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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1079 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 29, 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.

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I need help finding an old post. I think I remember the phrase "dark organic society" followed by either "theory" or "bullshit". It was about the idea that society organises itself in certain ways regardless of explict, program-driven organising, and interpreting parts of progressivism as a despair reaction to that. I thought it was on baliocs tumblr, but google disagrees that its on tumblr at all. /u/gattsuru because you might have been the one that linked me back then.

Mini-rant of the day (am I repeating myself or do I have deja vu? must be getting old): While I appreciate the intention behind occasionally using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun in cases where the gender is unspecified, the amount of reading fatigue it generates is underrated. First let me say that my actual preference might be a somewhat stupid-sounding but actually refreshing/mildly helpful habit of simply using the opposite pronoun as a habit. For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice. Handy little reminder not to jump to assumptions. For fairness, this should be more generalized: teachers are mostly women, so use "he" as the general form. Doctors are mostly men, so use "she". College grads are mostly women, so use "he". "They" can still work in a pinch, or perhaps in official documents, but I feel like the tradeoffs involve are favorable on the whole.

But nonbinary people in fiction? That's a whole different story. Consider the following sentence ripped from a story I am reading:

Mirian and Gaius took turns instructing Jherica on soul magic. They would be the weakest of the time travelers, so it seemed best to give them some means of self-defense against the one they couldn't simply die and recover from.

This sentence is a total mess, and a nontrivial cognitive load, for no good reason. Well, not zero good reason, but here the tradeoffs fall very strongly against a generic pronoun: the loss in clarity, the mental burden, the flow disruption, the forced "backtracking" through the sentence to clarify meaning are absolutely terrible. The first "they" isn't immediately clear on the subject - is it the two people, or the nonbinary person? Okay, contextually, we figure out it's Jherica. But then we have an implied subject (who is doing the giving?), the next "them" needs context that takes a moment to process (Jherica again), and then another "they" also referring to Jherica, but needs double-checking. The wonderful thing about this sentence if Jherica were given a normal gender is that "they" clearly refers to the pair of people and not the individual. It's a useful tool in sentence mechanics that is completely ruined. "She" or "he" might induce a small amount of confusion (did the author accidentally chop up the pair and is referring to just one of them?) but partly that would be the author's fault for substandard sentence construction, and I still don't think it is quite as bad. It's far from uncommon to be referring to a group of people alongside an individual, and super useful to be able to casually and implicitly differentiate the two via pronouns.

To be clear, the story is wonderful, and there isn't any big deal or mention made about gender here at all (at least if there was I have no memory of it), and authors can make mistakes especially when self-edited (as is likely the case here). Or, in fact, I'm not even positive the author did make said character non-binary in the first place, since the author occasionally uses "he" in the next chapter, but not always. So it's not some massive culture war thing in this particular case. I think the point remains however that some progressives have tried to gaslight people (including myself) that gender-neutral pronouns are a minor inconvenience at best, and leverage already-existing rules of English. It's true that "they" already can serve this purpose (e.g. "Who's at the door and what do they want?" when it is fully unknown) but there are still some significant burdens if it becomes popularized.

It seems that it really shouldn't be a big loss to perform some nonbinary erasure here. Many forms of fiction already do things to make it easier on the reader (and I always notice when they do) such as giving main characters names that begin with different letters, or in anime they will color the hair differently not just for aesthetics but to make characters more differentiable. Sure, these semantic and visual 'collisions' happen IRL quite a lot (e.g. two Joshes on your team at work), but it seems to me the loss in realism is more than offset by the practical benefits. Note that this isn't purely an anti-woke position, in my book: I think giving characters some identifiable traits can make them more memorable. So there might be good reasons to throw in an unrealistic number of non-straight or mixed-race people into your TV show beyond deliberate representation! I don't think I'm advocating for anything too extreme.

What annoys me, and has become quite common lately, are people who write in to advice columns who deliberately obscure the gender of everyone mentioned in their letter. They, spouse, sibling, child, partner.

Since I was in college, I've read every advice column I've been able to get my hands on, as a way to make up for my complete social cluelessness. Dear Abby, Ann Landers, Miss Manners, Carolyn Hax, Care & Feeding, Captain Awkward.

I try to picture in my head the people involved in these situations. But I cannot picture a genderless person - my mind short-circuits and just gives me a sentient cloud of fog!

It's not just advice columns. People do this in real life for some reason!

The speaker almost always has a common gendered relationship in mind - daughter, boyfriend, wife, etc. - but are deliberately choosing not to reveal that info when it would be harmless, and help the listener understand the situation better.

Especially when these people use gender neutral pronouns when the gender is already specified.

For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice.

Tbh I've arrived at the opposite conclusion. As a teen I used to like characters that go against stereotypes - and to some degree I still do, as long as they're done carefully and thoughtfully - but combined with the ubiquitousness and increasing importance of fictional stories in people's lives, it seriously distorts their worldview. Stereotype accuracy is one of the best-replicating findings of sociological research, yet many people I tell this - most of them quite smart and educated - are completely dumbfounded. Of course this is especially due to the nature of their education, but the fictional stories they surround themselves with just reinforce their biases over and over. This can get quite comical, such as women who worry something is wrong with them because they aren't as assertive nor sporty nor as interested in engineering/math/etc. as their heroines.

I've seen some guides for getting cheap Ozempic but they seem specific to the US. Is anyone here in Canada? Have you gone through the process to get some and how did you find it?

Some will ship to Canada.

Not sure what the rules are for this so I don't want to give direct links here.

The general shape of it is you want to find vendors that sell peptides for research purposes only, and also ensure they get their stuff independently tested including with links to the test lab report that you can verify yourself. Additionally, they will have robust Telegram communities where customers will get together in a group for each batch and randomly pick a few to send their samples to a lab as well.

