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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2228 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 2025

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

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

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

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Are there any studies on whether IQ is currently being selected for in lesser-developed countries like Brazil, Haiti, Nigeria? Are the higher IQ having more children than the lower IQ?

Is there any additional factor in the order and beauty of Japan besides the obvious — genes, early life education, emphasis on collective pride and shame?

Currently? Being ruled by decent people (and having seen off their Leftist movement in the latter half of the 20th century). I have no proof but I strongly suspect that Japanese people are capable of pivoting quite handily for another Mao or another Hirohito. It’s the nature of a hierarchical, collectivist society.

META: The upvote/downvote etc. buttons underneath comments display correctly if the zoom on the browser window is set to 100% or lower. If I zoom in to 125% (as I normally do, my eyesight not being what it once was), the buttons appear right-aligned (screenshot).

If your browser window is narrower than 768 pixels (with zoom taken into account), then this website's CSS switches from desktop mode to phone mode. This is called "responsive web design".

As the kids say, "notabug wontfix".

In that case, why are the buttons right-aligned on mobile? Left-aligned was haram?

My guess is most people hold the phone in their right hand, and right-aligned buttons are easier to reach with the thumb.

The buttons only became right-aligned on mobile within the past week. Previously they were left-aligned, which I definitely preferred.

I have found the relevant code. Apparently, the buttons were always supposed to be right-aligned, but badly written HTML and/or CSS prevented that from happening. @ZorbaTHut fixed the HTML to match the intent.

If you want, you can submit a pull request to undo the change by deleting the text "justify-content-end" from this line of code.

Thanks!

If you also don't want to revert the thing for everyone, the user can also add

.comment-actions {
  display: flex !important;
  flex-direction: row !important;
  justify-content: flex-start !important;
}

to their Custom CSS at https://www.themotte.org/settings/css

Possibly wraped with a

@media (max-width: 768px) {....

If it does weird stuff when not on mobile.

I cannot guess.

drags browser window a millimetre to the left

Well how about that.

Good recommendations for an Einstein biography?

I realized, over Thanksgiving, that all I know about Einstein is second order stuff and, even that, vaguely. General vs special relativity. The atom bomb. He has bad at math in grade school (allegedly).

So, Mottizens, can you point me in the direction of a biography that does a good job and not a hagiography of "the smartest dude who ever smarted?"

I liked Isaacson's all right. But personally I found far more interesting, despite its occasional dry bits, The Making of the Atomic Bomb which actually explained all the physics and stuff along the way alongside the physical challenge plus a side of the political as well. It basically gave mini-biographies of a ton of the players along the way.

The typical biography of Einstein that's usually recommended is Abraham Pais's Subtle Is The Lord. Note that Pais was himself a theoretical physicist and does not hesitate from diving into the math of Einstein's work.

Be warned, he was kind of a prick.

How so?

Dumped his wife for his cousin. Professionally I think he was ok, if I recall correctly.

I think my reading of a biography left me with the vague impression of: great conceptual thinker, somewhat bad at math but definitely not dreadful, mostly lives up to the hype in terms of the ideas but definitely not a super-renaissance man of science.

As many of you are probably aware, there’s this popular theory among normie and normie-adjacent white liberals in the US and the West in general that Charlie Kirk’s assassin is a so-called groyper i.e. dissident rightist, racist etc. follower of Nick Fuentes. I was wondering if the main reason for this belief is that said liberals are fully aware of the level of infighting and factionalism that characterizes the Left and then go on to thoughtlessly assume that the situation must be the same on the Right because they actually have only scarce knowledge about it.

I doubt it. I think the main reason is "we need to find something that avoids the conclusion that the Left does political violence, because the Left are the good guys". And fortunately, the Message Machine produced exactly the message they needed - it was actually a right-wing extremist (who are all extremely violent and dangerous, as everybody knows) who done it. So they grab it and hold on it for their dear life, and everything is correct in the world again.

Motivated reasoning and propagandistic considerations are also obviously at play but I think political sympathizers have an evident need for a narrative that is at least plausible to them and confirms their prejudices before they adopt it.

Doubt it. From my experiences with and as a leftist, the left does not have a mechanical model of the right wing at all, not even one that simply projects their own dynamics on them. The Right is rather seen as a primordial ooze of evil from which bad things emerge without specific processes. In that light, "A right-winger shot Charlie Kirk" sounds believable because shooting people is a bad thing that bad people do, and so it's perfectible credible for someone who drank from the source of all evil to have done it.

As a leftist, you can own the act as a left-wing one when you're feeling combative, assign it to the right when you find it distasteful, or even switch tracks multiple times in a day depending on whom you're talking to.

Not, mind you, that others are any better than the generic leftists I mean. People in general don't have a very faithful relationship with their epistemics.

Popular liberal thought-chieftains (substack lady and talk show guy) told their tribe that Kirk was right wing. This simply overwrote whatever else they heard because they trust them more.

Also the attention span is only so long. Killer was revealed, some sources alleged he was right wing and then on with the show

I'd more attribute that meme to three things

  1. If you're extremely online and your only interaction with young men is through NYT and Slate horror articles about how they're all turning right wing, you get the impression that the gender divide between young men and young women is essentially 100% of men are right wing and 100% of women are left wing. Most alt-right accounts on twitter or substack will give you the same impression, right wing is all men and left wing is all women. So you see a young man, in Utah, with a gun, and you see a right wing extremist. Because both left wing and right wing sources tell you that all young men are right wing.

  2. He hit his target. Left wingers, inasmuch as they perceive their side as capable of violence at all, perceive it as woefully inadequate at executing violence. Much of the disjunction and misunderstanding between right and left can be attributed to this: the left perceives the right as uniquely capable of violence, and the right perceives the left as uniquely capable of cultural persuasion; while both perceive themselves as incapable. To the Left, Left wing terrorism is the universe of harmless incompetents, right wing terrorism is horrifying and dangerous. To the Right, Right wing indoctrination is gentle prodding that will be ignored by most kids anyway, Left wing indoctrination is permanent psychological damage. The Left can't imagine a left wing assassin actually shooting straight.

  3. Pure bad faith deflection, you flood the zone with nonsense alternative theories long enough that people mostly forget about Charlie Kirk by the time it's actually settled what happened. Similar to the Paul Pelosi thing, or the Minnesota state senators that got shot, or the Kavanaugh hearings, or the Epstein files etc. If my opponent has me dead to rights, but I can just keep saying "well we'll see what comes out later" and avoid losing the argument; by the time things actually do come out later, no one cares about the argument anymore.

That said, it's not all that insane a theory. It's pretty common for internecine conflicts to end in murder, especially where the intelligence services meddle. The only Israeli prime minister ever assassinated was killed by an Israeli extremist. Malcolm X was killed by the Nation of Islam. It advantages the Groypers for things to get more, rather than less, extreme.

I highly doubt that there's a Groyper High Command who ordered Kirk's death, but I wouldn't be shocked to find out that any online weirdo kid dabbled in some antisemitism in addition to trans-furry whatever leftism.

dabbled in some antisemitism in addition to trans-furry whatever leftism.

Antisemitism is now completely fine with the left, and has been for a while. If one is skittish about it, they may use the z-word, but many don't even bother anymore. Not that it ever had been entirely out - Marx had been a rabid antisemite, for example - but there were times when it wasn't much talked about. Those times are completely past us. Now any leftist can embrace hating the Joos, and the peers would only cheer.

Which left are you talking about? In no leftist circle I'm present in are Jews every mentioned negatively qua Jews. If Jews are ever disproportionately lambasted in those circles it is only ever as a function of their disproportionate presence among Israeli and billionaires. Should a leftist go "Jews amirite" there, I have no doubt that they would be promptly expelled, given that it doesn't happen.

In no leftist circle I'm present in are Jews every mentioned negatively qua Jews.

In some circles they use the z-word. In some, they don't bother anymore. Both sides though know it means "the Jews", and both sides are ok with it. Now defining precisely may be a bit complicated, but I'd say AWFUL crowd would mostly be like "oh of course I don't have Jews, it's just about Israel policies!" while the Muslim and other "historically oppressed" parts would be much more open about what it is about.

Should a leftist go "Jews amirite" there, I have no doubt that they would be promptly expelled

Just as university students who literally denied Jews from entering the campus and physically attacked them were expelled, and so did the organizations supporting them?

of their disproportionate presence among Israeli

lolwut? "Disproportionate" to what? Did you expect Israelis to be Chinese instead?

I think what you're missing is that leftists genuinely do put Jews and Israelis in different mental buckets. And, leftists are also very comfortable with the general idea that regular otherwise-good people can be guilty of very-bad apologia. Thus, Zionists and those gullible enough to defend Zionists, even Zionist public opinion manipulators, can be real and bad people without there ever being a whiff of "and also BTW they control the world". Or at least, the Jews specifically controlling the world. "Billionaires" writ broadly and never defined well are assumed to have large de facto control already, so that idea isn't even too weird. And remember, since good people can be manipulated into apologia, it's very easy to motte and bailey most misspoken utterances - ironically, sometimes quite easy to claim.

As such, you usually need to say something pretty explicitly like "Jews control the world" and not merely two adjacent sentences of "Zionists control a lot of the media" and "Billionaires control the world" or even "A lot of Zionists have a lot of money". It's only "Jews control the world" where they go, wait, that's antisemitic. Even Jews have a lot of money jokes are somewhat diluted in effect because too many (often rich, left-wing) Jews made the jokes about themselves.

Thus: Zionists and Jews and Israelis are indeed different mental buckets. No, it doesn't make a ton of sense, but yes, it's a real and widespread perception.

Also, such leftist groups include Jews and never reject Jews based on their origin. The same cannot be said of unironic Jew haters.

In some circles they use the z-word. In some, they don't bother anymore. Both sides though know it means "the Jews", and both sides are ok with it. Now defining precisely may be a bit complicated, but I'd say AWFUL crowd would mostly be like "oh of course I don't have Jews, it's just about Israel policies!" while the Muslim and other "historically oppressed" parts would be much more open about what it is about.

I note you aren't claiming that they use the word Jews when hating them. It's easy to believe that Muslims do, but then I also don't really count them as leftists.

When you say "they don't bother", do you mean they say "Jews are disgusting" and things to that effect?

Just as university students who literally denied Jews from entering the campus and physically attacked them were expelled, and so did the organizations supporting them?

In an event that wasn't targeted against specifically Israel, right? Right?

Again, I define antisemitism as the phenomenon of hatred against Jews as the whole group. Not "Israel", not "zionists" and not "the capitalists". It would include Jews who don't live in Israel, don't support Israel, aren't rich, don't practice Judaism etc. I don't know how you define it, but if it's "students who stage anti-Israel protests" then we aren't gonna get anywhere.

The simpler explanation is that most leftists today hate Israel, most leftists today love Muslims and most Muslims today hate Jews (but hold their tongue when in mixed company). This applies in general to broad groups of people such as "The Leftists" - if you find diversity of opinion, what is most likely is that they actually do not agree, not that they all believe the same thing but some hide it.

I note you aren't claiming that they use the word Jews when hating them

That's good, because I said it at least twice :)

It's easy to believe that Muslims do, but then I also don't really count them as leftists.

Why not? They certainly vote for the same candidates and policies other Leftists do, and participate in the same party, so who are they if not?

In an event that wasn't targeted against specifically Israel, right? Right?

Exactly. They couldn't care less if a particular Jew ever been to Israel, what opinion they'd have on Israel and what influence on Israel beating up and throwing out of campus of this particular Jew would have (none). They just hated the Jew.

Again, I define antisemitism as the phenomenon of hatred against Jews as the whole group.

That's a bad definition. If you hate all the Jews but the one, then you aren't antisemite? If you have all the Jews but Naturei Karta, then you aren't antisemite? Nah, you still are. People are always inconsistent, even Nazis allowed some select Jews to serve in the army and governmental functions, at least for a while. If you're looking for a cop out where you can rule-lawyer some definition of "antisemitism" that excludes people that don't hate every single Jew, then you'd need another word to that describes the same phenomenon, because the word "antisemitism" will cease to be useful. This btw is a common leftist failure mode - they imagine if they all agree certain word means something, then it becomes reality - like, they call themselves "liberals" and "progressives" and automatically all the nice things that used to be associated with these words attach to them. Of course, in reality exactly the opposite happens. If you call antisemites by any other name, that name will start to mean "antisemite".

The simpler explanation is that most leftists today hate Israel

They do, of course. Because there are a lot of very uppity Jews in there, who arrogantly refuse to behave like the leftists would like them to. But now, as you correctly point out, this also aligns with the Left's embrace of Islamic radicalism, which also conveniently hates the Jews. The match made in hell.

Their anti-Israel tendency - more precisely, a tendency against the Israeli right-wing - derives solely from their overall anti-colonialist tendency. I think you already know that. France and Germany, for example, no longer follow a colonialist national policy, which is why you don't see anti-German or anti-French leftist groups of any significance. (We can nitpick about the former but it isn't really important.) The Russian leadership can reasonably be accused of being imperialists, however, which is why anti-Russian leftists are very much a thing.

derives solely from their overall anti-colonialist tendency

Not solely. "Anti-colonialism" is part of it, even though the idea that Jews, who lived in that land literally before recorded history became a thing, are somehow "colonizers", and Muslims, who arrived much recently, many - more recently than Europeans arrived to Americas and Africa - are "indigenous", is supremely idiotic and counter-factual. But that has never been an obstacle for the Left. However, Israel and Jews are subject to a special type of vitriol which is not seen towards, say, Belgians or English or French or Dutch. Who actually colonized and subjugated massive amount of people and countries, and some of them continue to keep colonies (same can be said about the US, tbh, I mean Puerto Rico? Hawaii? Samoa?) - and yet you don't see Belgians demonized around the planet because of that they did to Congo. You don't see Japanese vilified because of what happened in China and Korea. I'm not calling for all that to happen - I am just observing, that Israel is definitely being singled out, and any Jew who is not actively working for the Party - and some that do - is subject to attack for it. And the conclusion is unescapable - the "anti-colonialism" is at best a convenient excuse. The reason must be deeper.

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It's really only among the Hasan Piker crowd. So, Twitch Tankies with Islam overlap.

Interestingly, Marx came from a family of atheist Jews, who had converted to Christianity before his birth.

Exactly. It wouldn't be surprising to see a mixed up extremist who loved Nick Fuentes and also fucked trannies and loved Luigi and communism or whatever. Another Ernst Roehm or Skorzeny.

I literally watched a clip of Fuentes yesterday explaining how The Order is everything, and if some stupid assholes worry about their rights and freedoms, its nothing, and The Authority of the Powerful State must reign supreme, maintained by the overwhelming power of violence, and if your little individual freedoms get trampled, screw you. I'm not sure what would be a disagreement between him and Joseph Stalin by now. The color of the flags?

Has anyone ever met a conservative, atheist, vegan before? I have this friend that is all 3 and he feels like such a niche character. 1 in 2k? 1 in 10k? I'm not sure, but I'm informally curious how many folks with this similar set of beliefs there are out there. Particularly how many are women. As this topic is related to finding a mate with compatible values, and I think if he sticks to requiring them to meet his values, he's going to die alone.

I have a friend who pretty closely fits the description. I don't know if he fully deserves the conservative label I suppose, but he's an atheist and strict vegan. He's pretty well read in Western philosophy, though he seems to gravitate towards thinkers that I'm personally skeptical of, especially Hegel, though I don't really care enough to study him and other historicist philosophers to really have a substantive debate with him, beyond the bad vibes i suppose. Relatedly, he seems to occasionally be sympathetic towards some socialist economic theories, where we have the opposite situation in terms of how well-informed I consider myself vs. him. However, on all the other culture war issues he's way in the conservative camp.

On the dating thing, I think he should realize that if a woman likes and respects her man, she will adopt his values or at least change to become more compatible with them. Speaking also from personal experience, having impossibly high standards like this is also a way to rationalize avoidant behavior, stemming from anxiety about interacting with the opposite gender.

Not exactly, but I have known multiple conservative athiests, a few of whom were vegetarians, not vegan. They all tended to be odd in other ways as well.

Conservative atheists are a dime a dozen honestly. Vegan-Conservative are much less common, but tend to be religious, it's this weird hybrid trifecta thats unique.

Conservative atheists are a dime a dozen honestly.

There are dozens of us!

Vegan-Conservative are much less common, but tend to be religious

Yeah, Seventh Day Adventists were the first to come to mind, but I guess many of them are vegetarian, not vegan (and they're obviously religious).

Anyone who sticks to requiring some strict set of criteria from a partner wants to die alone. Trying to debate him without addressing his real motivations and goals is a waste of time. Arguing with him about the odds is telling him: your method is going to be very effective at achieving your goals.

This is a really bad take. It's trivial to conceive of a preference ordering consistent with any standard, being:

  1. Having a partner who adheres to X standards

  2. Having no partner

  3. Having a partner who does not adhere to X standards.

As a typical example for non-strict standards, consider X = "does not regularly smear shit on themselves". Most people would rather die alone than live their life with a shit-smearing partner, but still would like a partner in general as long as they can find one that meets their standards. If these standards are stricter then they're making a larger trade-off: stricter standards are going to drastically lower the probability of finding someone who meets them, but presumably increases the value of finding such a partner.

So if they have a strict set of criteria and stick to it anyway despite knowing it reduces their chances, it means their preference for those standards is stronger than their preference for having any partner, which is nonzero evidence that their preference for a partner is small, but it's absurd to extrapolate from that to concluding that their preference for a partner is negative. That scaring off most potential partners is actually the goal rather than an unfortunate side effect. If that were the case they could just call themselves asexual and not mention standards at all.

Small non-negative numbers exist.

I have met one. Male, retired marine. Very very Covid obsessed(which is why I don’t still know him). He was married, held social policy views which could have fit in with either party, but supported republicans because he homeschooled his kids and loved guns.

Has your friend tried dating vegan hippie chicks and convincing them of whatever he agrees with the GOP on?

Has your friend tried dating vegan hippie chicks and convincing them of whatever he agrees with the GOP on?

Yeah feels like best path is to assume reasonable suggestibility on vegan hippies and emphasize the tradbits.

I think the overriding problem is that hippie chicks are progressive and this man is too autistic enough to not immediately bring up where they disagree or entertain the idea of not talking about politics long enough for them to develop feelings and then slowly bring it up.

I have met one.

Do you know if his wife was vegan? I'm assuming this was from before the time of hyper-polarized politics that dogs these past two decades?

This was the late 2010’s. His wife was vegan, they were pretty into environment and animal stuff and they were homeschooling for partly that reason.

Plenty of eccentrics in the trades. Usually more of the white nationalism and a pet monkey version, but still.

Values are pretty important in a partner. He should at least know where he is willing to compromise or meet in the middle.

I'm atheist my wife is Catholic. I agreed to raise our kids catholic, but I never agreed to convert. And by raising them catholic I made it clear that I meant getting out of the way, and not undermining her efforts, but very little active assistance.

Would he be fine with a vegetarian?

Would he be fine with someone that is mostly apolitical?

In general, the more strict your filter is the more you are going to filter. I always had the approach that nothing was truly off the table. There are gonna be things you like and dislike in a partner. You want it to be net positive in the moment, and for it to be likely to remain a net positive in the future.

You can maybe get your friend thinking in the direction of tradeoffs by asking about age, weight, and looks tradeoffs. Since those things are more of a sliding scale and we all recognize that one of those characteristics being slightly off from perfect is fine if there are other positives to balance it out.

My understanding is that while he is open to marrying a Christian woman, he like you would not convert. Around where we are, supposedly that is a non-starter for enough conservative woman. They want a man to "lead them in loving Christ" I'm not entirely sure what that means exactly, but I can infer.

As far as Veganism goes, I think he's pretty inflexible on that. He thinks its downstream of values, and vegetarians are just copping out, making their life easier because being moral is hard. He of course is morally righteous, objectively. He has a very black-and-white moral absolutist stance on a lot of topics. Apolitical is fine, but anyone even slight left of center is: "infected with a virus that makes them dumb sociopaths screeching about empathy" There is actually a lefty woman who seemingly likes him, follows him around, goes on runs with him, but because she advocates for feminism and socialism, that's a red flag for him.

I am increasingly convinced he, like many incels, has gotten stuck in this red-pill rage phase and is fed by constant social media, content creators, and crab-in-the-bucket blogposts that make him think woman having rights is bad for him and his dating life. He of course dresses this up as "what's good for society" and "illogical decisions by woman to risks in the modern dating market".

In general, the more strict your filter is the more you are going to filter. I always had the approach that nothing was truly off the table. There are gonna be things you like and dislike in a partner. You want it to be net positive in the moment, and for it to be likely to remain a net positive in the future.

I agree. I also think you need to go where your potential mates are, figure out what they are looking for, figure out what are the bare necessities are for you, and make everything else flexible. Having extreme minority political views from multiple distinct tribes leaves a subsection of the populous that is just too few. Doubly so because woman cluster closer to the middle of social views.

age, weight, and looks tradeoffs.

These are expectedly not things he wants to budge on, ditto for divorce or kids. The biggest issue is that he's in his late 30s at this point, he is quickly approaching the mirror of "bitter middle age woman who thinks there are no good men and blames society", expressing this to him gets a screed about how its asymmetric and he doesn't have the same decisions/control/power that woman had.

Any thoughts on how to deradicalize a friend?

There is actually a lefty woman who seemingly likes him, follows him around, goes on runs with him, but because she advocates for feminism and socialism, that's a red flag for him.

There is a reason the "lefty chick + most racist man alive" meme exists, and it's for this man and this woman.

The biggest issue is that he's in his late 30s at this point

It is not a good sign that he's in his late 30s and hasn't realized that a woman doing those things is flashing every green flag she can to tell him that she's willing to be converted.

If his failures in life haven't deradicalized him I don't know if you will.

I was painfully lonely for a period and that made me drop some of the strictest requirements I had for a partner. That painfully lonely period was only months though, not years or decades.

You are a better friend than me. I would have probably dropped this bitter pill of a person from my life. Such bitterness and negativity will only get worse, not better.

I see my younger self in him a lot, though I am currently younger than him. I was very black-and-white. I went through an MRA and Red-Pill phase, which is funny enough how I found the motte back on reddit. I mellowed as I got older, learned to see the grey in the world. Some self reflection/introspection, points to the possiblity I'm trying to reach back through to my younger self and help him by helping this friend.

If his failures in life haven't deradicalized him I don't know if you will.

Yeah my fear. He is already too stubborn to take advice.

You are replying to a filtered comment.

comment approved.

I've been posting for several years at this point. Obviously my comments are not making it past the new user filter. I swear me being filtered is a more recent thing. Can downvotes push someone back into being filtered?

I recall you being no longer filtered also. As far as I know, once you're unfiltered you should not go back into the filter.

A fascinating conundrum, apparently the machine spirit of The Motte hates me specifically.

Perhaps Zorba built in an automatic filter for any post containing "vegan" and "atheist" within certain number of words of each other.

I wish, that would be an easy topic to avoid lol, but this has popped up several times recently. Maybe the mods prefer first dibs on responding to me.

I'm finally going to write an overview of the whole trans cult/ideology because I'm tired of otherwise seemingly intelligent and well meaning people arguing with me about it.

Could you all send me your best deep dives into the topic of transgenderism, both pro and con?

Best? How about worst? Here's a weirdo on X claiming that Google was to online trans social contagion what the Wuhan Institute was to covid. The account has been banned, so all I have is this screenshot and a link to Ogi Ogas' Google Tech Talk, A Billion Wicked Thoughts:

And what we found from our research is that there are four parts of the body that men are interested in universally, in every country we looked at including preliterate, unwired countries as well. Four body parts that all heterosexual men are interested in — it's breasts, butts, feet, and the fourth body part was a big surprise to us, something we completely didn't anticipate. It turns out that the fourth body part that heretosexual men are very interested in looking at is the penis.

Ogi then talks about "shemale porn" (as well as Edward Cullen; remember, this is 2011) as an "erotical illusion":

An erotical illusion combines different sexual cues in new combinations to trick out the sexual brain. So let me talk about shemale porn. Again, this is very popular among heterosexual men; gay men are not interested in shemale porn. This was a surprise, when we went into this we had no idea that shemale porn was going to be so popular. Obviously this is something that men aren't comfortable talking about but the data is quite overwhelming about that this is universally popular, immensely popular. So why are straight men so interested in shemale porn?

I don't know if it's as clear a smoking gun as the departed poaster says, but the talk is certainly interesting, and I could imagine impressionable young men rewiring themselves if they jerked it to enough shemale porn during their formative years. Ogi also talks about paranormal romance as a way for authors to manipulate the cues that trigger female erotical illusions in new ways. Someone should do an effortpost on the line from paranormal romance to romantasy and the women that wirehead themselves on it ("we saw many women in their mid to late 40s who are just absolutely sexually obsessed with Edward Cullen"), but I'll stay on today's topic.

It's probably also worth trying to untangle why, despite all the rhetoric around passing, some trans-identifying men seem to put effort into specifically not passing, despite claiming the exact opposite. If you're that worried about passing, a trans pride flag on your laptop or a trans tattoo is really not going to make it easier. The only thing I can think of is that for this class of trans-identifying man, it's less about passing as a woman and more about forcing other people to interact with him as a woman.

Also don't forget the things that Strangio said to SCOTUS during Skrmetti: it's been known for some time that "there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates".

/images/1764661267906849.webp

Best? How about worst? Here's a weirdo on X claiming that Google was to online trans social contagion what the Wuhan Institute was to covid.

What's supposed to be so schizo about that? The idea that companies with such a massive reach wouldn't conduct bizarre social experiments is the one that strikes me as implausible.

Also in a similar vein, pornhub was/is also pushing men in that direction

I think the idea is plausible, I just also think that my screenshot of half a twitter thread and one old tech talk is not the strongest evidence in favor of it.

I hope you look into the trans medical perspective as opposed to just debunking the modern progressive viewpoints.

Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition and even you write a the perfect rationalist takedown of the “trans cult”, it wouldn’t change anything for the average trans person. No one who has profound distress at having breasts and can’t bare to look at themselves in the mirror will cancel their top surgery (or stop wearing a binder, or go abroad if you made the surgery illegal locally) after a convincing philosophical argument about the definition of “woman”.

Like others mentioned, Zack M. Davis has written tens of thousands of words on the subject from a rationalist point of view, and it’s clearly a desperate coping mechanism for a psychiatric condition/neurological problem that he’s unwilling to have properly treated.

For some medical deep dives, I like Dr Power’s subreddit and its wiki for a bleeding edge take, and this classic from 1966 which shows the medical necessity of treating transsexuals from a time before there was any “gender ideology”.

Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition and even you write a the perfect rationalist takedown of the “trans cult”, it wouldn’t change anything for the average trans person.

You put several claims into one sentence:

  1. There is a genuine medical condition called "gender dysphoria"
  2. It's the same condition "trans cult" is concerned with
  3. The concerns of "trans cult" are purely medical and only go as far as medical necessities for the above-mentioned condition go.
  4. "Average trans person" is the person who has the genuine medical condition above, and in fact, every person that declares oneself "trans person" is automatically suffers from that condition by virtue of that declaration
  5. There is no other way to treat this condition except by accepting the demands of "trans cult"
  6. The treatment above is a necessity for an "average trans person" and without it they would suffer objective grave harm

Obviously, some of these claims could be true without others being true at the same time. I could probably grant you 1 and maybe a part of 2, but others are in no way a given.

I’m very confused as to how you made the leap to those other claims. If you’re at all familiar with progressive views on being trans, they literally say you don’t need dysphoria to be trans, and they are firmly opposed to transmedicalism, favouring an identity affirmation based approach.

@ArjinFreeman has it right, I think you’re the one conflating my views when I’m only arguing for point 1.

The claim I am addressing is:

Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition and even you write a the perfect rationalist takedown of the “trans cult”, it wouldn’t change anything for the average trans person

If you are only arguing point 1, then gender dysphoria being a genuine medical condition does not support the "trans cult" and has little bearing to the discussion about the cult and the "average trans person", because as you yourself said, the cult's claims go way beyond medical conditions, and they also do not identify "average trans person" with one having the condition. So it's like saying "vitiligo is a real medical condition" and arguing that is a very important insight into racial relationships in the US. Yes, it also about skin color, but it's completely different issue.

I’m getting a bit confused by your point so let me try and clarify what I meant:

A lot of the debate around being trans - e.g. are trans women truly women? Do people have an “inner gender identity”? Doesn’t change the reality which is that some people are distressed by having the characteristics of their natal sex and being perceived as a man/a woman, and want to transition with the goal of reducing that dysphoria. Some succeed in that they are eventually perceived as the opposite sex in most social situations and significantly reduce their dysphoria.

You can argue that alternative treatments should be researched instead, that medical transition is now insufficiently gatekept, that there is bias in research with regards to outcome, or even that it should be banned because it will lead to more harm overall.

But debates like “a woman is an adult who produces large gametes, so trans women aren’t women” versus “no, a woman is anybody who identifies as one”, would have no bearing on the above, and even if you thoroughly debunked the second collection of viewpoints, it wouldn’t matter to the practical reality of treating gender dysphoria.

A lot of the debate around being trans - e.g. are trans women truly women? Do people have an “inner gender identity”?

I'm sure some of the debate concerns these points. But the trans debate includes much more than that, and the "trans cult" demands much more than agreeing about "inner identity".

But debates like “a woman is an adult who produces large gametes, so trans women aren’t women” versus “no, a woman is anybody who identifies as one”, would have no bearing on the above

On the above no, because people are free to have "inner identity" completely untethered to any real events or facts. I could think I am actually a teapot, and nothing in medical science would convince me otherwise. There's no argument that may prevent me from feeling this way, and there's no argument that can prove I am not, in my deep inner thoughts, consider myself a teapot. There's nothing to debate here - either I think this way, or I don't, and if I do, then I do, there's nothing to debate. The debate is about what does this mean and what consequences and actions are appropriate for the society to take in this situation. And to that debate, of course, a lot more things than "could some people in their inner thoughts think they are other things than they are" have bearing. We know for a fact that yes, people can have "inner thoughts" that disagree with objective reality. The question is what to do about it. And to that question, saying "yes, could be are such thoughts" advances us very little towards the answer.

it wouldn’t matter to the practical reality of treating gender dysphoria

Of course it would matter, since there are multiple ways to treat a medical condition. But also you just said that "average trans person" and "person having gender dysphoria" is not the same thing, so if we talk about the whole debate, it would of course also matter whether or not we are dealing with actual medical condition in a particular case - even while we recognize the actual medical condition is real.

You put several claims into one sentence:

I don't think so? I read it more like: even if claims 2-6 are false that does not disprove claim 1. I happen to be pretty skeptical of claim 1 myself, but I'm not seeing any underhanded conflation here.

I doesn't disprove 1, it does disprove the claim that GD being a medical condition has relevance on the discussion of "trans cult" and "average trans person".

Ok, another way I would formulate their point is "the 'trans cult' is not relevant to the average trans person, so please don't limit your discussion of the issue to internet crazies, goofy academics, etc.". This would give you half a point on claim 4, but only half, because "and in fact, every person that declares oneself 'trans person' is automatically suffers from that condition by virtue of that declaration" is not stated anywhere or even implied. Trans-med's are kinda on the outs of the progressive movement precisely because they disagree with that claim.

another way I would formulate their point is "the 'trans cult' is not relevant to the average trans person

Trans cult is relevant to the society and thus to the trans person as part of that society. Yes, "internet crazies, goofy academics" etc. are not the only part of the debate - but also the "trans cult" is way bigger than a couple of crazies and some goofy professor in some obscure classroom. It's something that dictates day to day policy on the ground - and very successfully at that, I am not seeking that stuff out specifically and yet I read about various scandals related to trans issues pretty much every week. If I were a female, the question of "if I go to a locker room, will I encounter there a bearded man with his penis out looking at me undress" would be a very practical question for me now, and a question of "if I am a female athlete, is the second place the best I can hope for now, and how soon before it becomes fifth place or I get seriously hurt" is a practical one too. And none of these questions are really answered by "yes, there's such a condition as gender dysphoria".

It's not meant to answer them. All they're doing is asking OP to give some time to the best pro-trans argument, which in their estimation is transmedicalism.

You can dispute that trans-med is representative of the average trans person, and say that the Queer Theory wing of the trans movement has most of the power and influence. Hell, you can even question the validity of the diagnosis itself like I do, but I don't see how you can say they conflated any of the claims you listed with the main claim they actually made.

Gender dysphoria is a genuine medical condition.

What would be the argument for that? Calling anything in psychology a genuine medical condition seems to be a bit of a tall order.

Gender Dysphoria is a genuine medical phenomenon feels more accurate than assigning it as a 'condition' perse.

But why, though? In my opinion for something to be classified as medical, it need to have some physiological mechanism behind it. I suppose you can say that the condition / phenomenon is real, we just don't quite know the mechanism yet, but in that case the bare minimum would be being able to tell fake cases apart from the real ones. For example doctors were able to tell Tourette's apart from TikTok-Tourette's, do we have anything like that for gender dysphoria?

One of the links I gave above shows a surprisingly large correlation between gender dysphoria and measurable physical conditions (e.g. atypical oestrogen signalling). Unfortunately few people bother investigating these due to political factors - many pro-trans people are afraid of a "trans cure", and most anti-trans people see it as a made-up condition and that you fix it by making being trans illegal/socially unacceptable.

What "counts" is a difficult problem, and I don't think almost anyone has meaningfully consistent lines. I recall looking at some work long ago that found a neat correlation between particular physical signals and infidelity behavior (with a nice theoretical mechanism explanation and an animal model to boot). I remembered it mostly because it was a surprising contrast to the complete lack of results that were anywhere near that quality in the raging public discussion concerning sexual orientation. I doubted that any of the people who wanted to take a strong stance on sexual orientation would take a similar stance on infidelity, and well, yeah, I kind of doubt that most people would be willing to compare the types of evidence available for gender dysphoria stuff and have a consistent view on what "counts".

One of the links I gave above shows a surprisingly large correlation between gender dysphoria and measurable physical conditions (e.g. atypical oestrogen signalling).

Which one? I clicked all 3, ctrl+F'ed for "atopical" and "oestrogen" and got nothing.

Also, isn't this a bit hasty? Potentially having a physical condition to point to is a good start, not a smoking gun showing this is genuine medical condition.

many pro-trans people are afraid of a "trans cure"

I'd guess the bigger issue is there being objective criteria for telling people they're not trans.

and most anti-trans people see it as a made-up condition and that you fix it by making being trans illegal/socially unacceptable.

Uh, not really. Most anti trans people see it the same way they see anorexia. In both cases some form of distress is driving people to take drastic, detrimental to their health, steps to modify their body. In one case we try to dissuade them from it, in the other the medical establishment decided it's a great idea to do affirmarion only. The part that is seen as made up are the sociological theories on gender identity.

They don't want to make being trans illegal or socially unacceptable, they want to ban medical providers from offering unethical services (again, consider an alterntive world where anorexia clinics are there to help people starve themselves), repeal pro-transt laws and/or remove the social pressure that forces everybody else to play along with trans ideology.

Sure. I think my general approach is that if trans is some weird mental disorder that like .2% of the population get, whatever. I can see that happening, and it's probably not too harmful to let them cross dress.

Modern trans ideology is far, far, far away from that and is evil. Even if we let transgender people cross dress, it still needs to be weird. Normativity being enforced around the heterosexual family is crucial imo.

Being a transsexual is not treatable by crossdressing and requires hormonal replacement therapy at a minimum, and usually surgery. If you look at that 1966 book I linked, the author brought up a treatment plan where the patient would take hormones but otherwise dress and appear as their natal sex.

Do share what angle you’ll be going for if I’m wrong, but I don’t think you will have much headway with the people you’re arguing with (I assume highly educated, compassionate people with a progressive bent, perhaps in the rationalist sphere or STEM), from what you’ve shared so far. Those people also view your own ideology as an evil cult, and will oppose you on principle for wanting to enforce hetero norms.

Those people also view your own ideology as an evil cult, and will oppose you on principle for wanting to enforce hetero norms.

Oh I'm well aware. To be quite frank I am mostly writing this to settle my own niggling doubts, and to have an article to refer someone to for the hundredth time someone asks me to explain why I'm anti-trans. I hope it convinces people, but that is not the main goal.

Frankly most of the people I've talked to in the twitter post-rat scene (or tpot) don't seem to have a coherent ideology explaining why they are pro-trans at all, besides "some people are born intersex" and "it's mean to not let them do whatever they want." Along with the classic sob stories followed by the implication that my views are going to make people commit suicide.

Sadly I do believe they're straw men, but hey what can you do. Most people don't think about things very deeply, news at 11.

I think you might strawmanning their replies yourself. The intended message is probably something like

  • Intersex people show that the gender binary is not inviolable - someone can have XY chromosomes but appear completely female externally
  • It costs nothing to be polite and use trans people’s preferred pronouns, and not doing so, or making their lives more difficult, is pointlessly rude and mean spirited
  • If the majority of people had views like yours, the life of trans people would be significantly worse and some would commit suicide, see how it was before widespread trans acceptance in the West, or how it is currently in many parts of the world where being trans means your family disowning you

Although it is X/Twitter, so it is possible you got the replies you wrote verbatim. But I would still encourage you to consider their arguments more charitably, otherwise they might just dismiss you what you wrote after a single one paragraph.

If the majority of people had views like yours, the life of trans people would be significantly worse and some would commit suicide, see how it was before widespread trans acceptance in the West, or how it is currently in many parts of the world where being trans means your family disowning you

Yes but the huge reorientation of society doesn't seem to make a ton of headway on the suicide or social alienation issues, especially considering that human lives are quite long and most transitioners have decades left yet. It's a valid response from society to say 'No you cannot be Trans' and plausible that on the aggregate that aggressively tamping down on the issue is better than leaving a plethora of individuals stuck in weird individual culdesacs of human expression that ultimately produce more sadness than happiness.

The intersex bit is an almost complete nonsequitur. Next stage typically being some sort of 'Historical societies had a third gender, typically a designated sexworker or eunuch-lite therefore I am a hecking validerino'

It's a valid response from society to say 'No you cannot be Trans' and plausible that on the aggregate that aggressively tamping down on the issue is better than leaving a plethora of individuals stuck in weird individual culdesacs of human expression that ultimately produce more sadness than happiness.

The Middle East does that, and I don't think their approach produces more happiness than sadness.

Big chunks of the Middle East are fairly pro-trans all things considered, if only as a weird loophole since homosexuality is verboten and punished by death so it's better to transition anybody with any inclinations.

see how it was before widespread trans acceptance in the West

I notice you're making a factual claim about the recent past here. Do you have any evidence for your claim that suicide rates for trans people have declined over time?

Fair points! Yes and these are the arguments I plan to investigate and take down in depth. I have looked into this topic at length and concluded all of these arguments are fallacious, or at least not worth the costs.

If you're arguing in favor of cisheteronormativity, you probably should be at least aware of the Freedom of Form-style arguments. It, and a thousand weirder variants, are each individually too uncommon to be really necessary to counter or even counterable, but they or stuff like them underlies a lot of the nonbinary and what-you're-probably-seeing-as-ROGD stuff.

I don't know of any good summary articles, but there's also a bit of a will-to-power one: what Defense Distributed's 3d printing and Cathode_G's DIY nitration mixture said to gun control exists for hormonal modifications. You don't really have the ability to make things weird, just difficult. Never underestimate minor inconveniences, perhaps, but it points to policy limitations.

"The Categories Were Made for Man to Make Predictions" by Zack M. Davis, a devastating takedown of Scott Alexander's "The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories".

"Changing Emotions" by Eliezer Yudkowsky approaches transition from a transhumanist angle.

Not a deep dive as such, but I also enjoyed AntiDem's "On the Creation of Unicorns".

Seconding "Categories" as the post to read on Zack's website, though he has plenty of other bangers too.

On the more philosophical side of things:

Brief, 1 hour interview with a Gender Philosopher: https://youtube.com/live/w8D5tyvodSM?si=1tORdLvMpXnTDLLi

Extended discussion/book club on Gender from a Catholic lens (but holy shit I learned so much about contemporary "queering the gender norm" academics): Season 1, Season 2.

On the more medical side of things: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/15hhliu/the_chen_2023_paper_raises_serious_concerns_about/

https://old.reddit.com/r/detrans/comments/hp0ee4/so_im_actually_a_doctor_who_specializes_in/

How deep do you want to dive? What sort of angle do you want to take? Medical / scientific? Sociological / philosophical? I don't think it's a subject that can be covered by a single write up, and worse, I can't think of a single source I could link you that would cover all the beats. Aside from what the others have recommended, I'd give a shout out to Mia Hughes, who has a knack for covering the history of the phenomenon, and digging out it's historical analogoues. She's the author of the WPATH Files (see chapters "A Brief History Of Transgender Medicine And The Early Days Of WPATH" and "Past Cases Of Pseudoscientific Hormonal And Surgical Experiments"), and the recent review of the NYT "The Protocol" podcast.

My go-to references for the pro-trans side are usually people like Jack Turban and Steven Novella & David Gorsky, though these "muh science" arguments have lost a lot of popularity on the pro-side recently, in the wake of the Cass Review (as well as every other systematic review on the subject that has been published to date), so I don't know how far you'll get addressing them.

@ymeskhout's "In This House, We Believe in Gender Stereotypes", which he originally cross-posted here: there's an interesting discussion in the comments.

In rationalist circles, Scott's post "The Categories Were Made for Man, not Man for the Categories" is a very respected pro-trans article. I used to find it persuasive.

On the pro side, Freddie deBoer has waded into this topic on several occasions, which prompted my response to him:

Wonderful! Huh, didn't realize you were on Substack too, I'll have to follow. Ty for the links.

Excellent! These are wonderful sources ty. Phew this is going to be... interesting.

Jesse Singal is pretty even-handed, even if he's vilified a lot by activists; His position is, as far as I understand it, that the evidence on the entire topic is far too unreliable to act on it the way the medical establishment is currently doing. Diagnostic standards are far to deferential and all the available treatments have muddy positive impacts; If anything, the negative impacts have far better evidence than the positive ones. Nevertheless, he still stresses that we should be tolerant, that most trans-people are perfectly fine, and that this is especially about protecting teens and children from haphazard decisions that will impact their entire life.

Andy Ngo really trashes crazy (violent) left extremism in general, which includes a trans-rate of seemingly >50%. Of course you can't call this representative of anything, but it still gives you a good view into a subgroup that nevertheless enjoys widespread support in media & academia.

Colin Wright (note that this substack also includes some other authors) lands somewhere in-between, generally also primarily highlighting the low evidentiary standards. But he also regularly makes a deliberate point about the primacy of biological sex, and is more openly dismissive of large parts of trans medical care.

Obligatory self-promo: https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/contra-deboer-on-transgender-issues

I recommend binging everything @zackmdavis posted on his old site.

Gender:Hacked by Sarah Mittermaier formerly/also known as Eliza Mondegreen.

A review of Shannon Thrace's memoir 18 Months, her account of how her marriage collapsed after her ex-husband came out as trans.

Question about Lumina, is anyone here a user? I was wondering if there's anyone who's collecting and recording people's self reports about any effects. I have had lifelong issues with my teeth so I'm very interested to try it, but the lack of human trials and official vetting makes me nervous. I don't want to take the risk of permanent damage to my oral environment.

I've heard several anecdotal reports of people who took it and say it didn't really work. I don't think there's much risk of permanent damage though.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1p8y0xz/lumina_probiotic_the_caries_tooth_cavity_vaccine/

I was on goodreads, and out of curiosity, I took a look on final 10 Readers' Favorite nominees in SciFi category. I generally never use contests like that as a guide, but I saw an ad and I was curious about what I'd find there and if I recognize any names (spoiler: I recognized one). What I saw made me ask some questions. Out of 10 top candidates, 8 are female authors. I read the descriptions - I have never read the books themselves and likely never will, so that's all I have to go on - and in 7, the main protagonist(s) are women, in one they are bots, one had a mixed crew and in one I couldn't determine it. In young adult SciFi category, all 10 nominees are female. So my question is - why? I also checked last year winners - 11:4 female authors.

Since we're living in a clown world in clown times, I must post a disclaimer that I have no problem with either female SciFi authors or female sci-fi protagonists, and enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) books with either. Yet, somehow I didn't expect this situation. Why is it so - is it the case that 80+% of SciFi writers are now female? 80+% of good ones? Goodreads sample is skewed? Vote is rigged or meddled with somehow? Note I am not seeking a value judgement on this situation (as ultimately I personally don't care at all who is nominated or wins), but would like to understand its genesis.

Part of this is the standard stuff. Among mainstream publishers, and mainstream awards, there's a ton of pressures against recognition of new male authors (and, increasingly, even previously well-recognized ones); the male authors who are successful tend to take a cult following approach that leaves them less benefit from begging for reviews, or write in ways that don't really pull reviews, or not be willing to play the social media game.

((for a low culture war example, I will defend literally every Timothy Zahn book, even the kinda-trite Quadrail series. But the well-received and genuinely strong pieces get low-double-digit reviews. If you've read one of his books, what is there to say that doesn't detract other readers from the story?))

An increasing emphasis on novella-length novels by standard publishers at higher prices on one side and Kindle Unlimited on the other has also put some weird pressures into the mainstream system. I don't have a very complete mental image, but from what I have seen, a lot of conventional ways for workday authors to make a living publishing conventional stories that can take off been smothered or at least greatly reduced, the remainder have increasingly become the domain of the greats, while most of the novices and introductory writers -- even within the -- have gone to edistribution approaches that make it hard to get mainstream applaud or concentrate a large number of readers. The few who can tend to be Jemisins, as skilled at handling the social side as they are at writing character play, and that's traditionally not an area men have focused.

There's also just the flow and the fixtures; you're seeing the detritus accumulating at points of friction, rather than the motion of the waves. The Puppies tend to call them SFWAs, but there's a decent amount outside of that set, and a lot other other incestuous interactions (how many Goodreads-Top-Tens would you expect to be LA Times Critics At Large? Might surprise you!).

((for a low culture war example, I will defend literally every Timothy Zahn book, even the kinda-trite Quadrail series. But the well-received and genuinely strong pieces get low-double-digit reviews. If you've read one of his books, what is there to say that doesn't detract other readers from the story?))

I like your choice of examples, because Icarus is basically a much better-executed Quadrail.

I read around 25-30 books a year, and looking at my notes I've only read a handful of new books this year. Despite a conscious effort to read the NYT book review most weeks, and trying to make a real effort go to local small book shops and buy new books, I just don't end up reading many new books.

So it might be that women read more new books than men. That seems intuitively likely.

No one involved in this cares specifically that women read more books, though its almost certain that they do. The important fact is that they buy more books. The difference is subtle but important. All these lists and awards etc are just marketing aimed at their currently primary demo. That it also lets them denegrate and ignore male authors is just a happy coincidence that fits the zeitgeist. How convenient. I've read thousands of books in my life, fiction and non, and I don't think I've ever once been influenced by any form of advertising or marketing or 'buzz' of any sort over a book. For me this is an area of the economy that is blessedly free of this scourge, and at least for the books that men are still buying this is still true. I'd be fine if male authors were officially barred from all best-of-lists and book awards as I consider them to be negative influence on the space as a whole. Like forbidding my favorite male actors from appearing on reality tv or political ads. Que horror.

That's a good point, looking at my reading list, probably the newest books I read in 2025 are Murderbot series, which, ironically, are written by Martha Wells, and Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I've read about 25 books this year, but the rest of them aren't new.

And of course we can chicken and egg it as to whether the publishers don't publish books for men so men don't read them, or men don't read so publishers don't publish books for them.

But the fact remains. What's the last really male oriented "it" author or book of the year? It used to be common.

A Song of Ice and Fire surely qualifies?

So...1996 or maybe 2005?

ADWD was goodreads choice of 2011.

I mean sure, but still written by a boomer and part of a series starting in 1996.

Forgive me for asking the obvious question but – were these writers "female" in the biological sense or in the "identify as" sense?

Heck, with authors you can even go as far as "writes under the pen name of". For example, here is a mirror to "JK" Rowling.

Yes.

Goodreads choice awards usually come from the most popular books (on Goodreads) read that year published that year. Since publishing and readership overwhelmingly lean female it's not surprising that there's such skew. Goodreads choice isn't a great indicator of quality (rather popularity) so I'm not super bothered by it.

Since publishing and readership overwhelmingly lean female

Why? Males stopped reading? I certainly didn't, and I know many people who are male nerds like me and who read. Is it the millennial/gen Z thing? Are males only doing tiktok or games now?

so I'm not super bothered by it.

I'm not bothered at all - my concern is not having time to read what I already want to read, not to find more reading based on somebody's opinion - I am just curious as to what is going on.

The last time I was in a physical bookstore(a few months ago) and browsed through the sci-fi/fantasy genre, the majority of new books seemed to be overwhelmingly written by women in a quirky, post-2000 semi-ironic genre-smacking type style that comes across as a 'serious parody/satire' more than anything.

So if you want to find anything written that will appeal to men, you either need to go old-school or down the indie-rabbit hole, not exactly an easy thing to slog through.

Conversely, if you're being uncharitable, when women brag about how much reading they do, they're bragging about stuff like this and booktok(IE, it's all porn).

Well, I didn't read the GR tops but I am pretty sure it's not porn - at least not the thing I'd call porn - at least in the SciFi and YA SciFi categories.

Most males in my circle overwhelmingly read fanfiction and/or mass-produced male-oriented original fiction that usually involves isekai, magic nobles and harems (basically wuxia but not Chinese). I suspect neither is a category that takes top places on Goodreads.

Millennial and gen Z men basically don’t read. In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all. Podcasts have become the dominant medium instead.

Reading has declined across the board, but it seems to have hit men harder for some reason. I don’t have the full answer but I think Jared Henderson has a video about this, I’ll try and link tomorrow if I can find it.

Reading has declined across the board, but it seems to have hit men harder for some reason. I don’t have the full answer but I think Jared Henderson has a video about this

I don't think this was intentional (if it was, kudos), but "reading is dying out, here's a video about it" is very on-the-nose.

In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all.

My bubble is split roughly 50/50: some don't read at all, the others are probably top 1% readers. But even those guys practically never read anything written in the last 20 years. The backlog of classics is just to long.

I resemble this remark. I read a ton, but I'm not reading stuff that's been written recently (with a few exceptions). There are a ton of classics to read, and also frankly I don't think most new releases are actually good.

How does this compare to sci-fi novels by sales? Entirely possible good reads just has a slanted user base.

I know for my part I might recommend a book in person, but I’m unlikely to post about it on goodreads, and don’t actually know what good reads is.

I mainly use goodreads for cataloguing my reads (since it has a list of books and UI to manage reading lists, and I am lazy enough to use whatever is there instead of building my own) and seeing what my friends (people I actually know, not facebook kind of "friends") are reading. I sometimes also review, but definitely not all books I read.

Contemporary fiction literature is female-dominated across the board. We have a few threads a year on this (which I don't usually pay much attention to, since I don't read contemporary fiction literature). Try typing "Hugo Awards" in the search box.

If I had to come up with a non-social-justice based explaination for why this happened, I would guess that the invention of video games provided a superior substitute to books for male entertainment demand, and that this caused a cultural vacuum which was filled by women.

I lot of the men I know personally that are Readers pirate a great deal of books. I generally do for anything that isn't a new release by an author I support, in which case I buy a copy on release, then read the pirated copy anyway as its often more convenient to do so (and I can copy text out of the pirated file to search on the web with, Kindle makes you manually retype anything you want to search from the book). Books files are very small. I have an old external drive in my desk with about 90,000 books on it, including p much the entire cannon of western classics and all popular fiction published before about 2014 or so.

I think I've circled around this point without hitting it so neatly. As games increased in quality, I found my burning need for books to be diminished.

There are still so many types of stories that don't work as a video game, but I think men migratting to them and culture war junk are to blame.

Well, I know about all the Puppies saga and that stuff. I have some idea how that mechanics works. I wonder if it's the same in this case.

This post on "izzat" an Indian cultural honor system, went viral recently. I know we have at least a few Indian users here - how accurate is this characterization? Of course it's probably hard to generalize too much given the fragmented nature of India along cultural, linguistic, religious, and ethnic lines.

Here is the text in a non-image format from /r/askindia - the wide range of responses is interesting.

Doesn't resonate.

The kiwi farms post has me going full Sgt Doakes. Hindi/Urdu trace their etymology either to Farsi or Sanskrit. Urdu prioritizes Farsi loan words, Hindi prioritizes Sanskrit. Izzat is a thorough bred Farsi word. It only sees widespread use in Pakistan.

zero-sum game of collective honour shared by whole groups of people

In India, the closest analogue would be Khap Panchayats. They're clan based extra-judicial groups concerned with honor culture. They're found in pockets of Rajasthan and Haryana. They're illegal. But, they still hold some power in rural pockets of Haryana and Rajasthan. Tribal honor systems are more explicitly acknowledged in Pashto & Pahari culture in Pakistan. However, I doubt any westerner knows these groups well enough to write a 2 pager on them.

The rest of the post is frankly unreadable.

On the topic of Farsi words in Indian languages:

Mughal patronage for art created a rich and rather romantic literary movement. It's heavily represented in Indian drama, movies and of course, Bollywood.

Non-mughal Indians were introduced to these words through the arts and therefore, urdu words (and concepts) are primarily used for dramatic effect. Real life is usually less interesting, so the words don't find as much use in real life.

Izzat, tanhai (deep loneliness.), aashiqui (passionate love making), mohabbat (longing love), junoon (obsession). These Farsi words are common in dramatized Indian media. But I have never heard them used in real life.

If a friend of mine said he was feeling 'tanhai', I'd first laugh. Then smack them in the head for pretentiousness. And then find him help. Because, you must be real depressed to feel 'tanhai'. That's a strong ass emotion. Bro might jump off a bridge kinda emptiness, yknow. Farsi loan words in hindi/urdu all have this effect.

So if the word 'Izzat' feels really strong in the way its used, then that's intentional. The only time I've ever heard it used is patriach - prodigal son moments in a soap opera. The patriarch will say something like : 'Beta, hamara khandaan ki izzat rakhna'. (Son, please uphold the honor of the family) before the son does something reckless and gets disowned.

Edit: it is a type of an extensive honor/shame phenomenon which is cross-cultural across times and geographies. and it does have a positive effect (even if the news articles show its negative effects, which IMO most news articles highlight).

C'mon dude, this was obviously written by ChatGPT. Don't do this.

sincere apologies.

<snaps fingers impatiently>

It seems unlikely. Cultures that are truly face-driven have very high rates of violent crime, especially homicide (we can argue about whether it’s sanctioned or unsanctioned, so let’s call it ‘killing’ instead). Two major examples are Central America and urban black America.

India has low homicide rates, and while there is some dubious recordkeeping in some rural districts, it’s not bad enough to obscure hundreds of thousands or millions of honor killings a year. In a society of one and a half billion people where (as the KF OP claims) even an argument about garden ornaments quickly takes on life and death stakes, you would expect a lot more deaths.

This reads like someone who's had some really bad experiences and is painting with an incredibly broad brush

Like yeah honor/face culture exists in lots of places but acting like 1.4 billion people all operate exactly the same way because of one cultural concept is wild. I've worked with plenty of Indians who were just normal colleagues, not scheming honor warriors plotting my downfall lmao

The greentext story especially sounds made up as hell. Most of these examples feel cherry-picked to support a pretty harsh generalization

Someone in the thread, and I agree with him. When I first ran into this copy pasta, I was like, what the fuck is an izzat? I've lived in India for well over 20 years without running into it outside of cheesy Bollywood music played over a radio. I know it's originally an Urdu/Persian word, and it's not commonly used here.

Hell, the Wikipedia page is barely worth the TP it's printed on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzat_(honour)

Maintaining this societal reputation by all necessary means is considered obligatory upon every man and woman, as is revenge or punishment upon those who have or are perceived as having directly or indirectly violated it.

The fuck? Obligatory? Where?

The idea of reciprocity, in both friendship and enmity, is deeply embedded in izzat. It is required, for example, that a person goes to any lengths to come to the assistance of those who had previously helped them in their time of need,[5] and to fail to do so is to dishonour one's debt and thereby lose izzat.[5]

If anyone here belongs to a culture that doesn't have the concept of friendship or the concept of reciprocation, I pity them. Let me know so I can hear about it.

Seriously, this is about as useful as that meme of someone going, "oh yeah, in my culture, we loooove our family and food is very important to us."

In other words, the original description of izzat is not a good description of the majority of the country. Honor culture exists in many parts of India, particularly rural and conservative backwaters, but it's fuck all like that in general. I'm not sure if anyone should except better from a KiwiFarms thread called "India is a menace".

Edit:

There was a greentext from 4chan (I don't have it so bear with me). Anon knew an Indian. This Indian would make outlandish claims (he could benchpress 500kg, he was a billionaire, he did arms deals with the US government). Anon said he didn't believe the Indian. The Indian reacted with righteous indignation. The situation escalated to the point where the Indian was emailing Anon death threats. Anon responded by forwarding the emails to the police. The Indian killed himself. Anon was left baffled at the whole situation and had no idea what the fuck just happened.

The fuck? I think the antics of one compulsive confabulist or mentally ill isn't grounds for sweeping statements. Does anyone know >1 Indian?

I was like, what the fuck is an izzat?

My thoughts exactly; “The fuck izzat?” if you will

I will blame jetlag from a long flight for the missed opportunity. I'm smacking myself, it was right there haha.

You aren't the guys they're talking about. Clearly there are Indians that integrate very well into the West. We are lucky and happy to have you.

The label and description is hazy, but the concept of low trust scam, exploitative, backstabbing, win-at-all-costs behaviour is a cultural trait and the reason that India is not Wakanda'ing its way to global dominance. It is not unique to Indian culture. Corruption and low trust cultural behaviours are the reason that non first world countries are not first world.

That's very kind of you to say, but I still think that "izzat" is a poor descriptor for the average Indian.

Almost all of the things described in the original essay are not normal! India is poorly described as an honor culture. It is not like Afghanistan, even if we have regions that are closer to those norms. It would be like coming up with some kind of term for the honor culture in the Appalachians, and using that to draw sweeping conclusions about the rest of the States. Or using SF fent zombies as examples of the average American.

"When two Indians get into an argument, the stakes are always deadly due to izzat"

????

The post takes a small Motte and uses it to defend a ridiculously huge Bailey. Haggling with a merchant on the street or an Uber driver doesn't result in knives or guns coming out.

India is poor and corrupt, but it's not because of izzat. It's for the same reasons as any other poor third world country. Izzat is applicable in Afghanistan, less so in Pakistan, and nigh useless in India itself.

Almost all of the things described in the original essay are not normal! India is poorly described as an honor culture. It is not like Afghanistan, even if we have regions that are closer to those norms. It would be like coming up with some kind of term for the honor culture in the Appalachians, and using that to draw sweeping conclusions about the rest of the States. Or using SF fent zombies as examples of the average American.

There's a weird thing in America where we understand that out of 330mm Americans, there are at least like seven or eight distinct cultures that it would be ridiculous to draw parallels across, and then you take a place like India or China with four times as many people and assume they're all the same.

I watched this explode on Twitter and 4Chan last week. I think it will stick even as people make arguments about how its an Urdu word and not Hindu. People believe it pattern matches too well to a certain type of 'be the winner' or 'get one over them' behaviour so I can't see it disappearing anytime soon. This isn't purely an Indian concept, I've seen this type of thing in mainland Chinese behaviour too.

I see it as self-destructive suicidally empathetic 'white' high trust cultures developing an immune response to low trust behaviour in real time. Putting a label on the concept is just the first step in responding to the Eternal September of Indians (and other cultures) entering the West physically and online.

edit: Should make it clear I'm not Indian and I'm a heritage Westerner.

2nd edit: I'm surprised 'Izzat' hasn't blown up into a CWR top level post yet. Aukat is another key word I've heard mentioned in this context.

A lot of cultures have this pattern of behavior. Especially low-trust cultures. Not every one has a scary foreign word to attribute it to, but I saw it many times. In Russian culture, especially with its lower rungs which are thoroughly imbued with prison culture, this is a pretty common pattern. In Israeli culture, again especially among lower rungs (keyword: ars), this approach to every interaction being zero sum win/lose exists and getting one over somebody is highly valued. I am sure there are a lot of other cultures where the same pattern exists, because it's a common human pattern. Not sure why the Urdu term would be any better to use than any other meaning "honor culture" and describing common failure mode of honor cultures. But pattern existing in a culture and the whole culture (or set of cultures) being subjugate to one and single dominating pattern are very different things.

A lot of cultures have this pattern of behavior. Especially low-trust cultures. Not every one has a scary foreign word to attribute it to, but I saw it many times. In Russian culture, especially with its lower rungs which are thoroughly imbued with prison culture, this is a pretty common pattern. In Israeli culture, again especially among lower rungs (keyword: ars), this approach to every interaction being zero sum win/lose exists and getting one over somebody is highly valued.

Lot of low-trust cultures have strong ingroup preference and honor culture, but it looks like the Indian version is somehow more anarchical. For example, various cultures of the Caucasus have clans, vendettas (which force clan members to police the behavior of their youngsters to avoid murder spirals) and absolute honor of old age (which allows clan elders to negotiate the end of vendettas without risking their lives and losing face). Russian prison culture has its own hierarchy, with the honor and authority of the senior ranking members dependent among other things on their resolution of disputes according to the spirit of the law or the mos maiorum.

Russian prison culture has its own hierarchy, with the honor and authority of the senior ranking members dependent among other things on their resolution of disputes

The actual prison culture does, but street thug culture influenced by echoes of the prison culture doesn't respect any of that. If such thug gets into prison, he'd be either forced to adapt and learn respect, or will be killed. But while they are out there - and many of them are low-level enough to never get to prison - they don't have any such hierarchy.

Every district has a smotryaschiy that oversees local thugs. If they don't learn to show obeisance, they are... educated.

Not sure why the Urdu term would be any better to use than any other meaning "honor culture" and describing common failure mode of honor cultures.

You're correct. The Urdu word was the one that went viral first. It could have been Sanskrit, Bahasa or WingDings, but the first one out the gate normally has the most memetic gravitas.

Funnily enough when the concept started going viral there were many Indians that immediately started to 'Well acktually..' away the accusation which helped Streisand Effect the word into virality (source: go look at the replies to the patient zero tweet)

edit: couple of words and links

This isn't purely an Indian concept, I've seen this type of thing in mainland Chinese behaviour too.

This is also a solid characterization of typical western progressive behavior (and in Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet rule), too, which is perhaps why the two get along so well.

Co-ordination of meanness (of value-finders/productive people) combined with weak state capacity can delete Izzet by deleting its followers when they attack- personal firearms meant a defender could delete an outsized number of attackers, so peace was forced that way- which is why as states weakened coincident with the ability to co-ordinate meanness growing (which is why the Enlightenment happened when it did) Izzet was mostly suppressed in the West.

Once state capacity eclipses the individual's ability to escape it, though, the followers of Izzet tend to be among the first to capture it if the citizenry doesn't wield it appropriately and crush them. This typically requires a monarch, though, since wielding political power that effectively requires a citizenry that is able, willing, and has enough time to do so... and that's not an evolved behavior like Izzet is.

Again, I don't think this is a uniquely Eastern thing- it's visible everywhere you look, should you choose.

Here is the text in a non-image format

The original source is here.

The 'Patient Zero' tweet (referencing the kiwi farms post you've linked) as far as I'm aware is here.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Dawn of Everything. Picking up Tom Brown's School Days.

I went through Unconstrained, a novel about an AGI breaking out, over the weekend. The AI sections are uninspired and contrived, the characters are bland stereotypes, and the story is woke in that frequently described as "fish don't have a word for wet" way. At least the non-AI technical details were pretty accurate.

It's unfortunate that the most serious predictive engagement with the question of an AGI breakout remains a novella with the framing of a My Little Pony fanfiction. That's not as damning a praise as it sounds at first glance, but it's a strange issue given how much ink has been spilled and how omnipresent the technologies have become since 2012.

I'm still on Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead recounting a fictional WWII battle on a fictional pacific atoll, based on Mailer's own experiences in the Philippines during the war. I will say that after reading The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro has me questioning a lot of WWII stories from prominent men, so I question whether Mailer, who was definitely a clerk and a cook at other times in the army, was really volunteering for behind-the-lines Recon patrols as is claimed.

It's a funny parallel to listening to Darryl Cooper's podcast series on Israel-Palestine, because the more I listen to Darryl Cooper the more I realize that even where I disagree with him he is My Guy, we listen to the same music and married similar women and read similar books. Where the more I read Norman Mailer the more I know he would hate me, his petty villains in the book are literally called out as alumni of my school and being from my hometown.

Overall Mailer is a great writer, I decided to try his big classic after reading The Fight about the Rumble in the Jungle, but the Naked and the Dead feels a little all over the place for me. The emphasis of the book is on the internal struggles of the men on the island, the Japs are barely around. I'm halfway through the book, and the Japs have shown up for one night attack across a river, and one has been caught out behind American lines and war-crimed. Parts of the book deal with issues of strategy from the commanding officer's perspective, others with the actual labor involved for the GIs trying to win the war on the island, the drudgery of building supply roads, men being assigned to platoons or reserves being switched between companies, lots of walking and riding around and taking watch, very little action. Which is of course a view of war, but the particular way it is shown in this book is miserable.

The vast majority of the book is about the internal lives of the men, their fears and insecurities and personal sins and petty gossip and hatreds. Nobody seems to like each other in Mailer's army, they're either playing oblique status games within the military hierarchy or they despise each other for racial reasons and they all despise themselves for various insecurities related to courage or luck or wealth or success with women. For a bunch of men on an island, they are constantly thinking about pussy, getting it or not getting it or losing it. Mailer, who was Jewish, writes in two Jewish characters who specifically are outcasts from the rest of the group for their Jewishness, and estranged from each other by their own different degrees of Jewishness, one more modern and assimilationist and one more yiddish. And forget the Japanese American translator, who is a few paragraphs of a stereotype I've seen a lot by now but was probably revolutionary then. Officers scheme as to how to degrade their subordinates and force them to submit totally, subalterns cheat and steal to escape notice from their commanders when they aren't bowing and scraping to show what good dogs they are. HQ never seems to work very hard at anything useful, much time is spent talking about stuff that seems deeply out of place in the book, building a clubhouse for the officers, obtaining liquor for the officers, who put out a cigarette in the General's tent, stealing supplies from a ship offshore, etc. It's not clear where they find time to fight a war, what with all the backbiting and infighting and struggles of will and general dicking around going on. It seems like the Japs could have won the battle with a few well placed letters telling men their wives were cheating on them back home, and informing the general his aides didn't like him.

Mailer, of course, was there, he saw the elephant. So as part of my course of war memoirs this year, I have to fit it in. How does this fit in with American Sniper and Storm of Steel and Band of Brothers, or even Sevastopol Stories or The Things They Carried? Part of me tends to call this the (1944 American) Jewish experience of the war, the outcast's experience of the war: alienated, never fitting in, always being removed from your comrades, never quite one of the guys. The Naked and the Dead paints a whole army of similar outcasts. Where someone like Chris Kyle or Ernst Junger feels himself among friends in the war Mailer never did. In Band of Brothers, the first thing Easy Company does is get rid of the Jew Sobel in favor of Dick Winters, and after that they're a happy family. Antisemitism in the US Army in WWII might really be the underlying story here. Where in Band of Brothers the hijacking of army supplies and the redirection of stuff for fun and profit is a gay romp, in The Naked and the Dead it's a psychologically fraught crime ending in misery.

Overall, still half to go so maybe it justifies itself, and it's a Great Book by a Great Author on a Great Topic so it's never a total waste, but not one I'd really recommend.

I recently read, in a slightly weird context, two long-forgotten WWII memoirs published during the war (so generally as positive as is possible to be while remaining truthful - e.g. one of them devotes a paragraph to mentioning that there were some HQ officers he deeply disliked and thought did a terrible job, gives the unflattering nickname for one, then drops the topic as far as he can), and the sense I got from them was that when you're really at the frontline, you develop intense camaraderie or you die, but the moment you go behind the lines all the petty antagonisms come out. The real grunts stuck together in small groups even when behind the lines, but for the most part the military had a lot of every-man-for-himself balanced by small favours and horse-tradings. And of course every group dislikes and envies the guys behind them without much thought for the guys in front of them. Mailer, as suited to him, makes it much more alienated and emotional than these contemporary books (the other book, written from a frontliner's perspective, was mostly "you don't have room for emotions, except when talking about women, you either make ironclad friends with your squad or you go crazy/get killed, and humour is a critical survival mechanism"), but these accounts resonate together to me. Mailer was apparently mostly doing the miserable wait-around-build-stuff-steal-what-you-can work, whereas Junger was literally in the trenches for most of his war, and under artillery fire when not, so it makes sense the human relationships involved would be very different.

Part of me tends to call this the (1944 American) Jewish experience of the war, the outcast's experience of the war: alienated, never fitting in, always being removed from your comrades, never quite one of the guys.

A gay friend once described his alienation in high school in a way that made me think (but not say) "Yeah, that sounds exactly like being an insecure fat kid." I think the internal experience of alienation is pretty source independent. Maybe Mailer was just a weird asshole that no one else liked, doing a big old Typical Mind Fallacy.

Portnoy's Complaint, a book I read in November that I loved, did this well, using the particulars of the Jewish experience to really dig into the universal experience of male puberty. Mindy Kaling's Never Have I Ever did a good job with it as well.

It's striking seeing a book about soldiers where nobody is friends and nobody likes each other and everybody is brooding and alienated, compared to stories about war where comrades come together. And something you notice is that Band of Brothers starts out by kicking the Jew out of the company and then everyone gets along, where The Naked and Dead is full of Jews stewing about how everyone hates them and southie guys from Boston complaining about all the Yids.

The Wine Dark Sea.

I'm slowing down in my reading of the Aubrey-Maturin series because I don't want it to end. I can just reminisce about it and pretend that there is a lot more to come. I can't remember the last time I caught myself doing this with a series.

Making my way through Infinite Jest, I'm curious if anyone here has thoughts on it.

Missed it by a Month

I see, thank you.

Reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's actually quite a fun fan fic. I wish Yudkowsky had stuck to writing fiction, he's quite talented in that realm!

I am very surprised by a continued stream of praise (including such words as "genius") piled on HPMOR. I read it, and it was fun, and I admit the premise is pretty clever. But both as a fantasy book and as a literature it seemed to be very mid. Tons of plot lines lead to nowhere. Main reveal is obvious very early. The main protagonist is very Mary Sue. Other characters are severely under-developed. And coming back to the premise, what actually comes out of it? I mean yes, the protagonist wins (I don't think it's much of a spoiler that the titular character in a fantasy book wins at the end, and especially if he's named Harry Potter, right?) but isn't that where the interesting part starts? I mean, by that point HP is basically a god. And he intends to make everybody else into gods (without even asking them, of course - I mean why would he, they are all NPCs anyway). Or only wizards (what happens to muggles btw?) Isn't it something we may want to address somehow? Nah, we're done here, buh-bye.

I mean it's fun, I do not deny it. But genius? Life-changing? "one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads"? I mean I knew undergrads now are not what they used to be, but really?

HPMOR has many flaws, but it really does achieve what it sets out to do. It...

  1. Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.
  2. Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.
  3. Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.
  4. Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.

Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.

Yes, but not exactly. HPMOR's premise is that being intelligent makes you super-powerful. And it's not like Tolkien characters are not intelligent (please, no "why didn't they just order Eagle Uber to Mordor", it had been done to death) - it's just, as in the real world, intelligence is not enough. Otherwise we'd all be ruled by God Emperor Yud The First, The Only And The Eternal by now. But in HPMOR, intelligence makes you a god among mortals, pretty much literally. Unfortunately, this means all other characters (except maybe one or two) must be dumbasses for that to work out. That's disappointing.

Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.

Might be, not being a high-schooler I can't make much use of that, so here might be a part of it that I am unable to appreciate.

Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.

I must disagree here. The essence of how Potter wins has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with feelings, especially love. The whole premise of the original HP universe is that Voldie is smarter, more powerful, more capable, more ruthless, more everything, than any other character in the universe (including Dumbledore, which is close to his level but ultimately is also done in by him). And he still loses, because he doesn't know what it means to be human, and that's, evidently, how the magic works in that universe. HPMOR universe runs on pure intelligence, the concepts above aren't even featured there. Many people - especially rationalist, autist, introverted, hyper-intelligent geeks - may feel much more at home at the latter universe than at the former, but those are very, very different universes, and claiming HPMOR captures the "essence" of the original work is very far from the truth. If anything, it captures the external trappings while hollowing out the essence and substituting another - maybe more palatable to the geeks, but completely different.

Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.

I've noticed a number of literary mistakes (like, dangling plots, unmotivated actions, etc.) when reading it but of course I already forgot the specifics. But I am willing to believe HPMOR does not have a kind of mistakes that trigger the autists so much, like claiming in one part that certain staircase in Hogwarts had 12 steps, and in another chapter saying it's 11 steps. Of course, no normie reader had ever cared or will ever care about this. Avoiding such mistakes indeed may make it an easier read to certain category of readers - but that doesn't make it a work of literary genius. At least my threshold for it is much higher - and in a different place too.

I am only a few chapters in, to be fair! The beginning is very fun and engaging. Can't speak to the book as a whole.

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he? "Three Worlds Collide" was interesting but not great. I really like "Kindness to Kin" but it's just one short story. I'm working my way through "planecrash" right now, and so far it's a pretty good first draft of something that could have become a good novel series after it got a ton of editing that it didn't get.

On the other hand, HPMoR is roughly four long novels put together, and I watched it get produced in real time and saw how little editing it got, and although I find that intensely annoying (I'm trying to avoid getting too spoilery, but at at least one point there's an explicit moral that the protagonist has been an idiot by neglecting to consider advice from others, and the irony just hurts), it's quite amazing for someone to make it from beginning to end of that much writing, juggling a coherent arc-plot through multiple major tonal shifts, without ever seriously dropping the ball. In "planecrash" he's at least capable of co-writing and adapting to others' ideas, so he could have handled working with an editor if he'd ever actually made a career of writing and gotten one.

You may enjoy some of his other glowfics; I really liked "but hurting people is wrong". There's also the conspiracy world, a series of stories set in an alternate Earth. And the Masculine Mongoose trilogy on Tumblr. But, yeah, he mostly does one-shots.

Oh, hell, I forgot about the Masculine Mongoose! Yeah, those were wonderful, and more accessibly so than "Kindness to Kin"; still short stories, but I shouldn't have forgotten to mention them.

The "conspiracy world" stories were interesting but not great as stories.

I hadn't read "but hurting people is wrong"; thanks for the recommendation!

He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he?

Not on the level of MoR, but he is very likely the author of The Waves Arisen, which is a similar take on Naruto, with less intensive plotting.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, at his best, has leaps of genius nobody else can match. Fifteen years ago, he decided that the best way to something something AI safety was to write a Harry Potter fanfiction. Many people at the time (including me) gingerly suggested that maybe this was not optimal time management for someone who was approximately the only person working full-time on humanity’s most pressing problem. He totally demolished us and proved us wronger than anyone has ever been wrong before. Hundreds of thousands of people read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, it got lavish positive reviews in Syfy, Vice, and The Atlantic, and it basically one-shotted a substantial percent of the world’s smartest STEM undergrads. Fifteen years later, I still meet bright young MIT students who tell me they’re working on AI safety, and when I ask them why in public they say something about their advisor, and then later in private they admit it was the fanfic. Valuing the time of the average AI genius at the rate set by Sam Altman (let alone Mark Zuckerberg), HPMOR probably bought Eliezer a few billion dollars in free labor. Just a totally inconceivable level of victory.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone

Progress on Cryptonomicon has been slow, and I'm now about a quarter of the way through it. In addition to being very long it's also very slow in terms of plot progression.

Ah, Cryptonomicon. The book that pretty much killed my interest in Neal Stephenson.

...which is really weird to say, cause it's not a bad book by any means. I've read bad books before. That isn't one of them. Hell, I've read through slogs before, and I wouldn't call Cryptonomicon a slog.

But after finishing, I basically paused, considered everything, put it on my shelf, and never picked up one of his books ever again.

Which is weird, come to think. Cause Snow Crash was fun as hell, and The Big U was definitely entertaining.

Eh, maybe I'll give Diamond Age another shot one day.

Why did it kill your interest in him? Assuming you can answer the question without spoiling the plot.

Hit the half way mark and it will start to feel comfortable, to the point you’ll find yourself bemoaning that you’re closer to finishing than starting. At least that’s how I felt after the slow start.

Just finished The Years of Rice and Salt as detailed by the main thread. Otherwise still working through Marx and Kant and a Spanish thriller set in Medieval Japan.

I recently read and finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. I loved it - probably the most memorable book I've read in years. I decided to try her other (and much better known) major work: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Christ I've been finding it boring. I've gotten through just over 100 pages and I don't think I can manage any more. I get that it was a deliberate stylistic decision to write in the style of someone from the early 19th century but it doesn't work for me at all. That being said, I respect authors trying something radically different from whatever everyone else is doing and given all the plaudits it clearly impressed plenty of people. Interested in what anyone here who's tried to read it thinks.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell picks up in the last third. I haven't decided if it was worth reading.

Piranesi is a totally different genre than Norrell. Though the latter is also good, it is more of a tome like Neal Stephenson novels.

If you want more like Piranesi, I would strongly recommend Madeline Miller's novels based on Homeric classics.

If you want more like Piranesi, I would strongly recommend Madeline Miller's novels based on Homeric classics.

I'll definitely check those out, thanks for the suggestion!

My girlfriend has been reading Jonathan Strange for several weeks (months?). She initially found it delightful and easy to read, but then came to a chunk of it where the pacing slowed to a crawl. I believe she's now about three-quarters of the way through it and is determined to finish it before the end of the year.

Keep at it until Jonathon Strange comes in. Mr Norrell is really really boring, and it's not fun slogging through that, but the visceral experience of finding him boring helps you understand him better in the long run, as well as why the world reacts to Strange with such relief.

Finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was an interesting ride (pun intended) but the end was kinda disappointing. After all that buildup, suddenly they just cried together and that was all? I mean I get it that real life has no "endings", but that's what I expect from fiction, however old-fashioned it is. Maybe it's too much to expect. But, I think I get what Pirsig was going for, and likely will read the sequel at some point next year.

Lila is much better, IMO, if you want full description of his MoQ (Metaphysics of Quality). But ZAMM has much better metaphors (like Gumptionology, Newton's gravity, and so many others).

Abyss: Unbound Book 7 By Nicoli Gonnella.

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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