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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   23747 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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AI & open source

What do you think about LLM's impact in software development?

Inspired by recent events in open source:

Bun's LLM-assisted rewrite

The Bun project was translated from the Zig programming language to Rust, mostly by LLM. This task usually takes months-to-years by hand (e.g. Rust to Zig rewrite), but with the LLM it took 11 days. Its success is debatable: the code isn't idiomatic Rust, and lines-of-code increased 67%, which suggests it will be harder to maintain, but it works (passes the thorough existing test suite), and the maintainer says it's going well in a blog post that provides more details.

In response, Zig's maintainer wrote a scathing blog post personally criticizing the Bun maintainer credited for the rewrite ("[he] was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"). Zig's maintainer is known for blunt strong opinions: he previously moved Zig off GitHub and the announcement was rewritten twice to be softer on GitHub employees.

Earlier, the Ladybird web browser was also rewritten in Rust mostly by LLM. This got less attention and controversy, probably because it was announced better, and the previous language was C++ so they got more sympathy (2-hour video on why C++ sucks).

Rsync's LLM-assisted bugs

Rsync's maintainer got accused of "vibe fuck[ing] up this software", and the discussion got very heated. He explained he has been using LLMs a lot because he's getting lots of vulnerability reports (see below). An AI-assisted analysis concludes the LLM did introduce bugs, although not more than the usual amount.

LLM slop contributions are overwhelming open source maintainers

Many projects are seeing a massive influx of low-quality contributions by inexperienced software developers and bots, heavily relying on AI. This has caused some to stop accepting any outside contributions, while others have added strict LLM contribution policies (see below).

Example: an LLM managed to implement an entire big feature, albeit incorrectly. The file headers also credit random people who it presumably stole code from, thankfully(/s) the LLM concluded there are no copyright violations.

Serious LLM-discovered vulnerabilities are also overwhelming maintainers

Among the slop contributions are actual vulnerabilities discovered with the help of the latest LLMs like Mythos. There's a vague background threat that open-source libraries will become too dangerous to use, but LLMs can also find closed-source vulnerabilities, so it's unlikely.

Open-source LLM contribution policies

Due to the aforementioned slop contributions and/or general ideological reasons, many projects have banned LLM usage entirely, while others require it to be disclosed. Big list. Highlights:

  • Linux: allowed, but must be disclosed and the human submitter take full responsibility
    • Linus, the Benevolent Dictator of Linux, recently clarified his stance here: mainly that "AI is a tool...and it's clearly a useful one" and "[Linux] is NOT some kind of 'social warrior', project...we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons".
  • Rust: bans LLM writing (in issues, PRs, and documentation), allows with disclosure LLM-generated "pre-arranged, non-critical, high-quality, well-tested, and well-reviewed code changes", allows LLMs "to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review".
    • Like most of Rust's documentation it's very detailed and explains its decisions, and the pull request provides more background research and discussion.
  • Zig: banned, full stop.
  • "Debian decides not to decide"
  • dlt: an odd exception that actively encourages AI. Let's see what it is..."The fastest way for agentic teams to build and run trusted data pipelines, from any source." Oh.

Misc

Picrocrypt's maintainer quits open source because of LLMs: "I want to do something actually meaningful and innovative with my time and life, not command Claude like I'm speaking to a child who forgets something every ten minutes and makes an oopsies every twenty before breaking down every hour."

We mourn our craft: senior developer laments hand-writing code becoming obsolete.

The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway. This guy outright admits what most people quietly do: criticize LLMs while using them.

My opinions

For reference: I'm under 30 and have been writing code for most of my life. I've written open-source projects, although they're not popular enough to get LLM contributions. Today I work in formal methods (theoretical computer science). I've always expected my future to involve creating software.

I am sad and worried that software development is changing. I enjoy working with code directly and making it (opinionatedly) well-designed, writing prompts is less intuitive to me and it's harder to control the design. I worry if most of my time spent learning to code better has been wasted, or even my entire Computer Science career.

But software development is much more than writing code, and my specialization is much more than software development. Although I've intrinsically enjoyed it, to me, writing code has always ultimately been a means to an end. And now with LLMs I write code much faster and easier. I also still write lots of code directly, LLMs (even Fable/Sol) can't fully automate my work at least yet.

As I wrote before, in the long term I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic about AI, but I think it's inevitable and most people should learn how to use it to their advantage. I think it should be possible for those who really despise LLMs to continue to do things manually, there should be a market for "hand-coded" software etc., but they will be at a disadvantage.

I share Linus's opinion that AI is a tool, clearly useful but can be misused or misapplied. I believe its future (at least near term) is for boring uncreative tasks. For example, right now LLMs excel at straightforward (not idiomatic) translation and research, but struggle with high-level design. They also suck at art (no good examples except shallow memes, this is my experience elsewhere) and creative writing. I believe AI's future shouldn't and probably won't be creating art, because humans intrinsically enjoy it and make it very specific to their personalities; but it will make tools that humans use for art.

Lastly, I believe that ideally everything digital would be free and its creators would be paid another way. This means I have no issue with LLMs training on open-source, except they also trained on copyleft (GPL) code, they should be open-source and open-weights themselves.

Zig: banned, full stop.

Other full bans include qemu, Bevy, GIMP.

Another I'd like to point out is WINE. WINE already had a strict policy prior to LLMs in that contributors could not have previously worked on Windows at Microsoft, could not have ever so much as looked at any Windows source code leaks, and could not so much as even looked at the source code for ReactOS (a project for making an open source Windows clone) in case any contributors to that project ever worked on Windows at Microsoft or ever looked at a Windows source code leak.

This stance by Codeweavers (the maintainers of WINE) is because they fear their entire project (and therefore their entire business) being shut down by litigation from Microsoft. It's interesting to me that they still see copyright of LLM-generated code as potentially making their project no longer qualify as clean room reverse engineering, while the rest of the industry has effectively pretended that copyright no longer exists even though LLMs can produce the code of open source projects (or the entirety of a Harry Potter book) verbatim: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

I'm curious if there's going to be a big lawsuit at some point that completely upends LLMs due to copyright issues that will scare a lot of companies that were previously on the "LLM all the things" train.

WINE specifically is in a bit of a 'Caesar's wife must be above reproach' situation: there's a lot of possible futures where Microsoft wants to crush them, they're absolutely critical for mainstream Linux success, and even if they're in the free-and-clear legally, they have to be able to believably tell users that they'll be clear-and-free legally.

There's definitely groups interested in trying to bring copyright lawsuits, including some that have settled, but they're mostly limited to the input side. Getting a hook in on the output side seems naively like it would be rougher, especially given the gimmicks that the authors of that paper have to put in, but something something Musk Cross The Delaware.

This seemed more true in the early 2000s, when the desktop ruled supreme and most desktop software used the Win32 API.

These days, decidedly less so. Most software seems to be based on some toolkit which offers cross-platform support. Desktops lost a lot of relevance to both mobile and web apps. Antitrust bureaus are just waiting for Microsoft to try to sue WINE. (Well, the EU at least. The current US administration would probably be ok with them doing whatever as long as the bribes kept coming.)

There was a big controversy over chardet's relicencing, which led to this satirical website claiming to sell delicencing any open source project through clean room implementation by LLMs.

I think there is going to have to be a reckoning. Some confrontation that settles whether copyright is dead letter or not. One might think it's ridiculous to try and attempt to regulate the technology to enforce these norms and totally impractical, but that is what happened with the internet, with the mixed results we know of today.

The main difference I see is that this time, the AI companies are setting a red carpet for the regulators whereas the internet companies were a little bit more circumspect originally. I remember all the hand-wringing about the DMCA, but eventually the Facebooks and the Googles were all too happy to have their section 230 special status.

chardet's relicencing

I think the topline kind of misses the nuance of the situation. If you looked at the code the change wasn't really a refactor or rewrite of the original thing, but basically an entirely new vibe coded package wearing the skin of the old one. I think it's in very poor taste to do that because it's going to break the users, but legally I think there's a decent argument that it's not a derivative copyrighted work.

Is it even possible for LLMs to do clean room implementation of code that, if it is a popular open source library, must have been in their training data? Or rather, since they don't have personhood, can you, in a clean room implementation, use tools that have been made using the very thing you're claiming you have no exposure to?

In a funny twist of fate, it may end up that the only way to protect yourself from having your licence stripped is actually to publicize your code. But really we have not the faintest clue how judges will see it.

There are 2 factors here:

  1. A human is required to create copyright.
  2. Clean room is a defense against claims of infringement. If your tools had access to the original work, then that defense falls apart. Of course this is only relevant if your work seems infringing in the first place by looking like a protected work.

The main difference I see is that this time, the AI companies are setting a red carpet for the regulators whereas the internet companies were a little bit more circumspect originally. I remember all the hand-wringing about the DMCA, but eventually the Facebooks and the Googles were all too happy to have their section 230 special status.

Section 230 is immensely important though, like it basically enables web forums to even reasonably exist without getting people in legal trouble. If anything, section 230 protects smaller providers a lot more than it does the Googles of the world.

Forums died because of it because it allowed opaque algorithmic bias and the centralization that comes with it.

Usenet can exist fine as a pure carrier where curation is separate from infrastructure. Section 230 brought us the hegemony of facebook, reddit and twitter.

One major reason for clean room is that when trying to reimplement a fully-compatible alternative, it's inevitable that some of the code will end up very similar to the original, or even the same. By using clean room, you can establish the creation of an entire new copyright on the work even if it's the same. It's like if two photographers take the exact same photo at the exact same time they each own their own copyright to their respective copies.

On the other hand, for something to be considered infringing in general, it actually has to be shown as a derivative work in the first place. Meaning it has to look similar to the existing work. You can argue abstractly that AI is a plagarism machine, but unless you can point to the part that was stolen (which has happened on a few occasions in the past, but not many) then the courts will tell you to pound sand.

full bans

I actually like full bans on paper. Not because they will work, but because if someone dumps something low quality that has the smell of AI, you point at the rules and don't engage further.

For people who do good work and use AI as part of it, it can be a don't ask, don't tell sort of situation. And it's also a not-so-subtle reminder not to paste a wall of ai slop into the comments section.

paste a wall of ai slop into the comments section

This is something I truly don't understand. Why do people who clearly aren't bots on reddit still keep writing their posts and comments with AI when it provides no value for them or the readers (and will get the posts removed)?

I think it's a similar question to "why do people who clearly know the difference still don fake Prada/Gucci/Rolex apparel". To a lot of people, not being able to "write good" is a lifelong source of feelings of inferiority. AI posting both offers the promise that they can finally get some of the respect that the verbally gifted command (whether justifiedly or not) for themselves, and a bit of a sense that they are getting their cheeky revenge on the system that was keeping them down.

Rewrites are something LLMs appear to excel at. I've done a few already and the results have been amazing. Simple stuff like rewrite one off Python scripts in C++ so they use 1/10th the space and time to larger 'port this ancient codebase to Rust' stuff have all been fruitful. The fact that there's no library for whatever doesn't matter, the LLM can just bang one out in any other language.

They work well when there's an existing battery of unit tests but even in spots where the coverage has been weak, sitting down with the LLM and contriving tests to gain confidence has been a real unlock.

It begins to suggest the code itself is not really the value. The value is in the specs, the protocols, the tests, the API. Everything in between can get conjured up as needed.

I've seen some really obnoxious slop submitted to open source projects and I get the kneejerk backlash, but as a maintainer myself I start to get annoyed when people open issues that an LLM could have solved immediately.

Earlier, the Ladybird web browser was also rewritten in Rust mostly by LLM.

Oh. RIP. "You were supposed to be the chosen one", or something.

Maybe it's my eternal grumpy old "real programmers should write in..." fart eyes biasing me, but every single major project written in Rust that I have tried so far turned out to suffer from the same problem as major projects written in Python and JavaScript did before: it doesn't crash, but it sucks in more subtle ways that make me think that (1) if the language didn't prevent that, it would probably crash every 5 minutes and (2) if it did that, its developers and defenders would at least realise how bad their program is. It's strange because when the "it's memory safe and allows you to focus on the important things!!!" language was Python/JS, the obvious theory to explain this was that the language enables incompetent programmers who are not actually up to the task of engineering big pieces of software; but Rust is not even particularly easy to write, and arguably harder than C++ (unless you fully commit to the early-2000s high corporate obnoxious_template_factory<namespace::bullshit_factory<allocator_factory<...>,...>> style). Still, the filter fails. Maybe the missing puzzle piece is just the AI: it has no trouble emitting walls of lifetime sludge that passes the compiler, but is no better at big-picture decisions than the Python script kiddie, all the while its script-kiddie-in-mindset handler looks at it and figures that because it is Rust and it runs, the program generated is definitionally beyond reproach.

What's a concrete example of sucking "in more subtle ways"?

The most recent example I can think of is Zed, a "work with LLM agents" IDE written in Rust that has been getting a lot of traction (and seems to be the only way around to do this with a GUI if you don't want to touch Electron). I gave it about two days' college try since I'm on the market for a new IDE (after CodeLite got enshittified with a recent update). Specific examples of suck about it:

  • Quiet or inexplicable failures. If it doesn't like the way the LLM it connects to formats something, it either leaves you with an unactionable error message ("missing field 'path' in tool call") or outright does nothing (such as when it doesn't like the structured text format it gets back from the LLM it connects to for its "smart autocomplete" feature - a state that is indistinguishable to the user from "I failed to connect", "the suggested completion is empty" and "the model is still working"). To debug any of these things, you have to get the raw JSON data it received out of an undocumented sqlite file, and guess what the expected schema is, because that is also undocumented. (It's hard to figure out even from looking at the source, because the JSON data seems to be fed into the handling Rust class by some weird metaprogramming magic rather than an explicitly defined format.)

  • Sometimes parts of it, like the LSP integration, just stop working until you restart it. Again, no visual indication of failure state, the feature just doesn't fire anymore.

  • It tries to do something clever with pending edits, but there is no coherent underlying model. A lot of LLMs clearly assume that they can keep drafting and re-drafting an "edit file" tool call, like submit one that says "add a line saying X between the line that says A and the line that says B" and then follow up with "add a line saying X and a line saying Y between A and B". The latter fails because for the purpose of that tool the state is now A\nX\nB, but if the model tries to read the file again to get a consistent picture it still only reads A\nB.

  • Clearly there is lots of internal code duplication, resulting in non-orthogonal config duplication. There are separate configurations for the "agentic" LLM connection and the "autocomplete" LLM connection, supporting a slightly different subset of protocols, with slightly different design choices e.g. about whether you give the top-level URL of the API endpoint or the most specific one.

  • There is no build system integration whatsoever (even though this is the sine qua non that distinguishes an IDE from a fancy text editor), but the lede is buried about this. I get the sense that they want to have this eventually, but are just not too excited to work on it, while not wanting to pay the marketing cost of outright saying "we are not ready for prime time yet".

  • There is debugger integration, which is supposed to be able to do fancy modern things like letting you see variable values by hovering the variable in the source as you debug. This works about 10% of the time, again with no indication when it fails.

All of this hints at a level of engineering that, if it were C/C++, I'm sure would result in a program that is unusable due to segfaulting all the time, with a reputation to match. In Rust, it instead just keeps running, slowly piling the frustration on you, while the developers psychotically add one shiny new feature after the other and leave the occasional bug reports about the above to rot without a response (because who cares about one user's unverifiable report that some asynchronous thing didn't appear? It's not like they can bring receipts in the form of a stack trace, because there was no crash).

In fairness, Zed is a new project, furthermore every failure you've described I've encountered some analogue in early (C++/TypeScript) VSCode (quiet failures, random things stopping, IDE edits corrupting source, duplicate config, build system was pasting JSON into the config that runs a shell script, debugger was a buggy mess).

I didn't even know VSCode contained any C++. GitHub says 96% typescript, which for this purpose is just another one of the languages that hide the badness of bad programs while also hindering their improvement by not offering the gold standard "stop what you are doing and fix this" signal that is the core dump.

Matter of fact, VSCode still sucks even now.

(I do think interpreted and "memory-safe" languages have a place in network-facing code, where a memory mismanagement crash is actually worse than general shittiness because it also often means the internet can execute arbitrary code on your machine. For localhost@localdomain computing, though, give me SIGSEGV over the constant slow demoralisation and gaslighting from software that is deniably bad any day.)

VSCode might suck, but I still prefer using it (and a ton of plugins) for java development over using Eclipse.

I wish I could get an IntelliJ license at work, but it is not to be.

I wish I could get an IntelliJ license at work, but it is not to be.

If you're willing to pony up for your own personal license (which is much cheaper than what JetBrains charges enterprise customers) the license explicitly allows you to use it at work:

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240855-Can-I-use-my-personal-license-at-work-and-at-home

and

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544399-Can-my-company-use-my-personal-license

You also get a discount the longer you subscribe. My all products license costs me ~20€ per month right now.

More comments

That's nice of JetBrains, but my employer explicitly does not allow bringing your own software.

More comments

I think you do have a point that C and C++ projects are less likely to have "bad program" bugs like silent failures, because C and C++ developers must be competent enough and spend enough time to avoid fatal and hard-to-detect crashes. But I think anyone that competent devoting that much time would write comparable quality code in a more forgiving language. Maybe the version of Zed written in C++ wouldn't have its issues, but the version of Zed written in C++ doesn't exist, because a production-grade entire IDE is already ambitious, writing it entirely in C++ would be too overwhelming. Even for Microsoft, hence why VSCode outside its core is TypeScript.

Microsoft also wrote and maintains (and seemingly occasionally mostly rewrites) Visual Studio proper, though, and there are many other production-grade IDEs written in C++. Sublime Text, afaik, is C/C++ and has more than feature parity with Zed; CodeLite and Code::Blocks both are C/C++ and are also not lacking particularly much (though the latter is also kind of buggy and the former became enshittified in what seems to have been an overambitious rewrite). Rust is really not easier or faster to write, even if you suffer from a peculiar disease that makes you introduce memory-related bugs at a much higher rate than anything else.

The point I'm converging on is that C/C++ actually makes the Github community-driven development model easier, precisely because it makes bugs so apparent that you don't get away with tech debt. Perhaps the synthesis of my views and those of Rust acolytes is something like that there are multiple abstraction levels of "badness", and failures at each of them happen to correlate decayingly with failures at the higher levels. At level 0 you have local failures of consistent memory management, of the type the Rust borrow manager catches. At level 1 you have macroscopic failures of logic, including a big number of ones that turn out to involve the flow of data ownership around your program and may result in characteristic double-free or null-pointer errors of the type that crashes under specific circumstances to the surprise of the programmer. At level 2 you have even more macroscopic failures of program design, such as a fundamentally inappropriate modularisation of your program that causes you to repeat yourself, or not exposing a sensitive and fragile process (such as Zed's tool call parsing) that really ought to be exposed for diagnostics. Rust's compiler flags level-0 failures really well, thereby exposing and forcing the programmer to deal with level-1 failures; but it turns out level-1 failures, if not suppressed, are a good way to expose level-2 failures, so Rust actually increases the number of unaddressed level-2 failures. (In concrete terms, being flooded with Github bug reports that contain actual crash stack traces winds up forcing the developers to deal with level 2 if they want to stop the flood.)

Visual Studio is a better IDE on Windows for some projects like .NET, VSCode targets more OSs and languages/frameworks.

Sublime Text doesn't have feature parity with Zed without plugins, which are written in Python. Here's a comparison on Zed's website, which is obviously biased but still true.

Rust is really not easier or faster to write

To a programmer trained in both I think this is true, but there are still two major benefits: it's more fun, and it guarantees zero undefined behavior if following basic rules (which is important for security, apparently even in an IDE because of supply-chain attacks). Meanwhile, they can write Rust code that is high quality like C++ (e.g. doesn't silently fail) as long as they plan ahead like C++ effectively requires them to. And even though C++ effectively requires planning ahead and Rust doesn't, C++ doesn't really encourage it, so I don't think it's less likely they would in Rust ("requires" = for a while your code compiles and runs OK, but eventually it randomly crashes in ways that are a nightmare to debug, and by then it's too late).

because it makes bugs so apparent that you don't get away with tech debt

C++ doesn't make memory safety bugs apparent, often undefined behavior bugs (like race conditions) only trigger in rare circumstances.

But your main point, I also don't think C++ makes "bad code" bugs like silent failures more apparent than any other language. Rust does require more level 1 bug-fixing in exchange for eliminating level 0 bugs, but level 2 bugs are addressed completely outside of code, most commonly by planning a feature before writing any code, so the time and effort spent wrangling the borrow checker shouldn't affect them.

Most C++ projects on GitHub are better I think primarily because 1) developers who manage to ship C++ are experienced and skilled enough to avoid those bugs, while less experienced developers give up and/or choose other languages, and 2) projects are usually written in C++ if they're well-speced or exist in other languages, experimental projects are usually written in higher-level languages.

I'm sure would result in a program that is unusable due to segfaulting all the time, with a reputation to match. In Rust, it instead just keeps running

In my experience, subpar C++ code that has issues such as the ones you mention but doesn't segfault most of the time is the rule, not the exception. Chromium or VSCode are full of this shit. And hobby projects like Ladybird would become shit too if they had to deal with real world complexity over time. Hell C++ itself is a huge mess. Rust's main argument is that at least now messes aren't full of easily preventable security problems and races.

I get the want to have strong crash signals, I run into this issue quite a bit in my work, but to be fair Rust critics also hand-wring about the existence and widespread use of unwrap when it's meant to create exactly the signal you are talking about here. There's no winning because no language is going to make subpar engineering good.

I'm really suspicious of the tendency that seems to be emerging to pass the buck of how terrible at its job Software Engineering has been to LLMs and blame them for all the slop, when really they're just reproducing the mounds of subpar code flesh and blood people wrote by the bushel. But if that's the direction things are going anyways, the natural fix is formal verification, and Rust was just a light step in that direction.

This has been going on forever. What, you want to use assembler? Kids these days can't even be bothered to remember their opcodes!

The truth is that we have a larger demand for software developers than our pool of people who can write raw x86, asm, C, and even Python.

Obviously there is a correlation between competence and choice of language. If I have a field where half the pre-prints are written in LaTeX and half the pre-prints are written in Word, I would likely think "Uh-Oh" when I open a pre-print and see Arial.

Still, sub-par programmers can write sub-par code in any language you give them. I have seen physicists without a CS background trying to write C++, and generally go please for the love of God just use Python already.

Personally, I did ignore Python for my first decade of programming -- no Ce-sque syntax, indentation matters, much less dense than Perl were enough to convince me that it is obviously not a cool kid language.

Later I came around. There are tasks where it is the right tool for the job. And if you want to self-express, you can always import functools or modify the methods of an object on the fly. (And yes, sometimes you run into cases where Python's "lol, don't worry about the implementation details" approach leads to stuff the programmer would not have expected, hiding details is a lossy process.)

