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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  1yr ago (text post)   2969 thread views

Calling all Lurkers: Share your Dreams of Effortposting

It’s been pointed out recently that the topics discussed in the Culture War thread have gotten a bit repetitive. While I do think the Motte has a good spread on intellectual discussion, I’m always pushing for a wider range (dare I say diversity?) of viewpoints and topics in the CW thread.

I was a lurker for years, and I know that the barrier between having a thought and writing a top level comment in the CW thread can loom large indeed. Luckily I’m fresh out of inspiration, and would love to hear thoughts from folks about effortposts they want to write but haven’t gotten around to.

This of course applies to regulars who post frequently as well - share any and all topics you wish were discussed in the CW thread!

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I have a rly good effortpost chambered but I appear to be shadowbanned, so 🤷‍♀️

please post it <3

You Carp? I am beyond shocked.

Make them let me post! I have things to say!

No, you're just still caught in the new user filter and your posts have to be manually approved.

How does that work? My account is older than yours!

The new-user filter is based partially on post quantity and quality.

So it’s exactly like Reddit’s system where if you haven’t been sufficiently upvoted by the entrenched users, you’re invisible without moderator approval, just with a sneaky name and without the automod message letting you know that no one can see your stuff 🤔

Yeah, it was literally a clone of that because we were under time pressure to get this up and running and didn't have a better solution.

I actually do have a better solution upcoming, just, y'know, "up".

Also, the better solution will still be based on post quantity and quality.

Somewhere in me I have an effortpost on why crypto, including cryptocurrency is bad for rule of law and that a sane society would have banned both. We've been pretty fortunate that everyone that has built DNMs so far are not competent or visionary enough to produce something high quality. The potential black market has not come anywhere close to being fully actualized.

The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.

Yes, I am very familiar with the usual cipherpunk arguments for why crypto is an important tool for protecting people's security/privacy from criminals, and that also you can't trust police to protect backdoors in crypto systems and to also not abuse them. I'm not convinced the endgame world of maximally "useful" DNMs that could be produced wouldn't be a net worse world overall.

Seems like cryptocurrency is waning a bit so this future may be delayed for now.

Somewhere in me I have an effortpost on why crypto, including cryptocurrency is bad for rule of law and that a sane society would have banned both

This would definitely be contrarian here, curious to get a discussion going.

Dark net operations can be taken down without backdoors. We know this because it happens regularly. Granted, it often relies on a stupid mistake on the part of the people running the show, but humans are a very reliable source of stupid mistakes.

Cryptography can't protect cryptocurrency. At some point, the magic internet money has to interface with the real world. Hasn't China banned cryptocurrency? I haven't really been following the news. Has it been effective?

I think you may not realize how widely used cryptography is. With HTTPS, every time you browse the web, you are using state-of-the-art encryption algorithms. Without encryption, if you logged in somewhere on a public Wi-Fi network, everyone sharing the network would see your password, as would your ISP and anyone in the long chain between you and the website's servers. The modern internet wouldn't work at all without cryptography, and if you make it available for general internet use, you can't prevent it from being used by the bad guys.

The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.

This is a ridiculously unrealistic scenario. It sounds like it was dreamt up by a paranoid, technologically-illiterate boomer who falls for chain email hoaxes that show up on Snopes. For one, only a handful of the most popular Twitch streamers manage to get a viewership in the tens of thousands, and the demand for people saying funny things while playing video games is many orders of magnitude higher than the demand for child rape and snuff. I also recall reading (I think it was in a Reddit AMA with a paedophile, it may have even been on /r/themotte) that money isn't a major motivator for the "industry" and that the people who produce those kinds of videos are mostly enthusiasts who make it and share it to raise their status or because they just genuinely enjoy it. (How heartwarming.)

I think you may not realize how widely used cryptography is. With HTTPS, every time you browse the web, you

Everyone assumes I must be technically illiterate to not be repeating the standard cipherpunk talking points on this issue.

I've implemented ciphers and hash libraries and protocols. I've bought drugs on darknets. I've run cryptocurrency trading companies. I've worked at Google (most boring job of my career).

Let’s say that it is quite interesting that Tor relays seem to be located in Western, industrialized countries…and not Russia or China. It’s also true that Tor data can be deanonymized through certain types of attacks. The NSA and their counterparts in countries like France or Australia don’t bother catching puny small-fry dudes buying weed or something on the black market, just like the FBI doesn’t arrest these kinds of guys.

However, they can and do bust the owners and operators of large-scale darknet markets. You can go and buy weed (or even things like heroin or fentanyl) on the dark web fairly easily, but things like hiring competent reliable hitmen are considerably more difficult and may get you in trouble with law enforcement.

A site that ran a lucrative child-porn business would have a lot of motivated enemies. You’ve got to produce that shit somewhere. So too, consider the technical savvy of your average Joe. He’s no Satoshi Nakamoto; if there’s thousands of these sacks of shit a few will fuck up and become compromised by the alphabet soup gang.

Fighting out of the Red Corner: a bunch of dedicated hobbyists who are into evil things.

Fighting out of the Blue Corner: an agency full of competent professionals who make it their business to catch things like this, supported by the American people (at least here; I’d bet the average Joe on the street doesn’t give a fuck about illegal wiretapping if it’s being used to catch evil pedos sitting on piles of ill-gotten cash cryptocurrency)

I suppose this might work if it was all done overseas, in a country with lax laws and politicians that were amenable to bribery. Might. They’d still have issues with needing to produce this material and not get fucking killed.

Why is it interesting that Tor relays are mostly in "large, developed countries" and not the country with strict internet censorship, i.e. the great firewall, that presumably blocks Tor ... or Russia, a single country with less population than half the US? That's what you'd expect.

Not to say US intelligence hasn't tried to deanonymaize tor users, of course they have, and there are accounts of attacks on Tor where large percentages of new nodes are potentially malicious.

That is another explanation. That being said, these countries are more or less allies of America and the French or German or Australian versions of the NSA are cooperating with us. Hell, even famously neutral Switzerland helped us during the Cold War. If these dudes found out about a gigantic, well-funded pedophile murderer website…the guys running it, and a lot of their customers, would have law enforcement knocking at their doors.

You still have a bunch of dedicated hobbyists going up against large, powerful national governments with lots of resources and the backing of the general public…people would be literally calling for these guys’ heads.

The only way this would be possible, I think, is if these people had powerful patrons protecting them. I don’t know if that would mix well with just any evil shitbag with a laptop and a few hundred bucks’ worth of crypto being able to log onto these sites…I don’t think it would. Mr. Evil Pedo gets busted by law enforcement. There’s a good chance he sings like a canary…and if he doesn’t, there’s the next guy, and the next…someone’s going to spill the beans in hopes of a lighter sentence. Feds use that dude to go after bigger fish, with the cooperation of the NSA and the other alphabet soup boys.

There’d have to be a fairly large conspiracy and powerful people protecting something like this…if peasants (that means us) found out about this shit we’d be pissed. Could be a reasonably plausible way to get the American people to give up a lot of our civil liberties and accept an NSA headquarters at every police station or something, to be honest.

To sum up: you’ve still got like 100 militia dudes, who are decent at fighting but not professional grade, going up against hundreds of high quality professional soldiers. These guys are dog meat without a hell of a lot of help.

I have wanted to write (but probably won’t since it is gradually becoming a more popular position and I’m too lazy) a post making fun of the many Motizens who seriously believe that AI is more dangerous than nuclear weapons or that nuclear weapons are less dangerous now because of the test ban treaty. I’d maybe even go further and argue that it’s (AI) is less dangerous than either biological or chemical weapons as well.

It would also be nice to throw in a little discussion about how stupid analogies that compare AI with nuclear weapons (I addressed this a little bit here https://www.themotte.org/post/454/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/88276?context=8#context ) and how unsuitable an arms control treaty would be for regulating AI

The case for Open Individualism (there's only one consciousness in the universe), Analytic Idealism (consciousness is the fundamental "substance" of reality), why I think these ideas will go somewhat mainstream within a generation or so (maybe 10% of intellectuals will accept them) and how this could affect the world for better or worse.

Just a counterpoint to “consciousness is everything” being rare; this ideology is a major part of most esoteric movements. New Age, Gnostics, some forms of Wicca and noe-paganism all suggest that consciousness is the ultimate reality. On the more philosophical side, Pantheists would believe much the same thing.

I’m familiar with all these movements, pretty much all mystic traditions believe this. I identify as a panentheist myself. It’s quite mainstream in Hinduism too. But I believe even Western intellectuals will come around to a particular version of it (which ofc has plenty of overlap with many world traditions).

Meta: I hope these effortposts are realized, and I hope they're not posted in the main CW thread.

Why do you hope they’re not in the CW thread?

I think CW thread posts get more engagement, and kinda prefer when non-CW related posts go in there, but idk.

The CW thread is fast-moving and a top-level post can sometimes fall off the bottom of the page once the post above attracts enough replies. These effortposts look like they're going to add a lot of intellectual variety to the discussion here, and I hope they'd attract enough discussion that we'd be sad to see them disappear before their time.

Interesting point. I'm moving my CW effortpost into a new thread, we'll see if it takes.

Kind of a waste to even have the ability to submit new threads in the first place if 99% of discussion takes place in the weekly stickies. It would be good to encourage people to submit more original threads to encourage more experimental types of posts, and topics that don’t necessarily fit under the umbrella of the CW.

I've been wanting to write an essay tentatively titled "Following Godwin's law: In Defense Of Nazi Comparisons". The core thesis being that an example used to illustrate your position should be as uncontroversial as possible to avoid debate about the example. Everyone agrees Nazis are bad, so an example involving Nazis leaves everyone on the same page.

There is this idea of "everyone who invokes Godwin's Law automatically loses the discussion" that I believe is worth pushing back against, but this needs a lot of in-depth discussion which I don't feel prepared for and am not sure I have enouh content for.

Also, it might end up too similar to Scott's High Energy Ethics.

