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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2586 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026

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

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

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

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I'm not quite sure where to ask this, so I'll start here.

I've noticed an increased sense of precariousness among both my blue and white collar family members and friends. I've never seen it so strong or so pervasive. Everyone is convinced that they will be out of a job soon, and a significant percentage think their entire industry will be functionally dead before they can retire.

It's really wild. It's people ranging from bartenders to retail to professors to writers to software developers to painters (art) to painters (houses). Really the only people who seem optimistic are servicemen. I don't quite think I've seen anything like it.

Either something really bad actually is coming or we, as a society, have really done a number on our ability to accurately predict the future.

What do you all think is going on here?

The question above got me moving down another line of thought shortly after.

Let's assume that the technocrat dream future is half true and some fraction of the population can live off capital gains in luxury forever.

What do you do with everybody else?

In the last few economic wipeouts, the answer seemed to be "let people fend for themselves until things correct themselves. The worst off can eat a shotgun or overdose in the meantime".

Imagine that the US had some sort of "survival guarantee", where you could, no questions asked, be granted housing and food that would keep you from starving or dying of any notable nutrient deficiencies unto perpetuity.

The catch is that a single person would get a spartan efficiency apartment in a giant, Soviet-style mega construct. A couple could get a similarly spare one bedroom. A family with with kids could get an apartment with one bedroom per two kids.

Food would be simple - rice, beans, rehydrated eggs, and other cheap staples. This might be served from a central kitchen like an army ness, or handed over in boxes.

You wouldn't get anything else. You'd just be guaranteed to not starve or freeze.

The constructs would be built in out of the way, inconvenient locations. If you had a car, it might be a 20 mile drive to the nearest grocery. A van would go into town and back once a day for those who didn't have a car.

The apartments would share qualities with prison cells and cheap corporate real estate to minimize costs and reduce maintenance overhead. Think concrete or sheet vinyl floors, one overhead light per room, bathrooms that are all plastic walls where the toilet is also the sink with a metal mirror, and other measures. The apartments come with basic furnishings (eg: a Murphy bed per room, maybe a kitchen table with chairs and a couch), but nothing else.

Internet and cable hookups would exist, but would not be covered unless the resident set up their own account. Electricity, heat and cooling (centrally set), water, and trash removal (accessible via central chutes) would all be covered.

How many people do you think would take up that offer? How do you think it would end up?

That depends on whether you those implementing such a system are asking "How much can we afford to guarantee everyone as a minimum?" or "How little can we get away with guaranteeing everyone as a minimum?".

If they are asking the former, and increasing it as society produces more and automation advances, such that people can expect that the minimum 20-30 years from now will be less unpleasant, there might be statistically-significantly more than a snowball's chance in hell of it working.

If they are asking the latter, they will signal that you would let people starve to death if they thought they could get away with it, and it will not end well for them.

For this was the sin of thy sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and abundance of idleness were in her and her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy. --Ezekiel 16:49

The men of Sodom had abundant creature comforts, with little toil, for themselves; but refused to share those benefits with their neighbours.

The mills of G-d grind slow, but they grind exceeding small.

I'd like to make it clear that I don't endorse this idea. It's more of a question of what happens when the system starts to break to the point that a sizable portion of the population can no longer engage with it.

I'd like to make it clear that I don't endorse this idea.

Thank you for that clarification.

Internet and cable hookups would exist, but would not be covered unless the resident set up their own account.

Making nice internet-connected gaming machines very affordable and attainable could be part of the design.

How do you think it would end up?

Either Cabrini-Green or High-Rise.

Welp, now I have a new book to read.

High-Rise is excellent. If you haven't explored much Ballard, you owe it to yourself to do so.

I hope you're not launching a trend with this penury fantasizing.

Here's a question that is silly, but not too simple: when did The Onion/The A.V. Club, back when it was a single newspaper in Madison, WI, first print a Savage Love column?

Rambling based on a shower thought here:

Does an IQ taboo (established for political reasons associated with another taboo around HBD, or any other reason) contribute to more of a reliance in many people on the heuristics of social class, physical features, clothes, sociolect and prosody, credentials/profession, or even ideological conformity - and thus more of an opaque and effectively hierarchical society? A society where appearances become more important than the underlying reality, and where presumptions are not challenged? Where the average individual, who insofar as they've been taught anything about mental horsepower, has come to believe that it's about the development and growth mindset - any child can join any profession if they work hard and choose through free will to develop smartness; and knowledge - the person in higher education studying e.g. psychology becomes smart and competent through their acquiring of knowledge and routines and joining into a professional group? The flipsides of these coins being that someone who didn't go to college/university has stupidly chosen not to become smart and grow their brain and thus can blame themselves and should not be given much time of day? And if appearances are what matters, someone with perfect grooming and high class speech and all the shibboleths should be assumed to be smart rather than looking under the hood?

I've had this suspicion building for a while while going about my business in a very "blue" environment where social class is on some level assumed to not exist anymore and is never discussed, but in actuality might be used heuristically quite heavily to decide who gets to make the judgements and be listened to. Where snap judgements seem to be made (and then very hesitantly changed, if ever) about a person's intelligence and worth as a human being, without this actually being discussed or studied. I get the feeling a lot of people have their own poorly informed and biased understandings of what mental horsepower is and who's got more of it and why.

This arrangement seems to favor the people who are living and breathing inside of and shaping and reinforcing the dominant culture and hierarchy, while subtly closing out dissenting voices from outsiders: they have not got the surface appearances of people we listen to, regardless of what greater powers of judgement they might have under the hood.

Cosmopolitanism is a big culprit here. The reason we would need legible tests like IQ to rank people is because nobody knows anybody, and references have become gamified. Status (and even competence) is easy to fake over the short term, and if you're found out as a fraud you can disappear into the global economy and start again. We've designed a society for sociopaths.

My recommendation: get involved in your local community (or a sub-culture thereof) and build yourself a reputation. Human connection is the antidote to superficiality.

I think you're absolutely right. It's closely related to Scott's example of a law banning childcare employers from asking prospective employees about their criminal record (or lack thereof), under the assumption that this would improve diversity metrics in the industry. Instead, the opposite happened, for perfectly understandable reasons: employers don't want ex-cons working in their daycares, they're forbidden from asking interviewees if they have a criminal record, but they know that a given black interviewee is 7 times more likely to have a criminal record than a given white interviewee, so they make an educated guess.

I'm wondering if these are both examples of some kind of general trend:

  • activists notice that a favoured group is placed at a disadvantage because of some extremely legible metric
  • they try to prevent people from using that legible metric to make decisions, reasoning that this will improve the outcomes for the favoured group
  • because people can no longer use the legible metric to make decisions, they instead rely on vastly noisier and less legible metrics
  • this puts the favoured group at an even greater disadvantage

A related example I thought of was various kinds of rent controls, rent freezes and protections for tenants (such as those which make it extremely difficult to evict a tenant). In principle these are designed to protect tenants, especially people who might be especially vulnerable to eviction (say, because they're recent immigrants to the country, with no family or friends to fall back on in the event that they get evicted). In practice, they make renting to a complete stranger such a risky proposition that landlords would much rather rent properties to people they know via the "old boys' network", which makes it even more difficult for newly arrived immigrants to secure accommodation than it would have been otherwise.

Does an IQ taboo (established for political reasons associated with another taboo around HBD, or any other reason) contribute to more of a reliance in many people on the heuristics of social class, physical features, clothes, sociolect and prosody, credentials/profession,

I'm having a hard time understanding what the alternative would be? Mean IQ during grades 1-4 tattooed to the forehead in childhood? And how does HBD play into that? Standard deviation on IQ is so large, you can never replace the other heuristics with it, on an individual level you absolutely shouldn't even include it into the list of heuristics in the first place.

In the end, you sometimes have to make an assessment about which strangers are worth listening to. Guessing IQ from hearing them speak (especially speak freely) works well in my experience. Even "correct"/"incorrect" vocabulary and sociolect cannot hide their true power level for long. And sure, the halo effect exists, but clothes, grooming and physical features were always the stereotypical weak point of hardcore nerds, so making assessments on those never worked all that well, especially in spaces like tech.

