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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3377 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 14, 2026

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

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

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

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Vibe check. In this residential neighborhood found inside a city's metro I am seeing more American flags on or around houses than I ever have. More than any 4th of July that I can remember. Not only has the American flag become much more popular, pride symbolism appears to have decreased substantially in a neighborhood where "In This House We Believe..." held the #1 title a few years ago. Character of the neighborhood hasn't drastically changed in this period. I intend to do a proper survey to see if newfound flag waving correlates to new houses or neighbors. At a glance this doesn't seem to be the case.

More than any 4th of July that I can remember.

I mean, isn't it your country's 250th year celebration as well? I've visited the US a few weeks ago and companies seem to have been taking that excuse to put out american flag branded merch everywhere. Add to that a high profile international sports competition, and I'm not surprised to see some uptick of patriotism. The non-brainwormed democrat and centrists probably also likely understand that it's their only chance to celebrate that big a birthday for the next 50 years, so they're less likely to let "not liking the current administration" ruin it for them than if it was any old 4th of July that happens every year.

I've visited the US a few weeks ago and companies seem to have been taking that excuse to put out american flag branded merch everywhere.

Part of this is simply that the 4th of July is coming up in general. Patriotic merch starts going up in US retail in May every year, like clockwork, and there’s always a lot of it.

There may be something different about this year due to the anniversary, but retail looks about the same to me on the patriotic front.

Outside I don't hear much enthusiasm to celebrate 250th because Trump, etc. I also don't hear a lot of "It's our country, too" verbalized, which was the ancient permissive signal to okay patriotism. Maybe there is silent consensus that it is okay. A nice change of pace.

Why Tianamen is such a big deal for China? I have read almost everything there is about it - and it is just meh. Compared to Prague Spring or the Hungarian events, it was peanuts. Especially on China's scale.

In what sense?

Why'd they crack down so hard? Why is it still held up as a pivotal moment in Chinese history or why is it censored perse?

About the censorship. When it comes to massacres it barely even qualifies as one. So no reason to be ashamed or somehting.

I think there's a bit of a self-perpetuating loop where the outside world making such a deal of it means that there's more desire to quash it, plus having violent crackdown happening in the absolute center of the country in a way that the powers that be almost instantaneously regretted means less willingness to go over it. China also seems quite happy to crack down on navel-gazing/revisionist history stuff to stop it gaining steam, and better to absolutely prohibit topics. A lot of Chinese senior leadership is very scarred by the Cultural Revolution (since they were the 20-30 year old children of higher-ups who got sent to the countryside) and thus try their utmost to stop popular movements gaining steam.

They probably see it as a catalyst to rebellion. Just look at how many civil wars they’ve went through and it’s easy to see why they want to suppress anything that could be construed as challenging order and authority.

It is their version of exterminating the woke mind virus before it becomes endemic in the Chinese population.

This information quarantine requires maintenance so it's a sensitive issue. The Chinese are relatively united and patriotic, so it seems to have worked out relatively well for them. As far as I'm aware, they don't have a need for cultural war threads like we have here on the Motte. If anything, the Chinese are curious how western democracies aren't devolving into total anarchy and chaos given the increasing political polarization over culture war topics.

Kind of. Most of the Chinese senior officials were at formative ages during the Cultural Revolution, so they're very hesitant to allow anything approaching an ideological purity cycle to take place since they know how bad it can be for them. If Kent State happened in literally the middle of Times Square it'd have reached another level of exposure within the culture, though.

I do think you're overstating how ideologically unified the current Chinese populace is, but they've also seen massive improvements in living standards within living memory and tend to be anti-woke due to seeing a lot of the media that hits about Europe being flooded with refugees and whatnot.

Halfway serious question:

We've all heard of coping mechanisms. But what seething mechanisms do humans have?

I think rumination, especially the type that does not lead to any resolution, insight or action, can be described as such.

Complaining about the weather as small talk.

Some former coworkers and I had to make a rule that we were only allowed to bitch about our former employer for 15 minutes when hanging out before switching to other topics. We realized it was like junk food: extremely satisfying in the moment, but unhealthy if indulged in. A shared contempt is a dangerous thing.

My mother has something similar with her friends (70+ year-olds). Whenever they get together there is an "organ recital" where they each complain about their latest health problems then quickly move on to other things

  • Kvetching: complaining about something not because you want to change it but simply because you enjoy the act of complaining.
  • Complaining on social media about bad behaviour in public. For every ten people complaining on Reddit about e.g. people playing music on Bluetooth speakers in public, there must be only one who actually confronts the person and asks them to turn their music off. When asked why they don't just ask the person to turn their music off, they will inevitably say something like "I shouldn't have to" or "I don't want to get stabbed" when the real answer is "I'm a coward who fears confrontation". Either ask the person to change their behaviour, or try to ignore it. Refusing to confront the offender but moaning about their behaviour on social media is pure seethe.

If 9/10 people are cowardly, what meaning does the word have?

To give more meaning to the the word "brave." Something is only praiseworthy when it's the exception.

A descriptive one.

At night, [Otto von Bismarck] slept poorly or not at all. Often, he lay awake until seven a.m., then slept until two p.m. Lying in bed he mulled over grievances. “I have spent the whole night hating” he said once. When no immediate object of hatred was available, he ransacked his memory to dredge up wrongs done to him years before.

But 7am to 2pm is actually 7 hours of sleep. It’s not a great sleep schedule but it it’s a healthy amount of sleep and you could perform pretty well indefinitely on it.

Awful for his circadian rhythm and hence for his respiratory system.

Is this a case study in why we should all hate more? Seemed to have worked well for Bismarck. Hate can be a powerful motivator, after all.

If you compare the long term costs and benefits of sleep vs hate, I'm pretty sure sleep wins out.

Curious now that you mention it. Is there any other emotion that comes to us more naturally than hate? Hatred isn’t a hard won emotion at all but it’s damn hard fought over.

Anyone have any experience with getting dual citizenship (US adding EU)? I'm looking at the "Slovak by Descent" program as a bit of a lark, and was wondering if there were any pitfalls (aside from the obvious "no longer able to apply for jobs that need a US security clearance"). Seems to me to be all upside, no downside.

This isn't likely to be persuasive to someone who doesn't feel it in their bones, but I don't think you should hedge when it comes to the land of your fathers, and I don't want to live in a nation surrounded by such hedgers. A class of trans-national elites with no particular loyalties to hearth and home is a bad thing in and of itself, and you shouldn't participate in its propagation.

I recognize this is probably at least partially a result of a character flaw of mine, but I'm viscerally disgusted by the idea of dual-nationals and think we should amend the constitution to explicitly prohibit American citizens from being citizens of any other nation.

Tbh Americans probably have the lowest incentive to do it of most countries since the IRS is gonna come for your ass regardless and the basic passport is sufficiently strong.

It makes travel significantly more convenient depending on where you're going. A proper third-world passport is actually more useful than EU for this, since countries who have beef with one tend to have beef with both. And even if you're purely a US citizen you need two passports to travel to both Israel and much of the Middle East. Also worth doing if you're wealthy and have a second home outside the US, tourist visa limits can get inconvenient and citizenship can make dealing with homeownership bureaucracy easier.

You can 100% travel to Israel and the rest of the middle east on one passport, even in the same trip. I've done it. Israel knows the Arab states won't allow entrance to anyone with an Israeli stamp, so they just stamp a pos-it note they place on one of the pages and you remove it when you leave. And unless things have changed since the Gaza and/or Iran wars (very possible, my travel was a decade ago), Israel doesn't care what other stamps are in your passport. You might arouse enough suspicion to get questioned by security at the airport for a few minutes, but thats about it.