I'm glad you asked. Here's a few ideas, let me know if any of these are interesting to you and I'll think about writing something out.

  • Cultures often seem to develop in ways that echo or react to the cultures right next to them. For example many French cultural traits seem to be resolutely anti-British and many Japanese cultural traits seem to be purposely anti-Chinese.

  • "Late capitalism"- I used to roll my eyes at this term but lately it seems extremely apt. Broadly speaking, the powerhouses of the 21st century seem to be on some kind of steep decline while China is ascendant. I don't think China has the demographics or goodwill of the rest of the globe to rival US hegemony so I envision the next few decades will be a steep global decline driven by America's flailing performance in the next 10 years or so, dragging the global economy along with it. The rise of AI will make the situation more uneven and unpredictable, gains will be huge in some sectors and rapid decay will plague other fields. The current condition of Japan was quite shocking to see as someone who first visited about 18 years ago and I see its rapid decline as a canary in the coalmine for a handful of other nations.

  • What I learned about power from being gay and single for over three decades while also traveling in different cultures, shoehorning in some vague beliefs about reality and perception and also narcissism and selfishness and being spoiled and privileged and having the luxury of believing an incoherent and untrue version of the world. This is a lot but basically boils down to something like: we are all driven to seek power, but are born powerless and are told not to seek it. Power is given to those who either earn it or steal it from others. Good rulers earn their power through respect and bad rulers earn their power through toxic power games. If we can't be powerful we want to be under the rule of someone we respect. It's degrading to be ruled by those we disrespect. Present day American culture is in such a state of disarray because we have little respect for institutions and each other.

  • Something about how we seem to be constantly ruled by a monkey brain view of the world. People are constantly overcomplicating things when the monkey brain understanding of what's going on is usually so much more illuminating than the over-analytical concepts that people are constantly throwing out. This segues into something about the physical underlying material reality of populations and how they are always running the game at the end of the day, even while the media and internet (often using "woke" ideology or otherwise concepts of the ruling class) are doing their best to run interference on the monkey brain.

  • Speaking of the above, the material physical differences between population groups and how this affects their interactions and how divorced from this reality we've become in our current age. For example when I am in East Asia, as a large white man I'm often perceived as more threatening than everyone around me. I responded by being deferent and submissive in most situations to respect the people around me. In the Middle East, I'm perceived as more docile and less aggressive than others around me so I respond by being less reserved about my physicality and presence than when I'm in Asia. I think in the US, people have become completely divorced from the reality of group dynamics and people with more dominant/aggressive natures are told by the media that they have no power or money structurally and they don't realize that they have physically literally more power leading to aggression toward weaker populations that is basically an incoherent situation if you took away the messaging of critical theory and the advantages of money and power that afford weak people to be strong in the face of danger.

  • The aesthetics of rulers and how it can lead to revolution. Weimar Germany and the Ancient Regime France basically just got too effete and homosexual and led to their being overthrown. Also something something 2010s America.

  • Noblesse oblige and mutual respect and the lack of both in American culture

  • Why the culture of the rich used to look appealing but increasingly repulses me (Boils down to late 20th century creatives coopting underclass style for decades and then immediately protecting their wealth by disavowing any actual underclass movements that actually emerged ie Trump)

  • Men use the physical to protect the ego/mind. Women use the mind to protect the physical. Can also be extrapolated onto most power dynamics? needs to be thought through

Edit to add:

  • The cost of labor in rich countries is so high that it makes everything awful. Cost of labor in places like Thailand is so low that food is incredible due to labor intensive practices being used everywhere. I also suspect that less government regulation leads to more competition and innovation in poor countries vs rich ones. I am not an economist so I don't have the skills to address this more broadly but that's my working theory on why Thailand has better food and Turkey has better shopping than many rich countries.

This is a lot but basically boils down to something like: we are all driven to seek power, but are born powerless and are told not to seek it. Power is given to those who either earn it or steal it from others. Good rulers earn their power through respect and bad rulers earn their power through toxic power games. If we can't be powerful we want to be under the rule of someone we respect. It's degrading to be ruled by those we disrespect. Present day American culture is in such a state of disarray because we have little respect for institutions and each other.

This seems to strike to the heart of a lot of the issues I have with current US society. I'd love to see a more fleshed out version. Obvious parallels to Neitzsche's Will to Power and the Hobbesian struggle against nature.

I'd also argue that, going with your late capitalism post, it's degrading to have fundamental parts of meaning in our life reduced to transactions with money. Not sure why but something about the numerical aspect of transactions takes away something ineffable when it comes to relationships, social circles, etc. Having most people's primary social interaction or hierarchy be a corporate structure is destroying purpose and self-respect.

I would like to see an effortpost about the ARM/ASML/TSMC axis of chip design and manufacture and how Silicon Valley stopped making silicon. Given time, I could write a first version and see what came up in the comments.

Closer to the core culture war topics that get overdone, I think two sub-topics I would be interested in effortposts on are:

  • The nature and origins of Universal Culture/globohomo/Blue Tribe/Davos Man - is it Anglo, Jewish, both or neither? Is it the same culture as the Anglo-Chinese culture of Hong Kong and Singapore?

  • Just how unusual are "gayness" and "transness" as understood in Western culture? Male-male sex and people playing a gender role that doesn't match their anatomical sex are found in almost all cultures, but I think there is a standard pattern which is very different from Western gayness and transness.

For further reading on your gay question I'd recommend Beachy's "Gay Berlin" and Foucault's "The History of Sexuality." From these texts I came away with the impression that "gayness" and "transness" are a sort of modern western invention. I wrote a bit more about it in this thread.

I love the idea of looking into semiconductor manufacturing- very much a crucial piece of the modern supply chain. Perhaps the central piece as AI becomes more relevant.

Morality and Effectiveness - basically I feel like regardless of morals, people should be more concerned with instrumental values. Whether you desire a communist revolution or a Christian revival, work will help that goal along, so laziness should be (more of) a terrible vice in both ideologies. I think a lot of people argue about the ideal end result without putting in even a miniscule amount of work required to get there.

Rationality and Religion - Given many very common rationalist theories such as Many Worlds, the Fermi Paradox (and its rebuttals), and AI, I think it should stand to reason that God or something which would appear to us indistinguishable from God definitely exists. Any alien civilization or AI which has been around for billions of years will be as god to us unless you have utterly absurd projections for the diminishing returns of technological progress. I consider much of the discourse surrounding this (such as Outside View analyses of the Fermi Paradox, which I've already posted about) to be essentially cope around this fact.

Insanely Sane - Given how easy it is to make biological weapons, conduct one-man false flag operations, etc. it's shocking to me how rare those sorts of things are. Is there truly nobody who wants to discredit X cause by joining it, rising through the ranks, then doing utterly repugnant things? Nobody who will give their life to be the worst proponent of a cause they secretly hate? Doing so would be far easier and likely more effective than advocating for the cause that they like, if requiring much more dedication. The point would just be to talk about how strongly tied together logic and conviction seem to be, to the extent that there doesn't seem to be a single person alive both insane enough to cause a tragedy and sane enough to pull it off.

Moral Relativism - Even people (such as I) who claim not to believe it generally seem to act as if it's true. Also, it seems inherently self-defeating. I think a post about its use as a tool to maintain peace, and how that's evolved into seemingly a very dominant ideology, would be pretty interesting. Generally people seem to have mostly given up on finding and spreading objective truth.

Insanely Sane

That one reminds me of Gwern's "On the Absence of True Fanatics". As well as his "Terrorism Is Not About Terror", wich concludes that "terror⁣ism is a form of so⁣cial⁣iza⁣tion or status-seeking"; if that theory is true, then conducting a one-man false-flag operation, like the one you describe, would be precisely the opposite of that, and thus is unappealing to people who might otherwise have a terrorist mindset.

My vote is for Insanely Sane. That seems like an interesting thought.

My first thoughts on it is that the sane have a lot to lose and are being served by the system; the insane have little in the way of personal resources and capital. Sometimes, there are exceptions, but not often.

  • Furries as a result of reduced environmental enrichment and maternal bonding. Furries associate with a dog foremost because (1) dogs receives abundant physical affection and (2) dogs primarily engage in the environment in a sense-rich way.

  • How the New Testament is a truly great central text for a culture. It tracks a humble individual who persuades his followers with plain truth and moral insight, it criticizes both legal authority and the very idea of moral authority, it shows us the universal propensity toward social sins, it repudiates power and wealth and distraction, and it possesses a better understanding of happiness than pop culture today (the hedonic treadmill, growth mindset, and so on are efficiently fleshed out in the Gospel). It’s truly remarkable that this became the central text, let alone in the Roman Empire. I fear the consequences of a society which no longer sees it as a high level of truth. You don’t have to “believe in God” (I increasingly find belief or unbelief to be missing the point). The idea that such a text could actually become sacred is proof of the importance of religion, because only fervent individuals could hoist it up against the Pagan stories and worldly books. I can’t imagine any solitary book as useful for guiding a society than the New Testament.

hedonic treadmill

Where does it address that, out of curiosity?

I agree with you on the furries one now that I think about it, but I think the other factor is that dogs these days are pampered pets from whom nothing is expected. I admittedly don’t know much about the demographics of furries but I’d always assumed this was a perpetual adolescence phenomenon for whom ‘everyone likes you and you don’t have to do anything productive’ is pretty close to an ultimate fantasy- you’ll notice very few furries are farmers.

Furries as a result of reduced environmental enrichment and maternal bonding.

FWIW, one of my earliest memories (like from age 3) is of me telling another child that I had a strong desire to be a dog. And I had no shortage of maternal bonding either.

If I had to attribute the phenomenon to anything, I would just attribute it to the prevalence of dogs in children's media.

Furries as a result of reduced environmental enrichment and maternal bonding. Furries associate with a dog foremost because (1) dogs receives abundant physical affection and (2) dogs primarily engage in the environment in a sense-rich way.

Furries are result of ancient call of blood - Germanic blood waking up and yearning to retvrn to old Teutonic forests.

This explanation is as scientific as yours, but much cooler.

I’d be curious about the second one, as I’ve been kinda deep diving the history of the whole thing and I’ve sort of come around to the idea that Jesus actually founded the Ebionite movement and that Paul co-opted it and later the Romans turned it into a politically useful mystery religion.

Which kinda goes back to my thoughts about effort posting— the most effective way to shut up Yesua the Jew was to turn him into the second person of the trinity.

Write the furries one, it sounds wild.

I have a few effort post ideas but I really don't have time to sit down and write them right now.

  1. How the arts are reacting and could potentially react to AI advancements, how performative arts will change verses recorded arts.

  2. How the internet causes radicalization because there is too much information, causing tribalism as an easy and ineffective method to filter information.

2a) Why cultural elitism has shifted from having excess goods to limiting 'rare' goods - gluten free, extreme diets, superfoods, organics, etc.

  1. While patriarchal hierarchies and organization have noted and codified negatives, matriarchal organizations have less outwardly and clear-cut outgroups but are even more stifling and cause potentially worse negative externalities.

  2. How modern gender roles, trans-humanism, and lgbt rhetoric does the exact opposite of what it intends to do - it doesn't break down gender roles but enforces and codifies them.

  3. The 'normie' vs 'conspiracy' - the statistically average viewpoint of any given event frequently fails to hold up upon closer examination vs the people who closely follow an event/thing (for example, low information atheist vs high information atheist vs Cafeteria Catholic vs studied Catholic.

  4. Financial debt - how the government leverages people in significant financial debt to consolidate power.

How the internet causes radicalization because there is too much information, causing tribalism as an easy and ineffective method to filter information.

Ironic, I wanted to write an effortpost about how the internet causes radicalization because there is too much information, causing tribalism because you are finally seeing your opposing ideology's true, grassroots, mask-off arguments, not the laundered-for-public-consumption ones you get from their more tactful, tactical, official mouthpieces, and the truth is worse than most suspected. The radicalisation comes from less biased information on the other tribe, not a self-imposed more bias due to sloppy filtration.

What a shame that we can't fight about it because we're both too lazy.

It's not really a laziness thing for me, it's more of a time thing. I have a lot I'm doing right now so it's hard to find the time to really organize thoughts into anything substantial.

I've got a number of ideas bouncing around in my head that I just never have the time to try and make the case for convincingly. Headline followed by tl;dr.

A) Oryx and Crake was an instruction manual for biological research - not the cyperpunk zaibatsu dystopia species-level cuckoldry, but the bioengineering. We'll never understand biological systems until we start trying to build them. Preferably with the help of AI.

B) The Bayh-Dole act gave us a sugar high but led to us eating our seed corn. The startup ecosystem and private industry are dependent on uncommercialized, foundational basic research carried out by underpaid and overworked scientists motivated by furthering humanity and/or ego, not profit.

C) Are we witnessing the birth of two transnational ethnicities? Also, the case for globalization.

D) What I tentatively call 'pregnancy autism,' or maybe an autistic attempt to analyze relationships and relationship conflict. Hard to do a tl;dr, but maybe it's an existential crisis inspired by this quote from 'What to expect when you're expecting':

Don’t take her outbursts personally. And don’t hold them against her. They are, after all, completely out of her control. Remember, it’s the hormones talking - and crying for no apparent reason. Avoid pointing out her moods, too. Though she’s powerless to control them, she’s probably also all too aware of them. And chances are, she’s no happier about them than you are. It’s no picnic being pregnant.

E) Whatever the fuck this bullshit spam is from Nancy Pelosi/DNC that I get daily:

Subject: Trump MORTIFYING loss

This is incredible:

Since Donald Trump announced another hateful, divisive campaign for President…

THOUSANDS of Democrats have stepped up and chipped in to our Defeat Trumpism Fund to ensure he NEVER returns to power.

For that, I’m so grateful.

But my team just alerted me that we’re still 2,403 gifts short of our goal before the End of Week Deadline.

I don’t want to beg, but this couldn’t be more important. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a statement Monday morning. If we CRUSH our goal before this deadline, we’ll show Trump, Republicans, and the ENTIRE country that our Democrats have what it takes to defeat him and his MAGA allies once again. So I’m asking you to be one of the final 2,403 Democrats I need to chip in so we can start organizing to DEFEAT Trump and every last one of his extremist allies. Please, will you chip in $15?

Complete with 2005 html-era formatting highlighting text in red and blue.

F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.

G) Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.

Numbered lists apparently reset after quotes, unfortunately. Apologies for having to use letters instead.

edit: for my own records, the consciousness blackpill.

F) Healthy at more weights than you thought. IMO, people overstate the health risks of being overweight and don't sufficiently differentiate between overweight/obese and active/inactive.

I'd be interested in this if someone wanted to dig a bit deeper on the subject. In particular I'd be interested to know if some one could figure out how the original BMI based thresholds were set. I'm particularly interested in knowing why a BMI of 25 is considered unhealthy while a BMI of 18.5 is not. I've yet to see an all causes mortality chart where the point at 25 had a higher hazard ratio than the point at 18.5.

This was of particular interest to me when states were rationing COVID vaccine shots. In the state I was living in, having a BMI of 25 made you eligible for the full two shot sequence before people with a BMI 18.5 were even eligible for one. When I tried to figure out why, the state department of health website referenced the CDC. Clicking three or four times and past a circular reference on the CDC site reached a paper that showed minimum risk around 24, if i recall correctly. I don't think this is the same paper, but It seems to show something similar. With the identified minimums in Figure 2. between 23.7 and 25.9. I still can't fathom how the state health officials justified to themselves prioritizing otherwise healthy 18-39 year olds with a BMI of 25 over 49 year olds with a BMI of 18.5.

I'd also be very interested in high quality population level research that controls for body composition as well as BMI with respect to mortality. Surely for a male at 5'10" (178 cm) it healthier to be 175 lbs (80 kg), BMI of 25, with 15% body fat than 130 lbs (59kg), BMI of 18.6, with 20% body fat.

IIRC for males actual best health outcomes are around 26 -- probably the recommendations were just formed based on the distribution of BMIs in the population (ie. mean of 22.5, 1 sigma 2.5?) -- back when people were way skinnier though.

Unfortunately, I don't think it was that sensible. I've never bothered to dig down through all the references (you have to go back to actuarial tables from 100 years ago), but this review paper quotes a 1995 WHO report (internal citations omitted emphasis mine)

WHO Expert Committee on Physical Status referenced the meta-analysis ... presented the U-shape mortality rates that sharply increased when BMI <18.5 and >30.0 kg/m2 with the acceptable BMI range as 18.5–25.00. The WHO experts underscored that the cut-offs were chosen arbitrarily based on the “visual inspection of the relationship between BMI and mortality”...

I don't understand why you would set the low threshold at the point where the curve turns up sharply, but the high threshold at a point close to the minimum.

Numbered lists in HTML are an interesting feature. They were added very early. They've been in a state of "clearly done wrong but not so wrong to be worth fixing" for decades.

I don't entirely understand what you want say but speaking from some experience on D), the quote reads to me like the very idealised advice that is always floating around everywhere. It's not entirely wrong and so it gets shared, but it's over-consistent and fits a bit to conveniently in the currently popular framework of "always be nice about everything". Not taking the outbursts too personally is correct, not holding them against her mostly also. But you absolutely should point out the moods to her. When the hormones are talking, it can be surprisingly difficult for oneself to notice that you're being unreasonable. There's plenty of broken relationships because people just refused to stop indulging the wife. You should obviously pick your fights and time it right though. Also, there are certainly also plenty of broken relationships because the guy was a loser and/or a slacker, but there are no articles floating around how you totally should support your husbands "streamer career" even if it looks like he is just playing video games with like four people who aren't paying him.

Edit: Though I guess I'm falling into your "criticism is easy" trap, ha. So I'll be more specific about what I'm advocating: Be nice and considerate, but also confident and stand your ground. Hug her, but don't just agree with her because it's the easy way. Make her some tea, do some housework that normally she would have done, let her sit down and relax, but also let her know it's out of special consideration for her state, not because you crumbled under her accusations. And so on, you get the drift. This is obviously much harder than the former advice, because here there is tension between two values, "be nice to her" and "don't let her steamroll you", instead of the simple one-dimensional optimization.

Edit: Though I guess I'm falling into your "criticism is easy" trap, ha.

You're fine, it's not meant to be a trap to stifle discussion. It's more along the lines of someone proposing policy X or idea Y and getting piled on by haters who don't actually have a better idea.

Not taking the outbursts too personally is correct, not holding them against her mostly also. But you absolutely should point out the moods to her. When the hormones are talking, it can be surprisingly difficult for oneself to notice that you're being unreasonable.

It's more like I start spiraling into questioning when anyone is ever truly 'at fault' for something. Say pregnant, hormonal women aren't in control of their actions due to biological reasons (although therein lies another trap - makes it hard to take their grievances seriously, right?). Do we extend the same charity to testosterone fueled domestic violence or crime? How do we decide when someone is at fault, versus when someone isn't in control due to their biology? And finally, if someone behaves a certain way due to their environment (i.e. bad parents, poverty, etc) are they somehow more at fault for those things that are just as outside their control as their biology?

How about something more minor: I've cultivated pretty robust control over my emotions and reactions so I never really lash out at my partners. They still do things that irritate me sometimes, and it always turns into a choice whether I complain about it. But...why? I suppose one litmus test to raising an issue is whether it's actually possible to change their behavior in some meaningful way, and (here's where the autism dials up to 11) I could model myself as being a part of their environment encouraging themselves to change.

Maybe the moral of the story is what you say, and I've rederived the 'just strive to be a better person bro' that the ancients were talking about. And maybe the corollary is to make sure you find a partner striving to do the same so you don't get steamrolled in every argument.

