site banner
PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   2382 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 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.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Is there any precedent for the Army Chief of Staff being fired during wartime?

I can't think of anything since the civil war that comes particularly close.

I know a few people in tech - what you describe as "FAANG engineer" but vast majority of them never worked for FAANG specifically (though a small minority did). I would say I would be very surprised if less than 90% of them are Democrat voters. I of course can't know for sure, and I avoid talking politics at work or with work colleagues or potential colleagues, but you can see it, with some people right out of the door, with others eventually. Mostly because that's what nice, educated, open-minded, well-adjusted people in their circle do. Most of them are very smart people, IQ-wise. A lot of them are stunningly ignorant on actual policies they are voting for, and the consequences of those policies - and as far as I can see, most of them consider any negative consequences a minor bug which can be easily solved by proper regulatory policy tweaks, just as they'd fix a bug in the code. And I don't think anything short of at least full local society collapse would cause them to consider changing their vote. It's just not something that is done. I mean, they surely might vote for different Democrat candidates in Democrat primaries to select different Democrat policies, but that's as far as it'd ever go.

There's also a subgroup which calls themselves "libertarians". Some are actually libertarians and vote for LP (which is of course completely useless, politically, but points for consistency) but I'd give more than even chance that the majority still votes Democrat anyway.

Out of all tech people I know, I could name maybe a couple who I am pretty sure are pro-Trump, but most I'd say are very "orange man bad". Observing discussions in places like HN supports my assumption that it's not just my personal bubble, but it could be a wider bubble of course.

What is the typical White, Male, College-educated Democrat voter like?

Probably working for the government (or an NGO), or maybe a non-tech role as an employee in a Big Corp. Of the white male lawyers I know, the vast majority are probably Dem voters for federal elections, even the prosecutors. The non-Dems would likely be the ones who have their own firms and get murdered by taxes (probably lots of minority male attorneys with their own firms who voted for Trump). These are not "elite" lawyers. They went to state schools, have unremarkable non-prestigious jobs, etc.

Source: I'm a white male lawyer in my 40s. I know one loud and proud Trump-supporting white male lawyer. The rest are prone to making anti-Trump commenters for the slightest reason, even just small talk about the weather.

You're experiencing a bubble effect. I'm an elder millennial, so my peers are mostly late 30s, but because I play ultimate Frisbee which is a college team sport, a lot of the people I hang out with are white males in their 20s as well. I know a grand total of one confirmed Trump voter among them, including myself (I'm white-adjacent enough to count, in terms of how vast swathes of society pre-judge me), and he will only mention it to me when we're the only ones hanging out or if we're with his friends who are barely my acquantiances. Now, I don't know the precise voting habits of every one of my white male acquaintances, but given just how ubiquitous it is to hear some random jab about Trump followed by the equivalent of "aye" or applause in any social situation, and how much pushback I receive when I try to call out dishonest or manipulative framing of Trump's misdeeds, I'd wager that the number of white males I know who even consider it virtuous to treat Trump honestly, much less supports him, is vanishingly small.

What is the typical White, Male, College-educated Democrat voter like? I was surprised looking at the cross tabs for the 2024 election that this group was only 50% pro Trump.

I was shocked by the 50% figure as obscenely high, but surely you mean White Male College educated, but not Democrat? If 1 out of every 2 White Male College educated DEMOCRATS support Trump, this would be quite the coup, almost literally.

I think white and male skews pro-Trump, but college skews heavily anti-Trump, and it lands somewhere around 50%. It speaks to the power of ideas over the power of race or sex that college is able to be equal and opposite those other forces, which also speaks to the utter idiocy of judging the value of words by the speaker's race or sex rather than the ideas they're expressing.

This is Boston area, and the ultimate Frisbee guys are primarily nerdy college educated professionals in some field, including tech. Elite colleges don't seem any more overrepresented in this group than any other group of college grads; I can only name one ultimate Frisbee guy I know who went to one: Columbia.

Now, they do enjoy drinking beer and watching sports, but I'd say not in a stereotypical male way. More like a stereotypical nerdy yuppie way, only as an outside social event at a bar, and people basically NEVER do things like casually ask each other, "Hey what'd you think of the game last night?" or whatever. We drink Bud Light Lime ironically at tournaments, but otherwise, it'd be very rare for one of us to be seen drinking a beer that's not some microbrew or less popular import or some quintuple IPA abomination.

A lot of them, you'd clock as nerds, some of them as hipsters, and very few as jocks. Though I'd say, due to the nature of a physically taxing sport like ultimate, the overt nerdiness level is pretty low.

Bubbles are surprisingly strong. I’ve never met an open Trump supporter (or equivalent local rightwing party) in real life. All the young college educated straight white men I know are at least moderately leftwing, or at least heavily dislike rightwing populists. Supporting Trump would make you an instant social pariah, and make people wonder what went wrong with you.

From a personal budgeting standpoint, is an insurance reimbursement considered income or negative spending? I'm assuming the latter, but if anyone has arguments in the other direction I'd like to hear them.

If the IRS is asking then I file it under “non-existent.” I’d probably categorize it as negative spending like you.

As everything with taxes, it's complicated (not a lawyer or CPA, just random guy on internet who files his own taxes). Generally, if it's a payout for a specific loss, it's not taxable. If it's something like disability insurance or more complex insurance not tied to a specific loss event - it may be taxable. Something like car insurance probably not taxable. I classify it as "other income" in my budgeting app but I do not report it to the IRS as income.

Have you noticed the information density of youtube going way way down in the last year-two? Videos that could be 5 minutes are 35, everyone talks slowly and lazily. Up to the point where youtube offers x3 and I think x4 playback as premium features.

There's a whole type of content creator that basically makes videos answering very commonly asked questions on the internet, or with very short walkthoughs for commonly researched tasks, that puts most of their effort into stretching their video (that might even be answering a yes/no question) out to at least 10 minutes long with the actual answer appearing after two ads, then using SEO tricks, imitating the name and appearance of channels with better reputations, and other non-value add techniques to get views, that has been suddenly decapitated by AI, almost overnight. The channels that actually care about thier subject matter aren't doing much better if its not something nuanced or likely to be hallucinated about by AI. The stretching out of the videos to absurd durations is still about chasing as much add revenue as possible before the viewer closes the video. So not only does it take waaaay to long, it always seems like they are just about to answer the actual question in the name of the video, but they aren't. If you're lucky someone will timestamp it in the comments and the channel owner hasn't removed it yet.

I've heard that videos under ~5 minutes become shorts which don't get monetized, so the incentive is to make longer videos. I guess videos under 10 minutes are also getting downgraded now because they get less engagement / fewer ads?

I have also noticed that most of the recommendations on lightly-used logged-out browsers are now are now shorts of the simp-bait variety or long-form videos of the "show something rage-inducing and offer light, brainrot commentary from the corner of the screen" variety - Asmongold is the epitome of this, and I always regret clicking. To add to this, I suspect most of the history and food video recommendations I get are wholly AI-generated, and most of the topics that would be interesting are obvious clickbait. It's gotten to where I can pretty much only watch people whose channels I intentionally search.

I've heard that videos under ~5 minutes become shorts which don't get monetized

There was some panic over this in the early days of Shorts when YouTube was retroactively, non-consensually converting existing videos into Shorts, but these days, YouTube is pretty clear that only vertical/square videos less than 3 minutes in length become Shorts. So as long as your video is shaped like a normal video, it can be as short as you want without getting the Shorts treatment.

You can technically monetize Shorts now too, but I've heard it's not as lucrative as traditional videos.

I’ve always hated YouTube shorts. It always caters to low information, low quality content that fuels the dopamine rush people want. Having something long form even as background noise I’ve always liked. Especially while sleeping. Sleeping is an enormously difficult task for me and I need something to carry me away and push things into the background.

Sleeping is an enormously difficult task for me and I need something to carry me away and push things into the background.

I'm much the same in this regard, and it's always been viscerally difficult for me to understand people who need pure silence to sleep. Everything just seems too heightened when it's quiet; I become hyperaware of things like the house settling or find myself paying attention to every little sound on the streets outside and it just becomes impossible to relax.

Without 20mg-50mg melatonin every night I only sleep 3-4 hours. I don’t know if I’m a semi-permanent insomniac or what. But it’s the only thing that can do a halfway decent job of keeping me down and even then it doesn’t always take on the lower end of that dosage. Otherwise I’ll be awake for days. Parents used to yell at me all the time for not “going to bed,” but I don’t know how to fix it. I’d usually try and be productive by making breakfast for everyone in the very early hours of the morning before my family got up. Never stopped me getting yelled at but at least made them happy I suppose. Being tired was always a mental thing for me, never physical. I tend to recover extremely fast, physically.

I've recommended this book on this forum several times by now, perhaps even to you at some point, but you should take the time to read This is Natto: Are you ready for the journey within?. Unless you're some very rare specimen, hyperarousal in your mind likely contributes to or makes up nearly your entire problem with sleep.

I will definitely take a look at that. Thank you. My mind does tend to occupy itself a lot. When at home and not among company I’m a pretty emotionally lowkey and laid back guy. I don’t have ADHD or anything like that. But to me sleep was always a matter of my eyelids being so heavy I can’t keep them open. Even caffeine does nothing for me. I can’t drink coffee because it tastes like shit IMO but I do drink a good amount of soda. Doesn’t do anything. Even without it I could be awake for days without sleeping supplements.

I wanna say it was around 2020-ish when YouTube changed their algorithm to put a lot less weight on channels' upload record / consistency and a lot more weight on individual videos' watch-time. (Hard to know for sure because all information about the YouTube algorithm is buried under a mountain of "how do I get rich on YouTube" slop articles.) Previously the dominant strategy was to release a lot of short, punchy videos, ideally on a daily release schedule; Captain Disillusion griped about that in his 2018 parody video. But by 2021, creators like Quinton Reviews were seeing success with five-hour monstrosities that were actually just a bunch of shorter videos combined into one upload for algorithm purposes.