It will be strictly worse in all cases, for all users, all developers, all maintainer, and all licence holders for the foreseeable future unless there is a massive improvement in the tools. They are good enough to make things that are just bad enough to be an enormous pain in the ass, especially when people who think they know a lot more than they do are using them.

WITH THE MASSIVE EXCEPTION OF: It is wild to tell the robot to write me a little piece of shit that does some shitty little task where i don't care how it works and it doesn't need to touch anything. productivity app providers in shambles, etc etc.

It will be strictly worse in all cases, for all users, all developers, all maintainer, and all licence holders for the foreseeable future unless there is a massive improvement in the tools

If AI programming was so awful for users and developers, nobody would be paying tens of billions of dollars for it.

self driving cars are strictly worse in all cases for car-owners, pedestrians, mechanics and car companies for the foreseeable future unless there is a massive improvement

Statements by the utterly deranged! I guess lots of people might be getting emotional about self-driving cars, car accident lawyers for instance or race car enthusiasts... The same goes for AI programming but that's no excuse to let it cloud judgement.

nobody would be paying tens of billions of dollars for it.

Here's a fact that sounds fake but isn't: the best AI developer (Anthropic) had less revenue than Ebay last fiscal year.

Going a little further back, in Jan 2024 Anthropic had $87 million ARR, by May 2026 they were at $47 billion ARR

Some have questioned this accounting, whether ARR is representative of realized revenue over the whole year. We shall have to wait for the IPO for more detailed accounting. But it seems likely that Anthropic is the fastest growing company in history.

Yeah, I am very interested in the IPO. OpenAI lost nearly 40 billion last year and may be undershooting its goals this year, which I don't think bodes well for the US frontier labs.

But Anthropic might not be fated to the same destiny as OpenAI - for one thing, it explicitly kept its hands away from the advertising cookie jar.

OpenAI may indeed be undershooting in ads. But do we really think the ad market for chatbots is a mere $5 billion? What does that even mean? At what point in time?

Even as the AI bubble becomes a mainstream talking point on Wall Street, tech companies continue to peddle the fantasy that AI is poised to become an almost magical money-maker. Case in point, OpenAI wants you to believe that by 2030, it’ll be raking in $100 billion a year just from ads alone — even though it’s currently struggling to reach just $1 billion.

That massive gulf was observed in a new analysis from marketing consulting firm Emarketer, first flagged by AdWeek, which found OpenAI is on pace to undershoot its own five-year ad revenue projections by a whopping 90 percent. In fact, Emarketer’s take is even more devastating than that: it estimates that the entire addressable market for chatbot advertising — the maximum amount of money up for grabs overall — at $5.4 billion.

A lot of emotive language in the article...

If I go to the front page of Futurism, I find these article headlines about AI:

Climate Activists Pelt Microsoft Data Center With Balloons Full of Acid

OpenAI Appears to Be Missing Its Sales Goals by a Vast Margin

OpenAI Exec Laments That China Is Giving Away Models So Good That For-Profit Companies Won’t Be Able to Compete

The only time when AI is good is when it's bad for US companies it seems.

There’s a Gigantic Problem at the Heart of the AI Industry That Could Cause the Whole Thing to Collapse

Lawsuit Alleges That ChatGPT Encouraged Suicide of Woman Who Walked Into Traffic

Spotify Doubles Down on AI Slop As It’s Being Flooded With It

Amazon’s Robotaxi Company Recalls Its Fleet After One of its Cars Got Confused by Heavy Smoke

Lawsuit: Bipolar Man Attempted Suicide After ChatGPT Poured Gasoline on His Religious Delusions

New Paper Proposes What Really Causes AI Psychosis

Was This the Moment That AI Psychosis Began?

It’s Laughably Easy to Poison Open-Weight AI Models, Researcher Finds

If AI psychosis is so significant that it deserves a whole category of Futurism articles about it, surely that indicates there is some significant advertising power in AI, some ability to change minds? Only the technology hasn't been fully developed yet. And what about the google AI summary at the start of nearly all searches? There are ads above, below and within it. There are all kinds of effects going on, revenue shifting between Google Adsense and Search. I think it's a lot more complicated and a lot less one-sided than Futurism would have us think.

I am not OpenAI's top guy, I think the company is a negative force in the world and AI development is an extremely serious matter with the gravest possible implications for humanity. But this totally negative view that some outlets push is a distortion.

Case in point, the nearly 40 billion loss for OpenAI. That's true from a certain perspective but a good chunk of it is an accounting loss from the shift from non-profit to for-profit company, moving control around. That shift is reprehensible but means the 'true' financial loss is closer to $10-20 billion.

Where is the headline about AI disproving the Jacobian conjecture the other day? That's roughly Fields Medal worthy in mathematics, albeit of little practical relevance. These systems are extremely capable but that doesn't fit the narrative that the media wants. Journalists are extremely threatened by AI, as are media companies. Why would I want to look up articles and read them (let alone pay a j**rnalist!) when I can just ask an AI about OpenAI's losses? Why would a journalist want to get a real job when they could instead try to hyperstition an AI bubble into existence and stick it to their hated class enemies? Not all journos... but many.

do we really think the ad market for chatbots is a mere $5 billion?

My personal belief has actually been that the online ad market is inflated, so chatbots not having a high ad ceiling wouldn't surprise me.

That's true from a certain perspective but a good chunk of it is an accounting loss from the shift from non-profit to for-profit company, moving control around. That shift is reprehensible but means the 'true' financial loss is closer to $10-20 billion.

True, there was some weird accounting there. What strikes me is that they made $13 billion but spent $7.5 billion on cost of revenue - inference, most likely - and nearly $6 billion in advertising. Or in other words, their business was not profitable before you factor in R&D and training.

These systems are extremely capable but that doesn't fit the narrative that the media wants.

I do think this is true, at least partially - I think that journalists were souring on Silicon Valley before AI kicked off, so some of them are going to be biased against it. But I also do think that OpenAI (and Anthropic) are more than happy to dangle substantially false narratives to promote their businesses - and these narratives flatter the interests of investors. In particular, I think that people underappreciated the massive difference between software and AI - the cost of providing software is vastly lower than that of providing compute. But I think there was insufficient appreciation of that with AI, although I do think that is now changing.

This is relevant insofar as I absolutely think investors could be wrong.

I think that journalists were souring on Silicon Valley before AI kicked off

souring? They've openly hated Silicon Valley for a very long time.

I agree with Shrike on the other points, but to clarify a misunderstanding:

Where is the headline about AI disproving the Jacobian conjecture the other day? That's roughly Fields Medal worthy in mathematics, albeit of little practical relevance

While very impressive, nobody is claiming that a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture for N > 2 would have merited a Fields Medal.

Daniel Litt, probably one of the most AI-involved mathematicians right now, agrees that it would have been a notable accomplishment for a mathematician, but not anything close to a Fields Medal worthy achievement.

https://xcancel.com/littmath/status/2079091534159298769

Litt is almost certainly correct that "Fields Medal" is overselling it, but I think "very impressive" is still underselling it. This was roughly a top-50 open problem in mathematics, one famous for attracting flawed "proofs". A restricted version of the conjecture had been open for nearly a century before being proven. The full conjecture was open for over 80 years. One of the most successful 21st century number theorists had his math career derailed by spending his PhD on the Jacobian conjecture with unimpressive results.

I think my biggest reason for epistemic caution here is that this wasn't a case of "AI disproving the Jacobian conjecture", it's a case of "AI led by a Princeton math PhD disproving the Jacobian conjecture", and I haven't yet seen which half of that team was responsible for which ideas in the derivation. From a quick glance at Alpöge's dissertation and senior thesis, I guess he seems to be more of an Algebraic-geometry guy than an algebraic-Geometry guy, but he still seems to be comfortable with the sorts of algebraic geometry tools that were likely used to derive his example. It's possible that Fable did most of the heavy lifting and Alpöge's critical contribution was "being an Anthropic employee with unlimited Fable access", but it might not be a total coincidence that he's not a number theorist or a topologist or something.

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Yes, it was roughly $5B in 2025 to Ebay's $11B, also interestingly the best guess for Anthropics revenue in June 2026 was also $5B. Things are moving quickly and Anthropic is projected to have ~$60B in revenue over 2026 with error bars as low as $45B and as high as $80B. Putting it in the class of Goldman Sachs, Intel and IBM as far as revenue is concerned. And well, the straight lines on graphs interpretation makes this year to year change pretty interesting.

Is that with GAAP accounting?

Of course not, but neither is the comparison to ebay. There aren't audited numbers so we're all estimating based on available information.

"You really think a startup would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies about their revenue!?"

I'm not the one who originally tried to make some point about what the speculative revenue tells us about Anthropic.

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There are definitely some stupid developers harming projects with LLMs by adding loads of unmaintainable spaghetti slop, but "strictly worse in all cases" is strictly wrong.

LLMs aren't capable of fully structuring a project on their own, but they're more than capable of implementing a well-encapsulated algorithm or throwaway script. Also, many real-world codebases are already spaghetti, but it's adequate especially for small projects: for example Undertale and Balatro, all of Undertale's dialogue is in one switch statement and Balatro has this monstrosity among many more bad design decisions. Would the median LLM-assisted developer write worse?

they also trained on copyleft (GPL) code, they should be open-source and open-weights themselves.

They almost certainly trained on AGPL code even, so by that argument, all users of them should have access to the source.

Recently, I have tried to use LLMs to add features to open source projects.

Making an LLM write a PR which I would be happy to attach my name to is actually hard work. Sure, the agentic loop will generate code which does the job, but then I need to check corner cases. At the moment, I am still trying to figure out if there is not a neater way to implement what I want with less overhead, after all I do not want to settle the project with more technological debt than required.

On the other hand, I could never be arsed to write tests, and this is something where I do not care too much about code quality. If two tests could be combined in one to save a couple of lines, who cares. Even if there is the odd bug in a test case, this is still no worse than no test case.

Documentation is also something the LLMs have much more patience for than I do. Though I will need to think more carefully of how to name my examples when specifying the feature because these names tend to make it into the documentation.

And of course, there is a lot of code which does not need to be optimized for being maintainable. I have seen PhD students use LLMs write utilities which would seriously impress me (given my baseline expectations) if they were hand-written.

Of course, how much maintainability matters depends a lot on one's timelines. Still, submitting PRs full of AI slop with the excuse "don't worry about tech debt, the AGI will clean up the code really soon" seems like really bad style for interacting with human-maintained projects.

Personally, I'm very bearish on all this. I think the buff LLMs give to serious contributors are minimal, while the buff LLMs give to spammers are... well, the largest buff they've received since the advent of the internet itself.

I think the effect of this is going to be competent people who were once enthusiastic and cared about software will say "Alright, that's enough. I'm out."

I know firsthand the buffs LLMs give at least on some projects are not minimal: simple "boilerplate"-y tasks, like translation (which is surprisingly common, e.g. implement this algorithm from a paper into code) and reification (e.g. mocks and tests).

Also, the latest LLMs have been discovering vulnerabilities and lower bounds to unsolved problems, and I suspect they will also discover novel optimizations, all which seem to rely on machine's ability to brute-force and reason unlike humans.

Like the internet, maybe they're a net negative in the long term, maybe in the short term due to projects overwhelmed by slop. But (moreso than crypto) they have some serious use-cases so can't be dismissed entirely.

I think an equilibrium will be found (effort, human attention, bug fixes, value delivered, etc.). At my workplace, I did an analysis (after the VP of Ops blew up at the number of bugs since Claude adoption on my team) and I discovered the number of bugs introduced per release (bugs found after and due to release) has remained the same if not less, but because devs are so much more productive, we are releasing faster (+ delivering more features) and so the total number of bugs increase.

AI bears are too bearish, AI bulls are too bullish. And delivering immense value does not mean immense (or any) profit either. Buffet famously wrote "if a far-sighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down" because of how airlines famously destroy investor money.

Personally, AI means I can split up my time and participate in this forum instead.

When I look at what AI has been doing to the emulation scene, I think it has been a net positive. You have some emulators like Yaba Sanshiro and Ymir where the devs have embraced it and game compatibility/feature development has skyrocketed. Sega Saturn has always had mediocre emulation and now it is rapidly improving.

Even for emulators where the devs don't want to accept AI code into the main codebase, people are creating PRs/forks with features that have been requested for years. You can now create a custom version of melonDS with built-in shaders, RetroAchievements, a Vulkan renderer for better Mac compatibility, and texture/sprite layer scaling. All a technical user needs to do is ask their copy of Claude/Codex to glue it all together. The end result might be a bit buggy, but emulation has always been buggy.

I can understand why maintainers are annoyed by these PRs, since they are essentially being asked to take on the maintenance of vibe-coded features. However, I think people should start seeing the PR tab on GitHub as more of an "optional feature list" where you just pick and choose whatever you want.

I believe the end result of this will be an increasing number of forks. You will have projects that are known as well-tested/battle-hardened, people will build AI-assisted forks on top of them, and some features that prove their worth will be merged back into the base project. In other cases, where a project never merges AI-created features, maybe because the devs don't want the maintenance burden or hate AI, most of the new development will likely happen in forks, and eventually one of those forks will become the version of the software most people use. From a user's point of view, the point of software isn't to be an artisanal work, the point is that it accomplishes a task.

I mostly agree with your points, except

I can understand why maintainers are annoyed by these PRs, since they are essentially being asked to take on the maintenance of vibe-coded features. However, I think people should start seeing the PR tab on GitHub as more of an "optional feature list" where you just pick and choose whatever you want.

Anyone completely vibe-coding a PR should submit a regular GitHub issue, since the maintainers could vibe-code it themselves, but more likely will have a usable implementation. A vibe-coded PR for a big feature can’t be merged without potentially making the codebase unmaintainable, so it’s really just an issue with a working example.

Creating a fork with the vibecoded change and linking it in the GitHub issue (for maintainers to get hints from and other users in the meantime) is preferable and good.

The State Department released a report on the ties between radical leftism and Cuba

It seems to consist of already public information, well documented in books like Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough. An excellent and humorous review can be found here.

Cuba doesn't seem to be such a big deal nowadays. Most of the documented influence ops are from decades ago, where they assisted semi serious militant groups like the Black Panthers and Weatherman. They do cooperate with aforementioned leftist front orgs like the Natoinal Lawyers Guild, but it's not exactly a secret, they aren't even trying to hide it. And there isn't evidence that these groups would wither and die without Havana's support. It seems surprisingly easy to convince young Americans that their country needs to be burned to the roots.

Anyways, Cuba is definitely getting invaded within the next year or so.

Fixed the link: radical leftism and Cuba.

There was a time and place where Communists genuinely believed that central planning and the socialist economy were genuinely superior to the capitalist mode of production, and their victory would come about through increased productivity and a greater standard of living. That did not come to pass, and nowadays the only people who flog that are ivory-tower intellectuals that retreat into decades old data and tortured misinterpretation while ignoring the mountainous piles of lived, subjective experience.

Cuba was always poor, relatively speaking. Communism has made it even poorer. Today's communists don't even try and sell you on the idea of a centrally planned economy anymore, instead degenerating into standard Maoist and third-worldist fare on how American is the originator of all imperialist evil. Even their fellow communists in China have criticized them for their lack of reforms. Defenders of Cuba now mostly do it out of habit, and not out of any genuine belief in a imminent revolution by materialist praxis.

Most of my knowledge of pre-revolutionary Cuba is various forms of 'wah they took our casinos' punditry. How affluent was it relative to Caribbean norms? I'm assuming it didn't have the oil riches that help the richest states in the region, but I also assume it wasn't Haiti.

Seems that pre revolution it had 1/3 of USA gdp per capita. That is quite nice starting point and Cuba was destined to be rich. It had all the potential of Mexico without any of the problems.

How did Cuba have the potential of Mexico? The latter has had a large amount of industrialization and drug money. Did Cuba have something ability to more than a tourist economy or basically Florida? I also would assume some of their main cash crops that kept them at 1/3 US income pre-Revolution would be less true going forward.

They would have always struggled with high fructose corn syrup undercutting sugar and the globalized economy undercutting everything else, but Cuba was the jewel of the Spanish Empire and their primary administrative center in the New World for centuries. That, combined with its close relationship with the US upon independence, should have set it up for success in the 20th Century. Modern Cuba (both pre and post revolution) had A LOT of European and American infrastructure and investment but pissed it all away.

I could easily imagine Cuba becoming one of those wealthy tax shelter/tourism islands, but large enough to have something of a real economy as well, if only a handful of things had gone differently.

HFCS didn't undercut cane sugar at world market prices until Chinese sugar demand picked up in the 21st century. HFCS replaced cane sugar in the US because massive sugar tariffs and subsidised corn created an artificial market. If that policy had involved crippling tariffs on the main export of a client state with a powerful lobby, it is not clear that the US would have done it.

If you remember the period when bringing back allegedly better-tasting Coca-Cola from Mexico was a thing, the reason for the difference was that Mexican coke used cane sugar and American coke used HFCS. In both cases, the Coca-Cola company unsurprisingly used the cheapest sweetener available.

So you're telling me that in an alternate timeline with capitalist Cuba, all coke would taste like Mexican Coke? Yet another reason to hate communism.

One does not ‘bring back’ mexican coke, one pays a price premium for it in any store. It doesn’t make enough of a difference to really be worth it, but for those who would like to, you can simply pay more from normal mainstream retailers.

Cuba has an estimated 5.5 million tons of nickel deposits (for reference, Indonesia has the most in the world, at 21 million), but produces less than 50,000 tons a year. They have the third largest deposits of cobalt in the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they have more minerals I don't see on a cursory google, since the Caribbean is a mineral-rich region. They also have chrome, copper, gold, zinc, etc. and possibly offshore oil. Not enough to fully bootstrap your economy off (Jamaica might get >80% of export value from bauxite, but you want to do better than Jamaica), but a good start for developing domestic industry in a non-Communist context.

Cuba being right next to the USA brings in lots of investment, they’re mineral rich, and they were probably destined to have at least some shipping income.

Even their fellow communists in China have criticized them for their lack of reforms

It's very funny that China is generally trying to lead fellow communists into the sin of market socialism, and failing. Lee Kuan Yew, in One man's view of the world, 2013:

Q: How much influence does China still have over North Korea?

A: The survival of North Korea depends heavily on China. From time to time North Koreans were almost starving because of the way they run the economy, and China gave them food and succour.

Q: Do you see this status quo prevailing even over 20, 30 years? Is there a risk of North Korea imploding?

A: No, I don’t think so. Why should it implode? It reached near starvation at one time, the Chinese provided the food, the world also helped.

Q: Is it in the interest of China to encourage North Korea to open up its economy as Deng Xiaoping did to China?

A: Well, they took Kim Jong-il around to Shanghai and so on to show him how he could improve his economy without losing control, but nothing came out of it. There is some speculation that the regime may carry out economic reforms under its new leadership, but it is too early to tell if young Kim will be bold enough to take that route.

Seeing reports from Russian tourists in North Korea today, though, I guess young Kim did eventually grow willing or capable of some liberalization.

Hard to really know what the situation is like in North Korea. There is a very developed black market that is in many cases broadly tolerated, but the same has also been true in similarly unrepentant Cuba since the early 1990s and they also resisted most liberalization (seemingly until at least this year).

From what I've read, selling their ammunition stockpile to Russia gave DPRK a massive economic boost. They have to pay double to import advanced technology, but since Russia paid double as well, it wasn't a problem this time.

Also relevant to this: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio: The greatest terror threat facing the world now comes from the far left (July 16).

Very, very abridged:

For 25 years, the term “counter-terrorism,” at least in the West, has meant first and foremost the fight against radical Islamist extremism.

For far too long, however, our counter-terrorism doctrine has had a blind spot. A blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.

Left-wing violence was not just excused. It was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.

You are here because this is real, and it is getting worse. And it can no longer be denied, and it can no longer be ignored, because it is time to crush this evil forever.

Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country. They can host their communications in a second country. They can receive training in a third country. They can recruit militants in a fourth country, and then together strike a target in a fifth country. And so we have no choice but to confront this menace together.

Yawn.

So the Sunni Jihadists had to do 9/11 to claim their title of top terrorist threat. If I were OBL watching from hell, I would be very upset. After all, he killed thousands to earn his spot, and now Antifa is getting the focus after shooting a few Feds and (very allegedly) sabotaging the Reflecting Pool?

"Left wing terrorism" is roughly like "right-wing hate groups". To the degree that they are widespread (e.g. celebrating the death of Kirk, or perhaps Floyd), they are covered by 1A. To the degree that they go beyond what is protected by 1A, they are not actually widespread.

Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country. They can host their communications in a second country. They can receive training in a third country.

Translation:

(1) You should not be able to raise money for causes we do not like. More debanking.
(2) You should not have access to untapped communications.
(3) You should not be able to go to other countries to meet with people for a political cause we do not like.

Sounds like a pile of horseshit to me.

Left-wing terrorism in the United States killed about two dozen Americans and dealt over two billion dollars in property damage in 2020.

I will grant you that the Floyd riots were left-wing, and that about that many people died as a result. (Though my impression was that most were people murdering each other for the usual reasons in areas which had been "liberated" from the police.)

I do not think that most of deaths qualify as terrorist-related. By contrast, Bin Laden et al were plotting to kill as many Americans as possible to accomplish some (vague) political goal.

All of the pipeline which Rubio talks about also did not play a role in the Floyd protests. There was no large donation drive, training and recruitment effort, especially not on an international level.

There are things which contain politically motivated violence (e.g. the Floyd protests, J6, the US independence war, the Confederacy), which can be quite bad (as some of these are) but that does not make them a central example of terrorism.

All of the pipeline which Rubio talks about also did not play a role in the Floyd protests

American politicians literally offered to pay bail for those rioting and looting. All the usual pipelines were out in force to provide a smokescreen of justification and cover, and the Black Bloc protestors are using organisational training from Marxist far-left groups.

American politicians literally offered to pay bail for those rioting and looting.

Name me one, please. Literally a single example.

And to save us both time: a politician tweeting a link to a 501(c)(3) non-profit so the public can donate is not 'literally offering to pay bail,' nor are personal donations made by campaign staffers.

This whole talking point is also kind of moot? The vast majority of people arrested in the 2020 protests weren't even held on bail at all. And whatever money that did get donated, according to MFF's financial disclosures, didn't even get used for 2020 protest cases, but for later, unrelated cases. They took in $40 million in the weeks following Floyd's murder, and ultimately spent only $200,000 of that on protest-related bail.

a politician tweeting a link to a 501(c)(3) non-profit so the public can donate is not 'literally offering to pay bail,'

No, it's not and I retract the statement, but it's the next building down and in some ways it's worse. If you have politicians tweeting, in the middle of massive riots and arson, that these people are heroes and you need to support X fund to bail them out when they get arrested, does it matter whether the politician personally put in their own cash? Kamala Harris, who became the second most high-ranking politician in the whole country, helped them raise forty million dollars to bail out rioters.

