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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34371 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Sex is physical, gender is emotional. Both are based in physiology, and both are accounted for in science.

Sex is hardware, gender is software. Software can be misconfigured, and it can be reconfigured.

Sex is a fact, gender is an experience. Experiences are reactions to apprehended facts.

Sex is hardware, gender is software. Software can be misconfigured, and it can be reconfigured.

An interesting description. If hardware was roughly as easy to modify as software, would you be indifferent as to which was altered to create harmony?

If the hardware was able to be transformed and/or upgraded with minimal side effects, and without vivisection in the manner of The Island of Doctor Moreau, I’d probably save up my money and try something new myself. The immutability of the flesh is a barrier to a great many new experiences of self which might be more harmonious.

Wait, how would you inherently avoid the vivisection? The only way I can imagine would be cloning a person, but modifying for the opposite sex.

Off the top of my head?

  • stem cell reactivation/homeobox gene shenanigans

  • clone a groin alone (via homeobox gene shenanigans), graft it in

  • nanotechnology magic/grey goo

I know none of these are anywhere near ready. But I've read about the "pockets" created by MtF surgeries with the risk of a persistent smell of excrement. I've read about the need for sounding rods after FtM surgeries. The idea of transformation is much more appealing than the pale simulation we can now carry out, and it's no surprise to me that the suicide risk is not so highly reduced by the current surgeries as the impression their proponents try to create.

We need a better "control panel" or "configuration file" for the "software", in any case. What we need to teach children is how to deal with the disappointments of life, with a consistent model they can use to talk with their parents or guardians, their spiritual leaders, and/or their psychological counselors. And that means we need to find such a model and show that it works. The current "elevation to trauma/abandonment" model used for unpleasantness and disappointment in conjunction with medications is clearly not working.

I've waxed poetic here before about how useful I've found the Fourth Step of the Twelve Steps, how many of my own past issues have been resolved with it. If everyone were taught a simplified version of it, there might not even be a need for as many X Anonymous meetings in the first place. I accidentally used it to resolve my own species dysphoria, and I find myself far less enthusiastic about the furry fandom than I did in my twenties. I still prefer tales of nonhumans among humans as a metaphor for my autism, and I love animal and anthro animal tales as much as ever, but my fandom is no longer driven by a pathological need.

The science of gender belief is what now?

Observations, correlations, and hypotheses, all based on the subjective reality of gender. Because our brain hardware is relatively close to identical, our subjective realities will all be relatively close to identical. But not identical.

That’s a bit hand wavy. Also these observations are generally frowned upon these days by trans activists, who support affirmation only. If there was a science then we’d use it.

Not sure what you're trying to do by reversing the letters but it just makes this post hard to read. Anyways, I don't think it unreasonable to refer to more social aspects caused by sexual dimorphism with the word gender. For example, consider the following - Men do manly things. One reason for this is that male individuals on average are more predisposed to doing manly things, but actually some male individuals are individually not suited for this. As a society there is a benefit to using the heuristic of sex instead of measuring individual aptitude for tasks in order to tell people what to do.

So, what men do is downstream of average sex differences, but not downstream of individual biology of particular individuals. We can refer to this concept as "gender". In a perfect meritocracy maybe gender can be dead, but in a society, it's sort of real.

I'm curious about how you're using "folklore" here. Do you consider any of the following to be folklore in the sense you've used here:

  • Fiat currency

  • The concept of debt

  • National borders

  • Adoptive parenthood

  • The line between a species and a subspecies

  • The line between a genus and a species

  • The concept of species

  • Laws

  • Rules of etiquette

  • Social hierarchies

  • Race

  • Skin color

  • Nationality

  • Citizenship

If you don't consider any of the above "folklore", do you consider them "real"? Until I understand exactly how you're using the term "folklore" here, I don't know if I can really say one thing or the other of the exercise you've done here. Do you believe that the "folkloric illusion" is stupid in other domains, or just in redneg? Do you believe that folklore requires evidence, or can cultures simply create castles in the sky that are locally relevant but seem strange to those outside those cultures? Do you think folklore can be important and useful, even if it isn't "real"?

Similarly, you make the assertion that "half the humans on this planet believe themselves to be the folkloric entity called 'namow'", but I'm curious how you would get to that assertion. Do you mean that if we properly map all folkloric entities in all cultures in some n-dimensional space, we would find a cluster somewhere that every culture would recognize they more or less have in common, and that in our field of redneg studies is called 'namow', and that each culture would independently identify the beliefs of 50% of humanity as being non-different from the proposition "I am a namow"?

Could we train a neural network for "namow" and "nam" and input empirical information we collect about individuals and train it to reliably classify people into these categories, in such a way that there would be broad agreement that the classifier accurately tracks namow-ness and nam-ness? Can a human brain be reliably trained to recognize namow-ness and nam-ness in at least some cultures?

Uh, I think the answers to the questions in your last few paragraphs are generally "yes".

I assume OP had something in mind they were trying to say with this new terminology, so I'm not taking for granted that that is the case. In fact, they make the claim that:

This division of illusory categories is not exactly precise, as confirmed by the abnormal illusion being suffered by that rare group of people who call themselves snart[^4]. The folkloric illusion may seem intelligent and real to many people, but it is stupid because no one can come up with any evidence for its reality beyond sexual dimorphism.

So we are told:

  • namow and nam are "folklore" and also that they are illusory categories without precise divisions (is being folklore the same as being "illusory" or is a distinction intended here?)

  • That being snart is an "abnormal illusion", which confirms that the illusory nature of namow and nam

  • That this "folkloric illusion" is "stupid" because no one can come up with any evidence for it beyond sexual dimorphism

I think one issue is that the referent of a few phrases is a little ambiguous in OP's short post. If the "folkloric illusion" does indeed refer to the redneg-related ideas of namow and nam, then I don't know if I agree that the only evidence for redneg is "sexual dimorphism." To me, the evidence for redneg is the same as the evidence for htog(!) or ome(!) fashion - sure, the exact boundaries of htog and ome are hard to define, but that doesn't mean they're not real enough for people to form a social identity around. They really need to connect the dots of why they think "sexual dimorphism" proves anything one way or the other about redneg, since it seems to be a term related to sex and not redneg?

And given their final statement, are we to understand that OP is a redneg abolitionist? That they want to eliminate the concepts of namow and nam? What would that mean in practice? How would we treat snart people in a redneg-less society? Are snart namow namow, in a society where namow exist? If redneg is a "religion" are other concepts like noihsaf(!) and swal(!) religions as well?

This seems to be your thing.

Unfortunately, you're still presenting it in a very low-effort and trollish way. Reversing letters to make your thesis sound clever is not clever.

"Gender is a delusion, trans doesn't exist."

Okay. And?

State your case plainly, and actually say something other than "This is stupid."

There are many out there, mostly progressives in my experience, who confuse open mindedness (verb) with open-mindedness (noun). The noun version of it often assumes that open-mindedness refers to a set of specific outlooks and convictions, and not the simple act of being open to new and/or different views.

I'm really gonna need some examples to engage with this.

This is also analogous to people who "believe in Science" i.e. agree with a set of opinions they have been told scientists support, as opposed to "doing science" i.e. actually investigating claims and being willing to change one's beliefs when presented with new data.

This is interesting and I think a good point (it's something I remembered doing as a teenager - conflating "being smart" with "agreeing with very smart people") but it isn't really sufficient for a top level comment. Can you add some detailed examples?

This is a bad top level post. It is low effort, boo outgroup, and lacks evidence. Don't do this.

I’m not seeing the “verb” version as a verb. Use it in a sentence.

verb - being open to new ideas

noun - a specific set of ideas that are regarded as the open minded ideas.

Seconded. Open-minding? Mind-opening? Not really seeing any such form used as the OP suggests.

Probably what the OP meant was something like open-mindedness as a practice as opposed to open-mindedness as an identity. Their noun/verb distinction is wrong and distracting.

I'll second the comment that this isn't enough meat to justify a top-level comment. But to build on the post, I think this is a part of a larger pattern I see, where some people believe in principles and some people don't.

A personal anecdote I've brought up here in the past is me noticing - and being surprised by - around 10 years ago how common it was for people in my leftist progressive circles to describe ideology and behaviors they disagreed with (usually right-wing and conservative) as "gross." This was immediately after the previous couple decades of us fighting for gay marriage and more broadly gay rights and acceptance under the reasoning that personal disgust reaction was something that ought not to carry any sort of moral weight, and thus all those conservatives who found gay people icky had no ground in refusing to accept gay people just as much as they accept straight people. Yet the exact same people - often the exact same individuals - were using their own personal disgust reaction to something as a way to denigrate it.

Around that time around 10 years ago was also when Atheism+ was formed as an offshoot from the existing atheism/skepticism online community. I believe this was the blog post announcing this intended schism, which I quote:

Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

This was intended as a contrast to the existing community which was really just that last bullet point in its core, though I would actually describe it more as "Atheists as a result of using critical thinking and skepticism." Most of the above bullet points have nothing in principle to do with atheism, but are rather sociopolitical positions that were popular among online atheists at the time (and likely still today). I came to realize that, for many of my fellow online atheists, the reason they had arrived at atheism wasn't so much due to trying to reason about the existence of a god as it was due to being a way to contrast their own beliefs against the religious conservative beliefs they disagreed with.

Going back to the gay acceptance issue, more recently, I had a conversation with someone here (can't recall whom, and this was several months ago) about liberalism and gay acceptance, and I tried to make the point that if someone doesn't viscerally find gay people disgusting or degenerate or whatever, then supporting gay marriage/acceptance doesn't indicate anything about their support for liberal principles (rather than the liberal side of the liberal/conservative sociopolitical divide in the US); it's only by supporting rights and acceptance for something that one finds personally disgusting or otherwise negative that one can actually meaningfully indicate their support for liberal principles. I recall not being able to make an argument that was convincing to that person.

My thinking is that this is partly/largely an influence of postmodern thinking. In a very real sense, the people that I found surprising are stepping one meta level above where I am; I take one step up from the object level and relying on principles, and they're taking one step up from that and picking and choosing the principles that allow them to arrive at their object-level preferences. I haven't thought about this much beyond this and how to resolve the turtles-all-the-way-down problem here, though. I also wonder if this issue is just as common in other sociopolitical circles, since humans have human failings everywhere, but I notice it more among my own circles. But postmodern discourse and way of thinking tends to be more dominant in the leftist world, so maybe not.

You get it. That's exactly what I'm referring to.

I really like your point about atheism. I've noticed something perhaps similar with the rise of being "spiritual". It more strikes me as someone wanting to have their cake and eat it too; they want the palliative benefits of religion without having to suffer from the way religion is regarded culturally. In other words, they want the benefits of religion but they also want to be cool and progressive.

Also a good point about true open mindedness coming from a place of principal and not simple agreeance. I do agree that the tendency to determine one's conclusion and then reverse engineer the argument is all too common. I suppose this has probably been common to some extent throughout human history, but what strikes me as unique is that this psychology has infected institutional thinking as well. It doesn't seem that there are really any adults left in the room on that regard; institution managers who engage in the boring, almost technocratic practice of simply assessing the information and then making the right decision based on that.

One of Scott's best posts is relevant here

Here's a question for you that is less war and more straight culture. What makes a piece of media truly inspiring? What qualities does something need to possess so that things based on it will be great? I don't mean this in the sense of expertly turning your IP into a multimedia franchise through judicious licensing or whatever. I want to know what happens in the case of something like Dune where licensing doesn't seemed to be handled well at all. Yet it still not only managed to spawn a great movie. It also inspired a legendary board game, hugely influential video game, etc.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

Tfw you write out what you think is a really cool topic of discussion, but forget that nobody else lives inside your head but you, so you just expect everyone to connect all the dots the same way you did instead of explaining yourself properly, so you spend the whole time getting frustrated that nobody is engaging with it the way you expected.

When you include a line like "What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?" you really should reiterate your specific target. Especially since it was the only sentence you broke out of the paragraph, you basically made it the flashpoint of your post. People try to read left to right top to bottom, but our eyes are drawn to areas of uniqueness, I'd guess a lot of people read the last line first and, if they were like me, had an inordinate amount of trouble focusing on anything else you said after such a cosmetically ridiculous statement (because it does make sense under your stipulations, but your stipulations are kind of confusing.)

Here's a question - can you think of any examples of this other than dune? Another piece of media that seemed to fuck up its licensing opportunities but still inspired some great licensed works?

Here's a question - can you think of any examples of this other than dune? Another piece of media that seemed to fuck up its licensing opportunities but still inspired some great licensed works?

Dragonball managed to produce FighterZ even though 90% of its licensed games are terrible.

Moreover, the license fits the game. Dune II may have been a successful game, but I don't get the impression that it was successful as a Dune game specifically.

I suppose Dune II didn't necessarily stand out for its IP, yeah--the reason it's even called that is because the other Dune game of its time was a weird adventure game (albeit with strategic elements, weirdly), and aesthetically, Dune II doesn't quite fit with the visual style of the Lynch film (though Dune 2000 and Emperor would change that).

But that being said, I think Dune as an IP does give a cool enough world that makes people want to explore it--lord knows that that's probably why Brian Herbert continues to crank out Dune spinoffs.

Your mention of Dragon Ball does make me think: Gundam is an IP that arguably could be so much more, though it hasn't done too terribly--I think it's more that Gundam could use a bitchin' simulationist game along the lines of MechWarrior or Steel Battalion. The only games that seem to have come even close to emulating the brutal, anyone-can-die combat of the actual anime are MSG 2.0 for the PS1 and the Side Stories games for the Saturn--and outside of the Missing Link remake(?) of the latter, those games are trapped in the past. Everything else is more fantastical, arcade-oriented fare like Dynasty Warriors Gundam or Gundam Versus, or RPG stuff like SD Gundam or Super Robot Wars. And all of that stuff is maybe a little too focused on referencing iconic moments from their source animes, rather than simply plopping you into the world of the Universal Century, After Colony, Cosmic Era, or Post-Disaster and letting you choose your story. The only other kind of game that Gundam has spawned that really sounds appealing is the Japan-only Gihren's Greed series of strategic games.