Also, do you really want to be travelling to a country that is hostile enough to your home country to deny you entry with your main passport? I would not trust in the anonymity of a foreign passport with today's technology. It won't be hard for the government to figure out you're a citizen of a hostile power entering under less than fully candid circumstances. As much as I'd love to visit Iran, I would not feel safe currently doing so as an American, regardless of whether I entered on an Irish or Polish passport. I guess there are wealthy elites and certain kinds of professionals with very idiosyncratic travel obligations for whom multiple passports are extremely useful from a practical perspective, but that's got to be a pretty small group (among holders of first world passports, at least). For the vast majority of people who don't live or regularly work in a foreign country, the bureaucratic hassle of obtaining a second passport is probably going to dwarf any bureaucratic hassle you save by having a second passport.

Didn't realize the Israelis had finally started doing that, good for them. I haven't been there in a very long time. And yes, many countries which are perfectly safe and pleasant to visit have visa-free travel for fellow thirdies while putting annoying/extractive requirements on westerners. It's often through regional associations like CARICOM, but also a general rule of thumb that their relevant government personnel see Americans as suckers to be fleeced and annoyed, whereas an exotic passport is "who is this guy? Best leave him alone." Particularly if you have local government contacts.

the bureaucratic hassle of obtaining a second passport is probably going to dwarf any bureaucratic hassle you save by having a second passport.

True objectively. But one kind of bureaucratic hassle can be done at your leisure when you have lots of time at your disposal, the other often happens when you're time-crunched, sleep-deprived, and have very limited recourse to outside bureaucracies.

Am I one of the only people out there that thinks traveling just fucking sucks ass? Straight up. I mean yeah, I’ve always wanted to visit the morbid, desolate and forbidden stay away zones your mother would never want you to go to as a sense of adventure, but not as a way to marvel and mull over the fact that they have toilets and take a shit “just like we do!,” all the way in China. I mean it’s more or less “like this” almost anywhere you go (where you don’t want to put your life at risk).

Definitely agree that the hoe scaring countries off the beaten path are the nicest ones and tend to contain the most idiosyncratic and interesting things. Also they're not crawling with tourists and souvenir shops trying to sell you tack shit, or if they are it's in a very unique local way that's still of interest to an outside observer.

Overcurated leisure experiences like cruises, resorts, very guided tours and so on are overpriced and negate so much of what I like about travel that I barely view it as an option.

Traveling can give you a sense of perspective on the world like nothing else. Have you ever seen me deny that? It’s a tragedy of anyone thoughtful to look at two YouTuber’s like serpentza and laowhy86 who basically walked out of China with essentially all the same western prejudices they walked in with. Nathan Rich is a guy who clearly harbors a hidden persecution complex and dislike of his own society for not appreciating him, but at least to his credit he’s had the ability to understand and appreciate a different perspective on life than the one he grew up with. Experience is only what you ‘take’ from it. It isn’t where you ‘go’. I don’t dislike “travel,” I dislike “travelers” more.

I mean it’s more or less “like this” almost anywhere you go (where you don’t want to put your life at risk).

Out of curiosity, where have you actually been? I grew up in Malaysia and now live in Australia, I've travelled all over Europe and Oceania, been to North America and most recently have been exploring Asia, and could not disagree more with it being "like this" almost anywhere you go.

To be blunt, I find many westerners to be overly scared by countries that have been marketed to them as "third world" and as such overwhelmingly travel to a restricted range of relatively culturally similar places, though I actually often find them (particularly the Asian ones) safer and more pro-social than much of the West is today.

I mean yeah, I’ve always wanted to visit the morbid, desolate and forbidden stay away zones your mother would never want you to go to as a sense of adventure, but not as a way to marvel and mull over the fact that they have toilets and take a shit “just like we do!,” all the way in China.

"Morbid, desolate and forbidden" are the last descriptors I would apply to China, and I am going again this year. You're not going to be arbitrarily detained unless you want to sell drugs or something. There's extremely rich history, fantastic infrastructure, some really great food (outside of Beijing at least), it's very safe and cheap, albeit the digital ecosystem there can be a pain and people there smoke like it's 60s America.

Frankly, out of all the places I've been I would use that word to describe urban Canada. In other words, there's a lot of places I would deem as viscerally different while still being very safe.

Yeah. China's fine these days, maybe a bit of issues with sameyness in their urban renewal but it's also absurdly cheap and comfortable in the vast majority of places I've been in the country. Most of the places in the world I've been to and felt like I'm unsafe/witnessing urban decay have been in the West such as New Orleans and Belfast (Yes, I'm sure I could go find worse places in Asia but like no real desire to do that).

What's wrong with Beijing food? It's not my favorite regional cuisine but I've had some great meals there.

My perception was that the flavour profile of Beijing food had a good bit less depth and spice than the other regions of China I visited (such as Shanxi, where I really enjoyed the food), and I crave spice to an absurd level. Admittedly I've not spent too long in Beijing, just four days so I probably haven't had the chance to try too much; I had kaoya, zhajiangmian, Beijing-style shaomai in the Qing dynasty restaurant that spread these dumplings throughout China and a small handful of other regional specialities, I'd say they were fine but not great. I'm sure there's great food there though and am happy to accept recommendations for the next time I go.

Agree with most of your points. There's also lots more traditional practices going on in China than most people tend to think, IMO. People almost seem to believe all culture got supplanted by Communism - I've seen people assert that communist China "destroyed" things that a 5 minute Google search would prove still exist - but honestly it's quite clear visiting Mainland China that a lot of varied regional practices remain extant and have flourished heavily under liberalisation (sometimes you can find some seemingly really improbable things still being practiced, like the hermit lifestyle in the Zhongnan Mountains that stretches back all the way to the Qin dynasty). Aspects of traditional stuff actually seem to be cool among the younger generation in China unlike most other places in Asia I've visited, and as a Malaysian Chinese much of what I saw felt rather familiar to me.

I agree that Beijing food is a bit nonspicy/plain compared to other Chinese varietals but I wouldn't call it bad perse. There are countries where the baseline is a lot worse.

Also I'd agree on the cultural stuff as a white person living in a Malaysian Chinese family in Malaysia. I do feel that the average Malaysian Chinese adherence to cultural stuff is higher than the average Mainlanders, but also the sheer scope, regional focuses and population of China means that if you travel you'll see a lot more random showings of cultural practices that you wouldn't otherwise expect. A lot of the old temples have been overrun by XHS photo-takers, but sometimes you'll see people doing things the old ways. I accidentally walked into a closed temple (Somebody left a door open and I think the person watching it wasn't confident enough in their English to warn me from going through) on top of Taishan last time I was there and there was a lot more monks and elaborate offerings than I expected.

I think you’ve got a fairly wild interpretation of my remark. Here in the US it’s a common characteristic you’ll often find among parents, “learned people,” and the elite or “sophisticated” social classes of society that “traveling” and “experiencing the world,” is something only a healthy or well formed individual does. So much so in fact, that others will patronize and condescend to you endlessly and pathologize the type of person you are if you express no interest in it. It’s why you can find pockets of introverts, eccentrics, “shut-in’s” and autists (naturally, people who don’t enjoyably leave the cave) so hostile to the suggestion because of all the people it reminds them of.

Yes, it’d be cool to take a stroll across the Great Wall or visit the Forbidden City once in a lifetime. I don’t mean that kind of thing isn’t fun; that isn’t what I’m responding to. But traveling for the sake of traveling because you’re a rootless hobo who loves getting mistaken for some kind of bum urban nomad is my insult and giving of the finger to those the megaphone who always wants to tell me there’s something “wrong” with me because traveling isn’t a basic cornerstone of my life.

