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Last week anime culture war news was rather unwelcome here, so it is time for another.
The topic of last week xitter storm was anime.
Is anime weird? If so, what should parents do to make sure their kids never watch anime and become normal members of the crowd?
Fitting with the crowd as end in itself was always seen as moral duty in small c conservative tradition, nothing unusual with it.
It is clear who the bad people are and why they are bad.
Nevertheless, massive arguments for and against torn xitter asunder and joined with even bigger arguments whether normie existence in 2020's North America is really something you should strive for or whether much better, happier, nobler and more fulfilling life can be found elsewhere.
If you examine all parts of normie life, from such basics as school, regular employnment, transportation or house building and find this is worthwhile prize, and then find out that your kid is not normie, you should indeed tell them:
"For your whole life, you will live as undercover agent in enemy territory. As Otto von Stierlitz had to pass as Nazi, you must learn how to pass as normie."
(using Eastern archetype here, in Western culture heroes are men of action facing adversity directly and challenging enemy in honorable combat, not sus characters skulking in shadows)
But parents are usually extremely bad judges what is "weird" and what isn't. They remember what was normal and what wasn't in high school in early 1980's, and are unable to comprehend that times are changing. And this is the problem barely noticed, the problem that makes this whole discourse waste of time.
Whenever I start to worry that I'm not a very successful or well-adjusted person, I just attend an anime screening at my local cinema and I'm like "actually, you know what? I'm fine."
Last night they were showing Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg, which neither I nor my fiancée had seen, but she wanted to go. The movie was incomprehensible nonsense (disappointing as I thoroughly enjoyed both Ghost in the Shell films), but the real validation came from seeing the other people in attendance. The obese; the gender-confused male attending solo, with breasts that I honestly couldn't tell if they were the product of HRT, gynaecomastia, or both; the man wearing makeup and a headscarf like fucking Professor Quirrell; the couple who smelled so bad we moved a few seats further down the aisle; and of course a gender-confused female (I think?) with a cane she obviously didn't need and which she wasn't even pretending to rely on for support.* These people truly are the dregs of society: even the junkies I walked past on my way home seemed to be having more fun. At least none of these nerds literally yelled at the screen, as I had the displeasure of witnessing during a screening of Akira some years back.
I know, I know: "'Get a load of this weeaboo,' says man also attending anime screening". "Local man who posts on Mongolian basket weaving forum every day has the audacity to call others nerds". But believe me when I say that there is no way I could possibly be mistaken for one of these individuals, if for no better reason than because I haven't needed to be reminded to bathe since secondary school. (Seriously, what is it with nerds and smelling bad? Why is it such a universal thing in any country where nerds are to be found? Do they just not notice?)
In late prepubescence and early adolescence I dabbled in anime and manga, watching the aforementioned Ghost in the Shell and Akira and reading their respective source comics. Watching this parade of overweight smelly malcontents, congenitally incapable, to a man, of making eye contact for more than a second at a time – it made me feel enormously grateful that my interest in these things never progressed beyond mere curiosity. Some of the people in attendance even looked like they could have turned out perfectly normally (not to mention more successful and subjectively happier) had they not allowed their interest in nerdy things to become an entire lifestyle, had their parents not indulged their every idiosyncrasy and passing whim, had they been bullied a little more rather than less (s/o to @100ProofTollBooth). There but for the grace of God go I.
*This was the second female person carrying a meticulously decorated cane as a fashion statement I saw that day. Yet another thing I do not understand about the woke: they'll be the first to tell you that a white girl putting her hair in cornrows is cultural appropriation and utterly inexcusable, but trying to pass oneself off as physically disabled is A-OK?
Me attending any major fandom convention.
I was/am a nerd, but then I run into the nerd nerds and I feel the need to shove them into a locker and then go wash my hands afterwards.
Part of me is like "well don't deny a person their escapism" but there's also another thinking "you need to be cut off from the internet for about six months during which you're put through boot camp training designed to get you into decent shape and have a healthy routine in life and THEN you can have some anime, as a treat."
Ultimately it makes me do some self-assessment: "Do I want to walk down a path that could end up being THAT type of person?" And often has me actively deciding to limit my intake of the media in question. Kinda like seeing an alcoholic passed out on a bench, his pants soaked with urine, and deciding "I'll just skip the bar tonight."
It goes towards my other theory that many subcultures (even outside explicit 'nerd' hobbies) end up driving away 'attractive' and 'normal' people because they are usually governed by the most obsessive types, who have the most time on their hands, and often have NOTHING ELSE TO DO but gatekeep and bully and since this is the one tiny bit of power they have, they will drive away any possible competitors.