Has anyone done work for Data Annotation or other similar online AI labeling jobs? I have a PhD in math, and have spent the past few years doing mathematical modeling in Postdocs only to realize that I don't really like writing and publishing papers. Some combination of not feeling like the work matters, getting bored of working on the same project for a long time without any feedback, and then eventually finding out that nobody thought my paper was interesting. Mehhhhhhh. And then I lose motivation and do lower quality work and my next paper is worse. I need to get out of academia. But I also don't really know what else I want to do. I'm good at math. I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps, all of my coding has been mathematical models that I run myself and keep tinkering with to add features whenever I want to experiment with what happens when different features or parameters of the model get tweaked.

I'm also settled down in a medium-sized town with existing but limited local career options. I have a house, and a wife who is very attached to her job and family, so remote work is vastly preferable. I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away. I very much like the flexibility of working from home.

So... at least for now, Data Annotation looks promising? The advertisement claims that it pays $40/hr for Math and Programming talents, which I think I can do (unless they're super ultra competitive and only give the good work to people better than me?). The internet consensus seems to be that it's not a scam, but you might have trouble getting enough work to do it full time. And I could work my own hours, and work on discrete completable projects that feel more gamey and give feedback.

Does anyone have direct experience with this and can provide a more accurate and detailed account? Also, I think there are a couple of other similar companies that do this, so I'm not sure whether I should apply to one of those instead if they're better somehow. Or if I should apply to multiple and split my time between them in order to get a better pickings of the higher paying work? Or do you just anti-recommend the entire thing because it's not worth it? I'd like to hear thoughts and opinions from people who have either done this or know people who have done this, or know of similar remote work for someone with my talents.

It's not a scam. A friend of mine did this as a full-time job for about a year, although he didn't do any of the skilled work that pays $40 an hour, since he doesn't have a STEM background. Another friend did it part-time. I've signed up but haven't yet gotten around to doing the programming qualifications or any of the projects yet. If I do, I can let you know how it goes.

The feedback they gave was that it was pretty mentally exhausting. The tasks are not easy and require careful thinking. The friend who did it full-time really liked it though because he could work whenever.

The biggest problem seems to be that the tasks were running out, though the first friend did a lot of qualifications which made a lot of tasks available to him.

Do some Kaggle (or maybe Topcoder if they still have good DS comps?) and call yourself a data scientist, start sending out resumes -- you've already got a PhD (from a Western university?) and published papers, so you are honestly probably a better hire than at least half of the candidate pool that I've seen.

Lack of direct experience might have you applying to moderately lowend DS jobs -- but that would be in the $100-130K USD range rather than $40/hr and scammy (again assuming you are in the US) and WFH is still common.

If your medium sized town is south of the Mason-Dixon line and you don't mind occasional travel I might even be interested -- I need to hire somebody in the next couple of months. Feel free to send a PM.

I'm decent at programming, but I don't have experience making truly functional consumer-facing apps

If you’re smart enough to get a math PhD then you’re smart enough to code. Might take some time but you can do it if you want.

I'm also pathologically terrified of getting stuck in a boring 9-5 office job that eats my life away.

That’s… the majority of what awaits you outside of academia. Especially if you’re restricting yourself to opportunities of the form “trading my STEM skills for financial compensation received at regular, reliable intervals”. Are you sure you want to leave academia? The grass ain’t always greener.

There are always people on LessWrong from bespoke AI research institutes posting about their work and sometimes even advertising open positions, maybe you could explore something like that? (They tend to recruit from within their own social circles but it’s worth looking into…)

No, run. Treat those “opportunities” as lava. They’re but rebranded and/or higher class Mechanical Turk.

Know Your Worth is a cliche, but for a PhD in Math, $40 an hour is an insult. For an hourly position with no benefits, it should be deep into three figures an hour before a conversation even begins.

I and many of my acquaintances get regularly hit up with Exciting! AI! Opportunities! From LinkedIn-and-the-like thots—or excuse me—professional women with photos where they feel most confident to best position themselves for marketing purposes.

We used to chuckle at them like “hot girls in your zip code,” but we don’t anymore given the lack of novelty.

How do I accurately evaluate my worth? I'm too heavily confounded by impostor syndrome that I can't tell where it ends and my true value lies. I'm definitely below average for a Math PhD in terms of accomplishments. None of my grad-school work ended up getting published, and I've published 1-2 papers per year in my postdocs which have gotten ~5 citations each. I seem to work a lot less than my peers, and my advisor/bosses have been too busy and/or easy-going to push me, so I've kind of been coasting. That said, I am smart enough to learn stuff when I do try, and got a Math PhD, and know how to hack code together into something that compiles. I don't know what that's worth. What I do know is I'm not willing to put in the 60+ hour per week that the professors I've worked under seem to do writing grants and managing grad students and whatnot. At least not consistently, I would put in a couple long weeks if I really had to.

And I don't want to move, which drastically reduces my options. But on the other hand, the cost of living is not very high, and I'm currently DINK, so technically could survive on just my wife's job, but that wouldn't really be fair to her. On the work-life balance front I heavily lean towards the life part. Work is there so I don't starve and can afford people to do stuff like house repairs that I don't want to do.

I'm sure someone with my intelligence plus work ethic and ambition that I don't have could easily be making loads of money. However, given my constraints, is $40 an hour still an insult? My ideal position is remote, high pay per hour, few total hours, and meaningful/satisfying/moral, (I'm not phoning it in on a job that my employer expects more from), but I'm not sure what that is or if that's too many variables maximized simultaneously and I might need to compromise on some.