"Short daily video" YouTubers and "long infrequent effortpost" YouTubers have both existed on the platform for a long time (and still exist), but now that long videos are a popular/successful format, I see a lot more low-effort attempts at making them. It doesn't help that YouTube Shorts (and TikTok) provide a better path to success for people interested in making short videos.

I truly do not envy the lives of those whose paycheck and general live trajectory is dictated by an algorithm that is constantly and aggressively being tweaked but uncaring corporate interests to maximize eyeballs on ads, or whatever they call the actual metric they care about.

Arbitrary-seeming changes that often wreck your previous strategy, or even diminish the viability of the very style you prefer to express in.

Your work output dictated by constant compliance with a disinterested (not malicious, but it'd be hard to tell) program that remains, to you, a complete black box which you can only appease by offering up your best efforts and seeing which get rewarded with views and money, then adjusting from there.

It is true that we ALL live under someone else's algorithm (and, if you wish, EVERYONE is living under the meta-algorithm known as "the market"). But it'd be particularly maddening to me when there's a corporate entity that owes me no allegiance, and refuses to disclose the most important standards by which it judges 'success,' meanwhile it doles out the rewards as it sees fit with seemingly no regard for the quality of the creative work.

Did people ever think being full-time on social media meant you weren’t working in the gig economy? Unless you’re a back end developer at Google or something, being a single independent content creator was never likely to become a serious substitute for a career. Maybe at best it parallels things like being an adjunct professor or other up and down contract work but that’s about it. Even among creators that made it big and got lucky they were always exceptions to the rule. The rest of them wash out over time.

It is true that we ALL live under someone else's algorithm (and, if you wish, EVERYONE is living under the meta-algorithm known as "the market").

Eh. That stretches the concept quite a bit away from the original point. “Markets” are just massive auction houses that express a preference when people bid with their money. That’s the literal textbook definition of a market in capitalism. Nobody will ever be able to run away from the smaller market based constituencies that have existed for millennia that we call “commerce.”

I'm just saying that broadly speaking, everyone is mostly chasing incentives dictated by a black box force they have limited ability to control.

If you're in the gig economy or working as a streamer, you know where the Algo is and who controls it, at least.

Assuming that you're right, I would think that ads have something to do with it. Youtubers are (were?) notorious for stretching <10 minute videos to ten minutes, because that allows them to include a midroll ad.

It’s all downstream of the choices YouTube makes. YouTube wants to show you videos lengthy enough for ads, so they create incentives both monetary and exposure based for creators to make them, and then adjust their algorithm in order to show them to you. YouTube controls it all and the content creators are merely their puppets. YouTube has a monopoly over this sort of thing and that is how they get away with it. The monopoly is more or less inherent to how these digital platforms operate, with market forces encouraging centralization of user bases. So really it’s digitized markets to blame for all of this, YouTube’s just the beast it operates through.

Feels like it used to be that a 'video essay' was mostly guaranteed to have some insights and interesting commentary on a topic you cared about.

The more recent videos are just as long but less 'useful' information, lazier editing, and even the entertainment value has gone down.

Plus certain topics are getting recycled pretty often, so I'd just as soon go and rewatch older classics.

I just don't watch 'em anymore.

AI writing's also surely contributing to this. Somebody can toss in like 5 dotpoints and get a 30 minute script, whilst previously if they were writing their own there'd be more a trend towards brevity.

A method I've seen is for someone to copy the transcript of an existing video, feed it into an AI and ask it to make arbitrary changes, feed the outputted script into an AI voice generator, then use AI + third worlders on Fiverr to stitch together visuals to go with it, and voila, a complete video with minimal effort.

There's also a trend of using AI actors or clones. Essentially, since so many videos are just people talking into cameras with minimal movement, an AI generated actor is totally serviceable. It's AI script + AI voice, exposited by an AI person.

Now the question is, is AI mimicking people or were people already mimicking AI?

Ding ding ding.

Its easier to put out volume if you happily compromise on quality, and I have to assume the Youtube Algo doesn't care about quality over minutes watched.

So there's some 'optimal' amount of information/minute that pads out the video without losing the viewer.

Just so happens my preference is on information density is higher than the average youtube viewers. Which is unsurprising.

but we also have powerful defensive tools.

First thing to do with any long video is to copy/paste the transcript into your LLM of choice and get a summary to see if it's worth your time, or just to get the info without the padding

I think a better strategy is to just limit your consumption to trusted channels. I'm reluctant to watch anything that isn't by someone I've seen before. I may not be able to tell when it's 100% AI content, but a low effort video is a low effort video. It's pretty easy to tell when someone doesn't know what they're talking about and are simply summarizing a Wikipedia article, or LLM output for that matter.

Yep.

Hence why if the video isn't leveraging its advantages as a visual medium to be more engaging/entertaining, I'm backing out almost instantly.

As you get older your time and mental bandwidth becomes less and less and you have to become more selective about where you invest your time. I typically only leave my area of the pond to explore new ground when very trusted people close to me recommend something they know is up my alleyway. And they’re usually right. Leveraging your connections and reputation can help.

Holy shit they gated higher playback speeds as a premium feature? LMAO

I am pretty sure I have a chrome extension that works on every type of video to arbitrarily control playback speed.

Every time I see someone using the YouTube app instead of a modded client like Vanced (which I use and love), I die a little inside. It's probably better to use the browser at that point, even on mobile.

Probably useful if you’re a more frequent or power user of YouTube. If I’m watching an occasional video and I just don’t want to be pestered by an ad, I’ll use NewPipe.

They gated ‘queue next video’ and ‘play in window’ as premium features too. Netflix gates the latter even if you are a paying customer on the lower tier.

Last year, I did a movie watching challenge: 50 movies that I haven't seen before, from 50 years, 1975 through 2024. From the outset I knew that the selection of older titles on streaming services is abysmal, especially when you're not in the US, so my plan always was to plan the movies first, assume I'll need to pirate most, only watch on streaming if it's available. What I'm trying to say is that my expectations for streaming sites are very, very low, and yet I can't help but be surprised how bad the actual situation is. You really live like this?

There was a brief period in my life when I gave up buccaneering entirely because there was enough proper content on streaming platform to fill my schedule. That period ended quickly - the ecosystem fragmented explosively (and no, I am not going to buy 15 different streaming service subscriptions, thank you very much), most of individual platforms became 95% garbage, with distribution of worthy content in the remaining 5% being arbitrary and shifting all the time, and on top of that every streaming platform has its own app and most of them are crappy in their own unique ways. And of course it's all chock full of ads unless you pay and pay and pay and pay on top of that (and you'll probably still get ads because why not). It is completely intolerable to live like this - especially given the alternative is within the hand's reach, for those who knows how to reach it.

This is one of the areas where the current state of the market is objectively worse than in the pre-internet era. I remember when I was in college (the internet existed but hadn't subsumed everything) it seemed like every town had a video store that opened when the VCR came out in the 1980s, ordered every title that was available, and never threw anything out. The result was that you had independent shops whose archives included pretty much everything that was ever released on video. Sure, it might not be on DVD, and the tape might be in bad shape from having been watched 4 million times, but at least it was available. I remember they had a 5 catalog rentals for $5 deal, and the rentals were for a week, so it was kind of a weekly ritual to rent 5 movies every week whether I planned on watching them or not. They also had a byzantine setup that encouraged browsing because you never knew where you'd find anything, though they had a catalog you could consult. The new releases were obviously segregated, and they had the normal categories (comedy, drama, etc.), but the AFI 100 movies had their own section, as did "Black and White Classics", and there was something called the Video Vault that could have anything. I believe there was even a small LBGT section, definitely odd for a small town store in the mid 2000s.

They closed in 2007, well before streaming. I think it was a combination of OG Netflix and Redbox. I worked at a video store in high school, and 90% of our sales were newer releases, though the one I worked at didn't have much of an archive. It was part of a grocery store, and it became easier for the grocery stores to just put a Redbox machine in the lobby that would cover the dozen or so titles that actually made money. Netflix didn't make sense for new releases at the time, since you had to wait and could be on a list, but for movie buffs who would just put a hundred movies in the queue and watch whatever Netflix sent them, it was perfectly fine and didn't require as much effort. My roommate and I got the Blockbuster equivalent circa 2008 and I remember he spent an afternoon just inputting the entire 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die list in, and we'd watch whatever came in. That was probably the peak of movie availability since they really did have close to everything you could think of, unless it was really obscure.

As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.

As soon as streaming became the main business it was over, because bandwidth considerations came into play, similar to the space considerations of Redbox, and it was thus impossible to keep an inventory of that size, especially when the licensing agreements were more complicated and probably required them to pay for rights even for stuff that wasn't in high demand.

It's 100% the licensing agreements that cause this shortage, and not bandwidth.

It's 100% the licensing agreements that cause this shortage, and not bandwidth storage.

Bandwidth cost is of course completely independent of the number of available movies. Video streaming is rather forgiving of storage medium speed. Almost everyone watches linearly, 95% of traffic is to a small section of the catalog and people are quite tolerant of some seek time for longer seeks and startup time for rarer films. You can store a couple of thousand films on even a small disk array, the first 5-10 minutes of tens of thousands on another and then you have a few minutes to load the remaining film to a server cache for those rarely accessed titles.

You can store a couple of thousand films on even a small disk array, the first 5-10 minutes of tens of thousands on another and then you have a few minutes to load the remaining film to a server cache for those rarely accessed titles.

Have you seen the storage requirements for 2160p content? They’re enormous. Maybe if you’re talking about 480p, I could see that. Because if the former held up, then I ‘clearly’ built my stack the wrong way; lmao. And I know this stuff fairly well.

If I was talking about 480p content, I'd have 10x'd the number of films. And yes, I did do the math (hell, back in my university days I implemented from scratch all the major parts of a video codec for an image processing course and then worked for a number of years on a video compositing platform so this ain't exactly my first rodeo).

