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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2507 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Lately I've been reflecting and I think one of the biggest themes of change in my lifetime is the increasing efficiency of the world, and largely, it sucks. I think different people have described this in ways that suit their own worldview. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, Redditors might call this a form of late-stage capitalism, woke people would call a subset of this gentrification, I call it increasing efficiency. Let me give you some examples.

Airplane seats. Thirty years ago, a savvy traveler would know to get exit row seats, for the same price you got extra leg room. Over the course of my life airlines have recognized they had this little luxury and were effectively leaving money on the table by not charging more for it. Over my life they have created sub-designations like economy-plus to extract that little bit of value that they were leaving behind.

Some years ago I went to Kansas City for a conference and I was pretty excited to try the barbecue. I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense! If you were a world-class barbecue chef from Kansas City, why would you stay in KC where there isn't much money and the competition is fierce? Bring your talents to New York or San Francisco and you stand to get a much bigger payday and critical recognition that would never be available to you in KC. In some sense, having a great regional cuisine only available in Kansas City is just irrational. If people all over the world would like barbecue, why would it only be available in some relatively poor middle-America city? It should naturally be available the world-over in proportion to the money available in a locality. I think essentially the beautiful diversity of regional cuisines is an inefficiency or an irrationality waiting to be eaten up. At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants.. In the world I grew up in my dad would always tell me that you just couldn't get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly, that world doesn't exist anymore.

Or consider my hobby, daguerreotype collecting. When I look at older collections built in the 70s-90s, collections were more haphazard. People would have lots of mundane things I wouldn't look twice at today mixed in with some truly extraordinary things that would be impossible to buy now even if you were a museum. It seems like in the past, before the internet, price discoverability was basically zero, so with enough persistence if you were willing to hit the road and hit up dozens of antique and book stores you could turn up great things for nothing. Today with the availability of eBay, prices are more accurate and as a result collections are much more defined by how much money you have to spend. There is no shortcut, there isn't really a way for effort and luck to substitute for raw dollars today.

I think Tinder and OnlyFans are examples of the same phenomenon. Tinder, for women, is essentially a price discovery tool. If you are a gorgeous girl from some small town you no longer have to settle for some guy from your hometown. You can go on Tinder and find that there are 6'5" med students that do rock climbing a few miles away that are very much in-your-league. Regarding OnlyFans, if you were curious about ho'ing it up 40 years ago what was your option? Mail photos of yourself to Hustler and then potentially move out to LA for a giant question mark of a payday? Today if you are a moderately popular woman on social media you will have a very good idea of exactly how much money you would stand to make the very moment you choose to open an OF, which could be a very large amount indeed.. I think thirty years ago if you were some loser guy working at a small town gas station you could at least have the fantasy of getting the girl, because sometimes the world was just crazy and irrational and nonsensical things happened! Today I think that fantasy feels less realistic as desirable women have far more tools to get a sense of their true worth. Not to say the world is perfectly rational now, but it is more than it used to be. I think the popular SEC couples meme is celebrating exactly the wonderful irrationality of mixed-attractiveness couples that is increasingly rare to see.

I imagine if you are a guy that frequented strip clubs, hooters and escorts you probably view the glory days as behind you. 30 years ago you could probably find some seriously gorgeous girls with enough looking, today I assume any decent looking girl would be leaving those places for OF.

I would say gentrification is a specific subset of this same phenomenon. Essentially it is a majority/privileged/white group recognizing that a minority/marginalized group has something that is 'undervalued' and moving in to exploit that. This undervalued thing could be a food like oxtail, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, a hairstyle, whatever. Either way I think these are both cases of an inefficiency being ironed out, low-hanging fruit being plucked and the world becoming more rational and efficient. After all, shouldn't Williamsburg be expensive? It has a great view of Manhattan and is closer to the Financial District than lots of upscale areas on the Upper West/East Side. The fact that it was ever cheap was just an obvious inefficiency waiting to be corrected.

I think this kind of sucks because the theme across all of these is that the world becomes less irrational and by extension less hopeful. In the past you could dream of getting the girl, or finding that amazing daguerreotype in an antique shop, or coming home to a cheap meal of oxtail in your Williamsburg apartment with a great view of the Manhattan skyline. Today, as with collecting, the quality of your life is much more closely following the amount of money you have to throw around and opportunities for savvy or just plain lucky individuals are disappearing. Kind of sad imo. I think the human spirit and persistence of hope rely to a certain degree on irrationality and chaos to sustain themselves, the idea that anything can happen and it doesn’t have to make sense.