My description you cited wasn’t aimed at China. I was thinking of North Korea (which I do want to visit, so I can say I’ve been to the world’s last Stalinist dystopia), but in China, people eat, people take the train, people enjoy the night life, just as they world anywhere else. That’s my point.

I think you’ve got a fairly wild interpretation of my remark. Here in the US it’s a common theme among parents, “learned people,” and the elite social classes of society that “traveling” and “experiencing the world,” is something only a healthy or well formed individual does.

This is certainly a thing, and there are people who are extremely pretentious about it sometimes; I don't think there's something particularly wrong with someone if they don't want to travel. Just pushing back against the notion that things are broadly similar wherever you go or that it sucks ass. And the "I find many westerners to be overly scared by countries that have been marketed to them as 'third world'" wasn't exactly specifically directed at you, that was meant to be more of a tangent about other people I know.

I mean yes, there will always be similarities between people and places you come across based on the fact that ultimately everyone is human and will share basic human traits; you're never going to meet the heptapods from Arrival. But the specific differences have actually become incredibly apparent to me as life goes on, especially after having moved. I've come to believe that places in the world are not nearly as interchangeable as I would have initially thought, and that "settling in" culturally to a totally new country is in practice more difficult than it initially seems. "You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy" kind of deal. And all of these differences really matter to your QoL.

But traveling for the sake of traveling because you’re a rootless hobo who loves getting mistaken for some kind of bum urban nomad is my insult and reversal for the megaphone that always wants to tell me there’s something “wrong” with me because traveling isn’t a basic cornerstone of my life.

Thing is, I don't think this is a good mental conception of the people who really enjoy travelling for its sake. It really is just a difference in novelty preference and openness-to-experience. At least personally speaking, I find life gets extremely, painfully dull day-to-day, and while travelling isn't the only way to shake somebody out of one's routines and established mental patterns that get canalised, it certainly is a very effective one.

Some people don't feel the need to do that, some people enjoy the comfort of the daily routine and their familiar environment, and that's fine! But some people really prefer novelty, and perhaps they're typical-minding when they try to push others out of their comfort zone, but they're almost certainly not doing so out of malice or necessarily even superiority, and that retort is going to come off as needlessly hostile.

The way I see it you can choose breadth or you can choose depth. Choosing one means foresaking the other.

What can be problematic is when travelling broadly is presented as demonstrating one's depth. It's akin to stolen valour - the thing that makes those places exotic and interesting is that the inhabitants have spent their lives adapting to it and adapting it to themselves. On the flip side the thing that historically made travellers interesting was that they lived lives that necessitated travelling. The travelling was a means, not an end in itself. In both instances the origin is a type II or sometimes type III activity that is being repackaged as type I fun while clinging to the cachet of being type II/III.

Also I feel like seeking novelty by partaking of foreign people's native mundanity contributes to the starving of novelty in one's own culture. Cultural output requires the boredom and appetite for change that motivates people to organise and take action. If that's dissipated into activities that occur elsewhere it diminishes the energy available to produce or support the production of local cultures both old and new.

The travelling was a means, not an end in itself. In both instances the origin is a type II or sometimes type III activity that is being repackaged as type I fun while clinging to the cachet of being type II/III.

But leisure travel is old, it has been an end in itself whenever conditions became stable and there was any slightly sizeable middle-to-upper class; ancient Romans travelled all through Greece, Asia Minor and Egypt for fun (and sometimes left reviews of their experiences on the historical sites). Tourists would travel to the pyramids and the ruins of Troy, motivated by the concept of otium, or "self-realisation time". Temples would derive significant portions of revenue from tourism; they charged fees, contained artefacts for sightseeing and often claimed to house some legendary figure's remains. There were tourist resorts in Baia and Naples. This isn't particularly limited to Rome either, Chinese literati engaged in landscape tourism, going to mountains to gather herbs and appreciate scenery.

I'm also not certain the "stolen valour" hypothesis works very well here to explain the cultural cachet travel currently holds. Merchants who would have travelled heavily in the course of their work were not considered particularly high-status people in many historical societies (Greece, Rome, China, early medieval Europe all considered them a disreputable, parasitic nonproducing class). A lot of times travelling becomes vaunted once it becomes a pastime that the wealthy are willing and capable of participating in, when the empire is stable and it can be portrayed as a form of self-cultivation and source of worldly enlightenment instead of a job performed by the lowly for money.

Also I feel like seeking novelty by partaking of foreign people's native mundanity contributes to the starving of novelty in one's own culture. Cultural output requires the boredom and appetite for change that motivates people to organise and take action.

That is quite the opposite of my take. Cultural exchange has shaped societies in many novel ways over the years; it's far more often that novelty via partaking of foreign people's native mundanity results in that novelty being exported back to one's own society and syncretising in interesting and new ways. To continue with the Roman example from before, after the annexation of Egypt and significant travel there Roman Italy gained a large market for Egyptian-looking artworks and syncretic pieces of art that the well-to-do put in their homes. And while not so related to travel, the development of European chinoiserie largely was caused by coming across porcelains and textiles from China, in other words partaking in "foreign people's native mundanity", and it resulted in many new art styles such as Rococo.

Right, and I get all that. I’m no stranger to the fact that most people aren’t like me and that isn’t a sin against anyone, it’s just who they are. To some people the words “habit” and “routine” imply feeling like a caged animal. Likewise to me, when I hear words like “travel” and “change” I think of “chaos” and “instability.” I like predictability and security and traveling just never had that zenith tier payoff people try to promise you. I’m not being cynical about it, it just doesn’t impact me the way it does others. I’d like to visit a few foreign, distant locations at some point in my life, but the whole “traveling as lifestyle,” horseshit, as if it’s some kind of personality quirk grates on my nerves when I have to hear about it.

If you’re someone who just enjoys traveling or wants to get out of the house from time to time, more power to you, have at it. In that regard I’m the same way. Several years ago one of my uncle’s had a complete random chat with two Chinese men walking on the street who taught him basic Mandarin. The very next day, he hopped on a flight and went to Hong Kong. Just completely randomly. That kind of thing is awesome. When I was younger my friends and I would randomly go and explore abandoned parts of cities and travel don’t streets people always told us to stay away from. For me it was less about travel and more about adventure; like we’d stumble across Pandora’s Box in a manhole or something. If someone wants to expose me to their traveling experiences I’ll happily listen. If they’re up my ass about it, they’ll turn me off pretty quick.

but not as a way to marvel and mull over the fact that they have toilets and take a shit “just like we do!,” all the way in China.

Have you used a squat toilet before? I hear they're less common in China than they used to be, but this actually is something different parts of the world do differently.

No I haven’t. But it’s not like I couldn’t just take a dump on the street if I wanted, either.

Am I one of the only people out there that thinks traveling just fucking sucks ass? I mean, it’s more or less “like this” almost anywhere you go (where you don’t want to put your life at risk).

I agree.

I mean, yeah, I’ve always wanted to visit the morbid, desolate, and forbidden stay-away zones your mother would never want you to go to as a sense of adventure

I disagree.

My father was was appointed mayor of Nampa, Idaho. Nampa is in the Boise Metro, it's Idaho third largest city at around 110,000 people. R+20. He's only gonna be in office for a year an a half, doesn't plan on running after.

What would be the most impactfully policies he could pursue.

Of course he probably won't listen to me, and the city council certainly won't listen. Parks and Rec is more real than people think...

Your dad spells his name weird

He looks like he could knock back a 13 pack and make pancakes for the grandkids at 7am

I would say go for remembrance - just start going HAM on slightly illogical trees all over the town … think flowering bonsai for the climate

Pick a country and just blow it up - make it a big Croatian city … no one has anything bad to say about those people so he could sneak it past everyone in a kind of well, ok way

Make moats legal

Introduce a new species into the environment

Start a communism based farm but make it alpacas

Hummus Tuesday

Subsidized firearm for everyone that turns 18

Not sure where we'll get the ordinance to blow up Rijeka but cities are about the same size so fair fight.