The number of films that even have a 2160p digital transfer is limited and this isn't about archival quality copies but streaming for actual viewers, not for a few nerds who compare films purely based on specs. You don't need ridiculously high bitrates for tens of thousands of films because no profitable customer segment actually expects that nor can the vast majority of customers even stream reliably at such speeds. 99% of paying customers won't care if a film is available in "only" 15-20 Mbps when encoded with a decent modern codec (*) with proper options (and not the PSNR optimized crap that was popular for so long in "professional" encoders). They particularly won't care if that's the only way to watch the film at all.

More comments

This is why my only streaming service is the Criterion Channel. The only advantage of streaming over piracy is convenience, so might as well choose your convenience to funnel you towards good movies rather than bad ones.

There's also Kanopy, which has the added advantage of being free to a point.

'You' being non-US or streamers? Is it better in the US?

Yes, although it's been happening for a few years longer than that. The amount of clickbait has also steadily increased where entire 15 minute videos could be replaced by three sentences. And of course the search has now gone completely to shit with even the "before:2027" trick not working anymore.

Yes. The advent of the full time youtuber has led most video creators to compete at being bloated clickbait producing fucks who waste the hell out of my time. It's all so algorithm-meta-gamed and it's all so tiresome.

GothamChess gets a lot of shit for using clickbait titles instead of anything useful or informative, but he ought to get about ten times as much shit for it. Just relentless slash-and-burn farming of the commons.

Thank God I’m not the only one. I used to play high level competitive Chess for years when I was younger, but I’ve always disliked Levy’s content for ‘exactly’ that reason. The St Louis Chess Club’s most popular videos provide good analysis and agadmator as well. Last time I sat through one of Levy’s videos was his analysis of Magnus vs. Nepo a few years ago but that’s it.

So, what are you reading?

I'm reattempting Burnham's The Machiavellians. Feeling a need to revisit the roots of neoconservative thought.

Battle Cry of Freedom. I'm always fascinated by revolutions and civil wars since almost no one actually wants to fall into them, but one step after another makes people escalate to that point.

Re-read the Philip Marlowe novels by Raymond Chandler, and then started working through some Elmore Leonard novels and a number of the Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald.

The Lew Archer novels started to be published just as Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels were winding down. Upon re-reading, the plotting in the Marlowe novels is quite threadbare (although they do improve over time, and Lady in the Lake and Long Goodbye are leaps and bounds better than the first ones). However, as a glimpse of 1930s-1940s California + really sharp commentary, they're excellent.

The Lew Archer novels are much, much better plotted, and a good snapshot of California as it exploded in the 1950s-60s. The writing isn't quite as sharp or witty as Chandler's, but it's close. I don't think I'll read them all, but I've read 7 so far and will probably read another 3. I'm curious to read his take on the 70s in the last two novels (published '73 and '76).

Started rereading The Dresden Files after my fiancés uncle kept raving about it. It’s a fun romp so far, though I had to laugh at all the “science hasn’t solved disease, or starvation, or war.” I’m religious myself, but science has a strong case for mostly solving all three of those.

I'll warn you that the author has largely stalled on the series. At this point I'm not sure if he'll actually finish it.

I'd bet on Jim over Rothfuss or Martin, but yeah, still frustrating. Mind-reading a bit on the most recent book I think he'll wrap the series up a book or two faster than originally intended, but could still be another 6-10 years. And even that's assuming he doesn't have another Dresden Slump.

What? We just got a new book this year. Before that we got a new book (technically two, but it was effectively one story) in 2020. He hasn't stalled out at all.

But it hasn't. People still get diseases, they still starve, and there's still war. Science has mitigated the first two things, sure (it really can't solve war as that's a problem of the human heart), but it hasn't solved them.

That's true, but "Solved" is used colloquially as "mitigated" in many contexts

Finished The Tainted Cup. Good, prose quality fell off a little toward the end, resolution was reasonably clever. It's got WSFA syndrome, but only to the extent it's obvious why it was written that way, rather than suffering from being written that way.

Bell's And We Are Not Saved. I bought it a few years ago when having a discussion with ymeskhout, as a crux example of how a lot of things that Rufo gets accused of being dishonest about actually happened, but largely left it on the shelf. Was going to try a deep crunch into how this sort of work smuggles false or misleading claims by clown-nose-on and clown-nose-off between academic work and 'popular writing', but my notes aren't really coming together in any real readable narrative, even presuming anyone else would care enough about it. There's some value to seeing what tools of persuasion are being used, here, to distinguish the honest from the malicious or misleading, but I could have done that with Rufo's writing for free.

For fun, Eldridge and Deveau's Game Over, from this discussion. It's so heavily and clearly written for women -- weirdly, despite a front cover that looks like standard male gaze smut -- that it's not that sorta 'fun', but looking at how the prose and social interactions work is still enjoyable.

WSFA syndrome

I'm not familiar with this term.

Washington Science Fiction Association. Along with the similarly-named World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA, no I don't know why), they were kinda on the other side of the Sad Puppies on the whole Hugo Award wars from a decade ago. Some stories are written 'for' a specific space, and just as you don't give a dog-lover a Newbery Medal-winning story, a lot of people who found Gentleman Jole annoying won't like The Tainted Cup.

Each of the three has a certain flavor of story that really glues into their particular social environment - WSFA tends heavily toward a lot of vaguely neuroatypical mystery stories with box-checking social awareness checks - whether because the author likes that sorta thing themselves or because they were trying to cater to their awards or both. I'd expect more the former here, since WSFA's mostly a short story place and The Tainted Cup isn't, but it's one of those things that pulls you away from the world-building when you see the pattern.

I've been re-reading Larry Correia's collected works. The man is a modern day Robert E Howard, except less classy. I love it.

Last week I also read Jack Kerouac's Tristessa, his account of his platonic relationship with a Mexican prostitute and morphine addict. I'd never read anything by Kerouac, and on paper his writing style (stream-of-consciousness narration peppered with overwrought religious adjectives and a lackadaisical attitude towards punctuation) sounds like everything I hate about experimental prose. But I was surprised to find it oddly compelling, such that I read this (admittedly very short) book in two days. It helps that, unlike in On the Road, Kerouac doesn't commit any serious misdeeds or act as an accessory to anyone else's: he comes off as genuinely protective of the title character, and it's darkly amusing how this bumbling gringo gets exploited and ripped off by just about every Mexican he meets.

The Doomed City by the strugatsky brothers; thé prose is a bit dumbed down in translation but it’s an interesting and thematically rich story. I’m at the part where the good Nazis have taken power from the mentor and turned the sun back on.

Seven years ago, I stopped at a petrol station in Italy and found a discarded copy of Robert Gutwillig's After Long Silence. I decided to take it with me, and it sat unread on my bookshelf ever since.

On my morning commute the other day, I finally decided to give it a go. After ten pages I was already bored, and gave up.

Luckily I'd prepared for this eventuality, and also brought A Canticle for Leibowitz with me. It's a very old, battered copy with extremely fine print, and I'm only about five pages into it. The prose is a bit baroque for my liking, but I'm interested to see what happens next, which is more than can be said for the previous book.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is amazing.

Lots of stories tell you X happened Y thousand years ago, but it doesn't make sense. For example, in A Song of Fire and Ice, where the Night's Watch has been holding the Wall for eight thousand years and the Starks have ruled the north for just as long and I'm like "bro, the oldest organization in the world is the Catholic Church, which is barely two thousand years old, and the oldest dynasty is the Imperial House of Japan, which has been around for fifteen hundred"; talk about medieval stasis!

By contrast, A Canticle for Leibowitz takes place over 1,200 years, and it makes you feel every one of them. Technology changes, fashions change, political factions change, but you can believe that the monastery and the Catholic Church endures, though Rome was nuked in the backstory. It's a very beautiful novel with strong themes of cyclical history and faith. The future imperfect stuff is fantastic; if you liked Scott Alexander's "The Witching Hour", you will love it.

Just do yourself a favor and never read the sequel.

I read that book and quite enjoyed it. Then read the author's afterword in which he details his experience on a bomber crew destroying the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino in WW2. Nazi soldiers were using it as a fortress. It was a stone structure on a tall rocky section and was indeed a fortress. But a 1944 American bomber crew can easily wipe out a 1500 year old fortress by dropping bombs on it.

Turns out those Nazi soldiers had left earlier and war refugees were sheltered within. They accidentally massacred a bunch of noncombatants and destroyed the birthplace of the Benedictine order. Miller says he was reviewing the ending of the book and realized that the priest pinned beneath rubble and waiting for death was something he actually caused. What a finish to a great book.

I don't see any evidence that there were refugees in the Abbey, though it also seems that there probably weren't any german soldiers in there either.

Huh.

I recall him feeling bad about bombing those people. Googling a bit I see claims supporting this.

Didn't even know there was one, huh.

What’s up with the sequel? In general terms please, and spoilers so as not to ruin it for FtttG.

In addition to the other comments, the se-inter-quel also very much has a plot that goes absolutely nowhere. At least that's how I remember it, I read it in 2008 so some time has passed. Still, I do remember much more from other books I've read that year, so that might be a condemnation of its own.

It's just a really ugly book; one that represents a Walter M. Miller Jr. that had grown cynical and disappointed with the Church. It has none of the idealism and hope that characterized Canticle, and I'm not surprised that the author killed himself.

I mean, Canticle took place before Vatican II, and presumably the sequel was written when the church was at its ontological low point.

Yes, I see. Poor man. I thought he just had a sudden eruption of despair, I didn’t realise he’d lost hope to such an extent.

I’m going through the business of getting Confirmed at the moment and indeed the church is startlingly silly on many occasions but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless.