I would be very interested if people have more examples of this because I feel like it has swept across almost everything in the last 30 years

Great post, seriously. It hones in on a big part of what I think is the malaise of modern day society: either be the best or don't even try. A lot of people are choosing the second option.

One of my friends just complained about all the surveillance. FLOCK cameras are big news in certain right wing circles, but my friend was more complaining about everything else: dashcams, ring cameras, home surveillance systems that all tend to capture an entire street. For me, sure, I think that's not the best, but really, it's one of the absolute best ways to protect yourself and also fight crime, provided that crimes captured this way are actually prosecuted. I think they're pretty much necessary at this point, too, otherwise, there might be an even larger crime wave without them. So perhaps that's another way things have become much more efficient. Why use witness testimony when you can have a perfect piece of evidence? I wonder if it contributes to the background noise of the small percent of the population that goes insane.

I went to a couple places and overall, while it was decent, I'd had better in New York which obviously makes complete sense!

Yo, where the fuck do you think you can get KC grade BBQ in NYC. Please share.

I haven't found any place on the east coast north of the Carolinas that I think has acceptable BBQ.

One place in Jersey is decent but nothing compares to Joe's or Jack Stack.

Also, where the hell can you get a good cheesesteak outside of Philly? I've had Angelos a few times and nothing else I've eaten anywhere comes close.

While I agree with the thrust of your post I think the food bit is off base. Very few Indian place are nearly as good as what you can get in Edison, I don't think you can get decent Gooey Butter Cake outside of St. Louis,* Chicago pizza styles outside of Chicago are almost always trash, good Mexican food is impossible in many states etc etc.

*this one at least you can make yourself.

One place in Jersey is decent

Where?

I stopped by Red White and Que (Green Brook NJ) on a road trip and found it to be excellent for east coast BBQ.

...Still think the KC/Texas options or Pappi's in STL are way way better.

Yeah, there are lots of food culture things that are aggressively local. We aren't even close to peak efficiency.

Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

But so much stuff is straight up technique that can be duplicated elsewhere (yes the bread is important for most sandwiches but plenty of cities have good bread) - you should be able to make an excellent cheesesteak anywhere, they just don't.

Nothing is going to top fresh Maine lobster, Italian tomatoes, actual access to fresh fruit or whatever.

Every other tomato grown in the Mediterranean region. Same with olive oil. Italy is just better with marketing.

This feels so very true and depressing. I am a fan of capitalism. But man can it suck in some ways.

I remember seeing this process at the company I worked at between 2013 and 2020. Trips to visit coworkers in other offices became harder to justify. Nights out with co-workers used to be expensed or paid for by higher ups, and they did that less and less over time. Some of the fun co-workers that weren't necessarily as productive got kind of pushed out. The way per-diem worked shifted from a flat amount to having to submit all your receipts of meals. Amenities in the kitchen area became slimmer. It felt like the company was nickel and diming us constantly. Which was saving them a bit of money, but was mostly just making us miserable.

It led me to a big realization about politics and management at the time. That a good manager has two competing priorities. The first priority, which is their job, is to save the company money, or make sure that the company resources are being used efficiently. But the second priority, which is never spoken of by the company, is that the manager needs to save their people from the grinding destruction of all that is human and fun for the sake of the first priority. Managing that second priority is called "politics". Its a dirty word for the company and those who lose out by having a manager that sucks at it.

Politics is the desire to place the preferences of humans over the preferences of inhuman competitive forces.

The extent to how much an organization can get away with diverting resources to politics is a sign of how rich the organization is. An organization that is perfectly efficient with no waste or politics is probably a miserable place to work. I imagine Amazon warehouses are somewhat like this, where they have optimized things such as bathroom break frequency. An organization that is all politics can also be a miserable place to work, or an amazing place depending on whether you are on the winning side of the politics. Non-profits and some government organizations are both a bit closer to being 'all politics'.

On X, I've seen this referred to as zero-sum hypercapitalism, and as you note, it results in the tiniest inefficiencies being ruthlessly engineered away wherever possible. Optimization uber alles, but "optimization" from the big line go up forever view, not any kind of human flourishing view.

My wife was just complaining about how second hand shopping has changed from when we were in college.

Time was, Goodwill priced everything the same: a men's suit was $12.99, a women's dress was $8.99. Didn't matter if it was cashmere from Saks or polyester from Sears, for the most part they just priced everything the same. As a result, in the sea of junk, you could find gold, and cheap. My wife and I were inveterate thrifters through our undergrad years, I still have a lot of really nice stuff I bought that way. My friends and family members often commented at the time, something like "FiveHour, Goodwill is for poor people who need it, you can afford to buy new clothing." Inevitably, when they came with me, they realized that there was essentially no demand from poor people for camel hair sportcoats, and that my consumption was orthogonal to the charity aspect of the store, and they started looking for the half-off items.

Over time, the stigma of "used clothes" broke down from people like us shopping there for fashion, and resale sites like Ebay and Poshmark became more prominent. Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal. More and more people got comfortable with used stuff, and Goodwill noticed everyone else making money off of their work, and they started raising prices on good stuff to capture some of the value. With demand up as more people bought used, and the reputation appearing that you could get a great deal, people came in and paid higher prices.

Mrs. FiveHour whines that the used market isn't what it used to be, that it's no longer worth the effort. I'm an optimist, and pointed out that we had the best part of the wave: we got the low prices for designer goods when we were broke, and now that we're well-employed (and more set in our fashion ways) we have the money to buy what we want from the stores we like. And anyway, I've accumulated too many goodyear welted shoes and vintage cashmere sweaters anyway, I don't need to go buy more of them at any price. Though I will admit, I miss it as a fun date with my wife, I do think part of the reduction in fun comes from higher standards on my part rather than changing prices.

But if I were a broke college student today, I couldn't walk into a thrift store, invest three hours of my time, and walk out with gorgeous vintage designer clothes. It used to be that if you had the knowledge of clothing brands and construction, fashion taste and discernment, and time you could go to thrift stores and look fantastic without spending a lot of money. Now, that's a much tougher thing to do. Efficiency wins at all levels: Goodwill makes more money, or original purchasers on Poshmark get back some money, but for young or broke fashionistas the opportunity and creativity isn't there.

Mrs. FiveHour, when between jobs, made tens of thousands of dollars buying at Goodwill or Poshmark and arbitraging to Ebay or TheRealReal.

It's weird to hear you lamenting the decline in thrift stores when you actively destroyed what made them special :/

-- Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there. The pioneer tames the wilderness and makes it safe for civilization, only to find that civilization has no place for the pioneer, and that he can never step in the same wild river twice, that he isn't the same man and it isn't the same river.

-- On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene. I was at the library book sale over the summer, and among the old ladies and college students there was two or three immigrant women with little barcode scanners attached to their phones. And methodically, mechanically, they would scan each and every bar code on each and every book, one at a time, not even glancing at the cover or the title, and picking up one book out of every fifty or so which the phone told them was valuable enough to resell. That's what modern reselling looks like: poor immigrants sucking every cent of value out of stuff they don't even care about. I'm generally averse to critiquing the poor for trying to keep body and soul together, but their presence eliminates the opportunity for a down-on-their-luck hobbyist to hustle a bit of money on the side using their knowledge and skill. This is one less way that an ordinary person can make a little money without debasing themselves. And there's a certain romance to a young middle class woman leveraging her knowledge and enthusiasm to arbitrage, that just isn't there for a drone who doesn't care about the stuff involved, that I think makes the former acceptable in a way the latter is not.

-- As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40. It used to be I'd spend all day hunting for vintage Scottish cashmere, and get it for $8, but on the way I'd see a thousand Banana Republic sweaters and any day I wanted I could go over and buy a cheap sweater. Now the juice isn't worth the squeeze for the cheap stuff, I think you're better off waiting for a sale on it new at that price point. Nobody needs cheap Gucci, but it used to be nice being able to get functional nice looking stuff for cheap.

Is there anything more American than finding something new, civilizing it for the masses, only to lament and resent that the newly civilized space has no place for you? It's the plot of John Wayne's McClintock, where the old cowboy who killed the Indians and built the town regrets that both the daughter of his body and the son of his spirit can't experience pioneering the way he did, and the musical Rent where the hipsters who made the Village cool bitch that New York is cool now and they might have to pay money to live there.

Not really the same thing. It's more like shooting all the bison and wistfully remembering the days of the great bison herds without feeling any personal responsibility.

On a more culture-war and less FFT basis, I can argue there's a difference between what my wife did and the modern scene.

I am a discerning arbitrageur that leverages deep knowledge of the value of clothes with Gucci and Prada labels, you are a casual thrift store flipper, he is a drooling, smartphone scanning, drone NPC bugman.