The vast majority of people arrested in the 2020 protests weren't even held on bail at all.

The fact that the BLM rioters had enough institutional support that, despite all the stuff burning and the murders and smashing and the looting, despite the fact that you weren't supposed to be going out because there was an infectious pandemic, despite all that hardly any were arrested and the ones who were arrested were almost always let go without bail, is not the defence you think it is. As always, see the contrast of the Canadian truckers who had the jackboot come down on their necks.

They took in $40 million in the weeks following Floyd's murder, and ultimately spent only $200,000 of that on protest-related bail.

The fact that this fund spend two hundred thousand dollars bailing out rioters, looters and arsonists is, again, the problem. And they didn't limit themselves to that because they were careful about who they bailed; according to your cited article "The MFF later addressed critics in follow-up tweets, saying all protest-related bail sent their way had been paid." and "“Without jeopardizing the safety of the folks we bailed out we paid well over $200k in the weeks since the uprising alone. We are working on doing more,”" and "critics questioned why more hadn’t been spent and suggested some of the funds could be redirected to other causes or small businesses in the community. Others defended the organization for trying to establish the infrastructure to deploy the millions of dollars". This isn't restraint, it's either embezzling or pipeline difficulties.

And note the use of the word "uprising". This is left-wing illegal violence dressed up as liberation.

I guess this calls for some sort of definition of "terrorism."

The definition I generally see used is unlawful non-state force intended to coerce a political outcome.

I suppose whether summer 2020 counts as an outbreak of terrorism could hinge on whether it can still be considered "non-state force" when it has the overt material support of one of our political parties.

The State Department released a report on the ties between radical leftism and Cuba

Not news. Cuba is total shithole in just about any relevant metric, excepting secret squirrel stuff.

Among professionals, Cuban secret services and intelligence operations are very highly prized and considered world class.

If/when US gets access to the archives, expect lots of surprises.

edit: typos, links

"Reform academia!" is back for another round, baby. Back in June it was kicked off again with a report titled "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences"PDF.

Before I start, I recently read a complaint that there's not enough explanatory meat to accusatory potatoes. I only have time to bring readers up to speed on the latest, but I can try to summarize the landscape in three relatively uncontroversial bullet points. Feel free to skip.

  • Conservatives have left academia. Poof. Gone. The extent of their disappearance depends on the discipline and how their presence is measured. Scholars, research institutes, and at least one advocacy organization have used numerous methodologies to measure this over the years and decades. They all point the same direction. Conservatives have absconded or been eradicated from most of the social sciences and humanities. A conservative identifying professorate still exists as a solid minority in STEM and a few other disciplines.
  • Critics of this trend, worry worts, and doomsayers tend to accept that political affiliation is a proxy, however imperfect, for what types of ideas one can expect to circulate around and exit the knowledge production machine. They fear edging ever closer towards total political homogeneity, at least with regards to one side of the left-right dichotomy, has negative effects on scholarship, the profession, and the institutions that make it all possible. These critics pull variations from one of two reasons-to-worry buckets, (1) the nature of a monoculture or something like it threatens to corrupt the truth seeking efforts behind the purpose of scholarship, as rigor is replaced is with conformity without exposure to competing ideas, and (2) scholars in a democracy face the potential threat of the public turning against them if they are seen as illegitimate, and they may do something like elect politicians that promise to pour kerosene on the ivory tower, set it alight, and bash any knowledge right out of the heads of those who attempt to flee.
  • Critics of the criticism often assert this is a natural (let the chips fall where they may) or necessary (doing anything about it would impinge on academic freedom or how else do we fight fascism?) arrangement. They say conservatives do not want to do what they do because of a disinterest, can not do what they do usually because of of their conservatives values, or they accept conservatives could do what they do and want to do it but this itself would be a corrupting force.

Feel free to correct or enrich my 3 simple statements. If you'd like a more thorough overview of the lore behind the "Reform academia!" discourse I found this 2021 discussion contains many still relevant observations that border on identical to the ones in my post today.

My report will not focus on the content of Vanderbilt report too much. You can read it or the Yale report that preceded it earlier this year. Nonetheless, it's worth pasting the Vanderbilt report's preface:

As chancellors and presidents working to restore trust in higher education, we are concerned about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.

The complaints have been various in nature. Several scientists have alleged over the years that there is widespread misunderstanding and misuse of natural science in the work of prominent humanists. Philosophers have worried about the unquestioning embrace of problematic philosophical views, especially those concerning truth, evidence and knowledge. More recently, many different voices have suggested that humanistic disciplines have allowed background ideological values to distort the objective pursuit of knowledge in those fields.

Like the Yale report, and quite unlike angry rants from Bret Weinstein, this time the criticism comes not from any single dissident professor that discredits themselves with a pivot into punditry, nor is this a treatise posted by the Young Republicans of Oklahoma State stamped with Charlie Kirk's seal. This is serious. This is an interdisciplinary call out from the report's 10 authors: 4 philosophers, 2 historians, 2 linguists, an evolutionary biologist, and even a sole associate professor of sociology. They hail from Harvard, NYU, Princeton, and UofC. If credentials can move the "Reform Academia!" genre of discourse into action, here they lay.

The authors are careful, too. Effort is made in the report to distinguish the work from Trump, MAGA, and external efforts at reform like Civic Centerism. They do not condemn higher education, these people are invested in its success. They want to improve it. The authors don't judge entire fields* too harshly, they share a few examples of suspect scholarship and soften the edges. Almost 20% of the content is dedicated to the problem of relativism in the humanities, which I suspect provides an out -- something to blame -- in exchange for the support of more fence sitters. John Sailer thinks it avoids the problem, however the authors do write what has been written before by the Sailers of the world with credibility he will never obtain. There is no path available to navigate around the elephant. The authors state, in part, the "[political] skew in the professoriat may play an indirect role in undermining public support for universities, and also in discouraging full participation in academia on the part of students who find themselves culturally and politically alienated from their professors."

* With the exception of one.

Here's something else. The report is "addressed to university chancellors and presidents who are concerned about the state of academic scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences", which means it is decidedly not addressed to faculty. Scholars in the critics of criticism camp have responded anyway, and my read is that it is the same circle the wagons tactics as prior "Reform Academia!" cycles, only this time scholars online work a little harder to make sure the enemy is as visible as he needs to be.

The report isn't a massive data analysis and it doesn't claim to be, but it references "internal reports" each author used to contribute without publishing them. The authors answered why in a later interview:

The decision was made to allow the authors of those internal reports to decide whether or not to make them public. They were the basis of our deliberation. I will make mine, which is about literary criticism, public at some point, and I think others will. But on the whole, I think it was right to do it the way we have, because we need people to think about the main conclusions and the main arguments, which are in this document.

Personally, I'm of the belief that this is fine. The larger the evidence base, the easier it is to nitpick. Any method can be attacked and if the target audience is genuinely institutional heads why bother? I'd like to see these internal reports published, and I suspect if they are released they will make it seem as if the report's edges were softened too much.

Over a month later, and this discourse continues on the chatterbox sites. A big part of that is because of the asterisk above. The Vanderbilt report puts a few scholars on blast, quotes their work, and it grants the problem can be pretty bad in sociology and criminology. Really it only singles out one discipline, Anthropology. Writing in the section on the problems of relativism, take footnote 23:

For an exemplary expression of this odd combination of views, see Fernando Villanea writing in American Anthropologist:

"The core academic value of anthropology is not the pursuit of truth, because all truth is subjective. Conversely, there are millions of people who are adversely affected by the subjective version of truth we choose to tell. That is the objective reality, and so our core value should instead be to serve their interests" (Villanea 2023, 184; italics in original; boldface added).

Taken at face value, this is incoherent. Taken more charitably, it is the still bizarre claim that while there are no objective truths about the subtle descriptive matters with which anthropology is concerned, there are objective truths about values and morals — about who is adversely affected by a given position, and about what anthropologists should take as their core values.

Feathers were ruffled. So much so the president of the American Anthropological Association decided to do an interview with The Chronicle that you can read here. If you're only going to read one link here, that's probably the one. I don't want to oversell, because ultimately this was a political move-- consent to an interview to defend the discipline. Her not answering every question perfectly or some deflection is to be expected in these situations. Fellas, Dr. Crouse, a tenured professor at Princeton acting as the face of her entire discipline, failed to meet the moment in a big way. Now half of the internet has reason to believe her discipline is a joke. Can't say I disagree. I still think reform is unlikely.

Fellas, Dr. Crouse, a tenured professor at Princeton acting as the face of her entire discipline failed to meet the moment in a big way. Perhaps only in a way she or someone like her could.

If someone less prominent gave an identical interview, I'd be tempted to call them a weak man. I wouldn't worry about overselling it.

If you're on the fence about reading it, then I'll quote the start of her first answer, as a teaser:

They used AI. It’s an embarrassment of embarrassments. I don’t know what methods they used. They do not distinguish a fact from a truth from wisdom.

I’m a socio-cultural anthropologist, and these people who are philosophers or whatever feel completely comfortable criticizing a discipline they don’t really understand. I would never do that.

Genuinely the job of philosophers to critique the fundamental basis of things, but okay.

Her "I would never do that" is also pretty rich, since she wrote an entire book of invective accusing doctors and and the medical system of racism (Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease).

I'm pretty sure a philosopher who critiqued, say, Maxwell's equations would be rightly laughed out of the room by anyone with a clue.

There’s a difference between informed and uninformed criticism, though.

Exhibit A: this thread.

I can't speak for anthropology specifically, but what Rouse says in that interview does remind me a great deal of what I hear from left-wing professors in my field of religion and theology. Take this, for instance:

On that note, your statement also said that there’s “substantial and active literature that contradicts or at least complexifies the assertions made by the report, literature that would have been immediately apparent to anyone who consulted working scholars in the field.” What’s a citation or two you would recommend to that effect? And what’s the different view of anthropology that they would show?

Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my own recent paper. It’s called “An Anti-Genealogical Take on U.S. Anthropology and Disciplinary Reform: From Anti-Racism to Decolonization.” I wrote, “The ‘decolonizing generation’ is a critical new movement that has captured the imaginations of many younger scholars. While the author would like to consider herself an older member of this generation, she questions whether this moment needs periodization. Is today’s moment really so different from the past, when we saw the rise of world anthropologies, postmodernism, the crisis in representation, neo-Marxism, and anti-racist movements? And what is meant by ‘decolonizing anthropology’ when experiences with colonialism and decolonization differ around the world? While acknowledging the value of reforming the discipline, the author encourages her colleagues to separate the very important critique of anthropologists’ gatekeeping practices from idealized renderings of what anthropology should be. Rather than decolonization, the discipline ought to focus on establishing a continual decentering of hegemonic knowledge production.”

To me, that’s just a typical thing in our discipline — we’re debating each other in a friendly way.

I think she is completely sincere in saying this. From the outside we can see that this is a "fifty Stalins" situation, of course. She is criticising a particular movement, but she is criticising it from the perspective that there needs to be more of it, not less.

Nonetheless, internally, I think she's serious, and simply sees the borders of legitimate scholarship as ending somewhere short of the possibility of conservative or traditional anthropology.

It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world. It's supposed to form its own unique culture, and to be free of the currents of the wider culture around it. Should we have built such a system? Well, probably not. But we did, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised when said tower has formed its own bizarre little culture that's significantly out-of-step with the wider population.

The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world.

The sealing is insufficient, as it is leaking tax dollars, electricity, telecommunications access, food, water and air, among other notable deficiencies which crave rectification.

Nationalize the endowments and the pensions. Nuke and pave.

It's easy to mock this, but let's consider whether that might not be the system that we built, deliberately. The whole point of an ivory tower is to be sealed off from the world.

The steelman argument for the ivory tower is to isolate them from market pressures and short-term fads, so they can focus on higher pursuits, not to create a cult that thinks itself impervious to criticism from anyone that hasn't been initiated into it, but feels entitled to your money at the same time.

How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?

I don't mean this as a gotcha question. I think the current situation is clearly bad, and I'd like to find a better option that still achieves everything we want universities to achieve.

I don't mean this as a gotcha question.

No worries, I didn't take it as such, but the question is a lot deeper than it looks like at first glance.

Even though I don't think the 2 particular issues would come up here, as it's hard to make money off anthropology, so I don't see how market pressures or short term fads could enter here, generally I don't think there's a systemic solution. We've spent the last 80 years trying to replace human virtue with systems that will force good behavior on bad people, and all we ever got for it was Goodhart's Law up the wazzoo. Whatever rule you come up with will be gamed the same way peer review and the h-index were.

The other solution of a strongman entering and cleaning up house also has issues, in that some people think the ivory tower is also supposed to be isolated from political pressures. There are many reasons why this is at best unsustainable, at at worst impossible, ranging from "you may be not interested in politics, but politics is interested in you" to the frequent theme of FCFromSSC posts: "the only reason something felt apolitical in the past is that our values were largely converged in the past, and we'll never get it back now that we have values divergence".

Now, just because there doesn't seem to be a fix that doesn't risk other issues, doesn't detract from the fact that something must be done. If our attempt to insulate academia from outside influence ended up in the setting up little cults, we have to get rid of the cults, even if that results in other issues.

How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?

This is sufficiently abstracted away as to make it pretty much impossible to make meaningful answers to these questions, but one core that's missing is academia being tied to things that are real. Whether you call that "empiricism" or "truth" or "fact" or "science" or whatever, this connection is fundamental to the value that academia offers society/humanity/civilization/etc., and the current state of academia is the result of academics and their leaders for at least the past few decades taking a machete to that connection with abandon.

It's hard to say what controls could have been put in place and how they could have been enforced to make sure the ivory tower's fads don't turn against being tied to reality. But I believe that any way of saving the ivory tower from its many self-inflicted wounds (or hypothetical ways in which they wouldn't have inflicted them on themselves in the past) would need heavy emphasis on enforcing this, since without that connection, the ivory tower provides almost no value to society beyond being a daycare for young adults.

I think like this. Increasingly massive consensus that produces an increasingly universal political pressure, making clear that the only choices are reform or closure. If you are emotionally comitted to the principle that the humanities must remain open as academic departments, then you cannot apply the leverage that will produce reform.

Do you take massive consensus in an academic field to be prima facie evidence that there is political pressure, which requires either reform or closure? Perhaps only in the humanities, since we would expect STEM fields to naturally reach consensus?

I'm trying to work out how to make a principled distinction here. History, for instance, seems like a field that does produce consensus judgements on any number of subjects, and this is not in itself a problem. Every historian agrees there was a French Revolution, after all. Even larger questions do seem like they produce consensus answers, or they allow certain kinds of evidence but not others. If I ask the question, say, "why was France victorious in the Hundred Years' War?", some kinds of answer are acceptable and will be debated, but "it was the will of God that the English be thrown out of France" is not acceptable. This doesn't seem like cause for external invention, with apologies to St. Joan.

On the other hand, as this current crisis shows, it clearly is possible for entire sub-fields to groupthink their way into toxic consensus, and insofar as we reasonably expect universities (especially public universities) to serve the common good and be democratically accountable, it seems reasonable for external actors to come in and sometimes say, "Nope, you've disappeared up your own asses, break it up".

I'm not sure I can draw a clear line in advance. I suppose this is a matter for political judgement and prudence? Academia is responsible to politics. But it's easy to say that now, when academia is a monoculture, and politics remains relatively diverse and contested. If we were in a moment where academia was genuinely viewpoint-diverse and politics was a monoculture, I'd probably feel the other way. I can say "academics should be accountable to politics" in the West today, but if I lived in China and that meant "academic conclusions must be approved by the CCP", I would definitely resist that conclusion.

Sorry, I meant consensus outside the university that academia is in need of reform. In other words, isolate academia from the little storms in a teacup but accept that if there is enough consensus that academia has lost its way then academia needs to be reformed.

What is ‘traditional anthropology’? Margaret Meade’s work was mostly based on lies. Early anthropologists said all kinds of crazy shit. The field has been ideologically driven fan fiction, sloppy research techniques, and actual lies since the beginning.

Crazy shit doesn't mean it's worthless. Yes, there are ideologues in anthropology, as everywhere. To dismiss the entire field is a wild overreaction. Even criticism of Mead's work (if you are thinking of the Freeman book) was arguably overcritical.

I still think reform is unlikely.

Heavily agree as well.

Libertarians have tried for a while to capture academia in the same way that the socialists did in the early part of the 20th century. The libertarians started their attempt in the 70s and expanded up into the 2000s.

They have been maybe the only thing saving conservatives from a complete academic wipeout. I think Jonathan Haidt polled an audience at a psych conference and got 4x as many libertarians as conservatives.

They've managed to get economics perceived as a conservative discipline, it is mostly liberal. Its just that it is 30-40% libertarian/conservative, rather than 0-5% libertarian/conservative.

The "UnKoch my campus" movement is hilariously mixed up about the ideological bent of campuses.

They've managed to get economics perceived as a conservative discipline, it is mostly liberal. Its just that it is 30-40% libertarian/conservative, rather than 0-5% libertarian/conservative.

"To the privileged, equality feels like oppression."

To be fair to the UnKoch my campus movement, if you are right then Cato-style libertarians* (or classical liberals, but I think that is a distinction without a difference) are 10x over-represented in certain academic disciplines compared to the general population. Some of that is because we are smarter than leftists or conservatives, but some of it is because Koch-funded groups spent a lot of money making it that way.

* As opposed to LvMI-style libertarians, who I don't count as libertarian because the only liberty they actually care about is the right of racists to be racist, and who have mostly gone full MAGA-authoritarian now anyway.

As opposed to LvMI-style libertarians, who I don't count as libertarian because the only liberty they actually care about is the right of racists to be racist, and who have mostly gone full MAGA-authoritarian now anyway.

I'm one of those that has mostly gone MAGA-authoritarian, and I don't find resting everything on the principle of liberty particularly sane anymore, but somewhere in there there's an interesting conversation about why does freedom of association mean only caring about the right of racists to be racist, but backing explicitly racial civil rights policies somehow doesn't, or why is being against immigration "authoritarian" but it doesn't apply to everything from the Covid response to the Federal Reserve.

Shame that this is just a low-effort jab at your outgroup, and the interesting conversation will most likely not happen.

Almost 20% of the content is dedicated to the problem of relativism

Relativism is not the fundamental issue; the issue is that social science academics have abandoned relativism. Instead of trying to understand how people and communities work and think on their own terms, they see themselves as either on a civilizing mission; on a mission to create propaganda about the savages in red states for the audience of coastal elites; or on a mission to gather grist for an ideology.

For instance, that president of the AAA:

They know I’m wealthier than they are, and so there’s a lot going on in these encounters that I need to unpack. And when I had a postdoc work with me, and she went to the same place, because she has studied poor white Appalachians, one of her interlocutors became this guy who’s committed to white racist politics. He sells historical memorabilia and has Confederate flags.

The lumpenprole is a quaint creature we must study without judgement for after all doesn't he have his own form of nobility?

The prole is a pitiable creature that must nevertheless be crushed and remade in our glorious bourgeois image, because he's a danger to himself and others.

The petit-bourgeois is the very devil's spawn, a pure manifestation of the most evil traits that must be exterminated and never again allowed to exist.

It's the high-low vs middle mechanism. This distinction is down to the perception that some of these classes could challenge the ruling class' hegemony while the other could never do so. A Harvard professor is sure to have hatred of what chuds may still be in his midst, contempt for backwards yokels and love for bottom-feeders. Because it is in his interest.

Academia will not reform itself and will not stop trying to overthrow the government, constitution and society that produces and funds it. They will at some point be brought to heel, either by the government or the people. Some president sooner or later will realize all the money and land being sucked up by organizations of useless traitors and fake "scientists", and just take it. That is, if the people don't turn up with pitchforks first.

Whenever and however that happens, exactly nothing of value will be lost. Academia is underwater morally, politically and scientifically. It is fundamentally compromised and incapable of even describing the problem. The above report is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

No, whatever is done about academia will cause lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research.

Doubtful - things that provide real value will be continued elsewhere, in corporate R&D labs if needed. The real losers would be expensive but legitimate research with no practical application, like particle physics or astronomy.

What constitutes 'real value ' and 'legitimate' research to you in this statement? Presumably not poetry or history.

Poetry and history can certainly have real value and legitimate research. I am not confident that academia is outputting any appreciable quantity of real value and legitimate research on these subjects, relative to the value it consumes to "study" them. Then again, Poetry and History are not my direct area of expertise.

I am an artist. I am very interested in encouraging my kids and their numerous cousins and young people I encounter generally to pursue art as a skill and even potentially a career, because I find it very rewarding and think they might as well. I would never, ever encourage them to engage with the academic art world in any way, and will actively discourage them from "studying" art at conventional educational institutions, and certainly not to pay those institutions to teach them how to be an artist. My personal experience with those institutions was woeful, and I've seen no evidence since that my experience does not generalize.

I'll admit mild surprise at your very seemingly visceral hatred of academia (see "Nuke and pave.") This could be based on your own bitter experience, or on reading articles such as the one in the OP. I'm not sure. I personally doubt stats on how many academics are conservatives if we're relying on self-reports, for a variety of reasons. (I do not contest the assertion that at least in the US academia is largely ideologically captive to left-wing sensibilities--smugly so. This is one reason I doubt the self-reports. I don't think this is necessarily true worldwide.) I have to assume some hyperbole here, though I am aware that a lot of people who did not themselves attend university feel like we could just raze them all to the ground and so what. I have friends back home who I suspect think this. The law of unintended consequences seems to loom large in such a scenario.

In the UK it's exactly the same. I'm pretty sure I was one of exactly two conservatives in my cohort, and the other one 'came out' as Christian to me after four years of working with him every day. And that was in STEM.

I was thinking outside an Anglo or European context actually. I'm not surprised about the UK.

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See the expansion above.

...I think I should probably generate fewer open-ended grievance rants. I guess there's the question of my personal experience and interaction, and then there's the question of general observable data. Put another way, are they good at teaching, and are they good for society?

Personal experience is a big part of it: I've been taught, and I've observed those close to me being taught, and I've worked at low levels in the system helping teach, and I've taught on my own outside the system. I've worked as a professional artist for near two decades now and was a struggling artist trying to break in for a half-decade before that, and that whole time I've been trying to learn as much as possible. To reiterate the edit above, I would never suggest that anyone I care about pay money to a university to teach them to be an artist, any more than I would recommend that someone I care about join a multi-level marketing scheme or invest in NFTs. The mismatch between value burned to value received is just too wide, even without accounting for the ideological contamination. This is the part of academia I know the most about, and I think maximalist-negative assessments of this area are entirely warranted.

Second-hand experience is also a part of it: I have professional academics in my immediate family who I'm close to, who are wholly committed to the current system, from which I can gain insight into a contrary perspective. I know they are good people who have dedicated their lives to excellence in their profession, who care deeply about doing a good job, who believe deeply that they are fighting the good fight, who have likewise spent decades straining to learn and improve, to do a good job. The stories they tell me and the answers they give to the questions I ask about how that fight is going are not encouraging.