White Noise by Don DeLillo. Been wanting to read it ever since I saw the movie a while back, and it's pretty much what I hoped it would be as a book. Thus far (the airborne toxic event has just concluded for the curious), I'm impressed at how well the movie hews to the overall book, especially in tone.

God, I hated White Noise. "Wow, supermarkets are kind of weird and alienating huh?" Yes, Don, I suppose so. I don't think you needed to devote a quarter of your novel to making that point.

Really? I love supermarkets.

I love supermarkets, but I get DeLillo's point that they can be a bit weird if you approach them from a virgin point of view. But this point should have been made once.

People I knew who experienced western supermarkets with truly virgin eyes (coming e.g. from the USSR) seemed to not be alienated either.

Yeah, AFAICT people feel strongly about White Noise one way or the other. Me, I'm adoring it for the constant bloviating and overall absurdity, just as I did the movie. Probably doesn't hurt being old enough to actually remember the Eighties, either.

Which psychedelic did your friend do?

It happens to rhyme with Salman Rushdie.

Interesting. That's the one of the big 3 that I haven't tried yet, mainly for concern about how long primary effects can last. 8-12 hours? Ain't nobody got time for that.

4 hours for the ascent, trip, and descent on mushrooms? That's a nice Sunday midday event.

For what it's worth, a moderate dose of a benzodiazepine reduces the intensity of an LSD trip immediately. I don't know how functional you'd feel afterwards, but it's an option.

I had nothing important planned for the day, and I managed to mostly pull off the few errands that lurked waiting for me in the evening. But it's not a use and forget drug, and I agree shrooms are more sensible for the psychonaut on a time-crunch. What do you mean by the Big 3? I can infer that's LSD and shrooms, but the third one?

Mescaline. I consider those the big 3 of traditional (non-dissociative) hallucinogens. I consider the others, like DMT, the dissociatives, or Datura, to be the "hell no" zone.

Incidentally, I found mescaline to not be worth the hassle. I might've been under-dosed.

I haven't given mescaline much thought, it's probably far harder to acquire outside the Americas. I share your concerns about DMT, and datura is definitely something described in my forensic medicine textbooks for a reason. Nor is dissociation something I enjoy, it happened to me as a very idiosyncratic reaction to a prescribed drug, and it was quite unpleasant to experience.

You know, I’m not actually sure how to pronounce that.

Sal like the sul in sullied. Rush-D.

Ah, so you mean the wonder drug, PCP.

Correct. No notes. A Primary Care Physician is the solution for most cases of depression, or at least they can send you to a better shrink than I am.

The only psychedelic worth doing is DMT and its analogues, which don't rhyme with Rushdie. I am disappointed in your friend...

Are you trying to kill me or drive me insane?

I mean, you probably are, but you're usually more subtle about it. DMT is very low on the list of substances to try; I don't speak Machine Elvish, not even the LOTR kind. If they start talking shit about "universal love", I'm going to pull out a baseball bat.

Edit: I know it's unlikely to literally kill me. It's just not what I'm looking for, I don't want to lose contact with reality or risk truly mind altering or gnostic experience.

He doesn't know about the secret esoteric knowledge linear time factorisation method which breaks almost all modern cryptography...

I'll have to check in with Scott Aaronson, but I strongly suspect he hasn't tried that stuff either.

Eh, I wouldn't tell people not to try DMT if they're interested, but it's the polar opposite of what I desire.

Eh? Can you explain the acronyms please.

Sigh. It's probably not worth talking about. Any insights gleaned are personal and the kind of stuff I could have told you a week in advance if I was drunk.

I mean, sample size of one and all, but I actually delurked and started posting for a conversation like this one, FWTW.

Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:

The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.

Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.

Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.

That is quite similar to what I experienced after full anesthetic. Like for 24 hours different parts of my mind (and body) were disjointed and talking to each other. Like the self that was holding them together was missing. And fucking clock ticking in your mind all the time. It started 12 hours after the surgery when I got sleepy.

Miserable experience.

Huh. That's an interesting outcome, some anesthetics are known to have dissociative properties, but I don't think that's quite what I experienced. Which one was it, if I may ask (or if you happen to know, it's not usually disclosed specifically because most patients don't care)?

I wasn't fighting parts of my self, or my body, per se. Most of the time, the voice in my head was gone, or the volume was dialed down significantly. This has happened to me before on or after psychedelics, and is something I carefully noted during the experience. I always have an inner monologue, at least when I check for it. It might be damped down or absent when I'm extremely focused, but how would I know?

At the very peak, I don't think I was thinking in words, just visual metaphors. I used words to write (because I was able to do so live, albeit not with great grammar), and that stream of text was my stream of thought at a certain point. Very hard to explain unless you've been there. I was literally typing at the speed I was thinking (the latter definitely slower than usual) and exactly as I thought. Not quite the same as what I do when sober, where I'm usually at least planning ahead and have a general thesis in mind.

My body usually felt heavy and leaden. Then it got lighter as the peak came down slowly. No sense that parts of it were alien or in conflict with me, which you'd see with dissociation/depersonalization.

It’s funny to me that you went into this looking for an answer to your depression, had the answer shoved directly in your face, then still chose to “shear it away with a set of scissors” to protect your ego.

Uh.. I have multiple answers to depression. I know psilocybin worked the previous time. I could have gone for IV ketamine or ECT. I know for a fact that I do not need religion to be happy, and that becoming religious has a very real risk of making me unhappy as well as, in a very real sense, delusional and insane.

My ego exists for a reason. I am fond of being mostly myself. The parts of me I wish to keep are present when both when I'm happy and when I'm sad, and that's a fact that's clearly documented in my notes. If the only way to live is to trick myself into religious belief? You better hope to ask when I've got a literal gun to my head. I am not read to compromise my epistemics for happiness except for a very large value of the latter and a small amount of the former.

We had a kid from a Muslim family pledge our frat a year or two before I joined. He dropped acid with his pledge class, met Allah, dropped out of pledging, and every so often he'd show up at our parties with a big smile holding a can of Lacroix.

There but for the grace of God the Flying Spaghetti Monster go I. I've seen other people lose it with after using psychedelics, or outright go insane. And more who have become "soft" spiritual and woo-ish. I'm not saying I'd rather die than end up like that, but it's very, very low on the list.

Returning to an organized religion is definitely the best outcome out of that possibility set. Oh, you mean I can just download a helpful and prosocial memeplex into my brain and all I have to do is accept Jesus Christ into my heart? Give me the pill - hell, give me two!

Perhaps. It's still more likely to just become a bit wooly, touchy feely and "spiritual but not religious". I would not identify with a version of me that sincerely believes in a deity for anything but incredibly strong empirical evidence. I'd think the old me was, in an important sense, partly dead. Not fully dead. That option beats true psychosis and definitely beats real death.

More comments

Been there myself, though I chose... differently. I hope you understand when I say from the bottom of my heart that I believe you made the right choice.

It was mumblety decades ago, and I was several orders of magnitude deeper than I'd ever been before. When my own personal variety of cosmic significance came knocking on the door of my consciousness, I was all out of fucks to give. I was extremely cognizant that I was crossing a line by opening up my brain for an interior conversation with a hallucination, but I did it anyway, and as a result I had the classic experience of going mad from the revelation. Although I ultimately made it out the other side with some semblance of my Self still intact, it was a damn close run thing and it definitely Changed me. Were I my brother, I'm sure I would have had the good sense to pull a Brave Sir Robin and Nope right up outta there, but I wasn't, and I'm not, and here we all are.

I'm sorry man. I genuinely am. Even during the experience (or very very shortly after the peak), I was grappling with multiple existential crises:

  • Was the very vivid and literal visual metaphor real? Was it actually a "choice" to reject endless meaning and hedonium, or just my mind play-acting a decision I'd made well in advance while coming up with an entertaining visualization of it? I genuinely do not know. The opposite felt like a very real possibility. It terrified me.
  • I understood the impermanence of qualia, the meaning of the self being a series of continuous snapshots. I vividly remember (and have live notes) of a version of me that was terrified of dying and being replaced by another me. He was practically screaming and begging to stay alive, or at least to be remembered. Then, a little later, a version of me that was more pragmatic but also meta to a degree that annoys even sober me: he had the self-awareness to find this all amusing while hoping he'd be gone soon. He got his wish.
  • I understood why the brain's sober state is conserved the way it is. It's the only way to be functional, even if there's some wiggle room. Breaking something and being stuck like that? I'd call depression a broken brain too, but I'm not willing to go that far.

I don't know if you ever had a choice in the matter. I don't know if I did either. But I am so lucky to have made the choice of going the route I would have committed myself to going well in advance. Screwing with my brain's chemistry is pragmatically useful for therapeutic purposes and also... fun. But it's not a solution to metaphysics. If I claimed to have come up with one after the trip, my notes tell myself that I should consider the original me gone, maybe for good.

I hope you're doing okay. I wanted to be changed too, but I'm clearly the annoying kind of person who is just as analytical and self-scrutinizing when sober as they are zooted. I'm happy/sad about that. Uh, now that I think about it, I do understand the limits of language as a communication tool/expression of qualia better. That perhaps does constitute a change. Words genuinely cannot express the conflict within at the time. Good luck to you, if there is some residual damage, we will likely be able to cure you, speaking from a medical perspective. That is a promise I am mostly confident science can cash.

I'm sorry, too, sir, and thank you. It's not the funnest club to be a member of, though we sure can have some interesting and esoteric conversations amongst ourselves! Regardless, my story is also similar to yours in the sense that it took some serious depression for me to try acid for the first time. But when I did, I had clearly found my drug of choice, and for a period of about four months, I did it often enough to learn about the brain's ability to quickly build a short term tolerance to the stuff, and adjusted my consumption accordingly. Things dried up for several months after that, after which I had two deep trips maybe six week apart from each other, one weak one, and then the final time (which is the one I was specifically talking about) wherein I'd estimate the peak lasted 12-16 hours or so. All of which is to say that I've been around the block, so to speak, before I get into the fun stuff.