Mean IQ during grades 1-4 tattooed to the forehead in childhood?

Why would you need any of this? All you need is tracking (disliked by many for reasons @FtttG touches on) and the kids will put together the pecking order. We figured it out anyway in my school but it was tiny, 300 people total.

Post high school is a bit of a problem I guess. But if you had IQ tests and there was no awkwardness around you can figure it out. Thing is, I'm not sure we'd want to. It matters less in more selective schools and I don't know that people who run institutions want to be publicizing which programs actually capture the least mental horsepower.

And sure, the halo effect exists, but clothes, grooming and physical features were always the stereotypical weak point of hardcore nerds

Yes, the high-IQ sperg archetype is the clearest exception, which helps OP's point.

I believe that, in the US, employers are discouraged from using IQ tests to make hiring decisions, owing to the "disparate impact" doctrine (i.e. a tacit admission of HBD, even if no one will come out and say so). They must instead rely on proxies for IQ, some of which are reliable (the SAT is an IQ test in all but name) and some of which are not (such as being "well-spoken").

Ah, but the catch is that using the SAT directly still looks too suspicious for an employer to do, so you have to use the whole college degree instead. That could be an even better filter (assuming you keep track of which colleges still use the SAT) because it includes a measure of conscientiousness, but it's also a vastly more expensive filter, and the mix of "do they have a high enough IQ, and can they afford tuition plus four years' opportunity cost" might have a bigger disparate impact than IQ alone.

I am currently doing some research into historical details for a video game using major LLMs and it's almost great. They give you great answers, explain their reasoning and suggest interesting angles to explore. Much better than Google, which has gotten terrible at pointing me at good primary and secondary sources.

The only problem is that they give you completely different answers! Of course, I could just rely on how plausible their answers sound (if they can fool me, they can fool the players), but I am too neurotic for that.

How do you verify your conversations with LLMs? Are there services that ask several models in parallel and cross-validate their answers?

P.S. Lem was fucking prescient. I know Vinge had the same idea, but Lem was there first.

Just ask them for sources? You can also share output between multiple models and see their points of agreement or contention.

I know that OpenRouter lets you use multiple models in parallel, but I suspect a proper parallel orchestration framework is most likely to be found in programs like OpenCode, Aider, Antigravity etc.

How do you verify your conversations with LLMs? Are there services that ask several models in parallel and cross-validate their answers?

Which ones are you using primarily? With thinking and web search, they all now extensively cite their work, right? If a claim is missing a source, just ask for it to find one. And then, yes, I read the sources. If I don't like what I'm reading, I tell it to go find better sources.

If I'm far outside my expertise, I sometimes have two models debate each other by proxy. If one model claims X, I just tell it I've read Y somewhere and to explain where the discrepancy is coming from.

ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek. I think the first one doesn't let you combine thinking and web search. Gemini seems to be the one that likes to confidently answer every question in great detail the most.

Hmm? ChatGPT can definitely use web search when in thinking mode. I get links and citations by default, and more if I ask. You might want to check personalization to make sure you haven't set search to off by default.

They're definitely vastly improved, but I've still been burned recently. Both Grok and ChatGPT independently invented hallucinated time mandates (2000 and 2250, respectively) when fed in this, this, and this. To be fair, that's a hard enough problem that the FAA's gotten pushback over a proposed regulation not just because of normal problems like cost and necessity, but because literally zero mechanics can understand the charts and formula. It's one of the worst formatted set of PDFs I've ever seen, and I've worked with badly-translated Chinese microchip docs.

I have a ‘special test’ where I ask an LLM a series of questions about the ancestors of semi-prominent political figures from multiple third world non-English speaking countries. Stuff like “tell me about Xi Jinping’s great grandparents”, but for people much less prominent than him.

At the start, they would hallucinate all the time. Then, they became firmer about saying “there’s no information”. Then, they became a little better about finding and translating obscure foreign language sources and gleaning little bits of data from them. Now they’re really good at this, but the hallucination / BS frequency seems to have gone back up slightly.

Are you using "thinking mode" or "research mode" with your LLM(s)? With advanced math even the latest models will still hallucinate on me when they're just asked to immediately spew output tokens, but at least ChatGPT 5 has gotten good enough with "reasoning" that I haven't caught it in an error in output from that. (Some of this might be selection bias, though: waiting 5 minutes for a response is enough hassle that I'll still ask for immediate-output-spew for anything that's easy enough to double-check myself or non-critical enough that I can live with a few mistakes)

I still wouldn't rely on any claim for which it can't give me either a step-by-step proof or a linked citation, and with history you're stuck with citations as your only option, so ask for (and follow up on, and worry about the quality of the sources of) those.

The only problem is that they give you completely different answers! Of course, I could just rely on how plausible their answers sound (if they can fool me, they can fool the players), but I am too neurotic for that.

You want to keep your narrated facts straight, and you want your worldbuilding to be consistent with the facts, but don't be afraid to add a few sets of conflicting lies and half-truths to your dialogue. There's only one past, but there are sometimes multiple conflicting histories of it and there are often multiple conflicting perspectives on it. Consider the Brazilian vs the American attitudes toward Santos-Dumont vs the Wright brothers.

I've had difficulty even with its step-by-step proofs. It will make very subtle errors that really kill the whole point of what you're going for. For one example, I had a spot where it introduced a variable and then sneakily assumed a property for it that was never proven (and I suspect couldn't be). I spent more time trying to figure out where its various proof attempts were broken, then sometimes asking it to fix it, then having it come up either with something related that was subtly broken in a different way... or suddenly go in a completely different direction that required me to step back to square one to figure out if it was on to anything. I never could get it to give me a non-broken proof. This was recently, with a GPT5 subscription, using the thinking and deep research modes.

On the other hand, I may still find value in talking to it about problems I'm working on. Perhaps I should incorporate it in my process in a new way. Instead of seeing what it says and spending a bunch of time trying to validate the answer, I think in the future, I'll just ask it various questions, skim what it's got, poke at any clear issues, and ask it to take different approaches. I have had it introduce me to tools that I'd never encountered before, and that has been helpful. So far, I haven't actually used one of the tools that it introduced me to, but they're nice to know, and thinking about one of them did help me realize that I already had another tool in my toolbox that let me do something. So, in a very roundabout way, it did help me solve a problem, just by jogging my thought process to something new and different that ultimately led me back to something I already knew.

With advanced math even the latest models will still hallucinate on me when they're just asked to immediately spew output tokens

The other day I needed the equation for the voltages of two capacitors over time when charged initially to different voltages and connected via a resistor. That's simplest possible system of two differential equations, first term of the first year university level math. IOW it's the very opposite of "advanced math".

I wrote down the equations and asked ChatGPT to solve for V1(t) and V2(t). It spent a long time thinking and gave a confident answer with a bunch of "I can also give ..." extras. Too bad it was wrong. I changed the variable names to make it look closer to a basic textbook problem and after a bunch more thinking it gave a different wrong answer. Finally I simplified the problem so much that it became useless (fixed initial values to 1 and 0 respectively) to make it even more textbooky and I finally got a correct answer. Too bad it was useless. Finally I just ended up googling how to present such systems to Matlab symbolic math toolbox and got the answer I actually needed in the first place.

For history, ask it to provide citations with links for its claims, then you have the links to check.

Why are the Jews trying to burn down and steal Patagonia in Argentina? Why there, of all places? Plan Andinia is said to originate this, but what was the preceding interest before or contemporaneously with Theodore Herzl, does it somehow correlate with the NSDAP exodus after WW2 for becoming a serious option, despite existing settlements in Palestine? I imagine blood and soil should trace back to a time and place, so I can’t imagine a nomadic diasporic Anglo desiring a random South American place to reunify instead of UK/US/AU/NZ/CA.

https://x.com/paykells/status/2010611343251104209?s=46

https://open.substack.com/pub/ddgeopolitics/p/unmasking-the-flames-israels-shadow

  • -10

Why are the Jews trying to burn down and steal Patagonia in Argentina?

I strongly doubt that they are. However, let's suppose, as a thought experiment, that the claims given are correct.

The Jews tried to live in Europe. The people living in Europe did not agree to let them live there.