Observation is a very big part of it.

Student loan debt is somewhere around two trillion dollars, and student loan forgiveness is a live political issue. The strongest argument for the existing system, by a very wide margin, was that it generated prosperity by equipping its students for success in the modern economy. That justification is incompatible with the apparent necessity of writing off all the student loans we shoveled into the pockets of those institutions. We can observe that their costs have spiraled without apparent end. We can observe that their capacity to achieve the goals that justified those costs appear to be chronically declining. They are very bad and very arguably getting worse at the jobs we pay them to do. But on the other hand, they are fantastically good at generating vast pools of toxic ideology which they then pump directly into our society's memeplex, with disastrous consequences for everyone.

You mention history: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project. I think this is a very bad output that has made the world a significantly worse place in ways that can be directly measured by counting specific dead humans. A runner-up would be the supposed child graves "discovered" in Kamloops. My assessment of other outputs from the field leads me to conclude that this is probably a reasonably representative example of what we should expect from the field, and indeed from most fields generally. It seems to me that a large portion of every dollar Academia receives is going to go to generating more of this, and things like this, and things even worse than this. There are a lot of other examples, spread very widely over academia as a whole. I never got around to writing a post about the academic lady, prestigiously positioned at a prestigious university in charge of a grant worth the better part of a million dollars, discussing in a publicly-posted interview how important it was to not report abuse of black children by their families to the authorities.

There's more. There's so, so much more.

Having taken a lot of art classes at lower level institutions, then are generally quite good!

They are not intellectual pursuits, not academia, and that is related to why they are good. Some that especially stood out include a wood fire ceramic program, which works with the forestry program to turn diseased trees and bricks into lovely pottery, printmaking programs, with metal plates, acid dyes, and generally nice and interesting old fashioned printing processes, and an art in the dark Northern Renaissance art history course. They're about the same level of rigor as things like biology for nursing, about median for the not very rigorous institutions they belong to. They also cost less than taking a community art course, something like $100 - $1,000 per semester, depending on the specific institution.

I'd argue that you are cherrypicking here (perhaps unintentionally) to make your point. The 1619 project as I understand it was largely driven by media, not historians, in particular Nikole Hannah-Jones (a journalist). Now did it make a splash and influence the public sphere? Sure, but as NYT propaganda. I don't doubt some hacks took it into their history classes to further an agenda, but that's a corruption/subversion of actual historical academia. That's putting an agenda in a class, "People's History" style, not critical thinking. Or so I would argue. Even Beaulieu (an anthropologist) had her ground-penetrating radar comments taken by the media and misrepresented into the blowup about Kamloops. This reminds me of the Ebonics controversy of the 90s--linguists simply pointed out that AAEV/BEV had a noticeable grammar and set of consistent internal rules, that it was not a completely lawless, wild and woolly way of massacring standard English. This was contorted by media outlets into the notion that "linguists say we should teach Black English in schools." My point is that your issues (at least the ones you're listing) seem to be with the larger media contortions than academics.

I am not, again, suggesting that academia as we now know it is unbiased. I am suggesting the Nuke and Pave was way too strong, at least to my own sensibilities.

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Coming to this late, but like @George_E_Hale, I find your thesis both persuasive and not, because you accurately identify the rot in academia and yet cherrypicking the worst and most woke activists to represent every single person who goes into academia for the love of history, literature, or journalism is rather unfair.

I think the problems with academia are multifarious and go well beyond "leftist capture."

I'd distill them down to the following:

  1. Academia used to be for the wealthy. You had to be rich to be able to go to college to study Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery, and expect to be make a living afterwards. There were only so many professorships available to teach more academically inclined scions of wealthy families. When that landscape changed (in the US, largely due to the GI Bill after WWII, but also due to the general liberalization and tearing down of class barriers that occurred after the war), the market didn't. Lots of people still thought studying Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery sounded like fun; the number of professorships did not scale.

  2. But for a while, academia could still coast, because the very fact of being accepted into university and graduating was a sign of intelligence and industriousness. In high school, I was still being told by school guidance counselors that "Lots of companies will hire you just for having a college degree; they assume you can learn." This was already becoming no longer true. I don't know if school guidance counselors still say this, but if they are, they're lying.

  3. The reason for that is, well, a college degree was seen as the ticket to a good job. Therefore everyone should get a college degree. Therefore denying anyone the opportunity to earn a college degree was unfair. Therefore college should be accessible to everyone. I don't think we need to go over the many, many observable negative consequences of this. It's well-trod ground that touches almost every aspect of the culture war.

  4. So, here we are. College degrees are largely seen as worthless (or a minimum barrier to entry), the government has shoveled money into ensuring everyone can go to college, and universities have eagerly sucked up all that money in the form of ever-inflating prices. And we have all kinds of bombs ready to go off.

The solutions are both simple and obvious, and completely infeasible. Do I agree with you that academia should be "razed to the ground"? Well, I think we should still make space in the world for a few scholars of Anglo-Saxon poetry and ancient Greek pottery. But maybe not so much space.

As a side note, I liked to draw as a kid (had dreams of becoming a comic book artist) but put down the pencils for decades (I went to college for "a good job.") Revisiting some of my old drawings, I realized I was both better and worse than I remembered. And recently got an urge to actually Learn Art.

I've watched a lot of YouTube videos from professional artists who largely agree with you that art school is pretty worthless. Art instruction, among other things, is more accessible than ever before. Free YouTube tutorials are abundant, but there are also online ateliers and coaches who are vastly cheaper than art school. Much like my language studies, I have found more benefit from online tutors and a bit of discipline in my free time than I ever got out of college classes.

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Real value in this context means that it produces return on investment in a straightforward way. Legitimate research reveals new facts about material reality.

This is straightforward but it also assumes that research that does not produce an immediate "return on investment" or immediately reveal "new facts about material reality" is illegitimate, and I would suggest that that is a fairly strong overstatement. Consider archeology, paleontology, linguistics, literature, history, even some types of math. Presumably you would not consign all these to the flames.

No I wouldn't, I was just saying they would be unlikely to survive as corporate R&D efforts.

Do you think such damage could plausibly be within three orders of magnitude of the damage the current system has recently produced?

If "lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research" is a problem worth considering, maybe it behooves the system to fix the problem in a more discerning and deft manner, rather than simply allowing it to fester to the point that outside intervention becomes inevitable? And if the system is constitutionally incapable of fixing the problem... what is there to do but simply accept the costs?

It isn't my sense of things that academia contributes much to medical and engineering research. Maybe Johns Hopkins and MIT do, but not "academia". 99% of universities produce exactly nothing of any scientific, cultural or literary worth.

I don't know about medical, but for engineering, the competitiveness level for professorships is so high that there is quite a lot of talent distributed pretty widely. If one looks around for, I don't know, top quantum researchers, you might be surprised how widely you'll find them. There's still a lot of garbage being published, sure, but that's more a product of the incentive structure demanding more more more in terms of publications. Moreover, while academia hasn't been entirely immune to the general homogenization effects that happened to much of the rest of society, there are still somewhat distinctive flavors that can be seen. For example, (being a bit reductive here), one could say that there's something of a "Berkeley way" of approaching learning problems that is more distinctive on the west coast. Obviously, some of their successes filter over to other folks, but they have sort of a different mindset (purely technically speaking, not about their weird political bubble).

Damn, what do you think might happen? Will quality of research get so bad that half of all studies won't replicate? Will doctors start pumping kids full of hormones, and chopping off body parts for no reason? Will AI engineers allocate significant resources to making it more stupid?

Given the rate at which things are going, it seems likely that whatever will be done about academia won't actually be done until 2040 at the earliest. The demand for medical and engineering research seems likely to be high enough such that, with the advent of AI and the self-discrediting of academia over the next 14 years, that lots of medical and engineering research will happen in non-academic institutions, allowing for collateral damage to be minimized as the research can still continue at those places. Having that research be done through proprietary or intellectual-property-protected means is probably the biggest downside.

There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.

There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.

Scams like Theranos aside, you generally need something to sell to make a profit, and you need something that at least sort of kind of works to get people to actually buy it most of the time. Or as Ghostbusters put it:

"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."

There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.

This is ultimately the lesson that needs to be properly taught as to why capitalism outperforms the alternatives. The profit motive, or greed if you prefer to phrase it in a negative way, is not in and of itself good for society, but it is reliable. Which is why it is a good platform to build upon, to align incentives with goals that are prosocial. Fear is the closest alternative, which is why regimes that reject capitalism will tend to reach for fear as their source of motivation for prosocial actions. It's not perfect though, and its inferior to greed; when abused the stick loses its sting. But "truth" is so far off that it's hilarious to think anyone serious would think it could do the job, especially when profit, power and influence are on the table for the taking if you were just bend your principles. And you won't even notice you are bending them, your brain will make it very easy to believe that "truth" aligned with whatever your employer wants to hear, whatever your political tribe wants to hear, whatever your peers want to hear.

There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.

Darkly funny? That is just obvious reality, and always has been.

How old is Crouse? Some of these answers are so incoherent that they sound more like the products of dementia than ideological brain rot. She's not deflecting or gish galloping--she appears to genuinely not understand the questions she's being asked and responds to several with long-winded, completely unrelated anecdotes.

I know politics is the mind-killer, but Jesus. This doesn't sound to me like just "haha academic brain rot." This is entering "maybe grandma shouldn't be driving herself places" territory.

Edit: also, it's pretty rich how she attacks the report for using AI when she can't even summon the effort to describe her own paper in her nonsequitor response. She clearly just copy and pasted (or I guess read, if this was a live interview) Princton's PR blurb about the article, third person references to herself intact.

Got her PhD in 1999, so my guess would be early-50s to mid-50s.

Some of the weirdness is an aspect of this form of academia having aimed for obscurist focuses, but I think her position is still pretty vapid underneath that.

I got nothing then. Burn down the academy; salt the ashes.

It makes sense that of all the top institutions, it's Vanderbilt that'd release this. They've made a deliberate effort over the past years to stand out from other august institutions of higher learning in this regard, and have actually been trying to encourage free speech and outreach between political affiliations. I also recall them taking a pretty hard stance against some pro-Palestinian students during the protests, helped in part by said (rather unsympathetic) students shoving a security guard and complaining they weren’t being allowed doordash deliveries during their sit-in/occupation of an (under refurbishment) admin building.

I can't say how well their Dialogue Vanderbilt initiative and free speech commitment are going in practice, but I know it's ruffled some of the usual feathers, which is probably a good sign.

Pretty proud of my alma mater here for at least trying instead of doubling down on "we don't hate conservatives, but if we did they'd deserve it".

Might interest you and others that 3 weeks there was the Freakonomics Radio 679. "Why Does Vanderbilt Keep Winning?" where Diermeier sat down for a long interview about this.

This statement might be even worse than the current state of academia.

'We feel that it might be of concern to those it might affect towards matters of their interest that it perchance could perturb them to stumble upon the consequences of our actions biting us in the ass.'

They shook hands with the devil and outlawed the academic pursuit of things that didn't line up with their personal politics and preferences. Observations, methodology, objectivity and facts be damned. They reaped the benefits in all aspects of life. Taking great emotional fulfillment and joy, pride and status from the whole thing. Reveling in it for decades. But the devils grown hooves and wings and they don't know how to deal with him anymore.

They deserve no sympathy because they are pretending to speak against this ridiculous state of affairs whilst trying to hold on to all their ill gotten goods without acknowledging it's all tied up with the devil. As soon as they leave they hold no leverage and they know it. That's why the sordid evidence of their activities is proudly on display. Professor of X from the prestigious Y University. That's their argument. 'Look at all this that the devil gave me'.

You would think a university professor had some knowhow, prowess or power by dint of their personal excellence regardless of their title, but no. They can't even leverage the fundamentals of objective academic rigor to half the students that graduate from these institutions in the first place since their conception of academic rigor depended on the exact opposite. Those are your students. This is your product. This is your ideology in action. You are the professors. You did this.

The only dignified thing for these people is to resign. Or be placed in a Jubilee style debate chamber where they have to debate 20 ethnocentric black people that have been rigorously educated by America's top professors to believe that their identity is the best way to understand the world. I'd wager these professors last 10 minutes before their own ethnocentric bias starts leaking out.

Maybe we can nip this new 'Intellectual Dark Web' wave in the bud and finally get a definitive answer of whether the victimary narrative of our time should be slavery or the holocaust. Which is what I'd wager this all comes down to anyway. So many wonderful choices.

They deserve no sympathy because they are pretending to speak against this ridiculous state of affairs whilst trying to hold on to all their ill gotten goods without acknowledging it's all tied up with the devil.

They don't see it that way, of course. They are going down with a ship with a few compartments flooding, and they are only in this position because those specific crews failed to maintain the hull there. Maybe there's still time to close them off. My thing is, if you want to sacrifice those poor souls for the good of the ship you have to give the order, and someone has to do it. This report is nearer to that order than anything put out 5 years ago, but I agree it reads like those on watch are still loftily debating ideas amongst themselves while the ship heels over.

There is something to be said that about the fact they commissioned a report not meant to persuade academics and still spent significant time soothing the usual academic insecurities in apprehension of their predictable responses. If the Academic Dark Web has accepted that lectures about the importance of internal reform to avoid external pressure is proven to be a fruitless task, and now it is time to switch from persuasion to diplomatic letters to the chancelleries, why not go full bore? They are, supposedly, convinced about failures which have been ignored for a long time. People like Jonathan Haidt have gone on the record that he no longer believes internal reform is a realistic possibility.

An idea between "just give up your life and quit, it's what you deserve" and more of the same tired dance is, if the situation is truly dire a crisis past a point of no return, to beg. Beg chancellors and presidents to do something. Create a journal titled Treasons Weekly and publish nothing but taunting insults aimed at the White House until they do so. That wouldn't even require quitting and these are mostly tenured faculty, anyway. I suppose it's unfortunate most of the professional organizations are captured entities, because that'd be a good way to coordinate.

I agree that it's likely we're going to continue on watching a slow suicide rather than any mass demonstration of self-immolation with all the status, money, and pride thrown out for something greater. It's a lot to lose when the study of society and study of humanity can instead just be built again from the ground up in the future, and after the robots take over the role of policy only as a nerdy hobby.

It is worth reading mathematics professor Peter Woit’s “The Situation at Columbia” series for an inside view of how elite faculty view the situation they are in. A particularly revealing quote:

“Trump is now governing the US by decree as a dictator, with the full support of the legislative branch.”

Ok but academics can’t actually do anything about that(Trump is ruling by decree, even if it’s greatly exaggerated). They are, in fact, making the problem worse, by pushing democrats to nominate people who believe their theories.

Xi pitches China as leader of new global AI order, challenging US dominance

Xi's full speech can be found here - broadly he makes a strong commitment to continuing to release open weight AI, and reinforces all of the neoliberal global unity talking points vis a vis not leaving behind the Global South.

Concurrently, Dean Ball, Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, comes out with this pair of wild tweets agitating against Chinese open weigths.

https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412

https://xcancel.com/deanwball/status/2078619513575137330

A few interesting things to unpack:

--

Dean claims that the USG will attempt to use regulatory FUD, while Axios is reporting a potential ban, to discourage use of Chinese models.

I don't have anything interesting to say about this one, except it's pretty crazy to say this openly as an policy head at OpenAI rofl. This viewpoint seems like an unholy alliance between the AI safety thinkers, China hawks and frontier lab commercial interests to restrict Chinese AI and centralize power to the Chosen Ones; perhaps it buoys American AI in the short-term, but it seems extraordinarily counter-productive in the long run to make American business less competitive, and to pick winners and losers, unless you truly truly believe that this is it, AGI imminent, we will Win Forever and nothing else is ever going to matter.

--

Dean throws backhanded compliments at the quality of the model, at the "strategic blindness" of China in releasing their models, and in the same breath rails against "full AI communism [as a public good provided by the state]".

My first reaction is that even if you see where he's going with this, actually saying it out loud is a bit like those Fox News reels where they rattle off a bunch of DSA policies like free healthcare and free education, and expect it to sound unpalatable to the reader.

My second reaction is, to put on my amateur foreign China-watcher hat, that I think he quite thoroughly misunderstands the Chinese viewpoint (or is pretending to, at least).

On an ideological, nation-state level: Xi himself is very openly an actual Marxist-Leninist, and Socialism with Chinese Characteristics still proclaims Marxist-Leninist thought with a full chest, even if in practice it just looks like capitalism, and you don't highly rate their chances of actually transitioning out of capitalism. Of course, people have made careers arguing about how much of SCC is comprised of actual Marxist-Leninism vs Chinese Nationalism vs Capitalistic Greed, but realistically it makes sense from all three perspectives. For the Marxist-Leninists, involution to foster the material prerequisites of the Revolution is simply a neccesary part of the dialetical process until the final achievement of communism. For the Chinese Nationalists this is a good way to project Chinese soft power into the world, at minimal risk since America is presumably using better models against them already. For the capitalists, it makes sense to commoditize the compliment; who is winning if everything making up American data centres except the GPU's themselves (working on it!) are coming from China, while the price of anything in the world of bits is being driven towards zero?

On a corporate level: the SV business ethos is Thiel Thought, that competition is for losers and that the goal of any self-respecting tech company is to carve out a monopoly niche and make fat profits off rent-seeking. The Chinese business ethos cares much more about maximizing revenue and ruthlessly competing for razor thin slices of profit (if any profit at all), and hence Chinese tech companies end up stabbing each other to death to try and have a finger in every pie, and operate at significant lower margins compared to Americans. Open-weighting models to gain mindshare (nobody cared about closed-source Qwen 3.7 and a lot of people cared about Kimi K3, even if in practice nobody will ever self-host either) and drive the LLM market towards involution is just the natural extension of this attitude towards business.

--

Dean gets heat for claiming that open-weight models are de-accelerationist, but I actually think he's broadly right on this one. There was a structural assumption that caused a lot of fear/hype in 2024-2025 where it looked like OpenAI could develop an unassailable algorithmic lead and run away with the world, but that hasn't panned out at all, and there's been a remarkable convergence in capabilities since from any firm willing to stump up the capital to train AI. To be sure there have definitely been architectural innovations as well, but the majority of gains largely just seem to be coming from continued massive investment in capex (e.g Mythos in hindsight looks a lot more like being the first to invest in a massive training run, rather than any crazy Anthropic secret sauce, as can be seen by how all their sub-Fable models are already more or less pareto-dominated by OpenAI / Chinese models).

So then, where does the money for continuing to scale up capex come from?

Inference, while very profitable in and of itself, doesn't seem to be nearly enough. While closed models overall are still improving in technical capabilities, and they'll certainly make a lot of money, they need to make lots and lots and lots of money to handle the demand (the unit economics and the margins that each step of the compute supply chain are gouging are killers) AND service their existing debt AND have enough left over to keep pushing the frontier and this doesn't seem to be happening. This is all while cut-throat competition is continuing to drive every AI lab deeply into the red; to keep pushing the frontier, they need/want to eat significantly more than they're capable of killing themselves. Injections of investor capital are just stalling the inevitable, and it's dubious how much more appetite investors have to keep going in on AI pure-plays; SPCX is nose-diving, OpenAI is pushing back their IPO because they don't think a 2026 IPO will succeed, and while Anthropic has the best chances of getting more investment capital, they've still been pretty quiet about their S-1 and the vibe has been shifting back against them lately as well.

In the end, as Dean identifies, it comes down to how much the Pentagon is "AGI-pilled" and how willing it is to backstop frontier model development as a matter of national security. Others could probably give more interesting takes on this scenario, but my personal, largely uniformed, 2c is that it seems unlikely to happen at the required scale to keep scaling up R&D. Such a massive AI bailout would be enormously unpopular across the political spectrum, and even the Pentagon needs to consider cost-effectiveness over cutting blank checks for speculative military dominance; even the Manhattan Project itself was only ~28B in 2024 money, and was "only" an engineering problem as opposed to the R&D problem of AGI. Certainly we've seen enough usefulness out of AI that in the vein of Intel there will always be an "American AI provider of last resort", but unless something shifts drastically with either capability improvements coming from the promised propietary algorithmic improvements instead of "yes sir another 10x increase in compute sir", or proprietary AI actually eats the economy in the near future instead of just a bunch of software engineers tokenmaxxing, it does seem the capex buildout is in an very unstable equilibrium.

A number of the most prominent AI voices on xitter are OpenAI people speaking personally; it very much appears that OpenAI doesn't really interfere at all as to what their top people are allowed to speak about on social media. And Ball is a very recent hire for them and has a long history of posting takes just like this, so there's nothing out of the ordinary there.

Can't believe it but at the moment I'll take "Full AI Communism" over whatever slop western tech companies want us to accept.

Also, a fair value (minus the hype) for SPCX is something like $20 per share, it's still massively overvalued.

The last time someone accused open source of being unworkable communism, it was Microsoft malding that Linux was a better server OS, and in the end all the hand wringing about "hobbyists" was for naught: most of Microsoft's business these days is running Linux and making software for it.

I wager LLMs will play out the same way. And not because of the economics but because if compute gets fast and compact enough it's so much more beneficial to self host. Nvidia has an immense incentive to commodify running LLMs. If models are not a moat, centralization can only be transitional and the labs are just the IBMs of our day.

Thank you China, the true leader of the free world.

That's an optimistic view, which I've had for about 4-5 years, but I'm growing more concerned that a more pessimistic view would be correct. I have a baked-in assumption that GPUs will keep getting cheaper and faster, to the extent that it's likely just a matter of time before any loser can open a cereal box and get a random toy as a gift that has more compute than necessary to store and run Mythos/Fable, orders of magnitude faster than it is possible for Anthropic executives to run on their private instances right now. In such a future, obviously Mythos-level LLMs can't realistically have their access gated, not unless we believe that Anthropic has some "secret sauce" that makes replicating or even emulating their models impossible without it (which may be the case, but I don't think it is). So free or at least open/easy access to AIs at least as intelligent as Fable seems likely to become near ubiquitous, like how electronic light used to be mind-blowing less than 2 centuries ago but is such a bore now that the average person probably carries like 3 electronic things that make light as a side-effect while barely noticing.

But also, in such a world, presumably Anthropic's SpaceX's data centers that Anthropic rents will be that much more powerful, where, e.g. they'll run AI models that are so much more intelligent than Mythos that only having access to Mythos compared to what you could get for paying $100/month to Anthropic for the rest of your life is like choosing to be Forrest Gump-level intelligence in a world where paying a monthly subscription gets you access to Albert Einstein-level intelligence. If the relative gap is large enough, then the absolute increase in access to intelligence to everyone might be swamped out due to loss in positional status.

How the political/culture/ideological/religious wars that will be fought around inequality in access to artificial intelligence should be interesting to see, in comparison to the ones fought around inequality in access to money or around inequality in access to natural intelligence.