  • Taking your last point first, I have to completely agree with you when you say that the brain's sober state is the only way to be functional. One of my persistent impressions from my experiences is that my brain's built-in filters were significantly removed, hence the depth and intensity of sensory inputs and experiences. For instance, at some point I realized that the breathing wallpaper experience that could mesmerize me so had its roots in my own heartbeat. Likewise, on a purely causal level, I had the experience of having a realization, then having a censor kick in, saying in essence, "you are not ready to receive this truth," and then fighting to override that censor and get back to the original realization. It was amazing stuff, but it also meant that I could spend an hour looking for the car keys that were in my pocket the entire time, despite my pockets being the first place I checked!
  • I also agree with your thinking about the self being a continuous series of snapshots, and for me, the ability to perceive this as such is actually one of the true dangers of diving deeply into psychedelics. With sobriety gone and the ego much more malleable, the qualia of the psychedelic experience can create a persistent change in the perception of the Self. In your example, you could have chosen to be the more pragmatic, meta version of you that you encountered for a short time. While you didn't do that, it does sound like you not only recognize that, but experienced that to an extent for yourself. If you'll forgive the wordplay, self_made_human is no more, and you're now self_remade_human. As the lyric goes, what I used to think was me was just a fading memory, I looked him right in the eye and said goodbye.
  • The question of whether or not the vivid and literal visual metaphor you experienced was real is a haunting one. We know that as humans, the brain tends to make its decision subconsciously, then a framework of rationality is constructed around the decision that ultimately connects consciously and appears to be the process of the decision itself. Given my own belief that psychedelics get us closer to the "bare metal" of our consciousness, so to speak, this would necessarily mean that an actual awareness of the various possibilities of our choices could indeed be quite terrifying. I personally found the experience of being free of my own morality and empathy to be a hideous one.

I don't know if you ever had a choice in the matter. I don't know if I did either. But I am so lucky to have made the choice of going the route I would have committed myself to going well in advance.

Haha, probably true in my case, am I really going to turn down an offer of knowledge? Dangle something shiny in front of me and of course I want it for my nest! Moreover, I actually did try to snap myself out of it quite a few times, all without success. At one point the (un)reality was so bloody pervasive that as I was trying to rationalize my experience, I registered amusement on the other side of the conversation just as a couple of kids I'd been tripping with exclaimed from the other room, "whoa, [Muninn's manifestation of cosmic significance] is in the TV!" That's just a coincidence! I thought. More amusement. "There he is again!" Point, made.

Anyway, It sounds like you've been shaken but are coming out the other side shaken and changed, but not broken, and I'm glad for that. I'm also glad that you took the time to share some of your experience with me--like I said, I find these sorts of conversations to be fascinating, and there aren't many of us that have gone down this particular road. And I likewise appreciate your own well wishes for me. My own experience was a long time ago, and I've thankfully been able to deal with the fallout/residual damage as it has come to me. While my own path has steadily lead me away from mind and mood altering drugs and substances, caffeine notwithstanding, I appreciate the potential in psychotropic medications and work with some folks in your profession that can artistically prescribe a medication regimen for all that ails the psyche. For all of that, however, I am still mulishly stubborn and insist on thinking my way through everything, as is my wont.

I recognize a fell traveler, albeit one with the kind of scars I really don't want to acquire. Yup, that is precisely the kind of stuff that I was and am terrified of, but hey, you're here. You're talking. You know there's a problem. You give me the impression of having a functional life. I find that reassuring!

If you'll forgive the wordplay, self_made_human is no more, and you're now self_remade_human

In an unfortunate sense, it is impossible to say for sure if I'm the same person I was before and after psychedelics. But I genuinely don't think I've broken anything I'll miss. I feel like roughly the same person, a little happier, maybe, a little less emotionally reactive in a way that doesn't amount to apathy. If I start acting really weird, or even subtly off, I suppose enough people know me well enough to mention it. That is true both online and off, I hope.

In a very real sense, we're all Ships of Theseus, and always undergoing routine and unexpected maintenance. I don't feel anxious about going to bed or getting anesthesia, because I don't seem to change very much. I don't feel too bad about aging, except for all the physical health stuff that will inevitably pop up unless we find a cure. I think the version of me that was 2 years old has only a little in common with the man I am today, but I'm glad he grew up anyway. Similarly, I'm willing to do a lot of growing up (in the transhumanist sense), and I am not afraid of it as long as I get to call the shots and, preferably, make some backups along the way. I think a much smarter and wiser version of me that preserves the same values and desires is... me. A better me.

If it interests you, I just posted a full writeup of the experience on the front page. I doubt the phenomenological aspects are new to you, but I do go into more detail about my experiences and my takeaways from them.

More comments

I've never done it myself (and would be terrified to) but it's quite interesting to read these anecdotes about psychedelics and then connect it to some of the research that's been coming out. Psilocybin AFAIK disrupts functional connectivity in the brain quite aggressively and basically causes different brain networks to become less segregated and bleed together, and it does so most severely in the default mode network, which is the piece of mental circuitry responsible for your sense of time, space and self. So you get ego death.

It also helps to suspend depressive symptoms by disrupting the connections between networks, specifically the hippocampus and default mode system, which are associated with that. Your thought patterns are quite literally spilling into each other on the fly in a way that can temporarily disassemble your entire perceptual and affective world, and it offers the possibility of your mental circuitry settling into a subtly changed baseline for better or for worse. It's basically very imprecise, very ghetto biohacking.

I honestly don't think it's all bad and has some possible transhumanisty applications, but as it currently stands the drug is like a sledgehammer where the effects aren't fully understood or controllable. If not I would be all in to be honest.

I agree with you. That's my understanding of my the mechanics, though note that there's also a general increase in neuroplasticity as well as evidence of some neurogenesis.

In predictive processing terms: psychedelics relax your priors, which helps unstick the stuck ones (like depression).

For what it's worth, I was always fascinated by psychedelics even as a teen, and wanted to try them recreationally. But I avoided them for a decade, because I was too afraid of the risk. Then my depression got really bad, and I felt the clinical trial was a good shout before I resorted to IV ketamine and ECT (very annoying to get in my parts of Scotland). It worked wonders, and gave me more confidence that I could push things.

Uh.. Turns out there's a limit to how far I wanted to push things. I might try LSD again, but never at this dose. I've had my fun. I like my sanity. If you do specifically want a treatment for depression, the evidence for psilocybin is much more robust. You've probably read my blog post, but if you haven't, it's in my posts.

More comments

Is SWIY's trip over yet?

He fucking hopes so. But yes, it's over. Lasted way longer and took far longer to finish than he'd like.

SWIM = Somebody Who Isn't Me (wink wink nudge nudge)

SWIG = Somebody Who Isn't... God?!

Thank you.

Accurate on both counts, though the latter could be one of many potential extraplanar entities. Almost certainly just the outcome of the brain being reminded why certain mushrooms are not meant for consumption (though this one wasn't from a mushroom).

Looking for anti-woke books on parenting, preferably secular. How does raise children to not be woke? How does one teach them the gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice? How does one handle the hypergamy question? How to balance tolerance with an appropriate level of caution around "inner-city youth"?

How does one teach them the gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice?

I think a good start on both aspects is through personal metrics. Being better than you were last week, or last year, or even last night is a better model of success than comparing yourself to others, and it's simple enough for a child to understand. Alongside comes instilling the wisdom - or at least the habit - of choosing good metrics.

The same mindset might also guide and inform broader aspects of their life, like whether it's better to have 5/15/50 crazy lovers who make your life difficult or one loyal partner that you can trust and rely on, or whether it's better to have 50/150/5000 fake internet friends than five real life close friends who will be there for you in hard times, or good neighbours, and so on. It also provides a functional heuristic for gauging other people's trajectories. Is that "inner city youth" working to improve their life and someone who represents a positive contribution, or are they presenting an appearance of success by exploiting others? What about that business district executive?

Is your goal primarily to

A) maximize the odds of raising a little Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney-Barrett

or

B) minimize the odds of your kid going off the woke deep end and turning into a little Robin DiAngelo or Viv Musk

Those goals are somewhat in tension. A lot of the most straightforward religious conservative figures I know were raised in very restrictive and ideologically indoctrinating households by domineering patriarchs, but so were a lot of the most off-the-deep-end wokies.

The bisexual onlyfans type girls I've dated, the absolute nightmare of the manosphere, were all universally the product of religious upbringings, often bundled off to Liberty or Oral Roberts after high school, and broke bad as soon as they were out from under daddy's thumb if not sooner. I know of precisely one trans kid from my high school circle, her parents stopped talking to my parents during the Bush administration because my parents were too liberal.

If you want to prevent your kids from being crazy wokescolds, don't take politics too seriously. Horseshoe theory: the opposite of the wokescold isn't the religious conservative, that's just a switch in valence. The opposite of the wokescold is the normie who shrugs and just kind of gets on with their life and ignores everything else going on around them.

If you seek to indoctrinate your kids via weekly Dread Jim readings, you're as likely to end up not talking to your gay son or blue haired thot daughter as you are to buy them a lot on your compound to raise your seven grandkids in the Truth. Don't overcommit, don't overpromise your ideology. So many religious conservatives tell their kids that everyone in the faith is good and everyone outside the faith is bad, this is so manifestly untrue that it is obliterated by contact with reality the moment the child steps outside the bubble.

If you want to prevent your kids from being crazy wokescolds, don't take politics too seriously. Horseshoe theory: the opposite of the wokescold isn't the religious conservative, that's just a switch in valence. The opposite of the wokescold is the normie who shrugs and just kind of gets on with their life and ignores everything else going on around them.

So teach them to grill?