The only games that seem to have come even close to emulating the brutal, anyone-can-die combat of the actual anime are MSG 2.0 for the PS1 and the Side Stories games for the Saturn--and outside of the Missing Link remake(?) of the latter, those games are trapped in the past.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Crossfire (for PS3) is very down-to-earth—it's quite easy to be sniped across the map by Gelgoogs or Guntanks in later levels (or by Acguys in earlier levels). I've also read that Zeonic Front (for PS2) is very tactical in the style of the first Rainbow Six game, though I haven't played it.

Dune II may have been a successful game, but I don't get the impression that it was successful as a Dune game specifically.

Yeah, I loved that game as a kid, but when I got my hands on the book, I felt it's a big missed opportunity. The Dune universe is full of these little details that are begging to be translated into game mechanics - you can only reliably use infantry to move your forces around, anything mechanized is getting eaten by worms, unless you airlift it in the last possible moment, etc... it would be a lot of work to get it right, but you could have so much rock-paper-scissors stuff built around that.

I guess I'll throw my hat into this ring: to leave aside your specific examples, I suppose that it depends not only on the source material, but how to use its tropes. Maybe also other factors like how nerdy are the licensors and how memeable the IP can be.

Okay, I lied, I still had your specific examples in mind when I typed that sentence, but I'll use them to demonstrate my points in a way that can potentially generalize:

Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness. I'd heard that the Lynch movie was an honest-but-failed attempt at adapting the book, I knew about Dune II and how it spawned Command & Conquer and the rest of the RTS genre, I knew about some of the concepts (albeit if only because they happened to be referenced in TV shows I watched, like Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy).

I finally read the original novel a couple years ago and it blew my mind. Before, I saw it as a sci-fi epic for those with more elitist (read: pretentious) tastes, but afterwards I got it, I thought it truly deserved its place as a sci-fi classic. Again, though, something about it isn't quite as "proletarian" as, say, Star Wars. It's a thick and dense novel (quite literally, even with my paperback copy being the recent-ish edition by Ace/Penguin and being reasonably-sized dimensionally), and it's also technically incomplete on its own (that "I consume your energy" quote I've seen thrown about here and on the old subreddit a few times? That's from Messiah, the sequel novel that was originally supposed to be part of the original novel). It's political in every sense of the word, and the "elitist" vibe I got from it is because its message can be easy to miss (Messiah reportedly came as a shock to fans of the original who now saw Paul recast into the role of a galactic asshole--Herbert's intended message of warning against hero worship was probably undermined by, again, needing to chop off Messiah's story into its own thing). Still, Dune can be boiled down into a classic and relatable story about an unlikely hero who is tarnished by the world around him, even when he changes things for the better. The problem may just come down to the investment energy requirements.

LOTR, which I admit to not really reading or wanting to experience, may seem at first glance to have similar challenges. Isn't that source material also huge, with a lot of stuff to digest? Well, yes, but that doesn't stop its fans. It may just be because Peter Jackson got an incredible amount of opportunity to adapt Tolkien's work in more managable chunks, and with somewhat more deft care than David Lynch could afford back in the 80's. I think one factor, though, is that the movies gave people things to point to, in the form of memorable scenes, quotes, and memes. Through gargantuan effort, LOTR was boiled down to its more essential elements, then transmitted memetically in a way that people could latch onto and get invested through. By contrast, Dune mostly had references to the more memorably-bonkers stuff from the Lynch film for years.

The other thing is the worlds of these, well, worlds, and how enticing they might be to explore. I think a big problem you had with your OP was phrasing: perhaps you meant to ask why Dune has so much potential that was kind-of squandered, versus LOTR which was handled generally-well but hasn't rippled beyond itself in quite the same way as Lynch Dune or Dune II. To which, I'd answer that Dune and LOTR have had vastly-different impacts on their respective genres, and while no LOTR thing has changed a medium quite like some Dune things have (again, outside of the Peter Jackson movies, possibly), LOTR doesn't need to further define other categories of works in its own image. Both settings, however, do have their fans who might love to explore those worlds. Any franchise has the potential to go bonanza like this if the cards are right.

Dune, as a franchise, seemed a bit impenetrable to me, despite the available media. Maybe it was just that I never worked up the urge to actually read the original novel for whatever reason, but I often saw the novel as this mystery land of deepness and esoteric-ness.

I read the books in my early 20s and recently re-read the first 3 books in honor of the movie coming out and was immediately immersed. I completely agree with you that it deserves it's place as a classic.

I think the "problem" with adapting Dune and the reason that it has the reputation for esotericism that it does is that so much of the story and world-building happens "off screen" as it were. It happens in the little snippets of in-universe media that introduce each chapter, it happens in the footnotes about the empire's economy, and it happens in little vignettes were a piece of music will remind some character of an incident from their childhood. This works well when presented in the original format as an illustrated serial or as a bound book, but it presents challenges in adaptation. A classic example is the famous(infamous?) banquet towards the middle of the first book. For the those unfamiliar the book basically starts out as a spy thriller. The Atreides family (our protagonists) know they are being set up but not by whom or to what purpose. Paul Atreides is working the room at a state dinner trying to get a read on who the various factions are and who is plotting with whom. In prose it's a fairly important scene that establishes a couple of recurring themes, forshadows some of the main characters' future choices, and it advances the ongoing mystery plot by giving the audience some clues. However, if you were to do a straight translation of it to stage or film what you would get is basically 5 minutes of Paul making small-talk with a bunch of minor functionaries/side-characters while everyone else sips whine and looks pensive. It's just kind of hard to stage a scene where most of the action is happening in the form of internal monologues.

Edited to Elaborate

Yeah, it's a shame that amazing scene has been left out of both film adaptations, but at the same time, I don't know how you could include that in filmic form without going all Edgar Wright on Dune. And as you note, that's just one example of something that makes Dune difficult to process into other media.

Edgar Wright's Dune is an alternate history production i didn't know i needed.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

I question the premise that Dune is more fertile than Lord of The Rings. That said I think I understand the question that you're getting at will attempt to engage...

Related to my post last week on "Inferential Distance" I feel like one of the major assumption/axioms where blue tribe culture differs from the red is in the assumption that something that is popular cannot be good or worthwhile or vice versa. There seems to be this assumption that good art is supposed to be esoteric and inaccessible to the general public because how else is one supposed to demonstrate their superior education, intellect, and understanding. At the risk of coming across as uncharitable, the image in my mind is that of an insufferable hipster sneering at "all that shit" that the normies like

Meanwhile feel like history has demonstrated the opposite. The mark of "a great artist" is not being esoteric, or being admired by one's contemporaries. Often just the opposite. Historically the thing that has set a great artist apart is the ability to convey deep/complex themes to as wide an audience as possible, and I think that that is the true answer to your question.

What does 'blue tribe' mean here? Scott's Blue Tribe was "liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated". Some of these people are esoteric hipsters, but many, many more of them enjoy popular media, like popular music/movies/tv/, than try to one-up each other over short films they saw at film festivals.

In this context it means being a "Weirdo" IE western industrialized and educated, while also ticking the boxes of a secular, urban, hipster type. IE most of Scott's bullet points.

One thing that many popular fictions have in common is that engaging with them feels more like discovering than like inventing. For example, I can pose to myself and others the question of what Sherlock Holmes' childhood was like. Sherlock Holmes is fictional so any speculation that I or others do about his childhood is invention. But the fiction is so rich that one can enter into it, basing one's speculations on the known written material and the less effable "spirit" of the work, and it feels as if one were researching the history of an actual human being. Similarly, one can for example discuss with others what the relationships between Lovecraft's various invented fictional entities are, or speculate about the nature of Tom Bombadil, or write an essay about the motivations of the Bene Gesserit. The fictional universe is rich enough that it easily supports adding new creation to it because it has established a certain consistency and coherence of logic, flavor, and spirit so that one can pick up where the original creator(s) left off. It holds together. The boundary between what is acceptably part of the universe and what violates its nature is of course blurry and no two people view it in exactly the same way, but nonetheless pretty much everyone feels that there is some kind of difference between new creations that are more consistent with the fictional universe and creations that are less consistent with it.

20 years ago, it was LotR getting the Hollywood treatment while Dune was the flagship for an existing player's first forays into the miniseries format. How the tables have turned! Though Frank Herbert's Dune was well-received, probably because it occupied a sweet spot between passion projects and big budgets.

I'd say good media is the intersection of a decent premise and an artistic vision. Since we're talking about adaptations of famous works, the premise is already met. Then it's up to the director/producer/etc. to make a cohesive piece of art rather than a checklist. I know that's kind of a cop-out, but...that's the key. Design by committee reduces the risk of outright bad media at the cost of some of the good.

There's a whole other argument I want to make about market share, deconstruction vs. reconstruction, and postmodernism, but tonight is not the night.

Design by committee reduces the risk of outright bad media at the cost of some of the good.

Is is frankly astonishing to me how expensive some movies are and how few people are responsible for the artistic vision, even if it is a committee. It's even more astonishing if it's just left up to one producer. How is this kind of trust formed at all?

There's a hidden assumption in your astonishment that spreading the responsibility to more people would make movie production safer from a financial perspective. Is there a reason to believe that?

Indeed, some works shine thanks to the Auteur Theory.

Hmmm. I guess I don't have a solid explanation for why committees are safer. My vibe is that committees operate by consensus and this means individual weirdnesses get sanded down in the process, thusly ensuring the outcome is more firmly within bounds.

That's great in manufacturing or engineering, it's often detrimental in art and entertainment.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

I don't think that one has had clearly more franchise/influence success that LoTR, especially when one looks at their influence on science fiction and fantasy respectively.

However, I do think that there is an interesting contrast: Frank Herbert was deliberately an austere writer, partly because the easiest way to have a plausible and non-dated portrayal of the future is to leave a lot of details unfilled. Tolkien, meanwhile, often goes out of his way to fill his world with detail.

This does have the advantage that an adaptation of Dune can look like almost anything, and there are lots of details for imaginative creators to fill in, e.g. House Ordos (loads of houses in Dune, let's add a cool one), Lynch's uniforms for the Atredis, or Villeneuve's spaceships. Of course, you also get things like Lynch's Guild Navigators or Villeneuve's hilariously unsubtle understanding of the Voice, but that's the price of freedom.

Frank Herbert was deliberately an austere writer

Herbert, austere? Perhaps by modern standards but by the SF standards of the day he didn't hold a candle to most of the well-known writers, and not even close to Asimov.

I meant more in comparison to the average speculative fiction writer, and I meant mainly in terms of leaving out world-building details.

I had a similar reaction at first (pages and pages of Jessica drinking a cup of coffee?) but on reflection, Harlequin5942 is right - there's not much depth to the Dune universe. He tells us a lot about Arrakis, but mostly in the form of the history of the Fremen as it relates to Paul and the Atreides family. I don't really remember much about the story and history of the planet when it wasn't all about the Fremen Tough Guys.

And he mentions a lot of things about the Empire and so forth, but we get more "and this happened way back, and so-and-so lives on this planet" but not a lot of deep world-building. So there is a lot of space for adaptations, particularly in relation to games, to go whatever way they like - keep the visuals, but you can pretty much have Planet of Whatever, New Order, Sect, Guild, Society or Tea Rooms of That, and inventing all the original characters you like, because why not, who says they can't exist?

LOTR is a lot different. You can't just pop up with "oh yeah we have this new set of Elves", not unless you are going to fit them in to existing canon, and even if you go "Well they're Avari, that's why they look like a cross between Kenyans Maasai and Samurai" you will have to do a lot of fast talking to get that one to fly 😁

That's where Rings of Power fell flat on its face - it tried to crowbar in DIVERSITÉ and ENNNCLÚSION while keeping as near to the look of the movies as Warner Studios lawyers would let them go, and with not even two lines of "Okay, so Dísa is the black Dwarven princess from one of the Eastern Houses, this is why she doesn't look like the Khazad-dum Dwarves" to prepare the ground. Oh, you noticed our one (1) black Elf and our one (1) black Dwarf and you want more than "this is the 21st century adaptation" to explain that? You racist bigot hater!

At least in the very recent era of these IPs you can look at it like this: The people making Dune were trying to adapt the book of Dune. The people making the new Lord of the Rings show were trying to write their own prequel they made up and couldn't include anything from the Silmarillion.

Tbh after reading your other comments, this just reads to me like "Why is [thing I like] so much better than [thing I don't like]?". I hate the new LotR series just as much as anyone else, but I've never heard about the Dune video nor board games and even the current movie, while certainly not bad, is not even near the LotR film trilogy. Looking at review aggregators, wikipedia, etc., both the public and critics seem to agree with that as well. The board game has a small fandom with no larger impact. The Dune 2 RTS seems to be the only objectively culturally impactful piece of media following the Dune books themselves.

I don't dislike Lord of the Rings at all. I have read it four times. I'm rather disappointed by the trilogy next to Villeneuve's Dune, but only because I have high expectations for it. In fact, most Lord of the Rings media is underwhelming and forgettable. I tried a lot of Lord of the Rings media in the 90s and 2000s and most of it fell in that 3.5-6.5 range. It is so forgettable that (some) people disagreeing with me here didn't even know that Lord of the Rings branded media was being produced long before the movies. Compare that to most Dune media, which I have been very impressed by. Not because I prefer Dune, which I enjoy but have read half as many times, but because the media that is based on it is so consistently impressive by comparison to what Lord of the Rings has put out.

And while the board game is undoubtedly niche (as games that have been out of print since '84 tend to be), its impact upon board games is still huge. Unique, balanced faction powers are now common in board/strategy games.

Agree completely. The original LoTR movie trilogy alone trumps anything Dune has done.

LOTR also has a legendary board game, many popular video games, etc. So I'm not really sure what exactly you're trying to say is the advantage of Dune here.

I didn't ask about number. I asked about quality. Sure, Lord of the Rings has a great board game. Some of the video games are even pretty decent. But I'm talking about percentage of hits here. Lord of the Rings, for all of its numbers and popularity, is comparatively underwhelming when you compare the average quality of what it gets in comparison to Dune. Sure, War of the Ring is considered a classic, but what about Lord of the Rings that came before it? Or the Lord of the Rings TCG? Etcetera.