Well it's pronounced like Carl, with a D. It's less often now since he's lived in Nampa for decades but growing up 50% of people would pronounce his name wrong and he never corrected anyone. Because of that I've always found it odd people who make a big deal about pronouncing their names correctly.

Hasn't touched a drop of alcohol since college, but from stories its sounds like he could put some down back in the day. He makes pancakes for his grand kids all the time.

We actually didn't have rats in the valley until a couple years ago. While native - I've never heard of one in the city - Fish and Game tranquilized a bear out of a tree in town last week.

This is half-facetious but... is there any way to address how bad Nampa sometimes smells? We have casually considered moving there from Boise but we're afraid we'll accidentally end up somewhere that reeks when the wind comes from the right direction.

Also half-facetious... It's a federal problem end all agricultural subsidies and the sugar beet industry will collapse taking the the sugar beet factory with it.

Thirty years ago there were three big problems Amalgamated, the meat packing plant, and sewage processing. The three of them were spaced around the city so that you could get a smell any wind direction. The meat plant is gone, the city has and is dumping a ton of money into water treatment, and the sugar beat factory has had several rounds of of projects to mitigate the smell. Now, I only notice a sugar beat factory sporadically during the fall beet campaign if the conditions are just right, and I'm relatively close. So yes, don't buy a house next to the factory (granted that means farther from the freeway), but 90% of the town is now fine with only a few days a year where you might get a whiff.

While it pains me to say, if I was going to move back to that side of the valley I'd probably look at Caldwell. I think downtown Caldwell is far superior to downtown Nampa now. I haven't looked at how worse the gang issues are, but no matter what it pales in comparison to the late 90's early '00s.

Primary concern being my real name being tied to this place in any way? I thought about it - I would prefer the admins not put my main on blast - if we start woke struggle sessions being the son of my father will probably be the most problematic in and of itself.

Maybe his father did Elon-style parenting before it was cool.

Provide support for K-12 math competitions. Practice space without fees or burdensome regulations, funding for team registrations, equal treatment of public/private/homeschoolers. There’s plenty of local talent to coach the stuff between Micron and BSU. There would be negligible travel costs for anyone making it to a state-level competition since that’ll run in the Boise area anyway.

Probably the most important thing he could do is to pick a single (currently) nonpartisan, nonsalient bugbear that never the less causes unambiguous quantifiable harm and go after it with the fury of a thousand suns. For example, there's been some pretty decent research lately that shows that high CO2 levels reduce educational attainment, so he could make improving school HVAC systems a central priority. Compared to something grand like "fixing immigration" it probably sounds pointless, but remember that expected value is a joint consequence of how effective an intervention is and HOW LIKELY IT IS TO HAPPEN! There is almost certainly tons of low-hanging fruit lying around, because politicians typically prefer to expend all their time on salient and therefore voter-grabbing issues.

Such thinking is why I came here! Trying to identify such issues. Granted my proclivities are for less spending.

Oof, reducing spending is much harder than reallocating it. my impression of american municipal governments is that they're both fairly efficient and the "waste" that exists is fairly load-bearing. You could cut money from the parks and rec budget, but that will be immediately salient to the people who use those parks. Cancelling a local festival will infuriate more people than it's worth. And anyways, your biggest line items are probably police budgets and road maintenence, and those are a terrible mix of highly salient and very opaque.

The best he can probably do is probably fuck around with your city's zoning/building codes to reduce how hard+expensive it is to get new stuff approved and built. The direct savings will be pretty small or even negative (if you have to hire more bureaucrats to process stuff faster.) But time is money, so a complicated permitting process is effectively a tax on building new things, and therefore a tax that gets spread out over everyone who uses those new things in the subsequent years. Maybe there's some minor occupational licensing stuff your dad can make easier too?

Agreed on thr housing stuff. Zoning is probably the single most powerful tool for effective change at the hands of a municipal government. Pushing through a modest reform to Loosen zoning, making it cheaper and quicker to build stuff (especially housing) is the most imprtant thing a random mayor is likely going to be able to accomplish. Most of our current societal ills are ultimately downstream of the fact that nobody but retired boomers can afford to buy a house.

Annex the Caldwell LDS Temple. Rename it the Nampa Temple.

Why not just go for Meridian's? Then Nampa could retake 2nd largest city and have just as weird borders as Meridian.

Congrats to your dad!

Most of the complaints I'm seeing are about traffic. Is it that bad?

I'll be driving from Boise proper to Nampa this evening. I have to arrive at 5:30, which means I need to leave at 4:20, though it would be a 25 minute drive with no traffic. Whether or not that constitutes "that bad" likely depends on where you are from, but for an Idahoan, it feels outrageous!

I'm super stoked for him. His exit from his career came with less recognition than I felt he deserved, largely stemming from his stances on COVID policy vs. those of his bosses. This feels like his just recognition for all the work he did for 30 years.

In my opinion no, I'd challenge anyone to point to a city in a similar position with materially better traffic. Granted Mayor Dale (mayor for 24) put in a very odd traffic pattern in the middle of downtown that we all complain about, but that's getting fixed, and at best will save people a few minutes.

He can increase public awareness on a variety of important topics: that increasing school funding doesn’t work; that hiring post-bachelors teachers is actually harmful, let alone unnecessary, for increasing performance in schools; that you can download free books on libgen and free scientific articles on sci-hub; that IQ should be a permissible factor in hiring; that corporations should consider bypassing the university system and just hire promising high school students; stuff like that. Just break through the Overton Window like the kool-aid man. Do it on live television.

I like it, but ambitious. While we’re at it, might as well add sharing IQ, FBI crime, and racial in-group preference statistics to the list.

You’ve really got a boner for chaos don’t you? “But that would be too inconvenient for our ideology.”

He sent me to a private school, that regularly had none accredited teachers, and per student spending less than the public schools. Nampa has started closing schools, many transplants have been retirees and those with families have trended towards moving outside the district, homeschooling, and private schools.

Nampa, Idaho’s fourth largest school district, has seen enrollment plummet in recent years. Since the 2013-2014 school year, enrollment has gone from nearly 15,000 students to less than 13,000 this year. That may be surprising to some, considering the city’s population has nearly doubled this century. But school district leaders in recent weeks have described a series of factors leading to declining enrollment. For one, many Nampa newcomers are older and don’t have school-aged children. Additionally, housing development has focused on the outskirts of Nampa, outside the district’s boundaries. While the Vallivue School District to the west is growing, Nampa schools are shrinking. And school leaders expect the downward trend to continue. Nampa’s current kindergarten class size is 841 students, down from 1,239 a decade ago.

What would be the most impactfully policies he could pursue.

Deport all the Californians and Oregonians.

California is mostly a red state outside of the Bay Area and urban coastal centers. As a California native born and raised, believe me when I tell you there are plenty of Californians on one side of the fence who intensely dislike the Californians on the other side.

With the right policies can just incentivize self deportation. Go beyond Greenleaf and subsidize gun ownership for all heads of household.

So, what are you reading?

I'm about halfway through Churchill's Savrola. It's basically a political conflict between authoritarian President Molara and democratic agitator Savrola, with a woman in the middle. It's actually engaging, though the dialogue can be quite stilted. The focus is on the game of ambition and the necessary qualities to win in it, and the characters seem divided on either side between the people who matter and the people who need a firm hand. Probably it is more fascinating than it otherwise would be because of who wrote it, but I think I would like it anyways.

Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant—for what? A people’s good! That, he could not disguise from himself, was rather the direction than the cause of his efforts. Ambition was the motive force, and he was powerless to resist it. He could appreciate the delights of an artist, a life devoted to the search for beauty, or of sport, the keenest pleasure that leaves no sting behind. To live in dreamy quiet and philosophic calm in some beautiful garden, far from the noise of men and with every diversion that art and intellect could suggest, was, he felt, a more agreeable picture. And yet he knew that he could not endure it. "Vehement, high, and daring" was his cast of mind. The life he lived was the only one he could ever live; he must go on to the end. The end comes often early to such men, whose spirits are so wrought that they know rest only in action, contentment in danger, and in confusion find their only peace.

About to finish Worth the Candle. It started off incredible, getting a bit lame by the end. Too much focus on narrative, and the relationships / characters are too cringey. It's a shame because it had a ton of potential but I'm still enjoying it.

Really? I kind of liked the cringe relationship drama. Er, that might be a little strong. I appreciated having it around. It avoids certain failure modes of self-published fantasy by flying really, really close to them.

I feel like the story would be weaker if it didn’t have Joon’s confused psychosexual problems. But then, I rather liked Evangelion.

Same here. Unfortunately, the latter part seems to be his intended focus. He could be a decent "straight" fantasy writer, but wants it to be a philosophical work that subverts expectstions, but he lacks the nuance for. I finished the book, but mentally checked out at the rape-icorn.

Yeah I stayed checked in a little longer, but not too much. You make a good diagnosis of his problems as an author I think.

I swear I answered this yesterday, but it appears my post never made it. Anyway, it's The Minority Council: Matthew Swift Book 4 by Kate Griffin. For those interested, I greatly enjoyed Cured and would recommend it to any fan.

Finished Ghost Story, the N-th Dresden Files book. I thought it was pretty fun. Harry fights monsters, solves crimes, does his usual stubborn white-knight shtick, all in a good way.

I read the first half of the series as a teenager, then the next few as used books, and got this from the library. It feels like the appropriate way to go for the rest; while I have little desire to own them, I can't say I'm not a little invested. From the outside, it's easier to grumble about the author's quirks, but while you're immersed, the predominant theme is "hell yeah, of course magic should work like that." Like, you want to be part of this setting, even though it objectively sucks. Fantasy in the pure sense.

Next up I guess I'm reading Ancillary Mercy by Ann Leckie. I've written about why the first book in that series was so good. Then I enjoyed the second without finding it particularly special. I'm hoping for a return to form.

Oh, and I guess I've got Battle Cry of Freedom too. It's getting into the early stages of the war now. Still horrifying/incredible. Still increasing my respect for Abe Lincoln.

Ghost Story is, thus far, my favorite Dresden Files novel. Together with Changes, they're a hell of a one-two punch!

Not to pooh-pooh, but I found the series took a dive around/shortly after Ghost Story, or it's possible I just aged out of the books. They're romantasy for lonely dudes (but still way better than the romantasy for women, as far as I can tell secondhand)

I did like the most recent one. It actually had a time frame longer than the weekend. There was a lot of narrative admin work that needed to be done, and I felt like it did it well.

Yeah same feel like it was a reasonable return to form and it'll be nice if he can keep to an annual cadence from here.

The Siege of Krishnapur. I couldn’t get through Blood Meridian because it used retarded, over the top violence in lieu of plot or developed characters, albeit the prose was sheer artistry on display to almost make it readable.

I've been reading the Hierarchy series by James Islington. The first book, The Will of the Many was great: full of flaws, but the things it does right it does so well that the problems basically fade away. The sequel, The Strength of the Few fumbles the ball hard, unfortunately, so much that I'm not sure how much interest I have in the rest of the series (next book scheduled to come out in 2027).

Did you read his Licanius series, and if so, what did you think? I bought the first one on a whim but haven't read it yet.

Nope. I've seen a lot of people say it's not as good as his Hierarchy series.

Not OP obviously.

It can be a bit rough and uneven, and it's going to look like the following won't happen at times: it absolutely nails the ending, and does some INCREDIBLE things with really intricate plotting.

It has some story elements that are really hard to handle in a smart and elegant way and it does not fail.

Some of the other bits are more mixed.

Starting Blood Meridian. Surprisingly readable given what I've heard, but comically over the top violence and McCarthy's disregard for useful grammar objects, especially quotation marks, grinds my gears just as much as it did when I read The Road for a class in undergrad. Otherwise listening to HP 3 in Italian and reading a light Spanish book about a love triangle between three roommates.

It might grow on you. The style does provide this sort of relentless momentum to some of the action set pieces. By the end I found the general misery and despair more of an impediment than the prose.

My own experience with McCarthy was brief and memorable, though not in a good way.
I made a point of finishing the first chapter of Blood Meridian, but I was nearly immediately overwhelmed with the urge to grab the pen, typewriter, keyboard or whatever it was he produced this with and whack him over the head with it.
Simply atrocious.

I have to keep reading unfortunately because it's for book club. Other people seem to be enjoying it, so will have to see what they say.

Feed it into Claude and tell it to add punctuation for you.

Give in to the temptation. Rewrite the entire book with proper punctuation.

Funny, I don't remember noticing the lack of quotes in The Road. But when I heard Sally Rooney omits them that was all the reason I needed not to check her out.

No quotes: 🤯

No quotes, Irish woman: 😡

Lmao fair. Maybe if I re-read The Road today I'd find this stylistic device more annoying than I did on my first read. As I recall it's not a particularly dialogue-heavy book which might also make it more forgiveable.

About two-thirds of the way through Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

Ooh, I've thought about checking that one out, but I keep telling myself to read at least the really interesting parts of my backlog first.

Have you read the first two?

Aww hell, I was mixed up, the book I was thinking about was Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist--sorry about that! I'm actually not familiar with the Neapolitan series.

This weekend I read Colossus, of which the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project was a remarkably faithful adaptation, and which is hopefully not prescient, as well as The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul on a lighter note, my first outing with Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective.

I remember watching that movie with my father when I was young. One of those sort of cult classics that always stuck in my mind when the binary was being read out horizontally on the digital visor in the command center, and it was processing data humans couldn’t understand.

Finished with The Decipherment of Linear B. Very interesting to see the brass tacks of how ancient scripts get deciphered in cases without bilingual texts or even knowing what language it is.

Now on The End of Eternity. First 2/3 were entertaining enough but nothing especially amazing. I think it might be picking up though. Asimov continues to write like an autist; fortunately, that means he can write autists well.

HE MET THE girl in a corridor one day and stood aside, eyes averted, to let her pass.

But she remained standing, looking at him, until he had to look up and meet her eyes. She was all color and life and Harlan was conscious of a faint perfume about her.

She said, “You’re Technician Harlan, aren’t you?”

His impulse was to snub her, to force his way past, but, after all, he told himself, all this wasn’t her fault. Besides, to move past her now would mean touching her.

So he nodded briefly. “Yes.”

“I’m told you’re quite an expert on our Time.”

“I have been in it.”

“I would love to talk to you about it someday.” “I am busy. I wouldn’t have time.”

“But Mr. Harlan, surely you could find time someday.”

She smiled at him.

Harlan said in a desperate whisper, “Will you pass, please? Or will you stand aside to let me pass? Please!”

She moved by with a slow swing of her hips that brought blood tingling to his embarrassed cheeks.

He was angry at her for embarrassing him, angry at himself for being embarrassed, and angry, most of all, for some obscure reason, at Finge.

I'm a big Asimov fan, but that was one of his weakest. Hopefully if you're there it's just because you ran through all of his good novels first?

I've read a couple but nothing systematically. Which would you recommend?

The original "Foundation" trilogy is the place I'd start, if you're okay with the old-sci-fi "Sense of Wonder, Big Ideas, What's Characterization?" style. For the first whole book the plot jumps from generation to generation fast enough that when he does give you a fascinating character you have to resign yourself to soon saying goodbye and at best hearing about that character again later as a historical figure.