Unironically -- woke-ism doesn't survive contact with the practical world, so teach them to grill, fix cars, build houses -- stuff like that.

not be woke

media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the Prarie), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery), or makes fun of wokes (no idea where you’d find this, maybe there are some old cartoons out there )

gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice

This is not real and this is also not a gospel. Why would you want them to internalize the unhappiness-generating myth that their personal effort leads to success, by which you mean income? There is no study that shows this. It’s a mix of genetic factors (personality, IQ, beauty, height), social factors outside one’s immediate control (where one is raised, early peer group), social factors in one’s immediate influence but unrelated to effort per se (networking), and luck. The notion that “hard work” is a toggleable feature in humans which has a role in their success may be a useful glue to keep poor people quiet and make the wealthy feel even prouder, but it is the least proven of all the possible factors of socioeconomic success. Terence Tao is a funny example of this mythmaking. He obviously loves math, he was raised to love it, he has the genetic features for it (including a likely +1 Racial Trait), and has a social life which revolves around math that administers all the right social reinforcements. He will tell you to work hard, but when you actually look at what that means, it involves only working when he wants to, and not working when he is tired or unmotivated. It’s, like, an hour of hard work followed by a nap and a pleasant stroll. And you look at his interviews and he has no stress while working and clearly loves it. But of course, when a person loves his work and its accompanying frustrations he often calls it “hard work”, even when the whole thing was pleasant and a preferable experience (even gamers and climbers do this). And it is the socially-ascribed way of taking about one’s productivity. Similarly you can look at Magnus Carlsen: little toggleable effort that he pressed to succeed, it’s in his DNA, and when truly stressful “hard work” actually became required to win competitions he gave up competing.

media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the [Prairie]), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery)

That was the mainstream position prior to circa 1960; Western white people Could Do No Wrong, and everyone else was seen as half-beast. Then people realised that that view wasn't entirely accurate, assumed¹ that the opposite of a false claim must be the truth², and adopted the position that people of colour Could Do No Wrong, and white people were half-demon.

The truth of the matter is that cultures both in and out of the 'western' cluster have done both good and bad things.

"There are very few black or white hats in history; most are in the charcoal or slate range." --A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

¹...and do you know what happens when you ass u me?

²"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken." --E. Yudkowsky

That’s not what happened in the 60s. There was a movement that actively sought to make Western culture seem worse than it was through propaganda. The entire civil rights movement was based on the idea that White people were acting irrationally for not wanting to be around a group that was more violent and disordered, for instance. And when reality gets in the way of someone’s preconditioned beliefs, they are more apt to doubt reality rather than their social conditioning, which we see in all manner of political topics. Somebody raised to believe that everyone is absolutely equal will look at racial crime data across three continents and adjusted for income and conclude that reality is wrong, and their media-driven conditioning is correct. That’s just how conditioning works.

The notion that “hard work” is a toggleable feature in humans which has a role in their success may be a useful glue to keep poor people quiet and make the wealthy feel even prouder, but it is the least proven of all the possible factors of socioeconomic success.

I don't think you need a study to show this. Try:

  • entering a marathon, boxing tournament, or other physical contest without practicing
  • taking a test without any preparatory work or background knowledge
  • shooting in a rifle tournament without any prep

And see how you compare to people who put the work in.

Or take the time to speak to someone who's worked at a test prep center - contrary to what you might hear in the IQ reductionist space, test prep works (or at least that is what I have been told by someone in the biz). Similarly, look at professional classical musicians or Olympians: they don't succeed without practicing a lot.

Certainly there might be exceptions (savants, people with unnatural size and strength, etc.) but for most people your odds of success improve via hard work.

Magnus Carlsen

Isn't it correct that Carlsen's father was a chess fan who introduced him to the game at 5 and he's been competing since he was 8?

I definitely think that something like innate talent or genius matters, particularly around the tails, but if you can choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work you should prefer this as long as you can temper it with the understanding that there is not a linear connection between hard work and success.

Deliberate practice is the necessary condition for success across domains, but there’s no compelling evidence that activating “hard work” (in contrast to simply work) is a key determinant in performance. When you squint at what an elite performer means by hard work, you don’t often see a level of stress or endurance or extra care which a normal person would intuit is meant when they hear that they must “work hard” or “put more effort in”. They do not typically sustain a state of willful effort and instead there are just other factors involved. Even with SAT test prep, there are social and genetic factors which inform a person’s ability to sit down and study for long hours which seems totally uncorrelated to any manifestation of stress or vigilance or care which characterizes “harder work”. Those with the ability can sit in place for six hours with little stress; those without cannot, despite how hard they attempt it. (Usain Bolt eating 1000 chicken McNuggets in the week leading up to his Olympic Gold, where he turned around mid-win to smile always sticks out in my mind as an example of this).

there’s no compelling evidence that activating “hard work” (in contrast to simply work)

Okay. I'm not really sure we have any real difference of opinion here, since by "hard work" I don't necessarily mean "psychologically difficult." For instance, in my example above, Carlsen probably likes chess, people who shoot in rifle tournaments typically like shooting rifles, etc. But the truth remains that for lots of things (like, to use another one of my examples, test prep) people often don't like doing it, but they will be better off if they do.

When you squint at what an elite performer

I mean, I don't really know why the bar here is "elite performer." The OP said he wanted his kids to learn about achieving success through hard work. He didn't say "I want my kids to learn that through hard work they could achieve anything they want."

Usain Bolt is at an extreme tail and we shouldn't teach our kids to emulate him (at least not specifically, unless they also show extremely rare promise as athletes). I want my kids to be able to sit down and do test prep (even if they don't want to) to get a better grade than the one they could already have gotten. I don't particularly care if they are a world-class marathon runner.

for a lot of things (eg test prep) people often don't like doing it, but they will be better off if they do

Right but there’s scant evidence that hard work, as some communicated message or “gospel” or internalized value, through its enacting or though its belief, modifies a person’s ability to do this. The ceiling of the influence of grit etc when genetics are controlled is 4.4% on school performance, but even this doesn’t tell us to what extent that can be modified anyway. Some studies find very little effect / barely significant findings on GPA for interventions aimed at increasing grit / hard work. No effect longterm when a student self-learns grit in a module.

As a gospel this is a very poor gospel indeed, quite bad news in fact, because you are damning the vast hordes of the relatively unsuccessful to endless self-criticism under the false belief that it was their fault they failed — when it likely was never in their hands to begin with.

No effect longterm when a student self-learns grit in a module.

I think these sorts of studies are really interesting but "giving kids a module on grit" is going to give you only limited information on the effects parents will have on their children over the course of a childhood.

But hey, let's get into them. Your first study I think is shaky in the sense that it relies purely, as far as I can tell, on subjective teacher ratings rather than even a cursory objective standard - and the study itself notes this problem. But regardless, it controls for environmental effects:

Such non-causal sources may be both genetic and environmental. For instance, the association may be due to common genetic influences (pleiotropy: the same genes affect multiple traits; MacKay17), or due to a rearing environment that is conducive to both cognitive and non-cognitive influences on school performance.

So if OP is trying to create a rearing environment that is "conducive to both cognitive and non-cognitive influences on school performance" this study, if it managed to control properly, would screen it out. Or in other words, if I'm reading it correctly, it doesn't say much if anything about the question at hand.

(It also says "it is well established that self-control and grit predict academic outcomes" so I stand by my claim that if you can choose this, you should.)

Finally, I think that 4.4% is not bad. If someone gave you a button and said "push this and you'll score four percent better on every test you take for the rest of your life, no downsides or other side effects" it would be obvious to push it.

Your second link says that grit is associated with positive life outcomes and can be influenced through school interventions:

Given the importance of grit for individual success and its apparent malleability through school-based interventions, it is natural to consider it as a promising target of education policy. Nevertheless, not all interventions scale up well. Several interventions are effective when implemented in smaller groups under strict quality control, but ineffective when they are offered universally under potentially less favorable conditions, so evaluations of scaled up version of programs that were effective at a smaller scale are of great academic and policy importance.

Needless to say, the OP's intervention is going to be implemented in a very small group; presumably he has no need for it to scale, unlike the people who wrote the study:

We ask whether improvements in students’ behaviors and academic achievement can be obtained through simple, inexpensive, easily implementable at-scale school-based grit interventions and the extent to which these programs can help to reduce achievement gaps of disadvantaged students.

Regardless, the study found small impacts for students at large and substantial impacts to Roma minorities. I agree with the authors:

This is remarkable given that our intervention was not particularly intensive, consisting of only one session a week for 5 weeks, and ended over a year before some of these impacts were measured.

(I will confess I only read through the end of the second section of this paper before posting because it is 44 pages long and I only had to read 5 pages to see that it was saying that at a very minor classroom intervention had lasting positive effects particularly for students whom could be expected to do poorly.)

Just like the other finding, this is a no-brainer if there are no downsides. Nor do either of these studies suggest that self-control and grit cannot be taught, particularly by parents over an extended period of time. For the state, there are probably going to be trades offs or financial costs to teaching these to children.

But OP is going to have to raise his kids one way or another. It seems to me that he might as well raise them to believe in grit and self-control. Even if the benefits on GPA and income are minor, developing a healthy internal locus of control can hedge against depression and anxiety, which is a good enough reason to encourage it in children.

The teacher assessment was a survey on their grades, so not quite subjective. Re the second study:

substantial impacts to Roma minorities

Unfortunately, if the teachers of the Roma students are more likely to be Roma themselves (likely), then they would lie on both grades and teacher surveys, which explains their unique results. A researcher can’t come out and say “we found a significant finding, but only among Roma, therefore it should be ignored”, sadly, as there’s political correctness which prevents an academic from noting that the entire Roma culture is based on scheming and cheating and stealing. Really, Roma populations should be excluded from most studies. But if you look at this:

First, looking at short-term GPAs (Panel A), we find only small impacts which, in most cases, do not reach significance at conventional levels. There is an improvement of 2% SD, on average, for students in the self-learning treatment, but it is only marginally significant (at the 10% level)

Next, looking at medium-term and long-term GPAs (Panels B and C), we find some evidence that the impacts of our intervention on academic achievement become stronger over time, particularly for specific groups. Impacts, on average, are estimated at 3% SD (significant at the 5% level) for the teacher-delivery treatment one year post-treatment, with no significant impact for the stu- dent self-learning arm. Even if these are still small impacts, they are notable considering the short duration and relatively low intensity of our intervention and that evaluations of human capital interventions often yield fade-out effects over longer time periods (Hart et al 2023; Bailey et al 2020; Bouguen et al 2019)

There are just not many studies that have measured the effect of a grit intervention (or any proxy for “hard work” ideology) on academic performance, .