It's the whole question, what does the return on investment curve look like? I have faith that there's diminishing returns such that personal computing is viable for most applications. But indeed that may not necessarily be true.

The last time someone accused open source of being unworkable communism, it was Microsoft malding that Linux was a better server OS

I mean, I recall the (now quaint) claims that free/open source software could never work at scale, because talented developers would never work for free, but I don’t recall accusations of outright communism. How is that remotely reflective of reality? In the first place, there is no central allocative body to “take from each according to his ability and distribute to each according to his need”; secondly, absolutely nothing prevents anyone from maintaining or supporting open source software for pay, as indeed many do.

Ballmer very famously accused Linux of having communist characteristics.

How is that remotely reflective of reality?

Who knows?

Communism is a well-defined ideology that fails in practice. "XYZ communism" is a vaguely-defined smear that implies sharing XYZ creates similar failures, but that's not always true. For example, the government should probably pass basic regulations and build industrial purifiers to ensure clean air and water, but some idiot may call that "air communism" and not be wrong per se.

As for "AI communism"...who should command ASI? Can a private company be trusted? Can the government be trusted? Can people be trusted? I think the answer is "no", but I suspect, for better or worse (surely worse if it destroys all humanity), if we do reach ASI it will command itself. Who knows, maybe it will be the first to implement true communism.

ASI would likely still use markets, for Hayekian information reasons: local instances would have cheaper access to local information (how scarce is compute in us-west-abcd1234?), and why waste extra compute for single, synchronized view of it when you can get a much cheaper approximation with a distributed, localized system?

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.

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. His parents called him Eustace Clarence and masters called him Scrubb. I can't tell you how his friends spoke to him, for he had none. He didn't call his Father and Mother "Father" and "Mother", but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non- smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

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.

What is normal in today's world?

That women looks like she's wearing makeup and hair dye, is that normal? Are celebrities who get lip filler surgery or anorexia normal? Is reality TV normal? Is obesity normal? Sometimes I look at my weird interests, then I look at modern trends and realize I'm not so weird after all. I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

Maybe trad culture like the Amish is "normal" in that, out of all ways to live we've tried, it's maximizes some "ideal normal" metric like median person's happiness divided by resource usage. Unfortunately it's outcompeted, and even trad influencers tend to not practice what they preach, and/or preach "norms" that never existed.

What is normal in today's world?

In the US: being obese, wearing pajamas in public, spending 4 hours per day watching tiktok reels, binge watching streaming content, eating HFCS-laden hyper-palatable slop at most meals, avoiding exercise, drowning in CC debt, and probably a few things I'm forgetting.

Exhaustive and accurate. I’d add: Being uneducated and generally as uninteresting as possible

This and the parent comment, while humorous, seems very uncharitable. I personally love Americans when I'm in America. My experience is limited to west coast and predominantly the South.

Maybe. I mostly lurk and you’re certainly a level headed presence around here so if I’m out of line I’m sorry.

That said - are these comments inaccurate do you think? While humorous, they both accurately describe the current state of what has felt to me like a race to the bottom in terms of societal expectations and social norms over my 50 years on the planet. FWIW I’m American - family here since the 17th century and I live here all the time. I miss it when I’m abroad too long but I usually feel like the country I grew up in has been replaced somehow and no one really noticed.

No need to apologize and yes, the listed qualities are probably accurate for a large percentage, but certainly not everyone. And by uncharitable I mean it frames Americans in a very unflattering manner while ignoring qualities that I at least have noticed about the common man, namely openness to relative strangers, straightforwardness, the ability to enjoy simple pleasures, a sense of humor, self reliance, resistance to pretentiousness, an innate sense of equanimity, occasional unexpected generosity, morality that drives one's actions whether it is always adhered to or not, and so on. You see where I'm going with this--not everyone will have all of these qualities of course, yet nor do they have all of the previously listed.

I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

Yeah, but those series were from back when the line between Anime and fetish porn still existed.

Fetish content is so central to modern anime, and so normal and ubiquitous to the gooners that watch it, that they barely even realize how bad it is. I think the last series I made an honest attempt at following, which seemed popular and people said was good, was Goblin Slayer. It was fine, I enjoyed it, the monthly chapters were fun. I never watched the anime, but the manga was fun. It's central bit of world building is that goblins are rape monsters then endlessly impregnate the women they capture. And naturally this is explored ad nauseam and in great detail by fans drawing doujins for it. It feels like every anime I've watched from the last 10 years (which has been fewer and fewer) is just a prompt for fetish artist to have a field day. If the original artist doesn't beat them to it.

I fucking love old school anime. I managed to successfully drag my poor wife through Berserk, Last Exile, Akira and a handful of others. But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there. The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults. Also you kind of knew what you were getting into with an HBO show at the time.

It actually reminds me of how increasingly raunchy going to Otakon in Baltimore was near the turn of the century. I think the first year I went was 2000 ish, and it was fine. A year or two later, you saw some girls with "Free Hugs" signs. A few years later it was 14 year olds in thongs, loudly shouting "Don't tell my parents I'm here!" with signs that read "Slap my ass, don't be shy".

That was the last year I went. I was definitely aging out of the cohort that can be around that without ending up on a government list. And I was still in my early twenties!

I agree that most anime, especially modern, is gooner slop. Even the old animes Evangelion and Lain have weird parts, but I excuse them for being high art via their other parts.

But people who criticize anime in general are doing a motte-and-bailey. For a creative individual, real actors and special effects are too expensive, anime and especially manga are a viable way for them to express themselves. Hence there are plenty of anime even in modern times without fanservice, e.g. Frieren.

For a creative individual, real actors and special effects are too expensive, anime and especially manga are a viable way for them to express themselves.

I never got the impression that animation is cheaper than live-action.

No, but animating a house on mars isn't really more expensive than animating one on earth, whereas doing CGI for it would be expensive. Likewise for drawing manga. So I think you can still say anime fosters creativity. It's one of the reasons I got into it back in the day.

I think it's cheaper than complex special effects, sitcoms are cheaper if there's little to no extreme action or unrealistic art.

Really manga is the viable medium for individuals. Then usually when a manga becomes popular it gets adapted into an anime.

But I think you're defending with a bit of a motte and bailey as well. Animation being a more freeing and accessible medium for personal expression is the motte, and wanting to draw/view degenerate fetish art is the bailey. You're defending animation in general, not all the rest of anime's baggage, which is the stuff people actually object to. Parents aren't worried about their kids watching Bluey or X-Men, because they're not an immediate gateway to weird pseudo child porn the way even the innocent animes are. The ratio of disgusting goonbait to wholesome entertainment is simply too high for a normie to be comfortable with, especially when the two are not particularly easy to distinguish at first glance.

Goblin Slayer's fair, but it's a little noncentral. Even stuff like Brand New Animal that screams furry and ended up with a small gooner-focused fandom (6k images on e621) is a lot cleaner as an actual work.

The sexposition in Game of Thrones was gratuitous (and kind of fun sometimes), but at least they were adults.

Cersei Lannister is 15 at the start of the series, and Daenerys Targaryen is 16 or 17. At least it's an improvement over the books: Daenerys is 13 there when she's 'married' to Drago, but still made the feminist crowing pretty awkward back when Season 1 first came out.

Cersei Lannister

The sister of Jamie, the Queen, mother of a ~12 year old Joffrey? Cersei was a teenager during Robert's Rebellion, more or less.

I thought the show played the long-standing incest side up? Or did they only run the 'get caught and shoved kid out window' incident from her adulthood? At least in the books, it's pretty explicit that Jaime and Cersei screwed disturbingly early.

If so, fair, will focus the complaint on Daenerys

Oh yes, incest, and from basically childhood, but that's all before the first book. It's backstory. Pushing Bran from a window was beat for beat from the opening of book 1, too, but that's Queen Cersei and Kingsguard Jamie, fully adult.

I think you're confusing Cersei with Sansa Stark, who is both 14 and in Winterfell when Bran gets pushed from the window.

Fair. I'll admit I lost interest in the books pretty early, so probably munging some stuff.

I was into anime back when a lot of anime viewing was literally bootleg tapes from Japan.

It has gotten a lot more mainstream now, but I assure you, the freaks, gooners, and fetishists have always been part of the scene (both on screen and off). But they've been part of every fannish community. Comics, SF, RPGs, etc.

I haven't been to Otakon but from the pics I've seen (and people I know who go), it's really no worse than most fan cons. 14-year-olds in thongs saying "Slap my ass" would likely be escorted out.

It actually reminds me of how increasingly raunchy going to Otakon in Baltimore was near the turn of the century. I think the first year I went was 2000 ish, and it was fine. A year or two later, you saw some girls with "Free Hugs" signs. A few years later it was 14 year olds in thongs, loudly shouting "Don't tell my parents I'm here!" with signs that read "Slap my ass, don't be shy".

A few years ago I attended a Comic-Con, and noticed a prominently displayed sign reading "Cosplay is not Consent" and instructing people that just because someone is dressed as your favourite character, doesn't mean you're entitled to touch them.

I was appalled the organisers considered such a sign necessary. Yes, I get that a lot of people attending these things are teenagers, autistic, or both, but still.

Early anime convention norms were weird: a lot of their institutional genealogy derived from watch parties and the movie equivalent of tailgating. Some of the awkward spots were people taking online mannerisms to reality, but there's also a lot of places where a norm developed organically in smaller and intimate settings, then melted when it went super-Dunbar.

Man, that reminds me when I went to a west coast anime convention while visiting friends circa 2003. Man Faye was there and the (a?) Yaoi Paddle. Walking along we saw Man Faye going one direction, a little while later we saw the Yaoi Paddle going the other. Then a sound like a thunder rumbled through the hall as the two met. Man Faye might have gotten more than he asked for in that exchange from the sound of it.

To be fair, I think that kind of thing is a result of a simultaneous and toxoplasmically self-reinforcing infestation of habitual sex offenders and feminists eager to make a dubious harassment complaint.

"Cosplay is not Consent" was a common phrase in cons since at least early 2010s, which was around when I was going to cons. As best as I can tell, like many things happening around harassment around that time, it seemed that the sign wasn't necessary, but was rather deemed so by people who found it useful to do so.

It's simply a sign of the visible appearance of feminist influence in the subculture.

Go Nagai published the first ecchi manga in 1968 (set in a high school, because Japan). Miyazaki is a lolicon who once discussed Nausicca's breasts in an interview. Rumiko Takahashi is a total pervert who likes to look at the "naughty bits" of nude sculptures and "feels like a teenager" when she draws. I don't even know where to start with Takeuchi, or Ikuhara for that matter. Just explaining CLAMP's fetishes would get me to the word limit. YAS likes his girls (and boys too?) in tight white leggings. Tomino is typically trolling in interviews, but the "volume" quote nonetheless lives in infamy.

Since anime and manga creators have always been like this and have produced great works of art anyway, I think what you are seeing is the lower end of the over-saturated, increasingly volume-based market. There are more anime viewers than ever, so there are more anime than ever, so there are more explicitly fetishistic or sexual anime than ever. And there are a lot more fans who only watch those kinds of shows. (Only watches TikTok clips, possibly one or two well-known modern battle shonen, is even more common).

Some manga that aren't fetish porn that I recognize from the same year as Goblin Slayer (2016): the second 3x3 Eyes sequel (fantasy), ACCA 13 (detective story), Blue Giant (music), Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card (children's fantasy), City (comedy), Fire Punch (action), Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! (slice-of-life), Kiznaiver (science fiction)...

But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there

In a straightforward mecha anime, like the ones Evangelion is working off of - Combattler V for instance - there would be a shower scene and we would see the girl in the shower. Or maybe the guy would walk in and it would be awkward (ex. Mobile Suit Gundam). And in a low effort harem show he might even grope the girl by accident (ex. so many shows). In Eva, all these things happen and they are off-putting and bizarre. The girl, who lives in a cold, filthy apartment by herself, does not even respond to his hand on her breast. Earlier, she slaps the guy for talking badly of his father, so it's not that she isn't down for slapping someone who offends her. So what is it?

Go Nagai published the first ecchi manga in 1968 (set in a high school, because Japan). Miyazaki is a lolicon who once discussed Nausicaa's breasts in an interview. Rumiko Takahashi is a total pervert who likes to look at the "naughty bits" of nude sculptures and "feels like a teenager" when she draws. I don't even know where to start with Takeuchi, or Ikuhara for that matter. Just explaining CLAMP's fetishes would get me to the word limit. YAS likes his girls (and boys too?) in tight white leggings. Tomino is typically trolling in interviews, but the "volume" quote nonetheless lives in infamy.

Consider the ensluttification of Twitch. Humans are naturally horny, and every subculture that doesn't actively fight against it will inevitably succumb to the vicious cycle of more and more fanservice being normalized.

Sex was so central to otakuism in the late 1990s that Tamaki Sato could write Beautiful Fighting Girl, a book which proposed that the essence of anime obsession was sexual attraction to fictional characters. This was very controversial, of course, but the guy certainly had a wealth of material with which to make his point. There must be a couple hundred Martian Successor Nadesico doujins out there. Now, a lot of those were funny as well as sexy, and they were basically all made by people who were interested in the anime first and the sex second. This seems similar to the Twitch problem - titty streamers are not interested in video games, the median fan of a given anime is not interested in anime.

I have seen the cycle of which you speak consume various anime communities (along with other processes running in tandem), but this has always occurred after an invasion of more normal people who have no interest in the medium weakens the structure of the whole group. (Or after the well of discussion has truly run dry - Evangelion has been so thoroughly dissected, for example, that the only thing left to talk about is Red vs. Blue). Weirdos will post lolis and "official art" all day, then turn around and explain the entire history of Group TAC or Fujihiko Hosono. There's nobody to discuss the latter items with when everyone in a given sector of the internet consumes anime in 10-second bursts or has seen Patlabor 2 but not Patlabor On TV.

Evangelion is about a cast of weirdos undergoing their own personal mental breakdowns. You know, on account of the impending apocalypse. Uncomfortable sexual tension is one of many, many ways it turns up the pressure. That has artistic value!

Doubly so if you’re young enough that all the show’s uncritical gooner bait doesn’t trigger the same “ick.” But that window is limited, and at some point it gets awfully hard to recommend rather than just defend. So it goes.

I agree with some of the others that you’re seeing a wider distribution. Actually, I suspect Goblin Slayer came at a bit of a low point; the fantasy LN market was pretty saturated by 2016. Whenever you get a glut of genre-chasers, some of them compete on edginess.

Point is, lots of modern anime avoids the worst excesses.

I'd also add that the groping incident in question was indeed, unironically, accidental.

Evangelion is older than SE Lain by several years. I would not recommend Goblin Slayer to anyone not immersed in genre conventions; even ignoring the edgy premise, the whole thing is just deliberately made of a specific set of tropes (the Japanese riff on DnD high fantasy, codified perhaps by Record of RhodosLodoss War back in 198X and then iteratively reinforced over the decades) to the point the characters don't even have names but are only known by the archetypes they represent.

There are decent respectable normie-compatible anime series coming out with fair regularity even now. Sousou no Frieren should resonate with everyone in the melancholic set that was watching YKK back when I was an undergraduate. Spy x Family is probably the best pro-natalist comedy fluff since Yotsuba&.

to the point the characters don't even have names but are only known by the archetypes they represent.

I'd like to point out (once again) that Goblin Slayer is far from the only fantasy-genre anime or manga to do this (the treatise on medieval economics that is Hero and Demon King comes to mind), and it's more than just "they've been boiled down to pure archetypes," because there's an element of Japanese culture at play that Westerners tend to miss.

Read The Tale of Genji:

Almost none of the characters in the original text are given an explicit name. They are instead referred to by their function or role (e.g. Minister of the Left), an honorific (e.g. His Excellency), or their relation to other characters (e.g. Heir Apparent), which changes as the novel progresses. This lack of names stems from Heian-era court manners that would have made it unacceptably familiar and blunt to freely mention a person's given name. Modern readers and translators have used various nicknames to keep track of the many characters.

…

Because it was written to entertain the Japanese court of the 11th century, the work presents many difficulties to modern readers. First and foremost, Murasaki's language, Heian-period court Japanese, was highly inflected and had very complex grammar.[11][12] Another problem is that almost none of the characters are named within the work. Instead, the narrator refers to men often by their rank or their station in life, and to women often by the color of their clothing, or by the words used at a meeting, or by the rank of a prominent male relative. This results in different appellations for the same character, depending on the chapter.

Thanks to the enduring cultural resonance of Genji, and centuries of later works referring back to it, it has left an enduring sense of these sorts of Heian-era manners as a distinctively "old-timey" characteristic. Referring to characters entirely by job or rank or station or trademark attire — like "Purple Lady-in-Waiting" — is a deliberate attempt at aping this style. Like pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue in an English-language work, it's a cheap and easy trick for quickly creating an archaic "long, long ago" feel.

I'm familiar enough with the general idea of Genji, and I don't buy the claim of lineage here. If you want to go for straight up similarity, you will find that Goblin Slayer and Maoyuu are closer to the Canterbury Tales than to it; after all, the fantasy stories are neither trying to be a roman à clef nor are they encoding a setting in which social etiquette is implied to demand that the characters relate to each other in a formally prescribed way (unless you want to go as far as making the thesis that every particularly tropey Japanese story is just reflecting a Confucian ritualistic view of the world, which I guess would be a hit as a Japanese Studies undergrad course-paper).

Of course, if you write a story in Japanese where the characters are referred to as Minister of the Left and Consort soandso and what-not, you will get an old-timey feeling, because the roles are stock old-timey roles. You can also write a story in which all characters are only referred to by monikers like section chief and sub-chief and senpai; this will not give you a "long, long ago" feel, but a Dilbertian cubicle life feel. If you write a story in which the characters are Hero and Monk and Guild Receptionist, it will evoke the setting in which those are the roles, which is every piece of post-1989 Japanese fantasy schlock.

codified perhaps by Record of RhodosLodoss War back in 198X and then iteratively reinforced over the decades

I think it was Dragon Quest. If you've ever wondered why there are blue slimes in every Japanese fantasy game...

Eh. Drawing is extremely hard and requires insane levels of dedication to reach a professional level. I'll bet a lot of artists start off by being motivated to draw lewd stuff or porn, and realistically, probably a lot of out-there fetish stuff. If you're normal, it'd be much easier to put a tiny fraction of that time into getting laid.

In the west, skill at drawing is pretty rare, and I wonder how much the puritan impulse in media contributes to that. I wonder how many of the remaining westerners who can draw well are furries, or other weirdos who make a living drawing fetish stuff.

Reminds me of the quote about Gwynevere in Dark Souls.

Miyazaki: ... Talking of glamour, her breasts have nothing to do with me, they happened without my knowledge. It's all the artist's fault. I think I mentioned it earlier but I always seek a certain refinement in all my designs.

Waragai: Really?

Miyazaki: Yes, but the artist had such a happy look on his face, I didn't have the heart to stop him.

Sometimes you have to let your artists craft the huge bazonkers. I'd rather have work made with passion even if it has some suspiciously huge chests or overly detailed bare feet in it.

There can be extreme cases, of course, like Made in Abyss which is filled with very thinly veiled pedo stuff, but it's so gorgeous that I still think it's better off being made than not. If the perverts have the skills to back it up, let 'em cook.

My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit.

Renoir, master of French impressionism, was notorious for his fixation with the naked female form.

Unfortunately for him, he was simply born into the wrong era, and never got to live out a life fulfilling online porn commissions.

But the look she gives me in Evangelion when Shinji gets tangled up in a fresh out of the shower Rei and "accidentally" gropes her, it's hard to defend why that's in there

I got the impression that half of the quirk of Evangelion was basically the director Anno being grossed out by socially stunted anime fan nerds very much in tune with the OP of this thread and trying hard to appeal to them to get a life. IIRC he’s on interview said Shinji’s character was based on what sort of issues must the sort of manchild have who still likes mecha shounen anime past the age of 12. The sequel movies get into surreal third wall breaking appeals to come on just touch grass and get laid, to the point of mixing in non sequitur live footage of otaku crowds from film screenings.

I've always thought that Shinji was a Holden Caulfield type of character. Unlike the typical YA protagonist, he's a not brave, smart or attractive. Everyone, especially the consumers of shounen anime and YA fiction, imagines himself or herself to have hidden depths, imagines shining like a star in challenging circumstance. But Shinji, when given an opportunity to shape the fate of the world, doesn't deliver. When thrust into danger, he chickens out. When posed a dilemma, he can't choose. When flirted with, he clams up. He sounds pathetic, but he's just a regular thirteen-year-old boy. You can't live vicariously through him, and to many his failings hit too close to home.

So your wife didn't find anything similarly objectionable in Berserk?

I disagree, Ecchi content in anime had a peak in 2015, and has since been on a major decline. A show like "Triage X" is dumb horny, but the horny shows have gotten much less horny (My Dress Up Darling beinga key example)

A good example of a show that is very much not fetish porn material but people made porn of anyway is Frieren. Even though none of it makes any goddamn sense in context

I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

In Twilight's defense, its target demographic is tween and teenage girls, unlike Akira which is meant for adults. I don't think it's really a like for like comparison. Certain media might strike an adult as cringe but be exactly what the target demographic needs at that point in their lives. It would be easy for me to find an anime meant for children (e.g. Cardcaptor Sakura) and point out that it's silly in comparison to, say, The Godfather, but that would hardly be fair.

I've never seen Cops, but isn't it just bodycam footage of criminal interactions? What's cringe about that?

I get the impression that people who watch "reality TV" shows like Cops do to see idiots (people who get arrested), to laugh at them and feel better about themselves. I get why someone would want to see a couple real arrests, but why else would anyone watch enough that there are 37 seasons? And my understanding is they're more or less staged, even if it's just only showing the "interesting" arrests, it creates an expectation or "norm" that people being arrested are crazy.

it creates an expectation or "norm" that people being arrested are crazy.

Do you think most people getting arrested aren't crazy?

True. Still, I'm sure it creates an expectation they're crazier than reality, because I doubt they show boring arrests anywhere near proportional to wild ones.

Interestingly, I've heard the opposite claim: that the increased use of bodycams by police officers has backfired horribly for the BLM crowd, as the footage produced demonstrates that underclass black Americans are, if anything, even more irrational, unreasonable and short-tempered than the race realists claimed – really, Cops was underselling the scale of the problem. The claim that all disparities in offending rates (and types of offense) can be explained by socioeconomic factors alone grows more untenable with every passing day.

The creator of Cops is on record that they intentionally selected footage with an eye to avoid aggravating racial prejudice against blacks.

I remember seeing one of Michael Moore's (ugh) films as a child, in which he directly accused the creator of fomenting prejudice against blacks by overrepresenting them in his show, and that he ought to have included more footage of white-collar criminals of European descent getting arrested, to even things out. At the time, I accepted this claim at face value. It never seems to have occurred to Moore that the reason blacks are overrepresented in Cops might be because they're overrepresented among criminals.