They tried to move to America. The people there let some of them in, but refused many others, and asserted the right to decide whether to allow them.

They moved to the Levant. The people living there started three wars, lost them, and have waged guerilla warfare ever since, attempting to drive them out. The Western chattering classes have expressed sympathy with the guerillas, calling for them to control 'from the river to the sea' and advocating 'globalising the intifada', thus implying that they do not consent to Jews living anywhere.

Therefore, if there is no location whose chattering-class-recognised population is willing to allow the Jewish people the unconditional right to live there, then the only possibility is for the Jewish people to establish a home for themselves against the wishes of the current inhabitants.

Where exactly would you have that be? Where should the Jewish people have the right to live, even if the people living there don't want them there, given that that condition also potentially applies to anywhere else?

They…aren’t?

I imagine

There’s your problem. You’re speculating from a pretty incoherent starting point. Garbage in, garbage out.

They are. What exactly are you denying?

As far as my imagination of a diasporic Anglo race, how is that incoherent?

My question is about their fixation on Patagonia. Is it just strategic, or does it tie into certain beliefs like we see with Greater Israel?

I have basically no reason to believe in a Jewish conspiracy to burn Argentina, let alone steal it. The cited evidence is vague and confusing even if one assumes it’s all genuine.

Your hypothetical Anglo is coherent enough. The incoherencies come from all the other assumptions you’re making. Why should this be a question of blood and soil? Is this actually how a conspiracy would choose to achieve any goal? Stuff like that.

What?

be me, annoying Israeli tourist

Rules are for good goyim

start a "small campfire" to warm up my gefilte fish

Entire park burns

It's milei's fault for not spending ten trillion dollars to post a guard every twenty feet in los parques nacionales chilenos

(((Milei))) can't put out the fires because he's exported all the glaciers in a deal with (((Mekorot))

Milei cedes the charred hellscape to build the 'Zionist Explorer's Irgun Memorial Lodge'

Hashem's chosen people stay winning.

These chicks are way too hot for me to trust them on geopolitics.

You don't think Double D Geopolitics is reliable?

If you zoom in on the profile pic, you can tell it is obviously AI-generated by the books in the background.

Good bet that whole profile is being run from Russia.

Books look real to me, just mirrored.

https://www.amazon.com/Ustasa-Croatian-European-Politics-1929-1945/dp/1892478013

https://www.amazon.com/VERIFIED-Ground-Kosovo-Verification-Mission/dp/B0CP8FZ9SL

https://www.amazon.com/Croatia-Under-Ante-Paveli%C4%87-Croatian/dp/178831087X

Even the neo-Nazis are reading right to left now.

We must seize the means of reproduction, comrades!

Yes, with our hands! Come, join the revolution!

Doesn't help that her cat is called 'kitler'

Here is the kind of elite human capital you are dealing with :

I can feel in my heart that this is the year Sydney Sweeney will stop dating jews 🙏

Kitler (her cat), much like Hitler, has incredible fashion sense ⚡️⚡️

Happy New Year to all my Nazi friends.

On Venezuela being bombed

Another country that doesn’t have a jew-controlled central bank in US crosshairs
Fuck Donald Trump and his jewish masters.
Nobody voted for this.

Type of woman who would've volunteered to run the gas chambers.

It's not that hot chicks can't have informed insights on geopolitics, it's just that as a hot chick you have so many other more fun options to do with your time than deep-diving in to geopolitics.

This reminds me of a post I made about grassroots movements and the math of why that trait matters. If you have two variables x,y which combine to create some output f(x,y) which is increasing with respect to both x and y, (as a simple example, f = x * y ) then observing one of the variables to be large decreases your estimate on the size of the other one. (Ie, if you know f and y, but can't observe x directly, you estimate x = f / y). Or more generally you construct a partial inverse function g(f,y), and then g will be decreasing with respect to y.

In less mathematical terms, you observe an effect, you consider multiple possible causes of the effect, then one of them being high explains away the need for the others to be high. In the grassroots example: there are lots of protestors, this could either be caused by people being angry, or by shills throwing money around to manufacture a protest (or maybe a combination of both), you observe shills, then you conclude people probably aren't all that angry, or at least not as angry as you would normally expect from a protest of this size (if they were, and you had both anger AND shills then the protest would be even larger).

In this case, you observe a post about a political event which is getting a lot of attention, f. This popularity could be caused by a number of things, such as insightful political commentary (x), or hot woman (y). You observe large y, this explains the popularity, your estimate of x regresses to the average. It need not be the case that hotness and attractiveness actually correlate negatively, or at all, for this emergent negative correlation to appear when you control for popularity/availability.

Isn't that Berkson's paradox?

Kind of. I guess it's Berkson's paradox applied to a specific class of cases where the the output is easy to observe (and often just "this is a big enough deal for me to have noticed it"), and the variable you care about is harder to directly observe than other variables.

Not trusting thots, especially one with copious tattoos, is a pretty solid heuristic for life in general.

Does anyone have any advice around relationships counselors in Western countries? Particularly regarding 'counselors' (eg did a counseling course with accreditation) vs actual trained psychologists. I'm looking at seeing one individually, but unsurprisingly there aren't any male counselors available so I'm trying my luck with a female one. I'm concerned that a woman won't be able to properly empathise with a male point of view, and might balk at certain 'how the sausage gets made' conversations.

This isn't for anything critical, just relationship advice regarding my specific situation (with details I wouldn't share here, even incognito).

Here in the States, having a MSW is actually a prerequisite for the additional coursework that goes with each particular specialty in question, as is practicing in residence under another licensed mental health professional (LMHP) within the same discipline, such as a licensed professional counselor (LPC) or a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT). If your concern is that they're not equivalent to a trained psychologist, then you can rest easy--LMHPs in general meet that bar and then some. That said, just because and individual has managed a graduate degree and a license, that doesn't necessarily make them a good counselor or therapist. Like all LMHPs, a good counselor or therapist is worth their weight in gold, as there are plenty of, well, not-so-good ones out there. Just like finding a good PCP that will actually listen to your concerns and tailor their advice/treatment to you accordingly, finding a good counselor that will do the same is possible (they exist!), but you might not necessarily find one your first time out of the gate, so I'd advise patience and willingness to go elsewhere to find a good fit. One other thing to address is that since you're doing individual counseling, as a rule good individual therapy will focus your needs, and any relationship counseling will come from the perspective of what is best for you, regardless of whether or not that's at odds with what is best for the relationship. Relationship counseling, OTOH, focuses on treating the relationship and not the individuals. FWIW, judging by your other reply, it sounds like individual therapy is the way to go.

And because we're on the subject, I've also had experience with doing relationship counseling in my marriage, and my situation was similar to /u/RenOS below. Despite being an LPC herself, my wife genuinely acted as if the purpose of marriage counseling was, for lack of a better descriptor, to make me "do right". Our marriage counselor (who was an LPC as well) quickly twigged to my wife's particular issues, which to be fair to my wife are rooted in massive childhood trauma, and although she didn't focus specifically on that, all it took was several sessions' worth of trying to work with that before my wife abruptly ragequit. It took another year and another separation, during which time we each had to come to grips with our own shit, before we were actually able to start doing things differently.

edit: tidied up some grammar

Just like finding a good PCP that will actually listen to your concerns and tailor their advice/treatment to you accordingly, finding a good counselor that will do the same is possible (they exist!), but you might not necessarily find one your first time out of the gate, so I'd advise patience and willingness to go elsewhere to find a good fit. One other thing to address is that since you're doing individual counseling, as a rule good individual therapy will focus your needs, and any relationship counseling will come from the perspective of what is best for you, regardless of whether or not that's at odds with what is best for the relationship.

Yes, I've done therapy before so I'm pretty much expecting that the first counselor I try might not be a good fit. Especially considering its a woman.

I have had a good female counselor before, but considering the things I'm going to say, I just don't know if your average female counselor will be able to focus her empathy and bend her point of view enough to accommodate male needs in a relationship (emotional as well as physical). I'll see how I go, but at least I'm managing my expectations going in. If she doesn't work, I'll shop around to find a guy rather than wasting time and money trying multiple women.

Understandable. I know counselors that can empathize with you are out there, both male and female, and I hope your new counselor is one of said females. Best of luck!

I tell patients sometimes that finding a therapist is not like a PCP - you might like your PCP more or less but they all fundamentally do more or less the same thing. It's like buying a car. Some are better some are worse and they might be missing bells and whistles...but it is all the same shit.

A therapist is more like offering a specific movie.

If you are looking for a Rom Com then The Godfather isn't going to be what you need.

Find the therapist that offers the right movie for you.

Does that feel right to you?

I don't think I need a therapist but I am curious - how would one find the right movie? I mean, actual movies have re views, trailers, etc. What do the therapists have? I never even seen an ad for a therapist ever - are they even allowed?

I mean, I can't even tell you how to get the right doctor. Shit is hard as fuck.

Lots of people use word of mouth within an IRL social network or via something like Facebook. You can find lists in your area or otherwise online (and with Telehealth...world is your oyster). Many people are already seeing an MD for med management and they have referral networks. More so than general medicine getting something that matches your insurance is harder since so many do cash, which in that case you gotta match the financial resources.

On top of those considerations you have an element of "if this one doesn't work for you, try someone else."

Frustratingly many people stop after the first one or continue with the first one even if it's not a good match.

Shit is hard as fuck.

Sigh, tell me about it. Next to impossible, unfortunately I have some experience. Same goes for most of professionals, unfortunately, but at least some have reviews and portfolios (not a guarantee but at least something...) Good thing at least I don't need that one, it would frustrate me to no end.

I can tell you that on the healthcare end of things the issue is that the people who want to be serious about "shopping" over focus on customer service and end up with awful care as a result.

In many other types of engagements customer service is a large part of the service so I imagine it is a bit easier.

Really good comment! If I'm understanding you correctly, which is to say that most therapists will in their profiles/web pages/whatever advertise their preferred specialties and modalities and the like, then I think it does, yeah. To develop this thought a little further, while some modalities have become mainstream and common, there's still plenty of specific modalities for specific problems, like DBT specialists for BPD, CSTs for sexual specific issues, et cetera, and in that sense I'd absolutely agree that it's good idea to do one's homework and pick the right "genre" of movie accordingly. I was glossing most of that over in thinking, okay, so there are relationship issues but OP is doing individual therapy, and asking about counselors specifically... yeah, if they're seeing a LMHC, LPC, or whatever their State wants to call it, then OP should at least be in the right neighborhood. Not 100% guarantee, of course, but generally speaking looking at a good flavor of individual therapist. In making my comments about a PCP, I was drawing on my own experiences with a PCP in the past. I had a bad one that simply brushed off a serious and chronic medical problem that I had and when I got fed up and went directly to a surgeon, said surgeon took one look and was like, "yeah, you need surgery," and promptly scheduled me. My current PCP (when I actually see her) tends to actually listen to my presenting problem and offer me solutions if she has them or referrals if she doesn't, and I'm grateful for that. My wife has had similar experiences, so for both of us even getting more than blown off has been a non-trivial problem that we've had to overcome, hence my thinking that finding a good fit requires work even at the PCP level, and isn't something that can be expected right out of the gate. I think that part remains true, and the whole genre twist is an important one, though now my brain is going, "well, ackshully, all these licensed folks have to do so many hours of continuing education each year, some of which is different modalities, so maybe it's more like go to the right multiplex," aaaaand I'm gonna kill the analogy there before it goes further into the weeds.

Hmmmm what I'm really trying to find a way to emphasize is that the personality and the style they have to offer is part of the modality in therapy in a way that doesn't apply for other interventions. Yes the type of therapy matters but some people are never going to respond well to a more "ooey gooey feelings" type, or (frustratingly!) think they'd never respond well to that but would do great.

I think it's more common in the MD psychiatrist realm but you do see plenty of men who speak the male language and are heavy on tough love while still doing traditional therapy, which naively I imagine would work great for most of the Motte complainer types who mostly imagine a SJ adjacent "feelings" therapist.

Okay, gotcha. I still think your analogy holds merit, and that as much as good therapists can project an affect that I see as inherently Therapeutic (think Dr. Wong if you're a Rick and Morty) fan, it's also true that there's still some bleed-through that happens, personality-wise. So general agree, just was thinking along different lines.

Also, I gotta say that given my wife's firsthand experience in grad school the SJ stuff can be... whoo, boy! I mean, most of her texts were what you'd expect, but she also had texts like Decolonizing Methodologies and Privilege, Power, and Difference so, yeah. But getting into that would be thread derailing, so I'll just say that I think that there was enough dissonance there that my impression is that she mostly was able to doublethink here way through it.

In my interaction with therapists I think many of them aren't as broken by social justice as you might expect from the training and reading material. Fundamentally the goal is to help people, and the reality of the darkness you see helping with mental illness sands off some of the naive edges I think.

So great at playing the language games though yikes.

Yeah, that's certainly been true for my wife. After a few years of wanting the hard luck cases and the downtrodden, she's learning that working harder than her clients is a bad idea and that too much of that sort of thing is burning her out. That said, it was certainly an experience when she wanted to talk about Systemic Racism with me, blissfully unaware that I'd been around the internet more than long enough to have experienced many HBD debates and that the argument she was making was essentially straight from the Dread Jim with the serial numbers filed off. GUH.

Language games, of course, lead inevitably to The Rectification Of The Names. Alas.

the argument she was making was essentially straight from the Dread Jim with the serial numbers filed off

I would say you could fix her, but sounds like she doesn't need fixing.

I wonder how much seethe it would cause on /r/CoupleMemes if one posted a video of a young attractive white couple cuddling while a male AI voice reads (naturally, with subtitles that proceed one word at a time):

After a few years of wanting the hard luck cases and the downtrodden, she's learning that working harder than her clients is a bad idea and that too much of that sort of thing is burning her out. That said, it was certainly an experience when she wanted to talk about Systemic Racism with me, blissfully unaware that I'd been around the internet more than long enough to have experienced many HBD debates and that the argument she was making was essentially straight from the Dread Jim with the serial numbers filed off 💕
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N=1, but I had the amusing situation that while my wife talked me into going to a counsellor with her and I thought it's going to be a huge waste of money just to get someone to side with her, the (female, older) counsellor actually ended up being more sympathetic to me, if anything. It took only two appointments until my wife agreed that it was too expensive, and inconvenient for other reasons anyway. She also seemed somewhat mollified afterwards, so I guess it was worth the money after all.

This is just me speculating based on general life, but I wouldn't expect men to necessarily be more empathetic to you, unfortunately. Men can put women on a pedestal just fine. Especially if you're reasonably attractive & socially competent, you almost always can leverage some attraction/sympathy to your benefit, and that goes for both sexes. I'd say your best bet is a no-nonsense older married woman with kids (ideally teenage/adult sons with shitty girlfriends, but that's probably hard to find out). Those are both most likely to be sympathetic in my experience, and will usually have no problem being pragmatic. It's also important to start out nice and friendly at the first appointment, talk about her private life and be empathetic to her, which will allow you to both gauge whether she's the kind of person you want to get counselled by, and also to simply make her empathize back. Our counsellor was pretty open and happy to share, obviously nothing super-private, but she also though that a good match is important for counselling to work.

I'll keep it in mind to build some rapport before dumping on them. Luckily I'm doing individual counseling only, so I won't need to worry about them taking sides. I'll be the only one they meet.

In the US, you'd be looking for an LMFT. I've noticed male ones on psychology today in most major cities. If you're looking for individual care, then telehealth is the way to go. Expands your options by quite a bit. If you are in California or Massachusetts then I know a couple I would recommend.

I am dating a zoomer who thinks “Everyone should go to therapy regularly even if there are no specific problems, it’s just a health checkup for the brain!”. This means, apparently, both singles therapy and couples therapy. We have just the one female counsellor who serves all three roles (her individual sessions, my individual sessions, and the couples sessions). Which I’m sure must be a conflict of interest, but whatever, I go to indulge my adorable basket case of a zoomette, not to be the professional ethics police.

Sample size N=1, but I have absolutely found, as you suspected, that she is completely unable to empathise with the male perspective on anything.

Turns out Scientology was prescient! You have to periodically exorcise the Thetans to maintain the Clear status.

(The prescience being about having someone in a position of authority poke around your psyche occasionally being both happily accepted and conducive to keeping the population compliant. Of course, you could argue that the Catholics got there first with confession, but it was the Scientologists who gave it a "scientific" coat of paint and the idea that it is for your health rather than otherworldly obligations.)

I saw a clip of a standup comedian saying that seeing a relationship counselor when you aren't married and don't have children just means you should break up, and I'm inclined to agree. If you have children and a mortgage, you should be doing everything in your power to try and make the relationship work: if not, you're probably better off just cutting your losses.

Wild dynamic - your gf is essentially demanding another person be in your relationship! I wonder what she gets out of it.

I will admit to sometimes wanting a referee.

Sure, but the cumulative capital flowing from the couple to this therapist (3 different types of therapy...) is a huge outlay. I'd pick being Poly over being forced into therapy like this any day.

Wild dynamic - your gf is essentially demanding another person be in your relationship!

The more the merrier.

If one wants to add to the throuple and expand into a polycule, one could consider one or all of the following to accompany the therapist (LMFT) for additional Expert advice:

  • Financial advisor (CFA)
  • Financial planner (CFP)
  • Tax accountant (CPA)
  • Tax attorney (JD)
  • Estate lawyer (JD)

I am not familiar with the investment industry in the US, but I don't think a financial advisor doing private client work with people with net worth in the single digits (the equivalent of a UK IFA) would have a CFA charter. (CFA stands for Chartered Financial Analyst, not Advisor).

The CFA is an extremely demanding exam-based qualification and is about as prestigious as it is possible for a qualification to be if anyone can get it by passing an exam. Most people who take it are already working as financial professionals and do it over 4-5 years of part-time study. The typical CFA holder is working in a mid to senior role in a bank or buy-side investment firm.

You can register as an investment advisor with a CFA, but most registered investment advisors got there by passing the much easier FINRA exams.

I agree with @JarJarJedi that none of these people are going to get involved in intra-family affairs, except that a good financial advisor will discuss options for transferring wealth to kids and grandkids, including questions like "when should they get access to the money", and an estate lawyer will go into such issues as far as is necessary to write a will.

Interestingly, at the high end part of what a true private banker (I'm talking about the kind of service you aren't in the market for unless the family net worth is well into double figures) is paid for is to understand the whole family and to offer financial advice that takes that into account. A private banker absolutely would, if asked, mediate in a money argument between family members in a way none of the other professionals on that list would.

I'm well aware the "A" in CFA doesn't stand for Advisor. Just as a CPA isn't required to be a tax accountant nor is a CFP required to be a financial planner, but I threw them in there for the microhumor on credential inflation. As I mentioned elsewhere, they're just the designations most stereotypically associated with each. If CFAs, CFPs, CPAs are the most common designations for financial advisors and planners, and we give CPAs to tax accountants and CFPs to financial planners, that only leaves CFAs for financial advisors.

Where, as I previously mentioned, self-identified financial advisors also often offer planning and self-identified financial planners also often financial advisory. In fact, the types of advice all five of those roles offer can often overlap.

I agree with @JarJarJedi that none of these people are going to get involved in intra-family affairs

As I already explained:

"While one can always find low-performing financial advisors, financial planners, tax accountants, tax attorneys, and estate lawyers out there, a lot of being a professional in higher-paying client-oriented work (such as the roles mentioned above) involves proactively thinking on behalf of your client(s), describing and outlining options and tradeoffs for your clients."

"Or at least, being able to convincingly portray you’re doing so even if you’re not, and telling them in the early stages 'talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it' does not quite lend such a portrayal. Especially when what they think they want may be against their best interests or straight-up unlawful to implement."

Especially for financial advisors and planners, the roles are much closer to being sales/relationship management (that is, managing a relationship with an account) than being say, a HFT quantitative researcher; @JarJarJedi's characterization that "all of those are pure technical roles" is completely baseless and inaccurate.

Interestingly, at the high end part of what a true private banker (I'm talking about the kind of service you aren't in the market for unless the family net worth is well into double figures) is paid for is to understand the whole family and to offer financial advice that takes that into account. A private banker absolutely would, if asked, mediate in a money argument between family members in a way none of the other professionals on that list would.

In countries including but not limited to the States, the Scotsman you're describing is a private wealth manager (or sometimes called a wealth manager), typically used for a financial advisor targeting high net worth clients. A private banker typically refers to someone who sells financial products to high net worth clients.

And indeed, whenever there's more than one client involved in a client account relationship, whether the relationship between the clients be spousal, parent-children, or both, there can be tradeoffs, differences of opinion, balancing of interests. As I explained for the case of a couple: "there can involve balancing the individual concerns of the two members of the couple and navigating the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other. Aka, dealing with the relationship." Of course, one could take a No True Mediation line of argument, since the topics at hand may be different and level of intrusiveness might differ (or might not) than conversations with a therapist.

Under the traditional 1% of AUM model, it can be easily worth it for a financial advisors and planners to help "navigate the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other," for clients well below "double figures" of what I presume to be millions USD. Even a couple with just $5 million USD is worth $50,000 of fees annually. These fees are the lifeblood of financial advisors and AUM-fee-based planners. They'll do what it takes within reason to keep a client account going and telling them "talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it" is risking the account going elsewhere. Hourly fee-based financial advisors and planners will be even happier to sit around and deal with any relationship-navigating.

Here's one amusing anecdote as to how determined financial advisors are for obtaining and maintaining client accounts:

Quite a few years ago I temporarily had a brokerage account at say Bank XYZ, with only a few hundred thousand USD worth of stuff I was transferring around to chase transfer bonuses. I've long since transferred this account out and closed it. The financial advisory side of Bank XYZ, starting from the time I opened that brokerage account, has been regularly calling me to try to sell me on their financial advisory services (and still try to this day). Each time they call (once every few weeks to a few months) they leave a voicemail and say something like "I just wanted to check-in since I see you haven't reached back out to [last person who called me] yet..." So there's a long unbroken chain of follow-up voicemails—and in Ship of Theseus style—where the more recent callers almost certainly haven't overlapped with the first few callers in their tenures at Bank XYZ's financial advisory.

Other banks have also attempted something similar but not as persistently/thirstily.

Neither of those would go any further into the family relationships than "discuss important stuff with your SO". All of those are pure technical roles that help dealing with outside world, not your relationship.

All of those, when hired by a couple, involve balancing the individual concerns of the two members of the couple and navigating the tradeoffs between the utility functions of one and the other. Aka, dealing with the relationship.

I don't think CPA is going to do that. A CPA would say "talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it". So would any professional. If I hire a painter and I tell him I want the wall in teal and my wife wants it in beige then the painter won't mediate between us, he'll say "well, figure out between yourselves which color you want and call me when you have it".

Depends on the CPA’s specialty. If he does estate planning, trusts, etc then he might.

Sounds like you’re already retreating from talking confidently about “all of those roles” to “I don't think CPA is going to do that” and returning back to extrapolate upon all of those roles from your head-canon of the tax accountant.

So would any professional.

While one can always find low-performing financial advisors, financial planners, tax accountants, tax attorneys, and estate lawyers out there, a lot of being a professional in higher-paying client-oriented work (such as the roles mentioned above) involves proactively thinking on behalf of your client(s), describing and outlining options and tradeoffs for your clients.

Or at least, being able to convincingly portray you’re doing so even if you’re not, and telling them in the early stages “talk between yourselves and decide what you want, then tell me and I'll tell you how to do it" does not quite lend such a portrayal. Especially when what they think they want may be against their best interests or straight-up unlawful to implement.

After all, that’s what you’re supposedly there for, to share your knowledge as a knowledge-based professional—not a painter just looking to complete a wall.

The work of a tax accountant can involve a lot more than punching in numbers into TurboTax/H&RBlock for a couple if they’re not explicitly one-off flat fee clients. Even in just execution (much less planning) there can be a lot of decisions to be made with regard to a given year’s tax realization and how, and two members of a couple can have quite different opinions on how such things do, can, and/or should work.

