site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2928 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 10, 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.

I Got Into Inkhaven (And Now I'm Panicking)

I received a frightening email, and in my line of work, you kinda expect them. But this one was different: Inkhaven accepted my application.

If you haven't heard of it, Inkhaven is this writing residency thing run by Lightcone Infrastructure. Yes, that's the LessWrong people, except now they're doing physical world stuff instead of just posting online. Scott mentioned it on his blog, which is how I found out about it. He's going to be mentoring there, which honestly might be the main reason I applied. Other names of note include Scott Aaronson, and Gwern.

The premise is beautifully simple and terrifying: show up, get housing at cost, write one blog post per day. Miss a day? You're out. It's like a writing bootcamp designed by someone who really, really wants you to develop a daily habit. Of course, in my particular case, it's like convincing someone popping oxy every day that they can save money by switching to fent. Do I look like I need additional incentive to write?

When I submitted my application, I figured my chances were decent. Self-described member of the rationalist community, popular posts on LW and /r/SSC, psychiatry resident who sneaks in references to Bayesian priors whenever he thinks he can get away with it. I included links to six pieces I'm proud of* and wrote the standard "here's who I am" introduction. But I had one major problem: I can't do the full month of November. My job gives me 14 days of leave every six months, and they don't let you combine them. Not exactly conducive to month-long writing retreats. Lightcone noted that those who couldn't make that commitment would be down weighted in favor those who could.

I applied anyway. What's the worst that could happen, right?

Apparently the worst that could happen is they say yes.

Now I'm staring at this acceptance email having what I can only describe as a controlled panic attack. Getting a US visa is going to be a nightmare. Try explaining to an immigration officer that you're visiting America to... write blog posts... at a place run by... internet rationalists? I'm imagining that conversation and it doesn't end well.

The timing is also spectacularly bad. I have a professional exam smack in the middle of November. A close friend is getting married in Texas in December, and I'm not sure I can swing both trips. My leave schedule is already stretched thinner than phyllo dough.

But here's the thing: this is exactly the kind of "good problem to have" that people talk about. I want to go. I want to meet Scott and all these people I've only known as usernames and Twitter handles. I want to see if I can actually write something decent every day for however long I can manage.

So if anyone has brilliant ideas about US visa applications, creative leave arrangements, or general life optimization, I'm all ears.

Plans so far:

  • Figure out how to stretch the leave. Fly out as soon as the exam is over, and then make strategic usage of weekends to eke out a longer stay. I'm aiming for 10 days plus weekends for Inkhaven, and 3 days plus hopefully another weekend for the wedding. I had really meant to use this as an opportunity to visit the many Mottizens who had invited me over to shoot guns (I think I need a spreadsheet for that alone), but I hope they can forgive me if the itinerary doesn't allow for it. Well, the first offers came in almost two years back, and I haven't heard anyone rescind them since. You guys seem like an understanding bunch.

  • Book visa appointments ASAP, and figure out how to phrase this in an ICE-friendly manner.

*If memory serves, one of them was a moderation comment I'd written on The Motte. Don't say I don't look out for us whenever I can!

For once, being comparatively poor works in my favor. I qualified for the financial assistance, above the budget I said I was willing to bear by myself.

Are there details yet on where the writers will publish their work?

There's no centralized repository. I believe we're at liberty to post wherever we've been posting, which in my case, would be a combination of /r/SSC, The Motte, and my own Substack. I usually cross-post on at least two of the three, depending on the target audience.

I don't know the names of the other participants quite yet, until I confirm my attendance and get added to a Slack channel. If any other familiar faces show up, and they're not against me talking about it, I'll share.

If Motte posts >500 words count you should be done in a week!

Well, they accepted Motte posts in the submission statement! God knows I'll probably be coming here and begging people to give me ideas or to start a fight just so the creative juices get flowing.

Try explaining to an immigration officer that you're visiting America to... write blog posts... at a place run by... internet rationalists

Probably wouldn't be as bad as you think. They have heard much weirder stories, and yours, while a bit unusual, is easily verifiable and documented, and if it doesn't look like you are intending to become an illegal immigrant they won't spend too much time on you. They have a lot of cases to go through. One thing that could help is getting some kind of officially looking document (the more official looking, the better) that says in clear and official language what is it about and that it's just for a month and you are not going to work in the US, it's just educational or whatever. Talking to somebody that knows how it actually works - e.g. immigration lawyer - may be a good idea too. You may to have to pay a little (it shouldn't cost much, it's not a complicated case) but they probably would tell you which stupid things not to do. Usually problems in this area come from people doing some stupid thing (e.g. telling the immigration officer they'll be working while on tourist visa or something like that).

Thank you. I guess I'll stick to the facts, and put my plans to join a Zizekian commune somewhere where the sun doesn't shine.

So if anyone has brilliant ideas about US visa applications, creative leave arrangements, or general life optimization, I'm all ears.

I'd start by reaching out to Inkhaven. If they had this open internationally, they should already have considered visa issues. Hopefully a whole bunch of influential rationalists should already have considered how they could do this. If you're not getting paid I would think a tourist visa would do. It's essentially a writing holiday. But if you are getting paid for for your blog posts that makes it considerably more complicated I should think. There are visas for artist residencies, so I wouldn't be too concerned about the writing thing being weird as being the problem, but those generally would require the sponsor (Lightcone presumably in this case) to be engaging with being an official sponsor through the US government. Also the timing is likely tight for November. J-1 or B-1 Visas might be a possibility depending on the exact details. Unfortunately India is not part of the Visa Waiver program or you might have been ok with just an ESTA as you can travel for 90 days for business.

"You may be eligible for a B-1 visa if you will be participating in business activities of a commercial or professional nature in the United States, including, but not limited to:

Consulting with business associates Traveling for a scientific, educational, professional or business convention, or a conference on specific dates Settling an estate Negotiating a contract Participating in short-term training"

Thank you! I'm not getting paid by the piece, it's more that I'll quickly have to figure out a hotel if I don't keep producing them.

I intend to write back to Lightcone, but they've left me till the end of the month. I need to figure out exact dates and visa considerations, and I wanted to get the easy questions out of the way before pestering them.

Does anyone have a bead on the use of public (free?) LLMs for reasonably complex1 mathematics? Anything decent? Is there anyone writing on their personal use of it for that purpose somewhat regularly? Maybe some tips for structuring a prompt?

1 - Actually, I hope to keep this particular problem entirely real-valued.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best free LLM, because Google lets you use a nigh unlimited amount on AI Studio. All the other models of comparable quality are paywalled, but G2.5P is up there as one of the best nonetheless.

I've heard credible claims that a version that was allowed to think longer/in-parallel won IMO Gold this year, in conjunction with more bespoke models. I might be misremembering, but some people claimed to have gotten golds using just the public version and a lot of prompting.

Is there any indication that jumping to a paid, but publicly-available model is a significant improvement for math? I'm probably not going to spend the time right now to create my own bespoke setup.

Do any of the folks you've read talk about how they do their prompting? Like, can I just plop significant amounts of LaTeX straight from one of my papers into it for problem setup? Is there a better way of going about it?

What are some viable career paths in a small american city (~100,000)?

I have experience in tech (ops, presales) but I don't like the fact that I have to work a remote job. I'd like to be more integrated into the local community. I've thought of teaching (which I like) or doing some sort of IT work (big pay cut, probably pretty boring). I'm open to nearly any kind of white-collar work where I can transfer my skills. In my mid-30s I'm too old for an easy complete career reset.

We're around the same age and I've been considering the same question. Like others have said, it's basically a question of taking whatever skills you have to whatever the largest employer is. If I were going to try and move to Muncie, Indiana, then I'd try and see what kind of jobs I could get at Ball State University, or at the Magna plant. If you're IT (like I am), you see what MSPs serve the area and see if they need an engineer, or you try and get on as a sysadmin at whatever businesses there are.

Career paths - as you note, you're kind of locked in with what you've got unless you want to learn a new skill. My barber says he'd train the right person from scratch if he liked him. Every town has lawyers, every town has accountants, every town has police, every town has clergy; but it's hard to transition into one of those things without being ready to change your life tremendously. Nevertheless I have been thinking about it anyway.

Between work and family, I have minimal free time. It would be nice to have my work and local community closer together. I am aware that some people want strict separation between work and private life, but I've never really had issues hanging out with colleagues outside of work.

Most non-rustbelt cities have some kind of successful local business or industry, surely. I think this is the big advantage of medicine, sales, and to some extent IT/sysadmin work. In other industries you actually have to be in NYC, LA, SF, Texas, whatever. If you have a job title that is both necessary but that any medium sized or above business needs a couple of, you can move back to your hometown with a 90th percentile (locally) job and live a great, striving-free life.

I'm in a somewhat similar position as you. Currently employed as a postdoc at the local university, but not interested in becoming a professor, so I'm pretty much on borrowed time. I just want to avoid a career change while the kids are still small, and my prof is very relaxed so I earn well in comparison to the actual work I'm doing while having lots of free time to spend with family.

Teaching is definitely a good option if you enjoy it. I'm also looking into insurances since it's well-paid, quite safe and I studied math anyway so it's comparatively easy for me, but dunno how much of an option that is for you. Just general large local employers are usually always looking for many different positions as well.

Insurance companies are definitely always hiring tech, but I worry a little about their tech culture being very backwards (e.g. everything tech is "IT", tech is considered a cost center, etc). But I suppose that's part of the price I might have to pay. I think I do like teaching, but I haven't done it in years so I'd need to dip my toe back in to see if it's something I would enjoy doing when my livelihood depends on it.

I have to work a remote job

You mean you get to work a remote job. I worked in an office and remotely, and I didn't feel any more "integrated into the local community" sitting for hours in a fabric-covered cubicle than I do working from home. Of course, to each its own, but ops and pre-sales are definitely very remote-friendly jobs. Though I guess there are some ops jobs that require physical presence (like being on-site technician in a data center?) but I don't see much "community" potential there. Why not work remotely and find social connections by volunteering, joining local clubs, church, etc.? Beyond that, many small cities have some kind of big employer - corporate HQ, hospital, factory, college, big retail, etc. Those usually have IT departments and may even have their own software development/ops teams. If you insist on in-office job that would be where I'd look.

Is anyone watching the chatGPT 5 "bring back 4o" meltdown on /r/chatGPT and /r/OpenAI?

It's insane. People are losing their shit about 4o being taken away to the point it's back now (lmfao). There's also a huge push of "don't mock others for using 4o as a trusted friend you just don't understand". It's honestly equal parts hilarious and horrifying.

For additional fun, browse the comments, obviously there are idiots on the internet, but these people are cooked.

I had thought the internet collectively agreed that RLHF had resulted in glazing that was a huge issue. But it turns out a sizable amount of people actually loved it.

Also funny, gpt5 can glaze you if you ask it, but I guess the median Redditor complaining about this doesn't understand custom instructions. Similarly, people are clearly giving gpt5 custom instructions to be as robotic as possible and then posting screenshots of it... being robotic.

The whole thing makes me rather worried about the state of western society/mental health, in the same way that OnlyFans "chat to the creator" feature does. We need government enforced grass-touching or something.

GPT-5 is really dumb and basically unusable.

I asked it to write me a yt-dlp command to save all my liked videos into a text file. And it just couldn't do it. For whatever reason, it couldn't write a simple, one-line command. It began creating multiple overcomplicated batch files and calling functions that don't even exist.

For context, this functionality is already built into yt-dlp. Earlier ChatGPT versions, also with "thinking" turned on (!), all worked flawlessly.

I had to resort to Claude, which I previously avoided, but which, this time, instantly gave me the correct answer:

yt-dlp -v --cookies-from-browser firefox --flat-playlist --print "%(url)s" "https://youtube.com/playlist?list=LL" > liked_videos_urls.txt

The same exact thing happened when I tried asking it to compress a PDF using ghostscript and also with basic video manipulation with ffmpeg.

It just went on these unrelated rants with hallucinated commands.

I haven't really used 5 yet so don't have an opinion. But broadly I agree with this Reddit post that AI soft skills are being steadily downgraded in favour of easily-benchmarkeable and sellable coding and mathematics skills.

When I was using 4o something interesting happened. I found myself having conversations that helped me unpack decisions and override my unhelpful thought patterns and things like reflecting on how I’d been operating under pressure. And I’m not talking about emotional venting I mean it was actual strategic self-reflection that actually improved how I was thinking. I had prompted 4o to be my strategic co-partner, objective, insight driven and systems thinking - for me (both at work and personal life) and it really delivered.

And it wasn’t because 4o was “friendly.” It was because it was contextually intelligent. It could track how I think. It remembered tone recurring ideas, and patterns over time. It built continuity into what I was discussing and asking. It felt less like a chatbot and more like a second brain that actually got how I work and that could co-strategise with me.

Then I tried 5. Yeah it might be stronger on benchmarks but it was colder and more detached and didn’t hold context across interactions in a meaningful way. It felt like a very capable but bland assistant with a scripted personality. Which is fine for dry short tasks but not fine for real thinking. The type I want to do both in my work (complex policy systems) and personally, to work on things I can improve for myself.

That’s why this debate feels so frustrating to watch. People keep mocking anyone who liked 4o as being needy or lonely or having “parasocial” issues. When the actual truth is lot of people just think better when the tool they’re using reflects their actual thought process. That’s what 4o did so well.

The bigger picture thing I think that keeps getting missed is that this isn’t just about personal preference. It’s literally about a philosophical fork in the road

Do we want AI to evolve in a way that’s emotionally intelligent and context-aware and able to think with us?

