. Death for side characters when the author wants them out of a story. Torture or horrible circumstances for a main character as a way to toughen them up or get the reader to feel sorry for them.

In terms of slop, I’m surprised Amazon hasn’t cracked down on AI-generated knockoff scams. I recently purchased Graydon Carter’s new memoir, and in searching for “Graydon Carter memoir”, the first result returned was the actual hardcover, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines.

Then, the AI-generated paperbacks and e-books immediately followed: Graydon Carter Memoir 2025: From the Golden Age of Mazines to the Digital…, Graydon Carter Memoir 2025: When the Going Was Grand, Graydon Carter Memoir: When the Going Was Perfect, Graydon Carter: The Biography…

Perhaps Amazon is just dealing with a game of whack-a-mole, or maybe they don’t really care?

Given all the horror stories I've casually heard regarding chinese sellers and re-sellers on Amazon, I doubt they care at all.

This is amazing, it's like Borges' Library of Babel.

I think if I were Amazon, I think I'd have a hard time drawing a line between actual content and low-effort slop. Though honestly that sounds like a great use for LLMs.

That’s a great reference. ❤️

I think for a lot of genre fiction, an AI book edited by a human would probably be just fine for the median reader. Most of the published books in genre fiction are written to be read quickly and forgotten just as quickly, written more for people who want to read in transit between places (say on a bus, train, or plane) or as a pastime on vacation. It’s not nor was it ever intended to be serious reading. And while I don’t think AI at present can write well enough to be read as a beach read, it can produce something that would be publishable with a reasonable amount of developmental and line editing.

The advice for producing such novels is actually pretty cookie cutter. There are known plot development tools (save the cat is the most common), character development sheets, and style advice. Training an AI to use the beat sheets and other advice would produce a reasonable rough draft of a novel. Editing those novels might still require a human touch, but it’s probably not prohibitively expensive.

And yes, I know that "AI" is still a misnomer, I understand that LLMs are just token predictors, and I think people who believe that any neural net is close to actually "thinking" or becoming self-aware, or that really, what are we but pattern-matching echolaliac organisms? are drinking kool-aid

But you then go on to talk about how its helpful to you, how it can do art and coding and stuff. Doesn't that mean it's thinking? What is thinking if not intellectual labour that produces some kind of useful output?

See the cartoons here: https://x.com/emollick/status/1920700991298572682

How are these not proper newspaper-tier cartoons? It's not just pattern-matching, see the Cthulhu ones. How does that not require some kind of thought? If thought isn't required to make them, then so much the worse for thought. They're more amusing than many actual New Yorker cartoons.

It cannot build a fully functional application (beyond the simplest) by itself, though.

What model are you talking about? When you say ChatGPT, that could be GPT4omini. It could be GPT4o. It could be o3-mini, o1-pro, o4-mini-high, GPT4.5 (RIP). OpenAI does a very good job at confusing people here but there are major differences between 'slop for free' and 'serious compute for the subscribers'.

With a lot of finnagling and wrangling, I can make Sonnet 3.7 produce a fully functional application with a database, logging, UI (admittedly not a fantastic UI), user authentication... It's not exactly simple, maybe 8000 lines of code, some quite long and complex functions. I'm nontechnical. It does need my human wisdom and feedback but nonetheless, it's writing all the code. And while the code isn't perfect, it is fully functional.

I detect a fair bit of warranted snobbishness from those initiated in the tech world about AI. Yes, there are a bunch of idiots making simple apps on localhost:5000 and not even knowing what that means or why their bros can't click the link. Yet there is also unwarranted snobbishness. There are people making real projects with AI alone and earning revenue. See levelsio on twitter, he was making money with his multiplayer plane game thing. It's not a AAA game but it shows that this isn't just a toy.

See also this one-shot coding challenge from gemini, this isn't exactly simple stuff: https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/1922126885783281755

It has no way to embed themes and metaphors that echo throughout a book, it has no thematic consistency (often not even tonal consistency)

I observed Sonnet 3.6 inserting themes in a story unprompted, it was a noticeable difference from 3.5. Not amazing themes but themes consistently and consciously referenced nonetheless.

When comparing AI drawing abilities to writing abilities, I think a key difference is that for us as humans drawing slop is harder than writing slop. What I mean by this is that an AI can generate something like a 4K image of aliens with energy swords rendered in a hyper detailed yet ultra generic fashion, and the output is something that only 0.01% of humans have the technical skill to create. But when you ask an AI to write pages and pages of Shakespeare and the results are cliché ridden gibberish, you can only look at it and say that other than in terms of scale, I could’ve easily made this crap, if through some dada-style cut-and-paste technique if nothing else. Essentially putting letters in sequence to form words is easier than drawing entire images, and so when AI generates images, even though they’re just reconstituted from data sets on the basis of predictive software and so involve no actual drawing, they still seem impressive.


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!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats