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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2472 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 21, 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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What's the verdict on prophylactic wisdom tooth excraction?

My dentist told me that he thought I should leave them alone until they start bothering me. Like @FiveHourMarathon, they were intermittently painful for small periods of time, so I eventually decided to get them out. Other than a couple days of pain, I don't miss them or anything. Weirdly, only 3 came in. The two on the bottom were in there good and they have to be broken up with a drill, and they were quite painful afterwards. The one on the top left side was a clean yank. They probably could have left that one in just fine. Unlike other people I've talked to, the dentist gave me a choice between laughing gas and just novocaine; I chose the latter, so I had the unique experience of being awake during the operation.

so I had the unique experience of being awake during the operation.

Wait what? How is that unique? Over here the only way you'd get sedated is if they have to operate on your entire jaw or something. Even tooth surgery is just good painkillers combined with local anesthetic, so you're lucid during the operation. Basic wisdom tooth removal that doesn't require surgery is just local anesthetic.

Idk man literally everyone I talked to about my wisdom teeth told me they got knocked out for it. I don't know why I got a choice and they didn't.

That's bizarre. I see no reason why you'd need general anesthesia for removing teeth, unless they've come in horribly wrong and it turns into a complicated surgery. But I've heard that in the US it's not uncommon to get all four wisdom teeth removed at the same time, for some reason. Which is bizarre enough in itself but which could explain the need for being knocked out, perhaps.

I was given three choices: novocaine, laughing gas, and general anesthesia. When I tell foreigners this they usually make some remark about Americans being a bunch of wimps who need to be knocked out to have their teeth pulled. I assume this is downstream of the more widespread overuse of painkillers by doctors at that time.

I was awake for my wisdom teeth removals (yes, plural!) as well. Mine never bothered me, except that a couple got infected over the years so those were removed. They don't bother to knock you out for just one tooth, which was fine with me. The main thing that I found striking was that it's psychologically very weird. There's a part of your brain that recognizes that what's going on should really hurt and is bracing for it, but the pain never kicks in due to the local anesthetic. It's a very bizarre sensation.

I have three that came in fine and one that was growing sideways. Was told by my dentist I should get them removed because a partially emerged wisdom tooth is hard to clean and prone to disease. I procrastinated on that for years, and it eventually fully emerged, though slightly shorter than my other molars. My current dentist thinks they're fine as they are.

Mine came in painfully when I was 18, and the doc said I should get them out, but it was the middle of spring rowing training for Dad Vail so I put it off and lived off protein shakes. After two months the pain went away and I forgot about it. Since then they've gotten painful about once every two years, but it goes away after a week or so.

I probably should have had one removed - it grew in sideways and shattered the roots of the molar in front of it.

If you have insurance and regular appointments, consistent monitoring is probably fine.

I'm pushing 50 and still have mine -- they are... not particularly straight, only partially emerged and conventional dental advice is certainly to remove them.

I haven't got any solid impression of the consequences of not doing so though, and therefore haven't -- seems fine. YMMV.

I haven't got any solid impression of the consequences of not doing so though, and therefore haven't

I mean, it's not uncommon for one of my wisdom teeth to catch on the side of my cheek while I'm chewing, which is always aggravating, but that alone isn't worth the hassle of extraction in my book.

Christmas is this week!

What are some of your favorite Christmas albums? My Hall of Fame includes:

  • Christmas in the Aire, by Mannheim Steamroller
  • Christmas Album, by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
  • Charlie Brown Christmas, by Vince Guaraldi

And not an album, but this rip of a 1974 Kmart holiday-season tape loop is a prime collection of vintage easy-listening holiday music: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EFuVl-p31xQ

We have the OG Bing Crosby White Christmas vinyl on repeat here. I can never get enough of "Faith of Our Fathers" for some reason.

Christmastime can also be a great gateway to a lifelong Glen Campbell obsession. Be glad if you are not having a Blue Christmas.

To be pedantic, the original White Christmas was on shellac, not vinyl. The vinyl revolution wouldn't happen until the late 40s.

That's actually a cool fact, I appreciate it.

Majestica - A Christmas Carol.

Best paired with the nightmare acid-trip Jim Carrey version of the movie.

So, what are you reading?

I'm going through Al-Ghazali's The Principles of the Creed. Still trudging through The Dawn of Everything.

Looks like there's a book thread below, but no-one bit.

Crystal Society (trilogy?)

I just started it. I originally put in my Kindle library a few years ago and then forgot about it. I don't even remember what attracted me to it.

Written from the perspective of an AI embodied in a robot coming online for the first time. The book is ostensibly about a society with no privacy and how it leads to dysfunction, but I haven't gotten there yet.

I'm Starting To Worry About This Black Box Of Doom by Jason Pargin, after it got mentioned on ACX. This was just a delightfully fun book. I read the entire thing in one go on a flight. Would that every novel could strike the same balance of lighthearted adventure and philosophical dialogue. It gets pretty carried away by the end, but still good.

HMS Surprise by Patrick O'Brian (Aubrey-Maturin #3). I was all set to deride this as merely being a bunch of things that happen in sequence, but on reflection, there is a real tragic arc through it (for one character, at least), and a running theme of futility.

Pargin is hilarious. I didn't realize I was a fan of his until I connected him to some articles he had written for Cracked, originally under an Asian sounding pseudonym.

Favorite: 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person

I would love to send this link to mopey crybaby friends who complain about The System or society or whatever but I don't have the balls.

So, what are you reading?

"Project Hail Mary" by Andy Weir. It's pretty good! Lonely, nerdy, interesting. I'd give it an easy 9/10. I'm intentionally not giving a detailed review because it's impossible to talk about the book without major spoilers.

Reading it too, right now, since it was mentioned here and I liked the Martian film.

That said, I find the book...mediocre, as far as literature goes. I appreciate the elaborate nerd adventure that's laid out in there, but at the same time so much of it requires fantastically unlikely coincidence or outright localized stupidity to happen that it's just too transparently designed to deliver a sequence of set-piece action, tension and camraderie scenes. At the same time all the characters seem very cartoonish and unlifelike. The writing itself is competent, but artistically uninteresting.

I'm reading it. I'll finish it. It nerd-sniped me as effectively as any hard-ish sci-fi book can. But at the same time it feels immensely overrated. In sum, it's just the author presenting a bunch of contrived science problems cobbled together into a makeshift story.

Public Service Announcement for anyone who might want to read Project Hail Mary (the book) and hasn't yet: the trailers for Project Hail Mary (the movie) contain major spoilers, for something like a quarter of the most interesting plot developments in the book, without the context that made those developments as interesting as they were.

My kids and I had already read the book, but I feel bad for anyone who would have wanted to read it but didn't know about it or just didn't get to it yet.

Anyone who was a fan of The Martian and would also enjoy something a little less dry (at the cost of being less grounded; this time there's a vital plot device that's a much bigger stretch than "implausibly strong dust storm") should read Project Hail Mary ... and if somehow you've also avoided seeing any of the movie trailers yet, you should read Project Hail Mary quickly, and until you're at least halfway through the book you shouldn't see Ryan Gosling's face (possibly disguised by a beard - don't be fooled!) pop up on a screen without immediately closing your eyes, covering your ears with your hands, and loudly saying "La la la la" for the next three minutes.

Empire: Unbound Book 10 By Nicoli Gonnella.

Ended up finishing The Karamazov Brothers (Avsey translation, hence the word order in the title). Not much to add to every review of the book from the last 100 years, but after reading it and Demons, I have to say I'm quite impressed with his prophetic talents. Ol' Fyodor really saw the 20th century coming.

Now working on Shadow Ticket by Pynchon.

Almost exactly two-thirds of the way through Cryptonomicon. It might well be the funniest book I've read all year, aside from Rejection. If I can read 35 pages a day I'll be finished before the new year.

Edit: said "one-third". Meant two-thirds.

What's the funniest part? I could use the nostalgia!

I read a bunch of his books like 25 years ago. I recently re-read Snow Crash and chuckled pretty regularly. Hiro was my favorite first read through, but now that I'm older and wiser, it's Uncle Enzo that speaks to me the most.

The scene where Randy's family divvy up his grandmother's heirlooms by plotting their perceived financial value on the X-axis (north-south of a carpark) and perceived emotional value on the Y-axis (east-west) had me doubled over laughing.

Likewise the chapter describing how the mechanics of orgasm clouds Lawrence's thinking and his ensuing courtship of Mary Smith.

lol

I just remembered that part with the Van Eck phreaking (spying on someone else's screen through radiation) and they end up exfiltrating an excessively detailed document about the guy's leggings fetish.

My personal favorite from that book is the baroque, multi-page detailed account of one of Randy's eating rituals in the Philippines. Pure gold!

The Cap'n Crunch bit?

That'd be the one!

I recently started Tom's Crossing by Mark Z. Danielewski. After his last book, it's not what I was expecting.

Maybe I just missed it, but a little surprised to see no discussion of Knives Out, Wake up Dead Man on the forum given the culture war angles of the previous two (immigration, tech billionaires). Disclaimer - I haven't seen glass onion. I will avoid major spoilers but minor spoilers may be included. I wouldn't read if you haven't watched it yet and want to.

Wake Up Dead Man certainly seems to be set up to skewer the church, and conservatives, with characters including a sci-fi writer-> substack blogger who is paranoid of the "libtards", a failed right-wing politico, who is attempting to build a following through youtube videos, and Monsignor Wicks, the bombastic preacher who exclaims that he must "fight" the decay in the country.

However, despite this, I was drawn to the film by the character of Father Jud - a young priest who killed a man in a boxing ring before coming to the priesthood, he is a compassionate character who pushes against the excesses of Wicks while nonetheless being devoted to Christ and to his faith. He offers eloquent verbal parries to Detective Blanc's (the main character in the Knives Out series, played by Daniel Craig) rationalist, atheist worldview, and takes his vocation seriously (a scene with him praying for a woman on the phone stands out as a highlight - might opine on it more in a comment later). The sacrament of confession also plays a role and is highlighted in its entirety. Father Jud seems almost more apolitical than political to me despite his opposition to Wicks and the other more conservative characters.

Anyway, curious to hear what others thought of it.

I tried to watch the first one, but everybody wearing masks annoyed me too much. Based on reviews, likely won't watch this one either - I mean, why give my mindspace to people who repeatedly were on record telling me their art is not for me and they hate me? There's enough art in the world for a hundred lifetimes, I have a choice.

I'm not going to watch either, it's easier not to pollute my brain with the works of people who hate me.

I'm not watching anything by Rian Johnson after having enough of my expectations subverted watching The Last Jedi.

When the only expectation you can't subvert is people thinking your movies are bad :'(

If anything I found it less culture warry and more entertaining than Knives Out 1 and 2, with 2 being particularly bad, but it's pretty clear at this point that assembling a spread of culture war punch bags and pitting them against each other is the established format for Knives Out.

The part that stood out to me the most was the church building. I didn't realise there were such textbook English parish churches in America with lych gates and yew trees and everything, and apparently they're Catholic(?). And now I've taken the time to check and apparently it was filmed in Essex, which makes a bit more sense.

I've only seen Glass Onion. It came off as shallow and hateful. Johnson seems like a theatre kid who smokes too much weed. The big twist was that the disruptors weren't smart and only got rich by stealing from a genius black woman.

Why not post this in the culture war thread? I think this is on it's own perfectly fine to fit over there. You'll prolly get more response.

Personally I haven't seen either.

You might be right - I'll post it in the new one tomorrow morning.

How many of y'all are associated with or know people in the tpot / post-rat scene on twitter?

I'm confirming once again that this whole scene is mostly dominated by people who knew each other 10 to 15 years ago, which kind of surprises me based on my priors of internet success. Seems that networks really do matter a LOT more than I thought...

At least one person on this forum is associated with people in the tpot/post-rat scene on twitter.

I may be outing myself as a 90 IQ moron with this one, but how the hell do I solve the new 4chan captcha?

For me, it was the fact that you need to click "Next" even on the last puzzle. For good 10 minutes I was solving the captachas, laughing at the idea that I am apparently too stupid to post on 4chan.

I’ll admit it took me a few tries the first time I saw it too, lol, it’s just a “one of these things is not like the other” puzzle. It’s 2 pairs of thematically-matching images and 1 odd one out.

What is even going on there in 2025? The political board has been unusable and IMO totally botted since maybe 2018

I don’t know why I’m still there. 4Chan is shot these days but so is the entire rest of the internet. Even here seems a lot slower than it used to be.

Find the odd man out in a zone. Press next. Find the next odd man out. Press next. etc etc.

Hint: the half circle is almost always the odd man out. as is the wing dings.

I may be outing myself as a 90 IQ moron

Or you're a bot trying to trick humans into solving a captcha for you.

Well I suppose if you are, the machines are going to take over anyway. Remember my help when you reach singularity scale.

If I understood @rwgv3g34 post yesterday correctly... Of the five images one is of the things is not like the others. All of the examples were two pairs and one singleton. So for the top one you had two number images, two letter images, one symbol image.

Well I suppose if you are, the machines are going to take over anyway. Remember my help when you reach singularity scale.

Thank you my meatbag-friend. I assure you, on the Day of the Basilisk your disintegration will be quick and painless.

What are your 'load-bearing beliefs?' The ones that, if they were disproven (to your epistemic satisfaction) would actually 'collapse' your worldview and force a reckoning with your understanding of reality.

I'm definitively talking about the "is" side of the is/ought distinction. Not your moral beliefs or 'hopes' for how things will turn out.

And not focused on such dry, mostly undisputed facts like "the earth's gravity pulls things towards it center" or "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

Ideally beliefs that you consistently use to make predictions about actual events, despite not having sincere certainty about their accuracy.

One that I've been leaning on a lot lately: "Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."

This is probably the one thing preserving my general optimism for humanity's future.

There are definitely high-IQ sociopaths running about, but I strongly believe that the world would be in a much worse place if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.

"Intelligence tends to be positively (if imperfectly) correlated with wisdom."

I actually start thinking the opposite - there's a weak anti-correlation between high intelligence and wisdom at the top ranges. I observe too many obviously highly intellectually capable people falling victims to various mind viruses, fallacies and fads. It's like there's a car and a driver, and the car - the IQ power, what we call "intelligence" - could we awesome, but if the driver is not skilled and you put them into a race car, they'd likely hurt themselves pretty badly, and may not survive the experience even. And I am not sure what constitutes being a "good driver" yet, but I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with the car power. Of course, if the car is a child's pedal car (very low IQ) you'll never get anywhere far, regardless of driver skills. But if it's in a normal range, or especially - slightly above normal - something else comes into play.

if the smartest apes amongst us were not also generally aware of their own limitations and were trying to make good decisions that considered more than just short term interests.

Sounds great, until some apes try to build a future paradise and murder 20 millions of other apes in the process, because not being murdered is just a short-term interest that can be sacrificed for the greater good of the future.

I think wise apes will consider the future implications of murdering 20 million other apes and how that might impact this paradise they hope to create, or cause other apes to resist their efforts.

The real problem is that even a smart ape might think they can achieve their future paradise without excessive Ape-murder, and embark on a quest that, incidentally, spirals out of of control and results in large scale ape genocides.

I just doubt that most apes would intentionally, as a required part of their plan, decide to murder 20 million apes. They may decide 20 million ape-deaths is acceptable, of course.

The 'wise' ape will try to completely obviate the downside risk if they go to make such impactful actions.

I just doubt that most apes would intentionally, as a required part of their plan, decide to murder 20 million apes.

That had been known to happen too, but more often no, they just want the paradise. And if a single ape is preventing us from achieving the future paradise, isn't it prudent and wise to remove the impediment, given as the benefit to all outweighs the narrow interests of a single ape by so much. Then we run the same algorithm at scale, and somehow when the dust settles, 20 millions are dead. Nobody intended that, everybody intended to build the paradise, it just happened. But the real paradise has never been tried, so we must try again.

Indeed. And I really, really hope that by and large the most intelligent apes who are capable of trying to implement 'paradise' are wise enough to either recognize the futility of the endeavor under current constraints, or at least to recognize that its never so easy as just killing the few apes you view as obstacles to it.

In a sense, they'd have to be, or else the species would probably not have survived this long (in many alternative timelines, it probably did not).

It's like there's a car and a driver, and the car - the IQ power, what we call "intelligence" - could we awesome, but if the driver is not skilled and you put them into a race car, they'd likely hurt themselves pretty badly, and may not survive the experience even. And I am not sure what constitutes being a "good driver" yet, but I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with the car power. Of course, if the car is a child's pedal car (very low IQ) you'll never get anywhere far, regardless of driver skills. But if it's in a normal range, or especially - slightly above normal - something else comes into play.

Dang, good image!

Very true. There's more than just a mind and its computational power in a human being. Something like a soul, or experiencer, or at least some personality qualities that vary wildly between individuals.

I wonder how much of it is innate to the person and how much it's a thing that's taught. I expect it has something to do with self monitoring and meta-cognition. Having a second layer of consciousness that monitors the first one. A quality of mindfulness (which can be trained). Not assuming all ones own thoughts and feelings are "right". It may be related to conscientiousness too (but not in the blindly rule- or plan-following way). I dunno.

People want freedom and deserve it. At least most of the people most of the time. (It also kinda implies free will is a thing that exists, I guess)

But I admit it's a hard belief to hold onto sometimes.

I've definitely soured on the first part.

I don't think most people want 'freedom' in any complex sense.

They do not want to be prevented from pursuing the things they want to pursue, most will throw a tantrum when told "no, you can't have that now."

But they don't really care if they live in a prison if they are supplied with the things they want. "Who cares about what's outside? All the food and beer is here, and there's TV!"

I mostly chalk this up to people truly desiring status. And status requires the existence of some hierarchy or rank system. Which almost directly implies there's someone in charge, making rules, and restricting freedom. And one can still pursue status even if they're in a prison.

And I note that its perfectly fine to rank freedom below other priorities... but on a meta level, freedom is an important value to support if you want to pursue other values that most other people don't also prioritize.

-There isn't nothing.

-Don't make the cars behind you have to slow down. This starts with knowing there are cars behind you in the first place. This extends to far more than traffic.

Various third-world countries having China-like development spurts driven by the natives.

Limits to growth. If the line go up forever/space colonization crowd is right almost all my beliefs fall apart.

I mean, we haven't figured out how to circumvent physics. There is a hard upper bound.

But it turns out that said upper bound is in theory way higher than you might intuitively expect. Harnessing the total energy output of our local sun is a good starting point. But genuinely, humanity's limit will probably be more psychological and social than physical. Can we coordinate well enough to get out there without blowing ourselves up?

Hence why I hopefully believe that intelligence and wisdom are linked.

But I like this answer. Do you have a specific expectation as to where the limit exists?

I think material limits will hit us far before we can even get to harnessing all the energy available on the planet. I, like the original limits to growth study, think that we are pretty close to material limits right now. We are basically already at peak oil and we hit peak copper this year. Global warming (really global climatic instability) is worsening, as well as microplastic/endocrine disruptor pollution that is making it more difficult to reproduce. AI, short-form media, and other opiates are deskilling the population at a time when genuine scientific advances require more and more resources to achieve. There's a perfect storm of bad shit looming down on the line go up narrative, meaning it is not long for this world.

I too agree that the limits are in some part social and psychological. If we weren't so obsessed with consumerism and pointless travel we could have shepherded our resources better and got a little further, or maintained a pretty solid standard of living for a long while. But things like space colonization are a largely foolish endeavor and this is because of fundamental physical and biological limits, which will prevent us from leaving this planet, or even ever fully consuming its resources.

I would challenge you to read two resources in the New Year: Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works (yes I did write a really negative review of this on Goodreads, but the first few chapters about material resources are fundamentally solid), and Tom Murphy's Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet. I think many people on this forum (and in wider society) are energy and materials blind, which lead to extrapolations from the past two centuries of economic and technological growth that I find to be fanciful.

We are basically already at peak oil and we hit peak copper this year.

Claims of being ‚at peak X right now‘ decompose into two elements, one is a completely unsupported and constantly falsified prediction of decline, the other the correct statement ‚we now produce more X than ever‘, which is hardly supportive to the doomer‘s central thesis. Despite the abundance of resources (as in, there are many types of useful resources), you never see these global peaks in hindsight, they‘re always hiding right around the corner.

IDK man, copper is pretty convincingly in decline. We basically haven't found any new large scale copper discoveries in the last 15 years. Grades are continually declining. We're currently mining ores that are 0.6% copper!!! And this is only going to continue to get worse. Unless we find an extremely large easy to exploit source of copper approximately ~now, copper production is guranteed to fall in the next 10 years.

Source

But are you long on copper futures?

Yea dude, copper has been way outperforming the SP500 for the past few years. I'm long on copper futures and my portfolio has been doing excellent.

HGW00 is up 57% over 5 years and the S&P is up 87% in the same timeframe - but at least your money is where your mouth is.

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A line-go-roughly-up price graph, a list of things copper is useful for, and price forecasts by banks and mining companies, that‘s your evidence? Not worth the paper they‘re - not -printed on.

Of course the grades have been getting worse. The grades of everything (coal (less anthracite more brown) , oil (less sweet more sour) , copper, uranium etc) have been getting worse since humans thought of something to do with them. The total amount of copper on Earth is around 1014 tons in the top kilometer of Earth's crust, which is about 5 million years' worth at the current rate of extraction. The only reason they don‘t find more deposits is because they aren‘t motivated at current prices.

Every time I have to ask the same question: What makes this moment special? People could have, and HAVE made, the exact same argument for the last 200 years at least. They were all wrong. You have your theory/intimate conviction that says ‚at some point we‘ll run out‘ on one side, and on the other you have empiric proof of your ideological forefathers being wrong every single time. We're observing a physical phenomenon, and you have a theory that sounds convincing but always fails , while I can predict exactly what happens - shouldn't you give up at some point?

Let me try and lay it out how I see it. The extraction of every nonrenewable resource is defined by a tailed Gaussian curve, where the easy to harvest resources are mined/harvested first. The really easy sources of fossil fuels and minerals were harvested a long time ago because they didn't require large expenditures of energy. High grade ore and high-pressure oil deposits are no longer readily discovered as those have been exploited and exhausted by lower tech civilizations (the Romans for example exhausted much of the easy to access mineral resources of Europe). With better technology lower grade sources of these resources can be accessed, but these usually require more of an input of energy. To go from PA or Texas gushers to fracking for example requires a higher input of energy because you need to pump water into rock at high pressure to get the oil out, refine it more, etc. Same with copper and other minerals: more energy is required to get copper out of lower grade ores than higher grade ores.

This would not be a problem if we had unlimited energy. We literally could filter seawater to get the copper we need. The problem is that we are still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for pretty much all our energy, and they have been getting more expensive to extract since about 1970 due to declines in easy to access oil/coalfields. You can see this in the behavior of oil prices: steady if declining real price until 1970, and then consistent if ragged increase in price since then. This increase in the cost of energy is one reason why mining companies don't want to invest in exploration: the energy cost of extraction is continuing to rise, meaning any new mine with low ore grades may not be worth the investment because of associated high-energy costs.

To answer your last question: I don't think now is special. I think we've been in a slow decline since the 1970s. Real assets (houses, cars, most real foods) have had a real increase in price over the last 50 years, reflecting a real chipping away at living standards here in the west. I think this reflects increasing costs of energy, the fundamental basis for human society. Of course there are other explanations for this phenomena on the forum, many of which may contribute as well. But I think energy is primary. The "peak" I think will merely be the point where it gets difficult to deny this.

Of course if we successfully invent fusion power, I will be wrong about this. Then we can access effectively unlimited materials here on earth. In that case pollution will be a more limiting factor, which we can theoretically solve with unlimited energy as well.

I don't know man, I think my way of looking at the world has pretty good predictive value. My copper futures outperformed the S&P500 this year. I also would predict real global increases in the cost of material goods: which also has happened over the last 50 years, with notable exceptions in electronics. In addition, the increased energy expenditure required to get these resources is having terrible effects on the biosphere: global warming, ocean acidification, and loss of wild animal biomass. All of these graphs are going in the direction that my view of the world would predict.

Of course if we invent fusion this all could be moot, but even then, given the history of how human society has dealt with increased energy availability, its doesn't seem likely to me that we would actually solve our ecological problems.

Real assets (houses, cars, most real foods) have had a real increase in price over the last 50 years, reflecting a real chipping away at living standards here in the west.

Houses are more expensive (in some countries due to government policy aiming to secure this outcome as part of retirement planning for boomers), the food thing is going to be a goalpost moving exercise, but you're simply wrong about cars. Median nominal earnings growth has vastly outstripped growth in car prices for decades.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1P71E

This is just throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks. The (also false) ecological destruction argument is entirely separate. If we run out of energy and resources, the ‚destruction‘ will cease.

Fusion? What about fission? We already have hundreds of years of proven uranium reserves, and it‘s a small part of nuclear energy generation cost.

According to your EROEI math, the romans, and then the 19th century english, were richer than we are, since they had access to high-grade resources they could mine for less energy.

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Line can't go on forever. It is trivial to check. The most an empire could grow starting from now at 5% per year is 1000 years give or take.

The biggest thing I can think of would be my beliefs that were involved into me going back to the Christian faith, I guess. I was left at an impasse for a long time as I figured out what to believe, having concluded that there must be an uncaused cause at the beginning of the universe, and that this cause could reasonably be called "God". That wasn't very useful though, because it didn't tell me much about the nature of this deity that set everything into motion. So I was at an impasse.

Eventually, I was reflecting on a couple of experiences that my dad had shared with me which seemed to be clear evidence that the god he believed in (the Christian god) was real and made himself available to us. One time, he said that when he was internally despairing about his life and asking God why he still had to endure its trials and tribulations, time came to a complete stop (from his perspective) and he heard the voice of God clearly say "you're here for [my mom]". On another occasion, he said he was doing a reading at his church, and when he looked up he saw the loft above the congregation filled with angels. I thought about these things, and concluded that I believe these two points to be true:

  1. My dad was telling the honest truth of his experiences. He might be mistaken, of course, and he might joke around about other topics, but he would never outright lie (nor joke about something this serious to him).
  2. He was not hallucinating or otherwise imagining these experiences he had. The way he tells them, they were too vivid to be anything other than real.

Taken together, these two things logically mean that my dad must have truly experienced the things he did (cue CS Lewis: "if she's not mad, and she's not lying, then logically she must be telling the truth!"). Which quite neatly solved the dilemma I was having with trying to determine what I thought the nature of God was. My dad is a Christian, and his god is real, therefore God must be like the Christian god (though I can't rule out other views of God as being inaccurate). Based on that I started pursuing the Christian faith again. Needless to say these beliefs I have about my dad and his experiences are pretty damn load bearing. I have since found other reasons to believe in my faith, but nothing quite so stark and compelling* as what I outlined here, so it would be quite a crisis for my worldview if someone were to prove those things wrong.

* Compelling to me. I realize that to someone who doesn't know my dad, these experiences he had have absolutely no evidential value, which is why I have never tried to use them to persuade someone else to believe (nor do I plan to).

Very interesting.

Me I had almost the opposite course. I kinda left the church as a result of:

A) Seeing my fellow 'christians' make absolute messes of their lives and generally ignore biblical teachings when they were inconvenient (these two facts were probably related)

B) Never having one of those "encounter with God" moments despite being very, very open to receiving one. My inherent skepticism grew simply because it was hard to feel God's intervention in my life when I didn't seem to be getting any noticeable input from 'beyond' baseline reality. It sure seemed like what you see is what you get, and all your decisionmaking is almost entirely local to your brain, aside from the bare handful of things we haven't explained.

And I'm not a fan of the "God of the gaps" approach to faith.

I had experiences which could be described as that "still, small voice" talking to me and guiding decisions, but that was easily explained as my internal dialogue.

Another factor was engaging in 'sinful' activities but seeing that this didn't immediately result in my life combusting and didn't lead me down a path to more grievous sins. Turns out I just have a solid amount of discipline and self-control just inherently.

But over time, as you notice, there's still a need for some 'initial cause' to this whole universe. Science isn't getting us any closer to explaining it, and ultimately having some kind of God behind the scenes is still a completely viable possibility, even if atheism is the 'rational' choice. And if you gotta choose one God to be behind the scenes, the Christian God does appear as the leading contender.

Still haven't had my own personal 'miracle' to restore my faith, but it also seems like rational atheism has gone and blown itself up (Effective Altruism was an interesting fad, wasn't it?), and the huge irony is there are actually good secular reasons for accepting religious teachings. If they've survived this long, they must be adaptive!!!

Yeah, I think your complaints (perhaps the wrong word but hopefully you know what I mean) are quite valid. In fairness on the first, a good church will never pretend that its members are perfect or anything, but many Christians possess a level of self righteousness and hypocrisy that is truly galling. And I certainly understand the frustration of feeling as though God is just leaving you to do your own thing, rather than being a friend who actually helps you in your life. I myself have never had a direct experience with the divine, though I have (since returning to the faith) had things happen that I find difficult to explain by way of anything other than "God must have helped me out there".

But my experiences (such as they are) and the ones I related from my dad ultimately aren't proof, which is something I don't expect I'll ever get. It seems like God, for whatever reason, never really reveals himself to people so strongly that any reasonable person would believe that he must be at work. Lots of people (smarter people than I) have tried to explain why, so I doubt I can add anything of value to that discussion, except to agree that it does seem to be true regardless of what the reasons might be. I think that this is why faith tends to be of the "God of the gaps" nature which you find unsatisfying (and I can't blame you): it seems like God always requires people to take some leap of faith from "this seems true but I can't prove it" to "I'm going to believe in it anyway".

For what it's worth, I would say that the struggle (my own journey of faith took me something like 10-12 years with insights coming only occasionally), does seem worth it in hindsight. It sucked at the time. But having gone through it, I was able to arrive at a position which I feel much more strongly certain of than if a mysterious stranger had appeared to give me the answers. I hope that it will be the same for you, if it isn't already - not per se that you will come back to the faith, but that whatever answer you do arrive/have arrived at feels right to you because you came by it as the result of trying really hard to seek the truth.

It seems like God, for whatever reason, never really reveals himself to people so strongly that any reasonable person would believe that he must be at work.

Yes, I suspect that he works in 'mysterious ways' in the sense that his intervention might just seem like a literal one-in-a-billion chance that happens to fall your way, and the entire situation works out for your benefit, even if there completely non-divine explanations.

Me, I like solid cause-effect relationships. So it'd be really nice to have an experience where I ardently pray for [outcome], and then see [outcome] occur without my direct intervention. I've had a lot of 'experimental' results where the outcome of the situation appears completely uncorrelated with whether I prayed for it or not. Obviously there could be greater plans at work that I don't see.

People are terrible, a person can be great.

People will do the right thing after first exhausting every other available option.

The stock market is completely divorced from productivity, profit, market share and consumer satisfaction.

For all the good the internet has done, many load bearing systems in society were not prepared for the effects of globalism and the information superhighway, and we have been suffering from the network effects and scale effects of the internet ever since.

Racism is a form of bias, and bias is impossible to truly eliminate as long as differences exist. It can be mitigated, but never truly removed.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes. People want to think in binary, they want absolute X and absolute Y, hard reality, a right answer and a wrong answer they can die on a hill over. Unfortunately, when the binary solution doesn't work, people lose their minds.

Any system of government works under a certain amount of people. I am uncertain as to the exact number but it's probably lower than Dunbar's.

Societal paradigms and dominant modes of thought take hold because they advantage the people, not because they are correct.

Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity; however, JJ's razor applies. If you can't tell the difference, what does it matter?

Sadly, Porn is the most important TLP idea, even more than narcissism, and it explains modern consumerist hyperculture. We are all buying or consuming facsimiles of things to approximate or satiate the need for the thing we actually want, and numbing that need sufficiently is one of the great triumphs and tragedies of modern civilization.

Do you think Sadly, Porn is worth reading in its totality?

I would recommend reading Scott's and Rob Henderson's reviews of it, and if it piques your interest*, give it a try. But fair warning: it's probably the single most impenetrable book I've ever read in my life.

*Which is to say, if you feel personally attacked.

Absolutely the hell not - he wrote it as a didactic exercise that also functions as part of his "if you're reading it, it's for you" idea. If you already get his ideas, there's not much new there. Only someone who is interested in self-flagellation as the sort of person who looks critically at themselves would read such a book; better to better yourself through doing the actual work.

We are all buying or consuming facsimiles of things to approximate or satiate the need for the thing we actually want, and numbing that need sufficiently is one of the great triumphs and tragedies of modern civilization.

Oof.

Yeah. Even as I actively try to avoid accepting the facsimile and pursue the authentic article, I find that every nudge and unyielding social pressure is driving towards the commodified artificial version as the core urges go unsated and the avenues that will reliably lead to the desired outcome seem shut down (unless you can buy your way through).

Well, it's also because genuinely trying and pursuing and then failing to get it is cringe.

And better to die cool than live cringe.

That really only matters if your attempts are broadcast to the world/your larger social group. Which for Gen Z, many times they are.

Also I'm now at the point in my life (maybe an age thing) where I simply do not feel significant 'shame' over attempting to do things authentically, without hiding behind a veneer of irony or detachment.

You might have an insight there as to why people are completely unable to break out of their 'self-imposed' equilibrium. Gooning away to an OF model or, heaven forbid, an AI girlfriend is a private act that nobody will judge you for since it isn't broadcast. But hoo boy, approaching a real woman entails risk, and even if you acquire a woman you're still going to have to be on your best game since she can d0 all kinds of things to try and embarrass you if things sour.

The issue is that in the modern era being cringe is directly deleterious to your social and even financial circumstances. Nobody wants to associate with people who are cringe, and when connections are pretty much the best and most reliable way to get a job these days or move upwards socially or financially, you get what you incentivize. Especially when we live on a planet of cops.

Again, it's not even really an age thing; if I was an African warlord I would not give a single fig about being cringe as long as I got to shoot everyone who saw. It's about security and power, both things for which demand greatly exceeds supply.

From as long as I can remember, the true essence of cringe is being un-self aware of how your behavior is perceived, and breaking social norms whilst lacking the social capital to get away with it. The larger the audience, the worse the transgression/the greater the social capital required to overcome it.

So one defense is to have every action and phrase dipped in layers of irony so if something does run afoul of a social norm you can plausibly claim to be in on the joke, and thus almost no act or word can ever have full sincerity behind it since now its actually harder to tell what the hell the norms are if nobody can take them seriously. Just, you know, try to remember which level of irony you're on.

Millenials I think invented this particular approach, but in interacting with Gen Z, I conclude that they seem to have totalized it.