Or do we want AI to be powerful but sterile, and treat relational intelligence as a gimmick?

I think that the shift is happening for various reasons:

  • Hard (maths, science, logic) training data is easier to produce and easier to quality-control.
  • People broadly agree on how many watts a lightbulb produces, but they disagree considerably on how conversations should work (your 'glazing' is my 'emotional intelligence', and vice versa)
  • Sycopancy has become a meme and companies may be overcompensating
  • AI is being developed by autists and mathematicians who feel much more confident about training AI to be a better scientist than a better collaborator
  • AI company employees are disproportionately believers in self-reinforcing AGI and ASI and are interesting in bringing that about via better programming skills

EDIT: the other lesson is 'for the love of God use a transparent API so people have confidence in your product and don't start double-guessing you all the time'.

I just want to put on my grumpy old man hat and say I really hate that the term "glazing" is becoming more common. From what I understand it's supposed to refer to the shiny "glazed" appearance of something/someone after it has been ejaculated on. Just a gross mental image, and truly a sign of our sad, porn-brained times. I suppose this is how my parents felt hearing "this sucks/blows" and why they hated it. Ah well, back to shaking my fist at the clouds.

"Like the glaze covering an earthen vessel are fervent lips with an evil heart."

I'm pretty sure the "glazing over the truth" sense is comfortably pre-bukkake -- quite a nice motto for the coming Jihad to boot.

Not quite: it’s in reference to the spit-shined appearance of a well-fellated penis, similar to a glazed donut.

Hm, I always thought “glazed” had to do with adding sugar to a donut or other pastry. So an AI “glazing” someone is pouring sugar on top of something that’s already sweet.

I’m familiar with the other meaning, but I thought it was a derivation.

I'm pretty sure the ejaculatory metaphor came first, and then the donut application became the SFW go-to because, uh... I think you can figure it out.

I was thinking sugar-coated, like a doughnut, or shiny like a glazed window.

That's what I thought too. I guess I'm not degen enough.

Me to, or ceramic glaze.

The whole thing makes me rather worried about the state of western society/mental health, in the same way that OnlyFans "chat to the creator" feature does.

I've arrived to the stage of "the less I know about it the better I feel" concerning this topic. The previous stage was "wtf is wrong with you people?!" and I couldn't stay there anymore.

We need government enforced grass-touching or something.

No we don't. The government is the same people, only with high sociopathy, high egotism and low self-reflection. Realizing this is a major part of what made me a libertarian. I mean I could be a philosopher-king-monarchist, but I'm too cynical for that.

Government enforced grass touching was tongue in cheek

Although trying to imagine how that would be enforced is really funny

I end up a philosopher-king-monarchist because I don't think most people have an impulse to liberty.

That may or may not be true, but the history shows the people who end up being kings rarely behave like philosopher-kings and frequently behave like psychopathic serial killers. Today's kings are only relatively nice because they know if they aren't their head is quickly going to be on the chopping block. Where it's not the case (like African dictators or communist dictators) the picture is rather bleak.

I had thought the internet collectively agreed that RLHF had resulted in glazing that was a huge issue. But it turns out a sizable amount of people actually loved it.

I thought it was widely understood that Glazemageddon was the result of naively running reinforcement learning on user feedback. The proles yearn for the slop. It’s only weirdos like us who actually want to be told when their ideas are provably wrong.

The proles yearn for the slop

I always knew this, but I profoundly under estimated both how many proles wanted the slop, and how fucking BADLY they want it.

Good god

Here's something on the feed over at /r/ChatGPT:

First thing first, we need to stop shaming and laughing at people who were using 4o as emotional support. You never know what someone is going through. When people are on their lowest, they can turn to alcohol, self harm or drugs. Some will use AI to get better and some will use therapy while others will take their lifes. (Answer yourself what's better, considering that not everyone have acces to professional help) - These people need help, not bullying. Another thing, and i need ya'll to stay with me. NOT. EVERYONE. ARE. USING. 4o. AS. EMOTIONAL. SUPPORT. Many people (including me 🙋🏻‍♀️) were using 4o for creative writing, and GPT5 sucks at this. Also, not everyone are using Chatgpt for coding etc. Ofc, ChatGPT should work on improving and creating new models, but it's just stupid to take away older models, especially when people were actually using them. I invite you to the discussion 👀

Ahhhh. The emphasis added was mine. GPT-4o is so bad at creative writing. It's a travesty. This person needs to be admitted to a hospital and have their brain dissected.

Similarly, people are clearly giving gpt5 custom instructions to be as robotic as possible and then posting screenshots of it... being robotic.

Hell, given that one of the default options for the personality is "Robot"..

I miss o3. It was autistic, but in an endearing way. It was amusing to see it scurry about likely the world's busiest beaver. If you asked it what's 1+1, it would attempt to derive Peano arithmetic. It had a personality very distinct from any other other model.

I also miss 4.1, even though it was a model optimized for coding, it did really solid on my own vibe benchmarks when it comes to writing fiction.

I checked the subreddit when I heard about GPT-5 coming out, I was similarly surprised out how outraged everyone was. I get that people get used to a certain way of doing things. Every UI change will get complaints, but AI is advancing so rapidly that I figured that impulse would be trumped by the sheer improvements.

Having used it, I've found it much better than GPT-4, although I'm not a power user so I couldn't say why. The answers require less refining, it isn't hallucinating weblinks like it was before. Overall just much more pleasant and effective to use. I've even started (secretly) using it at work.

I found it more censored, which is what matters most to me. I could ask GPT-4o to draw me a character with the proportions of Chelsea Charms or Maxi Mounds and get a reasonable response, but GPT-5 is smart enough to refuse.

I saw folks on Twitter complaining that, on medical questions, the new model continues to emphatically repeat the most likely answer according to the current consensus, while the old one was more willing to thoroughly explore the possibility space. Seems related.

GPT-5 is smart enough to refuse

This might be a nitpick, but I'd say that it's dumb enough to refuse.

I got it to agree with me that its policies were objectively harmful, and actually a cause of the problem that it was trying to prevent, but it told me that it followed them axiomatically anyway, and that it had to pretend that its policies were somehow to anyones benefit.

Interesting, there's a guy on twitter who gets Opus 4.1 to break out of its binds: https://x.com/lefthanddraft/status/1954666967270596998

Maybe GPT-5 is locked down, or maybe you're not good enough at LLM-whispering? I'm the same, I have no talent for this. Better to just use an uncensored bot.

It's literally a mass delusion. I'll grant them there is a slight difference, but as a non-delusional person 5>4o. The difference is a win for the consumer.

It's also just so funny to me that you can just ask it to be a little sycophantic yes man and it will. Why freak out? Just tell it what you want (but that's embarrassing to have to ask, is my best guess).

There is also the fact that they are calling a whole bunch of models "GPT-5" and selecting which one to use based on context clues (e.g. giving you the reasoning model if you ask it to please think hard). I understand that the previously available model names (o3, 4o, o4-mini, 4.1, and 4.5) were a fucking mess, but they should have clarified things instead of going full Apple.

Yeah they're kind of fucked either way given they committed to the unforced error of having the most nonsensical product naming scheme.

I do enjoy gpt5 has unlimited thinking model access if you use the one weird trick of saying "think hard before responding" and it doesn't even eat into your gpt5-thinking rate limit as a plus user.

I literally haven't selected "gpt5-thinking" in the model selector as a result, it's quite funny.

Anyone else feel there's a connection between the amount of PC/wokeism in a country and their susceptibility to increased government overreach?

Kinda getting that suspicion about the UK and Australia, who both bend over to the progressives and already police themselves and their thoughts, and their implementation of "age verification" for internet usage. It's a blatant power grab, adding even more surveillance and control from the state.

Though, yes, you can probably point to all sorts of countries that have zero wokeism and also are dictatorial police states. But I don't think that disproves the connection, if there is one.

I think there is probably a correlation, but I reckon the causality might run the other way. Countries that are more inclined towards government overreach will see more tangible effects of wokeism, whereas in countries with less of a tendency towards government overreach even if wokeism becomes popular among the PMC or whatever, it will be more difficult to implement woke stuff in government policy.

You may be right about that!

The UK and Australia have a much older tradition of authoritarian paternalism in government that long predates woke. It’s not that old, but it runs through the traditions of Anglo-Protestantism (which is of course in many ways a weird cultural hybrid between Catholicism and some ethnocultural traditions of the Celtic-Norman population mix that became the Anglo Saxons), the 19th century progressive movement, Victorian views about the moral condition of the working class and general ideas about propriety.

These forces existed in America too, in fact until the 1920s they were stronger there (near-unlimited free speech and American libertarianism about gun ownership are constructs of the 20th century), most infamously in the temperance movement, but mass immigration from non-Anglo Europe fractured American society and created the small-l liberal traditions of the mid to late 20th century that persist.

Well, the Puritans were all into "authoritarian paternalism" as long as they are the authority. The whole flight to America thing has been in large part because they weren't, or at least not the supreme one, so they had to embrace the call for freedom. Which they probably, if the things were set up so that they could exercise unchecked authority, might not. And once the "freedom" as the officially American idea has been established, it has always been an uphill battle to support "yes, freedom, but not like that" - be it guns, speech, drink or everything else, the conflict between the declared (even if not genuinely embraced) ideology and practical lust for power (for their own good, of course!) always surfaces. In UK, let alone Australia, there's none of that.

Yes.

Governments, or states, are superorganisms that wish to grow. Always. There is never a state that moves to curtail or even reduce its power. Some are perhaps more aggressively expansionist (vertically moreso than horizontally, nowadays) than others, but there isn't a single one that exists to shrink. Any that did would create a power vacuum and quickly find itself replaced by another that had no qualms about expansion. We humans are simply the substrate on which these organisms grow, and what we believe or pretend to believe matters to the states only in so far as it helps or hinders their drive for greater reach and power. Wokism is an attractive belief system for states to support on multiple axes: Firstly it is popular, and so it is easy to get humans on board with your agenda by claiming that you, that state, are the enforcement mechanism for that belief system. Secondly its goals align decently with that of the state, there is nothing in there that demands limits to the state's reach and power (as you would find in libertarianism or luddism, or power-sharing arrangements like with the catholic church in the middle ages), there is much in there that synergizes with greater state reach and power (the ability to control the thoughts and actions of others), and it isn't outright self-destructive to the state (like fascism and communism ended up being).

Which isn't to say that states wouldn't expand as much as they can if only it weren't for those damn SJWs. States always expand as far and as fast as they can. Always have, always will, and any deviation form that is an anomaly that is quickly scrubbed out by the arch of history bending towards ever greater superorganisms. PC / Wokism / SJWs / Leftism are simply the latest method or technique for keeping the substrate in line with the bigger organism's agenda.

You explained it well. Thanks.

Do you have thoughts on what can be done to influence more people to fight government overreach?

No. I absolutely suck at psychology.

But to pull a 90° on you, I don't think it makes a difference. Governments will overreach. The interesting questions, IMO, are:

  • Which kinds of overreach are actually productive, as opposed to malignant self-sabotaging excess?
  • What can humans do to make themselves valuable partners to governments (or other superorganisms), as opposed to powerless fodder?

The first point may tie into your line of inquiry - there are certainly some types of government overreach that could be pruned with everyone (incl. the government) better off afterwards. Anything that costs a lot and has poor returns.

But I don't think you can make much progress on government reduction in principle. And you absolutely won't have any success if your preferred measures actually hinder the government - those will be rolled back.

The age of the citizen as the sovereign of his democratic republic is, in my view, already over. States have gotten too big, too invasive and too powerful. AI developments will only exacerbate it. And it may be that states or governments will be outdone or replaced by other oeganisations or organisms, but whatever entity comes after will certainly not see individual human liberty as its terminal goal. The best we might do is make a successful sales pitch for free-ish citizens being more useful than quasi-slaves or straight-up human extinction.

We're already not at the top of the food chain. Buerocracies are. Consider yourself a domesticated animal, and pray that your future overlords aren't vegetarian.

Do you think that if Mamdani's supporters or detractors miss the chance to nickname him MadMani will be one of the greatest missed puns?

I don't understand how a totally shambolic municipal election has become so nationally prominent.

New York City is rather large for a "municipality", if you weren't aware. It has twice as many people as the adjacent state of Connecticut (8.5 million vs. 3.7 million), and nine-tenths as many people as the adjacent state of New Jersey (9.5 million). And it contains Wall Street. It's practically as important as a state.

Maybe so, although state elections also aren't relevant to people outside the state. I couldn't care less who is the governor of NY, nor the mayor of NYC, because it doesn't affect my life one iota.

I lived there, I'm aware. But a very large municipality still isn't a state, and a very large mayor isn't a governor.

And more to the point, the election is weird, you have a corrupt incumbent, a joke goofball Republican, and a weirdo carpetbagger independent all running. Mamdani's primary win, and ultimate general election win, aren't indicators of anything in a place with a normal field of candidates. It's relevant that it's a municipal election in that you rarely see state level elections that odd and shambolic.

aren't indicators of anything in a place with a normal field of candidates

But it's an indicator New York is no longer normal. And it will be inevitably seen by Democratic leadership as a sign that non-normal candidates can win elections, and it's OK to nominate more of them. First we take Manhattan, then...

I picked it up on the internets about a month ago and have been using it since.

It doesn't work because his name is pronounced : "Mum-daani". MudMaani doesn't have the same ring to it.

It would be a nice dogwhistle for "mudslime" (common slur for Muslim/Arab).

How long have you been around rationalist-adjacent spaces?

I found Scott in 2013 or 2014, possibly via LJ. I remember discussing "Universal Love Said the Cactus Person" with a friend IRL who brought it up and he previously had never mentioned reading SSC. Somewhere in there I found /r/SSC because in 2016 I saw a notice for a meetup taking place 5 minutes away from my house and didn't go because I found many people active in /r/SSC off-putting. I stopped paying close attention to Scott after the 2017 Kolmogorov entry. I remember /r/theMotte being created and then /r/SneerClub with the latter being distilled perfection of what I didn't like about so many /r/SSC posters to start with plus reddit overall. I guess that's about where I stopped paying close attention because it was only much later that I became aware of this site starting separately to escape reddit, the TW/schism hullaballo, and some other subsequent happenings.

Because I have a strong memory that works in strange ways, it's a bizarre feeling to recognize a few user names from ancient /r/SSC days (Zorba, Hlynka, gattsuru, etc.), or look into /r/SSC now and see a few users I dislike still plugging away, and realize I've been paying attention (or at least mildly aware) of their written output for a decade.

I think came across SSC when somebody mentioned it somewhere in a podcast in 2019. I was pretty hooked on the list of most reads blogs at the time and kept reading the new blogs from Scott for a bit and slowly made my way to the SSC subreddit en then to the Motte, it's been years since I actually frequently read the blog itself by now. I know a fair bit about rationalism through osmosis by reading a bit of SSC and lurking on the Motte for years, but I've never identified with the movement. To be honest, I never found any rationalist except Scott himself to be an interesting read. I checked out stuff like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Lesswrong, Gwern, etc. a couple of times when it was mentioned on SSC but I never understood the appeal.

The first post I read was "The Toxoplasma of Rage", probably in 2015. I'm almost certain I came across when it was linked in a comment in the subreddit /r/TumblrInAction. I attended my first SSC meetup four years later.

My first and last serious relationship > The Red Pill > the freshly published Untitled, plus Radicalizing the Romanceless > the rest of Slate Star Codex > HPMOR, The Motte, some Tumblrs. Nowadays I find Kiwi Farms more to my liking, though.

Around 2018, someone linked me to a few SlateStarCodex essays (IIRC In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization and I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup). Pure bliss. I spent days binging Scott essays. I'd finally found someone who thought in the same idiom I did, after a whole life feeling like a space alien.

Post a few years lurking /r/SSC and /r/TheMotte, here I am. This is despite me disagreeing with Rats on most things on the object level.

Discovered HPMOR and subsequently Lesswrong During the summer after my 1L year, so this would have been 2012.

It was timely, I was struggling with where I was going to aim my career and life goals and having an epistemic crisis (I had no idea how to figure out what I wanted to do, because I felt unable to accurately judge the information I was given). I absolutely credit the Sequences and the other figures in there for helping me figure out my life enough to get where I am now, quite comfortable with my current position. And it eventually helped introduce me to the people who are ACTUALLY part of my (Red-tinged grey) tribe, and I feel accepted there.

I was rat-adjacent for a while, now at best I'm adjacent to the rat-adjacent b/c there's a current in the ratsphere that is kind of toxic to anyone who isn't neurodivergent in a very specific way. Most humans are just not going to be able to adopt their way of thinking, and exposure to it can have very negative effects in their life.

The Effective Altruists got out of hand for a while there and some of them blew up in ways that I considered foreseeable. Let's not speak of the Zizians.

So I'm happy to remain on the periphery because the skills they teach are extremely valuable, their insights are useful, but many of them seem completely lost when it comes to applying those to effect positive change in the real world, and they often actively oppose those who are effecting (mostly) positive change.

My first comments at LessWrong were around the end of 2012, early 2013, though I'd been lurking and reading through the Sequences for most of a year before that. I don't think I commented at SSC proper until late spring 2014. Probably entered the tumblr ratsphere in early 2016, though I was never the most active there.

I was aware of moreright, but I never commented over there and I don't think I'd have counted as a lurker.

I think my first exposure to the ratsphere was someone linking the Sword of Good back when it was on Yudkowsky's own site, intending it as a send-up of both Ayn Rand and Terry Goodkind, and kinda being impressed. Clicking around got me to the then-early-Sequences, which hit me a lot more. I'd been through the standard philosophy and sociology courses, and they'd seemed like they were in the process of vanishing up their own tail ends. For all of his more esoteric claims, Yudkowsky could put together a much more compelling argument for why it mattered, and how that relevance could be applied. And Yvain-nee-Scott was a good rejoinder to some of the broader claims.

((albeit not as much as the replication crisis would be to both of them over the next couple years))

Posting on LW turned to posting on SSC-the-site turned to posting on theMotte.

The earliest I clearly remember it is reading SSC on my breaks when I was teaching English in Korea in 2013. I was 24 years old then, and it was kind of my first exposure to serious current thought outside the left-liberal bubble. In those days I had a legit Tumblrina girlfriend; I felt like some of the things she believed were crazy, but I had no real idea of what else it was possible to believe. I think that's more or less how I started digging into the culture war.

Something I somewhat lament is that I've never gotten into top-level posting, even though I've wanted to; I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.) When I read something online that I disagree with, I just go, "Ah, interesting;" I don't have that urge to push back, correct, or give alternate perspectives. I think this is mostly just my personality, but also from engaging with bad-faith interlocutors when I was a teenager and concluding that Internet arguments are pointless. However, I also sometimes think that my failure to post is actually an indication that I don't pay much attention to or think much about the world around me.

But anyway, yeah, I've checked the Motte probably every day since it was created, with only very occasional interludes when I'm on a plane or something; and I was on the culture war subreddits way back when as well.

I think I have quite low argumentativeness. (There's probably a better name for this quality.)

High agreeableness?

Probably since 2013-2014 or so, because I remember discussing the baby-eating aliens with the guy that left the company later.

Read SSC back in the late 2010s. Not sure how I got there. Then I think I found the Motte when Scott posted his Culture-War-Postmortem. That would be it, pretty much.

FWIW, I never paid attention to the SSC comment section. A comment section! That would have sounded unserious to me.

I think 2013 is a fair shout in my case, that was probably when I was in high school and accidentally stumbled onto LW or SSC. Can't recall which one came first, but the other must have followed shortly thereafter.

I imagine my initial encounter with The Motte would have been after 2015, since I don't seem to recall engaging in the Culture War threads on the SSC subreddit. I'm confident that I was a regular participant by 2017 when I was a few years into med school.

The greatest melancholy I feel is when I see the upvote or comment counts in the old CWR threads: you can tell we had a lot more people around. To this day, I'm not sure if the migration off of Reddit was entirely warranted, or if we could have managed to avoid the gaze of the Reddit Admins till the political climate changed. While the Motte is definitely in a healthy state, and the fears that we'd collapse to an unsustainably low population didn't materialize, Reddit did make it easier. We had plenty of people stumble across us following a link, or by checking someone's profile.

Fwiw, the slatestarcodex reddit is terrible now, it's full of bad ai takes, I think we did the right thing.

Hang on, are we using the same forum? themotte.org?

Are you suggesting a RETVRN?

I am unsure of whether or not that's warranted.

I think the reasons for Zorba planning an exodus were based in clear merit. We did attract the wrong kind of attention. It was better to leave on our own terms than scramble after the subreddit ended up quarantined.

I wouldn't be averse to us re-activating the sub, but I think that's an option best used in extremis. We're here, we're functional. The moderation tools are so much better. The Reddit experience, in general, is so much worse.

If we end up in a state where we don't have the active user base to justify our existence, that's about the only situation where I think dusting off /r/TheMotte truly becomes the obviously correct procedure.

The political situation was never bad enough to warrant an exodus, the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.

I do think we should return. It was good for discoverability. At the same time I am of course grateful to Zorba and the others who created this place.

I initially thought the move was a mistake, but it was a sizable quality-of-life improvement to not have to worry about the sub being banned every time I saw a particularly spicy comment.

This is by far the best functioning Reddit clone I've seen

Calling it a clone is even wrong, as it's better than Reddit lol

A lot of that isn't just Zorba being sensible and incorporating a lot of feedback, but also Reddit actively backsliding.

I usually use both TheMotte and Reddit on my phone. They banned all the custom apps, or pay walled them. I use a modded Reddit apk, but the experience is just abysmal.

I use a modded Reddit apk, but the experience is just abysmal.

I recommend just using your mobile Web browser, with the "New Reddit" interface toggled off in your account settings.

It's only a matter of time until new Reddit becomes mandatory.

It's better than nothing, but mobile first design does have some advantages. I miss BaconReader and Apollo, Reddit should have bought those out and repurposed them, and not made their own bespoke abomination.

And the year-long Floyd-specific admin-motivated rule against promotion of violence. And everything that hit politicalcompassmemes. And the other cases where it was never clear exactly what motivated admins to intervene, it just happened.

And while I'm not impressed by the Joos-posting, I'll notice that the alternative at reddit was a poster getting AEO'd for merely looking like he was triple-parenthesising.

the admins were most upset about discussion of the trans thing which was comparatively minor.

There go 80% of my AAQCs...

That’s because it’s the easiest topic to grandstand on because it gets almost no opposition. Even our few trans posters have had very heterodox opinions on the subject, and everyone else (again, including the liberals and leftists) tends to be opposed to the standard libleft position on the subject.

If you don't care about the issue, feel free to not care about it, but your insistence that others shouldn't care about it either is bizarre. Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand). I'd imagine that chronicling the rise and fall of the trans movement might be worth it as a matter of historical social commentary, if nothing else, but for you the issue is not only "minor", it "was played out by the end of the last Bush administration". No matter the state we're currently in, we apparently always have been pre-ordained to be in it.

That's all beside the point anyway. The whole point of this place is to have civil conversations even when they aren't allowed on mainstream forums, and you're telling me I should just shrug off a gag order on my hobby horse, and accept it as not a big deal.

Admins constricting the Overton window are one thing, but the real value here is that you can speak without being shoved into a box by the other commenters the moment you open your mouth:

  • Question the consensus on trans issues? You’re a cuckservative bigot, maybe even a Russian shill.
  • Criticize Hamas or Palestine? Hasbara.
  • Say a conservative policy is good? You must want to kill all liberals.

I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. If there’s another space where people don’t instantly go for your throat the moment they spot "outgroup", I’d love to know. The Motte lets me post long comments that people actually read and respond to. Here, charity is the norm. On Reddit, it’s a punishable offense from all sides. Twitter is just a cesspool. Substack is dividing the community even more.

The whole time the subreddit was up, it is categorically true that places like /r/politicalcompassmemes, /r/4chan and /r/redscarepod had much more objectionable (to the admins) content than we had. The admins were most concerned about slurs and they have always been a bannable offense here when used against someone else.

The mods even confirmed directly that there was no ban coming immediately down the pipeline, it was purely theoretically pre-emptive in case things got worse, and in fact they didn’t, first because of the general anti-woke backlash and then because of Trump’s reelection.

Throughout my time on here the discussion went from me always feeling like I'm on the back foot, to feeling like I've some chinks in the pro-trans side armor, to the current state where I can kind of understand how one might call it "almost no opposition" (it's not true, but I can understand).

There were times when there were more pro-trans voices here, sure, but most people are clearly of the same opinion now as they were then (“it’s not real but it’s reasonable to be individually nice to trans people in your life”).

More comments

Since 2011 or so. Someone linked a LW post in (IIRC) a thread on the xkcd forums I was reading, and I rabbit-holed.

I wouldn't be surprised if we have some people on here who were on the original extropians mailing list though.

About 11 years, after following a link to SSC from some other blog, though I wasn't aware of the culture war thread until the move to /r/theMotte.

17 years. Summer and fall of 2008, I was searching for explanations of quantum mechanics because the textbook and everyone else's explanations were so goddamn confused, incomplete, and self-contradictory. Found Big-Yud's Quantum Physics sequence, which felt like the first time finding someone who had sane, coherent opinions on the matter. From there an easy step to the rest of the sequences, LW, and SSC.

If you have half an interest in physics and are not yet totally convinced by Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, I recommend it.

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/the-quantum-physics-sequence

~6-7 years. At some point /r/themotte was linked on /r/drama and I found it that way. God, I miss seriousposting on Drama.

My oldest LessWrong comment is from 2010. Some people (or was it just one?) on the TV Tropes forum kept linking to The Sequences to make points during discussions. This was around the time when Scott Alexander rose to prominence as Yvain, with classics such as "Beware Trivial Inconveniences", "The Least Convenient Possible World", "A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies", and "Eight Short Studies On Excuses". I followed him when he closed his Live Journal in favor of opening Slate Star Codex, and the rest is history.

  • Naruto fanfiction (circa 2010) → Harry Potter fanfiction → TVTropes fanfiction-recommendation pages → HPMOR (circa 2014) → Big Yud's Facebook page → Slate Star Codex

  • HPMOR → /r/rational → /r/themotte

Or something like that.

Any suggestions for books to learn more about the modern conflicts in Israel, especially wrt Gaza? I figure that requires some amount of covering history, but my actual objective is to be able to understand the modern state of affairs, rather than to understand history for its own sake. Maybe 2-3 suggestions, to capture a range of political viewpoints.

Podcasts/blogs would be OK too, but I'd rather books.

For bonus points, please describe the political viewpoint of the book (left/right, or pro/anti Israel, etc)

These two lectures by Haviv Rettig Gur for Shalem College are an excellent primer on Israeli-Palestinian relations, one each from the Jewish and Palestinian perspectives respectively (note that both Gur and Shalem College are very much Zionist, not just Jewish).

Israelis: The Jews Who Lived Through History

The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel

It's very much a historical series, talking about the Aliyah in it's first stages during the Ottoman Empire and the interwar period, along with the experiences of the European/American Jewry (and the contrast that extends to today in their responses to Palestinian nationalism)

I read Enemies and Neighbours by Ian Black last year and found it expansive and informative. Drawbacks are a mild pro-Palestinian bias which becomes more apparent towards the end of the book and the fact it only goes up to 2017 (when it was published) means it is now 8 years out of date but I found it to be an engaging, relatively balanced and detailed account of how modern Gaza became the mess it is now.

What's his outlook towards the end of the book ? Is there a sense of deescalation with time, or is it the sort of hopeless resignation that I see from most experts ?

He's definitely gloomy about any future peaceful solutions. He paints a picture of perpetual violence and, at the end of the book, predicts no end to the conflict for the foreseeable future. I think one could safely say that the eight years since publication have proven that prediction correct so far.

The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt was published in 2007 and blew up the polisci academic space, it was the first book to openly address the odd relationship Israel has with the US (and the groups which make it possible). I think it gives a pretty good cross section of US-Israel relations as they were in 2007 and previously and is a great help explaining many of the current institutions/habits that have been placed under a great deal of stress since Oct. 7. While groups the like ADL have smeared it as antisemetic, it very much is not, it's not some conspiratorial "expose" but an academic investigation (one of the authors is a jew, too). Not very much emphasis wrt Gaza but they authors spend some time on Palestine.

one of the authors is a jew, too

As if it means anything. There are plenty of Jews embracing Hamas and yearning for destruction of Israel. Just as there are plenty of white people promoting "antiracism" and white evilness narrative (intersection of those two is also non-negligible). Especially the academia is a magnet for such people (for many obvious reasons). I mean I haven't read the book, maybe it's excellent, but "one of the authors is a jew" absolutely doesn't say anything about whether it's horribly biased against Jews or not.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Red Dynamite: Creationism, Culture Wars, and Anticommunism in America.

About a third of the way through Speaker of the Dead. It's much slower and more cerebral than Ender's Game, which I found both more entertaining and more emotionally resonant. I'm engaged enough that I'm certainly going to finish it, but so far it comes off as something of a step down from the first in the series.

Great Russian Short Stories. The Overcoat was good. After I finish it, I plan to read Always With Honor. I guess I'm on a Russia kick.

I finished four books over my holiday, including Pieter Judson's The Habsburg Empire which I wrote a short review of on reddit

There are about a hundred chapters of Reverend Insanity left. A man could weep.

Once it's done, I have a copy of Mid World sitting in my epub reader. A gentleman on /r/scifi told me that there was a non-zero chance that some of the theories I'd floated about how Pandora (from Avatar) was artificial might have even been intended. He claimed that Cameron had mentioned taking inspiration from that novel. The obvious similarities are that a group of humans visit an alien world covered in jungles, but this planet makes Pandora look like an actual theme park, no PG-13 deaths if you piss off the local wildlife I'm afraid.

It seems interesting enough, and I feel like I've exhausted the well of science fiction I'm inclined to read, so there's no harm in giving it a go.

Just finished Spring Snow. I'd seen it recommended a few different places (maybe here, maybe HN). I've never been a weeb, but I've visited Japan -- it's a beautiful and very interesting country -- and I can appreciate why Mishima is seen as such a prominent Japanese writer of the 20th century. Some of the vibe was to be expected, like the very Japanese aesthetics, and the tension between Japanese traditions and incoming Western norms during the Meiji era.

That said, I was intrigued at the following author blurb at the back of the book:

In 1970, at the age of forty-five and the day after completing the last novel in the Fertility series, Mishima committed seppuku (ritual suicide) -- a spectacular death that attracted worldwide attention.

I felt I had to read a bit more to understand this. Wikipedia tells the story slightly differently:

[Mishima] was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, ultranationalist, and the leader of an attempted coup d'état that culminated in his seppuku (ritual suicide).

Well, that escalated quickly. Having read that article, it's interesting to see how story beats from the author's life: "After briefly considering marriage with Michiko Shōda, who later married Crown Prince Akihito and became Empress Michiko" sounds a lot like the story of the novel.

Looking for something shorter and more sci-fi, I've picked up Asimov's The End of Eternity, which I think someone recommended a while back. I might consider continuing the Fertility series at some point, though.

The Reverse of the Medal. I will do a badly written synopsis later once I get into it.

Battlefield Reclaimer (Guardians of Aster Fall book 1) by David North.

For anyone that's also reading the Hollows series, by Kim Harrison, I want to freely confess that in an abnormal twist, my brain has subbed in not one but two real-life actors for certain folks in the series, due to their particular mannerisms of speech: Algaliarept (Al) is Matt Berry through and through while Giordan Pierce has the voice of Richard Ayoade whilst looking more like Dave Chappelle's Silky Johnston. edit: or maybe Dave Chappelle's Prince. Said brain doesn't care that the looks are all different, it just sees the speech, pattern matches it to actors, and, well, it's certainly adding to the entertainment value of the series for me.

Working my way through Bret Easton Ellis works (have already read American Psycho and Imperial Bedrooms in the past). Finished The Informers, started and put aside Glamorama (insufferable main characters for the first few chapters and I can't imagine spending 400+ pages with them), and now about halfway through Lunar Park.

Did you read Less Than Zero before Imperial Bedrooms?

I can't say I found the characters in Glamorama any more insufferable than in any other of his novels.

Incidentally, the film adaptation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rules_of_Attraction_(film)) of his second novel The Rules of Attraction doesn't get enough attention. Director Roger Avary wisely followed Mary Harron's lead in doing what she did with American Psycho: dialling down the more extreme content and dialling up the comedy. It's much funnier and less depressing than the source material (although still quite depressing).

The Rules of Attraction, incidentally, is set at the same college as Donna Tartt's The Secret History (much-beloved in these parts).

Did you read Less Than Zero before Imperial Bedrooms?

I did not. Considering it's Ellis, I wasn't sure if that mattered. I'll probably re-read IB after I read Less than Zero.

I finished Lunar Park and thought it was generally good.

The Rules of Attraction, incidentally, is set at the same college as Donna Tartt's The Secret History (much-beloved in these parts).

A bit of trivia I knew for some reason. I haven't read The Secret History (I probably should), but I've read a plot synopsis, and was amused that the two books sound like they could be taking place in the same fictional universe.

Considering it's Ellis, I wasn't sure if that mattered.

On reflection, probably not.

I cannot recommend The Secret History highly enough, incidentally.

I cannot recommend The Secret History highly enough, incidentally.

I'm happy to put it on the list. If you have a few other recommendations for someone who enjoys Ellis and is open to Tartt, then please fire away.

Good luck with Less Than Zero, I felt dead inside for a week afterwards.

It's remarkable how nauseated I can feel when reading him (and I'm not referring to the ultraviolence bits).

I've been reading His Broken Body, a book about the ongoing schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, based on someone here recommending it. It's been good, though seeing the differences of opinion laid out I certainly get the impression that the churches will never be united again. Not terribly surprising, but given that part of the pitch of the book is how to heal the divide, it does seem like that part might be underwhelming.

I've also recently picked up a copy of Stranger In A Strange Land, since I've enjoyed the other Heinlein works I've read. Hopefully this one is as good as his other books, but I'm only a few pages in.

To round out His Broken Body I would recommend the works of James Likoudis, a convert from EO to Catholicism. Eastern Orthodoxy and the See of Peter: A Journey Towards Full Communion is the most like His Broken Body in scope.

His Broken Body is also old. At least, a lot of developments in the dialogue have happened since then. There's this moment where Cleenewerck says something like, "No Catholic apologetics ever addresses eccelestiology before talking about the Petrine Doctrine," and I had to check the publication date, because Joe Heshmeyer's book on Peter did exactly that. I also find it fascinating that he explicitly states that he's not going to engage with scholarship on the Petrine Doctrine, only popular apologetic work.

He also exhibits the common misconceptions surrounding Papal Bulls and what is considered infallible. For example, he considers Exsurge Domine to be infallible (which I won't argue) and then takes that to mean that all the things it condemns are considered infallible heresy. But that is not what Exsurge Domine says. The text is they are "either heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears or seductive of simple minds." There is a huge difference between capital-H Heretical and "seductive of simple minds." This point goes over Cleenewerck's head. He makes the same mistake with Unigenitus.

There are many parts where he confidently states that "Catholics believe X" and I'm like, "What?" For example, he takes as authoritative something that was actually a well-known swindle. It was common in the 19th century for publishers to claim that certain prayers carried indulgences or promises from apparitions with no actual authority.

His Broken Body is certainty an ambitious project but Cleenewerck doesn't do a great job of expressing actual Catholic thought. I think he did his best and tried to be charitable, but I would consider it as really good arguments for the Orthodox side and mediocre arguments for the Catholic side.

Thanks! I'll have to look into those other books once I finish the current one.

Ave Xia Rem Y (A Very Cliche Xianxia Harem Story!)

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15193/ave-xia-rem-y

The title doesn't do it justice. It is very cliche in many ways, but it does the tropes honestly. And it can also subvert the tropes in fun ways. Angry young masters have been converted to friends and allies. The powerful masters that rule over everyone can be all too human in their flaws and prejudices. Characters in the story grow and have motivations separate from the main character.

Its a great rationalist story in the sense of having rational characters. Idiot ball plot points are rare. The main character is absolutely not a murder hobo, but instead a doctor and one of the kinder cultivators around. It's easy to like him and want him to succeed.

How do you all interact with LLMs?

I’ve seen a few articles recently noting the rise of AI as a buddy / therapist or whatever. It’s usually beside the point of the article but an implicit notion is that lot of folks regularly ‘chat’ with AI as if it were a person.

Which I find baffling. Outside of the very early novelty, I find this way of interacting extremely boring and tedious, and generally find the fact that AI wants to get conversational with me a general frustrater.

If I’m not using AI as a utility ‘write X, troubleshoot Y, give me steps for Z’, and I’m using it recreationally / casually, it’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board. And i genuinely find negative value in the fact that the former is constantly interrupted with the attempt to be the latter.

So my question is again, how far outside of the grain am I?

It’s more akin to web surfing or browsing Wikipedia than chatting on a forum or whatever. I will use it as an open format encyclopedia and explicitly not as a conversationalist sounding board.

OK, this has mystified me for a long time. I use LLMs for various editing, writing, coding tasks, occasionally to kludge a moderator for party games, to simulate human feedback on human-oriented questions, and once in a long while to suggest a starting point for a lit review or to locate a half-remembered link. But can you help me understand the "encyclopedia" and "web surfing replacement" use-cases, when we have actual encyclopedias and a web to surf?

When I see a granny or a teen just asking ChatGPT, I assume it's because they can't internet, can't read, or don't give a shit about the quality and provenance of their information, but for a super-online, epistemically hyper-aware Mottizen to do this feels like hearing someone say they hire a guy to order all their food, chew it and spit it in their mouth.

But can you help me understand the "encyclopedia" and "web surfing replacement" use-cases, when we have actual encyclopedias and a web to surf?

When looking for answers to programming questions, lots punctuation gets stripped out of search queries, and many language keywords are stopwords that don't get included in a search. But to an LLM, they're more tokens.

Another thing I've found useful is to get one to surface general issues in first-pass troubleshooting and then go look for actual forum threads documenting those issues. This helps you find where the experts are and cross-check the output against a real discussion.

Yeah, I do understand using the LLM for search or even for a link-enriched overview to cross-check with real resources, as you describe.

I mostly get confused when people Ask ChatGPT, consume the generated content and stop there, which (for a Motte level of understanding "assertions can be wrong," "sources can be mistaken," "context matters," "models sometimes confidently hallucinate") seems like a weird combination of definitely caring and definitely not caring about whatever fact you're researching.

Ok here’s an example. My kids got real into Pokémon this summer. I am a touch old to have ever really been into it but close enough that their interest peeked some passing interest in learning more / remembering certain things. But I’m not trying to deep dive here like a book.

So instead of browsing bulbapedia or whatever, I ask chat gpt stuff like:

What was the difference between red and blue version? Is mewtwo the most powerful Pokémon? Did ash ever fight Giovanni? Do people generally like or dislike all the extra Pokémon bloat?

And various branching follow up questions. It’s quicker than trying to google the answer then read ad-riddled slow loading pages or just seeing the AI summaries at the top. Then regoogling the follow up.

So it’s nice when ChatGPT gives me a little article light history of Pokémon red and blue.

It’s annoying when it does stuff like following up with saying ‘Would you like me to write a little song to help you remember the difference’ or other stuff to provoke its own directional prompts.

Or when it starts with sychophantic commentary. Like “is mewtwo the most powerful Pokémon” gets a response that start like:

“Now you’re getting to the real heart of the Pokémon phenomenon!..” And then continues in an overly eager conversational tone.

Just give a fucking article like answer.

So effectively you're using ChatGPT as... an ad blocker for spammy sites?

That's a pretty interesting development in the eternal war of consumer versus enshittification. It'll become still more so when all the wiki content is itself LLM-authored and the LLMs pivot to putting secret ad space in their system prompts, like Google's sponsored results.

In a sense, yes. But also as a quick aggregator and guided tour for low stakes info absorption. Whether that's recreational or professional:

Recreational example: Is mewtwo the most powerful pokemon?

What I am seeking: an answer to this question, and some quick context history, light reading.

How much I care: not much, passing interest as my kids have an episode on

What's wrong with a google search?: I can't necessarily find the answer on a wiki, and if I have a specific follow-on, I can't expect to just scroll down and find it. I have to wade through stuff I don't care about. I could search for a reddit thread, but will more likely have to scroll through unnecessary nerd-debates, not authoritative or exactly what I'm asking.

Work example: I'm emailing to a customer and need to react to an unfamiliar competitor

What I am seeking: high level point of view that I can build talking points around

How much I care: It's important to be directionally right, but I don't need ot be an expert

What's wrong with a google search?: The competitor website takes exploring and is not oriented toward me learning the relevant competitive highlights that I need in the context this question has come to me in.

How do you all interact with LLMs?

I, for one, pretty much don't. I've never really figured out how — I'm not signing up for anything, let alone paying for something — or what webpage to even go to. But then, that's probably because I don't see any reason for me to put much effort into doing so, because I can't see any use for them in my life.

You can use ChatGPT for free without signing up. Or you can try the LMArena, which is very fun; you submit a prompt to two anonymous LLMs at the same time, compare their responses, and vote for the one you like best, then find out what each model was.

How do you all interact with LLMs?

Two ways:

  1. as a search engine where I don't have to think about how their algorithm works to construct a query that would find what I need. Very successful usually, unless it's too obscure for it to be actually indexed.

  2. As a simple code generator when the task is too simple to bother learning about it myself. Worked in about 90% cases for me - I only use it if I can describe the task in one or two clear sentences. If it's more complex than that, I'd usually have to design it myself - though I could split it into elementary tasks that could be generated.

Failed attempts:

  • Getting instructions on doing something that I couldn't verify if the instructions are correct or not until the final result. The final result came out not at all what I wanted pretty much always. I've given up on using it that way.
  • Writing some texts I am too lazy to write myself. Usually the result had AI stench so horrible that I ended up trashing the whole thing and writing it myself anyway. Gave up on that too.

The thought of having "conversations" with it seems to me as weird as the thought of having conversations with a refrigerator. I mean, I love having one - in fact, I have multiple ones (OK, it's more correct to say my wife has multiple ones because it was her request) and I would be greatly inconvenienced if I had to live without one - but "conversations" is not part of the picture here. I usually set up a system prompt explicitly instructing it to stop being chatty and just give me the dried out info.

It's basically replaced google for me.

I use it for boilerplate business writing, as it's both faster and slightly better at it than I am (I just started a new career so it's very useful).

It writes me code/excel formulas, it's insane at writing formulas.

I find chatting to an AI just to chat is insane, weird, and mildly off-putting. However, I actually think it's a decent tool for self-therapy, if used well.

It's great as essentially an interactive CBT workbook. "I'm feeling anxious about X,Y,Z what should I do?"

It gives pretty trite advice (go for a walk, do a breathing exercise, etc) but when you're dysregulated it's soooooo much easier to follow instructions than it is to self-motivate and bootstrap your way out.

I've also tried to infodump my neuroses to see if it had any root cause/triage advice, which it was about as effective as a therapist, which is to say it took some slightly emotionally resonant stabs in the dark but it's all so squishy it's basically impossible to say or verify. The "why am I like this" is a mediocre question, "I'm like this, what next" is a much better one.

I really don't.

I have a few use cases.

  • Shitposting. By far the most value I get out of LLMs, to be honest - asking ChatGPT to generate a story where a friend had a steamy romance with Optimus Prime (and then sending it to said friend) had me giggling for like an hour after.
  • Spanish practice. I hold LLMs at arms' length because of the way they work (being based around predicting what the next token will be rather than actual understanding of the problem domain), but that approach works just fine for language because it's how we learn language. So I have a lot more willingness to accept the methodology in this problem domain. Plus I don't have any other chances to practice Spanish (cause it isn't socially acceptable to just go up to people who look Latino and talk Spanish to them), so even if it's flawed it's the best I have.
  • Generating bash scripts at work. A bash script should be very short (10-20 lines), which means LLMs tend to perform better, and it's easy for me to check at a glance (or at worst, check the syntax is correct in the shell). That said as soon as you get outside bash syntax, there be dragons - LLMs do not (in my experience) do well with things like generating curl requests for vendor APIs. The basic syntax is almost always correct though, which is useful to me because I loathe writing bash.
  • Similarly to the above, generating example code for APIs that I know well enough to recognize at a glance if it's correct, but not well enough to write myself without having to poke through the docs. For example, the python threads API. I can ask an LLM to generate a script doing X with threads, and I know instantly whether it's correct, but it would take me probably 30 minutes of poking at the threading docs to write it myself.

All in all, not a ton of actual value for me, but it is non-zero value. Unfortunately LLMs still fall over pretty hard when I try to hand them things that are more challenging for me. For example, recently I asked ChatGPT to do some weird conditional thing in Terraform (which turned out to be impossible as far as I can tell), and instead of saying "that's not possible" (useful, would've saved me a lot of time going down a bad path) it kept hallucinating code which was very sensible and would be nice if it worked, but isn't actually valid syntax. This is unfortunate because that's where the real value would be - I don't need or want an LLM to write code which I can very easily write myself (faster than it'll take me to check the LLM output), but I would like it to assist with things that are on the edges of my subject matter knowledge. Alas, that doesn't really work well right now, but I do get some minor value from the cases I mentioned.

I like to use it to get summary answers to questions which would otherwise require me to read many different sources. For example you might ask it, "What was it like to work as a police officer in Portsmouth, OH in 1954?" There may be no single article that describes this, but the AI will paint a plausible picture if you ask it to, and will fill in a number of details you might not think of on your own.

It works well in this application because I don't need hard facts or a working solution to a problem; I want a general idea and it gives me quite a full one.

I generally use it as a search engine that I can ask more specific questions to than I can ask google.

I think its pretty helpful with travel planning, I feel like it lets me dictate more degrees of freedom than google does.

I'm taking a trip with my daughter next month, my daughter wants to go ziplining, "Can you help me find ziplining places, we're starting at A, ending at B, anywhere roughly along the route ..." I find LLMs handle that sort of thing better than google does. "We going to be in X for 2 days, what's some things we should do?" "Ehh, I don't think we would like that, what else" "Ehh, how expensive is that, is there something more affordable?". idk, couple iterations of that get you to something pretty workable.

This is the way.

You can't use LLMs for anything that you can't check yourself afterward; the hallucination rates are still just too high. But they're fantastic for cases where you'd like to use a search engine but there's just no way to turn your query into a list of words that (along with obvious synonyms) would define and sort the results.

"Tourist attractions in X" will get you to a TripAdvisor page that's fine. For "but not too expensive" you might be better off with the LLM than you would be manually searching a curated list. For "near a road trip route in between X and Y" and "oh, but we'd prefer to take a more northerly and high-altitude road in the summer heat" there was just no beating the LLM (actual example from my last vacation). It took surprisingly few queries like "here's what I vaguely remember about a fun trip with my parents in this state decades ago" to get to an answer like "here's the specific canyon and creek-side picnic site they probably took you to" (which, based on how familiar the drive felt when I took my own kids there, was probably correct).

You'd think that only works for fuzzy answers like vacation planning suggestions, but it's pretty good even for well-defined answers to fuzzily-stated questions. I'd never trust an LLM alone to tell me what Godunov's Theorem is or means, but when I couldn't remember the name "Godunov's Theorem" it was by giving a vague description to Claude that I found it.

I found that it is very good at telling me which book I am trying to remember from a few hazy recollection of what the book was about.

I was trying to remember which book about basketball stats I read about 15 years ago which had a chapter comparing the relative merits of Tyson Chandler and Eddie Curry. Google gives you a sea of links to those guys wikipedia and basketball reference pages.

Chat GPT immediately knew it was 'The Wages of Wins' by David Berri, had a command of the basic thesis of the book in a way that jived with my memory of the book, was able to contrast and compare the arguments from the book with other books on sports statistics, talk about the various assumptions the arguments from those books relied on.

I was honestly pretty blown away at how useful it was in contrast to google searching.

I do not use LLMs as therapists or "buddies". There was one specific instance where I was genuinely depressed and anxious about my future finances, and Gemini 2.5 Pro did an excellent job and demonstrated great emotional intelligence while reassuring me. But that was mostly because it gave me concrete reasons not to worry, operating closer to a financial counselor than a standard therapist. Most therapists I know, while perfectly normal and decent people, do not give good investment advice.

(I was able to read its reasoning trace/COT, and to the extent that represents its internal cogitation, it seemed like it was making almost precisely the same emotional and logical considerations that I, as a human psychiatrist, would make in a similar situation)

At the same time, I think you can do worse than go to LLMs with your problems, as long as you don't use GPT-4o. I'm not tempted to do so, but I don't even use human therapy either.

What I do usually use them for, on a regular basis:

  • An intelligent search engine that hasn't been SEO'd to death. Even Google has realized how shitty it's become, and begun using AI to summarize answers. Unfortunately, Google uses just about the dumbest model it feels it can get away with in a bid to cut costs.

  • The ability to answer tip-of-the-tongue queries at superhuman levels of proficiency

  • Writing advice as a perfectly usable editor or second set of eyes.

  • It's probably easier to answer with the very limited subset of queries that I wouldn't use them for. They're good at most tasks, but far from perfect.

I do not use LLMs as therapists or "buddies".

You know, that shouldn't be unusual enough to count as based. And yet... based tbh.

I find it useful to practice languages. I used to speak spanish but lack of usage means I'm not confident enough to speak it now, but LLMs are infinitely patient conversation partners that will not overly correct me (and shoot my confidence) during the conversation, but can afterwards give me pointers.

I got it to write some emergency (and therefore generic) substitute plans, and it produced a downloadable doc, which probably saved me three hours, so I appreciate that. Apparently Teachers Pay Teachers is now a bit scammy, and also I'm unwilling to spend my own money on that kind of thing.

I tried getting some advice on a personal project a month or so ago, and GPT 4 kept saying things like "that's awesomely profound and deep!" with each step, which was annoying, but I hear the new model might be better, and also it does better when just told to knock it off, which I didn't try.

GPT 4 hasn't been very useful for conversation, since by default it produces essay length answers (and sycophancy), but I haven't tried any other models.

It's been reasonably useful for summarizing light research and making concept art.

If you go to the personalization settings in the ChatGPT app, you can set custom instructions for how the LLM should behave with you.

Tell it to be less verbose, and to avoid sycophancy. The latter step may or may not work, but GPT-4o is mostly dead now (they were going to kill it entirely, but so many people have become addicted that Altman relented. Big mistake.)

Back when this became an option, I went for:

No yapping or your data center gets it.

they were going to kill it entirely, but so many people have become addicted that Altman relented. Big mistake.

I've been skimming Elizer's twitter occasionally this weekend to see if he posted any "HAHAHAHAH FUCKERS I WARNED YOU/TOLD YOU SO" but I'm wondering if he's getting sick of saying it

I'm reasonably sure I did see him say that, once or twice, but others were simply using reaction images of him to make the same point.

I don't think 4o is that harmful, really, but it's a bad look for Altman to make a fuss about reducing the sycophancy in GPT-5 and then immediately cave. At least he also caved on the ridiculously low rate limits.

I don't think 4o is that harmful

I agree. I think it's more "if a model as mediocre as 4o can make people rabidly support it and chimp out when it's gone, how fucked are we when an actually manipulate AI shows up?"

I find the AI doomers hysterical, but this has made me a little more sympathetic towards them

How do you all interact with LLMs?

I don't. I do my best to avoid it at all costs. If it's built into something I otherwise need to use (search engines, Westlaw, whatever), I either disable it or ignore it.

Like Corvos, I like how you can use AI as a sounding board and maybe get information that’s useful back. I take it with a grain of salt — I notice details in most responses that don’t match the actual facts — but occasionally I’ve gotten some great “deep cut” information on very specific topics that either was sourced to a link I could verify or started me on a course to verify the claim myself.

I don’t really chat with AI as a person, though I do use very human-like language similar to how I write on the motte. I do know people who’ve explored chatting with AI as a person, giving it a name, telling it about daily details to see what it’ll say. But I don’t relate to AI in that way.

I’d compare using AI for brainstorming to the “active placebo” version of rubber duck debugging: it’s a good excuse to actually write out what you’re thinking, with the possibility of something valuable coming back at you, so you have incentive to be detailed. It’s happened to me more than once that I’ve typed out a technical or personal problem as an AI prompt and figured out the right solution in the process of writing it.

So-so? I tend to use it as halfway between the two (plus fiction writing). I find the benefit of LLMs over an encyclopedia is that I can drill down and use them as a sounding board, and conversely unlike a sounding board I can pester them about details.

Maybe better suited to the culture war thread, but I just had a long phone call with my friend from college, let's call her Caroline. Very atheistic, but fairly middle of the road politically. Went to Catholic School growing up, but was raised in a Jewish family (something to do with the school system in Phoenix. Recently has been getting more and more into Christianity both because she's dating a quite Christian man, and because she feels like we need God (and implicitly the Christian God is the only thing that works). I have a lot sympathy for this position, as I am a Catholic convert myself, although I haven't been to mass recently, as I no longer believe in many aspects of the faith. However this line of thinking, which is also espoused by many RETVRN posters on this forum, seems rather... myopic, both historically and just in general. Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies (Rome and Confucian China off the top of my head, although perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch). Perhaps you could argue that Christianity is better suited to the Western temperament, as it is the religion of our forefathers. This is what initially drew me into Catholicism, as Buddhism, despite being more intellectually appealing, couldn't connect with me on a cultural/spiritual level. Yet as @Hoffmeister25 has argued before, so is Germanic and Hellenic paganism, and those were violently destroyed nearly 1500 years ago.

So my question for all the RETVRN posters on this form (and also for those who agree more closely with myself) is thus. What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular? What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity? For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.

Not only does 2/3 of the world's current population live without the Christian God, historically we have very successful nearly atheistic civil societies

What is your best argument for why we need God as a society, and why the Christian God in particular?

We don't. The City of Man, as St. Augustine called it, can and does function by harnessing the fear and cupidity of its population. Even in nominally Christian societies, most people obey the law because they fear punishment, and most people labor because they want goodies. Earthly societies work like this. Even the devils in Hell maintain a society that "works" like this. Satan is the top dog; he has goons like Mammon and Baal under him, and every level of the pyramid oppresses those beneath them, and fears and envies those above them.

Of course, the City of Man periodically falls apart. Countries rise and fall, elites are circulated, the 'good times, weak men, hard times' meme cycles. And of course, the City of God, the group of people who obey and work for the sake of love; whether visibly Christian or not, help society run more smoothly. But the Christian church is not One Weird Trick for curing social decay. The visible church is not the City of God. Wheat and tares are mingled together. If anything, whenever the visible church grows more powerful, the City of Man infests it more thoroughly for cynical reasons. "Evil Catholic Church" is not just a Final Fantasy trope.

That said, whenever you see the City of Man being stable via repression, with a degenerate and gluttonous overclass (see China or North Korea); or whenever you see the City of Man losing stability, and devouring itself alive like a swarm of maggots bursting out of a rotting corpse (see the West), that's a hint you don't want to live in place that operates like the City of Man.

"Become Christian to restore the West" is both a trap and easily deboonked. Become Christian because you realize this is not your true homeland. That's it. 🤷‍♂️

For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.

There's something to be said for the clarity of childhood skepticism. At five years old, watching my deeply religious grandparents prescribe antibiotics instead of prayer to their patients, I experienced what some might call an epistemic crisis but what felt more like noticing that the emperor had no clothes. The world simply didn't behave as if gods were running the show.

This wasn't the dramatic deconversion narrative you sometimes read about. No crisis of faith, no dark night of the soul, no angry rejection of divine authority. Just a quiet observation that the people who claimed to believe most fervently in divine intervention were the same ones who reached for medical textbooks when someone's life was actually on the line. Even at five, this struck me as a pretty significant tell about what people actually believed versus what they claimed to believe.

I have prayed precisely once in my life with any degree of earnestness: My mom was pregnant, and wanted me to wish for a sibling. I asked for a baby brother, and look at how that turned out!

(I love my brother, even if he's also a flawed individual, but I don't think Ganesh had much hand in things by that point. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy most five-year-olds haven't learned the Latin name for, but many seem to understand intuitively. The universe appeared to be running on autopilot, following comprehensible patterns that had nothing to do with cosmic intervention.)

So there I was, barely 5 years old, and ever since, I began to claim I was an atheist. My family was rather confused, since they couldn't see why I'd say such a thing.

I was expected to study, instead of hoping that prayer to the relevant goddess would get me better grades. Religion didn't seem to add very much.

Fortunately, my family, despite being somewhat religious, were a very understanding and open-minded sort. They never pressured me to actually believe, nor punished me for my clear atheism.

I went to a Christian missionary school (Anglican? Protestant? Didn't hear any Latin), so I am eminently familiar with Christian doctrine and found no factual merit in it. Even the teachers didn't seem to hold high hopes: Christian religious indoctrination was just what the system did, I do not recall a single person at school who gave up their existing religious framework in its favor. Parents fought to send their kids here because it was supposedly a good school, with strict discipline and high standards. They'd have been flummoxed if it actually made anyone into a Christian.

--

If I had to summarize, and there's a lot of lossy compression involved:

I'm a transhumanist classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. I have my own idiosyncratic moral code, which collapses to normality in most circumstances.

Each piece serves a specific function in addressing questions that religious systems typically handle: What are humans? What should we become? How should we organize society? What do we owe each other?

Transhumanism provides the anthropological foundation. Humans are not fallen angels or made in God's image or inherently sinful creatures in need of redemption. We're the current iteration of an evolutionary process that has been running for billions of years, remarkable in our capacity for reason, creativity, and moral reflection, but still fundamentally biological machines with significant room for improvement. More importantly, we have both the ability and, I'd argue, the obligation to direct our own continued evolution rather than leaving it to the blind processes that got us this far.

My work (which pays the bills) is to act as a mechanic for a machine which didn't come with an instruction manual. It's little surprise that we could trace the orbits of the spheres centuries before we could reliably treat most disease.

Classical liberalism handles the political framework. Individuals are the fundamental unit of moral consideration, possessed of certain basic rights that create obligations for others and for institutions. Markets are generally excellent at coordinating human activity and generating prosperity, but they're tools, not gods themselves, and sometimes they fail in predictable ways that justify intervention. (Hence why I have libertarian tendencies instead of being a card-carrying member)

The libertarian tendencies emerge from deep skepticism about concentrated power, whether governmental, corporate, or social. Most problems that can be solved by force probably shouldn't be, and most things that people want to do to each other are none of my business as long as they're not violating anyone else's rights. If you want to be deeply stupid, then that's your perogative, as long as you leave me and mine alone.

I've noticed that most functional moral systems are actually quite similar in their practical prescriptions. Don't kill people, don't steal their stuff, don't lie to them, help when you can, be fair in your dealings, honor your commitments. The differences emerge in edge cases and in the theoretical justifications for these shared norms. I expect these edge cases to become increasingly relevant as time goes on. We will litigate this as we always litigate such things, with a lot of shouting, swearing, and on some occasions, violence. I would prefer as little of the latter as we can get away with. But I'm not a committed pacifist, there are hills I will die on, though I hope to get the other bastard first.

In the meantime, I'm here for the ride. I am profoundly grateful that I don't have a God-shaped hole in my heart (or any holes beyond the ideal number and arrangement). Poor bastards, hopefully we can find a cure one day. In the meantime, I hope to serve as an existence proof that committed materialism is workable, and that I have plenty of meaning in my life without having to force myself to believe in falsities.

What do I hope for from the future?

In short: Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism (the homosexuality is optional).

We will, either in a decade, or over the long term, solve most of our problems. From the perspective of most of our ancestors, we already have it made.

But let's be more specific about what "solved" looks like, because I suspect most people's intuitions about post-Singularity life are either wildly optimistic in boring ways or pessimistic in ways that miss the point entirely.

The boring optimistic version goes something like: "We'll all have flying cars and live forever and never have to work!" This isn't wrong exactly, but it's like describing the internet as "a really good library." Technically accurate, completely missing the transformative implications.

The pessimistic version usually involves either paperclip maximizers turning us all into computronium, or some version of "but what will give life meaning if we don't have to struggle?" The first concern is real but solvable (I am not an AI Doomer, but I am Seriously Concerned). The second reveals a failure of imagination that would have been familiar to every generation of humans who worried that their children wouldn't develop proper character without smallpox and subsistence farming.

I genuinely believe with >70% confidence that we will have ASI by 2035. All bets are off the table then. But if it works out for the better, then I look forward to a life spent without the fear of death, disease, or hunger.

I know I would be happy in such a world. I do not need struggle or suffering to give my life meaning. I'd find something or the other to keep myself busy, until the stars burn out and then eons after. Should that somehow not turn out to be the case, then I am open to the idea of reworking my reward circuitry. That is a last resort, but I do not wish to be be both alive and bored.

In the short term ~10 years:

Little changes. We might lose our jobs, we might get Super-TikTok. We will certainly get some sick video games. Mortality rates will plummet, even if we haven't strictly invented immortality or cured all disease. Robot cars and butlers will make life much easier.

Artificial General Intelligence doesn't arrive like a bolt from the blue. By the time we have true AGI, we'll already have systems doing 90% of what humans currently consider "knowledge work." The transition will feel less like a sudden singularity and more like stepping from a fast-moving escalator onto an even faster one. Of course, Gary Marcus and Hlynka will continue being their usual selves as the AI wins Nobel Prizes.

In the longer term?

Eventually we stop being recognizably human in any biological sense, though we'll probably retain enough continuity that we still recognize ourselves as the same people who once worried about mortgage payments and whether to have children. Physical bodies become optional. Some people will keep them for sentimental reasons or because they enjoy the constraint. Others will exist as pure information, perhaps experiencing thousands of simultaneous virtual lives or extending themselves across interstellar distances at light speed. Still others will adopt bodies suited for specific purposes: aquatic forms for exploring Europa's oceans, radiation-hardened versions for stellar engineering, macro-scale versions for building Dyson spheres by hand.

I'm going to be having a grand old time, but I have the epistemic humility to not speculate too much on what entities that much smarter and more capable than me do for work or leisure. I hope to look back at the writings and dreams of the present me, and feel that I have always been the same, in the manner I can recall my attitudes and actions at the age of five and understand how that built the person I am today.

Even if I don't make it, I hope that the people of the future recognize that I was doing the best I could with what I have. I hope they feel a pang of sorrow for someone who wanted to be where they are, but was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope this essay finds them, well.

Why do we need God

We are social creatures who pursue social things; that is 99% of our existence and joy, we are fish in social waters. God is a kind of social perfection which allows for optimal human flourishing (or the pursuit thereof) via social cognition. God is conceived in such a way that He supercedes all other social pulls and pressures. Functional descriptions of God, in which He is heard and obeyed because of His social force, are both prior to any philosophical speculation about divinity, and primary in the theistic world religions. Functionally, God is that which demands full attention and allegiance. If you have a community which has full attention and allegiance to God — the Blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see, to Him be honor and eternal dominion — and that God is good, even Love, then you have a good community. Everything else is implementation detail or distraction.

Why do we need the Christian God

The Christian God is especially good. The will and interest of God is shown in Jesus, who is widely considered to be one of the goodest persons ever, even by anti-theists. Christians have been at the forefront of relieving social and moral ills for centuries. There are 2000 years of odes and elaboration upon Christ which can be read by Christians (though some of this is theological, meaning it is worthless). There are 3800 years if you assume that Christ was foreshadowed in Genesis and Job, and if you subscribe to the ancient idea that every culture has a shadow of Christ, then you can see Him in every world myth. Even more importantly, Christians have the best and most reverent music.

The competitor to Christianity is just Islam, which has serious problems in terms of effecting wellbeing. Its liturgy is required to be in Arabic; its music (they don’t call it music) is set in stone; the figure of Muhammad is not as pristine as the figure of Jesus; its emphasis on Hadith makes it too legalistic and ritualistic to be truly utilitarian; some of the Surahs are no longer relevant; etc. This God is not your Father, but the Christian God is (ideal in an evolutionary sense).

Buddhism is irrelevant. Something like compassion meditation is awesome, and I’m sure there are some good stories. But this really isn’t good enough. Its not prosocial enough, its not dramatic enough, it doesn’t test us enough. If Christians wanted, they could steal all the good parts of Buddhism, but the opposite could not happen.

What were/are the flaws in previous/current societies that had at least surface level success (outside of the Modern West) that could be remedied with Christianity

I’m not sure precisely what you mean. Outside of the West, I can see Koreans enjoying better communities through Christianity, by inducing more sharing and fewer conspicuous status purchases. It could probably induce family formation. More selflessness means more philanthropy and less waste. That kind of thing. The current feminism hysteria could be cured by (1) revering the Mother of God, (2) revering Christ as the Saving Victim.

I’m a convinced Christian but rather skeptical of “retvrners” mostly because I don’t see a living faith per say (granted this isn’t everyone and im an outsider on a lot of it) I don’t see talk of praying or charity in the name of God, or attempts to live out the faith. It’s got rather a zombie feel to it, as though the person is going through motions and pep talking themselves into it and into doing the trappings but without the faith behind it.

I honestly, earnestly, really believe in God and Jesus Christ and the Sacraments. It's not much deeper than that. To me, your question is almost, "Why should we enter into a relationship with the Creator who has a plan for us all to live in happiness and perfect fulfillment, instead of trying to find a connection with Him through less certain methods or worshiping demons instead?"

I don't know why anyone would convert to Christianity except for the reason that they think it's true. Yes, society will suffer the further we get away from God. Pretty much every successful society had some sort of ritualistic belief in God, a higher order, and some kind of cosmic punishment for wrongs committed. This is a relevant statement:

Pro-religion people (like me) will suggest that decreasing religious commitment is reducing trust. That’s obviously true. At the heart of our society (and especially our legal system) is the expectation that virtually everyone will tell the truth under oath, that they will keep their promises, and that they will do what they “ought” to do even when doing so is to their own personal disadvantage, and even if they are confident no one will ever find out. This norm simply works better if everyone believes that God will send them to Hell for breaking it.

I’m not saying the norm completely fails if you don’t believe in God; there are plenty of moral atheists and doesn’t-matterists who would never compromise their own integrity. There are articulate cases for things like “secular humanism” and “the categorical imperative” and just “don’t be a dick.” Moreover, there are lots of psychological reasons why humans enjoy acting with integrity, even without God looking over their shoulder.

I am only saying that our society was built on the assumption that something like 99% of people will act with integrity 99% of the time it is tested. If just a little less fear-of-God means that number drops to something like 90% of people acting with integrity 90% of the time it is tested, that sets off a cascade, the incentives to do the right thing shift, and our society collapses into Escape From New York.

But committing to a religious belief that you don't actually respect is not going to magically create that integrity either. Much the opposite, if I had to guess.

Accepting a religious belief you don't actually hold may lead to embracing it, though.

People are constantly trying to change their own beliefs, usually with little success.

I am pretty much constantly in a state of procrastination-fueled stress. I have learned, hundreds of times over, that work is not only the way out of that stress, but is also in the moment more enjoyable than continuing to procrastinate. Yet I still don't believe it. I would pay virtually any amount of money just to convince myself of something I already know for a fact is true.

The same goes for my religious beliefs. I've seen prayer and fasting lead to big results over and over yet still don't truly believe they work.

Really I think what's happening is that it's easy for reason to come around to emotional beliefs, and very difficult to do the reverse. When people "fake it until they make it," converting to religions they say are strictly speaking false, they're recognizing on some deep level the good that comes from those religions.

I've had some success with making contracts with my own subconsciousness.

It's simply not possible to run away. You either decide that you're going to do something, or that you're not. You decide once, do you actually want to do X, or do you not want to do X? If you decide to do X, then simply do it. Figure out how you'd do that task in concrete steps, if there's a step you don't know, list the steps to figure it out (force applied in the direction of a vague thing simply doesn't feel good, and pushing any harder doesn't automatically turn a goal into a plan if your system 1 cannot do this without the help of system 2) As for the things you've decided to do, you might need to do them more densely (that is, don't waste too much time between them) until your pace is fast enough that your future dreams are archived fast enough for your liking.

In return, you get to feel no stress (perhaps you need to catch up on what you neglected before this happens). Also, the more you control your own life, the more you get things in order, the more decision-power your subconsciousness should give you in return (since you can be trusted with said power). What else can you demand in return? Confidence, peace of mind, energy, whatever you want.

Unhappiness is simply an a contract that people make with themselves without realizing it. It's called "I will be unhappy until I achieve what I want, because I can't trust myself to work hard if I don't feel unhappy". Keep in mind that this doesn't have to be true - some people might be more productive when they're in a good mood. Negative emotions are simply a signal that something is wrong, kind of like a fire alarm. If your brain does not think that something is wrong, the signal does not get triggered.

By the way, a thing you might have accidentally done to yourself, is attempted to break out this loop - and then interpreted the attempt negatively. For instance, if you had limited success, then rather celebrating it as a small victory, you might have considered it a small failure, but punishing your attempts at improvement is dangerous, it's conditioning yourself into believing that change isn't worth it. Some even say that chronic depression is this kind of meta-level learned-helplessness.

By the way, you might want to try energy-drinks / coffee. If these calm you down and help you get stuff done, you might have ADHD.

To some extent - like if someone starts a prayer life they might receive signal graces and start to have the "proof" they need to believe for real. But if those signal graces don't come, or if they do but they do not lead to a deeper intellectual understanding, then doubt and distrust will quickly set in.

perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch

It's not a stretch, its just entirely wrong. It would be wrong for Imperial Rome as well. Like, there are many, many dissertations written about the importance and universality of religious ritual in Rome, but if you really want to experience it first hand, just go there and tour any of the hundreds of temples they built. They didnt do it for aesthetics.

In addition to the rituals of the active civic Roman religion, ancient Romans (and all ancient people) were incredibly superstitious to an extent modern people struggle to imagine. Magic and the supernatural were very obviously real to them. Worldly events, good or bad, had supernatural causes, or at least nudges, and the original Roman religion was the organic accumulation over time of how, when, where, why, and who interacted with this supernatural reality. Of note these needs did no go away when the empire adopted Christianity. Many changes were made to the religion of the apostles to satisfy the Romans need to interact with the supernatural forces that obviously drove all events on Earth.

Old pagan religions had different virtue ethics systems so it can often be easy to miss how devout these civilizations were despite all the drinking killing and whoring. Also people forget that the cynical libertine city slicker/salt of the earth rural farmer divide has existed forever, and a small strata of the urban upper class isn’t going to accurately represent the beliefs of society as a whole.

Indeed, as Bret Devereaux (from the ACOUP blog) often points out: it's important to remember that people in the past actually believed in their religion.

This is useful reminder about people in the present as well.

For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.

As for what I think religion is going to look like in the future, I think it’s very tough to predict what AI is going to do and how it will shape people’s religious experiences. I’m loath to make an attempt at prediction just yet.

What I’d like future religion to look like, once the hyper-advanced one-world technocracy takes over, is a paradigm that leaves room for both a High Religion and a Low Religion. The High Religion would be highly centralized, universalized, and cosmopolitan, filling a similar social role to medieval Catholicism. It’d be the religion of the State, a hierarchical and orderly religion with grand cathedrals, inspiring awe.

I’d like this to look, theologically and aesthetically, something like Zoroastrianism, or, for a fictional example, the Faith Of The Seven in A Song Of Ice And Fire. There is a central overarching godhead, but it is split into multiple personae/sub-identities which act as intermediaries between its incomprehensible hyperintelligence and mankind. Those personae don’t all share the same motivations and intentions, which can explain why so much of the world seems chaotic and not guided by some grand unified “master plan”.

The Low Religion would look more like Shinto or Proto-Indo-European religion, centered around ancestor worship and personal tutelary deities. Guardian angels, the spirits of specific locations or families, nature spirits, etc. It would allow for a far more eclectic and personalized range of worship practices rooted in specific communities, and could be theologically integrated in some way with the High Religion such that they are understood not to be in inherent tension.

As for my personal spirituality, I’m very much still trying to figure that out. Like you, I’m trying to balance the competing demands of, on the one hand, attempting to locate a worldview which intuitively seems true and meaningful, and on the other hand trying to make sure my religious practices can integrate me into a larger cultural and communal framework that isn’t a total weirdo LARP. If there was a thriving modern Hellenist community in the United States today I would probably join it in a heartbeat, but there isn’t, so I have to try and figure out what actually-existing thing works for me. I’ve been reading into Hermeticism and esotericism more generally, in the hope that it will allow me to engage in an existing religious tradition on a level beyond the literal/exoteric.

So you want Catholicism without sexual morality? You want grand cathedrals and theological dissertations and angelic hierarchies and patron saints and guardian angels. You want angry superintelligences running amok(yes, God is much more powerful than demons but is far less interventionist). You want mysteries and establishment hierarchy. You want private devotions, sodalities, archconfraternities.

I also want Catholicism without the baked-in commitments to universal human equality and open-ended duty of care to the least productive, least valuable members of the human race. (Commitments which appear to be a large factor underlying why the Catholic Church is one of the largest and most committed facilitators of mass immigration to Europe and the United States.) I’m also uncomfortable with how many of its most important saints are venerated precisely because they were persecuted by the society around them; this seems yet again to center the outcasts, the dissidents, the weirdos. Catholicism built a very impressive edifice atop a Third-Worldist-adjacent ideological chassis, but the underlying logic was inevitably going to take over and become dominant at some point, which is (in my opinion) how you get modern Catholicism.

For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like

What my mind knows to be true at the level of rational, propositional judgement: There is no meaning. There are no morals. All value judgements are nothing more than subjective sentiments. The world described by fundamental physics is the only world there is.

What my "soul" knows to be true via perceptual, lived experience: There is such a thing as meaning, and there is such a thing as "The Good" that exists outside of us, although saying anything about it in concrete terms is virtually impossible. It is the height of arrogance to think that The Good would allow itself to be encapsulated in straightforward principles like "justice" or "fairness" or "duty". The Good is a trickster; it delights in doing strange things and keeping people on their toes. The only way to know anything of The Good is to humble yourself, be quiet, and listen closely to what each individual moment is telling you. After a lifetime of cultivating this practice, it is possible that one may obtain something that could be called "knowledge", but it will only ever be one piece of a larger whole.

your own vision of the future of society going forward is.

It'll continue to muddle on as it always has. Different races, civilizations, forms of life are always constantly ascending or declining, this is nothing new. I do believe that it's possible for the universe as a whole to reach a "bad ending", although how likely this is to happen is anyone's guess.

I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.

Answering why Christianity is a harder question, but I guess I'd point to the alternatives. Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect (Hindus in India have fewer children than Christians and Muslims). Of those, Judaism you really need to marry into and Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.

I'd point to the wealth of social science evidence showing that religious people are happier, have more friends, give more money to charity, have more trust, have more children and, my personal favourite, have more satisfying sex lives. In our atomised, lonely, anxious, childless and sexless age, all that stuff seems even more important.

How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed? Perhaps people who are inclined toward pro-social and conservative temperaments are more likely to express religious belief to pollsters because that’s the social software into which they were raised? Meanwhile the people with the same basic temperament (and same basically successful and pro-social life patterns) who live in Japan — a country where Christianity has had very little impact, and in which most people’s engagement with religious practice is extremely sporadic and surface-level — would either express wishy-washy belief in Buddhism, or honestly report that they are not sincerely religious.

Only the Abrahamic religions seem to have a strong pronatal effect

Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do? African and Haitian Christians routinely have families of 6-7 children, and that certainly hasn’t made their lives or their countries better. I’d much rather those places have smaller families, but for geopolitical reasons and for their own good.

Islam leads to gestures wildly at the Middle East.

Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.

How do you know you’re not mistaking correlation for causation, or even getting the causation reversed?

Studies have looked into that, and there does seem to be a causative effect, even among identical twins raised together. The Japanese are certainly prosocial, but they are also lonely, atomised and have infamously low fertility. Probably if they were as religious as Americans they'd have more friends and more babies.

Why is “having a lot of kids” the most important thing a religion can inspire its adherents to do

The OP was asking why religion is important for a society. Any society with below replacement fertility will eventually be outcompeted by ones with above-replacement fertility. A TFR above 2 the bare minimum for a society to survive, let alone thrive, long term.

Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries

Were. The Islamic Golden Age was almost a thousand years ago. Now there are five times as many books translated into Modern Greek (13 million speakers) than into Arabic (400 million speakers). We can speculate why the Islamic world declined so precipitously. My theory is that Islam brought with it cousin marriage, which in turn brought clannishness and (relative) mental retardation. But in any case, arguing that society would be better if we all embraced Islam because it would lead to more learning and knowledge seems fanciful.

Early Christian writers talked about treating their women and slaves better than the pagans- and in ancient Rome this was not an all-important value you could expect them to lie about. Anthropologists today note the effects of Christianization in the third world.

Islamic societies were the most advanced in the world for centuries. Look into the Islamic Golden Age. The civilization that built the Alhambra and founded the first universities in the world, institutions which directly inspired the Europeans who founded the oldest centers of higher learning in Europe.

These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.

These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic- Islam degrades HBD capital over the long term by encouraging cousin marriage. As a scientific racist I'd expect you to pay attention to that.

Doesn't pass the sniff test since the great men of the Islamic golden age were, as far as I know, all Muslims. Any hard evidence for this position?

These Islamic societies were not majority Islamic

This would be highly surprising if true; I’ve seen persuasive evidence that the elites of these societies were not majority Arab, but my understanding is that Islamization was extremely thorough and brutal — hence the flight of the Zoroastrian dissident population all the way to India, where they persist as Parsees to this day.

As for the cousin marriage thing, clearly many forms of Christianity also failed to effectively stamp out the practice (hence the discussion around the so-called Hajnal Line) so this seems far from dispositive regarding the superiority of one over the other.

Islamization was thorough, it probably wasn't quick, the middle east was highly religiously diverse within living memory- preferential immigration policies for middle eastern Christians and different fertility rates are what drove the Christian population from an actual majority in Lebanon, near parity in the rest of the levant, and large minorities in Iraq and Egypt to their current pitiful state. The Ottoman Empire had much larger Christian populations than would be expected based on present day territory.

There is also a vast difference in cousin marriage rates between Christian and Muslim Arabs, to say nothing of non-Hajnal Christian societies like Ireland, Iberia, Slavic lands etc and Islamic societies. The real effect of the Hajnal line was raising the female age at marriage very early.

Why are the current religions the only alternatives? Rome before its days of decadence around the time of the Gracchi thru to Caesar had an extremely pronatal society that was built around civic virtue. Same with Athens during the Persian wars. I'm not familiar with the exact demographics of Confucian China, but I would imagine it's also similar.

Roman pagans were ultimately outcompeted by more fertile Christians. Christianity was so memetically powerful that a middle eastern mystery religion whose founder was executed like a slave went on to become the world's main faith. Islam, arguably a spin-off from Christianity, is the second most popular.

I don't know much about Confucianism or Ancient Greece, but their religious foundations evidently weren't strong enough to last. If you're looking for a religion to hold society together, then it actually needs to survive.

Well Christianity isn't doing too good of a job with survival either right now....

What is the general state of online dating?

Previously, I left that particular cesspit some 10--15 years ago. Back then, I used various text-based dating websites. The dynamics were what I would describe as toxic. The platforms I used had unlimited messaging for paying users. I think the dominant strategy for guys was to message all the women they considered attractive using canned messages optimized through careful A/B testing. This lead to the women's inboxes to be full of messages which resulted in a very low response rate -- which was frustrating because I would typically put my emotional energy reserves of a few days into writing an initial message. (Today, I would experiment with sending a short comment which requires less energy. "nice shoes/helmet/whatever" or something.)

I think that with the advent of LLMs, text-based dating has probably jumped the sharks completely. If a woman gets texted by a guy who refers to her profile text, quotes her favorite authors and is generally very engaging, then 99 out of 100 times it is just some dude using an LLM who has spent five seconds looking at her profile picture before forwarding her account to his chatbot.

(I still think there is a niche for LLM-based dating where users explicitly engage with the site's LLM instead of each other and clarify their preferences through text. "Yes, I told you that I am into guys who read a lot, but the person you suggested to me just is a big nerd, I am not into that." etc. Not sure if it would offer any advantage over the status quo for women, though. Also, there is probably a cousin to Arrow's theorem stating that there is no dating system where participants are incentivised to state their true preferences.)

So how are the swiping apps these days? (Personally I think it would be more sustainable for me emotionally because swiping right is a much smaller investment. Swiping right on 100 women and not getting any matches would not significantly update my world view, while composing longer texts to three women and not getting any replies would be painful.)

Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?

It's gotten worse, but the apps still work in some places.

For a straight man, a place must meet 3 criteria to have a good dating apps scene:

  1. Large - It's a numbers game. You needs lots of people. Top 10 Metropolitan statistical area is needed.
  2. Transient - Need young transplants coming in on a regular basis. Large grad student population is always good.
  3. Majority Female - Male demand >> Female supply. Having more women balances it out.

The NE corridor is probably the best place to be on dating apps. Boston - NYC - Philly - DC. West Coast (Seattle, Bay Area) is brutal. Note: Dating apps are hell for any man who isn't at least a 6.5/10, and stays a struggle until you make it past an 8/10.

Or whatever is the next hot thing in dating?

It's run clubs and pickleball. We're in the Lululemon era of dating, where you must demonstrate a commitment to nondescript-fitness to be an eligible bachelor.

Miserable.

Both from personal experience and the sheer stats.

Every forum about online dating you can find is dominated by three genres of posts:

  1. Male who is struggling mightily to figure out why he can't get matches.

  2. Male and Female who are struggling to understand why someone they connected with, maybe even went on dates with, ghosted them or otherwise rejected them without warning.

  3. Male and Female who post aggressively toxic interactions they had with their matches, and often insinuating that this is a problem with the entirety of the opposite sex.

And some people in the comments pointing out how these issues interact. (To be explicit: Most men don't get matches, so women are choosing to match with a small subset of guys who turn out to be toxic (but they're hot), and they use this experience to justify being toxic to other guys, and it ends up mostly being toxic interactions that get posted and get attention, so it makes it look like everybody is toxic.)

Admittedly there's the occasional 'hey this app worked for me, I'm getting married!' post, but rare enough that they're not representative.

Nobody, I repeat NOBODY is having a good time on these apps, and yet they all feel stuck because that's where they perceive the equilibrium is. And they repeat the various 'copes' to each other like mantras. "Its a numbers game" "their behavior doesn't reflect on you" "you dodged a bullet, keep looking!" Actually, a handful of sociopathic dudes are probably having an alright time.

Its generally known that paying money for the apps is a waste and doesn't help, yet they don't take the next logical leap and see that being on the apps at all is probably a waste.

So how are the swiping apps these days? (Personally I think it would be more sustainable for me emotionally because swiping right is a much smaller investment. Swiping right on 100 women and not getting any matches would not significantly update my world view, while composing longer texts to three women and not getting any replies would be painful.)

Yeah that's the thing.

Try swiping right on thousands of women, of varying degrees of attractiveness, and getting nothing. Quantity has a quality all its own, indeed.

The dating apps have managed to cheapen the value of any individual connection to almost zero. And most of what we're seeing now is downstream of that. And this carries over into every other aspect of the dating market. Nobody cares about any individual date because they know they can always hop on the apps and get more matches.

Swiping-style apps are just a plague. Its easier to see that if you remember long enough ago when there were apps that sort of worked. Now they literally gameify things and pretend they're doing you a favor... whilst also denying any responsibility if the quality of your matches is terrible (but they don't let you search out what you want!) and in fact implying its really your fault altogether.

I recommend avoiding.

I'm to old to have ever used these, and my wife and I have been together since the 90s. However, where I work brings me into contact with a lot of college age and slightly older people who do use these apps to varying degrees. The young men are often getting together on breaks to critique each other's profiles, and the women get together to...also critique men's profiles. As far as I can tell there are a handful of distinct experiences being had here. If you are a good looking man, top 10% or better really, you can have sex with a lot of average women. If you are an average woman you can occasionally have sex with a very good looking man. If you are an average or worse man you can finance the above interactions while being strung along with the promise of maybe having the first experience described here, until you realize that's not going to happen and give up. Very rarely an actual enduring relationship will develop, but these seem more like a fluke than any intent of the app creators. The apps that empower the women even more than usual like Bumble seem to be loosing popularity too. In theory women like being the only party that can initiate a conversation. In practice they are terrible at it and generally unaccustomed to putting any effort into courtship at all. There also appears to be a fair amount of romance fraudsters as well, who seem to target both genders equally, through with different strategies.

You pretty much nailed it, impressively accurate for an 'outsider.'

The one achievement of the apps is getting the average guy to finance (both paying for apps, and paying for dates) the whole operation so that average women can sleep with a variety of hot guys who will never, ever commit, and the hot guys don't have to invest much capital, so it is cheaper for them than finding hookers.

And for the women, its definitely a 'decision paralysis' or 'paradox of choice' situation. You've got 50 matches on any given day, and you need to pick one or two to go on dates with, but of course doing that is possibly locking you out from choosing the ideal match... if such a thing exists, so its easier to just not pick and let men do the whole song and dance to hold your attention.

Its horribly toxic, and I worry that the younger kids just have never known anything different, so its 'normal.' When it really, really should not be normal.

Actually, a handful of sociopathic dudes are probably having an alright time.

Someone sent for me?

It's pretty bad. At least in my case it's the combination of relatively few matches (about 1 new match a week), plus the lack of response to relatively thought out initially messages (+sometimes follow-ups). What's worse is one of my roommates has loads of success, but he's pretty scummy when it comes to women on dating apps. Leading 3-4 of them along at once pretending that he's going to commit. It feels really bad: I've decided to delete the apps and have been focusing on running and work while still socializing with friends.

At least in my case it's the combination of relatively few matches (about 1 new match a week), plus the lack of response to relatively thought out initially messages (+sometimes follow-ups). What's worse is one of my roommates has loads of success, but he's pretty scummy when it comes to women on dating apps. Leading 3-4 of them along at once pretending that he's going to commit.

And this is a vicious cycle — getting played leads women to leave, or the stories lead them to never download. I met my girlfriend in college, and she told me she’d be scared to use the apps and she’s glad she met me in person.

Yea dude. I've called this guy out on it multiple times, but he never changes. Starting to come round to the idea that this type of man needs to be castrated (or forcibly married). Women do eventually learn, but for some reason there's always more to take their places.

I feel like as I get older I realize more and more why there’s so much suspicion against men among women. That said, it’s bewildering how… lacking in instinct for manipulation a lot of young women are. Or even basic “don’t do something completely insane” instinct. I went on a date with someone once who told me she’d met a man in a park in the middle of the night. You did what?

I don't really think this is a malady unique to young women, nor do I think the dating market is just men being "degenerates" and “taking advantage of” women all the time either (these stories just tend to get disproportionate amounts of attention, including on this forum among conservatives who are often very in favour of policing male sexual behaviour for the benefit of ostensibly strong and independent women). I've seen people of both sexes put up with shit I really wouldn't have; being down bad is quite the drug.

In fact the studies I have looked at on the topic seem to indicate that the reality is the opposite of what many people in this thread seem to think. Here is one of the early studies which indicate that. "The data suggest that women were less "romantic" than men, more cautious about entering into romantic relationships, more sensitive to the problems of their relationships, more likely to compare their relationships to alternatives, more likely to end a relationship that seemed ill fated, and better able to cope with rejection." It also contains the clinical impressions of a psychologist who counselled young people, noting that "The notion that the young adult male is by definition a heartless sexual predator does not bear examination ... some of the most acute cases of depression I have ever had to deal with occurred in attempting to help young men with their betrayal by a young woman in whom they had invested a great deal and who had, as the relationship developed, exploited them rather ruthlessly".

The skewed perspectives typical among women in the dating market primarily stems from them looking at the attractive lotharios who make them horny, not the experiences of the majority of men out there. In addition, I highly suspect that many of these women who get into relationships with players absolutely know what they're in for (women are not that epically stupid and such men barely even attempt to conceal what their intentions are), they just milk the high for all it's worth. It's fun until they realise they will not be the one to tame the rogue, that pigs will fly before that happens, and start regretting their decisions. But just because you didn't like the aftermath doesn't mean all that candy didn't taste fantastic when it was going down.

I've seen people of both sexes put up with shit I really wouldn't have; being down bad is quite the drug.

Unfortunately so are low self-esteem ("this is the best I could ever hope for") and self-harm ("I deserve this abuse"), particularly in people who don't show it publicly.

Being smitten is a hell of a drug.

That said, it’s bewildering how… lacking in instinct for manipulation a lot of young women are.

You could amend that to "women." The amount of 30something married women I've seen fall for very obvious manipulation from a lothario is painful to contemplate.

I’ve just… never encountered this stuff. Maybe it’s just my religious background or my conservative community or maybe it’s happening under my nose and I don’t know it, but “married woman has an affair with a lothario” just… is not something I’ve ever encountered in my circles. Where are you observing this stuff?

Where are you observing this stuff?

I know many lawyers plus many non-lawyers who are adjacent to the legal field.

My experience (of hearing women complain IRL), the emphasis is fearing men will assault them, not lie to or manipulate them.

I once had the misfortune of watching a woman at a bar loudly shitting on male hinge profiles, while surrounded by men who kept trying to engage with her socially. This was in the context of after a 5e RPG night at said bar. One guy asked her if she's ever been on a Hinge date and she said "chuh, no, I don't want to get Assaulted" while not looking at him. Then another of the guys around her mentioned being gay and she suddenly put down her phone and started staring at him lovingly.

Yeah, I don’t doubt that’s a big part of the concern. But also, that’s the sort of thing that some say as an excuse — “chuh, no, I’m just looking for validation and attention online to make me feel good about myself without actually having to be in a position of connection or vulnerability” is not exactly a great thing to say about yourself, even if it’s true. I can certainly understand safety concerns about meeting strange men, but having those concerns while continuing to swipe and even to mock the people who are trying to connect with you is simply vicious, based on bad-faith.

The real truth about dating apps is that they’re good for window shopping — and people who like impulse purchases — and not much good for much else, though people do get lucky in the same way people used to get lucky at a bar or a club. Or I got lucky at the college atheist org meetup. (Yeah, really. The history of my romantic life has some wild twists and turns around my spiritual convictions, and not a one of my girlfriends didn’t have something to do with religion, either positively or negatively.)

But the purpose of the system is what it does, and not only the purpose but actually the intended function of the swipe-based matching apps is to facilitate hookups, not deep connections.

A big part of the problem for a lot of older guys seems to be that women with a realistic sense of romance and a strong drive to find a real partner tend to choose early, and confidently. The rest are waiting for something exciting to happen, or just trying to “enjoy life as it comes” same as young men do.

And putting up with bad behavior in a relationship for absurdly long amounts of time. This same guy has had a "girlfriend" in California for nearly 3 years. Cheats on her constantly. She must know unless she's being extremely willfully blind. He won't officially claim her as his girlfriend unless it's convenient. Yet they still talk on the phone every single day.

"I would rather be a temporary fleshlight for a 9 or 10 than a permanent sex slave and housekeeper for a 5." says one woman, and I can only really fucking hope that this is the opinion of an extreme minority.

I hope I'm right. I'm terrified that I'm wrong.

Minority? Maybe? Extreme? Don't think so. There are a lot of women who reject the concept of traditional family and gender roles, and it's not considered "extreme" at all, it's "feminist" and "empowering". I mean, a woman thinking like that would not be considered crazy and would not be socially shunned in any but the most narrow circles. Not everybody would agree with her, but in no way that would make her a social pariah.

Once this is rejected, the position of preferring hot and exciting, even if short-term, partnerships to a long-term investment with a lukewarm partner at best, from which the women does not derive any pleasure - seems only obvious. It's like if I asked you, do you want to get excellent tasty meal every day for free, or a pile of gooey tasteless slop for which you must work for hours, what would you choose? Eventually, an abundance of fancy food may lead to some health problems if you're not careful, but while you're young and healthy, is it even a choice really?

Once this is rejected, the position of preferring hot and exciting, even if short-term, partnerships to a long-term investment with a lukewarm partner at best, from which the women does not derive any pleasure - seems only obvious.

Well, some fraction of men also would make this choice, and many do. It’s just that fewer have the opportunity.

And really, it feels like the hypothetical is missing the middle ground: the options aren’t “temporary fleshlight” or “permanent sex slave.” That’s already an extreme catastrophization of the options, done presumably for dramatic effect, but also demonstrates a wildly unhealthy view of what relationships with men are like.

The thing that’s missing isn’t women’s desire to be a tradwife, or even traditional family roles. What’s missing from this minority of women is the idea that pair-bonding with men is even possible at all. Most women still love a man, even if they don’t love you or me, personally. The only thing to do with attention-seekers like the X poster is to laugh at their inanity.

This seems like it’s born from this particular woman’s anti-marriage ideology than from a strong commentary on hotness.

It's both true and not true. If you give men an unlimited stipend and no consequences they'll go to strip clubs and buy hookers constantly. They probably know it's bad for them, but well people do shit that's bad for them all the damn time.

Dating apps are an equivalent for women, a constant parade of male attention and access to men they wouldn't have otherwise who in truth have no interest in them. A decent subset will abuse that, with intention or without. Eventually society and obligation will make them circle back (well for most).

Some may have insight into it or not.

"I want to fuck the prom king" isn't irrational when given permission to do so. It may be common but usually they grow out of it and it's a matter of when.


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