Sure, if you pay enough, you can find a CPA which would work as your family relationship consultant. Heck, I can see a sum where I would agree to do the same (it'd be a lot of money, but still a finite sum). But that's not a typical financial advisor/CPA and not one that I have ever seen. Maybe I am just too poor to see any really good ones. But so are likely 90% of other people then.

What is the difference between a financial advisor and a financial planner?

It's not uncommon for financial advisors to be financial planners and vice versa.

Stereotypically, financial advisors are somewhat more prestigious and are more focused on things like investments and asset allocation. Financial planners are more "holistic," who may consider things like life insurance but may be more basic with regard to things like investment theory knowhow. Fee/compensation structures may or may not reflect as such.

In countries like the States—financial advisors are stereotypically CFA instead of CFP holders, financial planners are CFP instead of CFA holders. Although one can certainly hold both designations.

We have just the one female counsellor who serves all three roles (her individual sessions, my individual sessions, and the couples sessions). Which I’m sure must be a conflict of interest

Absolutely. Assuming you're American, this is enough of a conflict of interest that your therapist could potentially lose her license were you or your girlfriend to file a complaint. It's also all-too-common behavior, unfortunately.

whatever, I go to indulge my adorable basket case of a zoomette

Sounds like you might need a reliable therapist in the future, after all.

So, what are you reading?

I finally finished Al-Ghazali's The Book of Knowledge. I thought it would be a quasi-religious manual about logic and argument, but it turns out to be a remarkably interesting attempt to consolidate and support the basic opinions of Islam's Prophet and the Companions on the topic of knowledge in comparison to what was deemed knowledge in his time.

...the most satisfied state of mind for the sagacious is to deem yourself alone in the universe with God, in front of you is death, the day of judgment, reckoning, heaven, and the fire; ponder deeply on what will serve you best in that which is before you and abandon all else.

Otherwise I'm attempting Said's The Question of Palestine, for reasons unrelated to my reading on Islam or contemporary events, being more interested in the idea of Othering. I'm still on Bly's Iron John, and some day soon, I hope, I will make progress in The Dawn of Everything.

Like everyone around me... Dungeon Crawler Carl. Started after Christmas on Book 5 now. It's fun, and surprisingly not battling the culture war that much.

Dungeon Crawler Car

I knew it was a comedy series, but this is just ridiculous.

Started Theft of Fire. The setup is futuristic but the underlying sentiment feels extremely US-current red-tribe. Which is not a problem for me except it feels a bit like porn (not in a sexual sense but more in a socio-political sense, if you get my drift). Which I guess isn't a problem for me too, just not exactly what I expected. Will definitely continue.

About a quarter of the way through Deathly Hallows in Italian and loving it. Finished Half Blood Prince two weeks ago and while I love many aspects of that book, the last third is super rushed.

Also starting on Spinoza's Ethics and am reading a Spanish Historical fiction novel called Aquitania about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

I tried reading Alien Clay. Didn't quite finish it; repetitive prose and ideas, some degree of oppression porn, . Felt like Avatar written by an ecologist who is also a labor-of-my-body lets-have-a-commitee-meeting marxist rather than a blue cat native-american fetishist who likes submarines. The creatures were initially interesting, but then the planet becomes an anonymous blob of empathy breaking through the false consciousness, solving the coordination problem, and overthrowing the bootlickers. I think my personal grudges prevented me from enjoying it. TL;DR "What if [bad thing: hiveminds] is actually good?"

I liked Blindsight much more.

I'm making a concerted effort to read the books I picked up at the Library used book sale last summer, which have been sitting in a nice row on my china cabinet for too long. So I've been diving into Nelson Mandela's autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. Thoughts so far (his ANC activism has just started):

-- Mandela is an excellent writer. His account of coming out of primitivism and poverty to lawyer and activist is compelling and personal, he manages to balance good humor and honest accounts of oppression. I'd compare it to Angela's Ashes though obviously a bit more serious, where you have accounts of bad experiences that focus on the personal and the human.

-- Mandela's account of his youth reveals a modernizing tension. He grows up in a traditional tribal society, or at least the British-Empire-Sponsored Disneyland version of such, his father was a close courtier of the tribe's chief and when his father died Nelson was raised as a ward of the chief. Then the chief tried to marry Nelson off to another prominent family, in a way that would aid the chief in tribal politics, and Nelson didn't want to marry her so he ran away to Johannesburg. When he got to Joburg he prevailed upon his co-tribals and friends of the chief for hospitality and help getting jobs and connections, though some turned him away or reduced their aid when the chief got in touch others continued to help him. Later on he lost another housing situation when he started dating a girl from another ethnic group, and complained of the prejudice between tribes. This is both philosophically inconsistent, and very sympathetic and human: Nelson admires the close ties of tribal life, and takes advantage of them; but he shirks the obedience to the chief and insular xenophobia that creates those ties.

-- I never realized how late Apartheid was introduced. The 1948 South African elections brought the Nationalist party to power, and only then was the system formalized. While obviously the prior colonial regimes were far from woke and equal, the post-1948 system was a very real reduction in rights for blacks and an even larger reduction in optimism for future rights. Nelson's account before 1948 maps to the British belief that their colonial possessions would slowly assume independence as they assumed civilization: the British would create a civilized local black elite which would assist in ruling over the black majority and slowly assume rights, black rights would expand over time as more blacks were civilized until equality was reached. Then the Afrikaner nationalists took power and took back rights blacks had already been granted, while making clear that blacks would never achieve equality with whites. I wonder to what degree this change reflected the Afrikaner history and ideology of themselves as the oppressed minority conquered by the British? I always thought that Apartheid developed naturally from earlier systems, I didn't realize it was a late-created and harsher system than what came before.

I feel like something that always gets left out of discussions about apartheid is that afrikaaners are not a Northern European ethnicity. They’re a lot more clannish, tribal, and xenophobic than thé Dutchmen they used to be. The British wrote lengthy screeds about how they were impoverished religious fanatics who married their underaged cousins…. A description generally not used for Northern European ethnicities. The simple lack of British universalizing, civilizing impulse is pretty easy to understand there.

Impoverished religious fanatics? You mean, like Pilgrims? I don't know if they married their underage cousins, though. They probably did, it's not like they were spoiled for choice in Plymouth.

"The Afrikaner is never happy if he can see the smoke of another man's fire" was a saying from the period. Another way to put it is that the Afrikaners, as the name suggests, were not European colonists who expected to someday just go home, or jaunt off to another part of their Empire. They'd severed their ties to the metropole, struck out inland, and developed the culture necessary to survive without imperial support (this happened in other places, too, particularly inland regions disconnected from maritime trade - think the Rhodesians, or the French plantation in the director's cut of Apocalypse Now - but Afrikaners did it earlier and in much harsher conditions, so their society changed more).

As to the point about Apartheid coming later than expected, Apartheid was also a reaction to urbanization and migration of black workers to the cities. The old system of a farmer having patriarchal authority over his farmhands and a mining company over its miners, worked fine for a rural economy, but once SA's cities started growing, and hordes of unmarried young men came to work there (with all the problems that has always implied in history even before you get to the racial factor), the National Party decided they needed a system that would work for controlling cities as well as the countryside. The "Swart Gevaar" doesn't really exist before urbanization - rural unrest can always be put down but urban riots get out of control - hence why Apartheid comes later than the colonial systems of control.

It's very clear that the British viewed the Afrikaaners as colonial ethnics in the same way they viewed the Zulu, maybe a step above the blacks but fundamentally a primitive group to be managed through conflict with other such groups.

Wolf Totem

I'd always heard that Chinese literature, translated in English, was generally pretty bad- stilted, awkward phrasing, often on an infantile reading level, rather mediocre and meandering, like the worst of Dickens imitated by a third grader. But this is not like that; the prose reads like an American wrote it originally in the midcentury.

A bit over halfway through Blindsight. Honestly, I can't say I'm loving it. It may be destined for the charity shop.

It's one of my favorite first contact stories. What didn't you like so far?

I think it's mainly a style thing. The narration is so dense with jargon that there are often times when I literally cannot follow what's happening. Maybe this wouldn't be such an issue if I was a bigger sci-fi head.