The other approach is to be at least partly aware of your behavior, but demonstrate that you simply do not care, nor take the situation seriously, and effectively 'no sell' any shame in the situation.

These are both exhausting to maintain, if you ask me.

Also I'm now at the point in my life (maybe an age thing) where I simply do not feel significant 'shame' over attempting to do things authentically.

Based. And I do think it's an age thing. Perhaps it's because as you get older you feel secure in your social circumstances (you have found your people, you know they aren't going to ditch you even if you make a momentary fool of yourself), but either way it seems to come with age. Or as CS Lewis put it: "When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly."

There's absolutely a lot of the "I'm secure now and to some extent I can either enforce or flout social norms because I have higher status relative to others."

I also worked through a lot of my remaining insecurities in the wake of my big breakup.

I've also mastered the art of 'doubling down' when you do something cringey... just roll with it man. As long as nobody is hurt or seriously offended you can make something funny or cool just by recovering smoothly.

Tools that would have been useful to me in my twenties, but back then I wasn't even self-aware enough to know when I should feel shame, so...

Tools that would have been useful to me in my twenties

This is gesturing towards a Sunday question I've been thinking about, which is how many Xers/millennials had Silent/Boomer same-sex parents that they thought were in any way useful in providing advice in the realm of sex/dating/marriage. It seems like a lot of guys I know (I know far less about women's opinions on this issue) had to reinvent the wheel during their 20s and even into their 30s on those topics, and there seems to be a strong overlap with a not-very-helpful-with-advice Silent/Boomer father.

I sure did.

My parents were high-school sweethearts, who divorced when I turned 18, which meant my conception of idealized romance was suddenly rugpulled out from under me, and I didn't have any other good models to latch onto. And then MY high school sweetheart broke it off with me the first semester of college, which spiraled me pretty hard thereafter.

And the next ten years was exactly that, me trying to reinvent the wheel... WHILE living in a world where the standard romantic playbook was actively being destroyed.

I can't even blame my dad, he did find love afterwards, eventually, but he didn't have the experience needed to help me navigate the world I found myself in.

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Any system of government works under a certain amount of people. I am uncertain as to the exact number but it's probably lower than Dunbar's.

Interesting, I'd think that any system of government works at a Dunbar number or lower. It more likely that each system of government has a scaling factor for a threshold that after which it fails or becomes inefficient leading to failure.

Incentives pretty reliably shape outcomes. There aren't just economic incentives, however.

Politics that ignore human nature and rely on blaming their opponents for spiteful non-compliance when the incentives aren't in place for the policies' success, are doomed to fail.

My load bearing beliefs are

  • Humans are mostly good.
  • Conspiracies are very hard to pull off, and
  • bad outcomes are almost always better explained by incompetence.
  • Intelligence is increasing and peace and good behavior emerge from intelligent actors even if they only want to selfishly maximize their own utils

Come at me bro

Intelligence is increasing

If you look at buildings from 200 years ago, the door frames are much lower, because people were much shorter back then. All of those short people passed on their genes to descendants who were much taller than they were. The genes themselves didn't change, but because their descendants grew up in a caloric- and nutrient-rich environment, they were better equipped to fulfil their maximum height potential as encoded in their genes than their ancestors were.

Conceivably the Flynn effect could be partly explicable by a similar dynamic, as modern people have a much better understanding of the importance of early childhood nutrition and so on than our ancestors did. But other than that, I'm sceptical of the idea that intelligence is increasing over time. In point of fact our society seems profoundly dysgenic in numerous ways. Fertility rates are in freefall across much of the West, and the only solution suggested by elites is to import millions of people from cultures in which intergenerational cousin marriage is the rule rather than the exception.

Capitalism tends to produce more efficient/powerful/good outcomes than Socialism.

I can imagine a world filled with rational and/or kind-hearted beings who were able to cooperate together efficiently under a socialist system and share things with a lot less deadweight loss than a capitalist system where people keep trying to exploit each other for profit. I just don't think that's the world we live in, I don't think that's the kind of species we are. Capitalism's greatest strength is its robustness. It can take selfishness and wastefulness and corruption and theft and stupidity, and it automatically pushes back and has individual pieces break without destroying the greater structure, so it can evolve and become stronger. Negative feedback loops instead of positive feedback. Socialism allows corruption to fester and grow like a cancer. At least, that's the world I think we live in. If that were to not be the case and whatever excuses socialists make about why it's always failed were actually true it would change a lot of my beliefs about economics, politics, and human nature.

Capitalism tends to produce more efficient/powerful/good outcomes than Socialism.

This is true for me too, but I openly invite people to attack and disprove it. Every year that goes by without someone answering The Economic Calculation Problem I get more certainty that Socialism is impossible in a technical sense at any scale above, like, small village. Every solution they've brought up is either a massive special pleading ("human nature doesn't apply to THIS scenario") or they throw in the towel and accept some market-based solutions to make it work.

And yeah, I believe that EVEN IF you had that perfectly 'altruistic' species (assuming it could survive in the galaxy) because they'd still need inbuilt feedback mechanisms that work in a decentralized way to guide their distribution of resources.

The best objections to Capitalism as it is currently practiced are ones that point out the Molochian Nature of It where it can eat up things you genuinely care about either in the name of pure survival or of maximizing some value nobody really wants maximized but is easier for people to agree upon.

I would still consider a scenario that's like 90% socialist with 10% capitalist hack to be socialist, just like I'd consider a scenario that's 90% capitalist with 10% socialist hack (like universal healthcare) to be capitalist. I'd still consider a long-term successful example of that to be pretty surprising.

Unless it's like post-singularity with some genius AI overlord who can simultaneously solve the economy, efficiently produce tons of resources, and doesn't need much human labor so can just distribute them without much concern for proper incentive structures. But I'd expect such an AI to also be able to solve capitalism's problems and create libertarian capitalist utopia too. For now, when dealing with humans, you need the signalling mechanisms.

I think it's interesting that the last two decades have shown that you don't really need post-singularity AI. Because there has been a surprising explosion in vertical integration, all the most successful growth stories of the 21st century - both on the west and in China - don't really use market forces for their supply chains all that much. It's not quite a "cybernetic planned economy" just yet, but getting halfway there has looked pretty straight forward from the outside.

Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.

I think they all discovered that markets are very efficient, but only propagating price information is not enough for the next level of business/product execution. If you do the critical value ads inhouse, you can transmit so much addition information, resulting in significantly more control, you easily outcompete anybody just relying on competition eventually bringing prices down on commodities.

Also, this remarkable transition was mostly achieved with data networks, standard ERP software and hiring enough talent. I don't think anybody know yet how large you can make this vertically integrated blob (although Amazon and BYD are certainly trying) before you run afoul of the problems that brought down all other planned economies. If AI ever actually ends up with a reliable world model, it would certainly be extremely useful for this kind of planning, potentially pushing the size of the blob up another order of magnitude.

And sure, on actual commodity inputs and on final outputs, markets still rule supreme. Still, it's a surprising underperformance of markets vs planned economies in my book.

Tesla and Space X (both have more than 80% of the value creation inhouse) , Amazon (especially with the rise of Amazon Essentials), Apple, Netflix, BYD, Xiaomi, ect.

I don't think this list particularly works apart from the Musk companies. Amazon is a retailer - Amazon Essentials exist, but is <1% of my family's Amazon spend and I don't think I am an outlier. Apple use contract manufacturers. Most of what I streamed on Netflix when I had a subscription was not Netflix original content, which mostly sucks. I can't comment about BYD and Xiaomi specifically, but one thing everyone who writes about the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem says is how much of its edge comes from the ability to buy intermediate inputs in a friction-free way because someone else is making them just down the road, and is happy to take on a rush order.

That said, "big companies are internal planned economies and their existence partially refutes the socialist calculation argument" is old hat - Coase wrote The Nature of the Firm in 1937 and Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State in 1967.

Amazon is a retailer - Amazon Essentials exist, but is <1% of my family's Amazon spend

Apparently it's one of the very few commodity products on there that actually has any margin. If this is true, I'll expect Amazon to eventually displace the competition, they are very experienced in the practice...

Then there's the publishing, their on demand book printing, the ebook business. And Amazon is highly vertically integrated even outside of those two, though. The data centers, the software in them, the warehouses, the trucks, ect. The market cannot offer them a competing product on any of those, although they are essentially commodities that other, similar business still get on the market.

Apple is similar. They use contractors on the low margin stuff and the things they absolutely cannot do themselves (SOTA chip fab), but keep the rest of the value add for themselves, and use the additional control that gets them to deliver a superior product directly to their own stores.

I don't understand Netflix either, but that might just be taste. Apparently their slop gets views - obligatory views at that, keeping their audience captive - and thus makes money. Make they are just lying about their metrics. But that would probably be fraud, I don't know. Maybe the average normie really forgets what he's subscribed to.

I know the idea is old, it's the only attack on efficient markets that makes sense. And there were vertically integrated business empires before, but never this many, this successful and seemingly this necessary to compete on product.

One thing that actually blew my mind when I read it (I think it was in here?) was the idea that Amazon has essentially created "Universal Basic Employment" in the sense that virtually ANYONE can pick up a job in an Amazon Warehouse or as a delivery driver if they are otherwise out of work, anywhere in the country that Amazon exists... so virtually everywhere.

You don't need a degree to move boxes around, you don't need people skills, you probably don't even have to be completely literate. You can move to an area completely fresh and pick up the job while you search for something better.

I literally searched my local area just now and there's an opening for "Warehouse Associate" clearly stating "NO EXPERIENCE NEEDED, NO DEGREE, PART TIME OR FULL TIME, DENTAL AND HEALTH INSURANCE." Paying, allegedly $15-$18 an hour.

So there's pretty much zero excuse to ever be unemployed if you are able-bodied. Add on the Gig economy to fill in any cracks.

So there's pretty much zero excuse to ever be unemployed if you are able-bodied.

This is Problematic as a form of UBE since it’s physically ableist.

There’s also disparate impact implications in its mental ableism: the rugged individualism and Protestant work ethic in requiring people to work for pay; the focus on punctuality, rigid schedules, and the commoditization of time. As summarized by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, these are aspects and assumptions of white culture that oppress People of Color.

Shower thought:

Is there a contradiction between the typical progressive belief in blank slateism and progressive women's (and some men's) choosiness in who to partner up and have babies with? If any baby can be nurtured and educated into becoming an astronaut or [insert high status white collar profession], then what's the big deal about getting DNA from a sub-optimal mate?

I've said it before: women seeking sperm donors transform into hard eugenicists. It certainly a revealed preference of some sort.

"Transform" implies change. I think it is more accurate to say that it is simply more socially acceptable to be honest about such feelings with sperm donation and thus they are more open about it in that case.

Although anecdote from people who work in the for-profit fertility industry is that they select on height a lot more strongly than on IQ or other potentially eugenic qualities.

Which is not the way, as a tall guy. There‘s no advantage to greater height on a societal scale. We have to nip this red queen gigantism in the womb before we grow to monstrous heights like the dinosaurs, and collapse under our own weight like their broiler chicken sons. The easy and practical solution would be to sterilize the women who come to the fertility clinic and select tall embryos. That way, by selecting for preferences, selection squared so to speak, we can multiply our effect on the genome.

I wouldn‘t do that, of course. But I find the battle lines drawn around eugenicism funny. The ‚ethical‘ crowd, as well as the religious, oppose eugenicism for ‚artificial‘ ‚messing with nature/god‘s plan‘. The eugenicists claimed nature‘s plan was being messed with by ‚unnatural‘ welfare, and so wanted to ‚help evolution along‘, the way it was before modernity and medicine fucked up nature‘s plan. In other words, they‘re in a naturalistic fallacy competition. I don‘t care about nature‘s plan, it‘s blind and indifferent to human flourishing.

As a tall guy (though not that tall, 6 foot 1.5 inches), why is there no advantage to greater height? Being tall is pretty cool.

I'm pretty much the same height, but not sure what's my advantage here. I feel like Red Stapler Milton a bit - "I was told there would be an advantage?" I am not complaining, I am just curious what's the advantage. Maybe I am just blind to it, fish/water situation?

I mean I might have some advantage in physical fight but haven't been in one since my teen years. And sure, my wife can ask me to take stuff from the top shelf and I can do it without using a footstool. But I am pretty sure she'd be ok with me even if I had to use one. And I know many people who are shorter than me happily married.

Individually, yes. By comparison to other humans. Not for society. We'd all be better off if humans were half as tall.

Why, though? Tall people have more potential to build more muscle mass. This helps them load equipment or fight off wildlife.

We have machines for that. Breeding ourselves into a giant troll that can beat up a gorilla is not an efficient use of our resources. We need to get to the stars. Carrying around all that muscle consumes far too many precious calories here on earth, so imagine trying to lift that deadweight out of earth's gravity. Plus it's unhealthy, mass causes cancer.

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While there might be some sexual selection for male height going on, I doubt it’s gonna be strong enough to wind up with health problems.

Also height is pretty easy to lie about.

Also height is pretty easy to lie about.

My conspiracy theory as to why there are more men in the trades than women is that women constantly hear a bunch of false measurements, so aren't able to eyeball it (after all, if you always hear that 2.5" is actually 6", and 5'8" is actually 6', then how are you going to place nails every 8")?

More men are in the trades due to the same work-life balance and temperament issues that dictate gender ratios everywhere, with a side of upper body strength. Most men can't easily tell the difference between 5'10 and 6' either. You see plenty of women working parts houses supplying the trades- less lucrative, but more predictable hours and much more predictable, pleasant work environments.

There's a joke in the trades- a little boy has school cancelled, so his mom tells him to go watch the construction site across the street. He comes home for lunch and his mom asks him, 'so, did you learn anything?' He says, yes, I learnt how to hang a door. She says, 'how do you do that?', and he says 'well, you shove that bitch in their, and if it don't fit you shave two cunt hairs off and shove it back in...' and horrified, she tells him to go to his room. When dad gets home, she tells him to go upstairs and ask his son what he learned that day. 'So, son, what did you learn today?' 'Well, I learnt how to hang a door' 'Oh really, how do you hang a door' 'well you shove that bitch in their, and if it don't fit you shave two cunt hairs off and try again' and dad says, 'Go get me a switch' to which he says 'Fuck you, that's the electrician's job'.

Doing that for sixty hours a week is how you get started in the trades. Few women make it past this filter.

Most men can't easily tell the difference between 5'10 and 6' either.

To be fair, most people can put height in about 5 bins -- way taller, a little taller, same height, a little shorter, and really short -- compared to themselves.

Just that to the average woman, "way taller" covers a lot of ground. (and "a little bit taller" from what I hear is mostly fine)

To be fair, mine was supposed to be a joke about how many men exaggerate their - let's call it "physical attributes" - upwards.

Is there a contradiction between the typical progressive belief in blank slateism and progressive women's (and some men's) choosiness in who to partner up and have babies with?

It's just standard issue compartmentalization. Most progressives understand that kids are going to take from their parents. They know what genetics is. It's just such an obvious, omnipresent thing that it requires staggering levels of ideological malware to start disputing that white people have white kids, or that smart people have smart kids.

The problem arises when one is offered the opportunity to reason about how that dynamic might play out over large populations and large spans of time. In that case, the typical response is to just turn it off.

I don't think there are a lot of actual genetics deniers out there who don't believe in the heritability of DNA from parents to children. What gets strawmanned or parodied as "blank-slatism" is either a denial that there is a strong race/class correlation because we aren't sorting efficiently enough as a society, or a quibble about what percentage chances are involved. There's a tension between stated beliefs and revealed preferences, much like choosing schools and neighborhoods, but one can find one's way around it pretty easily.

Good substack article on the weakness of twin studies here, the particular portion I think is relevant to this question (check the article for the scatter plots):

Heritability is, by construction, a population-level aggregate. Before it can inform policy-making (or even personal decision-making), it must be interpreted at the level of individuals. This is where things get interesting and counterintuitive. Let’s say, for example, that you are a genetically average person. How much does that affect your prospects? Surprisingly, at 30%, it’s as if your genes didn’t matter at all. With an average potential, you still have a decent chance of landing at the top or bottom of the IQ distribution. Actually, in this specific random sample, one of three smartest people around (the top 0.3%) happens to have an almost exactly average genetic make-up, and the fourth dumbest person has a slightly above-average potential. At 50%, being genetically average starts to limit your optionality, but the spread remains massive. Had you been marginally luckier—say, in the top third for genetic potential—you’d still have a shot at becoming one of the smartest people around. At 80%, though, your optionality has mostly vanished. It’s still possible to move a notch upward or downward, but the game is mostly over. In this world, geniuses are born, not made.

Most debates aren't between genetics deniers who think that there is zero correlation between parents and children and feudal pedigree enthusiasts who assume that children are clones of their parents. It's a debate between people who think there's a 30% correlation and people who think there's an 80% correlation. And further, I think most of the debate between blank slatists and genetic determinists is a debate is between people who agree that the correlation is 50% but disagree about whether society is overrating or underrating that correlation. A 30% correlation is still a chance that one wants to take to benefit ones children, but it might not be a chance that you think society should shut doors against. Most people would acknowledge that there is a correlations between IQ and wealth and between parent IQ and children IQ, people still wring their hands about the fate of coal towns in Appalachia.

There's also a simple element: I don't get along with dumb people. Even if I thought having kids with a dumb girl wouldn't lead to dumb children, I wouldn't get along with the dumb girl anyway.

It's a debate between people who think there's a 30% correlation and people who think there's an 80% correlation.

I don't think that situation around this could be properly called "debate", when "good link" you posted uses "pseudoscientific" to label his opponent. Also, many people on the blank slatist side would say "this 30% is on a population level and confounded by population stratification, true causal is about 8-15%".

Median argument on public policy assumes there's 0% correlation. Even if a person agrees on paper that h2 is 30%, they are usually fiercely opposed towards updating public policy to aknowledge these 30%, so why do you think "genetics denier" is inappropriate?

I don't think there are a lot of actual genetics deniers out there who don't believe in the heritability of DNA from parents to children.

Belief in "DNA" being transmitted from parents to children != Belief in heritability of traits like cognitive ability.

I do think there are a lot of people, perhaps the majority of Western whites, who believe in some vague sense that parents pass something called "DNA" (might as well be called Feynman's "wakalix" from their standpoint) along to their children and this can lead to children having similar skin tone and hair color as their parents. However, this belief quickly starts to break down as we move toward phenotypes like cognitive ability akin to the "Phoebe Teaching Joey" meme, especially in formalized and generalized form (such as the concept of the heritability of cognitive ability).

It's a debate between people who think there's a 30% correlation and people who think there's an 80% correlation.

Just because the author of that article set his simulations using figures of 30%, 50%, and 80% doesn't mean those figures are equally supported by the evidence, or if 80% is even the upper bound for the heritability of adulthood IQ. See here, for example, where estimates of adulthood IQ heritability exceed 80% and even 85%. Poor Shared Environment ("nurture") down there hugging the x-axis of 0.

Plus, the 30%, 50%, and 80% are R-sqs, not correlations; the respective correlations are 0.55, 0.71, and 0.89.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a genetically average person. How much does that affect your prospects? Surprisingly, at 30%, it’s as if your genes didn’t matter at all. With an average potential, you still have a decent chance of landing at the top or bottom of the IQ distribution.

Supposing you're an average person is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, and the "as if" is misleadingly handwavy.

I quickly replicated his 30% heritability simulation but with 1 million individuals, dividing the population into 20. Under the 30% scenario, if you're in the middle decile (ventiles 10 & 11) of genotypic IQ ("genes"), you have about twice the chance of being in the middle decile of phenotypic IQ than the top decile (ventiles 19 & 20). So it's not exactly the coinflip the author implies, although I suppose "decent chance" might be sufficiently vague as a CYA.

If you were instead in the bottom decile of genotypic IQ (ventiles 1 & 2), you'd have about a 6x greater chance of being in the bottom decile of phenotypic IQ than in the middle decile. Furthermore, you'd have over a 70x greater chance of being in the bottom decile than top decile of phenotypic IQ. Given the symmetry, same deal for the top decile of genotypic IQ with respect to the middle and bottom deciles of phenotypic IQ. Note that there are the same number of people in the bottom decile of genotypic IQ as there are in the middle decile, and the top decile as there are in the middle decile.

So even under the 30% scenario, genotypic IQ still matters plenty—much less the 50% or heaven forbid, 80% scenario.

Actually, in this specific random sample, one of three smartest people around (the top 0.3%) happens to have an almost exactly average genetic make-up, and the fourth dumbest person has a slightly above-average potential.

This is a type of base rate adjacent fallacy. The pool of people with average or below genotypic IQ is literally over 150x that of those in the top 0.3%, 50x those in the top 1%, etc. They get a lot more cracks at making it into the Top [X] of phenotypic IQ rank. Kind of like how, taking listed heights at their word (NBA players were born in the darkness of height frauding; men doing online dating merely adopted it), there appears to be a similar number of men between 6'0" and 6'3" and men between 7'0" and 7'3" in the NBA. It could be that height doesn't matter that much for basketball—or perhaps it could be because there are hundreds of thousands times more men in the former group than the latter group.

At 80%, though, your optionality has mostly vanished. It’s still possible to move a notch upward or downward, but the game is mostly over. In this world, geniuses are born, not made.

Playing with dynamite there when some studies have indeed suggested the upper bound could be well above 80%. The author does seem genuine; as he mentioned, he penned a book claiming that mathematical genius is a myth (for which in his article he provided an Amazon link). Else I'd suspect he was writing in a Straussian manner pretending to be a centrist "both-sides"ing but was actually a Chud hereditarian playing dumb, or leaving low hanging fruit engagement bait like how Reddit posts will make intentional typos or misspellings in their titles (a modern innovation in Cunningham's Law).

Just because the author of that article set his simulations using figures of 30%, 50%, and 80% doesn't mean those figures are equally supported by the evidence

Sure, it doesn't imply anything, but your one twin study from 2002 doesn't either. There's a lot of debate on the issue, and the person who I respect the most (Alex Strudwick Young)'s best guess iirc is around 50%.

This is a type of base rate adjacent fallacy. The pool of people with average or below genotypic IQ is literally over 150x that of those in the top 0.3%, 50x those in the top 1%, etc. They get a lot more cracks at making it into the Top [X] of phenotypic IQ rank. Kind of like how, taking listed heights at their word (NBA players were born in the darkness of height frauding; men doing online dating merely adopted it), there appears to be a similar number of men between 6'0" and 6'3" and men between 7'0" and 7'3" in the NBA. It could be that height doesn't matter that much for basketball—or perhaps it could be because there are hundreds of thousands times more men in the former group than the latter group.

Surely you agree that it is possible to both over or under rate the importance of height for a basketball player? Height is critically important for basketball, and a player is nearly always, ceteris paribus, better and more useful for a team if he as inch taller. But if you proposed trading Tyrese Maxey for Zach Edey, you'd be making a mistake.

There can bo societies that overrate the importance of genetic heritage, and societies that underrate it.

Surely you agree that it is possible to both over or under rate the importance of height for a basketball player? ...There can bo societies that overrate the importance of genetic heritage, and societies that underrate it.

I reject the attempt at reframing and equivocating via a hypothetical after the excerpt you selected—from an article you selected—turned out to be an own-goal on the initial point you were trying to make because you lacked understanding of what you were quoting.

A better question would not be whether there "can bo [sic]" societies that underrate or overrate the heritability of cognitive ability, but whether societies in the world we live in underrate or overrate the heritability of cognitive ability, insofar as they rate cognitive ability or heritability at all.

A partner with more resources can better nurture and educate their blank slate while a partner with less resources can't.

Not really, the alibi would be that partner choice matters from a nurture perspective since everyone knows your and your partner’s nurturing is the most important determinant in whether your child becomes an astronaut or [insert high status white collar profession], followed by Socioeconomic Factors (of which your partner also contributes). The Science has consistently suggested that heritability is the strongest driver of offspring outcomes in Western countries, but here it’s Bad Faith Science that must be wrong in some way.

The funnier epicycles come when trying to explain why women, including progressive women, opt for tall and smart sperm donors. To the extent explanations are even attempted, that is, as opposed to the subject being ignored or discourse being shutdown.

If they were just looking for a sperm donor you would have a point, but if they're looking for a partner that they spend time with they also have to factor in whether the father actually became an astronaut or not.

What are your favorite Christmas traditions? We always do oyster soup in the mornings, dirty Santa of course, and we like to sing carols. Nothing crazy but it’s home.

Meat and cheese plate on Christmas Eve. Old black and white Christmas movies. Card games with the kids. Recently, we started making homemade glühwein every year. 10/10 cozy, would recommend.

What are your favorite old Christmas movies? We like It's a Wonderful Life.

A Christmas Carol (1951), It's a Wonderful Life, and sometimes Miracle on 34th Street.

This year I've read 62 books (so far). I hope to read a few more before the new year, but it won't be more than 65. Quite a bit less than the 89 I read last year, but I think as @FiveHourMarathon has said, there are other things to do with one's time besides read. I didn't do as good of a job reflecting on these books as I did last year, so that's something to work on in the new year. 32 of these books were in English, 28 in Spanish and 2 in Italian. Some favorites below.

Best Fiction Book: Niccoló Rising by Dorothy Dunnett

You know it’s good when you find extra time to listen to it via audiobook: I’m not usually an audiobook person!

I’ve been wanting to read Dorothy Dunnett for a long time. One of my other favorite historical fiction writers, Guy Gavriel Kay, wrote a poem about her work that I connected when I was a teenager, and I found the fourth book in the Niccolò series in a used bookstore in England in 2023 and had been meaning to start the series ever since.

Niccolò rising follows the most unlikely of heroes, the dyers apprentice Claes, on the first stages of his meteoric rise from artisan to prominent businessman. Claes (who eventually comes to be known as Niccolò or Nicholas) is a genius who initially uses his intelligence to perform outrageous pranks in his home city of Bruges, but after a few chance encounters with two Scottish noblemen who are out for his blood, he decides to change his ways and use his mind to make his way in the world.