I mean if it's about quality and not numbers, one single classic board game (War of the Ring as you said) is enough. The others before it don't matter.

I will grant that Dune 2 is a legendary RTS and LOTR has nothing with that kind of legacy, but I contend that has little to do with the IP. They simply were making the right game at the right time, and had few to no competitors. By the time you had LOTR games being made (which I remind you are actually pretty good in many cases), there was a thriving games industry and the genres were pretty well established. I contend that something like BfME 2 is as good as Dune 2, it just was later on and so it didn't have the same impact. The IP didn't cause that.

Of course the others before it matter. It's an infinite monkeys on typewriters scenario. If you give enough people opportunities to make a game based on Lord of the Rings, one of them eventually is likely to be good.

And sure, on a technical level, Battle for Middle Earth is the more polished, later game. But that is sidestepping the most difficult part in creating, which is creating something new and dynamic. It is easy to make a similar game in hindsight, once it has already been done. And you are simply wrong when you say that there was no opportunity to make Tolkien-branded games while they were making Dune games. That just isn't true. They were making games. They even attempted a strategy game before Dune II. It is just forgettable.

We're going to have to agree to disagree. I think you are wrong on all points, I'm sure you think the same of me. If we can't agree on the basic axioms we're dealing with, then of course our conclusions will differ.

LOTR has nothing with that kind of legacy

Not quite, but there was a very influential adventure game:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit_(1982_video_game)

Presumably that's why, in Red Dwarf, as their generic adventure game, they hint at a LOTR game:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fYAlB1Kxayc

I think the one IP based aspect of the RTS template that easily could have converged towards very different designs is the focus on in-map resource extraction and economy. You can't make a Dune game without harvesters, but you can easily make a strategy game without actively managed economy units and harassing thereof. And many successful RTS's from this century have abandoned this aspect.

I wasn't even particularly looking for Dune-related insights, but this is definitely an interesting point. Thank you.

I mostly agree with everyone. Your estimation of Dune versus Lord of the Rings seems way, way off to me.

That said, I think you are still observing something. Dune, even today, is a wildly alien setting. I have no clue how alien Lord of the Rings was when it came out, but today after decades of copy cats and the whole fantasy genre being a tentpole of nerd culture, it's bog standard. This makes Dune infinitely more niche. Both works are profoundly fertile IMHO, but LotR has had people tilling it's fields for 60 years now. It's just about used up. Dune on the other hand, has remained comparatively impenetrable. Relatively few artist have dredged anything out of it's pages, much less successfully, compared to LotR. And there is ample thematic depth to explore in that regard.

That said, we are no longer a culture that seems to comprehend themes. Watch the 40 hours of documentary footage about Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson cared deeply about maintaining the vision and themes that Tolkien infused into his works. I know people argue about how well he did. But at least he wasn't actively striving to shit all over it, "update it for a modern audience" or "fix Lord of the Rings.". I'm so fucking starved for sincerity and integrity in my culture these days, rewatching LotR almost brought a tear to my eye it was so beautiful.

The themes of Dune are more complicated and nebulous. The first book is a traditional hero's journey. Or is it? The sequels really have you questioning what young Paul Atreides wrought. The series as a whole takes place on a massive timeline. I question the capacity of our culture making apparatus to grok what Dune is really about. It asks questions like "What makes for a stable civilization, and at what costs?" And "Can I be so good at fucking that my sexcraft is considered a bioweapon?"

Frankly I'm shocked I haven't seen more Dune porn parodies. Or maybe they wouldn't even need to be parodies, just straight up porn adaptation.

Regardless, the Dune universe always seemed like a post-singularity world of profound human suffering. It was about as opposite to Iain Banks vision in the Culture novels as could possibly be. Instead of machines granting humans endless lives of luxury, they had been extirpated utterly and completely, and instead humans were beat into the tasks of machines, often losing their humanity in the process. I don't know if Herbert intended these depictions of humans "accomplishing anything" to be aspirational, but the horrifically deformed and caged Navigators or the drug addicted Mentats always squicked me out. It's never been done justice, and I don't expect it to. I can only give David Lynch credit for at least making a movie as weird as the books were, even if it got goofy as fuck in places with the source material.

So what do you think makes Dune so much more alien? It can't simply be cultural. Western fantasy, at least as an aesthetic, has certainly found fans in Asia. Is it the focus on politics and big, weird ideas like transhumanism? Is it the focus on the macro scale compared to LotR, which made it less character focused but better lent to the strategy games that I ended up having to talk to so much about?

What makes Dune so alien is that the people aren't people anymore. I mean, a few are remotely relatable. Duncan Idaho, as he comes and goes throughout the story, is probably the most relatable. But everyone else has weird alien brains, acting on strange neo-singularity logic in a world that takes what we know of the human condition and pushes it to it's breaking point.

Yet there is no struggle in this. The world of Dune is so habituated to this strange alien condition, it's taken totally for granted. It's a society that regularly wrings the humanity out of children from birth so that they can serve the functions various machines used to, and nobody cares. It's a wildly fascinating, alien setting. But it's so distantly removed from our present understanding of the human condition, it can only resonate weakly with an audience in that way. It's main draw is it's sheer alienness.

So you have these two settings. One (LotR) is defined by good versus evil, overcoming bleak odds for the sake of home and hearth, and hope. The other (Dune) is about stretching the parameters of the human condition until things are no longer recognizably human. It's easy to make a game, or a movie, or artwork or song about the first. To do the second one, and do it proper, takes a skill and imagination I have not yet seen. Oh there have been serviceable Dune products. A board game, video games, movies, that ape the aesthetic or literal plot points of Dune. And the aesthetic is important. But I've never, ever, seen the themes of Dune accurately portrayed or grappled with in any follow on media.

I should quibble that, while Dune isn't as obviously bound into the DNA of sci-fi as LOTR is to fantasy, Dune still has left indelible marks on the genre as a whole. Besides the aforementioned Dune II and how it led to Command & Conquer, the books themselves and the ideas therein were practically ripped-off for a sci-fi/sci-fantasy franchise you might recognize: Warhammer 40,000.

40K has a lot of Dune's ideas: a powerful God-Emperor, technology reverted to a means rather as the be-all-end-all, the focus on humanity and its capabilities (albeit twisted and tinged, no doubt, by heavy-metal influences like 2000 AD), the freakish Navigators that space travel relies on...

40K also has that "profound human suffering" part down pat, albeit for different reasons (in 40K, the human race as a whole commits great evil against others and itself in order to have a fighting chance against Moorcock-influenced endless evil). 40K isn't quite as interested as being as deep as Dune (at least, depending on the writer). After all, it is a wargame franchise, meaning there must always be war (which is literally part of the game's tagline!), and one of the popular sayings from the universe is "Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment." However, again, depending on the writer, the grand saga of the Imperium of Man can be about the human drive to survive and flourish, about how hope and unity can keep one strong in the face of evil.

The only other sci-fi franchise I can think of that uses some of the same tropes as 40K and also gestures broadly at the ideas of civilization, war, and stability is the other major sci-fi wargaming franchise from the 80's: BattleTech, the game and world created when Jordan Weisman picked up model kits/miniatures at a trade show and imagined a world not unlike the medieval, post-Roman-collapse world, but where giant anime robots replaced horses and knights and where kingdoms stretched across lightyears.

Star Wars has also obviously ripped a shitload from Dune. There's also an intergalactic emperor, a main character with a biblical first name (Paul -> Luke), a large part of the original firm takes place on a desert planet, the whole medieval/futuristic combination etc. More listed here.

If one accepts the Castalia House thesis that D&D actually didn't borrow much at all from Tolkien and was more indebted to pre-LotR pulps, one might indeed make an argument that Dune is at least as important to scifi as a genre as LotR is to fantasy. Of course, that is a big if.

Fuck without rhythm!

And you won't

Extract

The sperm.

Dune

Fertile

I'm sorry, what

By your own account, you think Dune licensing is mismanaged. And you still call this fertile?

Fertile means bountiful. There's much less Dune stuff than there is LOTR stuff. It might have something to do with the way LOTR invented a whole genre of fantasy fiction and then had a very popular and well-received movie trilogy that continues to live in the minds of "normies" long after it succeeded.

I think Marvel is heavily mismanaged, but still fertile. Just none of it is any good. They keep growing garbage. They keep making more and more of it, but it sucks.

They don't make a lot of Dune. Dune media is as parched as the desert it comes from. Had the newer movie not come out - a movie where even the company funding it was unwilling to commit to wholly and was on record not being willing to fund the second half before they saw how people reacted - I think licensing it would have been dirt cheap. I also don't think Dune is all that great, although it definitely fills its world with a ton of ideas and is quite rare in the world of schlock-sci-fi in terms of both its scope and breadth.

You could probably say the same about WH40k; a similarly rich and expansive world in scope, which takes the distinct opposite approach to licensing by shotgunning walls of flak at everyone in exchange for cashing big royalty checks from as many sources as possible, with a net result that maybe 15-20% of their licensed work is worth anything at all.

What makes a piece of media inspiring is a terrible question because what inspires people will vary from person to person. If I had to take a blind stab at it, I'd say it would probably have to do with stories that try to grasp at universal things about the human condition.

I think the enduring power in the LOTR work is that it posits the existence of clear good, clear evil, and that the corrupting presence of evil is not defeated by martial might or using evil against evil but by the willingness of small, humble beings from nowhere to sacrifice. These are things that speak to the human understanding of the world and the nature of evil.

Granted, I think the first Blade movie is Great. I also think Nabokov's Pale Fire is Great, and I think the Lives of Others is Great. I think all of these things are wonderful for entirely different reasons. I don't want things that are based on these intellectual properties, much less think they'll be great at all. Yes, even the Wesley Snipes vampire movie. The more of this we got the worse it gets. They fail (or succeed, rarely!) on their own merits, but I would not call anything based on the intellectual property great simply because it belongs to the same intellectual property.

That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.

That way lies Star Wars. And the more you look at Star Wars as an IP, the more you realize that sometimes dead truly is better.

Yes, I'm surprised when people are surprised that new Star Wars stuff is rubbish. There hasn't be a truly great Star Wars film for 40 years (arguably longer) and the heyday of Star Wars franchised stuff was the 1990s, I think, with some great Lucas Arts games from that period.

Creative success is one of those highly unpredictable evolutionary processes whose outputs look better on average than they are, because we tend to forget the detritus.

There has been a bunch good EU content though. My assumption was that similar to marvel Disney would try to pick through the material and more or less loosely adopt the good stuff.

This seemed like such an easy (and already proven within the company) recipe for success that I couldn't really imagine massive failure. The property isn't super complex and the fans are not very needy. And yet..

I think that it's at least 10 years too late to create a fun expanded universe. Too much PC, too much safety-first writing. Even the Marvel stuff doesn't interest me, except at the margins where some really vivacious creativity sneaks in e.g. the Guardians of the Galaxy films.

I think I would have to go back at least 20 years to find any Star Wars creativity that I thought wasn't just good, but great. I mean, there are still good Bond films, but I haven't seen a great one since Goldeneye nearly 30 years ago.

What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?

This paragraph threw me for a loop. My impression is that Lord of the Rings is way more of a cultural Thing compared to Dune. Like, there also LotR video games? Action adventure, turn based RPG, RTS, even an MMORPG! There are movie series both live action and animated. All these vary wildly in quality so I'm not sure savvy licensing is the reason for their existence and success. Not to mention Lord of the Rings influence on the development on fantasy as a genre of media in general.

Apologies for not commenting on the more general question on your post, which I don't have many thoughts on, but feels like a very specific cultural bubble to regard Dune as more fertile ground for inspiration than Lord of the Rings...

Right, but that is why I chose Lord of the Rings for comparison. For all of its impact, for all the media based on it directly and indirectly, it has a much worse pound for pound showing than Dune. Sure, it has a forgettable RTS, but Dune II practically invented the genre. Sure, one of the Lord of the Rings board games ended up being great, but Dune has, again, a hugely influential game that people loved so much they were still playing it when it had been print for nearly 30 years.

Was this just luck that Dune has such a stronger showing than a more popular, older IP? Or is there some quality that can be analyzed?

So could your question be rephrased as "why do Dune-licensed games have more impactful/genre-defining mechanics than LotR-licensed games"?

No, because I wanted a more universal examination. People just got really attached to the Lord of the Rings and Dune game comparison. Even the licensing aspect was less about importance for the principle and more about trying to head off nerdy arguments about what counts as influenced by these books. (E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?)

I mean, if comparing Dune II to War in Middle Earth is a particularly useful comparison for insights, sure, compare away. But I was hoping for universalizable principles here, not just comparisons of these two franchises.

E.G. how much inspiration does Star Wars take from Dune?

None. They both take inspiration from the same well, but Star Wars is much more open about the roots in the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Star Wars starts off with "desert planet" but then leaves that behind for the basic "rayguns and rockets" plot (and none the worse for it).

Dune is Morocco IN SPAAAACE and the Fremen are Berbers IN SPAAACE and he is a lot more pretentious than Lucas about it all. Both of them are planetary fantasies, but Herbert is all "deep environmentalism philosophy man" and Lucas was "and then pow! zap! space battles! stormtroopers! smugglers in starships! the good guys win!" so he's a lot more fun.

They both take inspiration from the same well, but Star Wars is much more open about the roots in the Saturday morning serials like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers

It also lifts a lot of plot and characterization from a specific Kurosawa movie. Mostly changed for the better but the parallel is very transparent.

Aside from generally being unpleasant and mischaracterizing my post, I'm not sure what your point is.

Are you mad that I'm not listing more fun Dune media? That I'm not getting further into the weeds? Or do you think that talking about another game that you have already described as fun and unique somehow disproves my point about Dune having disproportionately better media than Lord of the Rings?

What do I have to argue against, even if I wanted to? You say that Dune II is mostly generic with its ships and units, as if that is somehow a strike against the idea. But a couple of other people already made the point that the ability to fill in the gaps and details of Frank Herbert's universe is one of the things it has going for it when creating media.