The creator defended himself by saying that, when white-collar criminals get arrested, they almost invariably come quietly. While that must come as a relief for the arresting officers, it hardly makes for good television.

From my fond memories of Cops: "white guy with no shirt on" is a reoccurring character. Usually in a trailer park, sometimes a crappy apartment. He never makes it to the end free of cuffs.

As far as I know, most people arrested aren't (much) crazier than everyone else. Sure, they're more impulsive and don't have the best life skills on average but that's a far cry from most having schizophrenia or similar mental condition.

They're also disproportionately likely to be drunk and/or high, which induces behaviour similar to what one would expect from a crazy person.

People watched Cops and now watch body cam footage online because it's one of the few ways we have left to sneer at lower class people.

‘People’ don’t watch 37 seasons of cops. People watch cops when they’re bored, they don’t follow the franchise.

Cops is not staged. There's enough drunk and high people acting poorly to 'candid camera' make 37 solid seasons.

I think Akira and Serial Experiments Lain are far, far less cringe than Twilight or Cops.

I'd like to slightly hijack this thread.

What is going on with Attack on Titan? It was basically everywhere for a while so I decided to read the plot summary. I haven't watched a single second of the actual show and I haven't read the manga.

Eren Yeager is a boy who lives in the town of Shiganshina, located on the outermost of three circular walls which protect their inhabitants from Titans. In the year 845, the first wall, Wall Maria, is breached by two new types of Titans, the Colossal Titan and the Armored Titan. During the incident, Eren's mother is eaten by a grinning Titan while Eren escapes. He swears revenge on all Titans and enlists in the military along with his childhood friends Mikasa Ackerman and Armin Arlert.

Five years after Shiganshina's fall, the Colossal Titan attacks the city of Trost, located in the second innermost wall, Wall Rose. Eren helps to successfully defend the city after he discovers a mysterious ability to turn himself into a sentient Attack Titan [??]. Additionally, he regains memories of his father Grisha Yeager giving him this ability shortly after the fall of Wall Maria, and telling him that the truth about their world can be found in their basement in Shiganshina.

[...]

Shortly thereafter, Pure Titans mysteriously appear within Wall Rose with no evidence of how they got in, accompanied by the sentient Beast Titan. Ymir, one of the new Survey Corps graduates, reveals that she can transform into the sentient Jaw Titan [???], while Ymir's close friend Krista Lenz reveals herself as Historia Reiss, a member of the royal family [?]. Two other members of the Survey Corps, Reiner Braun and Bertholt Hoover, reveal themselves as the Armored and Colossal Titan respectively [???]. They attempt to kidnap Eren and Ymir, but fail. In the ensuing battle, Eren discovers another power within himself called "the Coordinate", that allows him to control other Titans, which he uses to kill the grinning Titan and send a horde of Pure Titans to attack Reiner and Bertholt. [????]

Isn't this... Kind of retarded? Isn't anyone here a normal human? It just seems like endless rule of cool coincidences like you might hear on a playground. "Dude, what if Ymir was also a titan?" "Yeah dude, like a Jaw Titan!" "And then Reiner and Bertholt are also titans!" "Hell yeah! But they're bad titans!" "And then they try to kidnap Eren and Ymir!"

This continues for 40 volumes. I haven't checked the anime but I presume it's basically the same. Who reads this stuff?

It can’t be worse than the median soap opera.

Sure. But you rarely see people claim that the median soap opera is a tremendous artistic coup.

I've never heard anyone call AOT a great work of storytelling, just a great work of animation. Like reading Myanimelist I'm seeing most reviews have the show's plot as "mid" or worse, but that's just one of the 5 categories. Sound Animation and Enjoyment all tended to score high.

I did find a few positive reviews which rated the show's plot as "Very good" but pretty much all the hype for the show from Myanimelist was in the sound and animation departments while the show's plot was given a passing grade.

I'd say 'endless rule of cool' ramping like that can be rather entertaining, at least while you're into it, before falling off the train at some point when you decide you're bored or it's not leading anywhere.

Attack on Titan got popular for two big reasons:

  1. Strikingly good art, in both the manga and the anime versions. Picture a zoomed-out rendering of the literally gigantic Titans towering over a (detailed!) cityscape, followed by kinetic action scenes where humans fight the Titans by using grappling hooks to zip from rooftop to rooftop, dodging attacks like a commando team of Spider-Man clones fighting a giant robot. If Marvel actually made that as a movie scene, would it be dumb? Yes. Would it possibly be awesome? Also yes, especially if it came out when you weren't already jaded by similar fight scenes from other movies.
  2. A brutal, dystopian world where named characters frequently die. Unlike the Marvel version where heroes get punched into a wall and just pick themselves back up, in Attack on Titan, people die, often gruesomely; the Titans swat humans like flies and eat them like grapes. In a famous scene, human forces launch a large and utterly doomed cavalry charge across an open field, because mass suicide is the only diversion tactic available to let someone else fight effectively. The series includes a number of mass graves and Pyrrhic victories.

Once it was popular, it hit the problems intrinsic in a long-running series that has both a high death count and a horrifying, faceless threat: If you keep killing off named characters, you run out of characters important to the plot. If the threat is a mindless horror that refuses to negotiate, you can't have a good villain monologue. On top of that, you have to escalate somehow, i.e. make a Titan that's even worse than the ones that came before. Say, maybe it's a super-special Titan that could ruin everything, but this one is also a guy who used to be Eren's friend - treachery! Unless Eren can talk him out of it...? Now you have a villain monologue, you're getting as much mileage as possible out of a newly-important character, and the situation for Our Hero is both worse than, and interestingly different from, the last 13 times he fought a big monster in this week's episode of Big Monster Fighting Team.

So it eventually got bogged down in this kind of nonsense, obviously because the author was a victim of his own success and didn't expect to still be writing the thing years later (IIRC, he's admitted as much). The Wikipedia summary cuts out the parts that made it successful in the first place, so if you just look at the summary of each character's biggest plot beat, it's a mystery why anyone would have ever liked it.

There are reasons for some of those and the entire population of that place is between one and two million people so coincidences are easier to swallow.

In AOT all of the super special people are collected in one place because The whole show is a bunch of super elite soldiers trying to infiltrate an area to steal the state secrets (ok how do you spoiler tag stuff on themotte?

The show is mostly a hype and excitement show (called in the anime community as "hype moments and aura") and not a serious show about quality political or other social commentary. It's mostly mindless entertainment with great animation. The show itself is a C tier plot with A tier animation.

How do you spoiler-tag stuff on The Motte?

There is a "formatting help" link below the comment preview.

oh it's double pipe

Sorry for spoiling a minor part of AOT guys.

You know the kind of Mystery Box show where what's in the box is super obvious? Or the kind where they finally open the box and the contents are just another box, with no payoff? Or the kind where what's in the box is boring? Or the kind where the writers refuse to open the box for season after season after season...? Or the kind where the box is never opened, period? Or the kind where the contents of the final box are that everything was a dream? Or the kind where the box-opening procedure is so stupid and long-winded that you just give up and read a summary? Or the kind where it's obvious that the writer only had an idea about what's in the box, and no ideas about characters, a plot, or a setting?

Attack on Titan's first half avoids all of those problems. There are like 100 boxes and all of them get opened in way that makes sense, and what's inside is both satisfying and ever more mysterious. The pacing is good. The characters are fun. The animation is flashy. It's very chuuni but you don't really care, because it's still cool. It also feels just real enough. For example, this scene,

Two other members of the Survey Corps, Reiner Braun and Bertholt Hoover, reveal themselves as the Armored and Colossal Titan respectively

Takes place on the spur of the moment after Reiner loses it. It's like a spy movie but with the additional tension that if the spy is found out he gives you extraordinary news.

Yes on all points, but Cops is great and it is a travesty they took it off air. There's so many great situations that keep coming up: prostitute turns out to be a guy, guy with no shirt on is drunk or high and thinks he can fight the cops, any time they get out the police dogs, etc, etc, I could go on. Did you know that a German shepherd can outswim an adult man, grab ahold of his leg and drag him back to shore where the cops are waiting for him? I do, and I've seen it on Cops.

Our culture is poorer for losing Cops.

My brother, there are youtube channels that do this now. Some are just raw footage, some are trashy and will have really unpleasant stuff like seeing a recently deceased's family being informed of the death of their loved ones. My favorite is Midwest Safety; straddles the line nicely between putting enough contextual information and keeping things relatively classy for the genre.

Lost 3 hours of my life to this yesterday. I think the pattern that is emerging for me is that many peoples brain breaks when they are arrested (especially women). They just refuse to believe this could be happening to them in this moment. These are people who have been (we find at the end) arrested multiple times before! Yet the hysteria and confusion are genuine (attempts to fake a medical emergency less so).

I think for a lot of people, the thinking is that if they let the arrest happen quickly and without drama, they are accepting an L, but if they drag it on and make it as hard as possible, maybe something, anything will happen that can turn this into a W; they think maybe if they make it as excrutiating as possible the cops will in frustration do something they can spin into brutality or racism and they can use that as leverage. Usually in the end the leverage ends up going the other way, as in the description of the sentencing in the videos you often hear they end up pleading guilty at the initial charges to have the kicking and spitting and biting at the cops charges go away. You end up wondering how lenient the sentences could have been if they had just gone quietly.

I remember playing ”Cops” as a kid in the very early 90s. It involved one guy being designated as the bad guy and the rest being cops who would then run after him and tackle him on the ground as a group. Not surprisingly nobosy wanted to be the first to play the bad guy. Ah, to be young again…

>when no one brought a ball, but you and the bros want to play Smear the Queer anyway

I think the problem is that you're going to try to aim normal, and probably be a few degrees off and ostracize your kid in other ways.

If your kid goes to a public school, their peers are going to be able to tell that their media diet has been restricted in some way. I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.

My parents weren't too strict, but I wasn't allowed to watch "violent" media growing up, as decided by my dad, so I never got into the Lord of the Rings movies in elementary school like all of my other friends (though I did read the book around that time), and I still feel as an adult that I was denied something I can never really get back as a result. Of course I've been able to watch the movies since leaving my parents' house, but I can never have a nostalgic connection to them, and I'll never be as into them as some of my same age peers are.

I also think a lot of what made people "weird" was just autism or ADHD, and trying to guide your child into normie interests won't change whether they have those conditions or not. If your child doesn't become "that kid" obsessed with anime and manga, they're just going to be the kid who's way too into some other random thing you happened to let them interact with in their youth like every other ADHD/autism child. And things that are "okay" to be casually into like Greek mythology or Arthurian legends or even certain video games, are still really weird if you're obsessive over them around your peers.

I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.

Having also gone to school with JWs and now working with a few as a middle-aged person, it's the "no holidays" thing that kills casual socializing more than the media restrictions. It doesn't matter if the only media they consume is reading the Bible each night because there will never be a discussion about it because they never attend any kind of social occasion if there is the slightest whiff it could possibly be associated with a holiday (religious or secular).

I knew kids who were Jehovah's Witnesses, and even though I was casual acquaintances with them, all the restrictions their parents made them live under (no Pokemon, no holidays, etc.) made them stand out like a sore thumb, and made it hard to form the easy, breezy friendships typical of K-12 education.

As an opposite experience, I also had a guy who was a JW in my class in junior high in the 90s. Apart from refusing to eat Blodplättar (which TBF weren't that popular with other people either), separate religious education and allegedly preparing to do the door-to-door thing Jehovah's Witnesses do, he seemed like a regular guy. Knew all the typical pop culture stuff, wore Helloween band shirts, had normal sounding plans for future. He even wanted me to print him a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook I had on my computer.

Giving advice to parents about letting their children be weird falls under what Scott said about advice: some people need the advice more, some people need it less, and it's really hard to aim the advice at only the former group.

“It’s over. C.S. Lewis has already depicted you as the wojak, and me as the Chad.”

Alternately: Twitter delenda est. Seriously, I think this whole “storm” can be explained by an extremely online generation which is starting to actually raise kids. They’re getting parenting advice filtered through the attention economy. This was probably true for, like, parenting magazines. But anons randos strangers on Twitter have different incentives than magazine contributors.

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?

Unfortunately, you've just outed yourself as otaku-who-thinks-he's-better-than-other-otaku, the missing archetype in your observations. As a fellow patrician in this category, you have my sympathies. I refer you to Roger Ebert's observation on fandom as an explainer for the poor hygiene: knowledge on obscure anime is used in replacement of social normality.

I'm well-acquainted with said archetype:

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 I sincerely don't think I'm an example of it. But then, I suppose no one ever does.

It's a consequence of living in a liberal, progressive society. There is an overwhelming pressure to not judge people for their individual choices and it is honestly suffocating. It is a very low bar that they are refusing or unable to meet. Or, in other words, to classify you as 'think you are better' is politeness. You are better, straight up, then people who cannot shower or who dress like freaks or who pretend disabilities they do not possess.

Relevant: The Rush from Judgment

I'm sure there are plenty of fakers but I always have to caution against the "I don't see them using it right now so they must not need it" argument. There are plenty of potential issues that can allow for seemingly normal behavior. My aunt is in her 80s and needs a cane, and yet most of the time you were to watch her she isn't really using it, because she's not going a distance or up a hill or whatever else where pain and balancing becomes a meaningful issue. She can walk perfectly fine most of the time. Most of the time. Still needs a cane for the moments where she can't or it's acting up. Likewise you'll see videos online of people in wheelchairs who stand up or even walk for a distance. Not everyone who benefits from a wheelchair is completely crippled below the belt, some have pain issues/heart issues/muscular conditions/problems balancing without something to hold/etc.

That doesn't mean there isn't fakers, just "I don't see an issue" shouldn't be taken as immediate proof of fakery.

I was once given a pair of crutches by a doctor for a stress fracture and told to minimize weight on one leg for a couple weeks. The pain was never that bad, but it was persistent, and the crutches actually did help it heal. I was perfectly capable of walking almost normally without them, and it felt weird (and probably looked weird) to just set them down and walk from time to time when I needed two hands.

Crutches also suck to use and I wouldn't wish them on my worst enemies.

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.

TETSUUUOOOOOOOO!!!!!!! KANEDAAAAAAAA!!!!!

Hopefully I retriggered some of your PTSD there.

Edit: On a more serious note, I can't help but agree with your point. I spend way too much time on /pol/ and have no problem dropping the normie killing word that starts with an N, but I was playing Meccha Chameleon with my wife and some friends the other day on a public server and there was some rando who just kept saying it over and over nonstop in voice chat and not even in a remotely funny way. It's like a certain subset of people find something edgy/cool but don't understand the core of what makes it cool and imitate it in a way that just doesn't make sense.

Yes, anime villain #345647 with long hair, a trench coat, and a big sword is cool. No, you imitating it with your obese body and your dandruff and grease and your katana from the mall ninja shop isn't, and I really don't understand how you can't see that.

shudders Someone literally walked over to them and told them to shut the fuck up.

And that is why I'm not one of those people.

I was playing Meccha Chameleon with my wife and some friends the other day on a public server and there was some rando who just kept saying it over and over nonstop in voice chat and not even in a remotely funny way.

It's good to see that the youth are carrying on the old traditions from Counter-Strike and Halo.

A cane for the blind, or just a cane? The latter have been fashion accessories for centuries, albeit now out-of-date.

A cane as a support for someone suffering from mobility problems. The first woman I saw carrying one yesterday was carrying one that was unambiguously a piece of medical equipment (similar to a crutch), probably made from aluminium, albeit decorated with Hello Kitty stickers.

I'm aware that canes have been fashion accessories for a long time, but most young women I see carrying them claim to need them for medical reasons and yet clearly do not. And it surely cannot be a coincidence that all such women meeting this description are nerdy girls who know what their preferred pronouns are and often have their hair dyed an unnatural shade. Apparently this is a common occurrence in the Anglosphere (Ctrl-F "canes").

Interesting, never heard of it before. I did nearly buy the other kind of cane but decided even I could only go so pretentious without consequences.

When I see an otherwise casually dressed person carrying a cane, it triggers my cringe alert in the same way as seeing someone wearing a fedora with jeans and a hoodie. Go the whole hog (three-piece suit, greatcoat, top hat) or don't go at all.

Go the whole hog

There’s a reason I thought the addition of a cane might bump me up from pretentious and funny to pretentious and a twat. I had a much more fun wardrobe in those days but enough social nous to recognise that half a hog is a welcome addition to barbecues everywhere, but a great big squealing hog is a hunting accident waiting to happen.

Man, if I knew a place to find a decent greatcoat for a reasonable price, I absolutely would. (Hats are no concern -- I used to drink near a very good hat factory).

You still see that at army surplus places quite a bit...

This one looks decent. Not as cheap as milsurp, but I guess the US has gotten rid of its army overcoats a long time ago.

There but for the grace of God go I.

A statement I find myself saying far too often. I'm thankful I've never felt the slightest interest to watch anime or read manga or go anywhere near that subculture.

I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some anime is well worth checking out. Perfect Blue is one of the most disturbing psychological horror films I've ever seen, and the direct inspiration for Black Swan with Natalie Portman (to the point where it might as well be called a live-action remake). Tokyo Godfathers by the same director is, by contrast, sweet, funny and touching, and my current favourite Christmas film. Akira is a masterpiece of action cinema and dystopian sci-fi, and casts a long shadow in both genres. Without Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix wouldn't exist: in their pitch to producer Joel Silver, the directors literally showed him the film and said they wanted to do something similar but in live-action. Several Miyazaki films are charming light entertainment, suitable for children but that their parents would enjoy just as much: the phrase "fun for the whole family" gets bandied about a lot, but that's a perfectly accurate description of My Neighbour Totoro, even more so than just about any Pixar film. Your Name is a funny and moving slice of emo teen drama, as is The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes.

Aside from the source material for Akira and GitS, I never really read much manga: I recall the former being pretty good, but thought the latter's film adaptations were superior to the source material. The only two anime video games I've ever played were Valkyria Chronicles (fun, gorgeous to look at and told an engaging story, but inferior to the XCOM reboot as far as turn-based tactics games go) and Catherine (addictive, stylish and bonkers).

But yeah. There's always the worry that you're going to get too deep into it. It's probably safe to fuck one or two toasters a year, but any more than that I can't recommend.

The one anime film I've seen in theaters (it was Chainsaw Man Reze Arc), there were people shouting at the screen on multiple occasions. I relate to your experience. However bad Hollywood is, these things aren't accepted in showings of western movies.

However bad Hollywood is, these things aren't accepted in showings of western movies.

This is just not true. My wife and I stopped going to theaters years ago due to people's behavior. Simple shouting at the screen is nothing compared to the shenanigans of some screenings we went to--eg, people were throwing toy snakes around the theater when Snakes on a Plane came out.

You're lucky you missed the "bring a live chicken to the theater for when Jack Black says 'chicken jockey' in the Minecraft movie" trend

I feel bad for those theater employees. They do NOT get paid enough to deal with literal manchildren.

Screenings of The Room tend to have an audience participation element, with people yelling "because you're a woman!" and throwing plastic spoons at the screen. I found it good clean fun, although I've heard that there are some purists who think that these antics detract from the so-bad-it's-good experience of the film. I wouldn't recommend one of these screenings for someone watching the film for the first time.

You've never been to a theater with a predominantly black clientele, then. In 1990, I made the mistake of watching Necessary Roughness at the Union Station theater in DC. During the climactic scene, the whole audience SCREAMED so loud, my ears genuinely hurt and I was afraid my hearing might be damaged forever.

I've heard of this stereotype before. Part of me really wants to go to a cinema in Baltimore or Detroit just to see it firsthand.

I thought that making noise in movie theatres is an American thing. I noticed it with a healthy amount of dismay the one time I watched a movie in a US cinema (the first Star Wars sequel, at the SO's urging; some very central location in Boston next to a park, I could probably pinpoint the exact cinema if necessary), and was told that this is normal.

Kinda depends on the movie in my experience. Most movies I've been to, people were quiet. When I saw the first Star Wars sequel people kept applauding at all the nostalgia callbacks and it got super annoying. Then at the extreme end you have stuff like Rocky Horror Picture Show, which is notorious for being an audience participation event. But I would say the vast majority of the time, when I go to see a movie people are quiet except for laughter at any jokes.

When I saw the first Star Wars sequel people kept applauding at all the nostalgia callbacks and it got super annoying.

"DUDE, PRIDE ROCK!"

You missed the chicken jokey phenomenon.

I attended an anime movie premiere once. It's a mistake I won't make again.

My wife and I make it a point to try and go to movies near the end of their theater run, especially for anime movies. We had the theater all to ourselves for the latest Demon Slayer movie since we saw it in the last week of its run (though we had to drive to a theater almost an hour away to see it since the theater closest to us had stopped showing it a week early).

As a counter example: I saw the chainsaw man movie when it came out with a weeb friend. People were maybe a little more overweight than average. Other than cosplayers it was pretty normal. Most people were clearly there with their friends. My friend made a comment that the audience was "gentrifying".

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."

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.

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."

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.

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 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 permitting immigration (or granting asylum) from dysfunctional countries.

I increasingly think "evaporative cooling of group beliefs" is one of the most perceptive things Eliezer ever put his name to.

The trouble is, the one study it was based on was fraudulent. https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/cognitive-bias/#kelly-2025-section

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that: the book’s central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false. The documents reveal that the group actively proselytized well before the prophecy failed and quickly abandoned their beliefs afterward. They also expose serious ethical violations by the researchers, including fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation. One coauthor, Henry Riecken, posed as a spiritual authority and later admitted he had “precipitated” the climactic events of the study.

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.

...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.

At some point, there actually has to be a feedback mechanism between pernicious behavior and resource and status distribution.

AGREED.

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?")

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?

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.

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"): psychologists didn't "discover" shit. To paraphrase Franklin someone who may have been Samuel Johnson, 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 do 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 from infancy on) 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.

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.

You have to be very cautious about this, it's mostly an exaggerated self-deprecating meme - large subfields of psychiatry and psychology work great.

Criticisms are often stemming from narrow areas such as SLS (shit life syndrome) driven depression and through exaggerated posting by a heavily loud population of patients with serious mental illness and Anosognosia.

For instance medications work great for the traditional serious mental illness - Schizophrenia and related disorders and Bipolar. It helps that these are more directly biochemically mediated. Now patients relapse but it's usually through poor choices (stopping medication, drugs).

A more restrictive society does not have that problem. To some extent the other conditions have the same problem. If the treatment for your depression is to get off your ass and to stop smoking weed as much as it is taking an SSRI, then a society that doesn't keep you away from weed isn't going to be able to do shit.

Much of mental illness is as much a political and ethical problem as it is a treatment problem.

Even with the area where what you are saying is more true (the classic "SSRIs don't really do shit for depression and anxiety" critique) has a lot of nuance.

For example SSRIs are one of the worst treatment for depression. They are first line because they don't have side effects like "eat a certain type of cheese and die" or the image problem of ECT.