This study in Germany finds a “4% improvement in GPA”: https://media-api.suub.uni-bremen.de/api/core/bitstreams/69dec0aa-d690-4c4e-94ab-a82b460fbdc7/content

And there’s this one: https://edworkingpapers.com/sites/default/files/Alan%20Boneva%20Ertac%20Grit%202019.pdf which finds

In the second follow-up in Sample 2, which we administered approximately 1.5 years after the intervention, we still find a positive and significant treatment effect of 0.19 standard deviations for math (permutation p-value =0.026) and a positive albeit insignificant effect for verbal scores. Similarly, for Sample 1 where we have data from a 2.5 year follow-up, we find that the treatment has a persistent effect on standardized math performance. In particular, the treatment raises student achievement in the standardized math test by 0.23 standard deviations (permutation p-value =0.044).

A 0.23 SD change in a typical high school GPA is a change of 0.14, which translates to 1.7% higher annual earnings. That kind of sucks! Because there’s a significant wellbeing cost if somebody believes that they have an obligation to always “try their hardest” for optimal results under the belief that this secures their success. And if all that this can do is bring a 70k yearly salary up to 72k, it’s just not worth it. If you told a youth that their hardest work will only move the needle by 1.7% annual earnings, he would probably conclude in himself that it’s not worth it to be faithful to the “gospel of hard work”. Maybe there’s another study that finds a greater effect and I haven’t seen it?

The teacher assessment was a survey on their grades, so not quite subjective. Re the second study:

Yes, but they also asked the teachers to evaluate their grit and self-control, if memory serves.

Really, Roma populations should be excluded from most studies.

Interesting.

Even if these are still small impacts, they are notable considering the short duration and relatively low intensity of our intervention and that evaluations of human capital interventions often yield fade-out effects over longer time periods

Right - if these minor efforts had good effects, it seems likely that a more prolonged effort earlier in life would have stronger impact.

That kind of sucks!

Again, you aren't addressing the point that studies that screen out environmental effects will screen out the effort OP wants to do.

If you told a youth that their hardest work will only move the needle by 1.7% annual earnings, he would probably conclude in himself that it’s not worth it to be faithful to the “gospel of hard work”.

If I told a youth this he would probably laugh at me for suggesting that getting lectured in class from time to time had that much of an impact on his life choices.

And if all that this can do is bring a 70k yearly salary up to 72k, it’s just not worth it.

I would happily accept a lecture telling me to work hard in exchange for an extra $100,000 over the course of a 50 year career! I would accept a lecture from you in exchange for $2000 right now! A monthly lecture, even!

Maybe there’s another study that finds a greater effect and I haven’t seen it?

Again, unless any of these studies you've dug up are looking at home life, we can assume that school intervention studies will control for home environment which means they tell us nothing about OP's plan.

The contention is that:

  • being inclined towards hard work
  • being able to sustain doing hard work
  • being able to get an output from that hard work that justifies it

are not actually factors under your control. In short you cannot "choose to be a person with an internal locus of control who believes in hard work". You are or you aren't, depending on genetics and early life and other stuff that you can't toggle on and off.

Not entirely sure this is true, I've veered both ways.

Well I know of at least one study which demonstrates that exposure to socialist ideology results in (materially) worse life outcomes. They note that it doesn't affect the underlying personality traits, so to me looks a bit like merely externalizing your locus of control ("bad things happen to me because of my social class and the existence of The Rich, only The Revolution can help me and others") can screw you up for life, ceteris paribus. Which in turn means that not externalizing it leads to if not better, then at least not worse results.

The OP is specifically asking for advice on how to influence someone's early life, so (in theory) even if it's entirely correct that 100% of one's ability to do hard work is unchosen, OP could still succeed at giving his kids the ability to do hard work.

I think, intuitively, that it is common sense that you can choose to work hard, at least to a limited degree. I think most people have the experience of buckling down on an important or time-sensitive project, and easing up or even slacking off when things are less urgent (or when there's less external pressure), even if there's still work to be done. And so if you conceptualize "working hard" as choosing to buckle down relatively more and ease up relatively less, I think it's hard to argue that you can't "choose to work hard."

The question of whether or not choosing to do that consistently pays off commensurate to the effort is a much more interesting one and I think sort of depends on your goals. But it seems fairly clear that below a certain threshold of hard work (failing to study at all, to show up to work, etc.) you will suffer. And I think above a certain threshold of hard work, you will probably suffer too (if for no other reason than you need to sleep!)

Anti-anything is a bad way to raise children. Pro-something is a better.

How does one handle the hypergamy question?

In my experience, lead by example. In my extended family, a cousin's likelihood to stay in committed relationships is directly related to the health of their parent's marriage.

How to balance tolerance with an appropriate level of caution around "inner-city youth"?

Exposure. Take them around the city. Let them see the city. They'll start pattern matching. The most sheltered are the most delusional.

gospel of success through hard work and mastery through practice?

Set up increasingly demanding loops of challenge -> struggle -> gratification.

At a personal level, figure out if you want to indoctrinate your kids with your opinion or give them the tools to form their own.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Instead of deciding what your child will not be, decide what you want your child to be. This is endorsed by the bible and common sense, but it also means that you can pick parenting books based on what you want for your child- that should help you pick one.

Like stock investing, raising children not to be woke and/or shielding them from the hustle and bustle of the urban youth is likely better done passively instead of actively. So more choosing the right place to live and leading by example, less John Derbyshire speeches and reciting FBI crime statistics before dinner every night.

  • While not as highly heritable as height or IQ, political views are still fairly heritable, so if you and your wife are naturally chuddy yourselves a lot of the work may already be done.

  • Live in countries, regions, and/or neighborhoods with few low information voters and with minimal lunchtime rowdiness. Aspiring rappers and Michael Jackson impersonators cannot culturally enrich your children where they can’t reach them. Normies think and refer to this as living in an area with a good school district. House prices discriminate so you don’t have to.

  • Similarly, live in countries, regions, and/or neighborhoods with limited wokeness. One way better-off Western families can accomplish this is by living in a non-Western country and sending their children to international schools. It can be a good solution if one has overseas family, especially after fat- or chubby-FIREing. While some teachers may be woke if they're Westerners or Western-influenced, at least your kids' classmates families' would less likely to be.

After wife and living location have been picked:

  • Make friends with other households where the husband is a crime-thinker too, and your families can hang out. Your families can be a positive reinforcers for each other.

  • Spend time with extended family starting from when the kids are babies. It's more difficult to believe in blank slatism when you can see how much more similar your nuclear family is to your extended family, and your extended family is to everyone else. While it may vary depending on one's circumstances, spending time with extended family is also good in and of itself.

  • Abstain from movies and TV shows that serve as girlboss and/or non-Asian minority propaganda. This might mean abstaining from most Hollywood products, but addition by subtraction.

  • If you watch sports in the house, keep it to the NHL and maybe MLB instead of the NBA or NFL. Don’t be one of those fathers who fawns over Ngubu scoring some fackin goals.

  • Be a man unapologetic of who you are. Maintain your physical and psychological strength even if life can be all_so_tiresome.jpg. Demonstrate the principles of sexual dimorphism and hypergamy through leading by example.

Regardless of what you do, for the foreseeable future daughters are more likely than sons to follow the Cathedral’s doctrine and simp for alphabet and racial minorities, eventually do stuff like post rainbows and black squares, vote for more third world immigration and wealth redistribution. As teenage girls and young women, many daughters learn that what they want can just be given to them, thus creating a disconnect between hard work and success.

There is likely greater potential for a treatment effect when it comes to boys, as they tend to be more open to crime-think in the first place and there are more developmental/environmental pathways for boys to gain exposure to chuddiness and the connection between hard work and success:

  • Get your boy(s) into weightlifting as a teenager. He can see his physique progress with work, and it's harder to believe in gender egalitarianism when the mirror and Lived Experience illustrate otherwise.

  • Think of the team sports the modal Reddit woman would seethe at for being too pale, too fratty, and/or too toxically masculine, such as lacrosse or hockey. Have your boy(s) join a team, or multiple of them, so he can grow in his journey with other chuds-to-be.

  • Play sports with your boy(s) starting from when they’re young. Just playing with them will help with their development so they can make the more elite toxically masculine sports teams (no need to get all tiger dad). Plus, it’ll make for fond memories. They can also see the ability gap narrow between them and their old man over time (hopefully not due to decline of the latter).

A lot of the above also has a virtuous cycle. For example, if your son plays a chuddy sport, you can meet other chuddy fathers and your families can hang out.

I come from a long line of racists. Many of my ancestors were even bigoted towards their spouses. I married a fellow non-Hajani (Mexican). Just as my grandfather held prejudice, my father held prejudice, I shalt hold prejudice and create the genetic baseline for my children, and my children's children to hold prejudice. We differ in the object of our distaste, but we shall be united by our holding of distaste.

Don't be a virgin who IQ-maxxxes or Nordic-maxxxes; be a chad who ethnocentrism maxxxes. That is the only way.

I have never met an international school kid who isn’t a turbolib. Half your suggestions are about shielding the kid from the racial underclasses, not from wokeness which is the English speaking world’s current elite ideology. You cannot shield from it by coming closer to the educated elite.

I have to say, this list has gotta be one of the textbook examples of Arson, Murder and Jaywalking.