I'm a just-received-tenure CS/math prof at a top rated teaching college. I've put in way less work than the traditional R1 faculty (but probably a bit more than what you describe). One thing I've learned since graduating is that the phd/postdoc life really only prepares you to think about R1-style academic work. But there's a huge world beyond the R1 research world that is much less intensive.

For example, there's definitely community colleges around where you live that have teaching positions you'd be qualified for. At community colleges, these positions are mostly non-tenure track these days, and won't pay a lot, but they'd definitely support a decent DINK lifestyle and give you the flexible hours to enjoy it. Based on what you described as your qualifications, there's probably proper 4-year colleges near you that you could teach at and get tenure as well.

I've been on a handful of hiring committees too at this point. If you want to PM me a CV, I'll take a look and provide more detailed feedback.

So, what are you reading?

I'm adding Shapiro's Contested Will to my list.

It Starts with the Egg by Rebecca Fett, a book I literally found on the side of the road and which, serendipitously, is uniquely germane to a project I'm conducting research into.

Tell us more.

As documented in the Tinker Tuesday threads, I recently completed the first draft of a novel which began as a project for last year's NaNoWriMo. On Friday the 11th I'm going to start working on the second draft, and I've been doing some additional research in the interim.

*Imperial Wizard 5: Seeds of Corruption (Arcane Awakening) by J Parsons.

Prompted by the discussion about aphantasia I started in on The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks.

I really enjoyed that one.

Starting on The Sword of Christ by Giles Corey.

Interesting premise let us know how it is.

Can anyone summarize and/or link to a summary of the supposed conflict over/between Gun Jesus (the Forgotten Weapons guy with the long hair and goatee) and whatshisface from InRange? I know whatshisface has a strong SJW-bent that puts off a lot of people, but Gun Jesus presumably kept the Brutality Match under the InRange corporate umbrella by choice (I'm guessing he and the others could have rebranded the format and registered their own LLC, had they wanted to) and the only reason I can think of to dislike Gun Jesus (other than the controversy over him planning to publish than cancelling the publication of a translation of a memoir by a foreign resistance fighter in the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which seems like a separate thing) is guilt-by-even-reduced-association with whatshisface, which would be a bit unhinged.

ThisIsSin covered it pretty well, the only thing I would add is GunJesus tries very hard (and succeeds!) at not taking sides in the culture war and keeps his videos and other endevours open to all. In this day and age, thats a very admirable thing and one of the main reasons he is universally respected.

Karl, on the other hand, at least by going off social media posts, rather vocally and militantly left wing, and not in a family friendly way either. (Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).

GunJesus tries very hard (and succeeds!) at not taking sides in the culture war and keeps his videos and other endevours open to all. In this day and age, thats a very admirable thing and one of the main reasons he is universally respected.

It's great. Paul Harrell (RIP) flirted with a sign-off phrase along the lines of "the difference between citizens and subjects is that citizens are armed and subjects aren't" and I'm glad it was temporary.

Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice

uh, did he actually do this, or is this a meme a la "Vance masturbated with his couch?" I looked at his channel, yesterday, and the SJ content was "Why Juneteenth Deserves To Be A Holiday" and "Why Is 'Guns Are For Everyone' Controversial?"

did he actually do this

There's a FB video of it somewhere, amongst all of the other Satanist content (not derrogatory, he is apparently a practicing Satanist). Lacking a FB account, i cant actually log in to find the specific one. But he posted it himself.

Now i personally dont give a fuck what he does, but for branding purposes he's sort of pigeonholed himself into a very specific niche that a) most gun owners and gun curious people probably dont align with, and b) would definitely affect the squeaky clean image Gun Jesus cultivates.

(Drinking cum out of skulls is, uh, certainly a choice).

This guy is a reverse duke nukem.

lol, whatshisface

Anyway, that's pretty much it; if there was a serious conflict I think it would have been a more immediate split. Actually, the arc of the channel is like that as well- born of match footage, they made a competition gun that nobody was really considering at the time [and single-handedly ended the AR-15 Bad Because Muh Vietnam meme], and then drifted apart.

I think that the ultimate problem with Karl is that he honestly doesn't really do very much on his own (I believe he thinks he's quite a bit smarter/more switched-on than he actually is) and is prone to flying off the handle at times; his channel took a very noticeable drop in quality after the split and hasn't recovered (there was promise, but since none of it delivered after the split I think that's a pretty clear sign the brains of the operation left). The totally-not-sponsored-sponsored-content (half the time it's the KE Arms show) sections are more technically interesting, which I think is an issue.

Karl's views match those that traditionalist gun owners (i.e. Fudds) tend to express- because progressivism is [morally speaking] just traditionalism with the valence switched (which you'd think he'd be able to figure out considering he's a Satanist, but again... what he wants to be and what he is are two different things). Ian is, far as I can tell, clearly not like that- while he can run into too-big-for-britches problems (depending on who you believe) that's relatively normal for those in his position- not like he has time to do that anyway.

lol, whatshisface

I would have guessed "Kevin," so I got the first letter right!

they made a competition gun that nobody was really considering at the time [and single-handedly ended the AR-15 Bad Because Muh Vietnam meme]

What does this mean? I know they did a "mud test" of both the M16 and AK, but not any other relevant thing.

but not any other relevant thing

The mud test is just one of the "sacred cows" that that channel was designed to challenge- that being "AKs aren't as good as you think they are, and M16s are far better than anyone thinks they are".