Are they wrong? Maybe. Feel free to make that argument. It could be interesting, but you haven't actually made it yet.

Instead you seem to think you have proven some point when all you have done is attack me, state some facts about Dune games, and declared that I am "wrecked" because of my "grand-sounding theory."

If you step out of your weird fanboy-rage for a second, you'll see that I don't actually have a theory at all. I have three statements, only two of which are at all controversial. One is the assertion that some media inspires higher-quality derivatives than others (even if the media itself is not necessarily higher quality). This is a hypothesis. It has none of the characteristics of a theory because it is currently a blank page. A thesis statement looking for a body.

My second assertion was that Dune has inspired quite a lot of high-quality media. This was an illustration of the hypothesis. Because abstracts without concrete examples don't get engagement.

My final assertion, the one that seems to have filled you with such weird, fanboyish rage, is that Lord of the Rings has a much lower average level of quality. This is also part of the illustration for comparison and contrast. This isn't a theory. Now, I'm not going to say that I don't understand why the statement is controversial, and I'd be happy if people were disagreeing in a way that even broached the thesis statement, but again, you aren't doing it. You haven't even actually engaged with the concept.

You are so mad that you think that you can somehow knock down my "grand-sounding theory" without even engaging it. You can't. Even if you were to somehow prove that I am totally wrong and Lord of the Rings has much higher quality media, that still wouldn't disprove my hypothesis. Because that would just fit the hypothesis in the opposite direction.

I didn't use the word prove, so I don't understand why you are once again attributing words to me to mischaracterize what I wrote. Is this intellectual dishonesty or just poor reading comprehension?

Edit: Oh, you think I "accidentally" admitted that this is unfalsifiable. Just poor reading comprehension, then.

More comments

LOTR's MMO was one of the best MMOs. For things outside of the movies, which LOTR still easily claims the better of them, Dune's universe is a bit more interesting when it comes to speculation. Middle Earth has a history. Dune has stuff. Its easy to create any sort of war or resource game (Age of Empire or Settlers of Catan IN DUNE)

Define "stuff."

Thousands of theoretical houses governing planets who could be at war with each other for any made up reason.

I mean, hell, you could make a strategy game depicting the Jihad as it happens between the original book and Messiah. Have two campaigns; one where you play as the Imperial house and work your way up to eventually meet face-to-face with Emperor Paul himself, and one where you're fighting for a band of houses trying to survive the wave of galactic murder Paul's ascension to the throne has unleashed.

That could be a fun 1P game, but RTS Dune is just low hanging fruit. You can be the Atriedes, the Harkkonnens, the Corrinos, etc.

It is not obvious to me that "a Dune video game created the RTS genre" and "there was a Dune board game so popular people played it decades after it was out of print" is sufficient to conclude "Dune had a stronger showing" than Lord of the Rings in terms of cultural inspiration.

The influence Tolkien's worldbuilding and method of storytelling on fantasy as a genre seems difficult to understate. Not just on directly LotR inspired works but across a range of intellectual properties and media types. This is not to say Dune wasn't influential or inspirational but it does not really compare, to my mind.

But this is just vague handwaving. I'm not arguing the popularity of Lord of the Rings or its cultural impact. I'm talking about the impact, in turn, of the licensed media that followed.

Lord of the Rings, as a book series, is hugely impactful on the culture. Lord of the Rings the multimedia franchise is, on average, middling and most of it will be forgotten. Dune, on the other hand, has been less impactful overall. Yet, despite having far less adaptations and licensed media (before the most recent movie. I'm not young and free enough to keep up with everything that is coming out now), what exists is both of a much higher average quality and often hugely impactful on their own mediums.

Just shrugging that off is simply being obtuse and ignoring the actual subject.

Then maybe that is where I'm misunderstanding what you're asking. I was thinking of the two works in terms of their broad cultural impact, not of just the impact of their licensed multimedia. In that case I think there is a case to be made for the original Lord of the Rings trilogy of films but that's about it innovation wise. I have enjoyed a lot of the Lord of the Rings games but I don't think they did anything particularly innovative, certainly not compared to what Dune seems to have done (I haven't played it myself).

On the one hand, I'd say this actually must be my fault in writing clearly because almost everyone is responding with a focus on the books themselves rather than the larger multimedia franchises.

On the other hand, I am mostly getting a lot of tears about how the Lord of the Rings trilogy is better and posters didn't even know that the board game existed so how impactful could it be? All without even engaging the question. High decouplers? Yeah, okay.

I think there's two different things being claimed.

Is the tie-in media for the Dune franchise better than the stuff produced for LOTR? Possibly. If you mean Rings of Power oh hell yeah.

Is the tie-in media for the Dune franchise more influential? Again, maybe, but I think it's more in the "niche sphere where people really really care about the RTS genre" and not "general game-playing public". I haven't played any of the LOTR games and I remember back when they were issuing board games under the licence, but I've heard about them and seen them advertised. I honestly don't remember seeing anything for Dune media.

What you said at the end there - that there’s Dune related media that’s “hugely” impactful isnt clear at all. I can’t think of any.

Dune has produced one bad movie and one good movie.

LOTR has hugely influenced fantasy, music, video games and mich more. Dune has nothing much

I'd say Dune's resulted in some bangin' music.

Before clicking the link, my guess was this.

Are we forgetting Peter Jackson's LotR movies? They were far more impactful and frankly better than any Dune movie.

Also, LotR basically spawned the fantasy genre. Even within the LotR franchise, there are countless books that spun off from the main series.

I don't understand how you came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings adaptations are less inspiring than Dune's unless you are ignoring the Peter Jackson trilogy entirely. Those are some of the most culturally significant films in recent memory. Not a month goes by where I don't hear someone quoting Gandalf, sharing a meme about the One Ring (this is one I encountered last week), comparing their political opponents to orcs, or otherwise referencing them. While Dune has also had a significant impact, this influence went under the radar for many people until the recent movie release.

For what it's worth, I had never heard of the board game until now despite having read all 6 of Frank Herbert's books and most of the Dune Encyclopedia. Most people I talk to about Dune know it has something to do with a desert, spice, and sandworms, but I am far more likely in my experience to find someone able to recite Théoden's speech at the Pelennor Fields from memory than I am someone who can recall the Litany Against Fear. If you are only looking at the most recent adaptations and comparing the Denis Villeneuve film to the Rings of Power show, then of course Dune wins hands down, but that hardly seems fair.

If your question was more narrowly focused on Dune II and the Dune board game being genre-defining as compared to LOTR strategy games and board games, then I'd wager that due to Dune's lesser cultural significance than LOTR and somewhat freer IP, developers were more willing to take risks and innovate than they would have with the Tolkien Estate breathing down their backs. Looking at the source material, it's clear that Tolkien left a lot more to work with than Herbert, so if it were a true free-for-all I'd bet on some Silmarillion adaptation wiping the floor with the best Dune has to offer (though if someone other than Brian Herbert wrote a proper Butlerian Jihad story that might stand a chance).

To be fair, the Dune RTS game was a genre-defining phenomenon.

But I agree with the overall sentiment!

I thought about that, but the Dune RTS was genre-defining in large part because of when it came out. It was easier for a game to stand out in those days.

Hi all, I was just curious on the opinions around here that people have regarding the paranormal? These types of events are also known as High Strangeness (theres a whole subreddit dedicated to it).

I've personally witnessed things throughout life that I can't properly explain and reading books, such as Surviving Death by Leslie Kean, has further reinforced my view that there really are things going on around us that one day may be understandable but elude us right now, such as UFOs (which are now being taken more seriously by the media).

I know this community has many smart people in it, who might be understandably sceptical if they havent witnessed anything paranormal first hand, but I think the study of high strangeness would massively benefit by more intelligent people taking it seriously.

Does anyone have interesting stories they could share of things they've witnessed that are unexplainable?

It's not often we tell someone to move a post in the other direction, but I think this would be more suitable to the Small Scale Question Sunday thread than the Culture War thread.

Elon is still making changes to twitter

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1637198368714772486

In the coming weeks, Twitter will prioritize replies by:

  1. People you follow
  1. Verified accounts
  1. Unverified accounts

Verified accounts are 1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies.

There is great wisdom to the old saying: “You get what you pay for.”

"1000X harder to game by bot & troll armies" Really? It seems like scammers have no trouble getting verified accounts: https://www.theverge.com/23379133/twitter-instagram-verified-account-for-sale-scam-criminal

Also, not to mention that verified accounts tended to be the ones who are woke and the most critical of his management, so why would Elon want to give them priority? It's already bad enough that there are more ads on twitter. Now giving more priority to blue accounts will make it worse.

This seems like a bad idea

From the article you linked:

Pearl was familiar with the email content’s theme as it resembled previous automated correspondence from Twitter — featuring a minimal white background, black text, and blue links.

Fearing her account’s safety, Pearl clicked the link inside the email that supposedly would instantly let her secure her account and entered her existing password on the following webpage to update it.

Moments later, a message arrived in a Telegram group. All it contained was a screenshot of Pearl’s Twitter profile and a link. Three hours later, the admin texted, “Sold.”

Pearl had fallen prey to a phishing attack. The email wasn’t from Twitter but from a hacker who had copied the look of an official Twitter message.

This doesn't seem like anything new, let alone related to the new Twitter Blue system. "Impersonation of official communication" is an age-old "social engineering" attack. Hell, the article predates Twitter Blue, and has more to do with the prior crypto-craze that's even led to things like the hacking of Discord bots.

I assume Elon's bet is that $8/month is too high a price for normal spammers and scammers to bother with. Phishers will always be a problem, yes, but again, we've had literal decades of trying to warn regular people to be vigilant against cyberattacks. Maybe it'll be worse when there's more bluechecks, but that's the other thing: the value of the bluecheck is not as high in the eye of the beholder, or, rather, the signal changes with the ubiquity of the check. Pre-Elon, the Blue Check was generally taken as a warning sign that the holder was a sanctimonious opinion-holder who leaned left. Post-Elon, "you paid $8 for a checkmark" has become the new lazy insult on Twitter. If the worst-case scenario you imply were to come to pass, why would the response not be "most users scroll past the checkmarked tweets"?

From that small excerpt, all I can say is that Pearl is an idiot. How many of these kinds of emails does everyone get everyday? I've had urgent messages about my account with such-and-such being compromised, and they look legit - but since I never went near such-and-such and have no account, I know it's a fake.

Anyone above the age of reason who clicks on a mystery link in an email, in this day, is an idiot. Sorry Pearl but it's your fault, not Musk's fault.

From that small excerpt, all I can say is that Pearl is an idiot. How many of these kinds of emails does everyone get everyday? I've had urgent messages about my account with such-and-such being compromised, and they look legit - but since I never went near such-and-such and have no account, I know it's a fake.

Anyone above the age of reason who clicks on a mystery link in an email, in this day, is an idiot. Sorry Pearl but it's your fault, not Musk's fault.

It is shocking to me, as someone whose job is basically helping small business owners deal with technology, how resistant people are to learning basic internet safety habits. There are often two or three clear signs that these emails are fake and a very simple way to verify without clicking any links in the email. Fortunately, I've trained several of my clients to forward suspicious emails to me, so I can confirm their suspicions, but it really isn't very hard and we've had 20+ years of life-training on this by now, haven't we?

Also, not to mention that verified accounts tended to be the ones who are woke and the most critical of his management

You don't use twitter, I believe.

While I'm willing to believe this statement (I think Grey has mentioned not using it before), I'd like to see evidence countering what you quoted.

Journalists used to be one of the foremost classes of Blueticks (back before it was a pay-to-play feature) and tend to lean pretty left.

Current demographics are a lot harder to track since it's gone to a subscription service.

The old school verified accounts/blueticks definitely tended to align with Wokeness.

These days it's far more of a mishmash of whoever's willing to pay.

I keep hearing whispers that Twitter is doing away with legacy bluechecks. Did anything ever come of that?

I can’t believe Elon is still trying to get people to pay $8/month. He still doesn’t get it. Power Tweeters (i.e. the people who might care about bluechecks) aren’t Twitter’s customers. They are Twitter’s primary product. Their purpose in the Twitter ecosystem is to attract eyeballs (ordinary users). These eyeballs are the secondary product which is sold to advertisers for $$$. Trying to extract money from the primary product directly is both inefficient (there are far less power Tweeters than ordinary users) and counterproductive (you run the risk of driving your most valuable assets away).

Yes. They were mostly converted to yellow piss marks.

I can’t believe Elon is still trying to get people to pay $8/month

$8 is nothing. Lots of Americans have bought it for the convenience.

Trying to extract money from the primary product directly is both inefficient (there are far less power Tweeters than ordinary users) and counterproductive

As to the $8 blue checks, I believe you're going to join the august company of people who thought they knew better than Elon Musk and didn't have basic physics on their side.

I keep hearing whispers that Twitter is doing away with legacy bluechecks. Did anything ever come of that?

It's a two-tiered system, which adds to the confusion. Old, legacy verified users are grandfathered in: no fee. New verified users who are notable do not need to pay the fee. Everyone else does.

And a lot of people, including me, use a browser extension that reveals if the checkmark is legacy or paid. There's another toggle on the extension to hide paid checkmarks completely, which is very funny to me. You can also opt to show them in comic sans font.

I actually think the For You option (versus just showing your followed accounts) is where I find a ton of interesting tweets and new people to follow. I see people complain about "horrible politics" on their For You feed, but surely that's related to what they interact with?

The workaround for anyone who dislikes changes to Twitter is to use lists to follow only the people you find interesting and use the 8 Dollars extension. Then it's just like old Twitter.

Yeah. Charging them for Twitter is like charging the Attractive women for Tinder and not the males.

You are confusing two blue checks here. The one you are talking about is the historical blue check. The new one is about the ordinary guy getting some features.

Does anyone have a good model for Elon's thought process here? I do not see him deriving any satisfaction from his current role at Twitter.

Investing effort as the CEO of a Social media product seems like a big step down from being known as a Tech Entrepreneur in the Electric vehicle or commericial Space aviation space.