I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture when I was growing up in Finland in the 80s and 90s. Sure, I also had nerdy interests like programming, reading fantasy books and the occasional RPG session but I never felt like they defined who I was. They were just things I was interested in or liked to do, the same way some other kids liked to play sports without making that their whole identity.
I see "anime culture" as like that cliche nerd culture: A bunch of people who fail to distinguish between their interest and their identity (quite possibly because they don't much have one) and that leads to all sorts of issues.
As far as I can tell, teenage subcultures are about psychological need to fit in. Be a member of a tribe. Nerdy subcultures are so because the nerdy kids and teenagers have some kind of trouble adjusting to the society of fellow non-nerdy teenagers and start building self-image out of imaginary simulacra found in internet.
Titular characters in Rebel Without A Cause would be weeaboos these days.
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As Freddie deBoer would say, you aren't the shit you like. It actually explains a lot about modern culture. Sending death threats to a film critic who gives an insufficiently fawning review to the latest Star Wars film is only really explicable if an attack on Star Wars feels like an attack on you, personally. Not that nerds are alone in this regard, as critics of Taylor Swift or BTS can well attest.
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Unironically, I think many ills could be cured with a year on a Wyoming ranch with lots of physical activity, healthy same-sex role models, and no internet.
I keep hearing about how people are totally sure grass-touching can cure many ills, but never the accounts of it actually curing them.
Your mileage may vary on whether I qualify as "cured", but two months ago I discussed how I've been prescribed a laundry list of varying antidepressants and antipsychotics in varying combinations, but didn't find any of them half as effective as simply doing a lot of intense outdoor cardio.
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How would you hear such accounts? They certainly wouldn't be posting them on the internet. They'd be too busy living happy, fulfilling lives.
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I've heard anecdotes of people who were isolated and socially awkward, they moved (usually by choice) to positions that required them to interact with others, and suddenly they had a large friend group and could socialize. (Also heard the opposite, people moved to a new area and felt like they lost social skills.) I'm sure it would normalize some people.
But others are autistic.
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Weight lifting and distance hiking cured me. Now it's the rest of society that's the problem.
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Well yeah, presumably good and properly cured people log off.
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Throw in some physical combat training and you have my endorsement.
I'm kinda heartened when I see that a lot of nerds are getting into MMA. For many, training jiu jitsu seems to scratch that particular itch for a mental challenge.
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I've previously mentioned a colleague of mine who's extremely nerdy and who refuses to eat proper food. Unsurprisingly, he's thin to the point of emaciation and his teeth are revolting to look at. I often fantasise about locking him in a cell and telling him "you can have brown rice, broccoli and pork chops, or you can starve". We'll see how "insurmountable" his
eating disorderdietary preferences really are.Less facetiously, I genuinely think mandatory military service upon reaching the age of majority would have done wonders for many of these people. It certainly would have done wonders for me.
Unfortunately I'm sure ED people would literally starve in that scenario.
I think society should encourage healthy activities, and extend school to include them (longer hours with more (mandatory) social and physical activities). But there are some people who don't fit in normal society, act weird like obsess over anime, and some of them have niche talents that lead to great advancements.
I don't think he literally has an eating disorder. I just think his parents indulged him as a child and refused to make him eat proper food, and he never learned on his own.
ARFID, where severely autistic children will only eat food of a particular colour and so on, is a real thing. This dude is just a manchild who wants his chicky nug-nugs. It's contemptible, and borders on outright neglect when he wants his children to follow the same diet he does.
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I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to. Of course there must be people with nerdy interests who still maintain normal standards of grooming and bodily hygiene, but once the people who don't reach a critical mass within a club/DnD group/whatever, then sooner or later the people who do will start to drift away, either from finding the smelly dudes personally repulsive or simply not wanting to be seen with them. The process is recursive and accelerative, as with every non-smelly dude who leaves, the smelliness of the average member increases, making the group increasingly unattractive to prospective members: you might join a club with ten clean-cut guys and one smelly one, but the only people who'll join a club in which the smelly outnumber the non-smelly are – you guessed it! – smelly people. Before long, the only people left in this group are smelly unemployable losers who've never felt a woman's touch, while the high-functioning nerds have long since departed for greener pastures. See also Scott's Living by the Sword and Neutral vs. Conservative, which describe a similar dynamic. Any community which conspicuously advertises that its members aren't expected to adhere to the standards of behaviour expected of society in general will inevitably find itself overrun and colonised by some of the most dysfunctional people society has to offer.