Anyways, thanks for indulging some navel-gazing cringeworthy discussion. Not something that's easy to bring up in real life aside from nibbling around the edges.

I would be interested in C)...what are those transnational ethnicities?

Likewise

Criticism is valuable, but easy - standing for something is hard but much more valuable. Tied to my distaste for reactionary thought and experience with pitching scientific ideas.

Kinda reminds me of the revelation I had over a common Russian saying, "anyone can offend an artist". I used to treat it as a statement that slyly makes fun of the artists' thin skin, but then I realized it's literally true.

If you are someone who makes art to make a statement and not just to pay the bills, you have a deeply personal relationship with your own work. You've poured tens, if not hundreds or thousands of hours into it. Hopefully, you've made thousands of people happy. But what do you see? Even if you filter out people whose feedback is "ur book sucks fagit" and pay attention only to the well-written and articulated reviews, you are reading mainly criticism, not apologetics. Someone who is 99% satisfied with your game will still try to spend 50% of his review discussing the things they liked and 50% discussing the things they think could've been done better. They are doing this partly because they want to show how deeply they care about your creative work, partly because they want to be "fair" to help those who are thinking about buying your creative work, but the final result is that 50% of what you read is negative feedback.

After realizing this I changed the way I interact with creators. If I like something, I try to not be economical with my praise. Who cares if someone reading this rolls their eyes at my "fanboyism". Creators deserve to experience the joy their works brought their audience before it has been distilled into a soulless number like the Metacritic score or their Patreon earnings.

For a long time I've been thinking I need to make it a rule to tell someone if I enjoyed reading something they wrote. This is another data point in favor of making that a rule.

Not exactly a lurker but stuff that's been sitting in my "i really ought the finish one of these and post it" folder

  • Inferential distance: permissive vs contested enviroments (it's not paranoia if people are actually out to get you)

  • Inferential distance: choosing life, love, and civilization over rationality

  • Inferential distance: internal vs external loci of control (even with a gun to your head there is always a choice)

  • Understanding the Appeal: why certain adaptations of a work are successful

  • On legacy sequels and nostalgia bait: Original Top Gun vs Top Gun Maverick, ST TNG vs ST Picard, Karate Kid vs Cobra Kai etc...

  • a commentary on/review of Barry Lyndon

  • a commentary on/review of Paths of Glory

  • a commentary on/review of Hoosiers

  • discipline vs technology, and internet culture war vs meat-space shoot-you-in-the-face war

  • a compilation of/expansion upon my old east Africa posts from /r/Themotte and SSC

  • a compilation of/expansion upon my old Iraq posts from /r/Themotte and SSC

I'm interested in the first three. Especially the third. I abhor the postmodern assertion that free will is an illusion on a visceral level and would love to read some discussion here about that.

I’d love to read your inferential distance posts. I often find myself wishing I could go back to the days before utilitarianism, determinism, and other non-values based belief systems convinced me of their logic. While those sorts of beliefs may be more true in some cosmos sense, they certainly have far less utility on a personal basis. Ironic.

Imo we could definitely use more firsthand Africa posts. Or at least I like to read them.

I've been mulling over how Fallout 4's depiction of the Institute was surprisingly insightful given how the scientific community reacted to covid. It might be a little too silly for some.

I've been thinking of doing an effortpost on the problems with the Trump indictment to see if there are any counter arguments I'm not aware of.

An overview of statistical inference inspired by the seeming statistical illiteracy of most of this community as seen in discussions of Aella. It was pretty hard to read, and made me doubt if the crowd here is equally clueless about other things where I'm less knowledgeable.

I'd be very interested in this!

Yes.

Two from my endless pile. Both labor intensive so who knows when, if ever, I'll get around to them:

Globalization, Fragility, and Monoculture - Basically, an exploration of the idea that modern economic conditions facilitate economies of scale in which commodity production and distribution is highly centralized, for reasons of cost i.e. the huge percentage of the worlds semiconducturs traditionally manufactured in Taiwan. This also facilitates standardization of design in these products. The analogy in the natural world would be the ability of certain species, hyper-optimized to fill a certain ecological niche, to flourish and crowd out potential competitors. This is well and good until something happens to disrupt the status quo; the product or organism that was perfectly adapted to one set of conditions is often too specialized to adapt when those conditions change. None of these ideas are terribly new of course. Since Covid, lots of people have been thinking about the idea that globalization is pretty fragile. Both John Robb in the security sphere and Nicholas Nassim Taleb have arguably been preaching similar ideas long before they started to enter mainstream currency. The issue, I think, is that the mono-cultural model tends to be very profitable in the short-to-medium term. Hyper-specialization is what allows for explosive growth, which is what hordes of slavering venture capitalists and would-be venture capitalists are always seeking. Not sure anyone has addressed the explicit tradeoff between growth and security/systemic diversity and the compromises that we may be forced to make on that front in a generation or two.

A tale of two elites - Arguably since the end of the civil war, the United States has largely been run by people associated with political and financial centers of power in the Northeast of the country. Broadly speaking, they tend to have similar educational (Ivy League) and professional backgrounds (often lawyers, academics, or some other wordcel-esque job), and place a great deal of emphasis on technocratic credentialism. The emergence of silicon valley as a possible rival center of power, with its own culture, norms, and ideals could set conditions for a major change. Again, hardly an original idea, but not one I've seen explored in depth to my own satisfaction

Neat ideas. Your first post is complementary to one I have been kicking around on the consolidation cycle. Most of us have lived to see the consolidation of social media/internet forums and all the CW- topics that spawns but the general process happens in many areas (manufacturing, farming, urbanization, etc. )

the post would be examine how technology changes the dynamics of the consolidation cycle. The idea is that the distribution of entities (as a function of size) generally follows a power law and that when a technology comes around that reduces transaction costs between entities two things happen. First, the time it takes to reach the "consolidated" part of the cycle goes down and second the exponent on the power law gets more negative i.e. in the consolidated state the first x% of the domain is controlled by a smaller number of larger entities.

One result of this is the impact on "matching" processes like trying to find a contractor, or Google searching anything. Paradoxically, having a greater "reach" on your search (enabled by lower search costs like internet search engines) at first increases your options, but ultimately reduces your options due to the market response/consolidation dynamics.

I think this dynamic underlies a lot of a host of cathedral vs bazaar type CW adjacent topics-- social media landscape, regulatory capture, dating, urbanization, globalization, the "bowling alone" phenomenon, and others

Been a minute since I logged in here, but I wanted to respond that I'd be interested to read that. What technologies exemplify this trend?

Any technology that improves the pace or efficiency (reduces transaction costs) of the movement of goods or ideas would be at play here: cars, airplanes, television, Internet, (and before that the printing press, trains and the ur-example, the horse). But also certain economic innovations, like standardized weights and measures and private property.

I'd definitely read the piece if you ever get around to it.

Looking forward to this! Some thoughts for your consideration:

Landowners in outer ring suburbs being losers-- would this be the case? If first ring suburbs are allowed to densify, there might be a net migration from outer rings to inner rings (I suspect this is a good thing from the perspective of outer-ring/bordering rural inhabitants). Or maybe you mean they'd be losers from a property value perspective as a result of this migration.

People who want to retain a suburban lifestyle in short driving distance of urban cores being losers -- again would this be true on net. I think to a certain extent this archetype of "dense urban core where all the commercial stuff happens surrounded by low density residential" is an artifact of existing land use restrictions, and may not be true in an alternative world. For example, before the widespread application of more or less "modern" land use, town centers spring up wherever there is a natural Schelling point to meet the economic needs of those in reasonable-travelling distance. So even granting they would lose out on access to the "big" city center they also gain the opportunity create localized pockets of commercial activity that are both closer to them and also more responsive to local needs.

I've been thinking a little bit about some of the dynamics of left/right wing politics as a continuation of high school social dynamics into old age. It's a half formed thought that I have not fully explored internally but the vague idea is; popular kids stop getting things for free when they enter the adult world and find it unfair they've lost influence, so engage more with 'people should just be good to each other' type ideas. Unpopular kids who became successful are still resentful and engage more with a 'fuck you, why would I share my money/power/influence with the people who hate me' worldview. Both are pushing to maximize the type of influence that benefits them the most, popular kids obviously do better with social dynamics and the ones who succeed economically or in the workplace might(?) do better where influence is measured in tangible things or actions.

A second thought kicking around in my head is a little weirder and harder to pin down. The human brain seems to compulsively project personalities onto ... stuff. Things, ideas, ideals. I suspect (but don't know how to go about researching or confirming) that most religions spring from a desire to understand things beyond our control. Thunder is scary, you can't control it, but you can project a personality onto it and then 'understand' that in a social sense. From this perspective a religion like Shinto displays a kind of raw form of this, in that any random inanimate object can be inhabited(?) by Kami, and thereby have personality projected onto it. It is enough for an object to have been interacted with by humans, and for an emotional bond to be formed, for it to be divine.

Non-religious people do this as well, their cars, computers, plants, tools; they all have 'personality'. I think if you take this to its logical conclusion, we are simply projecting a personality onto ourselves, and others as well. People are more convinced by being described as the type of person who would do something than by trying to convince them to take a specific action in the first place. There might be some way to fit this into existing conversations about whether machine-learning type intelligence is qualitatively different to meat based intelligence.

I'm unfortunately too busy with work to flesh out either of these thoughts fully, and most of the time too distracted reading the entertaining conversations others are having to make an effort post!

My practical experience in local youth politics basically indicates that almost everyone drawn towards politics is a bit "special" in some way, but generally speaking more popular one was, more likely they're simply to be drawn towards mainstream centrist politics, not any of the extremes.

My experience in the US is that any youths with political interests are a bit nerdy, but at least for boys the more popular, the more likely to be on the right, with a major confound that artsy needs are usually to the left of math nerds.

I think it depends how you’re interested. The nerdy types tend to (and this seems to generalize across most domains, actually) be the deep divers. A political nerd can talk endlessly about policies, the contents of various bills or laws or Supreme Court decisions. They can Also usually handicap a political race using polling data.