Getting into fist fights on Twitter trying to squeeze non advertising revenue from a social media product seems like the least interesting and the most self-defeating thing to do. The general population is now accustomed to getting Social media for "free". It's a losing battle to make them pay for it with the glut of other "free" options.

Does anyone have a good model for Elon's thought process here? I do not see him deriving any satisfaction from his current role at Twitter.

Epistemic status- Confident: I think he originally bought Twitter because he thought it was a morally good thing to do, that he would bring back free speech, even though it'll be at a small cost to him because the return on investment would be lower than if he just kept his 55 billion in Tesla stock. But when he bought Twitter, it caused advertisers to flee, because they don't want the bad PR of being associated with free speech Twitter. Elon realized he massively over paid for Twitter, and has since been scrambling to make Twitter remotely profitable, and not go the way of Tumblr after Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion and sold it for 3 million.

Epistemic status- I think this is true but I'm far from sure: I also think he gets caught up in internet arguments and drama the same way lots of normal people do. Lots of people share memes and get into pointless arguments on the internet. Elon is the same, but just has far from eyes on him than anyone else. He's probably relatively unbothered by the abuse that gets most celebrities to stop getting into constant culture wars. Also, he knows that his tweets going viral from people hating him still gets Twitter views and in the news cycle, so him saying something dumb often earns him more money than him saying something smart, at least in the short term.

Also, I don't think trying to turn Twitter into a subscription model is a bad idea. Ads, even when your site isn't blacklisted by a lot of advertising companies, pay very very little. If he can get even a very small fraction of users to subscribe, it can easily out earn advertising. For example, Tumblr introduced their own parody checkmarks(you get 2 for $8!) after Twitter start selling them, and the Tumblr app gained $263,000 in consumer spending since the paid verification scheme was launched, which amounts to a 125 percent boost in iOS in-app revenue(https://mashable.com/article/tumblr-twitter-blue-tick-revenue). Which is a pretty massive amount for a joke.

And my guess is Twitter will make a lot more than 263k per month on check marks.

The reason why Elon went with $8/mo is that is the amount twitter makes of a user in ads. By switching making revenue to the user instead of to advertisers, he's hoping Twitter will become less beholding to advertisers controlling what can and cannot be said on twitter and making it a more open platform.

Whether this will work is something to be seen as Elon went from Reddit's messianic hero good boy to super-evil megavillan in the blink of an eye, but I understand where he's going with this.

I remember someone writing a post/substack about how valuable the blue-checkmark is and that it should be 10k+ to maintain one for products, corporations, and/or power users. Maybe they'll create a higher tier for super users as well? Who knows.

I haven't used twitter in years so I'm just speculating. I just don't find that it's worth it to use.

It doesn't strike me as a terrible idea from a moderation perspective, but it might damage the product from an end-user perspective. I haven't been impressed with his management of Twitter at all. He didn't even unban all accounts like he said he would, nor has he stepped down as CEO like he said he would. He wants so desperately to be cool in a certain way, and that only makes him all the more lame.

He unbanned Kanye and Nick Fuentes, but then promptly re-banned them. Not unbanning Alex Jones was weak though.

Link from my blog SVB failure: the limitations of moral hazard, and the difficulty of assessing risk

The moral hazard and regulatory arguments are generally inadequate at explaining or preventing future banking crisis, like the collapse of SVB. There are so many ways banks can fail, or triggers that can cause a cascade of failure, that regulation is always chasing a moving target. SVB was actually capitalized well within the guidelines of Dodd Frank but it still failed.

Moreover, assessing risk is also really hard, even for professionals/experts, and even when all the information is known. SVB was done-in by needing to raise additional capital from a $1.8 billion bond market loss (out of a $22 billion investment). That is it. We're not talking hundreds of billions of dollars like 2008. In the grand scheme of things, this is peanuts. Yet it spiraled out of control, and the bank was insolvent 2 days later.

If you read the original press release from SVB on March 8th, nothing about it screams "this is fucked". It's like "We need to raise some money because we lost some money on bonds." If I read it and had to make a judgment call, not knowing what transpired, I would have said it was not that big of a deal (bad news, yes, but not catastrophic).

Overall, it is easier or more practical to just have to suffer with occasional bailouts, than aspiring to some unobtainable ideal of a financial system that is immune from ever failing. Bailouts are bad, but so are second order effects from economic contagion.

Would government bail it out if it was Lumberjacks and Oilfields Bank and not Silicon Valley Bank? Are 100% sure? Otherwise, politicians are stealing from everyone and rewarding their friends as usual.

You prevent a lot of crises by setting capital requirements to 50%.

Moreover, assessing risk is also really hard, even for professionals/experts...

I would actually take the opposite view, assessing risk is actually deceptively easy. The problem is that there is no reward without risk, and one of the most pernicious and pervasive ideas in all of human experience is "that it won't happen to me" that we are smarter faster or just plain better than all those other suckers when the truth is that we're not. As the old line about motorcyclists goes, "there are two types of rider, those who have gone down, and those who have not gone down yet"

No one is actually allowed to run a ~0 risk bank which would just keep money at the FED. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/safest-bank-fed-wont-sanction

Some of Curtis Yarvin's essays from the Great Financial Crisis are quite enlightening. I think maturity transformation is just fundamentally bullshit, and one of the primary functions of a modern government is to preserve the illusion that this bullshit is money. I suppose you could say the same thing about why green sheets of paper are considered money, but it still means that who wins and who loses in banking is essentially determined by this.

that reminds me, I am looking forward to his take on SVB

https://graymirror.substack.com/p/the-golden-age-of-informal-securities

Ending is paywalled.

It would almost be redundant. The only difference is that instead of the proximal cause being the government jamming the price signal for credit risk, the proximal cause of SVB was the government jamming the price signal for short-term interest rates post covid.

They should have let it fail. A policy of insuring 100% of deposits is simply incompatible with the idea that private banks make loans. If all deposits are insured that effectively means that banks will be loaning the governments money instead which will either result in 1. The government deciding how and who to issue credit to or 2. Theft from the public.

They are all ready trying to walk this back (listen to Janet Yellen at 1 hour 30 minutes): https://youtube.com/watch?v=WVTmS4mM5zk&t=5718s

It’s going to get ugly when they do inevitably have to let some depositors take a loss, as they will basically be admitting that svb only got a bailout because the depositors are politically well connected.

Frankly I’ve also been kind of surprised with attitudes on the motte about this issue. I can only assume that most of the posters here are adjacent enough to venture capital and broader sv ecosystem to be benefiting from this too such a degree that the usual

Libertarian ideals expressed here can be ignored on this issue.

I agree fully with letting everybody eat the full loss. I just lurk more than I post.

Frankly I’ve also been kind of surprised with attitudes on the motte about this issue. I can only assume that most of the posters here are adjacent enough to venture capital and broader sv ecosystem to be benefiting from this too such a degree that the usual

I'm not really seeing a consensus. I'm against a bailout and one would certainly help my department.

I don't think most people here were ever libertarians in any strict sense. It's more like libertarian ideals are more pragmatic in some instances, and less so in others.

FWIW, I agree. At least give them a haircut.

I’m not sure it’s related to Silicon valley connections, the motte is relatively pro-bailout as far as 2008 is concerned. From what I can tell, out of a mixture of respect for expert opinion and rellying on speculative counterfactual scenarios of (greater) destruction if no bailout happened. I’m not convinced by those: the experts had some major conflicts of interest, and a banking bloodbath/bad debt wipeout might have been just what the patient needed.

I’m sure most here can see clearly that saving the coal industry at great cost to the taxpayer in 70s britain isn’t the ‘prudent’ move, even though it also has major ramifications for the rest of the economy. But when people in suits excuse their mistakes and beg for their useless jobs, we like to defer to their expertise. One day perhaps they'll decide and explain if they're private or public sector.

Continuing my theme in the previous comment of springboarding off the QC thread for discussion topics...

War of the sexes, but specifically regarding long term relationships and marriage.

What, in your opinion, should/does a desirable male partner bring to the table? What should/does a desirable female partner bring to the table?

The goal here is not specifically symmetry, if the desirableness is asymmetrical. For example, if you think a woman should desire a man with a stable job, but a man would be neutral or negative towards a woman with a stable job, then there's no need to include that on both lists.

To make the discussion more specific, less hypothetical: excluding amorphous concepts of "chemistry", what is the concrete package of measurable traits the opposite sex needs to offer for you to want to commit to a relationship with them? What is the package you are offering them in exchange? Do you feel this is a "good deal"?

(I'll answer for myself in a reply rather than answering within the question.)

Making 30hr/week of work count as "full-time" for employers so you get health insurance would be a big one. The work culture / health culture in America at least is insane. I'd like to see it for everyone but parents are a good start I guess.

This is more controversial, but you could also let parents exercise kids' voting rights before they turn 18. Essentially give another vote for each kid your family has - maybe make the parents agree on where to put it?

This is more controversial, but you could also let parents exercise kids' voting rights before they turn 18. Essentially give another vote for each kid your family has - maybe make the parents agree on where to put it?

Congratulations. If I ever find myself as the dictator of America, you've given me the exact approach I'll take with our Neo-Sullan constitution to kneecap progressives in a way that might actually stick.

Would probably need to be limited to married couples to do that

Would probably need to be limited to married couples to do that

This seems to suggest the political correlation with fertility rate holds even if you include unmarried fertility. But putting that aside, by the pure math of the thing, the more children you have the older you must be, and older folks skew conservative.

What, in your opinion, should/does a desirable male partner bring to the table? What should/does a desirable female partner bring to the table?

Maybe this is a cop out but I think the terms of which partner brings what to the table is something to be negotiated by the parties entering the relationship. I, personally, don't think of any of these things as being inherently gendered.

To make the discussion more specific, less hypothetical: excluding amorphous concepts of "chemistry", what is the concrete package of measurable traits the opposite sex needs to offer for you to want to commit to a relationship with them? What is the package you are offering them in exchange? Do you feel this is a "good deal"?

This is kind of orthogonal but I have felt much better in my relationships when I stopped viewing them in this kind of transactional manner, as being about getting something in return for giving something. Maybe that makes me a sucker, certainly I'm confident some people viewing my marriage from the outside would say I was getting a bad "deal", but I have been much happier from letting go of that framing.

I'm fine with answering the question in an ungendered way if you think that's the correct answer.

This is kind of orthogonal but I have felt much better in my relationships when I stopped viewing them in this kind of transactional manner, as being about getting something in return for giving something.

First, this can of course work on an individual level, but any discussing of the dynamics of a "sexual marketplace" or what have you is obviously about broader transactional politics.

Second, I guess I do find that a vaguely strange worldview. Sure, after eight years of deep investment in my marriage, I have a lot of reasons, both moral, emotional, and practical, to stay loyal to my spouse if he stopped bringing anything to the table, although even then I'd probably be struggling with whether I should divorce him or not if it was a true total cessation of everything.

But certainly before marrying him I wouldn't have considered it if he wasn't bringing anything worth having. Why marry someone if marriage to them is not better than being single, and also assumed to be better than at least the most easily available other marriage prospects?

First, this can of course work on an individual level, but any discussing of the dynamics of a "sexual marketplace" or what have you is obviously about broader transactional politics.

I am admittedly not convinced that the best or most productive way to model human intimate relationship formation is as a marketplace. Surely there are some similarities, in that there are a large number of diverse participants attempting to enter mutually consensual interactions. But there are also lots of differences. There isn't really analog for currency. If it's any kind of marketplace it seems much closer to a barter-based system, the double coincidence of wants is in full effect. Frankly, I think most modeling of relationship formation as a marketplace involves flattening the diversity in men and women's preferences to a cartoonish degree, one that often leads such reasoners astray,

Second, I guess I do find that a vaguely strange worldview. Sure, after eight years of deep investment in my marriage, I have a lot of reasons, both moral, emotional, and practical, to stay loyal to my spouse if he stopped bringing anything to the table, although even then I'd probably be struggling with whether I should divorce him or not if it was a true total cessation of everything.

But certainly before marrying him I wouldn't have considered it if he wasn't bringing anything worth having. Why marry someone if marriage to them is not better than being single, and also assumed to be better than at least the most easily available other marriage prospects?

I mean, I agree. It's not like there's nothing my wife could do such that I would consider leaving her. But nor am I keeping some kind of mental ledger of how much I do for her and how much she does for me to make sure the scales are balanced or something. Maybe what I intended to convey is the kind of value my wife brings is often of a less quantifiable sort, though no less valuable to me for not being quantifiable.

I think we may be in agreement.

I don't see a barter system as not a marketplace.

A barter system is "how convenient, I can provide X and you can provide Y, what a mutually profitable exchange for both of us", instead of "I can provide X units of value, you can provide Y units of value, of X is greater than Y I have lost". I agree that's a way healthier way to think of relationships, but it's still a kind of transaction, with the goal being both parties feeling they have benefited.

As for quantifiable or not, I guess my impetus for writing this question is in discussions of the "war of the sexes" I constantly get the impression of people struggling to think of the other side as a full agent in a transaction. They'll fall back on complaining that men/women are "shallow" or whatever, whereas to me it makes perfect sense to conceive it as, for example, both sides want a partner who they are sexually attracted to, women want a partner they can trust to provide adequate parental investment in offspring, men want a partner they can rely on for sexual loyalty/paternity, etc. I don't see why this needs to end up turning into an antagonistic market relationship when it could just as easily be a mutually profitable market relationship.

But then, I'm happily married. So my perspective is obviously shaped by the market having "worked" for me. I guess I am trying to understand what makes it so hard to work for others.

I don't see a barter system as not a marketplace.

A barter system is "how convenient, I can provide X and you can provide Y, what a mutually profitable exchange for both of us", instead of "I can provide X units of value, you can provide Y units of value, of X is greater than Y I have lost". I agree that's a way healthier way to think of relationships, but it's still a kind of transaction, with the goal being both parties feeling they have benefited.

Fair enough, I was thinking too narrowly about a "marketplace" when I wrote my comment above. Reflecting on it some more I actually think a barter model avoids most of the things I find problematic about discussions of a "sexual marketplace" or "sexual marketplace value." I think discussions of SMV and similar tend to be oriented more towards the second mode of thinking you describe, where you "have" some objective value and you are "losing" by being with someone whose value isn't close enough to yours.

As for quantifiable or not, I guess my impetus for writing this question is in discussions of the "war of the sexes" I constantly get the impression of people struggling to think of the other side as a full agent in a transaction. They'll fall back on complaining that men/women are "shallow" or whatever, whereas to me it makes perfect sense to conceive it as, for example, both sides want a partner who they are sexually attracted to, women want a partner they can trust to provide adequate parental investment in offspring, men want a partner they can rely on for sexual loyalty/paternity, etc. I don't see why this needs to end up turning into an antagonistic market relationship when it could just as easily be a mutually profitable market relationship.

Two observations. People rarely think their own standards for partners are too high. If they did, they would lower them when they failed to find a partner. Relatedly, people can rarely think of things to change to make themselves more attractive to people they want to date or to meet people who would want to date them. If they could, they would probably just do it!

I think these observations combine to lead a lot of people (maybe just vocal online people) to believe the problem is other people's standards. This ties in to your description of not seeing the other person as a full agent. Their standards are too high, so they should lower them! They aren't entitled to their standards the way I am entitled to mine! Notions of a sexual market value, and that value entitling one to a partner of a similar value, also play into this.

When you fail to get a date with someone on a more barter-y model you both just had incompatible wants and that's fine. "They needed a cobbler but I'm a haberdasher, no mutually beneficial transaction for us." When you have a different orientation it's a matter of not getting your due. "I'm obviously a seven and she's only a five so she fact the wouldn't date me clearly shows her standards are too high." The relationship can become antagonistic because of the attributions of one's failure to unreasonable or unjustifiable actions by the other party.

But then, I'm happily married. So my perspective is obviously shaped by the market having "worked" for me. I guess I am trying to understand what makes it so hard to work for others.

I am admittedly in the same boat. My wife is the only long term relationship (or any kind of romantic relationship) I've been in. Though I do read a lot of other people articulate their romantic woes online!

I agree with all of this comment and hence don't have anything useful to add, except idly wondering if pushing strongly for people to think of dating as barter, not sales, would have any positive effect on the discourse.

What, in your opinion, should/does a desirable male partner bring to the table? What should/does a desirable female partner bring to the table?

Are we talking averages or specifics?

If we're talking averages, the male partner needs to be better than every other male partner in a woman's social circle. She needs to see her friends seethe with jealousy. All other criteria are downstream of this. It just sucks that a woman's social circle is now roughly 5 digits on social media.

Realistically women don't date down, so men are out of their brain if they think they can expect financial support from a woman. And realistically, very little causes a woman to lose attraction for a man like them ever showing weakness, so I wouldn't count on emotional support if I were you. There is the old trend of men being things oriented and women being people oriented, so it wouldn't be wise to count on shared interest. Probably the safest thing you can expect is that they can photocopy your DNA for you.

Specifics. What are you offering? What are you trying to receive?

If not interested in an LTR I guess the question isn't relevant, unless you want to imagine a hypothetical member of each sex and what you'd suggest them to offer and to look for.

I guess. I can answer better for the women seeking men side.

First of all, mature. This can be a lot of things. Can he keep up a household without hand holding, bathe, do the laundry, do very basic cooking. Is he prone to neglect important people or tasks for long Tv or video game sessions (which is a red flag). Would he be able to be trusted alone with a small child (in the he watches that the kid doesn’t get hurt sense)?

Second, does he have, or is he working (seriously on getting) a full time family-supporting job? Does he take that job fairly seriously?

Third, is he a well rounded individual? Does he have lots of friends he sees regularly? Does he have hobbies and interests that are not media related? Does he understand the basics of how the world works?

I think a lot of this depends on the age / stage of life when married.

As an example, my spouse and I got engaged in grad school. I’ve done well for us and she is now a SAHM. While she could’ve suspected that earnings potential it wasn’t a guarantee.

To make the discussion more specific, less hypothetical: excluding amorphous concepts of "chemistry",

I'll echo my learned friend in argument @f3zinker and say this is the real test. I do think over time patterns can be observed in who I have chemistry with and who I don't, but it's there or it's not. If you gave me a woman who met a bunch of objective standards I'm about to give, but the chemistry wasn't there for a reason I didn't articulate, marrying her would be a bad idea, because I've had the real thing and if it showed up after I married an "ok" woman without it, that's the kind of thing that ruins lives. I'm glad I didn't find that out the hard way.

what is the concrete package of measurable traits the opposite sex needs to offer for you to want to commit to a relationship with them?

My physical type is pretty eyes and waist:hip silhouette. The rest I can pretty much work around, historically speaking. I'll find things I like about her face, her weight, her skin color, her hair, her cup size, her height; if she has gorgeous eyes and she's shaped like a woman I'm pretty much there. I find no observable pattern on any of those other factors with past partners.*

After a party, is she the type of person who helps clean up before she leaves? This can be a house party, a political fundraiser at a fire hall, Thanksgiving with my family, a weekend at a friend's beach house; when I look at the girls I esteem and feel I could have committed to that is the number one shared trait. They were all the kind of girl who helps clean up when we're done. Whether out of native instinctive altruism, or merely out of familial/religious training in the idea of duty and help.

How does she understand things? Not what does she believe, that doesn't matter, but how did she come to believe it and why does she believe it? I can deal with anyone if our underlying epistemology is similar, but I can't get along with anyone if they believe things simply because they were told so, or because it benefits their "tribe." I need someone with intellectual curiosity and the ability to change their beliefs a little. Though I suspect this is an artifact of my personality, in that anyone who didn't share this with me would find me very tiresome, and girls who like me are going to be more attractive when they're with me, while women who are hidebound or take things too seriously will not be.

What is the package you are offering them in exchange?

Have you always wanted to date a 5'11"** model of a Ken Doll that got ahold of Frosty the Snow-Man's hat and came to life? Do you want a man who will send you highlighted passages from The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans to illustrate his thoughts on your relationship? Do you want to walk the dog and hear my hot takes on how America never should have given Mexico back after the Mexican American war? Do you value that your parents will fucking love me and say I'm "such a nice boy" regardless of their own beliefs or background?*** Are you ok with the fact that I'm going to make satisfactory money, but probably less money than I strictly speaking could make if I were more ambitious about getting ahead at work? Do you need someone emotionally stable, almost pathologically incapable of overreacting to things going on around him, to balance out your own insecurities and neuroses? Do you want someone that will always listen to you, but will normally give you off-the-wall opinions about your problems? Also, I've been told that the fact I know how to use laundry bags is pretty lit.

Well, do I have a deal for you! Some as-is, but in pretty good condition! Unfortunately, been under contract for a long time, and no signs of coming on the market.

Do you feel this is a "good deal"?

I think my wife and I both got a great deal, which is sort of the definition of a good match in my mind.

*As an aside, I think having low or absent standards has contributed to success with more "objectively" attractive women, like my wife, because I don't overly value how hot she is, where other men did.

**I've dated girls up to 6'1", no problem; being shorter than me is not a standard I have, as long as they are ok being submissive to a slightly shorter man.

***Honestly, if you don't believe in white privilege and eurocentric beauty standards, you haven't been where I've been meeting parents of virtually every race and being universally approved as 100% marriage material. Pakistani muslim immigrants, Black power leaning Babtists, Singaporean bankers, and of course any variety of white Catholic; your mama is going to love me. High SATs, saying "ma'am", and blue eyes are pretty much the master key to any mother's heart when her daughter brings you home.

What makes me want to enter a relationship with someone and what makes me want to commit to a relationship with them are two almost entirely different things.

For me to enter into a relationship it's about whether they are hot and socially fun enough.

For me to commit it's how I see them acting long term. What is their earning potential, how is their family (not as in i would have to spend time with them but as an indicator of where they are likely to trend), how do they treat household activities, what are their goals and most important of all: how committed are they to me and the relationship? I also expect my partner to do a similar evaluation of me and if I perceive that they don't then that is disqualifying.

Specific qualities are pretty uninteresting, most things are somewhat negotiable/exchangeable. Although, one attribute that isn't is confidence for men, if you're not able to at least project confidence then you're doomed.

Do you enter relationships with the intent of finding a long term one, or do you expect to perhaps stumble into a long term one maybe? Is long term commitment a goal or just a possible thing that might one day happen to you?

If the latter, your strategy makes sense to me - have fun now, maybe it'll lead somewhere - but if the former, I don't get why you'd waste time on people who have none of the traits you'd want to commit to.

I never had to specifically look for long term qualities in a partner in the first stage but I don't really see that working very well anyway. People falsely advertise all the time. To me it seems better to date in a pool of people that are likely to have the attributes you're looking for than specifically seeking them out.

As promised, my own answers:

I actually didn't mean the focus to be on traits, so much as on what you're offering in the relationship. So less "smart", more "interesting conversation partner", less "hot", more " regular access to sex with someone hot", if that makes sense as a distinction. Nonetheless I'll answer in both ways.

So, part one:

Traits I found sexually attractive:

  1. Attractive face, healthy lifestyle, not fat. I didn't care about height unless the guy was not just shorter than me but extremely shorter than me. I didn't care about six-packs beyond "not fat" (tangent: I genuinely do not understand why this is the shorthand for attractive muscle. I am pretty sure I am a typical woman in my attraction to nice biceps and pectorals, based on both accurate internet stereotypes about women's obsession with nice arms and basic sexual dimorphism logic where clearly sexed traits like upper body strength are more attractive. Very defined six packs just look vaguely insectoid, whereas very defined arm muscle ... Drool...). Ugly faces were a total deal breaker, though. For my standards of "not fat", I'd roughly say fat visibly spilling over waistline of pants would be my cutoff for "ew, no".

  2. Ambition and clear life goals. I actually didn't care about money, I had vaguely assumed I was going to be the primary breadwinner because of my chosen career‡, but I could feel my sexual interest shrivel up and die when guys didn't at all know what they wanted from life, or when all they wanted was to "kind of exist, I guess". I had empathy for them, sure, but it was also a super obvious kill switch for my libido.

  3. Emotional stability. I am the stereotypical neurotic, anxious, over-reacting woman attracted to calm, grounded, under-reacting men. Neurotic men just fed into my own anxiety, thereby killing my libido, therefore, not hot.

  4. Very affectionate, especially physically.

  5. Signaling caretaking and responsibility — this was actually very distinctly separate from caretaking and responsibility towards myself. It was things like someone being an older sibling and talking about ways they cared for their younger siblings, or someone being involved in community service, or someone helping old ladies carry their groceries. All of these things were very hot, and then guys without it just... Were less hot.

There were other traits that weren't really about hotness but about basic compatibility, like I needed a guy smart enough I could respect him, and obviously for marriage I wanted us to be on the same page re values and life goals. The above is just the list of things that made guys more/less hot to me, and then things like "don't hate his family" was just necessary qualification checking before the big leap.

Traits I offer, the package, as limited by my own self awareness:

  1. Physically hot - obviously there's a limit to how accurately I can gauge my own attractiveness, but still... *

  2. Playful, sense of humor

  3. Smart, curious

  4. Money and good social connections

The rest is harder to identify — from an outside perspective I can say a guy is involved in community giving, from an inside perspective I don't consider myself that way or think of it as a trait I offer even though I do, stepping back to look at myself objectively, get involved in community initiatives, regularly get turned to for help by my friends, etc. I also think some of the things I "offer" are technically more "negative" traits, ie I am relatively happy to be "needy" followed by being abundantly grateful and admiring to the person meeting my needs, which sounds vaguely bad while still being pretty clearly something men I was with enjoyed. I guess the more positive psychology term for this would be "vulnerability" perhaps?

‡ I was right

*(subtract points for being the kind of person who occasionally browses the motte, an unbelievably unhot trait. In total seriousness I think my level of being online is easily the least sexy thing about me and not something I'd ever tolerate in a partner, yet still I return, like a dog to its own vomit ... Sigh)

Part two: what I actually meant to ask, even though that's not where the discussion went

What I can offer:

  • I will cheerlead your goals, brainstorm with you how to pursue them, make time and space in the relationship for them to be a priority.

  • I will communicate my desires directly, including occasionally saying "I don't know, I just want something I can't articulate" or "I just want you to magically read my mind" if that's what I want. I am pretty in touch with my desires, of which I have many, and I don't like beating around the bush. (if you prefer more indirect, coy communication I am not for you. I don't do indirect flirting, I do "let's have sex")

  • I value regular and high quality sex, and will actively pursue it as a goal.

  • assuming you are admirable (otherwise why I am in a relationship with you), I will express my admiration frequently, including to our kids. Similarly I will both provide and demand physical affection frequently. (once again, if this isn't for you, it's no longer something being offered but a warning.)

  • I am shit at housework and will be hiring cleaning help.

  • I will do extensive research on big life decisions and provide summaries as needed for why I think the correct choice is X and what case could be made for alternative Y. I'll handle the load of researching correct child rearing, correct mortgage borrowing, etc.

  • I will handle necessary social coordination of who is doing what with whom and why this matters and where we need to respond how.

  • I will be a highly involved parent

Etc.

In exchange, what I expect from a partner:

  • someone who will make space for me to nurture my social network, i.e. willing to enable me to host social events, carve out time and money to support my friends, etc

  • regular orgasms

  • large quantities of physical affection

  • an intelligent and thoughtful sounding board for thinking out major life decisions

  • highly involved parent

  • whatever our disagreements, always backs me up in public and does not undermine me in front of other people.

  • equal partner around the house (but this can simply be paying for more cleaning help)

There's some asymmetries here, I don't care if my partner is good at communicating their needs, even though that's something I offer on my end.

Also this isn't even close to a complete list, it's just a sample, which makes me realize that the scope of the question was too ambitious. Oh well. I'm too tired to continue writing, but felt like I had promised this second part of the response, so here it is, even if incomplete.

3 parts:

  • A difficult quality to articulate, like: At least one passion/interest which she develops/works on/improves (can be chemistry "i love cute chemicals", dog training, old philology, horses...) / having agency / a serious about life, making active long term decisions (this leads to many things, like a good role model for kids, understanding cause and effect, to give kids a good mindset, so she isn't boring herself, so I don't feel guilty concentrating on something for hours because she has things to do too...)

  • in context of the above, the desire to also build a family, execute on some sort of plan etc. ...forever! So linking my own agency with another, whereas most seem to either not have any agency/selfstarterness or

  • also boobs, because I'm shallow

From 20-24 I wasn't mature enough to take basic steps and missed out on a few jewels, who then got married etc. shortly there after. Then I ran into some trainwrecks who failed on the 2nd point / misrepresented their goals or own position (went so far as to stay with a girl's family for a month, planned many things out... then she ghosted me for her wedding with the neighbor guy, her parents wanted her to marry since they were 12, who she quickly divorced...) But I've definitely met hundreds of perfect people, and some dozens who were actually in a position to be in a relationship etc. I just dropped the ball a lot. To some extent, at 30 I'm now scared that "everyone" is now TikTok addled and unable to truly make such a commitment. At least, it's much harder to find lovely people than 10 years ago. (Central Europe) In Latin America, I've met 2-3 people ever who would fit - all taken already or such.

The first point can often perhaps go too far, where it turns into anti-familiness etc.

I think a lot of the problem here is that it's very hard to articulate what men can actually do to be an attractive partner without it being some shallow 6 pack 6 figures 6 feet evaluation without appealing to gender roles that have been thoroughly burried, in many ways for good reasons, by the feminism of the past few decades. If women can do anything men can but better what could the male gender role even be? I have some opinions that might fit but I don't think we're ever going to get universal buy in.

shallow 6 pack 6 figures 6 feet evaluation

These aren't shallow requirements. Wealth, health, and fitness are clear markers of actual traits that women care about for very good reasons. I think it's pretty obvious to all that whatever putative gender blurring has happened on this front, it has had basically zero impact on the value of bringing wealth, health, and fitness to a relationship.

(because who looks forward to spending her last decade of life as a widow?).

My grandmother has been a widow for nearly 40 years. It really doesn't seem to have particularly bothered her, though her marriage was a very happy one. She has children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and she is far from lonely.

Women inherently tend to have life expectancies a couple years higher, and also tend to marry men who are atleast somewhat older than them.

Outliving your spouse as a woman feels like a pretty consistent thing regardless of their height, thusly.

Height is not actually health or fitness in today's world. Few people are literally stunted, we're just genetically short.

You say that until you get in a fight. Yes, they still happen, and should the current order weaken significantly they'll be happening a lot more. Women are smart to select a man who is physically capable of at least standing up for himself and his family.

And equally you can say tall height isn't bad but then you get into a room with low doorways and bump your head, causing great pain/needing hospital trips in the very worst case.

If anything bumping heads is a lot more common than fights these days so the expected cost from both situations is probably the same. Plus why would you ever willingly get into a fight these days, willingly risking harm to yourself is idiotic, not brave, and in modern society pretty much every situation has a flight option available to you.

Height is overrated. And when I say this, I don't mean women don't care about it much which is demonstrably not true. No, what I mean is, men keep stressing too much importance on this aspect of themselves. The outcomes can be positive if they work on areas that are within their control.

My anecdote: I'm actually below average in height, but I am fit and used to be in damn good shape before the 8 hour desk job got me craving to sink back into bed the moment I get home. I did get decent game in college, quite a few interracial successes too. Despite having been an introvert all my life, I managed to be a social butterfly. I knew someone in literally every store in the suburb I lived in, hell I don't recall even once paying for my movie tickets during my time there. And I wasn't even from the country.

And then there are two of my oldest friends. One of them is 6'2", mildly overweight, very social but too shy to ask anyone out, and somewhat below average on facial features. The other is 6'0, fit, very attractive but not too social. Both of them have well paying jobs. And both are still virgins.

Agreed, but there's only so much to be done about such strongly evolved instincts. Money and abs still work fine as honest signals in the modern world though.

Being unable to reach the top of the fridge is an evolutionary dead end.

That's an extreme example though. A 5'6" guy can reach most places he'd have to realistically reach, with more difficulty obviously.

Eh, why not try to answer anyway?

What makes you a good partner? What makes someone a good partner to you?

Who needs universal buy in, just describe what you personally think the opposite sex potentially has to offer, and what you personally have available to offer them.

I think a lot of the problem here is that it's very hard to articulate what men can actually do to be an attractive partner without it being some shallow 6 pack 6 figures 6 feet evaluation without appealing to gender roles that have been thoroughly burried

Perhaps there is simply nothing deeper and/or less traditional than that?

The man should bring love for the woman, and the woman should bring love for the man. That is my actual answer despite you requesting otherwise.

Listing out attributes is meaningless. I can just list the "desireable" 80th percentile most commonly matched keywords from dating expectations elsewhere and call it a day and it would be more correct than any hypothetical ideal answer.

I can literally list them for you but you can just come up with the above yourself.

To me the use of the word love here is a bit abstract.

What would be causes of the love? What would be observable effects of the love? How would the two parties coordinate on knowing whether they love each other or if the word even means the same thing to both of them (or if different meanings, then a difference they can live with)

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Basic economics suggest there is some truth to the idea that opposites attract. Stated differently, long term successful relationships are positive sum. Generally, you need comparative advantage to get positive sum. To an extent, you want differences to maximize that comparative advantage.

At the same time, gravity theory of trade suggests that while you want some differences (to maximize comparative advantage) you don’t want too many differences because that limits ability to trade.

So do opposites attract? Yes and no.

I would say she's the only person I know IRL who has original culture war takes that aren't just regurgitations of what talking heads are saying.

You hit the nail on the head. Very sad to interact deeply with people who only conceptualize the world through the lens of TV or newspapers. It's the difference between a PC or an NPC, a gap that cleaves through intelligence, status and everything else.

but if you let me talk about the intriguing fact that men seem to prefer beer and women seem to prefer wine I will love you forever.

Please make a separate post about that and tag me. I have been wondering the same thing forever.

Ha. I broadly agree in that, like I said, posting on the Motte is a strong signal against what I like in a mate.

I used to value the ability to maintain super intense philosophical discussion more. Certainly it was part of what I enjoyed about dating, probing people's minds in great depth. I find that in the actual day to day nitty gritty of being married it's barely even a half point bonus. I just need a partner who is willing to indulge me occasionally going off at length about a topic— I can find discussion partners with strong opinions online for no cost at all. As long as I feel assured my partner isn't an idiot and his opinions and values come from somewhere sincere and genuine, his being able to obsessively analyze them is, eh. Not very important.

I wouldn't describe "opposites attract" as total baloney, while still basically agreeing with you. I think people are highly attracted to certain very compatible personality opposites that are suited well to complementing their own strengths/weaknesses, and that aside from that they prefer to be as similar as possible. I don't specifically view it as sexed, at least individually, although it's clear that on a statistical level it is. My situation is a slightly weird variation on yours - I consider myself and my husband to be very, very different people, with an excellent match of complementing strengths, but outsiders say we're basically the exact same person, so at least on a superficial external level I guess we are similar. (We're certainly almost the same politically, religiously, intellectually, etc...).

In that connection, I wouldn't hesitate to guess that you are highly conscientious, and a big believer in being organized, dependable, ambitious, careful, and goal-directed. And, in turn, you rather understandably want a partner who shares that disposition.

Hm. I would describe myself as possibly none of those things? I am certainly not organized or particularly ambitious. But I do highly value conscientiousness in other people - I'm the kind of person to immediately offer a 7000 word opinion on anything I'm asked, on the spot, but I've always adored the kind of personality that says "good question, let me think about that" and then comes back two days later with a response. To me that kind of slow, deliberate care IS an area of opposite-attraction-compatibility, a very nice braking mechanism on my own more reactive/impulsive style (which I like plenty in myself, but since I've got it covered I don't need it from someone else).

It's worth having a smart or intense spouse because - your childrens' genes are half their genes, and creating more smart people is valuable, tbh. If you pick a randomly selected ~100iq 'nice person' as a spouse, your kids are going to be a lot dumber, less interesting, in expectation than otherwise. And just on a purely altruistic basis, more people being smart is pretty important!

Smart ≠ highly analytical and inclined to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.

Smart ≠ highly analytical and inclined to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.

Disagreed. They are the same.

But you are touching on the part where @curious_straight_ca errs. Smartness can be good because it allows you to navigate society better than non-smart people who don't analyze the world right/at all. On the other hand, it might lead to you inventing calculus, molecular wave theory, or special relativity while your non-smart peers go out to the club and flirt with girls. (Those guys ended up with 0, 2, and 3 kids respectively.) More likely, you could unheroically become engrossed in a useless but fascinating system like chess openings, futurism debates, or rationalism.

It's also possible smartness might make you piss off your tribe and/or develop mental disorders. Smartness is not an unalloyed good, probably because it leads to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.

Need more evidence/citations that they are same.

Anecdotally, using proxies for intelligence like vast breadth of knowledge, grasping new material extremely quickly, getting good grades in very challenging programs, and creative problem solving, I can think of a number of very smart people I know who don't do much in the way of in depth discussion, introspection, or navel-gazing. It doesn't interest or excite them the way, say, a cool engineering problem does. Their approach to their inner selves is -shrug-, to interpersonal politics is "well, it all works out in the end", etc. These things simply don't bother or preoccupy them, they find them tedious and a waste of time better spent on cool problems.

Need more evidence/citations that they are same.

Positivism is useless for defining words. I like my definition and think most people share it. As for why I contested you on a semantic point, it's common for people to try to redefine "smart" as "having the collection of mental attributes that lead to success", which is circular (good brain = good brain). This is IMO not a valid definition. From this comment, you are not falling into that trap, so my bad.

Anecdotally, using proxies for intelligence like vast breadth of knowledge, grasping new material extremely quickly, getting good grades in very challenging programs, and creative problem solving, I can think of a number of very smart people I know who don't do much in the way of in depth discussion, introspection, or navel-gazing. It doesn't interest or excite them the way, say, a cool engineering problem does. Their approach to their inner selves is -shrug-, to interpersonal politics is "well, it all works out in the end", etc. These things simply don't bother or preoccupy them, they find them tedious and a waste of time better spent on cool problems.

Highlight meaningful. You rephrased my definition. Their smartness is the mental quality that leads to them becoming engrossed in untangling systems: that is to say, analysis. We on the Motte are engrossed in analyzing and introspecting on one particular type of problem. They have another. Non-smart people get engrossed in analyzing neither. They just live life and vibe, which is probably the better way to go about this thing.

I simply don't feel that "interesting ways to solve energy output problems from solar cells" can be described as "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing".

If you think that any contemplation of a complex problem is "in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing", then sure, a total lack of desire to interact with complex problems is not well correlated with intelligence.

But if people are inclined to "live life and vibe" outside their professional fields + areas of special interest, that doesn't intrinsically reflect on their intelligence.

(I think this whole comment thread kicked off with someone dropping in to say prioritizing a smart mate is important, which I interpreted as a response to my claim that constant in-depth quality discussion turned out to not be nearly as meaningful to me as I'd imagined when I started dating. Hence my initial response resisting conflating the two. I really believe it has much more to do with personality than intelligence)

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The length of my reply may not communicate it, but I've been thinking about this question pretty much daily since 2017.

The answer is that if either a Man or Woman is looking at what the other can "bring to the table," the relationship is going to fail at some point. First, remember the passion-to-companionship cycle. At the outset, both parties generally want (and receive) fireworks. Somewhere pretty early on this gives way to a more "fun friends who have sex" situation. If it makes it two years (look around at your social circle and mark this as a milepost for breakups) then a lot of couples will get married if both parties are 28+. 7 Year itch within a marriage, 50/50 in America make it. Kids show up a lot of marriages are effectively dead but keep on going for the kids. Divorce late in high school or early college is most common for upper-middle class suburbanites.

The point of the above paragraph is that a romantic relationship and marriage that last 10,20,30 years changes so much that it is not possible for either party to meaningfully say "Yes, I'm in this for life" at the outset if the rubric is simply the "match score" for the other partner.

What's required is a personal commitment to the idea of a long-term relationship before you even meet the other person. And a recognition that the relationship will drastically change multiple times and require constant work. If that is the starting point, you've got a shot and then you can sort of grocery list for all of the matching attributes. If that is not your starting point, I think you can still have a decent enough romantic life, but you shouldn't think you're going to make it long term.

I don't blame this totally on the failing character of contemporary western folks. Most of marriage in human history (and, I would submit, the majority of it today worldwide) is basic economic survival and co-dependence. The idea of learning to love whichever person you ended up shaking up with to not starve to death is far more common the world over than "omg, this is how I met your mother" fairly tale stories. For a trip, read up on the emotional development of the arranged marriages of first generation Indian Couples in the U.S. from maybe the 1970s or so.

The idea of deep emotion, long-term pair bonding as the everything of marriage is a product of the massive growth in personal wealth the western world experienced after World War 2 and is also a good outcome of the mid-century feminist movement. It's just super, super rare. The bad outcome of this has been the destruction of the nuclear family since the 1960s. When the primary motivator is personal emotional satisfaction in a highly individualist society, the family is going to have a bad time absent some very strong microsocial pressures (i.e. high religiosity communities, or hyper invested "helicopter" parents who see the performance of their children as reflective of personal worth).

To conclude, however, I wouldn't call myself a marriage / long-term relationship cynic. In fact, I still think I want to get married (I just think the odds are low). I'm slightly optimistic that there's going to be some level of Gen-Z backlash to the crazy 4th wave feminism we see now and that may prompt new personal commitment to having a nuclear family and shedding some of the "but how do I maximize my own personal emotional state?" thinking. I am not Gen-Z, however, and their customs and ways are strange to me.

TLDR; It isn't about your partner, it's all about you.

What's required is a personal commitment to the idea of a long-term relationship before you even meet the other person. And a recognition that the relationship will drastically change multiple times and require constant work. If that is the starting point, you've got a shot and then you can sort of grocery list for all of the matching attributes. If that is not your starting point, I think you can still have a decent enough romantic life, but you shouldn't think you're going to make it long term.

I strongly agree with this.