Weirdly enough, this seems like a great argument in favour of broken windows policing. You might think that it isn't fair to throw someone in jail over a relatively minor crime, and if you're doing that across the board, maybe it's better to simply not bothering enforcing these "minor" laws. But every time you fail to enforce a "minor" law, you're making the environment in question less attractive to the law-abiding citizens, who will eventually get fed up and leave. And once word gets round that $Jurisdiction isn't seriously enforcing minor laws, inevitably it'll start to attract people who habitually violate said laws: and people who habitually violate minor laws tend also to violate major ones, on a long enough timescale.
Take it one step further, and it's a great argument against immigration (or granting asylum) from dysfunctional countries.
The trouble is, the one study it was based on was fraudulent. https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/#kelly-2025-section
Yeah, I've been meaning to take on the (LLM-assisted) project of reviewing every citation in The Sequences to see which ones are bunk. The Sequences were written before the replication crisis (was named/noted) and so much of EW's work is based on cognitive and other social science. I'm starting to suspect that a majority of the science behind his arguments is just BS.
I'm tempted to say "But the core of what he wrote is still so true and valuable!" It sounds like special pleading. If it works just as well with all the science, then why was all the science there in the first place?
It's a modus ponens/modus tollens thing. In the conclusion to the book Opening Skinner's Box, which I mentioned downthread, the author observes that, a hundred years in, psychologists still struggle to define what psychology is exactly, and if it's even meaningfully distinct from philosophy in any way. Sometimes when you ask psychologists to name discoveries their field has given us, they'll list off a handful that will sound quite impressive and which haven't fallen afoul of the replication crisis. But you quickly realise that when they say "we discovered X", they really mean "we gave a fancy scientific-sounding name to an observation about human nature which long predates our field". People had been talking about the concept of confirmation bias millennia before some academic slapped that label on it (Ctrl-F "Thucydides"). They didn't "discover" shit. To paraphrase Franklin, the findings of psychology are both true and original to it – but the parts that are true are not original to it, and the parts that are original to it are not true.
Eliezer wanted STEMlords to get onboard with his project, so he had to present the Sequences like they were a work of science, with lots of citations and superscript numbers and so on. But really, they're philosophy, and philosophers by their very nature does not demean themselves by justifying their opinions with sources and citations, the way that commoners have to. It would be cool to see a new edition of the Sequences, but purged of any pretension of being anything other than philosophy.
I was a psych major (well, double-major, I also did pre-law) and I ultimately think I want a refund on the psych part.
Psych really does have an identity crisis insofar as it tries to present as this grand theory of how the structure of the human brain maps to all the observed behaviors from the individual level all the way up to the, arguably, nation-state level, and thus someone who has mastered the science of psychology should be pretty good at predicting human behavior (not perfect!) in the same way someone who has mastered meteorology should be pretty good at predicting the weather.
But there's gaping holes in said theory at the very core, and it gets rattier and more tattered as the scale increases. "Social Psychology" regarding groups of people is like 90% woo.
Some areas like developmental psych (which has done a pretty good job at categorizing human development stages) and cognitive psych (which actually does succeed at mapping the human brain to human behaviors) are actually useful at understanding the world, so I argue work as 'sciences.'
And then you can plug in some neuroscience and it FEELS like you're gaining a deep understanding of how human decisionmaking and actions work. But what can you DO with that purported understanding?
The big condemnation of the field, leaving aside the replication crisis, is the failure to show results from applied clinical psychology. Most forms of therapy and 'mental illness' treatment just don't really work, at least not at effecting permanent 'fixes.' Scott used to talk about this quite a bit. Psychiatrists/therapists might be able to help a patient address one area of their dysfunction for a short period of time. True 'healing' is almost nonexistent.
If the application of your science to real life doesn't produce tangible results, its a sign that its been built on foundations of questionable value.
One exception: Exposure therapy. Despite being counterintutive, it works! If someone is afraid of a thing, and the thing isn't really all that scary/dangerous, then 'forcing' them to be in the presence of that thing, repeatedly and at increasingly high intensity, they will acclimate to become less afraid of it, which is exhibited as a tangible change in behavior.
Operant conditioning also works, although perhaps less effectively in humans than you'd expect. Its good to have some study of the unsurprising fact that "humans respond to incentives!"
But you have to be very exacting and apply some serious skepticism to pull out the useful parts of psych from the whole edifice, which is why the field as a whole is rotten. It hasn't reckoned with its own shortcomings and expelled the failed ideas.
And, of course, it likes to cover up one of its most patently useful and robust findings of the field: IQ testing.
You wanna know what happens to psychology discoveries that actually work at changing behavior? They become marketing.
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Ironically, while we were unable to replicate the result of people persisting their beliefs when they encounter crushing counterevidence among the classically religious, we may succeed in doing so among Rationalists.
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Shit. I guess I got Gladwell'd.
When I was a child I read a book called Opening Skinner's Box about the most important experiments in the history of psychology. Now I'm wondering if any of them haven't been exposed as fraudulent or survived the replication crisis.
Thankfully one of my favorite experiments of all time has withstood the test of time.
The Asch Conformity Experiment.
And that one actually fits here too. If the social norms of the group don't nudge people to 'conform' with healthy hygiene and cleanliness, then you start letting those norms be defined by the worst offenders.
Milgram held up reasonably well too, but a lot of people mistakenly believe that it didn’t because it pattern matches well to a lot of studies that didn't, and also they're misremembering whining about how it was unethically emotionally disturbing for the subjects.
I'm pretty sure Milgram didn't hold up at all. Loads of people said afterwards that it was really fake, and there's also just the glaring confound that nobody actually expects a university psych department to be torturing people to death so they don't take the scenario seriously.
(Now you might say that guilty participants would say this, and that's not provably wrong. It's one reason why deception in experiments just isn't a good idea. I've volunteered myself for one of those economic fairness experiments and I remember getting halfway through before saying to the poor student, "It's just a computer on the other side, isn't it?")
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...I'm questioning my own memory, but my recollection is that Scott wrote extensively on the cultural implications of the Robber's cave experiment and what it tells us about tribalism in his classic posting era, and then a couple years later someone pointed out that Robber's Cave was likewise faked.
At some point, there actually has to be a feedback mechanism between pernicious behavior and resource and status distribution.
AGREED.
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Back when I was going to anime conventions in my 20's, a friend of mine was super into Anime more than all the rest of us. Worked his ass off bussing tables all summer to save up as much money as he could to buy shit at that years Otakon we were all planning on going to. He gets there, sees some morbidly obese 40 year old anime fan, nobody to talk to, suspenders covered in pins of cute anime girls, and he decides "You know what... maybe I should take up drinking instead".
Man, I think that was the same year most of decided we needed to tone down our anime enthusiasm. I recall sitting in one panel for a publisher that happened after ADV's panel. ADV had announced licenses for nearly everything, then the room changed hands. People circulated. Some people stayed. So next panel starts, might have been Media Vision or whatever. So people are asking, as they do "Have you licensed X anime yet?" And some guy in the front seat who'd spend the last two hours rocking back and forth aggressively in his chair just kept interrupting the panel shouting "ADV ALREADY HAS IT! ADV ALREADY HAS IT!"
I just... like going through some of the twitter threads links in the OP, I hear it. Don't deprive your child of their special obsession. Let them spend their years where their time is cheap going deep on something that strikes their fancy. I'd be a much worse person if my parents cracked down on my love of computers as a kid. Certainly wouldn't be bringing home mid 6 figures like I am now.
But, all the same, maybe try to make sure your kid's special obsession isn't toaster fucking. Even in the unlikely event fucking toasters somehow brings in 7 figures for the top toaster fucker.
Ultimately I think it comes down to being a little selective in your consumption. I don't eschew anime in general, but I've learned what I like and what I do not. Unfortunately the larger anime culture has shifted more towards the stuff I'm ambivalent to negative about. Of course I have my preferences for classics like Cowboy Bebop and GiTS, and the most recent series I really got a kick out of was Vinland Saga. I would love another season or two of Black Lagoon but that seems vanishing unlikely now.
Turns out I enjoy animes that DON'T lean into the most notorious anime tropes. I don't need some overpowered protagonist, tons of fanservice, ridiculously cute side characters, or a harem romance subplot to get into it. The series' I mentioned above also really scratch an itch for stuff you cannot find in Western Animation.
So by sticking with the stuff I actually like, I don't get bogged down in the most obsessive, anti-social, degenerate elements of the culture.
If you find yourself suffering though a series you despise just so you can be up to date on the current trends, or you're debating the finer points of various waifus with an obese NEET then something has probably gone wrong. I enjoyed the hell out of One Punch Man Season 1, found Season 2 lacklustre but good, and then I heard how horrendous Season 3 was so... I just didn't watch it. I don't need to waste time on it to stay informed on debates and memes and drama, because this is not what I care most about in life.
Its the element of self-control, discipline, and, call it 'maturity' that seems to be lacking for many of these folks. In many (most?) cases its probably down to autism or something. But parents aren't WRONG to notice when so many of the 'weird' kids are into anime and this tends to put anime nerds in social circles that will potentially stunt them or otherwise keep them from acquiring the useful discipline and self-control they'll need to succeed in life.
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