Most people, regardless of political opinions, cannot actually do that. The normies might have various opinions on abortion, but they don’t understand the laws, or that the supreme court’s decision didn’t actually ban anything. They remanded it to the states and the legislature. I heard the wrong takes on that one from people who want abortions legal and from abortion abolitionists.

I'd say that "politics nerds" and other special types turn up in numbers in all parties I've encountered, but in the mainstream centrist parties they'd be more than offset by normie types who got into politics because they wanted, for instance, to fix some particular local issue (of course local-issue stalwarts can also go pretty weird and feral over their particular issue), or who just "felt the need to serve" or whatever. Often the mechanism for latter seems to be that they participate in one of the youth councils set up in municipalities to "give the youth a voice" and then gravitate to the party that rules their municipality (or where they have a family background, or which simply annoys them the least), which almost always tends to be a milquetoast centre-right-to-centre-left party.

I have a file in my notetaking program that I've named "mottepost ideas", with things ranging from bullet points to semi-complete drafts of posts to try and finish when I'm in a writing mood and not too frustrated with this place. The problem is that I've also been toying with the idea of trying my hand at real-name blogging for a while - both because I think some of those ideas would be interesting to write up for people I know in real life, and because the idea of attracting more real-life friends with similar interests by public writing is appealing in the abstract - and posting the idea on the Motte first would burn it for using there unless I'm willing to risk self-doxing.

Two entries in that file that I'm pretty okay with burning (because they're low-quality anyway):

critical theory vs. critical thinking

  • Alison Bailey [2017] surprisingly clear about this
  • logic = language of nature, power dialectic = language of humans
  • speak good logic to extract resources from nature, speak good dialectic to extract resources from other humans
  • are your problems better solved by extracting more from nature (chop wood, make fire) or from other people (capture warm house)?
  • "dialectic can not extract a warming fire from winter's frozen wood, nor quenching drink from scorching desert air"
  • dialecticians only can profitably wrangle people because someone has done the work of wrangling nature before them. Had nature not been wrangled, they would be sitting in caves wondering why their children died of tetanus, not sitting in shoddy flats wondering why they can't afford an iPhone

Weirdmaxing

Modern architecture sucks because of runaway elite competition, but what about good-looking traditional schools of architecture? Did those not arise from runaway elite competition? Even people in cultures that build nice buildings (say, 19thct UK) generally have no idea how you could build nice buildings in Japanese or Indian style. Seems like an "unknown unknowns" problem; is it optimal to not have one elite that gets to do runaway loopy optimisation with an evolving value function, but multiple, and then you get to pick out the best one from them? Is this generally a good approach to unknown unknowns?

Why do you believe modern architecture sucks?

Personal opinion, and I have yet to see anyone disagree in a setting sufficiently anonymous to remove the signalling advantage to disagreeing. (See also that SSC post ("Whither Tartaria?", I think) which cited some statistics suggesting that modern buildings are generally unpopular)

To be clear, I'm talking strictly about the macroscopic aesthetic qualities. I think modern buildings have many advantages in terms of interior space, plumbing, wiring, ventilation, materials, insulation etc.; however I would not even chalk those up to architects, considering that none of the US architecture students I knew seemed to be learning anything to do with this. Rather, as I understood it at the time, the architectural process is now such that the architect comes up with some artistic macroscopic design, and the details of how to turn it into a liveable building that satisfies relevant codes and regulations are worked out by subordinates with actual understanding of construction and physics (Civil or structural engineers?).

I ask because I recently stumbled upon the subreddit /r/architecturalrevival and was greatly annoyed by the ignorance on display. I've been thinking of writing a critique, so when I saw your post, I was interested in hearing what someone who believes modern architecture sucks thinks. The subreddit has no real arguments: the belief that modern architecture sucks is usually implicit, and if it is ever expressed explicitly, it is in a circlejerky manner.

Would you mind sharing your opinion on the Sydney Opera House and the works of Zaha Hadid? This question is inspired by one of the most common complaints on the subreddit, something to the effect of "modern buildings are all just boring concrete and glass boxes", which is plainly false. (That's just one of their many nonsensical and ignorant claims. An exhaustive list would be very long.)

Edit: Other people's opinions are welcome, too.

The subreddit has no real arguments: the belief that modern architecture sucks is usually implicit, and if it is ever expressed explicitly, it is in a circlejerky manner.

It's ultimately a question of taste, but according to surveys, they have the numbers on their side.

(That's just one of their many nonsensical and ignorant claims. An exhaustive list would be very long.)

An exhaustive list would still just be a list of exceptions, as far as a cursory glance out my window can tell, and even those exceptions will probably range from "meh" to ugly (which is my opinion on Sydney Opera / Zaha Hadid)

To be clear, I was not talking about a list of every modern building I like, but a list of the subreddit's many nonsensical and ignorant claims, as I said. De gustibus non est disputandum, of course, but these people are claiming their taste is objectively superior and the only reason anyone would disagree is because they're an evil globohomo communist or an evil greedy capitalist. They then have to justify this with the concrete box canard. Everyone certainly would hate modern architecture if it really did consist entirely of boring concrete boxes, but as the examples I mentioned show, this is not the case. No one thinks a forest of Soviet commieblocks looks good, but citing that as an example of modern architecture is a strawman. (Not even a weakman, since these buildings were not designed with appearance in mind at all. They were designed to house as many people as possible as quickly as possible.)

The list would further include conflating modern architecture with modern car-centric urban planning (you can have one without the other), comparing modern-day slums built by amateurs without the involvement of any architects at all to medieval palaces, and much more.

Not who you asked, but the sails are good as a skyline piece while the bottom layers of the SOH are a boring block of concrete, so the whole thing looks better from a distance than up close. And looking at the works of Hadid, she reasonably exemplifies the trend of inhuman boxes and blobs of weird shapes which look interesting for 5 seconds but seem in no way to be awe-inspiring, pleasant to be around or part of a beautiful skyline.

Really, this is the essence of the issue for me - a lot of Architecture from the previous century feels designed to impress people looking at it for 5s-5min. Wow, what an unusual design. But buildings are going to be the home or workplace of many people, and part of many more people's daily commute or view. I'd pick any place from the front page of that subreddit over any of Hadid's buildings for this.

It ultimately still seems difficult to communicate what exactly makes some objects ugly while others are beautiful in one's eyes, and the general theories of beauty that I've heard about symmetry, structure and surprise all seem to be such that nobody in an even slightly contrarian mood would ever agree to them. Therefore, I see no better option than to resort to the argument from majority revealed preference something like "few people seek out the appearance of these buildings unless they have status to gain from appearing to do so". For my own opinions, though -

Sydney Opera House: I've never seen it in person, but it strikes me as pretty ugly considering for example pictures like the standard Wikipedia one. The bottom part is just plain brutalist concrete with all of the charm of an Atlantic Wall bunker - inhospitable, lacking in symmetry and ornamentation, having an unattractive colour and evoking the general rusty rebar feeling of "if I scrape myself on this, I might get tetanus". I can see the sail-like structure on top as having been a fun gimmick for like the first week after it was built, but a single gimmick like that is bound to get old extremely fast, and especially now that it exhibits clear aging/weathering symptoms that do not agree with the sail theme, it looks like some 1990s Chinese plastic toy that washed up on the beach.

Zaha Hadid: I wasn't too familiar with her work (though I knew that she is a famous architect in the abstract), and some of the pictures of buildings I found actually looked somewhat nice - but (1) for some of them I suspect they have the same gimmick nature as the Sydney Opera House superstructure, where it's fun to look at for a while at first but once you got used to it there is nothing appealing to come back for; there is no detail to get lost in, little that's intrinsically beautiful, and a lot of the design is just gratuitously loud and conspicuous, and it seems designed to draw your attention even after you are already so overfamiliar with the architectural punchline that you derive zero novelty from looking at it again, like the same running gag screamed into your ear repeatedly forever, and (2) many of them might be fine standing isolated in the desert somewhere but are inevitably going to look jarring against any real cityscape, amplifying the "old joke screamed in your ear whether you want it or not" effect. In detail, Guangzhou Opera House, Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, Vitra Fire Station all look bad; (the concept art for) Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye Smart City looks quite good; Shenzhen Bay Super Headquarters Base Tower C-1 might be ok; the Beko Building seems okay in isolation but I've been to the location where they're building it and it seems like a travesty to place it between the old castle and the river.

I thought some of the buildings posted on architecturalrevival looked nice, but the place does have an upvote-farming circlejerk nature to it. To be clear, I really don't consider myself a neogothic-or-bust RETVRNer who wishes to roll back architecture in the hope of rolling back society along with it - the Ghibliesque buildings of the quasi-hippie that was Friedensreich Hundertwasser are appealing to me, and even the cheap knockoff Bauhaus style of modern Austrian vernacular architecture is perfectly okay. I really just think that the stuff that self-proclaimed tastemakers sell as akshually award-winning architecture that the plebs are just too crude to appreciate, starting approximately with the Brutalist era (or perhaps Le Corbusier, who had all the hallmarks of actually just being your typical narcissist who gathered a sufficiently big mob of enablers to sybil-attack the social proof system), is terrible.

Regarding architecture, my pet theory is that modern architecture is optimized to look good from a distance, as from a moving car, or a plane, or as from across the valley from where your residence is, looking into the city center. Whereas traditional architecture is optimized to look good up close, as to a pedestrian.

When viewed briefly from a car window cruising by at 40+ mph, all the architectural detail and texture of traditional architecture becomes muddled and visually pointless.

Modern architecture sucks because of runaway elite competition, but what about good-looking traditional schools of architecture? Did those not arise from runaway elite competition?

Modern architecture has two things going against it... first schools reward "creativity". So all of the grads from the top schools with top marks like to make buildings that are a little zany.

The other is competing preferences. Locals don't particularly care if their city hall looks like every other city hall. They just want a distinguished looking building for city hall stuff. However architects enjoy travelling and looking at unique buildings. So they have a bias towards weird.

Imagine if every city mayor had to buy all their suits from designs proposed by respected graduates of top fashion schools. Inevitably the mayor of Cincinnati would end up in a hot pink suit with rhinestones simply because that was the most normal looking option offered.

It's been my observation that the "high end" of every creative endeavor turns into a circlejerk between practicioners who sit around creating weird things. I've observed this in various arenas: modern art, cooking, fashion, and so on. My guess is it's because by the time you get to the top, you've spent so much time immersed in the field that you're just profoundly bored of all the normal options. That, and they've probably been done before. So between boredom and the desire to make their mark on the world, these folks compete to outdo each other in creating the weirdest possible things.

Unfortunately, that means that the high end stuff also has completely lost touch with everyone who isn't living and breathing that world. Normal people don't give a flying fuck about some weird avant-garde fashion show garment, they just want normal clothes that look nice. So these art forms wind up kind of sucking compared to what came before, because they're busy wrapped up in their quest for novelty instead of considering what people will actually enjoy.

Also, it seems like the creators don't really recognize their own limits. Everyone wants to be the pioneer who revolutionizes their field with a new creation, but few people actually have the chops to pull that off. I recently was at a restaurant where they had a deconstructed black forest cake. Every element of the traditional cake was done in an alternative way (e.g. cherry sorbet for the cherries, chocolate cake crumbs instead of a sponge cake, etc). It was very creative, but frankly it was just plain worse than a normal black forest cake. That chef would've been better off knowing their limits and just sticking to the classic instead of trying to reinvent it in a creative way. The same goes for many artists, fashion designers, and so on. They just aren't as good as they think they are, and so they make something that is not really very good as they miss greatness.

Here are a few ideas I've been wanting to see more of. I've written on some of these topics, but want to put them out there for more discussion regardless:

  • Implications of space travel on the economy/culture war etc.

  • AI alignment based on politcal lines - seems this area is up in the air right now, but given the current partisan environment I highly doubt we'll get both partied agreed on one side or the other. I tentatively think democrats will push for safety/halting research, while Republicans will push for acceleration. I'd like to see a more rigorous analysis though.

  • The rise of the medical establishment, especially psychiatry, and how it has interacted with the downfall of Christianity and classical Western beliefs. A few other posters have written on this idea but I'm curious of the specifics.

  • Nuclear power and how/why it become so polemicized. I'm sure that everyone knows the big incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but I'd be willing to bet there's a story to be told about the behind the scenes politicking that led to the current status quo where nuclear is toxic (heh) in public discourse.

  • Dreams and how they are totally disregarded in modern technological societies. Almost every culture throughout the world placed a large significance on dreams - now we don't! Wonder why this is and how it could play into our neuroses.

Nuclear power and how/why it become so polemicized. I'm sure that everyone knows the big incidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, but I'd be willing to bet there's a story to be told about the behind the scenes politicking that led to the current status quo where nuclear is toxic (heh) in public discourse.

In generally, in the US, what? How "toxic" nuclear varies hugely from country to country. In Finland, it's probably currently toxic to be anti-nuclear. However, several polls also indicate that the pro-nuclear view holds anywhere from a majority to a really comfortable majority of support in the American public, and at the very least there are no credible suggestions to actually start proactively running nuclear power stations down in the US, a la Germany.

Historically, I'd say the biggest motivator in anti-nuclear sentiment weren't the accidents, though those played a part, but rather the mental link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons. It's not an accident that Greenpeace has the word "peace" in name.

Nuclear power and how/why it become so polemicized.

I would like to read this, as I live in Japan where nuclear power has become (much more of) an issue (i.e. political talking point) ever since 2011. Too many people here seem perfectly happy confounding nuclear energy with nuclear weapons, and seem to me to have only the most muddled view of what happened in March 2011.

Implications of space travel on the economy/culture war etc.

This tickled the sci-fi nerd inside of me. But the realist part of me has to wonder "are we just too far away from meaningful space travel to get it before AI changes everything".

Dreams and how they are totally disregarded in modern technological societies. Almost every culture throughout the world placed a large significance on dreams - now we don't! Wonder why this is and how it could play into our neuroses.

Especially interesting when thinking back to early sci-fi. Asimov was pretty interested in dreams and AI. 'Do Androids dream of electric sheep' and 'i, robot'.

I have been pretty fascinated with my own dreams for a while. I sometimes get to go on elaborate sci fi and fantasy adventures all within the space of a night. I was at one point mining my dreams for story ideas. However, whenever I hear someone else talking about their dreams my eyes glaze over with boredom. Anything beyond one or two sentence summaries feels like a social faux pas to me.

There is a concept of a "dream world" which is different and separate from the "real world". I think ancient lives and cultures spent all their waking time heavily interacting with the "real world", a land of concepts / ideas must have been strange and foreign to their lived experiences. Meanwhile, in the modern world, we all interact with the internet, which might as well be a dream world. Its all taking place in our heads. And our connection with the "real world" has stagnated.

Interesting parallel with the dream world being something similar to the internet or cultural discussion. I do wonder if our ability to so completely enmesh ourselves in a virtual world prevents or discourages dreaming. Something to look into.

I've felt that it has enhanced my dreaming, but it has also made dreaming not very unique. If you offered me two options:

  1. Read a fantasy story in real life. Its got cool world building, some vaguely interesting characters, and a plot that keeps you hooked.

  2. Live out a fantasy story in your dreams. Amazing visuals and sensations, but you'll probably forget most of it in the morning.

I sort of prefer to read the fantasy story. I'll stay up late doing it and miss out on sleep with dreams. Now if I'm in a pastoral culture, and my first option is just "stare up at the stars" I think I'm gonna pick the dream option a little more often.

Small point：Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was Philip K. Dick.

On my list: A review of the book/anime series Legend of the Galactic Heroes.

Well spoilers for the book series (as opposed to the anime): the translation sucks. The translation for the first two books was decent, but they changed translators starting with book three and everything was much harder to follow or make sense of. And I had watched the entire original anime before reading the books, and even with my knowledge of the characters and story it was tough.

I do comment quite often, but I rarely make a top level post.

I have a few I'd like to make, but haven't had the time to realize fully.

  • The essence of comedy - language is a crutch. Inspiration: 2, 3, 1

  • Self-defeating cycles of resentment. eg: The exact things that make you an Incel, make it harder to stop being an Incel, and lead to standard advice making you even more of an Incel.

  • Your diet lacks in Macros - why Biden is a bad president and plotting the fall of the American empire

    • Micros = low impact local issues with immediate impact

    • Macros = strategic issues that define the fate of a country over generations

    • Western media and political leadership have polarized populations on micros. Trans bathrooms and police accountability are QOL changes with local impact that merely address symptoms prompted by Macro changes.

  • You don't get it, words dilute

  • The criminal justice system needs purgatory

  • Life is reinforcement learning

  • Why gamergate is the most underrated moment in the formation of the alt-right and new internet culture.

  • Modi. No one gets India. Least of all, people who claim to get India.

  • Man in a matriarchal world.

  • Why is everyone in leftist video-essay-youtube suddenly trans ?

  • You don't get it, words dilute

This is like one of the cryptic notes I scribble down and then can't remember what it was supposed to mean. Then when I go back and try and flesh it out, I'm probably getting the thought subtly wrong. Words diluting indeed.

I am infamous for speaking in metaphors and getting unjustifiably annoyed when the person asks for me to 'explain it better'. It ties into the old 'blind men and the elephant' story. I HAVE to explain an elephant in metaphors as long as sight does not exist yet. You then get someone asking for a phrase to capture the animal, and I am forced to call it a 'trunk nosed rhino' in resignation. It's the 'real world concepts' version of that.

I'm interested in India effortpost.

Seconded

That's honestly the hardest one.

No one gets India

Because that "no one" includes me. But it is also the one I am most likely to finish.

Rambling half-formed notes that never get posted are basically all I write. Example of a fun thread one whining about pokemon:

(Pokemon games are poorly designed by their own stated principles)

  • games constantly tell you to bond with pokemon, not only use them as tools, but then make you use them as tools, sometimes literally

  • and the stats/moves/types are unbalanced, encouraging you to only use the overpowered ones

  • the game doesn't teach the real game - doesn't play like a human trainer would, switching based on type matchups, having inter-pokemon synergy, having strategies.

  • (later pkmn games): raids .. - this is a terrible thing to put in as a game mechanic in pokemon. It makes sense in fantasy because coming together to take down the giant/dragon is sort of the thing. Pokemon is absolutely NOT that. It's .. cute cockfighting. It's low-level. It's gym training. It's person vs person, poke vs poke at their normal power levels. No super saiyan, no magic. definitely not supposed to be fighting some giant pokemon inflated like a balloon

    • can just imagine some lazy game designer coming up with this. "players like raids in MMOs right? very social, much enjoyment. let's just copy that!" instead of coming up with something more creative that fits the world & game they actually had

For my own drafts and areas of interest:

For things that I can't write, but wish someone with familiarity or sufficient nerdness would:

  • Does it make sense to take gwern's url archiving to its radical conclusion and start automatically saving-to-disk webvideo and random forums and every version of every executable I ever download? Would you get away with it for long before Google slammed you (I don't think youtube-dl is detectable?)? The tools for automatic categorization and identification exist (among others), but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it?
  • What the fuck is wrong with web tooling, aka updating Eevee's excellent rant (or maybe crossreferencing Zorba's Unity rant to a broader field? Not sure if that's related or just smells similar, given this seems to point the exact opposite direction).
  • The economics for small-scale production, and what's going on. A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3% -- but more seriously what's going on for the producers. I've got competing models where there's either a) a small industry of people creating cool bespoke stuff for a small but livable be-your-own-boss, b) an ecosystem where the only people actually making a real income are selling shovels and a tiny number of superstars, while most are second-'income'-less-than-min-wage a la writing, or c) both. This might seem trite, but the whole patrons of the arts has been one of the few plausible answers to automating all the things away... but a lot of the plausibility depends on actual existence proofs.
  • How much do and should we trust a lot of User Design stuff as reflecting what is measured, rather than what it studied? For web stuff, people are supposed to be hugely responsive to tiny changes in web page latency or to small user interface changes, but in addition to my general skepticism of nudges, so much residential internet or screen size is (and during the study time especially was) high-variance enough it seems like these should have been swamped by noise. Are people really as price-conscious as Amazon thinks, or is this downstream of other design decisions Amazon (and other dropshifters) have made?
  • Things that suck.
  • Cable (standardization orgs) that suck. Is there some Chesterton's Fence thing, here, or do these people just not know how to count?
  • Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation? Is anyone doing anything on the forefront of this field? Book fraud?
  • Relatedly, is there anyone coming up with (non-violent) solutions to the failures of class-action (context) or conventional lawsuits as a way to discourage bad corporate behavior?
  • The Three-Plate Method requires little more than three rocks, a decent dye, and a lot of patience; it has obvious applications from art to engineering to design, and is the core and fundamental of true standardization in parts... and was invented in the 1800s. Is there some obvious reason it wasn't invented so long ago we couldn't name the inventor (eg, prussian blue is magic)? Was it just reinvented and dropped over and over again? If neither, is it unique in how long it lay fallow or are there other similar spaces that could have been invented much earlier, and would have been useful, but weren't?
  • I'd love to see what someone with actual taste in music could see this, or if it's just me.
  • Are there any One Tricks for documentation? Not just in a code context; I hate javaDocs, but they do seem a genuine tool, and weird that they're such single examples.
  • What about group drama mediation?

@gattsuru, you recently edited this post. I happened to have it open at the time of the great crash (retaining links and formatting). I've messaged you about getting a copy of it to you.

Thanks you. Trying to decide if it's worth reposting mediated group hallucinated reality, but have readded the other links and updates.

The Three-Plate Method requires little more than three rocks, a decent dye, and a lot of patience; it has obvious applications from art to engineering to design, and is the core and fundamental of true standardization in parts... and was invented in the 1800s. Is there some obvious reason it wasn't invented so long ago we couldn't name the inventor (eg, prussian blue is magic)? Was it just reinvented and dropped over and over again? If neither, is it unique in how long it lay fallow or are there other similar spaces that could have been invented much earlier, and would have been useful, but weren't?

I wondered a similar thing when I encountered Primitive Technology's pot bellows. All it requires is a basic pottery vessel plus some sticks & twine and suddenly you have a method to smelt iron. Iron is extremely abundant but its high temperature requirement is why ancient civilizations settled for using bronze for so long, even though it's a pain in the ass to make. Almost all the bronze alloy recipes require combining metals that tend to not be naturally found near each other, so you need to trade or conquer your way across those distances. Bronze was the status quo for at least two thousand years, and the entire field of metallurgy could've started even earlier than that if only someone realized you could blow on fire to make it hotter.

Does it make sense to take gwern's url archiving to its radical conclusion and start automatically saving-to-disk webvideo and random forums and every version of every executable I ever download? Would you get away with it for long before Google slammed you (I don't think youtube-dl is detectable?)? The tools for automatic categorization and identification exist (among others), but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it?

I could write this, I don't really do effortposts though.

Does it make sense? Yes, content disappears very rapidly. A lot of youtube videos I wanted to revisit have disappeared, a lot of random sites, a lot of tweets lost to suspensions or history-cleans, free PDFS that aren't free a year later, hosted images on discordapp.com or imgur, ...

If you mean "archiving every video you watch and website you visit", you'd get away with it easily. Youtube is botted, and videos have lots of bytes, so it has some bot protection - but iirc isn't that strong, and the yt-dlp maintainers have consistently gotten past it, so using that on every video you visit would work. So just [visit youtube.com/* url] -> [run yt-dlp to save video]. For every other website you visit, it's mostly just html, so (ignoring a ton of relatively boring things) you can just save the html, and the images and videos within, and view it later. For discord specifically, discord dump style tools work fine. I'm pretty sure google could kill yt-dlp if they wanted to (imagine they make a backlog of browser quirks, and every day they release a new youtube patch that modifies the JS challenge to depend on that quirk, requiring yt-dlp's JS emulator to be updated daily or run a full browser emulator), but they don't for some reason, even though they have stronger anti-bot protection in other areas.

If you're imagining something larger-scale, archiving everything on a forum or tens of thousands of youtube videos - also doable! Archive team, archive.org, has done that kind of thing for a long time. In the case of youtube videos specifically, it's so easy (and videos are so large, and most of youtube content is so useless) that archive.org actively asks people to not upload random scraped videos.

While big tech puts a lot of effort into defeating bots, it does cost money for dev time and is a maintenance burden, so they only do in areas it's worth preventing bots, e.g. account creation and posting of content. Most top 100 websites can be trivially scraped at within-10x-of-human-activity intensities, because they already have tens of millions of users doing that, so preventing read-only bots at that scale doesn't meaningfully affect load.

but has anyone actually put them into a moderately user-friendly format to actually find stuff once you have archived it

I imagine fast full-text search or embedding-based search would work fine here. I'm pretty sure there are open-source tools for both 'save every text you look at and search it' that are janky, as well as startups working on making a good UI for it.

what's wrong with web app deployment

This has improved a ton recently, with tons of commercial products and open source projects. Also, eevee was doing "See, I actually have a 64-bit kernel, but a 32-bit userspace", which ... it'd take a ton of effort to seamlessly support every quirky configuration people can come up with, so most devs don't, which is correctly prioritized imo. Again, with the database, they didn't use the supported configuration of 'give it root' and did some permission thing.

A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3%

I know less here but ... 3% extra for etsy seems reasonable? Maybe not reasonable in the sense of 'how the economy should be', but reasonable in the sense that they have to address regulatory complexity, develop their software, deal with payments issues, prevent fraud... patio11's writing might be related

How much do and should we trust a lot of User Design stuff as reflecting what is measured, rather than what it studied?

Design is tightly coupled to revenue, which means companies and the people in them will be properly incentivized to care about it. If we imagine a psych lab doing experiments on college students, where ... any result is fine if you can publish it, and the pricing page of your SaaS, where your main source of revenue is people clicking and you really want them to click - if, in the former, you spew out a bunch of 2% uplift nudges that, when all implemented, add up to 0%, you can still publish, nobody's checking. If in the latter, you spew out a bunch of 2% uplift nudges that, when all implemented, add up to 0% ... you're not getting that bonus.

so much residential internet or screen size is (and during the study time especially was) high-variance enough it seems like these should have been swamped by noise

If it's actually per-user noise, sample sizes of 50M users x 100 interactions per day (adding together that many normals reduces your standard deviation by 70,000x!) are more than enough to wash it out for 'latency of every page load'. Even for 'converting to paid user', that's still a few million interactions total, which is more than enough. If there are ten groups of users with entirely separate behavior, that's still only 3x higher 'noise', which isn't that much.

In the particular case of latency - I definitely do notice latency and use sites less that take longer to load. Consumers being price-conscious in consumer goods, especially commonly purchased ones, is pretty well established, although idk the specifics of what you're referring to.

Suck thread was great.

Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation

I thought of "social media companies take it as seriously as they do racism", but they don't deal with that effectively either. Maybe as seriously as they do CP or ISIS (but even for CP they're not great).

Are there any One Tricks for documentation? Not just in a code context; I hate javaDocs, but they do seem a genuine tool, and weird that they're such single examples.

Not sure what you mean exactly. I also hate javadocs, /** @param1 int A Number @param2 int Another number @returns Two numbers added @desc Adds two numbers */ public int add(int param1, int param2)

While big tech puts a lot of effort into defeating bots, it does cost money for dev time and is a maintenance burden, so they only do in areas it's worth preventing bots, e.g. account creation and posting of content. Most top 100 websites can be trivially scraped at within-10x-of-human-activity intensities, because they already have tens of millions of users doing that, so preventing read-only bots at that scale doesn't meaningfully affect load.

That's fascinating to hear.

I imagine fast full-text search or embedding-based search would work fine here. I'm pretty sure there are open-source tools for both 'save every text you look at and search it' that are janky, as well as startups working on making a good UI for it.

Full-text search has a lot of applicable tooling, if you aren't just willing to learn grep (which, tbf...). Embeddings... there's a lot of image archivers that can (try to) identify and tag people (eg nextcloud here), and general objects it's probably possible to replace them with yolo models, but I haven't found much that's a great way to actually find stuff. And other spaces like automated transcription's always a little tricky.

Also, eevee was doing "See, I actually have a 64-bit kernel, but a 32-bit userspace", which ... it'd take a ton of effort to seamlessly support every quirky configuration people can come up with, so most devs don't, which is correctly prioritized imo. Again, with the database, they didn't use the supported configuration of 'give it root' and did some permission thing.

That's somewhat fair, although more so for the mixed-bit size than for giving root to random software (and even for the mixed-bit-size problem, it's a little discouraging that "we don't support 32-bit" or "here's this vital extension" isn't in the documentation). And I can certainly understand and empathize the problems with end-users wanting support across ridiculous breadths of deployment environment: I've submitted code to fix one-off problems that likely only applied to small circumstances like mine, and I can understand when they were accepted or rejected.

But I don't think eevee's issues were, and my issues are generally not, about one piece of software having a problem in one environment. A sizable portion of eevee's problems were less about the specialized failure modes, and more that even the canonical install paths aren't really complete (or are Docker, or more recently flatpak has started showing up for no goddamn reason). At the time of writing, Discourse did not say install Docker or else. It had a pretty long installation guide! But it did not (even at the time of eevee's writing; it was deleted the day after that post) actually cover things like 'what are actually the dependencies', rather than the minimum number of apt-get calls to get it to build on the author's machine.

That's not just the fault of the Discourse designers. The problem's that development in general (nuGet and maven have encouraged the exact same bad habits!), but especially web development, no longer has and often does not expect anyone to have the ability to seriously inspect dependencies, even as dependency trees have expanded. If you are very careful, you might be able to get your application to list all of its immediate dependencies (no one did for Discourse, hence the sidekiq bit, so it's a little bit Discourse's fault), in terms of full application-level dependencies. But those will have their own dependencies (or extensions, or modules, or packages, yada yada), which you might be able to get a list of what's currently installed. And in increasing situations, you'd have to dance down another level from that.

Docker bypasses this by pulling from specific installation images in order and just not caring if something else gets pulled along by accident -- which, hey, I'd be fine with on small scales. But then it installs a copy for each container. Which does solve dependency hell, since there's now one dependency install per application... at the cost of making it increasingly easy to have dozens of (oft-outdated) versions of common dependencies.

This would be a little annoying if it were just a problem during install, but maintenance and updating tends to be where it goes really bad. I've had multiple GitLab instances -- even with the 'recommended' omnibus! -- where upgrading just exploded because one version somewhere was out of whack. NextCloud just had a (nontrivial!) bug related to php versioning support. Even with grav, which is supposed to about as simple as it gets, I've still seen it go tango uniform because of a dependency versioning problem the developer was unaware of.

3% extra for etsy seems reasonable? Maybe not reasonable in the sense of 'how the economy should be', but reasonable in the sense that they have to address regulatory complexity, develop their software, deal with payments issues, prevent fraud... patio11's writing might be related

Patio11's writing is fantastic, but Patio11 also works for Stripe, which offers (listed) sales cuts around ~3% total, and hasn't taken over the world. Part of that's because Stripe doesn't want to (or, rather, Stripe's banks don't want it to), but another part is that there's not a horde of startups breaking down Stripe's door to take Etsy's lunch and 'only' make a billion USD... nor to provide a valet service and to charge 20%.

I could definitely imagine a vendor that gave the average seller 3%ish worth (or even 10%+/30%+!) of sales in benefits. It's actually not that hard, and that's a pretty reasonable cut in some circumstances. Amazon itself has bizarrely tight economic tolerances -- which doesn't mean it's an efficient marketplace, but winks and nods that direction -- and much of its business-side income comes only from shaking down sellers advertising. It's weird that it's turned into the standard for online sales even as a lot of these groups are doing less and worse, while no competitors are coming up at the extreme low-end, nor that more reputable vendors charging a little more (or providing fewer sales-assist services) haven't come forward. Amazon-style drop-shipping comes across as from what seems like a narrow maxima for a fairly broad sphere, despite being incredibly janky, and I don't think the conventional explanation makes sense.

The punchline to this twitter thread is that the Menards replacement probably ranged from 10 bucks more to 60 bucks less, depending on what popular wheelbarrow eigenrobot was getting and what shipping he used. You can buy end mills on Aliexpress, Etsy, Amazon, and they'll be the exact same end mill from the exact same manufacturer, for radically different prices. Or if you end up having to do currency conversion, Paypal ends of breaking normal expectations there.

So you don't have a hugely price-conscious buyers, nor hugely convenience-based, nor is it obviously trickery (as bad as Amazon or Paypal dark arts get, they're not actually earned that much cash). Is it just being a first-mover? Internet-wide search gone fucky? Scale-and-size? Reputation (if so, how bad would Amazon or ali* have to get)? People just hate having multiple logins?

Design is tightly coupled to revenue, which means companies and the people in them will be properly incentivized to care about it.

Fair. I guess just post Pivot To Video I'm kinda nervous about highly-publicized 'studies' by a corporation with One Weird Trick and a lot of reasons that replication failures wouldn't 'count'.

Not sure what you mean exactly. I also hate javadocs...

I hate javadocs, too, but a) people write them, b) people update them, and c) external users can read them, even if most don't. But I'm more motioning about how they're a documentation technology, in a way that technologies-used-for-documenation (eg, wikis, technical writers) are not, even if they aren't particularly effective. It's weird that this isn't something more common or more widely exploited beyond bad puns about self-documenting code.

The economics for small-scale production, and what's going on. A little on the logistics side -- how and why is Etsy pulling 6% of sales fees and eBay 13% compared to PayPal's (already high) 3% -- but more seriously what's going on for the producers. I've got competing models where there's either a) a small industry of people creating cool bespoke stuff for a small but livable be-your-own-boss, b) an ecosystem where the only people actually making a real income are selling shovels and a tiny number of superstars, while most are second-'income'-less-than-min-wage a la writing, or c) both. This might seem trite, but the whole patrons of the arts has been one of the few plausible answers to automating all the things away... but a lot of the plausibility depends on actual existence proofs.

I'm a seller on a handful of sites including Etsy. Etsy takes way more than 6%, it ends up being closer to ebay's 13%. Sellers still sell on these platforms (ebay, etsy) because buyers trust them and most of us don't want to invest the time and money into marketing and managing independent sites that no one will be able to find because google is optimized to give everybody links to ebay and etsy already.

C is correct. There are millions of people selling their products on these platforms who range from teen girls reselling thrift store clothes from their closet and making too little to even report to the IRS, to dudes selling thousands of mass produced products a day and making bank. And everything in between. Personally I abhor working with or for other people which is why I do the "livable be-your-own-boss" thing.

If I didn't recognize you as a reputable and prolific poster, the first draft idea you posted would have convinced me that you were clinically insane haha. I'm now very curious as to how they all link together..

Cable (standardization orgs) that suck. Is there some Chesterton's Fence thing, here, or do these people just not know how to count?

USB naming is confusing on purpose. They need to inform highly technical users what the situation is, so there needs to be naming. However laptop manufacturers don't want the average user to notice that the ports haven't been updated to handle the highest speeds.

Is there a (non-violent) solution to the problem of scam spamming, especially of the elderly, even if only a partial mitigation? Is anyone doing anything on the forefront of this field? Book fraud?

Short answer, no one one is doing anything about elder fraud.

So at the dawn of wide spread telephone usage a social decision was made by the government. They'll train people to trust phone callers and to counterbalance that they'll introduce wire fraud laws and aggressively prosecute phone scammers. Long distance fees would prevent things from getting too out of hand. The scammers would likely be fairly close, international phone scams would be cost prohibitive.

However long distance fees came way down, which put a strain on the FBI. Then the telcos built up systems to allow internet calls to come in as local numbers. It made sense, it was the most straight forward way to do things.

But now American elders are vulnerable to scammers from around the world.

There are a lot of organizations who could do something.

Scammers operate companies openly in places like India. The State Department could come down hard on them in various ways. Make it difficult to get financing, block the employees and owners from ever entering the US, many other options. But DOS has a global empire to run and doesn't particularly care about the elderly in the US.

Telcos could do various things... Improve caller ID so that it's useful. Run a warning message before letting an internet originating call in.

But they aren't going to do anything unless the feds make them.

The biggest problem is due to the international nature of the problem. Cracking down on foreign scammers who go after old white people sounds vaguely racist to the modern liberal. Arresting a few as part of your job is probably OK, but anyone who dedicates their life to solving the problem is clearly a cryptonazi.

I’ve had an effort post on blue/red ethnogenesis floating around in my head for a while, but don’t know where to start. I’ve had another one on conspiracy theories that are simply false, but lead to meaningfully better outcomes, and their role in modern society that’s closer to getting off the ground but still unlikely to happen.

When the pope dies(he is in poor health) or is obviously on his last legs I will write an effort post on the current political situation in the RCC and it’s implications for the path forwards, but I don’t think it will necessarily be a top level comment.

Here’s something to chew on:

Dr. Sharon Megalethery’s RCCX theory.

TL;DR chronically ill formerly high achieving doctor theorizes that epigenetic changes are responsible for (or greatly increase risk of) high-functioning autism, ADHD, mood disorders, eating disorders, autoimmune disorders, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and queerness. Also these people are more intelligent than average.

A disproportionate number of autistic and ADHD people are queer; same with being hypermobile. You’ve got a phenotype that is neurodivergent, less straight than average, and worse at manual labor, or at least more likely to be crippled by it. And it runs in families.

So your Red Tribe rural guy that leaves town at 18 to head for the Big City might well have had a father or uncle who had weird things happening with his joints and who’s a bit more fucked up than most from a life of manual labor. Maybe he’s not straight, either. Maybe he’s always been a bit different, and thinks he can find acceptance in the city. Yes, it’s a cliche…but some of that is due to straight-up physiological differences that mean that he’s playing with loaded dice with respect to chronic pain if he becomes a construction worker or something.

Wow. I'm not sure if I completely agree with her perspective. However I am 100% that she is on to something regarding the hyper-mobility. Just going by people I've met at Universities, hyper-mobility seems to correlate a lot with, as the cool kids say, "being weird" and also often actually being smart.

Thank you very much for posting about it!

Yeah, that makes sense. I’m not sure if I completely agree with her perspective either, but “stretchy-skinned weird smart queer” seems like a cluster. So too, these people seem to have a higher rate of autoimmune diseases.

What did that hypermobility look like?

One of the most common ways I've noticed it is that they sit in really odd ways despite never having stretched once in their lives. Also being double-jointed in the arm is something people love to showcase. Physical flexibility -> Mental flexibility? Haha.

they sit in really odd ways despite never having stretched once in their lives

To add to this, women tend to be more flexible than men.

Given that, it's probably natural that men with that trait would find themselves preferring a posture that women use (since it could naturally be assumed that kind of posture accounts for both that flexibility and the inherent weakness it trades off with).

Maybe flexibility (sits like a girl) drives socialization (mocked for sitting like a girl) drives sexuality (with overclocked sense of pattern-matching, decides he'll just be a girl) more than we want to admit it does, but this is probably also only true for these men.

LMAO - queer people not being able to sit straight is a meme.

I'd bet that physical flexibility at age 5 correlates with LGBT identification at age 20.