I'm likewise having trouble keeping track of which character is which, an especially galling failing given that the narration makes such a big point of how different the characters are (both from each other and the human norm). One of the main characters has multiple personalities, but might as well not for all the difference it makes to her voice.

I hated the prose too. Like another commenter said though, it is intentional. If I recall, one jarring word choice was something like the word 'vessel' to refer to a person's physical body -- over and over and over again. My guess is this is meant to characterize the narrator. so, I don't knock off points for it, just to say: I won't be reading it again.

It has some really interesting ideas, but I found the execution underwhelming for the same reasons as you.

I may read too much sci-fi, then, because I was all-in on the jargon.

The audiobook has good delivery with distinct voices for all the characters; Spindel and Cunningham talk quite differently while both being stemlords.

The narration is so dense with jargon that there are often times when I literally cannot follow what's happening.

I think this has to be somewhat intentional, it forces you into the role of the narrator, who also doesn't understand what's happening. I'm only being half ironic. I found this to get better the longer you read. But yes, Blindsight is probably the book benefiting most from a re-read I can think of right now.

I'm likewise having trouble keeping track of which character is which, an especially galling failing given that the narration makes such a big point of how different the characters are

I know what you mean about the multiple personalities, that confused me to no end when it was introduced first. And I agree, three of them are extremely similar (I think their points of distinction are "mother", "child with romantic interest" and "child who uses curse words". But I was fine with that, if I remember correctly they mostly work different parts of the linguist job. The rest of the crew (vampire, STEM-autist, military woman and the narrator) are pretty distinct in my memory and reasonably well done voices. But that's not what Watts excels at anyway. I mostly love Blindsight for his unique ideas, the central premise, his world building, how he structured the story, and - yes - his prose. The last one is up to taste, and there can be no disputes about taste.

Glad to hear I wasn't the only one unimpressed.

The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. I've been wanting to read this one for a long time but there's a shaggy dog story that boils down to buying this one in paperback ages ago but said paperback turned out to be a misprinted copy, so when it went on sale in the Kindle bookstore, I was all too happy to pick it up.

I read this one recently: I liked it overall. Without spoilers, I thought it interesting that the plot twist, to the extent there is one, struck me as very "of it's time" in how it reflects on the human condition, but in a way that I don't think could be written today because waves at culture war, nor would the conclusion be deemed quite as satisfactory in that light. At the time, it was pretty well received by critics, too: an interesting display of shifting political winds.

I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts, though.

Challenge accepted, I'll update when I've finished the book. Glad to hear that you liked it!

I started that this past weekend. Finished chapter 2 tonight. Not a very impressive start, but I'll keep going and see how it develops.

Eh, it's been good enough to hold my attention (currently on chapter 12, and things have developed quickly) but then again, I always say I'm a cheap date when it comes to books and it continues to be true!

Just started The Vorkosigan Saga and I'm loving it so far. Been on my list for a long time and I'm glad I'm finally checking it out. Old sci-fi at its best.

It was an interesting series but one that I myself never got into. It came highly recommended to me, but I read Shards of Honour, Barrayar, and then concluded that not only was it not for me, but I didn't understand the praise for it. To me it read like, well, pulp. Bujold's prose isn't particularly impressive, her worldbuilding is formulaic, and her characters were bland. I filed them away as the sorts of novels you read in airports or on long flights - not good by any reasonable standard, but consistently tolerable, while not asking much of the reader. To this day I don't understand the love for them. I can't even really muster the energy to dislike them. The strongest opinion I have of them is... well, I should put that down-thread.

What are some extremely good novels you would like, then?

I have fond memories going through the saga, it's certainly doing something pretty unique. Just introducing standard sci-fi tech gimmicks, and then really deep explorations of what having technology like that means for society. I also like how it mostly doesn't take easy outs, plenty of hard consequences for the characters to live with. It's pretty well done, even if it's much more classic space opera than modern hard sci-fi.

It's also an interesting time capsule, for me it's the absolute essence of proto-woke. The breath and depth of the progressive thought surprised me several times considering the release dates of the books. She hits most modern culture war foci decades before they became mainstream.

True! So far there's a lot of feminism for sure. But at least it's early stage feminism where she accepts inequality of outcome, and that women shouldn't try to pretend to be men. Not the insanity we have today.

I find this particularly funny because I remember reading Barrayar and feeling that it was... er, basically a pro-life tract? As a book? This greatly offended the liberal-left friends who had recommended it to me, but I think I stand by that judgement.

Barrayar is a book in which the protagonist is a pregnant woman, Cordelia, who chooses not to use an artificial womb because she feels that the biological, bodily experience of pregnancy is of some sort of inherent value, whose child is identified early on as having significant disabilities, and who faces tremendous social pressure to abort the child, or even to give him up for infanticide after birth. She takes great personal risks to keep this child and give birth anyway, because all life is sacred, and ultimately the character most determined to abort the inferior child, count Piotr, is charmed by the child's simple goodness despite his disability.

If I were planning a book from the ground up to make the case for pro-life ethics, I could hardly do much better.

The book is, of course, critical of patriarchal and feudal Barrayar, but its depiction of Beta Colony, the enlightened liberal state, is also harshly critical! I came away from the book feeling that Beta was, if anything, more dystopian than Barrayar. At least Barrayar doesn't issue breeding licenses. I felt that Barrayar came off as something like a defense of natural, traditional parenthood. Barrayar's aristocracy are so concerned with face and honour that they will abort and murder children; Beta is so disconnected from biological life that they sever birth from the mother's body entirely, and they put mandatory state-controlled contraceptive implants in everyone. These are both deeply wrong.

Very much agree. It's extremely lovely that she writes a world in which her politics don't neatly align with either traditionalism as such or extreme sci fi progressivism. I'm having a great time reading it, just finished The Warrior's Apprentice.

Yeah, that's the first major theme, and it always has some presence throughout the series. Next big one after that will be ableism, which also stays present till the end. Then classism, critique of empire and colonialism, mental health, fat acceptance, racism against actual new human sub-species, homosexuality, sexual deviancy, even some quick trans side characters.

But yes, most of it is well done.

See also the Vorkosigan Saga Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game (licensed GURPS product, "with character art specifically approved by Lois McMaster Bujold").

The AI 2027 guys have updated their timeline, pushing back the estimated time until a superhuman coder appears to 2032.

Does anybody else feel like they just got a stay of execution?

AI 2027 Guys in 2040:

"Although none of our original or updated predictions were right, per se, we believe that we were wrong for the right reasons and that our logical argument and use of evidence provided important development in the overall conversation about what was previously referred to as AGI and/or ASI. While future forecasting is a notoriously difficult field, we can be proud in our own effects to attempt to look over the horizon. Ultimately, the journey to AGI/ASI may never be totally complete, but we can all be assured that the ethical dimensions of our arguments will have been forged in the hopes of guaranteeing the best possible future for humanity."

Give me a fuckin' break. These guys are boomer charlatans out of their depth who are now post-doomering in order to maintain "mindshare".

It does feel like a release of pressure even if the overall uncertainty remains.

That's an extra 5 years wherein I can die before the Godlike AI comes in and tortures me forever.

Exciting things can still happen in those 5 years with just the current capabilities. I'm still holding hope for anti-aging to be the next sincere frontier and AI to speed up research and produce new solutions.

I'm actually hopeful that self driving cars, autonomous drones, and humanoid robots will be available as consumer grade products by 2030.

Drug discovery and Math and physics research and ultimately biohacking being unleashed would allow for manmade horrors AND manmade delights that are within our comprehension.

And if VIDEO production by AI keeps improving, I might be able to make that custom anime series I've had ideas for.

There might be a "Golden Path" available where AI plateaus right at the level where it can exponentially boost productivity while never quite nosing into true super-intelligence for reasons that may or may not be understood.

I don't think that's our trajectory, but managing to solve our most pressing issues without creating existential risk would be a miracle and proof that God loves us. Expert Systems everywhere would be pretty cool.

Climate change called, they want their "constant doomsaying" back.

I'm happy these guys have found something to do but attempting to make forecasts about socio-scientific progress as if it was a natural/mechanistic process feels too much like physics envy.