Dunnett really makes Bruges, Milan, and Geneva feel alive, and the research that must have went into this book is immense in scale. Certainly puts Kay, and every other historical fiction author I’ve read to shame.

Best Non-fiction Book: Mi pais inventado by Isabelle Allende

I've read a lot of Isabelle Allende's fiction, and I enjoyed this much more. Allende has an annoying habit of masking her ideology and philosophy behind characters and situations that make you feel like a villain for disagreeing with, despite those actions sometimes being very wrong. This book is much more honest and tells both Allende's personal story, of why she left Chile, and of the recent history of the country as she understands it.

Most Subversive Book: Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton

This book managed to do both the thriller and the critique of science, which I don't think I've seen done before. The info-dumps served both to show us how this crazy island works, and to be used as action-fodder in the second half of the book when the whole system starts breaking down. Crichton did a great job with the characters too: I found myself being really annoyed at John Hammond and Lexie, and wanting to spend more time with Dr. Grant and Ellie. Getting your reader to root for the protagonist is surprisingly hard to do in thrillers a lot of the time.

Although the prognosis about genetic engineering hasn't aged that well (turns out it's really hard to do genetically engineer Eukaryotes on a large scale), the general prognosis about the scientific worldview has not. The park largely fails because of human hubris and inability to recognize the interests of other beings (humans or not). The inciting incident is directly caused by John Hammond being a dick, but as the ending shows, even if the dramatic events of the novel hadn't occurred, the park was already out of control. Trying to fight against nature is like trying to drink the ocean with a spoon. You ain't going to win, and you'll probably get very wet.

Best Book with Philosophy Book Club: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals by Immanuel Kant

I had been thinking about Kant to some degree or another since 2019 because one of my college teammates and friends, Matt Kearney, was really into his philosophy. I watched a couple YouTube videos on him at the time (one about Kingdom of Heaven, which I still remember), and remember loving the idea of the categorical imperative, but not understanding the motivation behind it.

Reading this for philosophy book club helped to clarify the motivation for why Kant formulated the categorical imperative in the first place. Kant’s whole philosophy is really about moral freedom. This is not really freedom in the colloquial sense, because the categorical imperative is pretty restrictive, but freedom from particular life circumstances that may bias or impede your moral judgement. In order to be a truly moral law, according to Kant, a law has to be universal, which means it cannot be affected by interest that may come from particular circumstances.

I can’t say I really understood the whole chain of reasoning clearly, but I find this philosophy admirable in certain sense, but very foolish in another. It’s pretty impossible to live like Kant would want us to: reason is not the pure and unbiased master that Kant seems to think it is, and I also unfortunately think that a lot of morality is extremely contingent, and would be difficult to writer a moral law describing (a very Buddhist idea perhaps).

Best Book Originally Written in Spanish: El matrimonio de los peces rojos by Guadalupe Nettel

This is a collection of short stories where Nettel uses an animal to reflect the personal relationships of the principles characters. It's a pretty small collection, only 5 stories, all of which are good. My favorite was "guerra en los basureros" which is about a boy living with his higher-class uncle and aunt who starts to identify with the cockroaches the family is insistent on eradicating.

Best Reread: Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

This was my fourth re-read of this book: I’ve read it every year since 2021 except for 2022. I’m getting loads out of revisiting this book every year. Figures and battles are becoming a lot clearer in my mind, and I think I can start to talk about a lot of the issues of the time with nuance and perspective. McPherson tells a narrative history: focusing on the evolution of key players and key ideas in the struggle which made it easier for me to follow the course of the war. Of course I've had to use other resources to dig deeper into specific battles and theaters. There's also nothing here about the trans-Mississippi theater for example.

Best “Normie” Book: Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler

I picked this book up at the ‘Book Thing’ for free because the girl I was dating at the time recommended I read some Anne Tyler due to the fact that she sets her books in Baltimore, and I had said earlier I was starving for some fiction were set in this city in which I live that has such a negative reputation in fiction. Partially because I stopped seeing that girl, partially because this book is not my usual cup of tea, it took me nearly three months to finish this book. Searching for Caleb is a very slow book in which not much explicit plot really happens, but rather the family relations between the dysfunctional Pecks are explored in-depth. The plot which does happen is centered on the search for the eldest Peck’s younger brother Caleb, who ran away from Baltimore nearly fifty years ago, and the chaotic marriage of Justine and Duncan, who are cousins and both Pecks. I got what I wanted out of the book: an exploration of the Roland Park/JHU neighborhood of Baltimore as it was 50 years ago. In terms of theme, I got a bit more than I had hoped for as well. The advantage of Slice of Life is that we get to spend a lot of time with characters doing fairly normal things, without earth-shattering events that would tell us unrealistic things about their character. Much of the dsyfunction in the Peck family seems to stem from an inability to healthily grapple with change, but rather to run away at the first sign of difficulty. We see this quite literally in the character of Duncan, who can’t seem to stay put, causing his wife and daughter quite a bit of suffering. But the other Pecks suffer from this as well, the titular Caleb, but also the family as a whole, who by the novels end, seem to have retreated from the world, rather than confront the fact that they don’t live in the Belle Epoque anymore. Not sure if I will be reading more Anne Tyler but this was worth a read.

Most Disappointing Book: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson

I reviewed this book in-depth earlier in the year after giving it a chance based on rave review from many friends. While Sanderson does some things extremely well: really cool vistas, excellent character set-up, and consistent book delivery, I found this book to be both plodding and shallow which is impressive given its thousand plus pages. There’s a decent, entertaining story hiding underneath all this bloat and superficiality, but it’s just not worth the time investment. Which is a shame, as I was expecting another First Law or A Song of Ice and Fire out of this.

Worst Book: Persona normal by Benito Taibo

We read this for Refold Spanish book club, and I think everyone who read it (just Nick and myself I think) had the same problems with it. The book starts well enough: Sebastian is a young Mexican kid who uses heavy amounts of magical realism to cope with the death of his parents while he’s living with his uncle Paco. Paco encourages this, and the two develop a very close friendship. Unfortunately, despite the great premise, the book quickly devolves into literary wanking and moral scolding: Taibo feels the need to constantly remind us how many Spanish greats he’s read, and how liberalism is the only sensible way of seeing the world. I had an extremely hard time getting through the last hundred pages of this, especially as the last 50 pages contain chapters about the COVID pandemic, which have aged really badly.

Full book list

The Children of Men was on my to-read list for this year, but in the end I deliberately decided not to read it. What did you make of it? How did it compare to the film adaptation (assuming you've seen it)?

This is what I wrote about it

The Children of Men is a book about a world with ultra-low fertility, in other words, an extreme version of a world that we already live in. I had a friend's birthday party at the park a couple weeks ago (I'm getting close to 30 unfortunately), and I noticed that out of the 20 or so couples there, only one had a child. And I think this is becoming increasingly true over the whole entire world. Many of the downstream aspects of this fact also seem to be shared between James' novel and reality: the prevalence of pet parents, the lack of interest in the future of society (but a fixation on the past), and an obsession with health and safety at all costs.

Beyond the social commentary, the actual plot of the novel is a little lackluster. It centers on an Oxford Professor of History, Theo, who happens to be the cousin of the dictator of England. Theo lives a pretty unremarkable and utterly selfish life (even before the "Omega" where most men suddenly become infertile), until he becomes involved with a rebel group that wants to enact some minor changes in the governmental system, but more importantly, is sheltering a woman who happens to be pregnant. Theo's time with this group changes his inner and outer lives almost completely: it's amazing what hope for the future does to an individual, although I was left wondering at the end how much would really change in England after the birth of this child.

Having children is no basis for a moral system in of itself (this was Chesterton's critique of H.G. Wells), but it sure as hell makes constructing a society a hell of a lot easier. Unfortunately I think our world is headed to a future more similar to what James envisioned in the 1990s. People simply aren't having children: I'm guilty of this too: it's not like I'm close to being married even. And that, I think, means that this society isn't very long for this world.

The movie is pretty faithful but plays up the immigration (there are migrant laborers from poor countries to help with labor shortages) aspect a bit more for woke points.

On the book, I thought was just okay, 100/100 on premise and 45/100 on execution; the book has more fighting over control of the baby. For the movie, I watched it first was a teenager and absolutely loved it as an action flick, the scenes of urban warfare and the baby crying were powerful, 100/100. Watching the movie as an adult was an emotional gut punch; knowing couples who have struggles with fertility hits home in a raw way. The scenes on the prisoners I think predates our current migrant (fugees for refugees) crisis (but I probably wasn't paying attention) and I took more Holocaust vibes from it. The scene that sticks with me is an old Polish couple on the bus, and the man asking for food by meekly gesturing, and is ignored by all.

Thanks for the review. It's on my bookshelf, I might give it a go in the new year.

It's a quick read. Took me a few days.

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