"The Caves of Steel" (followed by "The Naked Sun", "The Robots of Dawn", and "Robots and Empire") would be option B. Sci-fi/mystery crossovers, maybe not as good overall but not nearly as weak on character development.

There's a two-book prequel series to the Foundation trilogy, which was my favorite of all the fiction he's written, but which I wouldn't recommend reading until after the above 7 books.

I think that covers all the strong recommendations for novels.

His collaborations with Robert Silverberg were good, but they were all just fleshing out earlier novellas, and honestly you could just read the novellas instead to get 90% of the quality in 30% of the time.

He got started with short stories, and some of his best stuff is in them, but any particular anthology is a mix of quality, except that his last couple ("Gold" and "Magic") I found disappointing.

His "Empire" novels ("The Currents of Space", "The Stars, Like Dust", and "Pebble in the Sky"), weren't best-of-the-century things like the Foundation trilogy was, but I did like them better than The End of Eternity.

He had a couple kids' book series. I remember loving "Lucky Starr" and being disappointed by "Norby", but I read "Lucky Starr" in elementary school and I wouldn't dare guess how it would hold up to an adult. Perhaps Norby was just as good but I found it in middle school or high school and had aged out of the intended audience.

Edit: I almost forgot to mention "The Gods Themselves" - I wouldn't even put it above the "strong recommendations" line myself, but in some ways it was one of the most unique and interesting books of his I've read, and I've known other people to say it was his best, and it's perhaps a safer recommendation (stand-alone work, not "you should read these other seven books first!") than my own favorite.

I was always one of those guys who loved his non-fiction much more than his Sci-Fi. Asimov always stayed true to the reputation people often pinned to him as “the greatest explainer of the age,” and he was truly remarkable when it came to that. When I read the Foundation trilogy though, it just kept coming through to me, over and over and over and over and over again just how sterile his writing seemed to feel; and it wasn’t at all to my liking.

IMHO the Foundation trilogy gets much more humanized halfway through, and even for the first half "sterile" is an overstatement, but you're at least directionally correct, I must admit.

I'd agree his non-fiction was better than his fiction, it's just harder to recommend because there's so much to choose from! Hundreds of books instead of dozens, in so many fields that it's hard to say that a fan of one subject would equally appreciate the others. "Asimov's Guide to the Bible" was perhaps the most in-depth example I can think of to recommend, but by far my favorites were (the anthologies of) his pop-science essays.

Thanks, I'll add some of these to the list.

I remember loving Lucky Starr and being disappointed by Norby

I vaguely recall enjoying the Norby books, though I remember almost nothing about them except the weird telepathy punctuation (was it italics with guillemets?).

I just used the "she's not here right now" classic in response to an "any allergies" while out for dinner. She was too nice to groan audibly. Any other excellent ideas?

The AI says that the joke is that "she's not here right now" sounds a lot like "cheese nut hair rice now". Incredible joke! Way to come up with that one!

Do you have a natural child we haven’t heard about? Because that veers awfully close to Boomer dad joke territory.

If I do, then I don't know about it. Or the unpaid child support didn't follow me across continents.

Perhaps it would work on a male server

"He's not here right now" would be slightly more menacing, or come across as gay.

No; I mean the low-stakes perceived misogyny -- boomer-tier wife jokes -- of "she's not here right now" might work on a male server. Of course you don't want to be menacing or gay to the male server.

"she's not here right now" classic in response to an "any allergies"

Were you talking about an ex-girlfriend, to another woman (not your ESLesbian)? It sounds like you were on a date. If that's the case then it's a sad joke that reflects your inability do some mental filtering before you speak.

I see your sense of humor could do with a tune-up. Or you could use a proper nap so you're less sleepy.

To be painfully specific: I was having a meal by myself (as one does), and it's standard practice for servers to ask about allergies here. I have no allergies, except to bullshit and painfully pedantic eggs. I've broken out into a rash. But since you asked so nicely, it's a silly joke, along the lines of the "old ball and chain" and not a reference to any woman in particular.

I think people who make non-specific complaints about the opposite sex into memes are (mostly unintentionally):

  • Encouraging people in so-so marriages to see the negatives in their current situation
  • Warning off unmarried people against marriage

and therefore making the world a worse place for the sake of a cheap joke that isn't even funny. I wish they would stop.

I register your opinion, since you, unlike someone else, said so politely. But I think that's an awful lot of fuss for what is intentionally a dad joke.

I agree with both of you. Shrug

How unreasonable is it to prioritize work over interpersonal connections? I truly enjoy my work and find it so much more gratifying than anything else I have ever done in my life, but there seems to be some sort of prevailing consensus that you are only human if you relate to others? Has anyone else led a somewhat more solitary existence and prioritized only themselves over connections with others (outside of the connections you make at work anyway in a team, although those connections are more transactional in nature)?

Reasonable seems like an odd phrasing.

Can you live your life that way and survive? Yes, obviously.

Will you miss out on many things? Yes, obviously.

I think the big question to ask yourself is are you comfortable with coming back to interpersonal relationships in ten years and being in a profoundly weird position of trying to play catch-up?

High achieving gunners often experience this after college, they focused on academics throughout high school and College, and now they've achieved their early professional goals and it is time for romance, but they missed the developmental steps along the way, so they're stumbling through first dates and first kisses at 24, and lack the training and reference that their peers have around these things.

are you comfortable with coming back to interpersonal relationships in ten years and being in a profoundly weird position of trying to play catch-up?

I have seen people much older than me catch up, but I do feel that even if they’re successful it is a somewhat odd position. My only cope is maybe when you’re older you’re wiser and more patient and can handle human relationships better - without the self flagellation that comes with being young.

so they're stumbling through first dates and first kisses at 24, and lack the training and reference that their peers have around these things.

Ouch!

How long ago did you decide this and how has this experience been going for you?

How confident are you that this work will actually stay so gratifying for the next x0 years of your life? What if the industry gets automated/offshored? Company goes bankrupt or does layoffs? You get a crappy manager? Develop physical or mental health problems? Or everything else goes fine but you simply don't like it so much anymore at some point?

Not very confident; not very confident that I’d meet people who gratify me similarly either. All this discussion around it is quite interesting, life is hard.

I'd strongly advice against any kind of one-track lifestyle. No matter what you do, things can always go bad in a way that is not really your fault. It's good to have fallbacks, ideally uncorrelated ones, that you can be happy about. If you have a reasonably fun job that pays reasonably well (but is not amazing by either measure), have a partner, have friends, have family you're on good terms with, have kids, own a house that you deliberately made your own, and maybe some other things like hobbies or volunteer work or local community stuff, then it's pretty hard for your life to get completely ruined in a modern western society.

Work in particular is imo one of the easiest and most tempting one-tracks to get into, and thus the one you should be most careful about. This has a bunch of reasons, in no particular order:

-I'm hardly a communist, but they are correct that bosses are very eager to get you into this. It's just not about capitalism, it's simply very beneficial for anyone in a hierarchy above you if you have nothing else on your plate. It's extremely easy to talk a young unattached girl into unpaid overwork for a job she loves.

-Because of the way aging works, a lot of the other things will only get harder as you get older: Well-adjusted people will already be paired of and have kids, and they will already have enough friends so that even if they like you, they'll probably put no work in to turn this into a friendship, for example.

-This only applies to you if you have a "fun" career: Work is fundamentally the stuff that needs to be done, but which is not fun enough for people to do for free. It's also normal to get paid badly at the start of your career. And there is this pervasive idea that you need to "find the right work" that "fulfills" you. This leads to an interesting dysfunction in modern times: Extreme competition around fun jobs that people are actually willing to do for free. I've seen more than one person get completely burned out on something where they think they just need to "focus more on their career", except everyone is doing this so you can't get ahead; The fundamental problem is that supply outstrips demand so much that only a tiny sliver of ultra-competent can earn anything at all.

-Work has a tendency to become drudgery over time, moreso if you have nothing else. There are unfortunately large differences between "sounds good", "is fun (at first)" and "stays tolerable over long time spans". Worse, most people only find out once it happens to them.

-Contrariwise, especially on a partner & kids I've seen a noticeable tendency where people think that they don't need or even want it when they are young, but they nevertheless become unhappy and regretful once they're too old and it's too late.

-The great majority of work is ephemeral, even the work you think isn't. At some point you'll realize that you left almost nothing behind for the future. Are you ready for this?

-Finally, to hark back to the general criticism of one-track lifestyles, work is especially susceptible to outside influence. You boss leaves and the new boss sucks. Or the entire field isn't doing so well so you're getting chopped. Or politics does something stupid that impacts your company negative. Or some of your favorite coworkers leave and the atmosphere turns bad. Or the world changes in an unpredictable way that makes your job far less fun (to understand what I mean, see the complaints from programmers who like programming itself but hate supervising and double-checking AIs who do the actual coding).

Really great points, thank you for providing forward looking insights into this.

Maybe because I’ve spent 20+ years trying to make friends (ever since I was a conscious child, for example), but they haven’t lasted (no fault of theirs, maybe some of mine), and of course relationships are almost a joke in how little they mean since one day someone can wake up and just decide they don’t find you worth their time anymore, I feel like I have some experience with being alone.

The intellectual stimulation at work is so intense that it leaves almost no space for worrying about anything interpersonal. So was graduate school, but you’re right that the landscape of work is ever changing and it’s quite likely that in 5 years I might get replaced by some AI.

You’ve given me a lot to think about, I appreciate that.

Autists hyper focusing on work they enjoy is how we get extreme specialists that sometimes make contributions to the pool of human knowledge. In that sense, I encourage it from a utilitarian perspective.

I was always too far-sighted to have ever risked having lost the plot when it came to getting too caught up in work. Some people think I’m this “workaholic” type guy, but the reality of things couldn’t be further from the truth. Unless my friends or family are prompted to organize something and they ask me to play a part in putting it together, I would much rather spend my time doing something else. Unless you’re say a Hasidic Jew who believes as part of the foundation for his religious vocation that it’s his job to seek God in everything he does (including work and labor more generally), I’ve always looked at the older cohort who retires and then makes frequent appearances or returns to work as having nothing better to do outside of his job. If that were me, you would never see me again and I would never return. I’m too engrossed in my own pursuits and interests and family life to find enjoyment in that.

People also tend not to appreciate what’s good in their life and what they have until they’ve lost it. Fortunately that was never me.

Not appreciating the good things in one's life is probably a common mistake, and a mistake that I've made many times. Sometimes it's useful to reflect on the bad points in one's life to regain perspective on the things that are actually going very well by relative comparison.

The first polycarbonate to survive anodization and rival the tensile strength of magnesium will be invented by a lonely heart

Very likely. To paraphrase the immortal Zapp Brannigan, "Some of you autists may die alone, but that's a price I'm willing to pay."

Might be confusing it for some of his other bangers.

“It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.”

"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide mission."

I stand corrected!

That's Lord Farquaad.

I heard that in Lieutenant's Kif's voice.

relationships are almost a joke in how little they mean since one day someone can wake up and just decide they don’t find you worth their time anymore

What does it mean when somebody claims to be female, but describes an archetypal, rite-of-passage experience of men?

It may be too hot a take for this board, but I would say it means women aren’t actually foreign agitators with incomprehensible experiences.

There are, of course, other possibilities.

And maybe the Moon is actually made of cheese. I would still consider other possibilities before concluding that the moon rock sex scandal was a cover-up for a rat infestation.

Only interpersonal romantic relationships, friendships aren’t like that. They’re a slow drift towards irrelevancy but you can recover them.

I'm OBVIOUSLY referring to the romantic relationship moment of having the female half inevitably proclaim "I'm not haaaappy" with little to no prior indication, which is recognizable to any man with experience.

Consider the most obsequious, autistic man you know and then imagine him as a woman. ANNOYING!

Any unattractive or ordinary-looking person could have such a realization after being dumped by an attractive person, regardless of gender.

Great post, thank you.

I wholeheartedly recommend that you do as I did, and gradually isolate yourself from interacting with absolutely everybody, except for the cases where one of you or both are acting in a professional capacity. (For context: I am recommending it because I'm a misogynist.)

It is possible to make such a recommendation without being a misogynist.

I admire the strong boldness or complete ignorance to make a statement like that; my only addendum being it isn’t exactly wrong to ‘conclude’ that, if your life experience has led you down the path of understanding and realization that “lack of success doesn’t prove lack of effort,” when it comes to the romance game. If you come up empty or find yourself at a dead end you can have it anyway you want: with the self-pity; or without it.

if your life experience has led you down the path of understanding and realization that “lack of success doesn’t prove lack of effort,” when it comes to the romance game

Friendship, romance—same thing (1 2).

I don’t know about that one. I have friends who have married their wife and others who married their female best friend they’d known all their lives. The former has seemed to prove more successful than the latter.

How long have you been a misogynist?

You're describing the life of a graduate student, which is fine for a time, but at some point most people will want something that's easier to obtain with a social network to draw on e.g. a job referral, meeting a potential spouse, a couch to crash on, someone to help you move, someone to ramble about philosophy to at a bar late at night, and so on. Perhaps your job is stable and you enjoy it enough that you don't need any of those things, in which case I envy you, but some part of my soul recoils at the thought of living like Nikola Tesla, great inventor or no.

Well I wish the existence was more Tesla-esque in terms of intellectual output. You’re right that there’s some erosion of the soul when it is just devoted to the altar of inputs and outputs. My only salvation is that this feels easier than the socialization aspect of being human for now. I might be asking a completely different question in a year about all this though.

This is one of those times where the easier path is most likely the worse path in the long term. Force yourself to socialize the way you should force yourself to physically exercise, if you are not already exercising through your work or hobbies.

Imagine yourself the parent of an antisocial child refusing to talk with their peers. They might turn out the type of person who values solitude, but the odds are the child has normal social needs and some forced socialization is healthy for the child even if they are unwilling to do it. If you let the child's antisocial behavior become a habit, it will only be harder to break the habit later and you do the child harm. As an adult, if your parents didn't correct your bad habits, you will need the force of will to establish good habits yourself, for your own health and happiness.

You have to be very careful in how you balance bringing this to a resolution. Far too many parents don’t understand the personality and temperament of their own children, and the worst ones always commit the same cardinal mistake: they end up parenting the child they were growing up, and not the one they have. As a parent, you may think just because your child has similarities to you that means they are you. A zebra and a horse both have 4 legs and a tail, but a zebra is not a horse.

People’s constant attempts to encourage pushing me in various directions when I was younger only ever achieved nothing but intensifying my resistance and dislike for everything they were trying to impress upon me. It wasn’t until they finally just gave up (not through any moral epiphanies, just age and being fatigued by time) they just found themselves without the strength to continue to try and cram their garbage down my throat; that I actually had the breathing room to explore these things on my own terms and time, and finally got around to finding interest in enjoyment in what they wanted to expose me to.

At some point work may not be so exciting anymore and you may have like 50+ years of your life to putter around. Basically where I am as I don't have any real friends currently after I kind of stopped talking to everyone.

Why did you stop talking to them?