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As someone that's been in the same relationship for over a decade, I agree with a lot of this. But one slight disagreement is that I wouldn't say I've ever made an explicit personal commitment to the idea of a long-term relationship. The way I would describe it is that I feel that I get a lot out of the relationship itself, which is different from getting something from the person I'm in the relationship with. In that way I think it's similar to having children. You don't really ask "what do kids bring to the table" and if you do then you're probably going to convince yourself it's not worth it. You have kids because you want to be a mother or a father, the value is in taking on that role and in forming and building that relationship. Sharing your life with someone that has their own agency (even if they use that agency in frustrating ways), the game of trying to make things work together, experiencing the emotional highs and lows.

So I would say that one of the important things for a long-term relationship is that both people really want to be in a relationship and they value being in a relationship.

Sharing your life with someone that has their own agency (even if they use that agency in frustrating ways), the game of trying to make things work together, experiencing the emotional highs and lows.

In my opinion, this reveals a lot of very good and positive perspective on things. So, go MWei.

I would wager, however, that the overwhelming majority of currently married / long-term relationship'd people are miles away from sentiments like that.

As always, the most interesting answers to this question probably lie in what isn't said in the replies because it is taken as self-evident. I am not perceptive enough to tease that out, but maybe somebody should.

So, I could wax lyrical about the love of my life for ages here, but I won't. She's too precious for you cynical lot and you don't deserve it (neither do I, but I digress).

Instead, I will tell you an anecdote. When I was in my late twenties and freshly heartbroken, it was around the time PUA became a thing. And I remember leaving a comment under one of those blogposts to the effect of "but I want to be able to cry in front of her, I want to be able to show vulnerability without that being taken as a sign of weakness!" and the reply was "sure, and she wants to cut her toenails and pick her nose in front of you, it just fundamentally makes you less attractive".

Well, let me just say that I found someone that lets me do that without thinking lesser of me (it probably helps that she also said similar things about me as @raggedy_anthem recounts below). Or, as loveless harpies would put it: She provides emotional labor for me.

To me the subject of men crying is pretty easy:

Imagine the ideal paragon of a masculine alpha male. He's got three hot young college girls bent over his bed in a foursome, drilling them and thrilling them with his rabid piston-like ramming and endless stamina, tossing them around like juggling balls. They love him. They'd do anything for him. They would rip a baby right to shreds right on the bed if they thought it would appeal to him or make him devote even a second more of his attention to them. They caress his muscles like a rare and invaluable diamond. They would die for him, kill themselves for him. He is their God because of his pure testosterone-fueled magnetism and charisma.

Maybe in another scene he's fixing a car, sweat and grease smeared across his brow, his 40 year old MILF neighbor that he's doing a favor for wishing she was in the first scene instead (and maybe she will be after the car is done). Maybe in another scene he's surfing, programming (a nice masculine, logical activity), kicking someone's ass, cleaning a gun, humiliating someone verbally with his impenetrable wit, or making millions of dollars.

But in any scenes of his life, is he crying? And if he is, is he letting a woman gawk at it?

So who would you rather be? Would you rather be him or would you rather be given fake pity applause by women for your "emotional sensitivity?" Sure, most of us here will never be that close to this perfect Super Chad Infinity, but would you rather get closer or further away?

And maybe you have a nice wife or girlfriend who is decent enough to tell you that there's nothing wrong with crying and it just shows that you're exquisitely in touch with your feelings unlike some other unenlightened caveman.

But when her fingers snake beneath the waistband of her panties in those idle moments, who is she fantasizing about? Again, who do you want to be?

But in any scenes of his life, is he crying?

Is Achilles enough of a paragon of manliness? Is Ulysses? Aeneas? Beowulf? Roland? All of them cry, some quite often, and all in public.

That's quite a lurid little pornographic fantasy you've TMIed us with there. But you know, Chad Thundercock may not be crying, but he's not doing much in the way of intellectual activities either. (I like how you slipped "programming" in there between surfing and kicking someone's ass, with the "nice masculine, logical activity" qualifier - that is, ahem, a tell.)

Pretty sure your girlfriend isn't snaking her fingers beneath the waistband of her panties imagining you or Chad Thundercock writing code or reading books either.

Pretty sure your girlfriend isn't snaking her fingers beneath the waistband of her panties imagining you or Chad Thundercock writing code or reading books either.

No. But she's not imagining him surfing or fighting either. She's imagining him fucking, as all people (barring weird fetishes) imagine when they fantasize about somebody else sexually.

That doesn't mean the surfing and fighting don't still turn her on specifically though. It also doesn't mean that programming and reading books turn her off either. Most likely they will just get a superficial "OMG he's smart AND hot!" reaction from her, even if you're just reading Twilight and programming "Hello World". (And of course if you weren't hot the reaction to the same would probably be "What a creepy nerd! He's probably not even as good at programming as Chad!" even if you're reimplementing ChaCha20-Poly1305 directly in PPC assembly.)

Crying though?

His girlfriend is going to hug him. She’s a woman, not a sociopath.

This is not true in a shocking highly number of cases (a sizeable minority at least, perhaps the majority in some demographics). I'm happy if you're an exception, but don't generalize too strongly.

I'm a man so no. If anything this all turns me off, because any amount of inadequate I am by comparison to Super Chad makes me feel less sexy and thus less sexual.

Sorry, but I don't really buy that you're some sort of amazing unicorn. I think your panties mentally drop when you see a guy who mogs your husband on traditional masculine axes same as every other woman, whether you want to admit it here or to yourself or not.

I also bet he scores a lot more highly on those traditional masculine axes already than you're letting on, which allows you to enjoy his "unbelievably adorable" side, and that if he didn't you might instead find it to be some combination of childish, infantile, creepy, and/or off-putting. (Let's hear his height, BMI, facial width, bicep size, jaw depth, ring/index finger length ratio, penis size, grip strength stats, test and estrogen levels, etc.)

Cute online persona though.

I never said you needed to be Super Chad. I'm not Super Chad, I have a girlfriend who isn't quite Super Stacy (though she's a decent bit more Stacyish than I am Chaddish, due to psychological manipulation techniques I learned from autistic men on the Internet), and we're pretty happy together. But it's obvious from certain tells that, though I don't think she has any plans or explicit intentions to branch swing, when she's around a man who mogs me her mind wanders as is natural.

And that's fair, because so does mine. Sometimes when I fantasize I imagine her and sometimes I imagine a more symmetrically babyfaced and plump-lipped milky pale cosplay weeb goth DDLG bimbo with a way bigger ass (which I'm sure secretly hurts my GF's feelings a bit since she has a pretty large one herself which is her obvious main immediate charm point at least physically as a woman, and she knows I'm a big booty addict), larger tits, wider hips, and longer legs (who is also shorter, as somewhat ironically, at least according to some study I read once, men like women who are shorter but also still longer-legged).

We still argue half-joking about my head supposedly "flying off my neck" to ogle a girl at Publix who had an ass the size of a baby stroller (and wasn't otherwise fat) tucked into the tightest yoga pants imaginable (which again pissed her off extra for the aforementioned reason that anal appeal has been her charm point since she realized at like 7, or so she says, and I'm an ass man). And I know she does the same when she encounters (comparatively rarer) rock-hard abs, just a bit more subtly since she doesn't have nearly as many autist tendencies as me. You can't negotiate with instinct and biology.

So no, I can't be Super Chad. But again being a little bit more like him seems to me like a worthier result than getting kudos from a woman for being Oprah material. Nobody is turning their heads to look at the guy who cries really well.

Basic question: On a sexual/lustful/physical/primal level, are you more attracted to Super Chad or to your husband? You tellingly refuse to directly address this issue.

Beyond that - well, I’d strongly prefer you didn’t speculate in such frank terms about my panties.

That's just it. They're not your panties. They're the panties of all womankind, even those who don't wear them, even those who were around before they invented them.

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Not to unduly simp here, but that was a far more charitable response than I'd have been tempted to give. Good for you!

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...So, does she pick her nose in front of you?

(Fwiw my husband's ability to cry from sheer emotion is something I cherish about him, coming from a family that has all the emotional range of a shriveled peanut. He cries whenever he's feeling really deeply and just thinking about it makes my heart go all melty. He's just so emotionally well adjusted and not fucked up and repressed! I thought that kind of thing was a myth!)

I see womwn talking a whole lot about how they conclude that a man who cries is in touch with his emotions. That is typical minding males.

It assumes men that men can or even want to cry to begin with but are hiding it.

I for example, cry maybe once a year or two. Not because I dont feel strong emotions, quite the opposite. Its just that crying is not my natural physical reaction. I couldnt do it even if I wanted to. Its a testosterone thing.

I mean, I assume the men and women I know who never, ever cry — my grandfather was noted as having cried a total of three times in his entire adult life, my aunts/uncles do not cry at funerals or weddings— have plenty of emotions. It's nonetheless also obvious they are uncomfortable with expressing said emotions in a lot of contexts, not just crying. The ability and willingness to cry is a symptom of being more emotionally open, not more emotionally feeling.

It's fine for you if you don't cry, it's not like it even would have been a deal breaker for me, given how used to it I already am. But that doesn't change that it's a relief to me that my husband does cry, and that I appreciate that about him.

I think many of us view crying as being emotionally overwhelmed. In this view, it's not about openeness, it's about self-control and emotional maturity.

Right, and viewing crying as a lack of self control and a lack of emotional maturity would be something I'd want to run away from. Someone who lets himself cry is strongly signalling that he does not believe crying is a lack of control and a lack of emotional maturity.

Define “crying”?

Full on crying that lasts more than a minute, I can’t remember the last time I did that. But I will frequently shed a few tears when I’m just reflecting on things and I become overwhelmed by the gravity of a certain concept, or I encounter a particularly beautiful piece of prose, or things of that nature. It’s quite easy and natural for me.

But I’m also a huge weirdo and I shouldn’t be taken as an exemplar of any demographic, man or woman.

The only times I’ve cried in front of my wife related to deaths in my family / when I got emotional about the harm caused to our child due to covid response. Though now at weddings I almost become misty eyed when father daughter dance occurs (I have daughters).

So to me this wasn’t that important (if my wife mocked me for crying about my father dying well that would be a very cold woman). Are you naturally emotional?

I am very sensitive, I guess. I cannot watch Theoden's speech without crying, for example. I am also very neurotic. I ruminate a lot about disrespectful behaviour towards me. Otherwise, I am quick to anger, but also very quick to forgive. I do not always show it and I would say that I have better control over the external symptoms of my emotions than most. I am much more needy than the median man I would say. Or maybe I just admit to it more easily.

I feel like the ideal relationship has both sides suspecting they've gotten the better edge of the deal (found someone superior to themselves). Isn't that where we get referring to spouse as a better half, etc?

In any case, while I don't relate to most of your particulars (the desire for protection, the specific breakdown of talents), I do relate to the desire to admire. I consider my husband to be one of the best human beings I've ever had the luck to meet, and that obviously makes everything about being devoted to him easier. (not sure why devotion would be degrading?)

(.... This sort of relates to the fertility thread. I just think my husband is really fantastic and if the world has more people carrying his genes that's really good, and I always wonder if the reason some people don't have kids is because they love their spouses but wouldn't want to replicate them. However, I assume that's probably not the answer plus tons of people have kids with real dickheads so there's obviously also a more powerful basic drive)

Getting rid of a dress my husband doesn't like seems obvious to me.

But wearing a dress he got me that I don't like seems a bit much. Why not just... Tell him what style you like instead? Especially because I'd assume that, for example, the concept is "you'd look hot in red lace" and then I could be like "great, gonna get myself something in red lace but {a different shade of red that doesn't clash with my skin tone/a different cut/whatever}". I mean presumably he's buying the dress to make both of us happy so why would I hide not liking it? Anything he wants I can probably find a way of accommodating that I also like.

If he wants something incredibly specific and irredeemable (I don't know, ten inch leopard print diamond studded stilettos?) Then it would need to be an inside the house only deal, I'm not wearing clothing I feel ugly and uncomfortable in outside the house, he can come up with a counteroffer.

As for the rest, he does all the same for me, I'd be a huge hypocrite to not reciprocate.

(And I do buy him clothing I think he'd look hot in, and he does either wear it or tell me it's not his taste, so I guess not being a hypocrite applies there as well. I also 100% expect him to get rid of clothing I find ugly, unless it's something with sentimental value or whatever. But basically we're obviously getting dressed with our number one target audience being each other...)

I would have thought so, but I get a lot of side-eye for it.

I believe you, I just also find that very strange (and sad, I guess). And if it was your friend who thought it was ugly, would you also be judged for not keeping it? Or is it only your husband's aesthetic opinions you're supposed to ignore?

To be clear, I don't wear things I actively dislike, just things I wouldn't buy for myself - e.g. I get no thrill out of activewear. I own more yoga pants than I need, purely because he has a thing for them. And hey, they're comfortable and practical, so why not? If you buy more, darling, please avoid black and capri lengths.

Oh okay that makes much more sense. (Although I personally love black and capri length 😅)

The women I know often seem anxious that, by taking on more around the house to support their husband's career, or by making sacrifices or compromises in their own aspirations in order to be with someone, they're doing something terribly retrograde.

I think with my husband and I, we simply accepted that at different points in time one or the other of us would be making the bigger sacrifices, but that overall it would balance out. It doesn't seem to me to be realistic to have a family without ever making any sacrifices. Maybe for DINKs it's possible?

In any case it feels really unhealthy to call compromise and balancing each other's needs "degrading", unless only one side is doing all the compromising. Again, I trust you're describing things accurately, it just sounds incredibly sad :(

This makes me think of my college roommate's girlfriend. She seemed torn between religious tradwife and empowered modern woman, and it did ruinous things to her mental health.

On one more tradwife-y occasion, she invited him and a few of our guy friends over, and just served us each a plate of steak and potatoes and a beer. And my blue-tribe acclimated ass reacted with wild-eyed panic, exactly because it felt like doing something terribly retrograde.

That memeplex is powerful and merciless. And I think it contributes mightily to modern human unhappiness. Which isn’t necessarily me advocating for trad roles, but for being being more relaxed about it all around (and accepting that most people will thus prefer something a little more trad than not).


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