That's what their 'WWSD' rifle was designed to showcase, and the myths it was designed to smash: AR-15s are the best rifle system developed to date and don't need some stupid piston to "increase reliability and fix its fundamental flaw" [actually it makes the gun less reliable and heavier], pencil barrels don't shift zero any more when hot, plastic is just fine for parts that used to be made of aluminum provided they're manufactured with that material in mind, guns don't need to weigh 11 pounds to be good, and Chinese optics really are Just As Good.

After that paradigm shift they... just petered out, and became more of a social club to support Brutality matches (which I will note have changed the competitive shooting landscape significantly). And then 2020 happened and Karl went full conservative Progressive at that point- it wasn't really apparent (IMO) until then.

Just finished my fourth annual reread of Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, which is perhaps the best one volume history book about the civil war ever written. Some random thoughts from my reread below.

  1. It seemed like the war was coming long before 1860. At least the South seemed ready to leave the union in the 1850s. So why was there no preparation for this war in terms of stockpiling weapons, encouraging military training/enlistment in the US army? Maybe these things would have been too obvious, but at least pro-secessionist leaders could have encouraged things like the strategic localization of ammunition factories, diversification of agriculture away from cotton, and investment in railroads. Nope, instead we have cope about how feminine mechanized labor is, and how the only real work is overseeing a plantation. This society deserved to lose.

  2. I think Lee is overrated. He managed to win a ton of really impressive tactical victories, but never seemed to effectively follow these up to destroy the enemy army, which is what all the tactics is supposed to be in service of. In fact, Lee's tactics ended up shredding his army much more than his opponents, and he arguably only won because of northern inability to deal with taking casualties, especially under General McClellan.

  3. It's interesting how much the rich man's war, poor man's fight theme seems not to be true, in contrast to most modern wars I can think of. It seems like a general on one side or the other dies in almost every engagement (Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, James McPherson, to name a few off the top of my head). In fact, generals were something like 50% more likely to die than privates, which is a wild statistic.

  4. Struck by the respectful treatment of Army of Northern Virginia by Grant/Chamberlein upon Lee's surrender. Yes, the South fought for a horrible cause, but still can respect the valor, leadership, and conduct of people you really strongly disagree with. Perhaps an argument against tearing down confederate monuments/renaming forts. You don't beat a man when he's down. Modern politicians could learn a thing or two from this.

  5. Insane levels of delusion by Southern leadership in Late 1864/1865. How did Hood think that assaulting breastworks head-on was going to work in Franklin/Nashville? How did Davis think the government was going to continue the war after the fall of Richmond?

  6. Cool to see how much of the technology of this war would presage WW1. Importance of rail lines and logistics to Northern victory. Also shift to destruction of ability to wage war/armies rather than necessarily capturing territory. Arguably this started with Napoleon too.

  7. I'm getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective.

On 1), the south believed the war would be a quick war of maneuver and thought the north would sue for peace with limited war.

On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.

"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.

"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?

There was a group of so-called "Cotton Whigs" who were in favor of industrializing the South, but they operated under the assumption that slave labor could be used in factories just as it could on farms. Whether they were right or wrong about this is subject to debate, but it's useful in examining the arguments you see sometimes from amateurs that had the North laid off the slavery question and focused on industrialization the institution would have died on its own. Like I said in my other comment, we know that know, but it wasn't obvious at the time, when advocates like James De Bow were talking about the ways slavery could be used in an expanded non-agricultural economy.

But altogether I think you're correct in the sense that an industrialized South doesn't view the expansion of slavery as necessary for self-preservation. I think the more interesting hypothetical is what would have happened had the South considered the slavery matter settled, whether by extension of the Missouri Compromise line, popular sovereignty, or some other mechanism.

To attempt some answers:

  1. It seems obvious now because we know it happened, but you have to put yourself in the position of someone who would have been observing things at the time. For most of the 1850s, things were looking pretty good for the South. There was a string of Northern presidents with Southern sympathies, who weren't about to rock the boat on the slavery question. Dred Scott happened. The Whig party collapsed. Democrats had a 2 to 1 advantage in the Senate and Congress. There were certainly huge problems, but it wasn't until the 1860 election where the Democratic party split along sectional lines and the Republicans swept the North that the writing was on the wall.

  2. Lee is certainly overrated. Jackson is as well; both he and Longstreet are examples of guys who maxed out their own competence. Jackson was good at semi-independent commands but didn't have the political skills to be in charge of an entire army, and didn't do well when fighting directly under Lee. Longstreet was the opposite, in that he was a good general when serving under Lee but not so good independently.

  3. The "rich man's war poor man's fight" thing didn't have so much to do with who was taking casualties in the army but who was fighting in the army itself. The perception arose that thousands of men who would never be able to afford a single slave were fighting to retain an institution whose primary beneficiaries were plantation owners who weren't serving and who had an inordinate amount of political power.

  4. There's a difference between treating your enemy with respect and going out of your way to honor him. I doubt there are any statues of Petain in France commemorating his work in WWII.

  5. The commanding generals in Virginia take up most of the slack for the idea that the South had better generals than the North. In my opinion the opposite is true, with the North's generals being somewhat better on the whole. In Hood's defense, he didn't really have a choice at this point, as the war in the West was already lost and he had to do something. It's like a runner at third trying to score on a sac fly to left field when the team is down 7–2 in the 8th. Bad idea overall, but sometimes you just need to get something going. As for Davis, I think he had the idea that he wasn't going to cave until he absolutely had to. Most of the Deep South and large parts of the Trans-Mississippi never came under Union occupation, and I think the idea was that he'd make them fight for every inch, because the Union couldn't really claim victory unless every state came back.

  6. Yup

  7. It's easily the best single-volume work about the Civil War ever written, and it's required reading for anyone who wants to claim familiarity with the war. It's of "read this before you begin to discuss it" variety. The Great Courses series by Gary W. Gallagher covers similar ground, but in more depth, and he and McPherson seem to be like-minded about most things, so it makes an excellent supplement if you're looking to go further without risking running into a dud or something controversial.

  1. Right, hindsight is 20/20. Much of the upper south didn't even secede until after Sumter, so it was by no means a sure thing. I'm thinking of a lot of the rhetoric of the firebrands from states like South Carolina who seemed to want to secede in the 1850s even when things were going well. But these people were ideologies who can't be expected to seriously plan things. The actual talent in the confederacy (Davis, Stephens, Lee, etc.) all seemed to have been caught a little off guard by secession. And like others point out, this is also making assumptions about what kind of war we know that the civil war was, rather than the war that people thought it was going to be. Although there had been examples of total war (end of the Napoleonic wars, and the Crimean War) in the recent past, the mindset of the ruling class was very much that of limited war, which the south could have won.

  2. Totally agreed. Jackson's legendary performance in the valley and at second Manassas is offset by his terrible performance during the seven days, and the extremely high casualty rate of his division. Longstreet is a general I'd like to learn more about: I know he was vital during second Manassas, and seemed to see a lot of the problems with Lee's plan at Gettysburg, but I don't know much about his performance at Chattanooga, or about his time in the Republican Party after the war.

  3. It's not only the casualty rates, but the enlistment rates largely don't reflect the rich man's war, poor man's fight either. I don't have the statistics on the top of my head, but MacPherson states that the only group that was actually underrepresented in the army was unskilled labor (and also immigrants interestingly enough in the North). The South did have some weird exceptions to this (the overseer exemption from the draft for example), but even in the South, the planter class was at least proportionally represented in the army. Some planters, like Wade Hampton, spent significant amounts of their own money furnishing entire brigades for the army.

  4. This is true.

  5. Agreed that Hood had to do something, but his tactics in these battles were sorely lacking. That whole army might have been much more useful opposing Sherman's March to the Sea or something. Also good point about the Trans-Mississippi: most of Texas was completely unconquered, and after the disaster of the Red River campaign, most of Western Louisiana was safe too.

  6. I'll have to check this out! I'm currently going through Bruce Catton's trilogy, and a book about the battle of Fredericksburg in particular.

There's a great FCCfromSCC post...maybe on reddit about confederate monuments...

Ope not FCCfromSCC, but here you go: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/71ydqb/comment/dnfdfl3/?context=3

Fascinating watching Redditors from 7 years ago argue.

Wait, does the API search work again?

Is there a new cheating epidemic?

  • Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree

  • High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

Haha we had an interesting discussion on this two years back., so before LLMs were ubiquitous.

The fishing tournament example stuck in my mind enough that I still remember it from time to time as an example of something that's just absurd to be dishonest about, but they do it anyway.

I might broaden it to it just being an epidemic of demolished social norms and declining efficacy of shame as a behavioral deterrent. Being utterly unrepentant and impervious to most social shaming is in fact an adaptive trait in the current social environment.

I hesitate to say a rise in sociopathy, but perhaps now there's a default assumption that all the rules are just there to hobble you and if you choose to follow them whilst everyone else is 'defecting' you're just a sucker, where the only thing that's really 'wrong' is getting caught. Or, perhaps, getting caught isn't the problem, if you can avoid punishment it'll all still be worth it.

Zoomers have been raised in an environment where every aspect of their performance and social status is tracked, by default. Using EVERY SINGLE advantage, licit or illicit, that you can possibly find and implement is presumably seen as necessary to remaining competitive.

My generalized prognosis is that we're in the throes of transitioning to a low trust society

Quoth Betteridge…

I’d like to see real data rather than relying on (years-old) reports from a notoriously punishing game.

I can’t say I understand the conflation of academic and game cheating, either. The dynamic is—or should be?—completely different.

I don’t think it’s possible to find real data about this, because the only way to determine cheating is for a reasonable observer to watch footage (otherwise, the algorithms would quickly catch them). You can’t generalize that across time for obvious reasons, and you can’t trust a cheater to answer a survey for obvious reasons. The next best evidence is to see what high-reputation people in these niches think about the question, and I’d guess most of them across different games would say cheating is out of control.

In CS2, nearly all of the leaderboard: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6GA4AM1Szxc https://youtube.com/watch?v=m8wsCU0NR38

In Trackmania, nearly all of the leaderboard (I think this is the most competitive racing game): https://youtube.com/watch?v=yDUdGvgmKIw

Chess . com : https://youtube.com/watch?v=SG5PMVyCi8U (though here it is significantly easier, almost trivial, to find and ban cheaters)

There are also many in the speedrunning niche.

I can’t say I understand the conflation of academic and game cheating, either

They are similar from a psychological perspective involving honesty and rewards. You want to win in order to gain status and feel a sense of success. Among males, video game success translates into reputational benefits, bragging rights, plus the basic biological pleasure of defeating an opponent in a bout. This is no different from academic success, except perhaps that the rewards of academic success occur on a longer timeframe, making the rewards of cheating a little less salient.

I think the college level cheating stuff is kinda overblown. Kids have always looked for shortcuts up to and including hiring other students to write essays for them. We made college about the degree and get big mad when kids know that’s what matters and min max the system like old school rpg players would minmax Morrowind.

I don’t get cheating at a game.

High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

They should also be banned with the Geneva convention. Making students write essays is probably the most wasteful way to use a functioning brains.

Why? Writing essays is the most directly applicable skill I learned in school, moreso than AP Computer Science (java) - and I'm a backend java dev. Concise, precise communication is a critical skill. Design docs are super important. (At least to the promotion committee.)

That said, I'd love if we make the essays be on more useful/interesting/self-selected topics, have more persuasive/technical writing, etc.

That clip from step by step perfectly illustrates my opinion on what essays usually degrade to https://youtube.com/watch?v=l9RPNH7YhtU

And don't get me started on Java. My opinion of the language and the ecosystem is not as high as the one about the essays.

University students should all learn:

  • How to write an email to dispute a claim including supporting evidence
  • How to write an email summarizing action items from a meeting
  • How to write readable, unambiguous instructions for performing some technical process
  • How to write a well-formed request when asking for help

because even senior managers and execs all seem incapable of doing some or all of these.

Cheating with AI in school is trivially solvable on an object level. It’s just that the bureaucracy and or faculty don’t want to.

Whether that’s due to laziness, head in sand, politics, profit, or some sense of “inequity”, or any other misaligned incentive is up for debate.

I assume the inequity part is a decent amount of it. If you start actually forcing measurable accountability, it will take away other subjective safety nets.

This will effect pass rates and almost certainly have some disparate impact.

But the point is that anybody with even a little bit of intelligence could think up a plan to counter AI cheating for any given course or learning objective.

Mass AI cheating would fix the achievement gap and make it so the students who have fallen behind don't look like they have fallen behind. Ubiquitous AI cheating is potentially a massive gift for schools and universities. I guess with universities there is a risk it might destroy the reputation of the university. but this is a problem someone else will have to deal with in 5 years time. The current administrators are free to set fire to the schools reputation and enjoy all the rewards that come with it.

As someone involved with teaching college students, it's even more simple than this: Teaching (and marking even moreso) is a nuisance appreciated by no-one (least of all the students, who often just want their piece of paper and be done with it) at this point, so you just go through the motions of doing the absolute minimum. For one class I work together with literally the most popular professor, who has won multiple student-led prizes for teaching at our university. His assignments and exams? "I have done the same for a decade now, why change anything?" His policy for passing students? "I would pass them during the oral exam anyway, so why should I make myself the work by not letting them pass the written exam?" He is a really nice guy, his classes aren't bad and he is always helpful when you ask him for anything, so I have nothing against him; But if that is the mindset of the best, woe upon the rest!

IMO this comment is way too uncharitable. It's like, 80% solvable, but you're right that solving it requires work. But it's actually a decent amount of work. I'd hesitate to call it laziness. I think a lot of people underestimate the typical teacher workload. Many teachers would probably do much better work and especially more efficient work if you increased pay by 30%, staffing by 30%, and reduced class sizes by 20%. (Part of this could be offset by slashing the administrative/pseudo-support staffing by 60% or more, but this still might require a net investment). This would give them much more time to plan lessons (instead of rolling out the greatest hits over and over without adapting to the times) and importantly, assign (and create) tests and homework assignments that are AI-resistant, if not AI-proof. It's just that these types of assignments and assessments are much more time-consuming to create and grade, plus as I mentioned the requirements to create them custom-tailored to your class and curricula make for the need to constantly be tweaking them (which again, most teachers don't have sufficient time budget to properly perform).

With that said there are certainly some school districts and even some teachers who are scared to fully grade work, but IMO most of the resistance is more from administration or parents, even, than the teachers themselves. A lot of teachers probably would prefer to hand out bad grades more, not less, current philosophy alleging this is psychologically damaging somehow notwithstanding.

IMO this comment is way too uncharitable...I'd hesitate to call it laziness.

To clear this up, I didn't call it laziness, I just listed that as a possible pragmatic blocker. My point is that it's trivially solvable in technical sense. It's really really easy to think of ways to evaluate students or have them practice learning in scenarios that AI cheating could be mitigated. It's not remotely unsolveable in that sense. But there are, to your point structural and indivdual reasons that make implementing such a solution harder.

I have sympathy for these defenses, but not infinity. If it's something any homeschool parent could solve without any innovation, then the school system needs to be able to react to in order to remain a legitimate concept. We can't just 'oh well...' cheating at scale. It needs to be treated as existential to schooling, if it's really this widespread.

There is no legitimate reason an institution of learning, can remain remotely earnest about it's mission as a concept, and still allow graded, asynchronously written reports.

Now of course many of the blockers to reacting to this are an outgrowth of similar challenges schools have faced for decades: The conflicted, in-tension-with-self mission of schooling in general. as described in the excellent book, Somone Has to Fail. Schools simultaneously trying to be a system of equality and meritocracy will fail at both.

But AI has stopped the buck passing; like so many other things, AI is a forcing funciton of exponential scale. I think if the can gets kicked any further, ever single semester, every single assignment, the entire idea of schooling massively delegitimizes itself.

I think you could honestly do it much more easily then that; for example, you could keep all of your existing assignments, but simply tell people that you will be asking some number of random students a question about their essay/assignment/whatever at the start of the class in which you return their assignments. There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them. This would catch a good chunk of AI submitted assignments with very minimal work.

If they "cheat" and use AI anyways, but memorize enough of their assignment to answer a question? Mission accomplished; the nominal goal is to teach students the information, so we shouldn't actually care about how they learn it.

There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them.

A teacher I know says that the kids (except the really smart ones) use Chat GTP for everything and don't give the impression that they even read the output beyond a cursory look to make sure it was in the general ballpark of answering the question, so this shouldn't be too hard.

I used ChatGPT once to do a required writing task that I thought was useless and didn't want to do. I did edit it for some semblance of accuracy, but did not exactly read it, nor do I remember what it said. If I thought it mattered or was a useful thing to do I would have written it myself, I like writing essays, including college essays.

High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI

This is also a problem at universities.

Take-home essays were always a stupid idea; there was nothing stopping past students from having a big brother or a stranger from Craigslist do the actual writing, so they unfairly penalized anybody who was honest and did not have a big budget. All graded assignments should be done in class; AI simply made this clear.

Rather, they unfairly enabled the unscrupulous to get ahead. I realize that the two look very similar in terms of outcome, but accurate framing is important.

Homeowners of The Motte -- what would you differently if you could do it all over again?

I plan on building a house in the next 12 months on a lot about an hour away from the Gulf of Mexico America. It's going to be a two-story 5BR house with porches on the front and the back, built in a traditional Southern style.

I'm a bit overwhelmed as I don't even know what I don't know about building, and I want to avoid making costly mistakes that I'll have to pay to renovate later (or worse, be unable to fix at all). Happy to hear both from people who built and people who bought.

Given your description, I'm guessing this is a semi-rural to rural area. Double check your utilities connections- if this is in Texas, there may be a difference between oncor(electrical grid monopoly) or a utility coop, depending on where you are. For a house that size I'm guessing 100 amp service and two air conditioners? Also, if water comes from a well- do you have a filter already budgeted for? And what's your plan for backup power in the event that a storm knocks out power to the pump(and btw- pumps are already expensive and you more or less get what you pay for. Get a long lasting, quality one.). You're close enough to the gulf that hurricanes are a realistic concern; do you have a plan for them?

Will you be having a conventional built house or a prefab(much cheaper)? Do you plan on a pier and beam(better foundation but you need pest mitigation strategies) or slab?

I highly recommend, given the climate- screen in one or both of the porches. This is near tropical America and you're going to want something to keep bugs out.

We label turn off valves. For us, this has been sharpie on walls, but I would go for a nice label option in a home I built. When the house is flooding a nice label with an arrow pointing to a handle you last looked at when you moved in 5 years ago is a good thing.

When we do repairs we add turn off valves if possible. I would rather turn off the water to one room than turn it off for the whole house, if possible.

When I was a kid my parents tried to build but there was weird neighborhood approval of plans required and they eventually gave up and sold the land. Hopefully you don't run into anything like that.

If you're not modifying existing plans, the architect should go through all that with you. Some architects are hacks, but those ones don't generally do custom builds. Assuming you want an architecturally correct Southern style and not some ersatz version, an architect excited to dive into the details of the exterior will be more than competent to guide you away from making the kinds of mistakes that end up in builder designed houses.

Not a hoomer, but some thoughts:

  1. Get Your House Right is a really good resource for basic design questions (proportions, moldings, layouts, etc). You might also see if Brent Hull has any videos on southern style houses.

  2. Lever handles are much better than doorknobs IMO. I fairly often need to open a door with stuff in my hands and it's way easier to do it if the door opens with a lever handle.

  3. Think seriously about room ventilation. The house should be set up so that you can get cross-breezes going.

  4. Make sure you put in a skookum kitchen hood that's sized appropriately for your cooktop. I've lived my life in places with underpowered or non-existent hoods and it sucks.

  5. Try to avoid making the garage a major part of your house's facade. May not be possible depending on your lot, unfortunately - but it looks much better if you can make it happen.

  6. Put some thought into sealing your garage to keep insects out.

  7. If you end up with a small bathroom, consider installing a pocket door. I have a bathroom right now where the room door and the shower door open into each others' space and it sucks.

  8. Two sinks in the master bath is a must.

Thanks, these tips all make a lot of sense. After living in houses both with and without, I strongly suspect two sinks in the master bath correlates strongly with lower divorce rates.

I am very glad that the person who built the house I own:

  • Installed a metal roof
  • Planned ahead for water flow, and intentionally designed the landscaping around it.

A big house like that might be hard to cool in the summer. I don't have any specific suggestions -- we can't afford a full house air conditioner, so we're all in the main room with the window unit in during summer afternoons, and use open windows and fans at night.

I was hoping you'd reply as IIRC you have three or four children too. I responded here regarding house size. What do you think? I was thinking we might also just make the rooms smaller in general so that there are the same number of rooms but less enclosed space to cool and clean.

Water flow is definitely important for us where we will live as mild flooding can happen even just with a bad afternoon squall.

Specific random things, because most things are going to be covered by smarter guys than me:

  1. Plan one entrance to the house with no steps. Almost nobody does it, because it's difficult to handle the architecture/landscaping to make a ramp look good, but you totally can if you plan it from the start. Elderly people fall on steps all the time, and often hurt themselves. Also convenient for heavy stuff in general. If you plan for it now, you'll have it forever; if you have to rerig it later it will look bad, especially if it's at a time when you yourself are older/less capable.

  2. Anywhere water comes into your house will eventually leak. Plan for that now.

  3. That's a big house, think about how you're going to use the rooms. A lot of people end up with a big house with four rooms that are all variations on "couch and we watch TV in here;" or they all started as bedrooms and got adapted.

  4. Think of the repair guy. Don't put anything in a place where it will be difficult to extract when (not if, when) it needs to be serviced or replaced. Make it easy to reach the air handler, the water heater, the septic system, etc.

  5. Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements. Store them in multiple places, hard copies, in the home, for the future.

Re. 2, how do you recommend planning for it? Do you have an example?

Re. 3, we have four kids and may have more. Our thinking is:

  • 1 master bedroom
  • 1 home office (wife and I are WFH)
  • 1 older boys' room
  • 1 older girls' room
  • 1 younger kids' room
  • Guest bedroom somewhere, maybe? The design we're looking at is 3,300 sqft. Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house? I'd actually prefer not to have to clean, cool, and maintain a huge house.

The design we're looking at is 3,300 ft2. Do you think it would be possible to get away with less house?

I can fit your stated requirements into less than 1700 ft2. (Whoops, I forgot the utility room in the design on the left. Add 208 ft2 + 40.5 in2 and increase occupants to 13. But the design on the right is correct.)

Plan one entrance to the house with no steps.

Specifically, in accordance with ICC A117.1 § 1104.2 and ch. 4.

That's a big house. Think about how you're going to use the rooms.

Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction pp. 40 and 46–48 have some nice diagrams of bedrooms, living rooms, dining rooms, home theaters, and home offices, including typical furniture dimensions and clearances.

Take pictures of the inside of all the walls before you close them up. Write notes and measurements.

Or just keep a copy of the construction/as-built plans!

I would really want to have rooms wired, with conduit and pull strings in the event that I needed to pull something which wasn't already there. It's a complete pain in the dick to wire things after the fact, and I have often wished that I had wires for networking, for speaker connections, etc.

Ah yeah, good call. I am 100% sure I'll get Ethernet everywhere but I hadn't thought about installing conduit just in case.

I'm interested in following your journey. A few questions:

  1. How are you financing the construction? Are you working off a loan or cash saved?
  2. Did you design the house or did you work with an architect?
  3. Why did you decide to build instead of buy an available house?
  4. What was the timeline between buying the lot then building the house.
  5. How much government red tape did you have to navigate to build a home on your land?
  6. Given the risk of extreme weather—hurricanes and flooding—in the region near the Gulf of Mexico, why did you decide to build a house there?

We're still at the very beginning, so my answers aren't very interesting, but:

  1. Working off a loan, but we also have enough investment money that we could make more aggressive payments if needed.
  2. We've picked a plan off of a builder's site that we liked. We're not really "dream house" people, we're pretty practical. We've actually like most rentals we've lived in that were just cookie cutter designs. The only times we were unhappy was when we lived in a place with poorly sealed windows overlooking a street (lots of traffic noise) and when we lived in a house with poor insulation in a place where the temps varied between 15F and 95F over the year. That said, I'm still thinking about getting an architect and doing a custom build.
  3. A few years ago, I picked out a great lot in the heart of a small, fast-growing middle class town on the outskirts of a larger city. The neighborhood is perfect and everything is walkable. Tradeoff is that we have to build now.
  4. It will probably end up being 4-5 years.
  5. TBD, but it doesn't seem like there's much in that area.
  6. I have family in the area, and I was very careful to avoid flood zones and flood zones adjacent properties.

Not the same person, but:

(1) I'm paying mostly cash, since I have it and I generally dislike the idea of taking out gigantic loans just to have the bank second-guess everything. Of the 220-k$ price tag, I already have 110 k$ of investments, and my brother has agreed to lend 40 k$ to me. While construction is ongoing, I expect to make up the remaining 70 k$ with my salary and (if absolutely necessary) a 35-k$ unsecured loan and my two 10-k$ credit cards.

(2) I drew up a rough design on my own, and then hired an architect to double-check the suitability of a few lots that I found on Zillow. The builder's in-house architect then made some small changes.

(3) I like insulation and heat pumps, and dislike closets and non-flat roofs.

(4) I bought the lot in February. I expect to get a construction schedule in the next week or two.

(5) The permit process has not yet started, but I don't expect much hassle. This lot does not have any environmental entanglements (such as a floodplain), and I certainly don't need any variances.

(6) (not applicable in Pennsylvania)

Re. 2, how did you draw up your own plans?

My rough designs generally were drawn on paper, in GIMP (at 1.5 in or 6 in (3.8 cm or 15.2 cm) per pixel), in QCAD, or (for full 3D) in OpenSCAD.

On building or remodelling, what I will say is that one of the absolute most visible parts of the work is the drywall/trim finishing. Most GCs sub this out, and most subs are horrible. Since this is close to the final stage of construction, it is hard to have the patience to make them do it right, but it is what you will notice every day even if the rest of the work is great. If a remodel, the drywall stage is an absolute nightmare due to the obscene amount of dust that low quality contractors create. I recommend stressing to GC that professional drywall finishers are a must.

Does this add a significant amount of cost?

I don't even know what I don't know about building

You may want to buy a copy of the Architectural Graphic Standards for Residential Construction. It's a bit pricey, but absolutely comprehensive in terms of design.

Highly relevant is the International Residential Code. This link leads to the 2024 version. Your jurisdiction probably uses an older version, but you may still want to tell your builder to obey parts of the newest version. In particular, ch. 11 (Energy Efficiency) has undergone major changes recently, such as §§ N1102.1.3 (Insulation and Fenestration Criteria: R-Value Alternative) and N1108.1 (Additional Efficiency Requirements). Appendices NE (Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure) and NG (Energy Efficiency Stretch Code) may also be of interest to you.

International Property Maintenance Code § 404.5 (Overcrowding) also has some handy guidelines for design, and ICC A117.1 (Accessible and Usable Buildings and Facilities) ch. 11 (Dwelling Units and Sleeping Units) has information on the different levels of accessibility that you may want to meet in order to facilitate "aging in place".

t. in the process of getting a two-bedroom custom house built for 220 k$

Since this is the stupid question thread -- what should I hope to learn from those books? They appear to be reference books about regulations. Should I study them so I can keep my GC honest or double check his work?

What should I hope to learn from those books? They appear to be reference books about regulations.

The Architectural Graphic Standards include a lot of helpful guidelines and drawings in addition to regurgitation of (an old version of) the mandatory codes.

Reading the Architectural Graphic Standards and the codes enables you to draw up on your own a rough design on which the builder's architect has only to put minor finishing touches, rather than describing what you want to the builder's architect and having him draw up from scratch a design that probably will require a bunch of iteration.

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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."

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