I was in a very low mental place, but was doing a lot better materially than them so I felt unworthy to ask for help, and otherwise didn't feel like I could be my real self around them. It was kind of a silent cry for help, but you need fairly pushy friends for going unresponsive to be productive in that way, otherwise they'll be fine just moving on.

didn't feel like I could be my real self around them

You can’t really, not many (or anyone?) can handle the true nature of human wanting or whatever. Hope you’re doing better mentally now?

I think there are degrees but yeah that's essentially true. I'm in a better place now, definitely.

It's reasonable if it's a stable, long term preference. If it's only an intermittent preference, and especially if you might want a family, your late 20s and early 30s is exactly the wrong time to remain socially secluded.

Man I wish having friends ever led to a date.

It’s led to many dates for me, including my current partner. (Introduced by a formerly romantically interested friend.)

Do your friends know that you are single and looking? Have you put in the legwork to make yourself attractive and not unattractive?

When I had friends I was attractive enough and made it clear I was painfully single. Still had to fight tooth and nail for every date I've gotten unfortunately.

Sorry to hear that, I'm sure a lot of it comes down to luck and specific circumstances as well.

I don't have a ton of romantic experience, but such as it is, it's been the same sources as friends. I do realize that this has the failure mode of ambiguously date like friendships, but I've never tried anything else, and so have no experience with relationships that are romantic from the start.

At some point companionship would be helpful but I am opposed to children, even though they’re lovely, because of other personal reasons.

How were your early 30s in terms of socialization? I don’t dislike the idea of it, but the effort vs returns can vary significantly

How were your early 30s in terms of socialization? I don’t dislike the idea of it, but the effort vs returns can vary significantly

I moved states, got married, had a baby, and moved again during Covid, so my social life outside my husband and family was pretty thin.

In my late 20s, my social connections were through church, liberal arts college, and volunteer work, and that was lovely. We were putting on supras (formal toasting dinner parties), bonfires, game and beer nights, holiday festivities, meditation meet ups and other pleasant events.

Personally, I would have gotten burnt out working all the time and not prioritizing community get togethers, but I'm a woman, low in conscientiousness, and doing the kind of work where more work doesn't result in increased opportunities, so ymmv.

Your 20s sound so idyllic, thank you for describing them and your life now too, it all sounds lovely. I sort of imagined myself vicariously at a bonfire too for a moment.

This is the thing with socialization, it never seems like a bad thing and people’s overall view of them doing all this is always great to learn about.

I’m a woman too but I think I crave positive reinforcement in the form of quantized and measurable feedback which a high-impact, complex job seems to offer. Sometimes I struggle with such feedback from human beings, and it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?

it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?

Haha.

I remember enjoying how CS Lewis talked about philia in The Four Loves.

My parents keep joining book clubs; currently they're looking forwards to a TS Eliot meetup. But we were all educated lower middle class, and didn't have any idea how to get complex, satisfying jobs with quantized and measurable feedback. We've mostly had the kinds of jobs where feedback came in the form of getting yelled at, or sometimes unexpectedly fired. I can see how it would be very appealing to put time and effort into an actually good job that you're good at.

We've mostly had the kinds of jobs where feedback came in the form of getting yelled at, or sometimes unexpectedly fired

That sounds terrible and that is my fear that if you devote yourself even to a satisfying job at some point you may lose your humanity and see people as numbers (or worse human resources, or worse liabilities on a balance sheet)

I'm curious to see what, if anything, comes of the LLM driven automation of the next decade. It seems primed, especially, to take over low level management work. I wonder if it would be better or worse for the average worker to have high level decisions made by an AI program vs a human manager. Thinking of some of the human decisions, it might be mixed. Reports out of Amazon warehouses aren't great.

We've been learning about the mining labor struggles of 19th Century Colorado. This isn't from Colorado, but is a good song: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MjFcllICjUc

I’m a woman too but I think I crave positive reinforcement in the form of quantized and measurable feedback which a high-impact, complex job seems to offer. Sometimes I struggle with such feedback from human beings, and it might be unseemly to ask people to rate their social interactions with me on a scale of 1-10?

Has The Motte finally found a mythical Manic Pixie Dream Girl Autist?

Welcome! I suspect you will not suffer from lack of positive reinforcement around here.

You think so? This place scratches some autistic itch I have to observe humans as anthropological interests, but yet I love the feeling of being outside the bubble of it. I’m too stupid for astral codex ten though sadly. Wish I had that advanced form of autism.

If you're wondering where the cranky conservatives from the Slate Star Codex comment section went, it's https://www.datasecretslox.com

I’m too stupid for astral codex ten though sadly

Scott Alexander himself is an exceedingly brilliant thinker, but I am frequently told AstralCodexTen comment sections, because of their higher penetration and mass appeal are actually more stupid than the rocket scientists at TheMotte. I'm confused, I want to know what is true and what isn't. 🤔

The other comment can be interpreted as a joke with two meanings.

In the misty past, it was the default assumption that all users of the Internet were ugly men, and any user claiming otherwise without providing proof was a liar—a person shrewd enough to assume a convincing false persona in order to gain social clout in online spaces. (A long-dead shorthand phrase related to this phenomenon is "tits or GTFO"—i. e., the identity of an Internet poster as female cannot be confirmed without a photograph in which the subject exposes herself while holding a piece of paper with a timestamp.)

In modern times, this assumption has greatly weakened. (In particular, the "rationalist" community has been accused of being too trusting and incapable of simulating the thought processes of liars.) But it has not totally disappeared. So, in the opinion of the other commenter, if you are actually a woman you will get the deserved attention that you want, and if you are an ugly man pretending to be a woman you will get the undeserved attention that you want from this website's "quokka" denizens (positive reinforcement for your evil trolling).

In the misty past, it was the default assumption that all users of the Internet were ugly men

The joke I remember was "Welcome to the Internet, where all the men are men, all the women are men, and all the children are FBI agents."

That was before anyone was really thinking of trans-ness or anything like that, just the demographics of those inclined to figure out dial-up modems or work in tech in that era.

Haha, I started using the internet when I was 16 so I do remember TITS OR GTFO phase; those men probably have families now. Strange thing to consider.

if you are actually a woman you will get the deserved attention that you want

What type of attention do women deserve and want? I want to imagine the internet is more egalitarian now and just being a woman online (an egirl?) isn’t enough to warrant any special treatment or attention.

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Has The Motte finally found a mythical Manic Pixie Dream Girl Autist?

Could be. I'm fascinated to see if the Sim decides to run with this plotline.

Hang around a while, here I mean, and you could probably get loads of respondents.

I will! Mostly just to read and learn

She definitely found the correct corner of the internet.

There are so many worse corners to be in, this one is cool!

Has anyone else led a somewhat more solitary existence and prioritized only themselves over connections with others (outside of the connections you make at work anyway in a team, although those connections are more transactional in nature)?

There is some historic precedent.

Broadly speaking, there's a limited window for family formation (yes, even for men), so that's something that needs to be prioritized if that's something you want.

Thank you for directing me to the concept of anchoress; I wasn’t previously familiar.

I understand the obligations of starting a family early enough but imagine if you weren’t bound by that

Out of curiosity, how did you find this forum?

someone on a private discord told me about it, it’s a bit overwhelming but intriguing!

I suppose it depends on how connected to your college peers you are and how old you are.

If you're a year or less out after college and you're still close to your college friends (like you're all in the same town, it's going to be a lot less important to start building connections. If you're 30 and still throwing 100% into work, you better be on a career path where wealth or fame will open doors or change your plans ASAP.

Not in my 20s anymore, but spent all of my 20s in education so the start of the career was somewhat delayed (but everyone should go to graduate school I think).

It feels gauche to say that wealth is a good motivator but it does seem to be. Your opinion is really helpful in this.


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