As I use codex/claude code to implement high-level features and do complicated changes with just a few lines of natural language, not really! I mostly just think the AI 2027 people are wrong to update that much upwards.

Not particularly, this seems to be following the usual trajectory of "in five years time" for all claimed World-Shattering Advances. As we get nearer to 2032, I wouldn't be surprised for more 'updated' timelines about "well we mean by 2036" and so on.

I'm not saying AI won't happen, I'm saying the fairytale AI won't happen. No superhuman ASI better at everything than the best human. AI integrated into our work lives the same way email and the Internet became integrated, and for once a shakeup in white collar jobs first, but no "now we have AI running the economic planning for us". Robot factories supervised by four or five humans cranking out cars? Yeah, that's plausible. AI working out how to colonise the light cone? Come off it.

I'm not sure how you could be confident of that because the entire point of "fast takeoff" is the nonlinearity. It's not saying "AI is going to improve steadily at a fast pace and we're going to get 10% of the way closer to lightcone speed each year for 10 years. It's "At some point, AI will be slightly smarter than humans at coding. Once it does that, it can write its own code and make itself smarter. Once it can do that, growth suddenly become exponential because the smarter AI can make itself smarter faster. And then who knows what happens after that?"

I'm not 100% convinced that this is how things play out, but "AI is gradually but slowly getting better at coding" is weak evidence towards that possibility, not against it.

is weak evidence towards that possibility,

My intuition is that "intelligence" actually has theoretical bounds we just haven't derived yet. We haven't, IMO, defined what it is well enough to state this easily, but information theory broadly defines some adjacent bounds. Also that real humans require orders of magnitude less training data --- how many books did Shakespeare read, and compare to your favorite LLM corpus --- which seems to mean something.

Also that at the scale of economics, "singularity" and "exponential growth" both look darn similar in the near-term, but almost all practical examples end up being the latter, not the former.

information theory broadly defines some adjacent bounds.

Don't forget physics. We're probably nowhere near the limit of how many computational operations it takes to get a given "intelligence" level of output, but whatever that limit is will combine with various physical limits on computation to turn even our exponential improvements into more logistic-function-like curves that will plateau (albeit at almost-incomprehensible levels) eventually.

at the scale of economics, "singularity" and "exponential growth" both look darn similar in the near-term, but almost all practical examples end up being the latter, not the former.

"Singularity" was a misleading choice of term, and the fact that it was popularized by a PhD in mathematics who was also a very talented communicator, quoting one of the most talented mathematicians of the twentieth century, is even more bafflingly annoying. I get it, the metaphor here is supposed to be "a point at which existing models become ill-defined", not "a point at which a function or derivative diverges to infinity", but everyone who's taken precalc is going to first assume the latter and then be confused and/or put-off by the inaccuracy.

That said, don't knock mere "exponential growth", or even just a logistic function, when a new one outpaces the old at a much shorter timescale. A few hundred million years ago we got the "Cambrian explosion", and although an "explosion" taking ten million years sounds ridiculously slow, it's a fitting term for accelerated biological evolution in the context of the previous billions of years of slower physical evolution of the world. A few tens of thousands of years ago we got the "agricultural revolution", so slow that it encompasses more than all of written history but still a "revolution" because it added another few orders of magnitude to the pace of change; more human beings have been born in the tens of millennia since than in the hundreds of millennia before. The "industrial revolution" outdoes the previous tens-of-millennia of cumulative economic activity in a few centuries.

Can an "artificial superintelligence revolution" turn centuries into years? It seems like there's got to be stopping point to the pattern very soon (years->days->tens-of-minutes->etc actually would be a singular function, and wouldn't be enabled by our current understanding of the laws of physics), so it's perhaps not overly skeptical to imagine that we'll never even hit a "years" phase, that AI will be part of our current exponential, like the spreadsheet is, but never another vastly-accelerated phase of growth.

You're already pointing out some evidence to the contrary, though:

real humans require orders of magnitude less training data --- how many books did Shakespeare read, and compare to your favorite LLM corpus --- which seems to mean something.

This is true, but what it means from a forecasting perspective is that there are opportunities beyond simple scaling that we have yet to discover. There's something about our current AI architecture that relies on brute force to accomplish what the human brain instead accomplishes via superior design. If we (and/or our inefficient early AIs) manage to figure out that design or something competitive with it, the sudden jump in capability might actually look like a singular-derivative step function of many orders of magnitude.

Don't forget physics. We're probably nowhere near the limit of how many computational operations it takes to get a given "intelligence" level of output, but whatever that limit is will combine with various physical limits on computation to turn even our exponential improvements into more logistic-function-like curves that will plateau (albeit at almost-incomprehensible levels) eventually.

What people seem to fairly consistently forget is that the exponential improvements in computation have come at an exponential development and build resource cost. It doesn't matter if a hypothetical AI can keep improving the core design part when everything else required to actually use that new core design keeps increasing exponentially in cost.

All of those are strong possibilities that I think a lot of AI doomerists underestimate, and are the main reason why I think AI explosion to infinity is not the most likely scenario.

But I definitely believe that less strongly than I did 10 years ago. AI has improved a lot since then and suggest that things are pretty scalable at least so far.

Except that is bullshit, because you can start with lower smarts than humans and still have the parabolic curve. It is not that you need human level intelligence. Also humans have become worse at coding in the last 30 years.

It is just sensationalism from their part.

humans have become worse at coding in the last 30 years.

Have they? It seems like for the category of "motivated, experienced developers who do it for a living or as a serious hobby" you might be right, but it seems like there are an awful lot of people who would have had no ability back in the 90s who can bang out a half-assed python script today.

Exactly. For LLM quality of data is more important than quantity. So we have more shitty code on which to train. Which means we are moving slowly towards AGI. One more of the benefits of Java, JS, php and C++

We're relying heavily on "the AI can make itself smarter" for this. We've been trying to make ourselves smarter for a long time, and the results are mixed. Perhaps "regression to the mean" will apply to AI also, and the product of "it rewrote its code to be smarter" is "well uh turns out that made it reset to an earlier state".

We've been trying to make ourselves smarter for a long time

What? We have basically no forms of self-modification available whatsoever. You can study and reason, I guess, which is vaguely like adding training data to an AI. You can try Eugenics, but that's highly controversial, incredibly slow, and has not been tried at scale for long enough. Hitler tried and then people stopped him before he could get very far. Gene editing technology is very new and barely used due to controversy and not being good enough and taking decades to get any sort of feedback on.

We have NOT been "trying to make ourselves smarter" in the same way or any way comparable to an AI writing code for a new AI with the express purpose of making it smarter. What we have been doing is trying to make AI smarter with more powerful computers and better algorithms and training and it has worked. The AI of this year is way smarter than the AI of last year, because coders got better at what they're doing and made progress that made it smarter. If you have more and better coders you get smarter AI. We can't do that to humans... yet. Maybe some day we will. But we don't have the technology to genetically engineer smarter humans in a similar way, so I don't know what sort of comparison you're trying to make here.

Education, better nutrition, recommendations from Top Medical Men about what to/what not to eat, drink, sleep, wear, how hot or cold your house should be, and the old-fashioned "just do it like we breed racehorses: get smart men to marry smart women and pump out smart kids".

We haven't yet been able to stick pins into our brains to re-write our code, but we'll try that as soon as something seems vaguely plausible (Neurolink, maybe?) Somebody out there is going to try and use AI to do "adult genetic engineering, rewrite your cells on the fly" to get Moar Bigger Brain.

I tell you, we will have energy net positive nuclear fusion in just 20 years!

For the low low price of $99.99 in 999 easy instalments!

I'm pretty sure we\ve had it for a while...

I don't think it is net positive if you account for all inputs.

That is one way of looking at it, yes. Bit of a drastic solution to "the city needs more energy", though?

The Chernobyl power plan did the five year plan - petiletka - for thermal energy production in 34 seconds.

Pyatiletka, tovarish.

Ehh... The harvested energy pales compared to the work that has to be put in to build the "reactor" and refine the fuel. Besides, that particular "containment" method has only ever been used in prototype tests and never in actual production use.

Damn. I hate it when my attempts at being technically correct get out-technically-corrected.

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