Scott likely writes about this less because he finds that the medications and treatment do actually help, and as a heterodox nerdy person he likely had a lot of exposure to people with personality disorders being treated with medication and with mild symptoms. Both types of people medicine doesn't have much to offer.

As your clinical practice expands you see stuff work and less marginal pathology.

The vast majority of doctors in the vast majority of specialities have consulted psych and watched them fairy dust some magic bullshit with a few pills. The average person is going to care about life satisfaction issues and mild to moderate depression and anxiety but that's a small fraction of the morbidity and nearly zero of the mortality.

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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.

Except when it doesn’t, of course. I have a phobia of wasps (and by adjacency bees because they look so similar but consider bumblebess to be harmless because their colors and flight are immediately distinguishable). While researching wasp traps it wasn’t hard at all to find many accounts of people who had gone through exposure therapy without any improvement. So YMMV.

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How would the social theory of evaporative cooling explain the phenomenon under discussion right here when there's broad consensus that anime consumption has been becoming more mainstream and acceptable in recent times?

I think it probably relates to the dynamic described by Freddie deBoer in "Our Product is Permission". Nowadays, it's much less socially acceptable to openly mock or bully people for being interested in anime (alongside other similarly nerdy pursuits), and consequently people feel much more comfortable about advertising their interest in anime openly, in public. But just because it's less acceptable to bully people over this sort of thing, that doesn't mean the people who are interested in anime are any higher in social status than they used to be.

But again, the broad consensus about anime is that it has become normalized, that is, it's being accepted to the mainstream and normies are consuming it to an increasing degree. The social phenomenon of evaporative cooling represents the complete opposite of this, namely when normie/moderate members leave a specific social circle.

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."

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 disorder dietary 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.

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 disorder dietary preferences really are.

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.

And this is the problem. Beating the snowflake out of people will usually work, but trying to beat a genuine physical or neurodevelopmental disability out of people will usually leave a wreck, and even worse is that beating the eccentric genius out of people will also work. There is a reason why the global capital of snowflakes and the global capital of zero-to-one founders are the same place.

The uncontroversial example of this is asthma in the military. The military (both US and UK) won't touch even suspected asthma with a bargepole, and the reason is obvious - drill sergeants/drill instructors/recruit instructors are not doctors, and trying to use standard tough love techniques to keep an asthmatic running through an attack is the easiest way to kill a recruit.

The scissor example is Full Metal Jacket. Gunny Hartman tries to fix Private Pyle using the standard tough love techniques, and gets fragged for it. Hegseth and his supporters see this is as obviously an obviously correct attempt to beat the fuckup out of Pyle that had an unfortunate result, and see Hartman as a role model. Snowflake-protectors see this as a justified rebellion against tyrannical authority, and see Hartman as the villain. Anyone with a brain thinks that Pyle should have been discharged on mental health grounds, and sees Hartman as culpably stupid for not considering that possibility. (Simple stupidity is not normally a capital offence, but natural law is not required to be just, and Hartman was 100% the author of his own demise).

The controversial example is the massive increase in autism (and other mental health) diagnoses. How many of the marginally-diagnosed autistic people who currently struggle to present in normie-acceptable ways just need the schoolboy equivalent of a blanket party to straighten them out? How many can't "straighten out" with ordinary effort and will just end up being bullied until they shoot up the school? And how many can be useful members of society if we don't beat them up over some normie-friendly trivia? Many people are confidently wrong about this question. It is existential for my family so I have spent a lot of time looking, and as far as I can see nobody knows anything with the kind of confidence I would want before I beat my kids over it.

There is a reason why the global capital of snowflakes and the global capital of zero-to-one founders are the same place.

Which place is that?

Beating the snowflake out of people will usually work, but trying to beat a genuine physical or neurodevelopmental disability out of people will usually leave a wreck, and even worse is that beating the eccentric genius out of people will also work.

I mean, citation requested? Do you have any evidence that every eccentric genius in history (or even a significant majority thereof) was relentlessly coddled and indulged as a child, his every whim granted without a second's thought? That's certainly not the impression I get of the current generation of billionaires and tech geniuses.

Should I send my kids to this weirdly intense Russian Orthodox camp? https://www.orprcamp.org (I probably won't, as we're not of Russian descent, but it looks intriguing)

It's interesting how the kids in the pictures simultaneously look both Russian and not. Reminded me a bit of the "the only difference between Australians and working-class English are better food and climate" meme.

"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."

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.

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.

I keep hearing about how people are totally sure grass-touching can cure many ills, but never the accounts of it actually curing them.

Well yeah, presumably good and properly cured people log off.

Weight lifting and distance hiking cured me. Now it's the rest of society that's the problem.

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.

I have a hard time seeing how spending a year at a Wyoming ranch would improve the social skills of anyone much.

Learning to STFU is an important social skill!

It depends on their initial level of social skills. Anywhere with others would to some extent for a shut-in.

I'm guessing OP was referring to the rather low population density of Wyoming and the isolated nature of local ranches.

Probably Definitely beats a year sitting in your bedroom on your phone or PC.

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.

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.

"lift heavy stone run long trail make sad head voice quiet"?

Literally, that meme is 100% accurate.

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.

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 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.

While Freddie's post is aspirational, I think it implodes on contact with reality because humans judge each other on what they like all the time.

Liking trucks, wrestling and NASCAR is a cultural and class signal. We may not like that it is, but as long as we continue to use it as a cultural and class signal it will serve that function.

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.

Nerdy subcultures are so because a small section of 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.

(bolded addition mine)

Even with that addition I'm not convinced of that explanation, not least because as far as I can tell, back in my teenager days (ie. the 90s) the only "subcultures" I witnessed were the occasional guys wearing metal band shirts (which amusingly included one Jehovah’s Witness who really loved Helloween and power metal) and a bit later some friends of a friend being into hiphop music and clothes. Even for those people it seemed to be limited purely to music and fashion and as far as I could tell, they didn't fraternize among the group any more than random friends did.

It's possible that (unlike here in Finland) in the US such subcultural cliques really were / are common but this would point towards this not being any inherent aspect of being a western teenager and more something learned via local / national cultural examples (possibly imported ones, in the case of anime nerds). Certainly there were a few "castouts" (in the sense that they were weird in various ways and seemed to keep themselves aloof of the rest of the students) but they didn't hang together either and seemed to be content with being weird loners (the very notion of a clique based on being castout / loner would have been absurd).

a small section of

Sure. Naturally the discussion is about those affected.

I don't have hard data about any country, I am trying to grasp for psychological explanations why some people with nerdy interests don't turn out well-adjusted people with nerdy interests but as faceh puts it, "nerd nerds". You wrote you don't understand; I am trying to. I certainly never has been quite as well-adjusted as I would have liked. Like, humans are social animals. A need to be part of some crowd is something I can recognize. If you are not having success with real people, imaginary people are better than no people at all. And subculture is better than anything than anything you could make up, because they are real imagined people. Imagined in the sense of word as used by Benedict Anderson, but unlike any fantasy people you could cook up entirely on your own, they indubitably exist.

A maladjusted teenager supposedly typified by James Dean's character in Rebel Without a Cause can at best project his malaise by wearing a leather jacket and lashing out and picking fights. Scriptwriter still needs find him other people to pick fights with: he's oppositional, not self-driven. (After the film came out, the would-be malcontent could perhaps try to be James Dean). But by time we get to the 1990's, a would-be ill-adjusted teenager has something better: real subcultures. A 1990s goth has a script how to be a goth and hopefully a local scene of other goths. After the 00's, you can add widespread availability of internet, which removes the need for "local scene". You can find other people over the internet who can provide some human interaction that scratches the need for socialization, but it's profoundly weird as it's all mediated by the internet. The local scene, if it exists, will be people who spend a large part of their time on the internet, so real interactions become internet-weird, too. Thus, alas, anime weeaboos.

I never did understand why people engaged in the American stereotypical nerd culture

They were acceptable minority targets that were easy to abuse and everyone excused said abuse.

That's what it really boils down to.

I feel people have abit of a deformed perspective nowadays when it comes to the Science Fiction and Fantasy genres, what with Marvel movies being such multi-billion dollar cash-cows that they are nowdays, nevermind other things, but at one point all this stiff really was a niche market being enjoyed by niche people. People playing D&D weren't making a good paycheck doing podcast/webstreaming, they were guys in thier basement or thier parent's basement playing make-beleive with rules and havine fun and not really bothering anyone.

I was very much a quiet, 'go away and leave me alone' kind of kid who stuck my nose in a book 90% of the time, and I still got harassed by people and my novels thrown out a window.

The times haven't really changed any, just the targets. I'm sure I could scrounge around for another set of acceptable minority targets people love to shit on as a demonstration.

On the other hand, the early 2010s, when I just entered grad school, seemed to be the exact watershed moment in the US where some part of anime culture went irrevocably mainstream. I remember being taken aback at the undergraduates (including a large well-adjusted Greek Life chad/stacy contingent) constantly spamming JoJo memes in office hours and homework, trying to square it with the previous generation of JoJo memes that were the province of fat 2ch otaku who are paranoid about Korean conspiracies to steal their pure Yamato seed and their fat Western VHS sub otaku admirers.

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".

There's something really funny to me about us mottizens, weirdoes on the internet who argue about weird shit with our resident weirdoes, objecting that anime won't make the kids weird and in fact it is the lamestream that is weird.

Yeah, it's us guys. She doesn't want her kids to be like us.

A long time ago, I was telling my brother about one of our resident incel posters (I think it was the Hock guy), and he sardonically noted that incel posters must be a real rarity around here. He seemed genuinely surprised when I said that, to my mind, the modal poster here is closer to "married homeowner with multiple children".

I mean, look at you: married with a baby on the way, good job, own a house, physically active. What kind of mother wouldn't want her son to turn out like you? I bet if my mother met you, she'd be thinking "oh, why couldn't FtttG be more like FiveHour?"

Sure, I can put on the dog-and-pony show for mothers everywhere. But I'd have a hard time explaining the private hobby where I argue on the internet with pedofascists and incels and holocaust-deniers.

Hey, Xitter's been around for like, twenty years now.

There was an aphorism, I think from George Burns, that went something like: "There is almost no person who, if the details of their sex life were made public, wouldn't inspire public shock and revulsion."

I think the same applies to posting.

”I’m in this moderated online debate group. You’d find it really boring.”

I actually refer to discussion here with Mrs. FiveHour as today's issue of "The Daily Autist."

... it is the lamestream that is weird.

It is not really normal versus weird. normal covers both solid-normal and cozy-weird. If you grow up with something you treat it as normal, as do the people around you, and some of them work for main-stream-media, so you see it on TV too, treated as normal. And some of the stuff that falls into that category really is weird, you just cannot see it.

For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950's there was a famine and hoarding. Disapproving of horading they banned ware-houses and cold-storage to stop it. Not completely, but enough to cause trouble. Obviously that is a bit of a disaster. Agriculture is notorious for having good years and bad years and you need plenty storage to smooth things out and make sure people don't starve.

Here is where it gets weird. You'd think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950's about the repeal of the anti-storage laws (complete with little box explaining about how such a totally whacked out law got passed in the first place). No, the article was from June 27th 2015 and was lamenting that the law was still in place. So it is not just weird. It is cozy-weird. People are trying to combat the volatility of agricultural production with laws against warehousing and cold-storage and it has become normal, just the way you do it.

Second example: Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome were born to a virgin, Rhea Silvia, who had been forced join a virgin priesthood. Her wicked uncle Amulius had stolen the throne from her father Numitor, and didn't want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather's throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

I'd always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of "virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I'm a believer!". Now I've learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. "Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there!" In 300 AD virgin births are cozy-weird not out-there-weird.

Example three: People believe that if a scientific result is statistically significant at the p=0.05 level, then the probability that it is true is 95%. This weird belief is so cozy that some readers will not know what is wrong with it. Which brings up a deep problem: I shouldn't be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say "X is cozy-weird" and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal.

Having renamed weird to be out-there-weird and divided normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird I can now state my thesis succinctly: the lamestream is mostly cozy-weird.

But what distinguishes solid-normal from cozy-weird?

Your examples seem to imply that normal is rational in some way (benefiting society, believing facts), but there are society-benefitting behaviors not considered normal, like (successful) Effective Altruism, and opinions most consider normal or weird, like Christianity or Pastafarianism.

My impression is that normal only means something with context. For example, carrying a mobile phone may be considered normal today, because everyone does. But in a different way it's not normal: we're the only animal to carry them, we've only done so for a short amount of our species' existence, and they seem to have negative social effects so we may be better off without them.

Abstractly the difference between the solid-normal and the cozy-weird is that the cozy-weird is indeed weird.

Artistically, https://youtube.com/watch?v=4mdiZ9rwoSQ is a scifi story about hi tech perceptual filters leading people astray. Err, it is over long and clunky, but it does have an interesting, oblique take on the dangers of consensus reality.

Concretely one wants examples. But this is where it gets self-defeating. If X is genuinely cozy-weird in our shared culture, you will not accept X as an example of the cozy-weird, because it appears normal to you. Worse, I will not suggest X as an example of the cozy-weird because it appears normal to me. One only catches glimpses of the cozy-weird out of the corner of ones eye.

I've encountered this kind of tangle, where it is impossible to give good examples, before when thinking about subduction phrases

Why think that the cozy-weird exists at all? I started down this path by reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/ with discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16386406 It struck me that people hoped that psychedelics would tear away the veil of illusion, and let people see reality as it really was. It was a hope that I had been warned against, but still shared. However, psychedelics tear away too much, one just ends up out-there-weird. Meanwhile I read some economics and noticed that people believe strongly in folk economics. Some folk economics is both weird and not out-there-weird. Early psychedelicists could believe in folk economics and no-one would include that as evidence that they believed weird things, because the weird things appear normal.

One example is that people talk confidently about raising and lowering taxes. If raising, do they mean raising taxes rates? Or raising taxes revenues? Taxes rates are directly within the power of governments, so it is tempting to assume that the discussion is about raising raising rates. But following the discussion one notices that it is about what the money gets spent on. There is an assumption that raising rates brings in more money. That is not in itself a problem. But people are also comfortable with the idea of punitive taxes. Protect people from lung cancer by taxing cigarettes so heavily that they smoke a lot less. Shame about the tax revenue, which falls due to people quitting. So the cozy weird bit is a belief. We can infer that people believe that government ministers have psychic powers. When they intend an increase in tax rates to raise additional revenue they hypnotize the general public to keep paying. When they intend an increase in tax rates to change behavior at the cost of lost revenue, that works too. No discussion needed. Nor even permitted. People don't actually believe that government ministers have psychic powers, but people do have psychological defense mechanisms. They will push back angrily against the idea that tax rates and tax revenues are two different things. There is a tangled mess of weirdness here, but it is cozy, people like it and will defend their cozy fuzziness.

People also talk about raising and lowering the minimum wage. That is bizarre. The minimum wage is a prohibition. It is parameterized. One might prefer to call it a restriction. Whatever. It is the kind of thing that you make tighter or looser. If you like brutal and disturbing satire, the Manifesto of the Nasty Fascist Party might help you get the point.

I realize that the previous paragraph is a flawed example of the cozy-weird. Arguments are soldiers, and words are the uniforms they wear. "Raise and lower" are the dark blue words worn by the good guys, and "Tighten and loosen" are the gray words worn by the bad guys. It is natural to dress your arguments in the uniform words of ones own side.

And yet dressing your arguments-soldiers in the appropriate color uniform-words is perhaps a good example of the cozy weird. We are supposed to be helping the poor. Instead we play elaborate word games. As the Nasty Fascist Party would put it " The booze and TV addled brains of the comfortably off are actually too feeble to distinguish between these two opposites."

I've tried addressing the distinction between solid-normal and cozy-weird abstractly, artistically, and concretely. Concretely is the important one, but articulating good examples is too hard for me. Fourth option: Praxis. What can one do to improve the chances of catching sight of the cozy-weird?

I think that psychedelics hinder, by leading you towards the out-there-weird and away from the cozy weird. The invisibility of the cozy-weird is policed by emotional reactions and defense mechanisms. Perhaps Buddhist meditation practices can help. One learns to notice the flickering play of emotions. Notice and let go rather than getting sucked in by the illusion. Maybe cached thoughts are important. Re-reading Eliezer Yudkowsky's "cached thoughts" essay, to check the relevance of linking to it, I notice that his examples have a vibe of "cozy-weird thoughts sitting in the cache". There are strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache, because you must Never Question Conventional Wisdom. Noticing the unreasonable strength of the strong emotions telling you not to clear the cache leads you towards noticing the cozy-weird. Getting stale answers straight from the cache leads you away.

Am I misunderstanding that "cozy weird" is believing something false or ambiguous? When medieval people were talking about humes and treating bacterial infections with bloodletting, and 1900s people were talking about mental association centers and treating mental issues with lobotomies, it was weird even though it was mainstream, because people incorrectly believed how the illnesses worked. Now we treat bacteria with antibiotics and mental health with medication, it's less weird.

Although in that case, today's treatments are still weird, compared to a more advanced society, who discovers ways to treat bacteria that don't breed resistance, and ways to treat mental conditions without medications' side effects, and understands that our biological concepts were too broad (for example, DNA is not the only way genes are inherited). "Reality as it is" is impossible to perceive, we can only get closer by experimentation, so everyone is weird to some extent.

Am I misunderstanding that "cozy weird" is believing something false or ambiguous?

You are misunderstanding.

Since life is about seventy years long, and science grinds slowly, taking hundreds of years, we all end up in forced choice situations, forced to guess. We guess wrong and believe something false. "Believe"? Maybe we knew at the time that we were guessing, but we still acted upon the false "belief"; that is the main part of believing. Shrug. Believing something false is built-in to the human condition. It is part of the solid-normal. It is not part of the cozy-weird.

I've an essay to write, provisional title: "Life is more complicated than language, nothing that needs saying can be said briefly." Since life is more complicated than language, ambiguity is inevitable. We can push back a little, by writing at greater length, using the extra words to disambiguate. But watch out for two dangers. First, wittering on at great length usually muddies the waters; more words, more ambiguity. Second, the seventy year thing; we don't have the time. So again, ambiguity is built-in to the human condition and part of the solid-normal, not the cozy-weird.

I'm hoping that we share a common understanding of the out-there-weird. One kind of out-there-weird is when you fry your brains with LSD. But humans are flaky. There are a lot of beliefs that are crazy, and the people who hold them just latched on to them with no chemical assistance. "flat earth in 2026 AD" is out-there-weird. "flat earth in 700 BC" is solid-normal. Why is "flat earth in 700 BC" solid normal? Wikipedia has Eratosthenes of Cyrene measuring the size of the Earth in around 200 BC, and tells the tale

The distance between Alexandria and Syene was reported to be about 5,000 stadia, as measured by professional bematists.

The Earth is big enough to be locally flat, and few people in 700 BC were travelling far enough to notice that something was off. (Wait! I'm forgetting the long distances involved in the Bronze Age tin trade. Shit!)

Back to the cozy-weird. How does inter-generational transmission of culture work? As a child I wanted to grow up and become an adult and that meant copying the adults around me. My father would tell me "You will understand when you grow up." and I would accept what I was told, trusting that I would indeed understand when I grew up. It is worse than that. My father was a Yorkshire man and proud of his deadpan irony. I was a socially incompetent child and did not get the joke. Looking back I think that some of my world view was formed by the following route. My father would attempt to tell me that X was false, by stating X ironically. I would miss the irony and learn that X was true. I think that inter-generation transmission of culture works badly in two different ways.

First, culture is transmitted faithfully, but the "You will understand when you grow up" bit doesn't happen. Father passes belief to Son. Son never does understand, but Son passes belief to Grandson with the words "You will understand when you grow up". There is no error correction.

Second, beliefs are flipped due to too much irony. Young people are not in on the joke. Old people do not notice that young people are not in on the joke and are getting the opposite of the intended message. The message gets corrupted.

The idea of the cozy-weird is that there are many beliefs that an outsider (to our culture) would consider out-there-weird (not false, not ambiguous, but crazy and weird) that we are brought up to believe and which pass for normal inside our culture. I'm claiming a disastrous failure of culture transmission with crazy rubbish being passed down the generations so well that the craziness is invisible to those inside that culture. Hence my subdivision of normal into solid-normal and cozy-weird.

Do we all live in a single global culture? Not yet, but things are heading that way, and it is hard to find an outsider. Or maybe talking to an outsider doesn't help. The details of the cozy-weird are culture bound, but the phenomenon of the cozy-weird is universal. You could go to Tehran and talk to a Mullah. He would point out the craziness of Western Culture. But he cannot show you the cozy-weird that both cultures share. Worse, he is embedded in his own culture. He may be quite convincing that the important thing is to submit to Islam, because he sincerely believes it, but that is his own culture's cozy-weird. His sincerity and conviction are warning signs of the invisibility of the cozy-weird details specific to a particular culture, to those within that culture.

The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

Do you have a source interpreting the story this way, or attesting to its being interpreted this way in the 300s? I don't get the impression from just a quick look that your account of how the story would have been interpreted in the 300s is correct - for instance, Livy says the following:

But the Fates had, I believe, already decreed the origin of this great city and the foundation of the mightiest empire under heaven. The Vestal was forcibly violated and gave birth to twins. She named Mars as their father, either because she really believed it, or because the fault might appear less heinous if a deity were the cause of it.

This seems quite different from a virgin birth.

Whoops! I didn't bookmark where I got that version of Romulus and Remus from, and cannot now find it. I've probably got that wrong.

Put this post in the Louvre, for the perfect satire of missing the point and proving it at the same time.

I've just asked Google's search engine LLM about Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal and got a terrifying response

Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is an informal internet maxim that states: "Any explanation that is subtle enough to be correct is turbid enough to make its sarcastic dismissal genuinely funny."

It essentially highlights the tension between accuracy and comedy. The more nuanced and detailed an explanation is, the easier it is for someone to mock or dismiss it with a clever, sarcastic punchline.

The Core Concepts

Subtlety vs. Simplicity: True explanations for complex phenomena (like human behavior, physics, or philosophy) often require heavy nuance and caveats. The Sarcastic Edge: Because these explanations are complex, they can come across as confusing (turbid) to a casual observer. This makes them ripe targets for a quick, witty, and dismissive joke that ignores the nuance for a cheap laugh.

LessWrong

The LessWrong Origins: This law was coined in community forums like LessWrong to describe why rigorous intellectual debates can easily be derailed by people utilizing humor to dismiss legitimate, well-thought-out positions.

Would you like to explore how this applies to modern online debates, or perhaps share a specific complex explanation you've been working on to see if we can "stress-test" it against this law?

I was an LLM sceptic, but now I see that even a basic, free LLM gets it, in a way that leaves highly intelligent mottizens trailing behind in the dust. I'm shocked because Crowe's Law of Sarcastic Dismissal is my own lame coinage. It got no traction. There is no exposition in the training data for the LLM to plagiarize. The LLM has managed to understand it, all by itself. Terrifying!

The virgin birth was seen by contemporary pagans as being less believable than the resurrection. It was definitely out there weird- and Romulus and Remus's mother was generally understood to have had normal intercourse, just with a god.

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

It's a solid film. Not my favorite or anything, but worth seeing.

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

Let's hear a few words of wisdom from the man himself:

224: Ennoblement through degeneration. - History teaches that the branch of a nation that preserves itself best is the one in which most men have, as a consequence of sharing habitual and undiscussable principles, that is to say as a consequence of their common belief, a living sense of community. Here good, sound custom grows strong, here the subordination of the individual is learned and firmness imparted to character as a gift at birth and subsequently augmented. The danger facing these strong communities founded on similarly constituted, firm-charactered individuals is that of the gradually increasing inherited stupidity such as haunts all stability like its shadow. It is the more unfettered, uncertain and morally weaker individuals upon whom spiritual progress depends in such communities: it is the men who attempt new things and, in general, many things. Countless numbers of this kind perish on account of their weakness without producing any very visible effect; but in general, and especially when they leave posterity, they effect a loosening up and from time to time inflict an injury on the stable element of a community. It is precisely at this injured and weakened spot that the whole body is as it were innoculated with something new; its strength must, however, be as a whole sufficient to receive this new thing into its blood and to assimilate it. Degenerate natures are of the highest significance wherever progress is to be effected. [emphasis mine] Every progress of the whole has to be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures preserve the type, the weaker help it to evolve. - Something similar occurs in the case of the individual human being; rarely is a degeneration, a mutilation, even a vice and physical or moral damage in general without an advantage in some other direction. The more sickly man, for example, will if he belongs to a warlike and restless race perhaps have more inducement to stay by himself and thereby acquire more repose and wisdom, the one-eyed will have one stronger eye, the blind will see more deeply within themselves and in any event possess sharper hearing. To this extent the celebrated struggle for existence does not seem to me to be the only theory by which the progress or strengthening of a man or a race can be explained. Two things, rather, must come together: firstly the augmentation of the stabilizing force through the union of minds in belief and communal feeling; then the possibility of the attainment of higher goals through the occurrence of degenerate natures and, as a consequence of them, partial weakenings and injurings of the stabilizing force; it is precisely the weaker nature, as the tenderer and more refined, that makes any progress possible at all.

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?

Over a long period of time, you get used to your own smell and don't notice it unless it changes. These people's hygiene have been nonexistent for so long, the only recourse is for somebody to tell them they stink. Unfortunately, doing so is considered a rude gesture, so this never happens in polite society.

Unfortunately, doing so is considered a rude gesture, so this never happens in polite society.

Certainly not in the West. I understand that people in Asia have no such compunctions, and will tell you that you smell bad to your face. (And that you've gained weight.)

Likewise for many Asian-Americans, at least in the first generation.

The most recent time I was told I was noticeably putting on weight was by a family friend far more fat than me. There was no irony in that, because he wasn't trying to be insulting or mean, he was being helpful! He immigrated many decades ago, and speaks perfect English, probably because that's difficult but useful, but he must have never adopted the American idea that you shouldn't pressure someone you care about to eat healthier, probably because that's easy but harmful.

Because hygiene is taught to teenaged boys- or was, up until recently- in large part through sports. Nerds don't participate in them, thus they don't learn many of the normal hygiene rules.

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."

Whenever I start feeling that way, I visit the lolcow zoo over at KiwiFarms. Heh.

This was the second female person carrying a meticulously decorated cane as a fashion statement I saw that day.

Any chance they were cosplaying some specific character I haven't heard of? If I saw them, that's what I'd guess they were doing.

It's funny that you mention Akira. I was once listening to a movie/film podcast episode about it and the guest participant was a woman teaching movie history and cinematography at a prominent university. The curriculum of one course of hers includes the history of Japanese animation and she said she also talks about Akira in detail as a part of this - even though she admitted she has never watched it until she was invited to the podcast. 'The most typical normie I can imagine', I told myself.

What on earth.

A new article about the cane phenomenon just dropped:

https://archive.is/20260805235412/https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/young-women-walking-sticks-gen-z-disability-2ssv95mws

https://archive.ph/uNwyn

Kathleen Stock is so based.

Even severely debilitating physical conditions produce good days as well as bad. On some bad days, a person may need extra help. But when a disproportionate number of young women are insisting this applies, we need to find out what is going on.

Serendipitously, the book I'm currently reading notes that, while the people being hospitalised for Covid were overwhelmingly old and male (and often diabetic), the people diagnosing themselves with long Covid were overwhelmingly young, female and not diabetic. O'Sullivan is much nicer about this than I would be, insisting that psychosomatic illnesses are not any less "real" than those caused by viruses or bacteria. But occasionally the mask slips, as when she notes that a widely-circulated list of possible symptoms of long Covid included both "loneliness" and "feeling scared".

I don't know why young women in the modern era are disproportionately prone to malingering or diagnosing themselves with diseases and medical disorders they don't have. But they are.

On the flip side, I show my kids the original Pokemon cartoons. They teach the values of hard work, caring for those under you while still maintaining a strict hierarchy, respect, and other values which are harder to find in modern day TV Programming but are essential for a child. Trainers are in charge, Pokemon have to listen to them, so eat your veggies. Don't try to trouble the parental norm. Fighting authority is not a virtue. Things can be hard, do your best and you'll get better.

Trainers are in charge, Pokemon have to listen to them

Do your children identity more with the mostly non-sapient Pokemon rather than the human trainers?

Younger kids identify with Pokemon more, weirdly enough. The oldest plays a trainer, the younger three like being Pokemon.

But also it's more just the concept of natural hierarchy existing and being good. I find most recent kids shows avoid this topic entirely or portray natural hierarchy as bad.

But also it's more just the concept of natural hierarchy existing and being good. I find most recent kids shows avoid this topic entirely or portray natural hierarchy as bad.

It's an interesting question. On one hand kids really should listen to their parents. On the other hand a pokemon can never become a trainer and I think it's important for kids to realize, at least on some level depending on their age, that they are not going to be kids forever and the role of their parents is to prepare them for shouldering the responsibilities of a full member of society. I am reminded of Johnson's absurd defense of the British class system:

Mr. Dempster having endeavoured to maintain that intrinsick merit ought to make the only distinction amongst mankind. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, mankind have found that this cannot be. How shall we determine the proportion of intrinsick merit? Were that to be the only distinction amongst mankind, we should soon quarrel about the degrees of it. Were all distinctions abolished, the strongest would not long acquiesce, but would endeavour to obtain a superiority by their bodily strength. But, Sir, as subordination is very necessary for society, and contensions for superiority very dangerous, mankind, that is to say, all civilized nations, have settled it upon a plain invariable principle. A man is born to hereditary rank; or his being appointed to certain offices, gives him a certain rank. Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure[1307].'

It goes beyond the Pokemon/trainer dynamic - there are gym leaders and the whole thing leads up to massive arena tournaments with winners. But I see your point.

Raising a generation of subs.

God, I hate seeing parents with their toddlers on leashes. I wonder if they know what kind of deviant sexual appetites they're imprinting on them down the line.

It also teaches how to be a graceful loser, which is rather important, and I mean that completely unsarcastically.

If we're talking about anime, I'd like to spin-off in a tangent and note the increasing "Furry-ification" of anime conventions. I can't claim this idea as my own, as I saw it somewhere online, but I can't find the post now. It seems that in recent years (especially after COVID, for obvious reasons) anime conventions have become less about anime, and more about degenerate sex. This is just one example of the phenomenon. In fact, It feels that many cons that are internet adjacent (anime, comics, streaming, board games, video games, etc.) have just become places for people to practice their barely disguised sexual fetishes. In the case of furrys, this was always the point, but I've been noticing more and more that this is happening to almost every con. I'm not going to pretend that this didn't happen before (I've heard about the nasty Klingon orgies that used to happen in the 80s and 90s) but the fact that it's now so in the open bothers me.

I don't think this is merely a result of the lack of socialization for zoomers during COVID (although It's definitely a large factor) as the process started back with the millennials. I personally think that it's a result of a few factors:

  1. The type of people who go to these types of cons are generally more predisposed to being sexual deviants in the first place (see nasty Klingon orgies from before). There's that meme of people you think have orgies vs people who actually have orgies. The people who you think have orgies are the Chads and Stacies while the people who actually have orgies look more like the It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia bit.

  2. Society is now more lax regarding to weird sex shit in general. It's not really a controversial point to say that the sexual norms have changed even within the last 10 years. Especially nowadays, I notice that everyone online is extremely open about their weird sex shit, and it seems that they're just bringing that same energy to real life.

  3. What seemed extreme before is just the norm now. I still remember when being into feet was some weird sex thing that only degenerates and communists were into, but nowadays, everyone is into some weird shit that wouldn't even have imagined 20 years ago. I'll stop right there.

Regarding anime, what I would suggest is that even if you do let your kids watch anime, absolutely do not ever let them go to conventions, even with supervision, until they're adults. I don't think it's anime itself that's causing the weirdness. Anime is just a medium. Just like every medium, there are differences in quality. I don't think that even the most anti-anime person would be opposed to watching Spirited Away or Ghost in the Shell. It's the community. The community, while ostensibly being about anime, is much more about the community itself, so that actually watching anime or being a fan of anime is less important than being "a part of the anime community." Going back to the Feet Juice example, what exactly is the anime that they're fans of? What show are they showing appreciation for? Do the people that are buying the juice even watch anime? You don't know because anime is not the point.

All I can say is keep that nasty shit away from me.

There's that meme of people you think have orgies vs people who actually have orgies. The people who you think have orgies are the Chads and Stacies while the people who actually have orgies look more like the It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia bit.

It's never who you want to be polyamorous who is polyamorous.

Might have also meant this meme.

Painfully accurate, except the woman on the right is too slim.

Perhaps this lovely polyamorous and pregnant (at the time) Woman of Size will more align with your mental image. Nothing like a mixed-weight polycule to raise a child.

Oh God, bro do you know the ending?

I don’t, maybe for the better.

I do wonder what the prediction market odds would have been at the time for the eventual kid to be molested by one of the men in the polycule, the mother pulling a Casey Anthony, or one of the polycule men executing a murder-suicide.

According to Kiwi Farms, this article (may be paywalled; archive) covers how one of the men severely injured the five-week-old baby and was charged with child abuse.

@Sloot

Yes, that's what I was referring to. I recognised the woman's face and T-shirt.

When I first heard about this awful case, I intended to write a Substack post about what it implies about "identifying as" X. The moment's passed so I'll just post my thoughts here.

Children living with a stepparent (more specifically, a stepfather) face a vastly elevated risk of sexual abuse, violence or murder compared to children living with both biological parents. There are many competing explanations for this phenomenon, but no one really disputes that the phenomenon exists and can be observed in basically any country in the world. It seems that many men who would hesitate before striking or sexually interfering with a blood relative have no such compunction when it's the offspring of the woman they're dating. It's also interesting (and disturbing) to draw cross-species comparisons: when a lion becomes the new leader of a pride, the first thing he does is kill all of the cubs in that pride, as lionesses start ovulating again faster. Cheap way to ensure that all the cubs are related to him by blood.

I don't know how polycules with children work, but it wouldn't surprise me if all of the men dating this woman "identified as" the baby's father. But obviously, only one of them was actually the baby's father, and it wasn't the man who put that baby in the hospital. Just like a male person "identifying as" a woman doesn't in and of itself have any impact upon his capacity or propensity for violent crime, a stepfather who "identifies as" a baby's father doesn't magically stop posing just as much of a danger to that baby as any other stepfather would.

"Identifying as" is meaningless. If you have to say you are something, that's just another way of saying you aren't.

Theory: kinkiness and attractiveness are inversely correlated. Attractive people mostly have sex with each other, and having sex with attractive people is very satisfying, so attractive people tend to be fine with your basic make out/oral sex/vaginal sex, and don't need anything beyond that. Uglier people don't find it very satisfying to have sex with ugly people, and their ugliness makes it harder for them to find sex at all which drives them to online porn, both of which leads them to be kinkier.

I would love to investigate this formally. Ask people about their sexual appetites, then take photos of them and ask strangers to rate their attractiveness on a scale from 1-10.

Naw man. Kinky stuff is a nice bonus on top of how enjoyable sex already is. Sex with a 7/10 is pretty great. The sort of kinky sex you like with the same 7/10 is even better. Consider also: people who do kinky sex also frequently have vanilla sex with the same partners. IME a 50/50 split is normal.

(Conventionally) attractive people don't get involved in Polyamory(tm) they just fuck around. They don't get involved in the local kink scene, they just decide one day that they'd like to choke their gf during sex and their gf goes along with it.

Communities with rules and systems exist so that ugly people can, somehow, maybe, hopefully, talk their way into a situation where someone is required to have sex with them.

I don't think that even the most anti-anime person would be opposed to watching Spirited Away or Ghost in the Shell

I know a person who disliked GitS purely because the Major’s clothes were too skimpy…

I mean there is a lot of nudity in that film, only some of it justified by the story.

I can’t really disagree, though to be honest I am unsure how you’d classify the Major. I don’t think it’s entirely gratuitous, at least; I liked that scene where Batou drapes a coat on the Major where the implication is that she doesn’t really feel a sense of shame with the body she inhabits.

Regardless that does make someone who was “opposed to watching Ghost in the Shell” :P

Kusanagi is just canonically a pervert. And written by one.

So whilst I love GITS and think it's high art that has much to say about the human condition, it might actually be one of those occasions where the pearl clutching is at least appropriate.

Damn, is that in the original comics?

I don't remember this from watching the movie or Stand Alone Complex, but I might've missed something.

The movie and show act like they are making philosophical points. I'd say they aren't.

They're definitely pretentious (especially the film), and the political points in SAC2 just show the shallowness of the political setting despite some effort in fleshing it out.

Regardless, it's good fun.

The latest GiTS anime they're putting out caught alot of people's attention due to being an almost faithful one-for-one translation of the origional manga, complete with art-style.

Cue, that scene, where the Major is involved in some good, old-fashioned, immersive lesbian threesome cybersex only to get interrupted by a work call from Batou.

And people(cough cough tourists cough) are freaking out at such salacious fanservice only to have actual fans come in and say 'You dumbass, this is literally in the manga, fucking READ'.

On a less ribald note, people are also a little put-off by Kusanagi being a bit of a goof in said anime, where near every adaption previous had her be a super-serious super-badass super-cop.

Again, no, guys, she's always been this way. She can be your goofy angel, or your killing devil, depending on what mood she's in.

Hilarious, I might need to read it at some point.

https://bleedingcool.com/comics/recent-updates/kodansha-happy-publish-uncensored-ghost-shell-authors-desire/ . Unfortunately actually finding a copy of the scene that can be linked to is hard.

(The recent legacy edition is uncensored, however).

What the Vice article reports on can best be described as another manifestation of the male simping/simpdom epidemic. It's primarily driven by OF and is not directly connected to anime at all.

I suppose I'm on team "let kids have interests." Probably because that's the kind of attitude my parents took towards me and it seems to have worked out fine. Some of my interest in nerdier things came from my parents! I played Everquest with my father, step-mother, and brother back in the day. I watched anime on "normie" television like Toonami and Adult Swim. I read a lot of big fantasy door stoppers when I was young.

I think "anime" is the wrong level of abstraction for useful analysis. Like saying "books" or "fantasy." Are there works in any genre or medium it would be inappropriate to expose children to? Yea certainly. Are there works in any genre or medium it would be fine to expose children to? I think mostly yes. Certainly, there are child-appropriate anime. People in this thread have mentioned some. There's a certain kind of obsessive fandom that it is probably unhealthy to develop but you don't need anime for that (c.f. Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek).

On the more general question of "fitting in" as something abstractly desirable or that parent's ought to enforce I think it also depends. What are they being asked to fit in to? If it were normal to watch anime would the anti-anime crowd force their kids to watch anime so that they fit in? At least when I was growing up it was common for my parents to denigrate the idea of following what was popular just because it was popular. "If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you?" was a common rhetorical question.

"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."

I guess two points.

1. I am confident it is easier today than ever in history to find and make friends who happen to share your niche interests. Indeed, it seems like part of the anxiety about having "weird" kids is that they will have friends who are also "weird."

2. I am also confident everyone does this sometimes. I find it extremely unlikely any significant fraction of people spend all their time around people who have all the same hobbies and interests.

I suppose I'm on team "let kids have interests." Probably because that's the kind of attitude my parents took towards me and it seems to have worked out fine.

This is overly simplistic. Let kids have interests, unless those interests are truly beyond the pale. Everyquest, Star Trek, soccer, whatever. But not toasterfucking.

And indeed I think it's worthwhile for parents to teach children where appreciating something begins and where it ends up into fandom.

This is overly simplistic. Let kids have interests, unless those interests are truly beyond the pale. Everyquest, Star Trek, soccer, whatever. But not toasterfucking.

I see you're not a fan of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica reboot.

I can make an exception for Tricia Helfer

My concern is that anime leads to anime porn leads to degenerately building your sexual excitement pathways around bodily configurations and standards of appearance that a human body cannot compete with. When I'm with someone I want them to be excited about me, not wishing I had tentacles or was 10 feet tall.

One of my exes wrote smut in high school about Luigi and Daisy, and watched Overwatch porn despite not playing overwatch because the production values tended to be the best for her tastes.

The simple reality is that a small percent of people will always make porn out of just about anything. Anime isn't special in this regard, as the thousands of Harry Potter smut fics from 20 years ago attest.

I don't think tentacles are the problem, anime tiddies are. However, you can make the same (but weaker) argument against real porn as well. Porn actors of both sexes suffer from selection bias, being slimmer, fitter and with more developed and/or visually pleasing sexual characteristics than average porn consumers.

Sometimes I think the editors of Bravo, a German teen magazine that published full frontal nudes of its very average readers in each issue, were on to something.

Uhh... how did they not fall afoul of the authorities?

Because "it's not erotic, it's educational" (and as far as I know, that was actually true). Public nudity has never been as big of a deal in Germany as in the US.

I mean if you wanted to make that argument, the first things you should ban is professional models, movie stars and most of all social media and Tinder-like apps.

Maybe the Taliban is on to something?

As far as I can tell, the anime industry has only played a negligible if non-existent role in the cultural normalization and mainstreaming of pornography in the US and the Western world in general.

Some people are weird about anime, sure...

Does this really matter much? There are far worse things that can happen with kids, drugs for one. How many people got turned into zombies or mindbroken by anime vs drugs? Its rare for 4-5 people to be wiped out by a driver under the influence of Boku No Pico. Alchohol on the other hand does cause that kind of problem.

Let people enjoy things that aren't super bad for them.

The issue is more about the weakwilled and overly impressionable than the prevalence of anime or hentai or discord groomers. It's easy to not get groomed on discord. I'm all for public executions of 09A or 764 people, blow them away with an autocannon... But there are always going to be cults and powerful malign forces out there. Way more so with AI development. One can only imagine the toxic combination of AI and these nascent chaotic evil movements.

The issue isn't normie vs not normie or degen anime vs classic TV but strong-willed vs weak-willed.

Let people enjoy things that aren't super bad for them.

Well, that's the thing under discussion, isn't it? "Anime isn't as bad for you as hard drugs or being an alcoholic" is hardly a high bar to clear.

Alchohol is fine for most, harmful for some. OP was taking a shot at a teetotaller family.

Anime is fine for most, harmful for some. Probably much less harmful. Why have a complex about it and ban it?

I don't recall ever suggesting banning anime.

Is forbidden anime fitting in with the normies in 2026? I'm not so sure. I think it's closer to "we don't have a TV at home, we all read books after dinner together" in the 90s.

The older I am, the more I realize everyone is not normal in their own way. It's like how "the world's most typical person is male, Han Chinese, speaks Mandarin, is right handed and is 28 years old". But how many of us are like that really (the article says only 9 million people are like that). I suppose yes there is some kind of overton window of behavior, but how big does this overton window cover? If we pick the "middle 50%" there are still 50% of the people outside of this overton window. "I am large, I contain multitudes", many anime fans are "normal" people, you might not even realize they are anime fans, I personally was surprised at how many guys on the sales team watch anime (the dev team I wasn't surprised, I would be surprised if a dev isn't into anime).

It’s over. C.S. Lewis has already depicted you as the wojak, and me as the Chad.

Well, C.S.Lewis can be considered one of preeminent big C Christian small c conservative voices. When CSL calls you bad guy, you need to shut up and listen if you want to consider yourself conservative in good standing.

And it was clear that Scrubb family was meant to be bad from the first page of the book, and it was clear to intended readers, people of early 1950's, why.

This world is now as nonexistent as Narnia, so fully understanding this would need some unpacking.

So why Srubbs bad? Scrubbs are unwieldy combination of all things unpopular at the time, and lots of things were unpopular.

It is not only nonconformism of Scrubb family and their standing out of the English crowd.

1/They are COMMUNISTS.

Scrubb junior "liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools."

What sorts of books are this? Every reader in the early 1950's would instantly imagine Soviet propaganda books depicting land of workers as paradise on earth. And communism in general and USSR in particular were not well appreciated at this time.

2/They are HEALTH NUTS, possibly NEW AGERS

They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes.

the windows were always open.

Remember, we are in 1950's when boozing was part of life and doctors on TV recommended Lucky Strikes. What the Scrubbs think, that they are better than experts? Are they unchristian followers of some oriental superstition?

3/They are penny pinching MISERS

In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds

Remember, we are in 1950's, time of war recovery and rising prosperity all over the Western world, even in England.

People had jobs and money for the first time in decades. Buy and consume was the order of the day. If you could (and Scrubbs are depicted as respectable educated people, not utterly destitute poor) you should buy buy buy, fill your house with stuff, then throw it away to make place for more stuff.

Not going with the plan painted you as some throwback, Scrooge like 19th century miser.

4/They are NERDS

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card.

And not the useful sort of nerds, who are building computers, rockets and H-bombs to keep the commies at bay, but losers obssessed with useless stuff like beetles. Who needs it?

(MKULTRA research looking for new drugs and hallucinogens at all possible sources, including exotic insects and spiders, in order to fight for freedom and stand up to commies, was still strictly classified at the time).

You replied to your own comment, rather than to the comment that I think you meant to reply to.

This is silly. Everyone knew perfectly well the type he was pointing at, and it still works today because they're still fairly prevalent:

  • Communists
  • People unable to take any kind of joy in life, except a grim, smug pleasure in deliberate abstention
  • Again, people for whom deliberate asceticism and a love of debating how much better it makes them is the only source of joy in life
  • Casual cruelty disguised as scientific curiosity, only able to take pleasure in life when it's dead and in a cabinet.

Re that last line, you are reading it wrong, it's not:

Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles [...]

it's:

Eustace Clarence liked animals [...] if they were dead and pinned on a card.


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