"Be an example of a strong, non-feminine man... check... family values... check... and no matter what you do, don't let them see a nigger ball. They might just think he's actually better at something!"

I'd say it's more Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick.

Shame on me, I haven't been ruining my life with tvtropes for nearly enough recently.

Once bitten, twice shy; is there a way to engineer scenarios where they get bullied or otherwise mistreated by diverse and inclusive wokescolds?

Most of the advice given in this thread seems like a pretty good way to accomplish that.

Reality check: You can stand against society alone, but to raise kids, as one wise stateswoman said, you need a village.

Your kids need peer group of people with the same beliefs who will stand with them and support them.

Otherwise, it is just all media, school and society telling them W, while dad alone is rambling non-W. Why should they follow the old dodgering dodger?

Just one sad example: case of Adrienne Black.

Born as Don Black in racist family and raised as racist. Not some Klansman primitive, but devoted scientific HBDIQ aware racist. Little Don knew his IQ tables and bell curves as soon as he learned to read.

Dad was prominent white supremacist and Internet pioneer.

He did everything he could to raise Junior in racism and white supremacy.

And all his efforts were undone on New College of Florida by power of Jewish friendship and love.

In May 2013, Black started to befriend several Jewish people on campus, and gradually realized that her own beliefs were wrong after attending multiple Friday night dinners with Jewish friends.

Wikipedia:

She recalled of these dinners:

I would say, "This is what I believe about I.Q. differences, I have 12 different studies that have been published over the years, here’s the journal that's put this stuff together, I believe that this is true, that race predicts I.Q. and that there were I.Q. differences in races." And they would come back with 150 more recent, more well researched studies and explain to me how statistics works and we would go back and forth until I would come to the end of that argument and I'd say, Yes that makes sense, that does not hold together and I'll remove that from my ideological toolbox but everything else is still there. And we did that over a year or two on one thing after another until I got to a point where I didn’t believe it anymore.[8]

In 2013, Black wrote a public statement to the Southern Poverty Law Center, publicly renouncing her views.

Little Don knew his IQ tables and bell curves as soon as he learned to read.

Well, knowing group average IQ scores might prime someone to be favourable to Jews.

To tell the truth, maybe one white supremacist called Black would be spared the law of nominative determinism. An entire dynasty of black-hating Blacks, though?

Comedy is prophecy

I find that rather wholesome, even if it would be too unrealistic for a TV movie. “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.”

Normally I would too, but...

- Remember son, never trust the Jews!
- You know nothing, father! I've made lots of Jewish friends this year, they're nothing like you say.
- Oh god, Donny, what have you done?!
- My name is Adrianna now!

Is not the most fortunate look.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree here, provided you have the right (meta) frame of reference.

In this case, witness the results of genetics predicting a higher likelihood of "latching hard onto the dominant counter-cultural-but-actually-not-really social issue of the day and holding onto it throughout the rest of one's life".

In the '70s, that narrative was white supremacy; in the modern day (late '10s), that narrative is gyno/trans supremacy.

I guess if you really drill your kids in bell curves they start to wonder why they'd believe their dad (midwit gentile European) instead of their Jewish friends (+1SD Ashkenazim). Then the whole edifice falls down.

Be careful what you wish for!

Raising non-woke kids is probably easy. The question is how do you turn them into non-woke adults through the teenage years of thinking mom and dad are stupid. Bryan Caplan seems to have managed it.

I'm looking for a drone rec. Context: my father and his wife bought her family "farm" (~40 acres + fully renovated farmhouse and barn , mixed woodland and open field, currently much of the open field is leased to a neighbor for hay). They're both very fond of it, and are looking to restore/return it to use, more in a hobbyist way than an investment way.

I'd like to buy them a not-too-pricey drone as a gift, for land surveying, a neat new perspective on the land she grew up with, and so I don't have to climb any more goddamn rickety ladders to inspect their gutters, because if the fall doesn't kill me, my own wife will.

I don't even know where to start looking in the drone space for something like this. Budget would probably be in the $500-$1000 USD range. Might be impossible, but as I said, I don't even know where to start looking.

I'm not the one to ask either, but while we're at it you might also consider gifting them a new ladder. I like the foldable, extensible aluminum ones. Lightweight, portable, and last forever with occasional treatment of graphite lubricant in the moving parts.

Which anime or manga, if any, do you think has a profound art style? Not just interesting, detailed, or cute, but deeper than that?

Many people in this thread are posting good-looking anime with stylish art. I am convinced the art in Flowers of Evil was specifically designed to match the plot and characters by being ugly and banal.

Some unlikely recommendations:

Blue Period. Does an excellent job of capturing coming of age anxieties through the lens of art-commenting-on-art.

Oyaji. I don't know what it is about this manga. It conveys a flawed patriarch's parental love in visceral manner. It is short, and I couldn't put it down. It's not perfect but it is focused and memorable.

Freesia has a really sketchy artstyle that can almost hurt to read sometimes, but it works considering the main character's mental state.

Baki also has a very strange artstyle that can take time getting used to, but it also has the best fight choreography of any manga.

Perfect Blue (1997)

There's an interesting purposeful distinction between the way idols and regular people are drawn in this anime, and it's obviously related to the plotline. I haven't watched too much anime to say that this hasn't been done anywhere else, but so far it's the most realistic portrayal of objectively beautiful appearance and regular/ugly appearance I've seen.

One of the nice parts of anime is how much easier it is to use unreality to engage with themes and so on. Someone seems more dominant in a conversation? Make them a little bigger than they usually are/everyone else. For more stylized ones...make them A LOT bigger.

You can play with those tricks in a way that's much harder with live action.

Huh, for me the decoy villain was drawn in a ridiculously ugly way that strained my suspension of disbelief. Such an extreme outlier would immediately stand out in any crowd.

He was for sure the ugliest... but they were almost all ugly, aside from the idols of course. Side characters and random people in the background weren't good looking, just like people in real life. I guess the reason it stood out to me is because in many other animes, characters that aren't supposed to be pretty are still aesthetically fine by being symmetrical, having perfect teeth/smile and so on. While in Perfect Blue a random guy you see for 3 seconds would have a shitty hairline and droopy eyes for no reason at all.

The Ghibli film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya's art style to me is achingly precious and beautiful. The story is also profoundly moving if you're open to its message but I think many people are not. The art style I think reinforces the beauty of the story.

I am a huge fan of 60s and 70s shoujo manga and I think the artwork in Moto Hagio's and Keiko Takemiya's work from that era are sometimes profoundly beautiful. Shoujo Kakumei Utena borrows heavily from this era of anime/manga and the art style is fantastic- the sort of abstract mannerist heights the movie reaches in its art nouveau meets modernist architecture is really interesting. The character design of the Utena characters is also so odd, with weirdly overlapping physical traits and rich personalities.

I don't know how the content of Ah My Goddess holds up today but I've always found the artist Kosuke Fujishima incredibly talented- the quality of his linework is immaculate and he renders the curls and twists of hair as precisely as the intricate machinery he draws.

Not what you asked for but while I'm here, Macoto Takahashi, Yoshitaka Amano and Tomomi Kobayashi must all be mentioned as extremely good artists working in the manga/anime style.

I don’t know how you describe profound but Yokohama Shopping Trip has beautiful pen and ink. Since it’s essentially about the beauty of the world, it’s important to convey it.

Atelier of Witch Hat follows in that tradition.

Not really sure how you define profound but I liked the art in Homunculus, and parts of Eden: it's an endless world! might have what you're looking for.

Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but the original art for Mob Psycho and One Punch man, by ONE, are notoriously bad. I have absolutely no artistic skills and if I tried to make a manga that's about what it would look like.

What I find profound is that the writing is so good that people noticed and enjoyed them anyway. And because we live in a society, they got adapted into anime by proper artists (and One Punch Man got a remake manga by a talented artist). This guy has amazing writing talent but garbage art talent, and thus on his own would only be able to make mediocre manga. But by synergizing with other humans where he can utilize his strengths to its utmost while someone else uses their strengths to compensate for his weaknesses, together they can make amazing art that is better than what either could make on their own.

It might be bad art, but it's presented well. Like in many ways the quality of the characters, and the general look is worse than Murata, the fights themselves are better presented in One's original web comic.

Dude has a genius level of artistic vision and just lacks the drawing skills. This is one of the things that makes me most excited for AI art as it develops. How many people are out there with creative ideas and vision but only have half the necessary skills and can't actually make their stuff? If ONE had been born 20 years later than he was he probably could have coaxed an AI into converting his character designs into high quality versions of themselves and generating each panel with him tweaking and coaxing it until it gets it right.

If there are dozens of ONEs with similar skillsets who never got noticed, they might be able to make their own stuff without needing a Murata to help them.

Two examples that always come to mind are Blame! and Otoyomegatari.

I was also going to recommend Blame!

The artist has trouble with motion and action, but really sold me on people endlessly wandering through a superstructure the size of the solar system.

Those two are my go-to examples when this topic comes up, explicitly because they're so radically different.

One's a brutalistic dystopic transhuman venture through the metaphorical circles of hell in order to find god and may very well be the ultimate example of 'Show, don't tell', given how much of it is spent in utter silence. And is written by an architect.

The other is a sloppy, historic love-letter to the Asian steppes with attention to detail that borders on extreme autism, with a broad palette of adorable characters you can't help but hope they have a good ending. And is written by a woman.

I'm rather enamored with them both, if you couldn't tell.

Or in Cibo's case: find God and then steal its body to wear as your own.

I've never heard of Otoyomegatari. I'll give it a look.

You might have heard of 'Young Maid Emma', or just 'Emma' which was drawn/written by the same author/mangaka, and is an earlier work. It's also excellent, and I whole-heartedly endorse it, but comparing Emma and Otoyomegatari, you can definitely tell the mangaka has improved drastically, to the point where you can call the style 'profound'.


What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats