site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2638 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 8, 2025

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

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

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

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

How do you use discord?

I don't need, like, a literal user's guide. I mean, how do you use it in a way that's actually practical, fun, and not overwhelming?

I grew up with AIM and online chat rooms, so i'm not a stranger to this sort of thing. But discord just seems so hectic and overwhelming. It's, well, discord in a literal sense.

Every channel I join, starts with this huge list of rules that I have to agree before I can even see anything. Then there's usually a host of hidden channels that all require separate hidden handshakes to enter. It's policed by mods who seem to take their jobs very seriously. Then there's so many different users, all spamming things at each other, and so many different notifications. It's literally impossible for me to read everything even from just one discord channel, let alone if I'm in multiple.

Bad experiences that I've had:

  • had been chatting with people on there for a while. Tried to set up a dinner to finally meet offline at an event. It got too hectic and we never managed to find each other.
  • had been chatting for a while with a different small group. We had our own subchannel led by a mod. The mod apparently had some hiddend drama with the admin (I have no idea what), got banned, and our whole group was kicked out. We all lost contact.
  • Went to a newly created channel where there was only 1 other regular user. We chatted for a bit about random stuff, then got warned by a mod for being "offtopic" and moved to separate rooms. We were literally the only people there.
  • in general just a flood of notifications and messages that I find incredibly distracting. I can't keep it open if I need to do anything else. I have no idea how some people manage to just sit on there all day and respond to everything.

I join Discord servers with a specific purpose in mind, not to hang out.

An Arma unit? I'll join to have buddies to play with.

AI related? So I can keep up with the news and shoot the shit.

IMO the best way to keep Discord pleasant is to not join public servers. It works best for small groups of people who know each other, like an MMO guild or similar groups of friends. I've joined large public servers before and they are kind of miserable.

well, i don't have any group of friends so... guess I'm doomed to misery lol.

You can make friends by going to a discord server about a topic you like.

I mostly don't. I belong to product discords so I can ask questions about their code's weird behavior. This works great for me but they've probably answered my question a thousand times and I can't google their previous response.

I hang out in writer's discords so I can sometimes get muted for a day for making a joke that tangentially references drug use in a channel that allows the presence of children. This is stupid but I'm not gonna get bothered by it. It's just easier to taboo whole topics of conversation than make intelligent calls about the difference between a joke that references something and corruption of the youth.

If I actually want to, y'know, chat with people? I either use my own server or a friend's server. It's pretty much the only way to avoid officious mods, big public channels wade through so much shit on a daily basis that anyone who mods one will eventually become trigger happy. For the notifications: If a channel gives me a notification I don't need literally once, I mute it forever. You're basically never gonna regret muting things on discord in my experience.

Yeah that first case is what frustrates me so much about the modern internet. it's all ephemeral, designed to prevent being google searched. I guess that's good for a quick private chat, but it's really annoying when you just want to ask a frequently asked question.

Seems like you gotta have friends to make friends... everything is like a job search now.

  • mute servers unless every single message on there is important
  • mute channels you don't need so they don't light up
  • mute categories
  • set notification settings on the server to "only @mentions" or none
  • don't join silly servers

This should be enough that you only see the big red (1) if someone addressed you directly or has the privilege to ping everyone.

I've been using discord mostly for keeping tabs on specific games' updates as well as a few thematic communities, as well as a personal friends' group. I have no recollection of any server being that silly besides, ironically, the motte/rdrama BotC server. If I don't need to watch a server, I don't even quit it, I just mute it completely and move it down the list.

That sounds like "the best way to use it is to not use it at all." But yeah I'll try adding more mutes.

the best way to use it is to not use it at all

Yes.

It's about curating what you actually want to use.

I mostly use it for three purposes:

  1. Voice chat with friends.
  2. Ask questions about software that I can't find the answers to on Stack Overflow.
  3. Receive updates on niche computer games.

And even for those two latter purposes, Discord is more annoying than useful most of the time. It's like 4chan on crack, with the lack of anonymity doing far more to encourage attention-whoring than to discourage shitposting. It is, as you said, loud, chaotic, nonsensical, a maelstrom of inanity, people screaming over each other, incomprehensible memes, an unceasing discharge of shitpost. It's a chatroom from hell, for zoomers. Everyone's an autistic transsexual furry and has a caricature instead of a personality. It's incoherent, anathema to attention span, outright hostile to any attempts at having a conversation. Anything that doesn't fit on-screen with the latest messages in a given channel may as well never have been written.

I hate it, but still use it because for many purposes, it's the only way to obtain specific pieces of information.

Its most-appreciated feature as far as I'm concerned is the option to mute channels.

I mean, how do you use it in a way that's actually practical, fun, and not overwhelming?

Practical and not overwhelming: Do like I do; minimize your interactions with it, try to block out the most annoying parts while getting the information you want. Give up on it in cases where this does not work; it's never worth the effort of diving deeper.

Fun: Become one with the mob. Embrace the brain damage. I can't imagine there's a sane way.

It’s said that the reason Northern European Ashkenazim often have light eyes and light skin is because these genes were selected for over ~1000 years. Doesn’t this mean that the health consequences of inadequate vitamin D are more serious than commonly considered? Given that the predominant darker skin tones must have been significantly selected against. And doesn’t this poke a hole in the theory that pale skin was sexually selected, given that Ashkenazim marriage patterns were mostly predicated on business ties and rabbinical performance, rather than an individual’s own tastes?

Why are you “it’s said”ing? We have genomic data. Wikipedia:

A 2013 study of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA by a team led by Martin B. Richards tested all 16,600 DNA units of mtDNA, and found that the four main female Ashkenazi founders had descent lines that were established in Europe 10,000 to 20,000 years in the past[165] while most of the remaining minor founders also have a deep European ancestry. The study argued that the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Near East or the Caucasus, but instead assimilated within Europe, primarily of Italian and Old French origins.[166] The study estimated that more than 80% of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to (mainly prehistoric Western) Europe, and only 8% from the Near East, while the origin of the remainder is undetermined.[167][165] According to the study this "point to a significant role for the conversion of women in the formation of Ashkenazi communities."

They’re just Europeans, albeit from a parallel, ancient strain. The men are the ones with strict Levantine ancestry.

The pale eyes are a dead giveaway. Northern latitudes are perfectly compatible with dark eyes.

Edit: kept reading, and more recent studies estimate more and more European ancestry. So it goes.

I know about the DNA research but the average Hasidic Jew still looks more pale than the average Italian (Hasidim being a good example of “pure Ashkenazim”)

How did illegal immigration become so polarizing? The last two Democratic presidents prior to Biden, Clinton and Obama, both talked about maintaining strong borders and deported millions of illegal aliens. Suddenly in the last few years, Democrats act like it's always been our cultural policy to allow whoever wants in, to live here. Is this really just a crass strategy to build a larger blue voting base, or is it something more?

There's three major stories I'm aware of:

The Red Tribe story starts in 1986, where President Reagan promoted and passed a major immigration bill with two central components. On one hand, almost all existing immigrants, regardless of their status, would be given an amnesty and treated as if they had legally immigrated for purposes such as deportation and naturalization. In turn, we were supposed to get a massive enforcement apparatus discouraging further illegal immigration. But like all Wimpyisms, we found that the stuff that took place today happened reliably, and the prong that was supposed to happen in the future faded away; the various rules to cut off the employment of illegal immigrants were left unenforced, and various court cases would make deportation harder even in the rare case anyone was caught.

((Note that there is no honest Blue Tribe analysis of the impact of these policies: compare the wikipedia's "allowing for the legalization of nearly 60,000 undocumented immigrants from 1986 to 1989 alone" with the actual source).

This was, on its own, frustrating. But it did not escalate immediately. What really brought the tension to the forefront was the 2013 Gang of Eight bill. While a lot of broad stroke discussions of the proposal (championed by Rubio) heavily promoted an increased enforcement mandate, the combination of interactions with the then-controversial ACA and widespread loss of trust in claims made about the ACA made it far more critical. And then the language actual came out, and one of the biggest enforcement mechanisms was a entry/exit database that had been required by statute for over a decade-and-a-half already. This time they'd really do it because the amnesty would only be provisional until (some of) these enforcement actions happened... because ten years of provisional status would be a lot more politically costly to act against. And that goal leaked.

So a lot of conservatives absolutely lost their shit, Rubio was a joke for months. A lot of mainstream conservatives swore, at length, that they would not even consider any bill that did not prioritize enforcement first. Meanwhile, the mainstream democratic party saw any bill without a broad amnesty component as actively useless.

... which was itself, in turn, an escalation. After seeing the conservative response, President Obama, and pushed DACA and DAPA, along with a number of other various non-prosecution policies. While not all of these would manage to go into action (albeit some were only blocked officially), the blue tribe calling conservatives the Party of No weren't exactly wrong! And the next ten years would primarily focused around lawfare; because neither side could pass legislation the other would even consider, various executive actions were the only real option, and because this required no negotiation except for what had to pass SCOTUS scrutiny, these policies could be much wider or single-sided than any plausible statute. Conservatives pointed to increasingly fraught possibilities of downstream political consequences (JarJarJedi has listed most of the mainstream examples, but for a particularly fun one most people who can think about don't say outloud: under the INA, people who have immigrated legally are eligible for naturalization after five years. guess how 'immigrated legally' is defined, or the legal consequences of a grant of citizenship that can't be stripped). Eventually this culminated in US v. Texas under Biden, where it turned out to be impossible to compel any enforcement policy at all from a President that didn't want to follow it.

The Blue Tribe story starts a few years later, as the IRCA1986's entry date amnesty thing passed, and it turned out that there were millions (sometimes estimated as ten million!) people who either entered the US too late for its use, did not register in time, or who were not eligible for other reasons. Run all the above with the opposite valiance, and you've got ten or tens of millions of people, a large portion who immigrated as children, are forced into a gray-at-best legal environment over what the Blue Tribe sees as a glorified paperwork offense, and Republicans who demand that we make a lot of additional paperwork offenses and hefty punishments for them before even considering confronting The Real Problem.

((In both the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe tellings, there's also various selection pressures: pro-immigration Republicans and restrictionist-Democrats were either compelled to change their minds or pushed out of the party/national politics.))

The Gray Tribe story starts much later, and thinks the legal and legislative connections are a little besides the point. They explain why things aren't happening, but they don't explain why the rioting is happening. For that, we instead look to a large and increasing group of who have long framed immigration enforcement of any type as fundamentally illegitimate, and any attempts to do so as fundamentally driven by animus and a sign of unadulterated evil. That put the normal paeans to informed compromise off the table.

The exact start date is fuzzy and depends heavily on who you ask and when. The growth of Punch A Nazi discourse in 2016 is an easy example, but you can also see people pointing to G20 protests or the tactics formalized in the gay marriage wars (I use 'animus' specifically). Everyone's least favorite web forum also 'must' have been the source.

IMO it's the confluence of several things:

For one, the pre-2010s Democratic Party were far more beholden to private sector organized labor and high school educated voters in general, and that group tends to be skeptical of immigration be it for cultural or economic reasons. For all his Millennial fans, Obama won in '08 because high school educated white Midwesterners (He won Indiana!) liked him. Since then, thanks to Millennials being the most educated generation in history, the college educated (who tend to be pro-immigration) are far more powerful in intra-Democratic party politics than was the case in the 90s and 2000s. The pro-immigration lobby has also arguably changed from mostly being a pro-business project (hence Bernie's quip about open borders being a Koch brothers policy, which is literally true if one reads the 1980 Libertarian Party platform) to being a project spearheaded by educated immigrants and second-generation children of immigrants themselves.

Relatedly, the fusionists (a bunch of highly educated/cosmopolitan northeasterners along with the pro-business lobby) lost control of the GOP to the populists (Trump has personality, yes, but his platform is largely cribbed from Pat Buchanan minus the hoe scaring social conservatism, nominating ACB aside.) representing the high school educated. The GOP aren't so much the party of big business at this point (Nationally, anyway; this is less the case at the state level.) as small/medium business owners, whose interests concerning immigration are more mixed (Some use illegal labor, yes, but others are irritated with having to compete with illegal labor. See also: free trade.).

IMO an underrated cause for polarization on both sides is internet media making the issue more visible and mobilization easier. It's true, yes, that post-2000 immigration has spread far beyond the traditional locales of border states and major coastal cities, but there's also the media factor. On one hand, we're seeing things from the right like truckers using social media to lobby for English proficiency requirements and crackdowns on non-domiciled CDLs on the back of several high profile fatal accidents involving immigrant truck drivers (I have no idea if anyone's actually quantified whether or not foreign drivers who can't speak/read English crash more.). On the other, enforcement of immigration laws has never been overly pleasant, but it's never been easier to capture the anguish of the unfortunate migrant being deported, akin to viral incidents of police brutality in general.

Finally, there's the obvious answer that immigration has become more contentious for the simple reason that the foreign born population is at or near historic highs. The last time we were where we are now in that regard we got the first red scare and the height of the second Klan.

Stephen Miller's reach goal is 3,000/day, which, if we're generous and assume that government workers get in a whole 52 weeks a year, would be 156,000/yr

day =/= week

Wow I don't know how I managed to miswrite that one.

Democrats are unwilling to accept any policy that might require being mean to someone.

Correction: "might require being mean to someone who isn't on the list of group identities that are allowed to be subject to being mean". They are just fine being mean to the deplorables.

'White skin bad, brown skin good' took over the democrats+TDS.

In my perception it’s not so much that the Democrats have gone crazy it’s more that Republicans won the messaging war and also, tactically, tricked many Democrats into knee jerk reactions. Dems have always been praising the virtues of model minority immigrants and at times Reps too, that’s important background. Dems had a long history of wanting more “charitable” treatment for the poor or oppressed (whether you think this is a weakness or a strength is partly a values disagreement). We can’t act like this isn’t a recurrent historical position - see for example the Statue of Liberty poem about bringing America the poor and hungry and persecuted. (Immigration sentiment also historically has come in waves for and against)

So when Trump says some overtly racist things or does a Muslim bad etc., plus the college educated lens of viewing Trump pronouncements as facially and literally accurate rather than the directional pronouncements most voters actually hear, I think there was an overreaction. Dems operate partly on guilt and border security plays on that guilt. But again, although some politicians got tricked into saying and supporting poorly considered things in Trump backlash (hate to admit he could be right about anything) extending even to the Biden years still in the shadow of Trump, I’d view this as mostly organic rather than some actual pro-immigrant plot.

To be sure, there IS a subset of Democrats who legitimately feel greater allegiance to the globe and humanity as a whole than they do to the US, they are loud but this is often a minority and they don’t always get into authority positions.

I should also add that at least 3 times in the last 15 years we got extremely close to compromise with immigration bills, but they all failed to pass so in a very real way the problem got worse than normal. In that way, of course the rhetoric gets most extreme, because the problem is more extreme

we got extremely close to compromise with immigration bills, but they all failed to pass

I am pretty sure at least 2/3 of the population and probably even 2/3 of Republican voters would be fine with pretty wide immigration and even amnesty, if certain conditions are satisfied:

  • Whatever rules we set up, we actually enforce them and not make mockery of them immediately. This includes getting rid of clown shit like "catch and release".
  • Shit like "sanctuary cities" which low-key secede from the nation and choose which laws they are going to follow and not follow stops like right now. You don't like the laws - vote for people that will change them, just ignoring them whenever you like should not be an option.
  • People that follow the rules get it easy, people who do not follow the rules get kicked out (details debatable, but the principle must be kept)
  • Current illegals suffer some consequences for jumping the line. Maybe not deportation, but something. Maybe like 10 years of permanent residency before they can apply for citizenship and voting rights, maybe fines, I dunno. Something.
  • Anybody illegal with a criminal record GTFO. I'm not talking parking tickets, but any violence or other socially detrimental crime must be hard disqualifier, and it shouldn't take 9-0 SCOTUS decision to deport each one, it should be quick and automatic. They got the due process when convicted.
  • Some kind of filter on the entry that at least has some chance for selecting on alignment with US culture and societal mores.

None of these sound crazy or extreme to me (obviously) but I don't see Dems agreeing (and honestly implementing) this kind of compromise, unfortunately. What they seemed to be offering was more of "we keep the current shitshow maybe with a tiny coat of paint and some money thrown in the general direction of Border Partol budget, and in exchange for that you get mass amnesty for pretty much every illegal that is not on death row for murder right now". Not sure how that'd be a working compromise.

Current illegals suffer some consequences for jumping the line. Maybe not deportation, but something. Maybe like 10 years of permanent residency before they can apply for citizenship and voting rights, maybe fines,

It should quite obviously be fines. A surtax on income, or a set amount. Migrants come to the USA because they can earn more money, let the government and the citizenry wet its beak!

Whatever rules we set up, we actually enforce them and not make mockery of them immediately. This includes getting rid of clown shit like "catch and release".

Shit like "sanctuary cities" which low-key secede from the nation and choose which laws they are going to follow and not follow stops like right now. You don't like the laws - vote for people that will change them, just ignoring them whenever you like should not be an option.

These two are tied together in my mind. Asking cities to tolerate an underclass that the feds refuse to deal with is absurd.

The two work in tandem. The first premise (or, in Dem's hands, anti-premise) is about when Dems are in power - they then would just ignore the immigration law completely and mass-import as many migrants as they can. The whole "illegal" thing loses its meaning because what's the point in the law is the government is refusing to follow it and the courts just shrug and stand aside? It's not a part of legal system anymore, for any practical purpose, just a mockery of what the law is supposed to be.

The second part comes in if Dems temporarily lose some amount of power on the national level. Then they fall back to the local level (there's such thing as "state rights" and contrary to popular - among Dems - opinion, it's not just a mindless Nazi slogan!) and ever if the law tried to reassert itself by temporary slowing down the intake and deporting some of the illegals, they would obstruct it on every level possible. The law is sacrosanct if it serves the Party's purposes, and completely ignorable - moreover, must be ignored - if it contradicts them. In other words, if they don't control the law and it's execution, it's not worth having. Of course, this must be accompanies with demanding the other side to follow every letter of the law (and some that they'd invent on the spot just to make it harder to follow) and exhaust every possible legal delay and perform every triple-checked verification before they take any action.

Taken together, these two parts form a ratchet, which make it very easy to move the policy and the action on the ground towards open borders, and next to impossible to move it to the opposite direction. Little wonder is the Republicans aren't exactly happy with this state of affairs.

see for example the Statue of Liberty poem about bringing America the poor and hungry and persecuted.

I do wish people would not truncate the stanza:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

(Emphasis mine) Sometimes people even truncate the poem mid line "Your huddled masses." There's not even a comma breaking the sentence there! Critically she doesn't say send me all. Her command for who to send does not require nobility, but does require carrying an essential notion of liberty with you. It is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty after all, not the Statue of Unlimited Open Boarders.

There's not an entirely negligible portion of the population that is fine with even fairly generous immigration policy. They might prefer, though, if the plan is to vote for the same shit policies that you are fleeing from that you do not come to the US.

That’s a great point and I was just trying to be brief with my allusion. I actually think that you could get bipartisan support for limiting the type of immigration that leads to large amount of remittances vs those who genuinely want to raise families and establish themselves. Thus my point about how the current split is partially a result of the stalled bipartisan efforts (like really we were only a vote or two shy several times)

It's not only the voting base. The census counts illegals too (Trump tried to change it and lost), and with thin margins of current Congress majorities/minorities, two more/less seats for California or Texas may decide who controls the House. It is also budgets - leftist NGOs were getting literally billions of dollars from the budget for "immigrant services". You need to have a crisis to get billions for "helping to solve" it. Plus, of course, there are a lot of businesses who wouldn't mind cheap labor force not covered by the myriad of regulations Democrats introduce - which is fine with Democrats, since they get less pushback from businesses for introducing those, as businesses know: in a pinch, they can always hire illegals. And, of course, this population now needs welfare/social services coverage, which means expanding welfare state programs (and attached NGO networks, again) - a dream for every Democrat. In addition to that, on the ideological level, the colonial powers need to pay for their past sins, and accepting unlimited migration is the prescribed way to do that. The West stole everything from oppressed people, now the oppressed people finally get to enjoy it. There are many factors why unlimited migration aligns well with the governance model Democrats are embodying.

The West stole everything from oppressed people, now the oppressed people finally get to enjoy it.

I keep seeing the vapid mantra, “No one is illegal on stolen land!” in discussions about the LA riots. It’s retarded, but it’s suddenly everywhere.

A good slogan should go from the ears to the mouth smoothly, without stopping in the brain. That's what Orwell called "doubleplusgood duckspeak".

“No one is illegal on stolen land!” in discussions about the LA riots.

Translation: "Only Blue Tribe has the right to determine who deserves what land."

Due to various circumstances, I sometimes (about 6-8 times a year usually) find myself traveling to various cities in the US and having a free weekend afternoon with no plans. I usually just went for a walk in a park, or to a museum, but lately my walking capacity has been diminishing (after an hour or so I sometimes start getting various unpleasant feels) and with the museums the ongoing wokification is starting to get on my nerves. So, I am looking for new ideas - what could be a fun way to spend an afternoon in a new city? I am an introvert, and the free afternoon usually comes after several days of interacting with a lot of people (that's usually the reason why I got there in the first place), which means my social battery is near depleted and anything involving meeting any new people and talking to them is just too much. And unfortunately I am completely indifferent to most sports. Obviously there's always spending the whole time reading or watching some movies, but I can do it at home too, so I want somehow to leverage being outside in the city. Any fresh ideas?

jazz bar

Have you tried ‘quirky’ museums? The Bigfoot museum is unlikely to say anything true, but it will say much interesting.

In the OKC area, I recommend both the American Pigeon Museum and the Museum of Osteology.

I keep seeing the latter show up in Wikipedia photos.

Beer garden

This happens to me sometimes too. I've taken to reading a bit about the local history of an area before the trips and use my free time to visit historically interesting, but tourist uninteresting, locations. Some great experiences in the past include visiting very old churches/shrines, the oldest restaurants/bars in the area, harbors/docks and other industrial areas, train and bus stations. There are often very small specialist museums that have been pretty good too. I visited a devastated Rust Belt town that in 2020 was at something like 15% of its all time high population from 1950. The town had converted an old train station into a local history museum full of photos and artifacts related to what people used to do there when it was an economically viable, vibrant location, a whole post mortem shrine of remembrance to a place that doesn't really exist anymore. There are a lot of little spots like this around the US, but they take a bit of digging to find them. I often just use Google maps to virtually explore, then visit spots that look interesting.

I like to check out aquariums and aviaries, personally. Fish aren't known for a history of racism and colonization.

Love aquariums, but not all cities have decent ones, and ones that do I've been to them already a couple of times. May be worth another visit though.

You'd be amazed. Not by racist fish, but by the pathological need of ~museum curators everywhere to conform to the trend. Pride finds a way.

I love finding random small bookstores or something like that. Atlas Obscura also has cool stuff https://www.atlasobscura.com/

Thanks, Atlas Obscura sounds interesting, though sometimes outdated - noticed some place there are actually closed or inactive. But certainly helpful as a starting point.

There's always geocaching.

https://www.geocaching.com/play

Can help you look at your environment in a new way, and also creates a nifty record of all the places you've been.

Depending on where you are this might not be an option but I usually go to some restaurant or café in the city center with outdoor seating and do some people watching while drinking a beer, eating or having a coffee. If there is a waterfront you can also go there.

Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics? Or generalize those tactics to the magic or tech or whatever makes the setting unique.

I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.

I think lots of games end up encouraging unfun tactics and have to have artificial rules in place to prevent those strategies from dominating.

One obvious rule like this is just a raw limit on numbers. Matches are x vs x. Some MMOs like EVE online dont enforce this, and EVE as a result became heavily about how many people you could field.

FPS games have problems with "camping" and snipers. But hiding and killing the enemy from a distance when they don't have a chance to fight back is an objectively smart thing to do in a real war situation.

Flanking is one of the most basic tactics that tends to organically evolve all the time and not get whacked down by developers.

In RTS games: basically everything except has a real world analog.

Only certain strategies, but there can sometimes be some fun dimensions especially when outnumbered to the Total War Troy or Pharoah games.

I think you should try Myth II: Soulblighter. It's a real-time tactics game where the multiplayer really shows how it can shine with regards to troop placement and management. I think the multiplayer community eventually settled on the best formation for melee being all of them packed in shoulder-to-shoulder, though.

Wait - do you get a lot of melee-only battles in Myth II? I only recall playing the first game, and that was a quarter century ago, but I vaguely recall there being enough ranged area-of-effect attacks (dwarf molotov cocktails, some fireball and lightning magics, an exploding suicide unit) that you had to keep your units spread out more often than not.

I do remember our Myth I multiplayer games getting up to some very weird tricks, though. Like: you'd have a dwarf throw a bomb, and then you'd quickly hit the ground below the airborne bomb with another unit's lightning, and the shock would accelerate the bomb high into the air and let it hit units practically on the other side of the map. We may have been evolving our tactics for Rule of Cool rather than for maximum victory rate, now that I think about it.

Myth TFL had some physics that made the multiplayer fun and broken, yes. The fetch lightning propelling the dwarf bombs sounds like a lot of people did it. Unfortunately, it is not present in Myth II. Generally, you have to keep the AoE guys away from the melee guys, yes. You frequently see melee dudes mopping up other melee dudes though.

Anyone know any games, roleplaying or otherwise, which end up encouraging real/historical tactics?

That is an impressively vague question and one which I can only really answer by saying "yes" and "more than I could list in a single comment".

To start with there's the entire world of tabletop historical wargaming, which (as it says on the tin) is supposed to encourage historically accurate/authentic gameplay. Now, sometimes you end up with games like Team Yankee, which somehow managed to make a Cold War game look more like a Napoleonic one thanks to a business decision to use a miniature scale that is too large for the rules. Games I would recommend include Chain of Command for WW2, Warmaster is good for a fairly wide period of real world history, as well as fantasy. Speaking of fantasy, the Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth tabletop game from Games Workshop is actually great and does an excellent job of capturing the "heroic" but still quite grounded combat you'd expect from that kind of story and out of all the stuff I list here is most likely to be the kind of thing you're looking for. There are tonnes of other good games but those are just ones from the top of my head.

In terms of computer games you're slightly more limited but there's still a pretty decent selection, in terms of realism/authenticity I struggle to think of much that can top the Field of Glory/Combat Mission/Graviteam games. The last two are really not games for the faint of heart though, it turns out that in our modern age, real world tactics are actually quite complicated and unintuitive.

I was playing D:OS2 this weekend and found myself thinking, "wow, all these spear-wielding magisters have zero incentive to form up and fight in ranks." It's a chaotic free-for-all.

This is what really killed my interest in that game, it's all so incredibly over the top. It's more than a little silly how everyone seems to be able to do these incredibly over the top attacks and have these incredible abilities and yet it is still somehow a standard issue medieval fantasy world.

Sorry! I really underspecified. I should have asked more about emergent historicity.

Consider a spectrum between abstract and concrete strategy games. Chess is a pretty darn abstract form of dudes fighting. Miniature wargames add all sorts of extra rules to flesh it out. For the most part, they hold on to useful game abstractions, like dice, or alternating turns. Once we get to real-time games, though, even those can be stripped out or hidden in the pursuit of verisimilitude.

Slitherine-type games seem to go really far on this simulationist end, though with some pretty unusual focuses. It's bizarre seeing abstractions like "cards" in Shadow Empire, a game which also models planetary hydrology and the military procurement process. But so, so cool. I'm going to have to check out all three of your realist/authentic mentions just to salivate over things I don't plan on learning.

But these simulations, sometimes ridiculously complex, don't usually converge on historicity. The game conceits, or the epicycles which were added to disguise them, keep most games from getting too realistic (and, presumably, boring). So we get Warhammer games where one side can be effectively "tabled" in one "shooting phase," giving up their precious "victory points." Divinity, where my squad can spend all our "action points" beating the tar out of one guy while his friends wait their turn. Really, action economy has got to be one of the biggest sources of this kind of divergence, but it's not like actual economics are safer. Victoria 2 is kind of infamous for keeping its plates spinning with careful scripting and duct tape.

Sometimes you get more verisimilitude by reducing the level of detail. I'd say old X-COM is a good example. Oh, there's plenty of game-mechanics nonsense, but the fundamental "Time Units" system does an amazing job of implying simultaneity. Move, and you risk enemies reacting. Hold your fire, and you get a chance to spend it outside the confines of your "turn." You get interesting game choices which wouldn't be possible in a real-time combat simulation.

So when I asked the question, I was thinking something more like: "what are the simplest, most abstract games which punch above their weight in encouraging historical strategies?" Games which reward pike blocks not because someone programmed an explicit stat bonus, but because the rules of their game world imply the physics of ours.

I was thinking something more like: "what are the simplest, most abstract games which punch above their weight in encouraging historical strategies?" Games which reward pike blocks not because someone programmed an explicit stat bonus, but because the rules of their game world imply the physics of ours.

Ah, you want the Diplomacy of wargames, don't you? Simple rules that end up creating interesting and realistic-looking situations. Except even the big D doesn't work like that. WWI wasn't a free-for-all where alliances were brokered and broken every six months.

It's the same with wargames. On the one hand, you need to understand why historical armies fought they way they did. And this is something actual historians can't agree on. Why did the Helenistic phalanx demolish the Persian army, but lost to the Roman legions, which then never succeeded against the Parthian army? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ How do you distill the lack of knowledge into simple rules?

On the other hand, if you want the rules to create interesting outcomes, you probably want to avoid including clearly broken meta in them.

The last two are really not games for the faint of heart though, it turns out that in our modern age, real world tactics are actually quite complicated and unintuitive.

I'm interested, tell me more.

Not the person you asked, but I might be able to give an armchair perspective while you wait, because it's a question that interests me a lot.

In the real world, there is no minimap, there is no shared vision, and the terrain is orders of magnitude more complex than most games or even sims portray. You do not necessarily have a perfect or even particularly good idea of where you are, your idea of where your allies are and their idea of where you are is even worse, and the enemy's position is a complete unknown.

This would already be a pretty serious problem, but it is made much worse by the fact that real-world weapons have absurd effective range, penetration and killing power. This reality is greatly magnified for crew-served and mounted weapons, which are fantastic for inflicting what is known as a "mass-casualty event", a situation where multiple people go from effective combatants to dead or dying more or less instantly.

The combination of these two realities mean that it is extremely important to hide basically all the time. Hiding tends to degrade your situational awareness even more, and it's easy to end up with a worm's-eye-view of the world where you are effectively blind in all but a few very narrow sightlines.

Obviously that won't work for any sort of offensive, so you have to leave cover and move. But leaving cover means exposing yourself to an exponentially-increasing number of attack vectors. So you need to do this very, very slowly and very, very carefully, preferably in tight coordination with lots and lots of allies doing the same thing. But again, you probably have poor knowledge of each other's positions, so you need to be even more slow and careful, covering each other as you methodically work your way from cover to cover, clearing or maintaining watch on all the highest-value attack vectors. And often the way you discover the enemy's location is when some of you accidentally walk into a prepared ambush from cover, possibly by a heavy weapon.

The charge of the winged hussars, it ain't. it's more like four-dimensional minesweeper, plus the clearing numbers can lie, and you have to coordinate moves with five people, each of who has a different grid orientation. As @netstack mentioned, there's some games that actually try to simulate this sort of thing, but they tend to be very niche because very, very few gamers are actually interested in that particular flavor of masochism. You can get a small taste of it playing ARMA, that's probably one of the more accessible versions; even playing some of their goofy scenarios versus bots, it's easy to find yourself scrunched up against the back wall of some structure, panicking because you have no idea where the enemy is and you're pretty sure if you break cover you'll never see where the bullet came from. And that's baby's first easy mode, hide and seek against dumb bots carrying small arms.

The combination of these two realities mean that it is extremely important to hide basically all the time. Hiding tends to degrade your situational awareness even more, and it's easy to end up with a worm's-eye-view of the world where you are effectively blind in all but a few very narrow sightlines.

The Russo-Ukrainian war paints an even bleaker picture. There's a visible range drone monitoring you during the day. There's an IR drone monitoring you during the night. If they notice your dugout, bomber drones will come and drop ordnance on you. You live like a crepuscular mammal in the Mesozoic, leaving your hole during the short twilight hours to empty your chamber pot and pick up the supplies a friendly drone has airdropped for you. This is also when most human-powered attacks happen.

Thank you. That sounds terrifying.

I think I got the tiniest taste once playing laser tag with my coworkers once. Two of the dozen or so guys were ex military and they were just wiping the floor with everyone. They weren't spec ops or anything, just low ranking army enlisted, but they clearly knew how to move between cover, how to wait patiently for their opponents to move, and how to understand their and their opponents' line of sight. I got tagged a bunch, it was eye opening.

Given the above, it's interesting to me that there are some people who are exhilarated by the experience. I guess some just have a knack for it and are thrill seekers. Definitely not for me.

GURPS and ACKS generally try to be realistic. Regarding spears, GURPS Martial Arts has guidance for emulating multiple historical styles of spear fighting, and both GURPS Martial Arts and the ACKS 2 Revised Rulebook have rules for setting a spear in the ground against a charge.

Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI? For me, it just kind of seems "internet-of-shit"-like, both in that it often seems like a gratuitous application of technology and that it seems to combine multiple of the internet's worst problems.

Sure enough, I eventually tried to make an account for Claude, because I thought it might help me procrastinate more effectively. Despite Anthropic giving lip-service to privacy, they not only require a unique phone number per account, but wouldn't accept my VoIP numbers. And I couldn't even get that far in the process, without allowing Google's third-party javascript! Why not just make people go through a dozen recaptchas, if it's actually about spam!? I then decided to see if I could make an OpenAI account, but the page kept giving errors, even with a bunch of third-party javascript allowed.

I've never used it for anything personal, so I've never made accounts like described above. I do work for a large corporate tech company though who has its own AI offerings. I use this one for work a modest amount and its been helpful but not game changing. I review a number of very large speadsheets on a regular basis. 95%+ of the data in these sheets doesn't really concern my immediate duties. AI has been great in digesting these and presenting me with just the information I need to see. Its also good at reading my many, many emails and flagging ones where people are asking me to do something specific, or touch on a number of topics I've flagged at important. Its also really good at reviewing the recordings of long meetings, converting them into text transcripts, and extracting the valuable information (if there is any), finally turning the meeting into the email it should have always been.

Its also good at reading my many, many emails and flagging ones where people are asking me to do something specific, or touch on a number of topics I've flagged at important.

Do you use a specific service for this, or something custom?

Its our in-house AI tool. I understand that microsoft has build something similar into Outlook, but our IT sec teams have blocked it on our work accounts.

Oh, neat. Your people don’t waste any time.

I’ve occasionally used ChatGPT as a glorified search engine to help find specific building codes, or to make suggestions for specific things like a roof cap suited for a certain CFM. It’s pretty effective, better than google for the kind of case where you know what you’re looking for but can’t remember where to find it. You just need to make sure to double-check what it’s saying, of course.

Has anyone else here not used "non-toy" AI? If so, why aren't you using AI?

Because what would I use it for? None of the common use cases I hear people here put forth for AI are anything I do with any frequency.

It's not about spam. It's that the models they give you access to for free are expensive to run and they throttle you pretty fast. They don't want people creating tons of free accounts to circumvent the limits.

They should say that, rather than claim it's about spam. Also, don't they limit model choice and some proxy for "compute-per-conversation," anyway? What's the multiplier for the utility of n accounts, over 1 account?

Is there a clear quantification of cost/man-hour-replaced? Proton charges $9.99/month for proof-reading and shortening emails, which seems steep for such basic (presumably low-token-per-use) functionality, but they have to make things E2EE and their use-case doesn't really allow limiting per-month usage...

don't they limit model choice

I'm not really sure anymore. I think they were at first but this led to people trying the free version, seeing how crappy it was, and deciding AI was a fad.

I was about to say that I've never used AI, but then I realized that would be a lie - I've used AI before to put together a long string of fluffy bullshit for work in order to save myself the aggravation of putting together said fluffy bullshit.

...and I will likely use it again this week to, yet again, put together a few paragraphs of fluffy bullshit to appease the MBA types in my office.

I haven’t and I don’t know what I would use it for.

That really depends on what you mean by "non-toy AI".

Do things like AI noise reduction and music stem separation count? I use both regularly. DeepL is very convenient for translating random languages to English.

I don't use LLMs as I have little use for very limited tools that require massaging long prompts that might or might not kinda-sorta do something helpful if I spend a lot of effort at it.

Maybe you would know, but are there good “AI” piano music transcription models nowadays?

Unflortunately I haven’t looked into that. I suspect they wouldn’t perform particularly well unless it was almost a solo piano piece.

I use Ultimate Vocal Remover to remove vocals and reduce the volume of drums and bass to make it easier to hear what the guitar is doing and I combine that with Zplane Decoda (shows rough chords and allows transposing and changing speed on the fly) for practising playing along to songs.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on the Iliad, Dialectic of Enlightenment and McLuhan's The Classical Trivium. Picking up Nudge: The Final Edition.

Wrapped up the last of Journey to the End of Night, which I ultimately got almost nothing interesting out of, and finally finished Seeing Like a State, which I got a lot out of but I expect everyone here has already either read the book or read better folks than me summarize its findings better than I could.

Started Storm of Steel which is a fascinating contrast to American Sniper. Both authors, at least at the start, enjoy the war. It's the difference between the 2000s Patriots or the 90s Bulls, and a role player on a .500 team. Kyle goes in expecting to win every time, and is shocked and takes it personally when he loses. Junger is immediately just hoping to survive. Kyle experiences enemy soldiers and civilians as "savages," as mooks that are just part of his story. Junger experiences them as formidable dangerous foes.

As an aside, I saw a local performance of Penelope, a one-woman musical of Odysseus' famous wife. It was fantastic. That woman really carried the show for an hour and a half straight, just her and a band, and of course that is the core commentary of the play: Penelope did it all alone, with nothing but a backing band, for twenty years until Odysseus returned. The show definitely plays the situation for light feminist snark at times, but never lapses into wokeness: at core it maintains a belief in Homer, Homer's heroes stay heroes and his villains stay villains, it doesn't try to flip the script like so many recent musicals based on old stories. It's very reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in that it looks at how great events feel to someone who isn't privileged to speak constantly with the gods; where Athena speaks to Odysseus pretty regularly, Penelope here gets only a single, cryptic and non-actionable message from Athena. My only critique of the play is that, compare to Madeleine Miller's Circe, the play cuts off before the really interesting and difficult stuff to get Penelope's commentary on: the slaughter of the suitors and the hanging of the maids. How does she feel about her Telemachus going all school shooter on the place?

I've decided in celebration of the show being cancelled to re-read the Wheel of Time. It is just as aggravating, annoying, lengthy, and wonderful as I remember.

Didn't care for the first couple chapters, and given how much everyone complains about the series I've never really heard anything good enough about it to bother committing to all that.

I was just talking about WoT a few weeks back and while the series as a whole was kinda uneven for me (tl;dr I loved the first four and last three books, it's 5-12 5-11 that could be so-so) I still have to say it's an excellent series overall. I think @SubstantialFrivolity is dead on in observing that the wait for the next book was a significant factor in making the slog through the slower-paced books more difficult for me personally as well. More generally, with a story of such epic scope, there's almost bound to be some characters that you're eager to read more of, others that are irritating and/or frustrating, some plot threads that you find really satisfying, and other plot threads that are b-o-o-ring to the point of tears. But even with everything we fans have to complain about, it's still a hell of an epic tale at the end of the day. I'd encourage you to stick with it a bit longer (although certainly pull the ripcord if it's not grabbed you by the end of the first book at the latest) and see whether or not it picks up for you.

I loved the first four and last three books, it's 5-12 that could be so-so

I thought there were only ten O.O

There are fifteen! Or fourteen if you don't count the prequel book, but let's be honest... if you read the other fourteen you're probably going to read that too lol.

I bounced off the very beginning several times myself. But once I got past the first few chapters, I really wound up enjoying the books. I even love the books that people complain about. I know why they complain, but by that time I was so in love with the characters and the world that I was just happy to spend time with them. Plus, a lot of people have observed that the books which are considered a slog are a lot more bearable if you weren't having to wait years for each one to come out like when they were first published.

I can't promise you will enjoy them like I did, but I encourage you to give them a shot. I would say that they don't really hit their stride until the fourth book (the first book in particular is weird because it was written to serve as a standalone story in case Jordan didn't get the chance to continue the series), but if you aren't enjoying them at all by at least the second book then they probably aren't for you.

It's not for everyone. But if you can handle wanting to reach through the pages to strangle several POV characters, it really is a cornerstone of fantasy for a reason. There are deaths that will make you cry, marriages that will make you want to dance, what is in my opinion the best-written "formless horror" ever (which is admittedly a fairly minor plot device but still, it stands out for how good it is), and moments of such incredible power they will take your breath away.

But those Wetlanders have a strange sense of humor.

I got to the middle of Use of Weapons and I am kinda doubting if I'm going to finish it. I've pretty much guessed the main reveal already (it became so painfully obvious at some point that I broke down and checked it and yes, it was exactly what I thought) and the story is somehow not that engaging for me, and in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases. I know a lot of people like The Culture series, would you advise me to persevere or try another book or just look elsewhere entirely? I read Player of Games before, and it was kinda obvious how it's going to end (I mean you don't set up the whole thing to lose at the end, right?) and there also were a reveal which I thought was kinda meh but overall it was ok, not super-excellent but also I didn't feel like I need to force myself to go on. With this one, I am kinda struggling.

Player of Games and Use of Weapons have a somewhat similar dark vibe, and I could definitely see someone disliking those while liking other parts of the series. Maybe try Excession if you want to give the series one last chance? But frankly it sounds like the series just isn't for you, and you should switch to something else, and IMHO that's perfectly fine. It's a culturally influential (rimshot) series, but it's not the only or the best sci-fi book series out there.

in general the Culture kinda looks pretty assholish to me at this point, not sure if it was the intention of the author or my biases

The contrast between the general "which party should we go to next" culture of the Culture and the "what asshole tricks are we going to need to pull next to keep these people's parties from being ruined" culture of Special Circumstances is definitely intentional by the author, as is at least some of the way the assholishness "leaks" out of that supposedly self-contained organizational apparatus. IMHO the series would have been insufferable if you took away its insufferable characters, though; with just the external conflict it would have come across as just another Mary Sue "look how the universe becomes more awesome when more people think like me" Utopia story.

I know a lot of people like The Culture series, would you advise me to persevere or try another book or just look elsewhere entirely?

If you're not feeling the overall vibe of Banks' work then I'd encourage you to go ahead and drop him from your list. Life's too short to read stuff that's only kinda appealing and all that. While Banks' novels, be they Culture novels or not, build different worlds and, to an extent, explore different ideas, they all tend to have the same sorts of edges to them, and if that's not engaging you, then you're really not missing anything by letting them go. FWIW, I've read quite a few of his books, and they're not bad by any objective stretch, but at the same time I have several more that I may not ever read because I've lost the desire to engage in his work myself. I'll probably read one in the not-too-distant future, perhaps just because of this comment, but still, there never seems to be a heart to any of his books that I've read.

I found that one a bit mid and kept skipping the flashback chapters.

My favorite one so far is Surface Detail. Player of Games was decent, I thought. I also enjoyed Consider Phlebas as a good introduction.

Definitely don't read the short story book.

People here say they liked Matter but I thought it was snoozeville and gave up after 3 chapters.

I'm reading Look to Windward right now that's going okay.

I've been reading the murderbot series after watching a few episodes of the show and deciding I liked it and didn't want to wait.

After watching the series and reading all the books I can definitely tell the books are better. Some cliches are there for a reason, I guess.

That is interesting, I'm not surprised I like the books better, but I wouldn't have thought many other people were the same.

The books can be sparse on details in a way that I like. The show fills in those visual details, mostly because it is forced to do so by the medium of film.

Alongside a re-read of Reverend Insanity, at o3's suggestion, I'm halfway through The Outside by Ada Hoffman.

The core conceit of the novel should be like crack to me. AI Gods? Said Gods fighting against eldritch abominations? Sign me the fuck up, I had independently considered writing my own novel along those lines before finding this one.

Unfortunately, the real deal is incredibly mid. The protagonist is a capital-A Autistic genius woman, written by an autistic female author, who hasn't heard of "show, don't tell".

If I have to read another line about her sensory issues and inability to function in normal or posthuman society, I'll lose it.

Beyond that, the pace is achingly slow, and the prose not very tight for the most part.

I'd call it a 6/10 novel, barely worth reading. I'm just out of the kind of hard scifi I normally enjoy, they just don't write those fast enough.

who hasn't heard of "show, don't tell".

Fang Yuan let out a breath of turbid air. He was an old fox, the aspect of how [a particular aspect of cultivation that isn't even relevant much to the current narration], it was extremely clear to him. As for so-called conciseness and elegance, he did not give a damn. Beauty, ugly, did that really matter to Fang Yuan? He he he... The only thing that mattered was eternal life!

(I will not let this go)

I hate you so much, but you have a point.

Curious if you were reading this take on 'system war' SF with a title I am too embarrassed to type out? It's coming to a close now, I found it to be a pleasant weekly read, at times disappointing, but overall a decent quality novel.

Huh. I had already begun reading that one, made it a few chapters in before I forgot the name and lost the tab in the millions I have open. I do remember thinking it was of above average quality in the usual sea of Royal Road slop!

I recommend you try it again then, quality is consistent until the very end.

usual Royal Road slop

Different realm!

Yup, already reading it again. Thanks for finding it for me!

Still on The Perfect Heresy, which I'm determined to finish tonight or tomorrow so I can move on to something more interesting. Medieval history just doesn't seem to do it for me.

I just finished the United States Chemical Safety Board Final Report on the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery Exploision. I vaguely remember as a kid when this happened, but I had never realized it was the same company that caused the massive oil spill just a few years later.

The report hits all the standard beats for this genre, penny-pinching management, shoddy maintenance, "procedures" that exist only on paper and which may or may not even work, but all of it is cranked-up to 11 for 300 pages.

One of my favorite anecdotes is that at one point the call came down from London for all facilities to cut fixed costs by 25%. Most BP refineries realized that this was insane and didn't do it, but Texas City really did cut 25% and ended up running the facility into the ground.

CSB reports are pretty fun, if morbid reads, especially since they're a lot more willing to point fingers (contrast NTSB).

I will caution that they tend to put a pretty heavy thumb on the scales to favor as wide-ranging a possible conclusion as available from the evidence: even their own videos make it sound more like BP (or Amaco's) process engineering played a much bigger role than the page count would. The report notes that there were previous incidents involving the blowdown system, but most of these were from before the 2004 budget cuts, and some were from before the merger. Counterfactuals are hard, but with that bad a process design, and that level of normalization of deviance, I'm not sure better trained or less tired staff would have done much more than changed the body count for whatever inevitable incident happened.

I'm currently reading a deposition where the head of safety at the facility freely admitted that he had never actually looked at 29 CFR 1910.119.

I also really appreciate the one victim's mother who hired her own lawyer seperate from the ones representing the other plaintiffs just so he could ask if they knew that one victim in particular and to berate them especially hard for their failures.

Ah, you've read deeper into the incident than I have, then. Apologies.

Daring (Pax Arcana Book 2), by Elliott James.

@Titanium Butterfly, City was quite thought-provoking! Not at all surprising coming from Simak, and I'm really glad that someone has dedicated themselves to getting his stuff published. I've probably read at least one book that was directly influenced by it--don't remember the exact name of it, maybe Manta's Gift, but it was by Timothy Zahn.

Glad you liked it. Simak was so far ahead of his time. Particularly the part where everyone goes off to try another mode of existence and nobody comes back stays with me. But the whole book has such a vibe to it and I think it ages well. Definitely one I'll be getting my kids to read.

A few years ago I was up in Seattle on business and found a first edition in fantastic shape at Twice Sold Tales. Very happy with it.

Meanwhile I'm on book 2 of 12 Miles Below. So far it feels not quite as good as the first but definitely willing to give it time. Thanks again for the rec.

12 Miles Below has been steadily getting worse over time, but it started at such a high point that it's still okay. I won't spoil the later books, but it gets increasingly self-aware and the humor becomes obnoxious.

Interesting - I still love it (and relevant to here, especially for its representation of AI).

When do you feel it started to go off the rails?

I still love it (and relevant to here, especially for its representation of AI)

This is one of my least favorite things about it. The nice goddess behaves plausibly but the mean one doesn't, and the greatest flaw with her minions is that they don't either. They're riddled with arbitrary human weaknesses. Every single thing they do wears at my suspension of disbelief like a cult knife on a relic armor's shield. I'm only holding out because I'm hoping that at some point this absurdity is explained.

I don't know where you are in the story but their is an EXTREMELY good explanation for some of the behavioral inconsistencies (which I personally find narratively satisfying and ties back into my enjoyment of the representation of AI).

Keeping vague: The circumstance's behind bad AI's creation greatly constrain its thinking and options. This also applies to several different types of artificial beings in the story.

I read it on royal road so it's not really split into books in my head. And it's been a couple years. But I'd say maybe book four. I love the action scenes, and the worldbuilding is good too, but more and more attention gets focused on comparatively irrelevant stuff, the pacing gets worse, and there's a particular plotline that's been dragged on for AGES with no progress.

Honestly still love it though, those action scenes are just delicious.

For those of you who were not born into/raised with some kind of religion, how did you find your way to it in your adulthood?

I'm a male lawyer in my mid-40s. I was raised by irreligious boomers (who have drifted into extreme anti-religion in their old age). My childhood experience of religion was essentially zero. I'm not a hard atheist or anti-religious, but I also don't feel a "god-shaped hole" where many people seem to try to shove some kind of belief system (including the Current Thing) in an attempt to fill it. It seems more like I'm lacking the socket where some kind of faith module would even go.

I do much outdoors (pondering hiking the PCT next year, which wouldn't be my first thru-hike) and enough time outside will have me thinking "this has to be intentional Creation to explain why it's so amazing in so many ways." But it's a big gap from there to "sin is real and Jesus Christ was the son of God and sent to cleanse me of my sins" (yes, I'm aware that gap is where faith comes in).

I have investigated some churches around me, but all feel very culturally Alien (discounting the ones that would clearly be a bad fit since their doctrine appears to be "We Support the Current Thing, but we do so with a sprinkling of Jesus"). Church websites alone are enough to give me that Alien feeling. It's like the "Women Lawyers" associations that are technically open to all (to avoid problems with anti-discrimination laws) and some men do join, but it would take a Hannibal Lecter gurney and straitjacket to get me there--it is so obviously Not My Place that I would never go voluntarily. I get that feeling from any church I've looked into, too. So I can't say of the options I have near me call me into trying to learn more.

Read through the gospels. Read them slowly, meditatively. Use lectio divina on one of them. And while you're doing it, go to church. There are lots of them; the alien-ness is just a perception. And pray.

Christianity is not something which we shape to suit ourselves. It's something which changes us into the better. Don't worry about a fit, worry about keeping on because the spiritual life is a marathon and not a sprint.

You were not raised religious in any way, and that's how you found your way to it?

I am cradle LDS but needed to find my way back to the church after an atheist period.

For me, the beginning was reading the Sequences and realizing the LDS church had extremely satisfying answers to every anti-religion argument they made. Our answers for theodicy, the Invisible Dragon in the Garage, the nature of consciousness, free will, etc. are all quite good imo, if you are starting from a rationalist-adjacent perspective.

But what really brought me back was simple, undeniable, tangible evidence. I decided to try to pray for something (freedom from an addiction I had) and the result was spectacular, far beyond anything I'd have expected. I then set about more formally testing prayer and related things and found consistent, similar results.

But it's a big gap from there to "sin is real and Jesus Christ was the son of God and sent to cleanse me of my sins" (yes, I'm aware that gap is where faith comes in).

I think "sin is real" at least should be fairly self-evident. There are self-destructive behaviors which both make you feel worse as a person, and decrease your capacity. Making an effort to avoid them makes us both happier and more capable of accomplishing unrelated goals. One can (and I have) run a series of tests to confirm this.

As far as faith in Jesus, I don't think there are any knock-down philosophical arguments that prove Christianity more true than, say, Hinduism. But I do think there are practical tests that work. Prayer and fasting get results. God doesn't ask for totally blind faith (that would be silly) nor for us to rationally consider philosophy in a vacuum to determine the correct religion (something very few, if any, humans are capable of). He provides hard evidence to those looking and ready for it.

The fact that prayer is what brought you back is really strange to me. Do you think there is any statistical evidence that prayer works? What about other statistical evidence, like people who live on coasts that have earthquakes tend to die more to tsunamis? Completely area-based, unless you make the argument that people who live on coasts are more sinful and thus encounter the wrath of God more often. How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out? Knowing that statistics has incredible predictive power is enough to dissuade me that prayer does anything at all.

From a non-Mormon perspective, the sophisticated argument for prayer is that it changes a person’s disposition or spirit, and that this is what it means to receive something from God. This would have especially strong results where the desired object is itself a change of disposition, eg the addiction OP mentions. How could prayer help or cure addiction? Addiction entails the pursuit of pleasure where pleasure goes against one’s own social, prosocial, identity-determined goals. God solidifies a person’s social identity in ways impossible to accomplish with secular language or materialist understanding alone, for a variety of psychological reasons. Prayer works to recollect and elaborate upon social identity. It makes prosocial decisions salient and forefront, and even existentially significant. It involves an omnipresent social superior, social confident, and social lover. Many more things can be said about this. But there’s a reason even Huberman the neuroscientist prays every day.

The statistical evidence that prayer works is that religious people, especially those who pray to a loving God, have greater wellbeing and are protected against addiction. Really, all that we want at the end of the day is greater wellbeing. So it works in toto. If establishing prayer in your life is more conducive to your happiness than otherwise, then it is established that prayer works and ought to be done, as any reasonable organism seeks greater wellbeing.

Regarding disasters —

There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

Unsophisticated shepherds dealing with unsophisticated dangerous feral sheep have often claimed that natural disasters are allowed by God or are the punishment of God. This is to promote society-wide prosocial behavior in an efficient way. But it is not the case.

How many people are mired in addiction that try everything, including prayer, and never make it out

Many, but they die in hope and conversation with their perfect Love One. The alternative is less prayer is unlikely to be more conducive to success and wellbeing. But the advice should never be “only pray” — of course you do everything else, but you also pray.

tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks ford a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

You make some great points, but not any that I don't already agree with. I fully admit that greater wellbeing and protection against addiction are great things and can reasonably be attributed to belief in God, prayer and everything else that goes with it.

Critically, @Tenaz's posts are going outside the scope of this and claiming that prayer can positively affect factors outside of your control, as long as you're praying for things that God wants. If he kept inside the scope you and FCfromSSC typically stay within when you talk about prayers being more about relationship with God, I would never have posted what I did.

I wish more people mentioned the tower of Siloam as you have. The Christians I have talked to have not noted its significance, and they don't usually have very well reasoned responses to my problems of evil, which goes against what @AnonymousActuary says when he writes

though it seems like you are just hoping bringing up the problem of evil will somehow magically turn someone atheist again like they've never thought about it in their life?

Many of them have not thought about it.

I think "why is this bad thing happening to me" sorta a diet-problem of evil is an extremely common thing for people to think about? But yes, I doubt the median Christian has read the Bible through even once. I remember when I was ~10 talking to a Sunday school leader and mentioning I was starting my 3rd time through reading a chapter a day and he was shocked. I was like "wait doesn't everyone do this?" haha.

And the Bible as a whole definitely addresses it frequently - think the Tower of Siloam story, the story of the cripple ("who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?") or like, the entire book of Job. I don't think the answers that come out are ones that are going to intuitively solve the problem for someone who doesn't already believe, but it is certainly considered.

I think there is still value to this sort of “illogical prayer”. Imagine you want to run a marathon. If you’re constrained to logic, then you can pray for the spirit (mood / feeling / aim) to practice every day; the praying would help to increase salience and craving for the activity. But you can also enter into the post-logical realm: you can believe that God guarantees that you will complete a marathon, and actually changes reality provided that you practice. And now you have no wavering or double-mindedness about your practice and pursuit. There’s now no room for doubt about whether you obtain it, it’s just a matter of when. It’s hard to convey this beneficial goal certainty without eschewing logic, but you see it in a lot of high-level performers across domains, eg Magnus Carlsen saying that the optimal mindset for chess is “between delusional and confident”. It seems essential for the instrumentalization of cognition toward a goal.

Humans need to be certain that they will accomplish a goal and “God will make it so” is no less delusional than “I simply believe it” or “if you believe you will achieve” (at the very least, religious language is more poetic). But the utility of prayer is more clear when you factor in more variables: someone is more likely to take the time to pray when they believe (when they know) that they will be heard, answered, and gifted something materially. It’s easier on the mind and increases interest. “My act of praying gives myself a spirit” turns a person into an actor playing a part. “My loving Father is eager to give me my request and only asks for prayer and practice, that I prove my interest and allegiance” turns someone into a social animal, a human. It’s simpler, there’s no pretending. And it activates much more cognition and interest, because every time you pray you are speaking to the maker of all things and the ruler of time. That dogma itself will make the content of your prayer more striking in your mind, increasing the chance of it occurring.

As for the problem of evil, my view is firmly in the minority but I believe in a sovereign force of evil which evades the problem completely. From the Wisdom of Solomon:

God did not make death. For he fashioned all things that they might have being, and the creatures of the world are wholesome […] It was the wicked who with hands and words invited death, considered it a friend, and pined for it, and made a covenant with it […] God formed us to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made us. But by the envy* of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are allied with him experience it.

I read this as a sovereign force of evil always existing, later in the form of the devil, who unleashed death when our archetypal ancestors disobeyed the Good in paradise. The evil in the world is both due to evil as a force and mankind’s own alliance with it (Adam isn’t just “first human”, but we all existed in Adam and we inherit his temperament etc). This is very satisfying. God has ultimate control over everything in the end, and ultimate control over the Good, but there currently and forever was a sovereign evil force. Every attempt to make God all-powerful including over evil is ultimately making Him less moral and less loving.

Well, prayer is (among other things) making requests of God. When I say it works, I don't mean that you can ask God for just anything and it will always happen. But if you know what you can ask for, and ask in faith, then it will work.

Just like with any other test, every piece of evidence one way or another helps to refine your model of reality. If you pray for something and it doesn't happen, you should shunt probability from models of the world which predicted the request fulfilled, into models of the world that predict the opposite. This means both decreasing your overall probability estimate of God existing, as well as studying to figure out the character of God and the nature of prayer, and pushing some probability towards hypotheses of a different character of God who would not have fulfilled that request.

In other words, every prayer is an opportunity to learn more of God's character and what he wants of you, as well as gathering evidence of whether he exists in the first place. There are other tests too; I think the most reliable are tests of God's commandments. Pick one, make an effort to follow it, and if it's truly one of God's commandments the results will be good. God encourages these sorts of tests.

Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

In regards to addiction, I believe in a God whose primary goal is to help us grow. He rarely denies us the opportunity to test ourselves. Addictions are really rough, but they're great training, and he'd much prefer to strengthen and change us (something he will not do without our cooperation) than remove the temptation. This model of God leads me to pray very differently from someone with a different model. I don't expect to see the addiction (or whatever it is) completely defeated on my behalf, but I do expect all sorts of revelation regarding how I can best go about fighting it, what my next step should be, etc. as well as direct help when I'm in a truly desperate situation.

My own freedom from addiction was certainly more than the null hypothesis (strict materialism) would predict but certainly not sufficient evidence alone. But the much more involved tests I set up later were more than satisfactory. Basically it involved testing out commandments, particularly commandments which distinguished between alternative likely models, and tracking the results. For example, we've been commanded to take care of our bodies, eat well, exercise, etc. but I would expect that to work regardless of whether it was a commandment or just a good idea. I would not expect prayer and/or fasting to work better than doing nothing or meditation, so those commandments are better for initial testing.

Do you think there is any statistical evidence that prayer works?

I know there is because I made some myself. If the tests had turned out the other way, though, I certainly wouldn't have believed any study saying otherwise (that prayer does in fact work).

If you really think that this is something that works empirically, it should be easy to design some studies that properly prove it. Has anyone done it? Or maybe there are too many confounding factors like true belief? If you fail to pray for something and it happens anyway, did God do it?

I'm perfectly happy to let Christians have their faith. I think it's healthy. But I really can't stand these kinds of outrageous claims about how prayer really works when it's been pretty clear that it does not work at all for years. If God only grants you specific, insignificant, entirely-taking-place-in-the-mental-realm prayers, can you say it's that useful, especially if something like stoicism grants you similar results? Is God pleased by secular stoicism? If we compared prayers made to God to prayers made to stoicism, what would the results look like?

If God only grants you specific, insignificant, entirely-taking-place-in-the-mental-realm prayers

Yeah, that's not what I'm talking about at all. I saw (and see) entirely tangible results. My claim is specifically that if you pray for things, with a good understanding of who God is and what prayer actually is, you're likely to get those things. It's not limited to revelation or other mental changes.

If you really think that this is something that works empirically, it should be easy to design some studies that properly prove it. Has anyone done it? Or maybe there are too many confounding factors like true belief?

Well, studies can't truly prove anything, ever. But I've seen plenty of relevant studies. Some tested whether crops which were prayed over did better than others, some tested whether people who were prayed for survived longer than others. Some have positive results, some negative (no effect) results. I'm not satisfied with any of them.

If you look at some of the popular commentary on these studies it is shockingly bad. Just look at the first study mentioned:

Probably the experiment cited most often by advocates of prayer is the one performed by Byrd, a cardiologist at San Francisco General Medical Center. According to his report, he studied 393 patients between August 1982 and May 1983. He divided the group into 192 patients who were prayed for, and 201 who were not prayed for.7 He reported that, among other things, the people who were prayed for were five times less likely to develop pulmonary edema. None required endotracheal intubation, and fewer patients died.

The problem with this and any so-called controlled experiment regarding prayer is that there can be no such thing as a con-trolled experiment concerning prayer. You can never divide people into groups that received prayer and those that did not. The main reason is that there is no way to know that someone did not receive prayer. How would anyone know that some distant relative was not pray-ing for a member of the group that Byrd had identified as having received no prayer? How does one control for prayers said on behalf of all the sick people in the world? How does one assess the degree of faith in patients that are too sick to be interviewed or in the persons performing the prayers? Even Byrd acknowledges these problems and admits that “`pure’ groups were not attained in this study.”8 Since con-trol groups are not possible, such purported scientific exper-iments are not possible.

Basically the guy is saying "ok, evidence says prayer works, but maybe people in the control group were prayed for too, so it doesn't count." OK, but the experimental group was likely prayed for much more. It's like saying that a vitamin C supplement study (with a control that doesn't take the supplement) is impossible because the control group will still eat some vitamin C. No, that's not how studies work. The same calibre of commentary (easily dismissed by anyone with half a brain to think about these things) can be found everywhere. The studies themselves are not much better, and I think you can dismiss those that find positive results for prayer as easily as I can dismiss those that find negative results.

I could go on. Maybe a smarter person than me could define a good study. Maybe they already have and I haven't seen it yet. But in the meantime I think it's up to each person to figure this out for themselves. It's really not hard to do, as I did, a "controlled" study of the efficacy of prayer. Make a list of twenty things you want, good things that you think God wants you to have, come up with a rough estimate of how likely they are to happen, and pray for a randomized half of them. It doesn't take that long.

If you fail to pray for something and it happens anyway, did God do it?

Yes? God works the same way reality itself does--we don't fully understand him or have perfect knowledge of every detail of his mind. I don't understand the objection here, is God not allowed to do anything unless we pray for it? I don't believe prayer is guaranteed to achieve results--for that to happen I'd need a perfect understanding of who God is, rather than a pretty good one. I just think it raises the odds, basically proportional to how good my understanding of God is (and reality, too).

For example, say my dad is depressed because my mom is on her deathbed. So I pray for her to live a bit longer so that my dad can have more time with her before she passes. But, say I don't know some crucial detail--maybe he'll be happier and more at peace in the long run if she passes now. Let's assume I have a correct model of God, too, and I'm asking in faith. This doesn't necessarily mean the prayer will be answered, simply because my model of reality is correct. God knows my heart, and my prayer (which is really about alleviating my dad's suffering) doesn't force him to ignore the spirit of my request.

Now, I've been down this road before, with other interlocutors. So I'm going to politely request, using enough lines that you're sure to not miss this part--

please

please

please

please

please

please

please

think through the implications of this before typing up a snarky response. Assume I've done the same. My only claim here is that prayer increases the odds of the thing you requested happening. I'm not saying it's guaranteed. I'm not saying you're stupid, bad, or wrong if you pray for something and it doesn't happen. Please assume I've actually put ten seconds into thinking through the implications of this.

But I really can't stand these kinds of outrageous claims about how prayer really works when it's been pretty clear that it does not work at all for years.

Have you seriously tried to test it? It will take perhaps an hour to get started, and then five minutes a day for a few weeks. Provided you go into it with an open mind I'm confident you'll see results. Plenty of people put that much time into meditation on a whim.

Let's say that the study really did prove that prayer works.

Okay. What kind of wording was used during the prayer? How many people prayed for the subject? Did they pray a long, individual prayer, a short, individual prayer, or multiple prayers throughout the days? Does length of time spent praying increase the statistical likeliness that the prayer works? Do acts of faith (fasting, attending worship, displaying faith artwork) improve the outcome? Does Biblical conduct (charity, honoring the Sabbath, honoring one's parents) improve the outcome? Does the intensity of the prayer (praying for one's child recovering from cancer as opposed to praying for one's stubbed toe to stop hurting) affect the outcome? Are people in the faith more likely to have a support group that helps them relieve stress?

Do you see that there are an impossible amount of factors involved in such a study? I guarantee the study was not so rigorous as to specifically probe every single aspect that I've listed here. Even if you asked them, you wouldn't get straight answers. People forget, people don't understand their own minds or why they think certain things or do certain acts.

It's really not hard to do, as I did, a "controlled" study of the efficacy of prayer.

This is the same problem we ran into last week with the gender dysphoria thing. It's impossible to look inside someone's mind. Do you tally your successes to failures? For how long? Are they correlated at all with the other upswings of your life?

In my youth, I thought that when I was worried sick about my dog, calling for it to come back over and over, praying desperately for it to come back, that it was certainly a miracle when it did, in fact, come back. The problem is that there is no evidence for this whatsoever. There is no way to run two exactly matching sets of reality, one where I prayed that my dog came back, and one where I did not pray that my dog came back. For such a trivial matter, it is easy to say that my calling had more effect than prayer. What about for not-so-trivial matters? The feeling that a miracle happened would be even greater, but it would have no more basis than my dog anecdote. I felt spiritually uplifted by that event, just as I guarantee a girl who mistakenly thought she was a boy would feel great relief at wearing boys' clothing and being called by a masculine name. But feelings are not proof of anything. We are not scientific beings. We are animals, a big ball of emotions, tightly wound at times.

I can tell you I prayed for a troubled girl once every night, and despite my devotion, despite pledging I would never ask for anything more besides if this wish was granted, she ended up shooting herself due to chronic abuse that I had no idea about. It was after some years of sustained nightly praying that her soul did not go to Hell that I realized the utter stupidity of such a venture.

Let's say that the study really did prove that prayer works.

Okay. What kind of wording was used during the prayer? How many people prayed for the subject? Did they pray a long, individual prayer, a short, individual prayer, or multiple prayers throughout the days? Does length of time spent praying increase the statistical likeliness that the prayer works? Do acts of faith (fasting, attending worship, displaying faith artwork) improve the outcome? Does Biblical conduct (charity, honoring the Sabbath, honoring one's parents) improve the outcome? Does the intensity of the prayer (praying for one's child recovering from cancer as opposed to praying for one's stubbed toe to stop hurting) affect the outcome? Are people in the faith more likely to have a support group that helps them relieve stress?

Do you see that there are an impossible amount of factors involved in such a study? I guarantee the study was not so rigorous as to specifically probe every single aspect that I've listed here. Even if you asked them, you wouldn't get straight answers. People forget, people don't understand their own minds or why they think certain things or do certain acts.

Well, look, I don't put any faith in the study at all. I only brought it up to critique what I see as both typical, and extremely lackluster, commentary around that kind of study (and by extension, the quality of the studies themselves). Like I said, I'm sure either of us could absolutely tear it apart.

But these objections you've listed really aren't great. Just as quantum physics adds up to normalcy, all these factors add up to a statistically significant difference between the experimental group and the control. If it works, that's an enormously important thing to know about the world, and it would be worth first replicating, then attempting to control for each of these factors in turn.

Do you tally your successes to failures? For how long? Are they correlated at all with the other upswings of your life?

Yes, for a few weeks. I would have gone much longer but the results were extremely definitive quickly, to such an extent that continuing the test felt quite disrespectful. I recognize this means that the test really isn't worth much as far as evidence goes to anyone other than myself--I can only ask you to try to replicate it.

In my youth, I thought that when I was worried sick about my dog, calling for it to come back over and over, praying desperately for it to come back, that it was certainly a miracle when it did, in fact, come back. The problem is that there is no evidence for this whatsoever. There is no way to run two exactly matching sets of reality, one where I prayed that my dog came back, and one where I did not pray that my dog came back. For such a trivial matter, it is easy to say that my calling had more effect than prayer. What about for not-so-trivial matters? The feeling that a miracle happened would be even greater, but it would have no more basis than my dog anecdote.

Well this is why I made a list of things I wanted, estimated their outcome probabilities, chose half at random, prayed for them, and then compared my average error in that group to my average error in the group of outcomes I didn't pray for.

Human reasoning isn't perfect but I do think it's capable of overcoming this sort of error with enough study. The dog will probably come back eventually, so if you want to use [dog comes back] as your test of prayer then it probably needs to be focused on timing. How long does the dog normally take to come back? How long did it take to come back when you prayed for it? A few of my desired outcomes were this sort of test (though a bit less trivial). I certainly agree that the feelings themselves aren't good evidence.

I can tell you I prayed for a troubled girl once every night, and despite my devotion, despite pledging I would never ask for anything more besides if this wish was granted, she ended up shooting herself due to chronic abuse that I had no idea about. It was after some years of sustained nightly praying that her soul did not go to Hell that I realized the utter stupidity of such a venture.

I'm very sorry. I think this absolutely should reduce your faith in God. But it should take most of that probability mass from theories of God, and reality, that most strongly predicted otherwise. In this case, I'd say a lot of that probability mass should be taken from the theory that being alive was actually good for her--that what you were praying for is actually what you would have wanted with full knowledge of all the details.

It's pretty trite to say "she's in a better place now" but I truly do believe she is--with family members who care for her a lot more and a lot better than it sounds like her living family did. You were praying against that outcome, and God didn't answer your prayer.

This is the same problem we ran into last week with the gender dysphoria thing. It's impossible to look inside someone's mind.

I'm not asking you to--I wouldn't expect anyone to take my results on faith. In fact, not only would I not believe my own results if someone else told them to me, but I often don't believe they happened myself, and it takes a fair bit of convincing to remind myself they actually did happen.

In this case, I'd say a lot of that probability mass should be taken from the theory that being alive was actually good for her--that what you were praying for is actually what you would have wanted with full knowledge of all the details.

Ha. Haha.

I have sometimes thought that someone being dead means that you will never worry about them again, because their story has ended; they are right where you left them, and you will always know where they are, what their status is.

Offense taken, all the same. What an absolutely awful way to view life. I suppose everyone who is dead is better off dead, otherwise they wouldn't be dead, right? Not to mention the conclusion that perhaps the suicidal ought to take their own lives since their earthly ones suck so bad.

Regardless, I wish you the best in your theories, though I will continue to doubt them.

More comments

I don't understand why you think someone could believe that prayer sometimes works and not also believe that plate tectonics exists?

It's the idea that absolutely awful things can happen to you for reasons outside of your control at any time for many multitudes of reasons that were decided by seemingly nobody.

I honestly can't tell if this is some kind of gotcha or you are trying to make some profound point that is whooshing right over me haha

I am not really the person to make the point, anyway. I saw @Hoffmeister25 make the point much better than I can, and if @FCfromSSC had any satisfying response to it, he sure didn't seem to post it there.

But it's an old question: the problem of evil, the problem of random things inherent in nature hurting you for no reason. Why are there so many things that are absolutely awful, caused by immutable nature, and are only explainable to us modern humans? To ancient humans, it seemed functionally equivalent to being smitten by God to get tuberculosis and die slowly. They likely thought that prayer had something to do with getting bubonic plague and dying, similar to Tenaz's idea that prayer causes better outcomes. The Aztecs thought that sacrificing people was statistically likely to keep the world from ending. Perhaps they sacrificed something and felt some sign from God twitch within themselves. But they couldn't have been further from the truth. Do you think we modern humans are more pious than ancient humans? Not a chance.

I have seen from some young earth creationists the idea that it's because humans are fallen ever since the Tree of Knowledge was eaten from by Adam and Eve. But that only works in a young earth model of the world. If there is no young earth, there was no Adam and Eve, and we are just animals, and the world was always fucked up, right from the start, before any human was involved at all.

I am not really the person to make the point, anyway. I saw @Hoffmeister25 make the point much better than I can, and if FCfromSSC had any satisfying response to it, he sure didn't seem to post it there.

The conversation continued here. @Hoffmeister has the last word there as well, as most people I engage with do. I have a lot less time for discourse than I used to, and on deeper subjects like this one, formulating replies can take awhile.

The LDS model is that God is not conceptually omnipotent. He is not capable of preserving human agency and simultaneously allowing us to grow of our own free will. We can remain like Adam and Eve, in an innocent, childlike state forever, or we can venture out into the fallen world, separated from God, with all the suffering that entails, and grow in the process.

The reason suffering exists in this fallen world is due to the absence of God--because God is voluntarily choosing not to constantly exert his power at all times in all areas. God in our view did not create the universe ex nihilo or invent concepts such as good, evil, joy, or suffering, and the universe in its natural state (without God) is one of evil, disorder, and suffering.

If God were to exert his power more, not only would the suffering disappear, but our freedom would as well. There would be no meaningful distance between action and consequence. In this world, evil actions are often rewarded. In a world closer to God, they would be punished instantly, and good actions would be rewarded. We would remain children, lacking any opportunity to exert ourselves physically, intellectually, or spiritually. I'm not sure we'd even know what exertion is; nor would there be any reason to try to do anything, since God would provide for our every need. The Bible hints at this (1, 2), but it's a primarily LDS belief as far as I know.

There would be no need for effort in the first place. We wouldn't even be capable of exerting effort. Effort is intrinsically tied to suffering, after all.

"But it doesn't have to be"

Remember that I'm talking about LDS beliefs here, not broader Christendom. Our God can't reinvent concepts at a whim.

"But can't God at least step in for the worst suffering?"

If he steps in too much then he limits our agency and our ability to grow. But I believe both that he does step in, and that suffering is very, very rarely so bad as to be intolerable. I struggled with severe ulcerative colitis for nearly a year, and found that even at the very worst moments, if I just focused on taking it one step at a time, life was still significantly better than neutral. Even in the throes of physical agony, things are basically fine. I expect this follows for literally any level of physical pain.

The worst pains we experience are losses of joy. The loss of a loved one hurts much more than any amount of physical pain. I think it should tell us something that life is, for most people, so good that our worst moments are when we lose just one of the many sources of joy given to each of us.

And then we die, our proximity to God increases, our suffering and ability to improve as people are greatly diminished, and we enter what's been aptly called a "rest".

"What about dead children? Why is a human lifespan eighty years instead of a thousand or a million?"

I can go into more detail here if you want, but suffice to say that there will be other opportunities for moral growth, and I have faith we're all given what we need to flourish.

"But what about animals?"

They have spirits too. We don't know as much about why they need to be here (it's not nearly as relevant to us humans) but they probably do have some degree of agency, and thus moral growth, and they definitely have the capacity to distinguish pleasure from pain, good from bad, on some level. They're learning just as we are. Anyways, their main form of suffering is physical.

With that out of the way. My wife read what I wrote here and told me (in nicer words) that I was being excessively callous and autistic. Sorry about that. What I wrote was not even correct, really--God doesn't ever want his children to commit suicide. But he'll also never make a choice on our behalf. His ability to step in without harming our agency is ultimately pretty limited.

In the end I have faith that your friend will be okay, faith based not in high-and-mighty philosophical arguments from first principles, but in my personal experience with God's love. I understand if you don't feel the same. Probably the most consistent response I have seen to prayer is when I have asked for relief. I can't think of a time I was suffering greatly and asked for relief and it was not quickly given to me. I sincerely believe that if you take a minute to say a prayer now, and ask for relief, or ask God if he loves you, you'll feel peace and comfort. This is nowhere near proof of anything I've said--but it's a start.

I do appreciate your sincerity, and your honorable attempts to explain the gospel remind me of the valiant and zealous missionaries of the past, as shown in movies like Black Robe (1991). Growing up, I thought Mormons were really weird, and you are another in a long string of non-weird Mormons who challenge that stereotype. I thought the same about Catholics, as well, until @SubstantialFrivolity made a post giving quite the steelman of the branch. Like him, you are perfectly willing to wade into the difficult stuff.

With that out of the way. My wife read what I wrote here and told me (in nicer words) that I was being excessively callous and autistic. Sorry about that. What I wrote was not even correct, really--God doesn't ever want his children to commit suicide. But he'll also never make a choice on our behalf. His ability to step in without harming our agency is ultimately pretty limited.

No problem. To be honest, you did articulate something that it is not polite to think, yet I think many people think it privately to themselves - that some unpleasant lives would be better off if they were not alive. It is humanitarian to strive for the best for everyone, and that they continue living for as long as possible, but in many cases, the thought springs up anyway. If we actually take that thought seriously, we get some scary hypotheticals, like "at what point is it acceptable for lifelong chronic depressives to just give up and step into traffic", or "maybe you should kill your kids so they don't get a chance to lose the faith as adults". And if it was okay for her, as an abuse victim who was awfully messed up herself, to take her own life, then that has bad implications for other people who struggle with chronic depression or bad childhoods. I shouldn't have gotten mad at you, though, especially since you realized your mistake later anyway.

I hope she will be okay too, but an entire childhood of fundamentalism telling me that people who commit suicide go to hell and unbelievers go to hell cannot be washed away by the same fundamentalists backstepping with "God is perfectly just, so you can trust Him to make the right decision". You didn't say that, but there are so very many interpretations of the Bible that many people who genuinely were looking to God to give them the interpretation came to it. All of them genuinely feel their way is the right one and can cite scripture and cite their own internal spiritual uplifting upon praying. For Mormonism, the problem is even more acute, as @TracingWoodgrains found out through testing Moroni's Promise on an open minded Christian.

For these reasons, and more, I am afraid my faith is permanently disrupted. I don't think it's a good thing, so I appreciate your defense anyway.

More comments

If anyone satisfyingly resolves the problem of evil in a forum post they are clearly misusing their talents.

I also will not solve the problem of evil for you here either. There are lots of books you could read by smarter people than me if that is what you are searching for (including books of the Bible), though it seems like you are just hoping bringing up the problem of evil will somehow magically turn someone atheist again like they've never thought about it in their life?

Based on a few interactions on this forum, I think everyone who brings up the problem of evil is personally pretty troubled by it and convinced it's a big problem. It may also be an argumentative tactic, but not a disingenuous one.

I'm not asking anyone to become atheist. But the idea that prayer does anything is chafing enough to me to cause me to comment. As I said elsewhere, I think religion is healthy, though I struggle to accept the good with the bad.

More comments

I am a cradle catholic, but with two caveats. First, I was raised in the very definition of a "leafy suburb Novus Ordo" parish. Second, almost all of my 20s I was totally away from the church - zero mass attendance, zero daily prayer.

I'm now a (developing) traditional catholic. Latin mass, much better (re)cathechesis, real theological reading and study - although this last part is largely just do to my ability to sit still now.

However, I didn't have any specific moment of reawakening. The journey was longer and sort of ... academic? I started reading about epistemology when I was working in Data Science. I did this because I found it profoundly preposterous how professional "data scientists" and their managers would find some very weak frequentist statistical relationship between two variables and present it as 100% iron clad evidence for some sort of business decision. After letting myself become jaded with business data science, I wanted to at least recover faith in an analytically rigorous process of both induction and deduction. So, lots of books on epistemology and prob/stat.

Pair this with a growing awareness of culture war topics starting in the mid 2010s. That led me to a much quicker "conversion" from a wishy-washy tits-and-beer lib to an Old Right style conservative. Philosophically, I went hard into the idea that at least the conception of an absolute morality is required for a functioning society.

Thus, you have a combination of adherence to the concept of absolutely morality paired with a constant suspicion in how humans reason and come to believe things (side note: a pure rationalist / empirical stance is epistemic downs syndrome). That's a pretty good petri dish for faith formation. I think that maybe the specific bridging function was reading Alasdair MacIntyre (RIP, homie) combined with all of my latent catholicism - as lame as suburban NO history is.

I'm a big hiker and I do "find God" out there more than I do in other places. I think you said it well in your own post - looking at something the Wyoming Rockies and shrugging it all off as "ehh, random collision of atoms over billions of years. All noise." seems far too trite. It's overwhelming beauty that your brain can't fathom beyond "oh my god this is wonderful" (see what I did there?).

Obviously I'm going to make the unsolicited recommendation that you look into the Roman Catholic Church. Adult cathechesis - at a traditional parish - will tickle your lawyer brain. It's very structured, very grounded in philosophy and theology often in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas.

In terms of finding that personal spark, sorry to be trite, but that's on you, bud. There's no way to force it.

Mine was a combination of psychedelics and meditation slowly opening my mind over years to other possibilities, then having an odd string of coincidences leading to me taking Christianity a bit more seriously. Over time I began to learn more and more including listening to Jordan Peterson's lectures, John Vervaeke, and reading a good amount of the sort of "post-modern" Christian apologists. Eventually I decided to go to a church and slowly work on my faith.

In terms of the culturally alien thing... yeah. That's kind of the point if you want to fill the God-shaped hole. Anything that fills that is going to be alien to you, because your worldview is basically secular materialism. Even if you don't realize it, you have a 'religion' right now with extremely strong precepts. A big part of the journey to a "real religion" is recognizing that secular materialism is a philosophical system with axioms that must be investigated as well.

If you want a super dry book to read on all this, I'd recommend All Things are Full of Gods by David Bentley Hart.

EDIT: Sorry misread the God shaped hole thing. Also it helps to think of sin as "error" or "missing the mark" which is the Greek translation.

Why is that the bars with the oldest clientele are by far the most boisterous in the UK? I'm surrounded by pensioners playing weird card games, and they're bringing the house down haha.

They don't give a shit. Their social circle is other pensioners, and what's gonna happen if they make a drunken ass of themselves in public? They're not going to be fired, they're not going to be shunned by their social circle, they're not going to deny themselves future opportunities. They basically can do whatever they want (within limits of the law, presumably) and not care. So they are doing that.

Bars/pubs with an older clientele tend to be regulars who mostly all know each other, instead of small groups of young people there to talk with their friends. Same thing in the US, at least in terms of being welcoming. I once dipped into Chicago neighbourhood dive to charge my phone, and an old lady came over with a shot and said "now, son, we don't like to see people sitting alone here, less they want to." Spent two hours yukking it up with the old-timers telling me about the good old union welding days.

The younger blokes are socially stunted, simple as.

sips craft beer while googling "how to join conversation at pub"

Is the art market in trouble? First I see Patrick Boyle's video https://youtube.com/watch?v=dvcg1ytmtVA and afterwards I start seeing youtube sponsorships everywhere for masterworks.com which is clearly a service in search of a greater fools.

I would hesitate to use targeted advertising as evidence for any particular trend.

Does Mr. Boyle have some special insight into the art world?

Nope. But him and Plain Bagel have a knack for smelling blood in the water early.

What are the odds of a global recession given ai spending. Where's your Ed at by Ed Zitron is a decently rigorous left leaning newsletter that covers ai and his posts made me worry about a real collapse. Large firms like Microsoft are already pulling out by not allowing openai billions in credit and Apple came out with a paper against reasoning models not actually thinking.

The vast majority of comments on twitter about the paper are negative, ofc not one engages with the actual paper. The ones that do mostly agree. Given the s and p 500 being so tech heavy, tech being so ai happy and ai not providing results, is a recession likely? Ed's reporting states that openais dependent on smaller firms that are taking loans for their datacentres. He details this out better than me so please do check it.

The extreme amounts of money aren't justified given current rate of progress. Llms and their usage has gotten better but if it were worth a trillion dollars, the consensus would have been far more unanimous. Plus every single anthropic employee appearing publicly including their ceo isn't doing this any favor. You hear them say that this will take away all jobs etc etc, agi is here in 2026, which 's a year late compared to openais estimates.

I like llms, people get a lot of help from them but Ed's reporting and Microsoft and Apple conceding ground looks bad.

I don't think it will lead to a global recession, since it isn't even a real business making real money. I think it will lead to a recession in the tech industry though. The problem as I see it is that they've probably reached the limit of how much cash they can shovel into research and development without seeing any real results in terms of people actually paying for the product, and so much has been invested thus far that the product will have to be fairly expensive to recoup those costs and actually generate a profit on the whole venture. The whole business model relies on them being able to give it away for free, and companies seeing enough potential that the productivity gains make it worth it for them to start paying. But while you hear about billions of dollars tech companies invest into it, you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases. The whole thing is unsustainable.

Keep in mind that single sectors leading to huge recessions are rare. The tech bubble in 2000 is one example, but that was a relatively mild recession, and the amount the overall economy was invested into tech at the time was far beyond what we're seeing today with AI. Back then any company that was somehow related to computers was getting massive financial investments, and ladies' investment clubs were investing in IPOs. Most of the AI bubble is centered around a few big players, and big players see stock price dips due to localized circumstances all the time, we just don't think too much about it. I used to work in the energy industry, which saw pretty big collapses in 1999, 2014, and 2019, but they didn't lead to national recessions, let alone global ones.

For another example, the US housing market actually crashed in 2006, but and it did cause a global recession, but only because the mortgages had been securitized and the banks had a ton of exposure. It took a full two years for this to play out, and no one payed much attention to the crash at first because it was initially presumed to be localized to the mortgage industry. And then there's the farm crisis in 1985, which wreaked absolute havoc in the Upper Midwest, particularly Iowa. Farmers were committing suicide in the barn, having lost farms that were in the family for over a century, while the banks that foreclosed on them became insolvent due the inability to resell the land. A new chapter in the US bankruptcy code was created specifically to deal with family farms. Yet the entire thing only gained national notice once musicians started raising awareness and holding benefit concerts. I see an AI slowdown having local effects, with limited influence on the wider economy.

you don't hear about non-tech companies spending any substantial sums to use it. If they were to start charging a non-trivial amount for it, no one would pay, outside of a few edge cases

I don't see any mention of figures but there was the first regulatory approval of an AI-based law firm in England last month. https://www.sra.org.uk/sra/news/press/garfield-ai-authorised/

Law, medicine and finance are large service industries with notoriously steep fees that would gladly peel off a few billion to become more productive and competitive if they were allowed to. People might be slow to pay for image slop and virtual waifus but they'll happily pay up for things that matter. Will it scale to offset the expense of running the AI server farms? I don't know.

I'm a lawyer, and I'm not impressed by this product. I don't know what it's like in the UK, but in the US, debt collection in small claims court is without question the simplest thing you can do, to the point that it's one of the few legal things I'm already comfortable telling people to go ahead and do themselves. The service they appear to be providing doesn't seem much different from a number of commercial products already available in the US. I can't see how this is meaningfully different than a software package that completes forms for you, or books that provide forms for you to copy and fill out. Hell, these days most courts and some advocacy websites have downloadable forms for stuff like this.

Aside from that, though, I'm not sure who this product is actually for. Individuals loan each other money occasionally, but it isn't that common given how easy it is to get credit. The website makes it look like they're targeting small businesses with unpaid invoices, but how many small businesses have unpaid invoices to consumers? I don't think I've ever bought a product where the vendor agreed to ship it to me along with an invoice. Most of these unpaid invoices are from sales to other businesses, and if other businesses aren't paying, it's because either 1. They can't pay or 2. They have a reason for not paying. The AI product seems set up to expect a default judgment, and it is the case that most debt collection cases result in default judgments. However, most of these cases are consumer credit cases initiated by banks. They're worth it for banks to pursue because most individuals have jobs with money regularly coming into bank accounts that can be levied by court order (FWIW, the AI product won't help you with this step of the process, which is much more difficult than getting the initial judgment). Most businesses that aren't paying their bills and aren't contesting them are bordering on insolvency. The reason most of these claims aren't pursued isn't because of legal fees, it's because the judgments aren't worth any more than the paper they're printed on.

This is aimed at small businesses serving businesses owned by Indians, who are notorious for stiffing their vendors on the bill.

That doesn't really change the crux of the issue, which is 1. This isn't much different than other products that have been around decades, and 2. It isn't going to help you collect on the judgment. Honestly, a how-to on the subject published by a reputable company like Nolo (in the US) is likely available at a local library and will provide a broad based knowledge that can be helpful to understanding the process, especially if something unexpected arises. Filling out AI prompts can't help with that. It can answer questions, but the software already comes with disclaimers that it's not legal advice, though I doubt the AI knows the difference and will keep itself from answering if it gets into that territory.

Probably not, no, but small business owners do not know this.

The crash would be a big L for rationalists who despite evidence to the contrary believe in future outcomes that require multiple miracles. Yud and Scott would be questioned for spreading ai doomerism over tech that's not even good at what it's supposed to do, let alone be agi.

David Gerard is one guy who I abhore and him providing decent criticism for ai with his website pivot to ai would be a small win for him and tens of his readers.

Openai may have to charge anywhere from 10 to 100 times more per query in order to be profitable. Their api calls netting sub 1 billion means that all llm wrappers are bad, period and are getting funding for valuations they don't deserve. Sam, Dario, Amjad, PG, every single VC knowingly lied and should be seen as responsible parties.

All of them are aware of the financial impossibilities I've listed. My contributions to this place haven't been the best, putting a realistic future scenario is the least I can do. I don't see a way out where this doesn't lead to thousands of jobs going out, I'll write one last post on this in a bit. Many here including me are in tech at various stages, categories, seniority levels and some are employed in startups that use non llm based ai, the good kind I mean. This affects all of us.

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