As part of the above, the level of stuff involved is different. Mrs FiveHour would find the odd piece of Gucci or Prada and buy it for $10 and sell it for $300. Nowadays it's Banana Republic and Abercrombie getting sold at Goodwill for $20-25 and then resold marked up to $30-40.

Ironically, the first thing is obviously way worse. You're okay arbitraging away the opportunity to save 96% but think that arbitraging away the opportunity to save 17% is just going too far.

I'm good with the idea that the we can't always have a Wild West and that part of what made the West fun was the taming of it, and so we can't have it again.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way. It's either a commons that needs preserving or a resource that needs exploiting.

As an aside, my impression is that there is still a lot of finds to be had at estate sales (at least in CA). I think the real reason the thrift store market has dried up is not because of people buying the good stuff from the thrift stores, but because the suppliers have stopped sending the good stuff to the thrift stores. People now find the good stuff at the estate sale, and so the left over junk that gets donated has much less signal to noise. I suspect the higher prices at the thrift store are also related to garden variety inflation, where it is magnified tremendously by not being part of the official basket of goods tracked.

But I'm not cool with the idea that destroying the commons is okay when I do it in a classy way but not when those shlups do it in a low class way.

Ah, there's the problem, I am cool with that idea.

Another great example! I've heard exactly this lament from vintage resellers I know endlessly and in many ways it mirrors exactly my experience with daguerreotypes and antique shops. Similarly it is hard to blame Goodwill for picking up the fistfulls of dollars they were leaving on the table. But as you said and as I said above, it is a bit sad for people that are broke but with aspirations of higher fashion. In the before time, a bit of effort and fashion-knowledge (as your wife had) could stand-in for money in a way that it can't today. Today if you're broke you're going to look broke.

I've heard this called "perfect price discrimination" and airlines try to apply different prices not just to different seats, but to different passengers. They can easily map you to your digital profile via fingerprinting your browser (that includes facts like "loves to switch on incognito mode when shopping for airline tickets") and estimate how much more they can charge you for a seat just because you can afford it and your fellow passenger across the aisle can't.

This has always been rumoured and it's possible but is there any actual evidence of it?

It's not true to my knowledge, though I also believed it for some time. If nothing else, if it was true, you'd have airmiles obsessives writing thousands of blogs about optimizing it. Try to navigate the website of an average airline and you'll have a pretty good idea of how good their tech is. The talented guys they do have are generally in the "keep operations from falling apart in the next 24 hours" department rather than the price gouging department.

At this point the only foods remaining regional are really ones that nobody else wants..

You could have chosen surströmming, or balut, or nattō, or kholodets, but you chose a normal-ass hamburger.

That is not a normal-ass hamburger IMO. They don't normally have a bunch of filler added in addition to the beef.

Surströmming is less food and more chemical warfare.

No, it’s a great example. It’s an inferior good. There’s no direct alternative to natto other than just…not.

I think this is a major contributing factor in the oft-discussed "enshittification" of everything. The world has become increasingly flat, and increasingly bland. Car companies don't take risks, and everything they sell is some shade of grey with maybe some blue scattered in. Companies increasingly recognize that any small "lifehacks" or perk can be monetized, and our sense of hope and wonder fades away. Even Disney World has MBA'd itself into a place I would no longer remotely describe as the "happiest place on earth".

The phenomenon stems largely from corporate consolidation, as well. You used to have a bevy of media options and ownership groups, which could bring multiple flavors of radio stations and newspapers to even a mid-size town. Now they're all pretty much owned by the same handful of companies. And hiow many quaint local mom-n-pop stores have succumbed to Amazon and Wal-Mart?

Companies increasingly recognize that any small "lifehacks" or perk can be monetized,

My new car doesn't have cruise control, because I didn't think to check or choose the $2000 upgraded trim package (not that I could. It was used.).

What car company? Just so I can be absolutely certain to never buy one.

Ford. They fixed it in later model years, but still. I'm kind of with you on that now.

Yeah, I'm glad I've never owned one. That's been standard on all but the most basic cars since at least the 80s. What money-grubbing bastards.

Good post. The internet really brought that efficiency everywhere. My example is ski mountaineering. The internet ruined it.

Even just 10-15 years ago, this was a niche hobby and an extreme sport. To plan a winter ascend, you had to buy guide books and stacks of paper terrain maps. The first few times you needed a good mentor or a hired mountain guide, just for judging the weather and the current avalanche risk (also for route finding and for teaching the techniques). But if you left the ski resorts behind, the mountains where empty and quiet, and full of untracked powder (that tried to kill you when you least expected it).

Then the internet told that every single resort skier on the planet, and it turns out they really already have 95% of the skills necessary to go touring. Now the back country is swarming with people. Mountains that used to be empty now have 10 different tracks leading to the summit the morning after a fresh snow fall. I can't even remember when I've had to break a fresh track the last time.

Decades worth of experience judging the weather? The daily forecast is much better than that, and it comes with live precipitation radar maps showing you where the snow storm is and where it's going to be, and when. The local guy tracking the layer composition of the snow pack all through the season? Professional avalanche reports online give everybody that information for every single valley. Route finding? Just load a GPX track someone else planned onto your smart watch. Want do check that guys work? Here's an app that shows slope angles and rates your track for avalanche risks. Local knowledge about a difficult couloir that has powder in late spring? It's all over Instagram, and there's 10 touring portal posts about its conditions this moth. Also, here's a 3D render of that entire mountain, in case you where wondering if there's any other skiable gullies.

There's upside, too, of course. All the information available actually is much better (especially if you buy guide books in addition anyway). It generally is so much safer now (but many more people die - because many more people are out there). The larger market hugely improved the gear - everything is lighter, more reliable, less finicky, more comfortable. The avalanche beacons now actually work.

I also have a counter example: the used market for commodity consumer products still works. All the kids here ride the same plastic bob sledge through the snow. It's a bomb proof design, tried and tested through the decades. They all get it from the same big box store, and it costs 140. Yes, for 4 pieces of injection molded plastic from China, made millions of times. Anyway, they go for 10 bucks on the local equivalent of Craigslist, and chances are the family selling theirs is about as far away as that big box store.

I can think of a few examples of how better resource optimization can make things less good.

  1. There used to be a lot more friction around moving people around; someone who is a top 0.01% engineer might not have ended up with Google or NVIDIA or whatever due to not being as keenly aware of their level of skills. As such, you tended to get more talented people in more diverse spaces (as opposed to concentrating them all into 1 or 2 big companies). By the inverse token, people tend to be a lot more interchangeable in jobs themselves, as anyone better will have gone to a better paying position, so you are necessarily stuck with a bunch of people who are approximately the same level.
  2. I'd argue that there is less room for disruptors too; for example, card and tabletop games (like, say, Magic the Gathering), or even early PC games (like, say, Starcraft) did not have as much penetration as to what the "best" choices were at any time. A very popular thing amongst CCGs currently is the presence of the "netdeck" - as in, someone who buys the exact deck that the pros buy, then plays exactly that. In ye olden days, it was much more likely to find someone who had simply been playing games in a different circuit than the pros were, and had completely different tactics and builds.

Overall, very good post.

I very much like both of these examples. I'll respond to reach.

  1. On careers. I will attribute to this my inability to find a good plumber. Here is my hypothesis. 70 years ago I imagine that if you were the son of a plumber there was a good chance you ended up a plumber too even if you had an IQ of 130. Today if that's your IQ, all you have to do is do well on the SAT and you'll get whisked away on a scholarship to NYU or something. And after that, well, how you gonna keep em down on the farm? The point being, if you shopped around enough 30 years ago you could probably find a pretty damned intelligent plumber. Sure, even back then most plumbers wouldn't have been the sharpest, but there were at least some. Today with the much more efficient sorting of people, how many common residential plumbers have an IQ of 130, approximately zero?

  2. The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example. I played Vanilla World of Warcraft and loved it very much at the time, and I remember awaiting the launch of WoW Classic with great hype. Unfortunately I found when they relaunched it, it just wasn't the same. Of course it wasn't the game that had changed, but me, and us and how we approached it. I and other players were no longer content to bumble around in dungeons and group wipe repeatedly all night. We weren't 12 but 30 and we expected dungeons to be a polished and professional experience, and generally at the first sign of a wipe we were abandoning the group and finding something better to do with our time. But in our greater desire for time-efficiency in game we had somehow removed all the magic. My experience in WoW classic lasted a couple months before I gave it up, the magic just wasn't there anymore like it was when I was 12 and naive and just fucking around.

The prevalence of metagaming and net decking is a great example.

I don't play much but I've noticed people have very strong opinions on The One True Allowed Way To Play a game and what sorts of game types others should even be allowed to play at all based on their preferred play style. This is exemplified by the assumption that anyone who isn't a hardcore competitive gamer who's willing to invest in a $5000 gaming computer should only ever play ultra lightweight casual games. I think it was even on /r/themotte some years ago where I pretty much got jumped on for saying I'd like a version of Starcraft 2 that nearly completely eliminated "actions per minute" as a relevant metric in single player game (which is to say, a version of SC2 with the artificial stupidity of unit AI removed and some basic action automation features added).

I'm not quite sure if it's about the one true way to play, so much as it is fear of losing something people like. Take your SC2 example: I personally quite agree that SC2 would be a better game without the focus on APM. But to someone who loves SC2 as it exists today, they probably hear that and envision a world where vanilla SC2 is replaced with a version of SC2 where it has all the unit automation. So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

I understand people who like the multiplayer aspect wouldn't want to play like that and I have no problem with it. Any implementation could essentially be just another variant of easy level difficulty purely for the single player campaign.

That wasn't what the comments said, though (in that and some other similar conversations elsewhere). They were all about me supposedly playing an entirely wrong game genre (as if single player RTSes are somehow inherently about braindead unit AI and twitchy mouse clicks) and I essentially got told that I should just play turn based strategy games (a completely different genre that I have zero interest in). Essentially that only people who people who have play with "proper" meta should be allowed to play games like that and everyone else should stick to simple casual games.

Everybody sees the dangers of cultural appropriation once it's their culture.

In an ideal world "StarCraft 2" and "SC2 but with better AI" would just be two different game variants, and a vanilla-SC2 player wouldn't complain about the AI options any more than a blitz-chess player would complain about someone else preferring to play without any clock.

But everybody's attention is a scarce resource vied over by competitors, and in a world where network effects make it much more enjoyable to have everybody else's attention go to the same target as yours does, it's actually reasonable to worry about whether an alternative is going to stop that from happening. If you actually preferred Betamax over VHS, HD-DVD over BluRay, etc, it sucked to be you.

I thought SC2 was popular enough that nobody should need to worry about splitting the player base, though; surely both sides of any split would be able to find online matchups easily for years to come? At the very least an experienced player who eschews better AI should be able to find a game against a noob who doesn't. Maybe video game fans have just been through so many iterations of the of "Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo" fight that getting worked up about such things is a reflex now.

So they push back on it because they don't want to lose the thing they love, and they're afraid that's what would happen.

If you want to see these sorts of fights played out on Hard Mode, look at the worries some people have over driverless cars or vegan meat substitutes. The bailey is that driverless cars are unsafe or that vegan pseudomeats are unhealthy, and that no amount of technological improvement will ever make them good enough, but I think the (occasionally explicitly stated!) motte in each case is the risk that, once the new alternative actually is better for most people, there'll be pressure to make the traditional alternative outright illegal. Nobody's ever going to ban anyone's preferred versions of Star Trek or StarCraft, but animal rights groups or public safety groups might actually get some traction against real meat or human-error-prone cars once the main argument for them is pared down to "Freedom!"

The higher stakes version of vegan meats and driverless cars is going to be embryo selection

As a former national merit scholar with a STEM masters who's currently stuck doing manual labor in a medium-sized metro, here's hoping I can make some of that frictionlessness work better for me. I was just thinking to myself last night (yes, on Sunday night), while hammering together some outdoor timber steps that I'd seriously underbid, what a great deal the client was getting given that he couldn't have found anybody else both smart enough to do the job this well and dumb enough to do it this cheap.

Without going full Girard, I think this efficiency also leads us to target our desires more to what the market has made measurable, and limits discoverability of greater personal upsides in the course of removing risks of aggregate downside. The scope narrows for being pleasantly surprised in ways you may not even have known you could be surprised. Tinderella may actually have been much happier with a particular Mr. 5'8" for illegible Tinderella-specific factors, and now she'll never know because she's set the same 6'1" filter as everyone else without even really knowing how much it matters to her. Even if average outcomes are better, maybe some of the best outcomes have been closed off because they only aligned with desires that were particular to us, perhaps unknown to us, certainly not known to the market at large, and which the market is actually leading us to downplay in ourselves.

These are half-formed thoughts and I could write a whole essay on this but I have to go hang a gate on some frozen posts.

Come down to DFW. It sucks here but there’s a whole lot of STEM work. We’re basically trying to underbid California.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


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