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TheDag  Per Aspera ad Astra  1yr ago (text post)   2968 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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One thing I really want to write about is Fraternities, specifically German ones, and what role fraternal groups and societies play in the development of people and Culture.

It would probably be a series of posts, something like this:

  1. The role of Fraternities in the German culture war.

  2. Freemasons, Rugby clubs, voluntary fireman and other such groups.

  3. Personal development in fraternities, masculinity and Alcohol

  4. The slow extinction of fraternal societies.

It's baffling to me how little these organizations are talked about, given that its members dominate our politics. I think I can give an interesting inside scoop on this parallel society. Also, it would hopefully interest all the people here who frequently talk about the lack of male spaces and the self-isolation of the modern male.

– Have you heard anything about the Westphalian secret court?

Sasha was a little taken aback. Then he thought about it.

– I don't really remember German history, – he admitted. – I've heard something, but that... Some kind of secret society like the Freemasons.

– Freemasons are Freemasons. - Wietz made himself comfortable, obviously intending to speak at length, - I'm talking about the Westphalian, aka Free or Femean Court. The name comes from the Latin fama, «popular opinion». The secret courts arose in the thirteenth century, in a situation similar to what we have now in Russia. Power exists, justice does not. Imperial justice did not work and did not want to work. But the Germans, unlike the Russians... – here Witz was silent for a second, and Sasha thought about how unpleasant this word, "Russians", was – took matters into their own hands. The Feme system worked like this: any Christian could turn to the secret court, and it summoned the accused to its session. If he appeared, he was tried according to the ancient laws and sentenced. If he did not appear, he was considered guilty, and the assassins caught up with him.

– Could a Jew turn to it? – Tsypin asked for some reason.

– He could turn, – Witz said; as one could describe it, pointedly.

– Sounds like the Mafia, – remarked Sasha.

Vincent wrinkled his forehead, trying to find the exact wording.

– It's Mafia that's like a Femean court. That's what it was, but then the uomini d’onore tried to switch sides, lost everything, and turned into mediocre mascalzoni. Fema is a different matter.

<...>.

For two centuries the Fema courts acted in isolation. But then came the idea of uniting under a single will.

– The party is a hand of million fingers, clenched in one smashing fist, – Sasha couldn't resist another stilted quote. He became somewhat animated: the conversation became bookish, and bookish talk calmed him down.

– You guessed it again, – the guard looked at Sasha with approval. – Exactly a fist. Latin for faustus. The Fema Courts, as well as a number of Fereins and some other forces, created an organization by that name. Which subsequently assumed responsibility for the order and prosperity of Europe.

http://haritonov.wiki/Вечность

Dunno, I feel like they are talked about to exactly the appropriate degree. I'm a german and they are occasionally mentioned both by acquaintances & media, always in a sneering, disdainful way a la "who is even still joining them, must be a loser" or "guess he must be a fraternity member" after seeing a guy misbehave.

Frankly, I can't help but agree with them. At least at my university, nobody in power I know of has any affiliations with them, and their reputation as places of toxic masculinity means that their at odds with the current social norms, so being a member is if anything a hindrance to gaining power. I'm not even sure we have them locally here, they are just the kind of negative stereotype that people love talking about - especially those who claim to not be prejudiced. I guess they used to be relevant and so some of the old guards had some affiliations, but nowadays everyone is scrambling to make sure that everyone else knows how much you hate them.

Fraternities have definitely lost most influence in the 21. Century. As you said, the old guard have connections, but that's about it. But the stuff you learn about them tends to be factually incorrect. Current members are of course marginalized and completely powerless.

Your post is emblematic of the surrounding discourse, though. Fraternities are now so insular and small that they have become this bogeyman of student culture. Nobody actually has any idea what they do, just what rumours and journalists who know as much as their readers spread. Since 1968 there's been a real organized effort to discredit, marginalize and bully fraternities into dissolution. Things have calmed down in most cities only because they have essentially succeeded.

German Fraternities are an openly "conservative" thing. The members are usually not conservative, but what they get up to is, the entire point is to be conservative. They created a multipolarity in student cultural power, between left and right. Used to, at least, since such a thing can't be tolerated on the modern campus.

My future post will go into more depth. In the meantime, could you please stop hating on what are essentially, in their current form, Friend groups that take part in funny and entertaining traditions in their spare time haha.

Also interested.

would definitely be very interested. even just spitballing the German fraternities part and then doing the modern day later would be fine.

Sounds interesting

Would definitely read this

Please ping me when you get around to it. I might be able to add something.

Many obsolete abandoned drafts for substack based on stuff discussed around these parts.

  • The pessimistic bias in science fiction that makes it to screens. Banks estate refusal to allow adaptations of Culture, failed Chinese attempts to incentivize optimistic productions.

  • Stonetoss' dog breeds comic and its woke edits as a case study in epistemology and chilling effect of the default mode of school education.

  • Procautionary and Precautionary principles and shouting fire in a crowded market: the unreasonable absence of repercussions for incurring an opportunity cost via playing the adult in the room.

  • Why the french AI researchers are unambitious

  • Rationalist reversals: the notion of «Infohazard» is the most salient example of infohazard known, anthropic shadow as an anti-bayesian cognitive bias and reasoning yourself into a cult.

  • Traditional (especially Western Christian) morality as incompatible with effective altruism and privileging pet causes and projects as acts of cultivating a personal relationship with the transcendent.

  • LLM-based methods for discovering words that really express untranslatable concepts and supposedly define culture.

  • Psychedelics as the bane of mesa-optimizer; reflections on a bad AI take, bad psychoterapy take, the hedonic gradient and the fact that greatness is born of evolutionary failure.

  • cringe policing as a way to set the borders of allowable discourse, and its limits.

  • Steelmanning as a corrupt intellectual practice in rationalist discourse that amounts to clever logorrheic strawman; defeating golems made of steel, superficially formidable bosses with known weak points.

  • related, "puzzle assemblers and lego arguers": Scott Alexander and Bryan Kaplan on mental illness as examples of deductive vs. inventive approach to reality

  • On pruning science, or, the razor of Bayes: one of many thoughts of «what if Lesswrong weren't a LARP» the need to have a software framework, now probably LLM-powered, to excise known untruths and misstatements of fact, and in a well-weighed manner all contributions of their authors, from the graph of priors for next-iteration null hypotheses and other assumptions.

  • On atomization and connectivity; with more autonomy and commoditization, some assumptions about human nature become self-fulfilling.

  • in defense of Marx.

  • the empire fetish, nation as a purposeful project (MacIntyre), and what Westerners got wrong about Russian-German business.

  • Poshlost and what anti-AI artists get right. Reflections on watching Master and Commander and Black Adam in the same day

  • Russian societal attitudes and policies around minority crime prior to the war

  • Russian Death and death as conceptualized in Russian culture.

Many others.

Steelmanning as a corrupt intellectual practice in rationalist discourse that amounts to clever logorrheic strawman; defeating golems made of steel, superficially formidable bosses with known weak points.

I would like to read this as it is counter to my intuition but that probably means I need to get my head around this perspective.

Most of these are quite fascinating - I’d love to see your defense of Marx in particular. Communism is definitely a bugbear around here.

in defense of Marx.

I was not expecting this.

Poshlost and what anti-AI artists get right.

Please write this one so I can reply to it.

Traditional (especially Western Christian) morality as incompatible with effective altruism and privileging pet causes and projects as acts of cultivating a personal relationship with the transcendent.

This one is just straightforwardly true (which is why I’m not an effective altruist).

As someone fluent in more than one language (grossly different ones to boot), I'm hard pressed to think of even a single word in all of them that I can't with enough time and effort get across to a reader only fluent in one.

I've always found myself leery of the concept, at least in terms of written/spoken words. It would be difficult to convey the qualia of redness vocally!

Rationalist reversals: the notion of «Infohazard» is the most salient example of infohazard known, anthropic shadow as an anti-bayesian cognitive bias and reasoning yourself into a cult.

Curious about this.

On pruning science, or, the razor of Bayes: one of many thoughts of «what if Lesswrong weren't a LARP» the need to have a software framework, now probably LLM-powered, to excise known untruths and misstatements of fact, and in a well-weighed manner all contributions of their authors, from the graph of priors for next-iteration null hypotheses and other assumptions.

Also interesting

I've been thinking about doing an effort post ethnography of /r/manga. I spend enough time there, and in other anime/manga communities, I think I've got some funny/interesting anecdotes and analysis about it. Does that sound interesting to anyone else or just me?

Actually interesting to me, because I hate /r/manga and their shit 35 yo teenager taste in /popular but still go there sometimes to see something /new.

I mostly do just browse by popular. What stuff do you see in /new that you like? I rarely see anything particularly good there besides some occasional under rated yuri

I don't pride myself on taste in manga, nor keep a list. Some minor relatively unpopular things I've liked:

  • After god

  • Hero has returned

  • Ragna Crimson

  • Shinazu no Ryousen

  • Ryuuma no Gagou

  • Thank you Isekai

occasional under rated yuri

Ah, you mean Onee-sama to Watashi: Ojou-sama ga Isekai Tensei?

Ah, you mean Onee-sama to Watashi: Ojou-sama ga Isekai Tensei?

I didn't have anything in particular in mind, I just know I've sometimes seen yuri romances that would probably have 5-10x as many upvotes if the one of the characters was swapped with a generic male

It'd be very interesting. There are a lot of mini-ethnographies of online communities on /r/hobbydrama, and a few on rdrama

It does sound interesting to me.

The effortpost drafts I have in my virtual drawer are:

  • emotional labor/mental load. I started writing it in January 2022, got derailed by the war and never finished it. I guess it's time to write the remaining 10%, as it's culture war-adjacent

    • a derived post I can see is "why do women write passive-aggressive webcomics to talk about their problems"?

  • 25 years of Putin. It's one of the "put your ideas down on paper, otherwise it's mental masturbation" ideas I had. I started writing it, ended up opening 100 tabs to cross-reference my memories and a hour later it started feeling like work. Moreover, it's not really pertinent to the culture war, so my motivation to finish it isn't that high.

Be very interested to read the Putin thing

Curious about the mental load thing - do you mean the common meme that women do more emotional labor than men? Or the idea that the modern world adds a lot of mental overhead for day to day tasks?

The former. It's about being "the manager" of the household even when the physical chores are split equally.

  • 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.

Write the furries one, it sounds wild.

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.

hedonic treadmill

Where does it address that, out of curiosity?

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!

Here are some drafts I have, though not particularly CW.

  • Acetylcysteine as the first treatment for a cold/mucus in Spain but not in Britain

  • Ze Dreadful German In Ze Writings of Curtis Yarvin. I would respect the guy if he was a gentleman and a scholar, actually knew German and used it to better capture the Zeitgeist and express his Weltanschauung, but instead we get a Blitzkrieg of stilted phrases which annoy me.

  • Comparison of The Driver (1978), Driver (2011), Baby Driver (2017). Same plot, different decades.

  • Base rates of success dating docs.

  • Tetlock forecasting approach vs Subjective Bayesianism

  • My ideal prediction market playbook

  • Optimize hard or GTFO

  • A retelling of El Mio Cid, an Spanish epic poem where a recurring theme is that the hero would be a good and loyal knight if only he had a good king as lord.

  • A lot of shit on OpenPhilanthropy, FTX and EA.

  • Utilitarianism for Democrats

  • Utilitarianism for Republicans

  • Why are we not better, harder, faster, stronger

  • Updating in the face of anthropic effects is possible

  • Betting and consent

  • How to host an autarkic/uncensorable site.

  • Tetlock vs subjective bayesianism

  • Something on the limits of Bayesianism

  • I want to nerd out a bit on infrabayesianism / what one should do if one expects that one's hypothesis may not be able to represent future events.

  • Bounties, things I would pay for

  • My consulting rates

  • Criticism as a demand side problem

  • My preferred deviations from common English

  • Some observations on the speed of qalia

  • People's choices determine a pseudo ordering over people's desirability

This is more than what I would have though, typing this out.

I've been posting a stream of similar ideas on my blog (https://nunosempere.com/blog/), with an eye to those that I think could be more valuable. But if this community is particularly interested in any of these, I'll probably be happy to re-prioritize.

Tons of great ideas.

Optimize hard or GTFO

A lot of shit on OpenPhilanthropy, FTX and EA.

How to host an autarkic/uncensorable site.

Why are we not better, harder, faster, stronger

Updating in the face of anthropic effects is possible

Seems more useful though cultural stuff is probably more interesting.

Updating in the face of anthropic effects is possible

Now here: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/05/11/updating-under-anthropic-effects/. Pasting the content to save you a link:

Status: Simple point worth writting up clearly.

Motivating example

You are a dinosaur astronomer about to encounter a sequence of big and small meteorites. If you see a big meteorite, you and your whole kin die. So far you have seen n small meteorites. What is your best guess as to the probability that you will next see a big meteorite?

In this example, there is an anthropic effect going on. Your attempt to estimate the frequency of big meteorites is made difficult by the fact that when you see a big meteorite, you immediately die. Or, in other words, no matter what the frequency of big meteorites is, conditional on you still being alive, you'd expect to only have seen small meteorites so far. For instance, if you had reason to believe that around 90% of meteorites are big, you'd still expect to only have seen small meteorites so far.

This makes it difficult to update in the face of historical observations.

Updating after observing latent variables

Now you go to outer space, and you observe the mechanism that is causing these meteorites. You see that they are produced by Dinosaur Extinction Simulation Society Inc., that the manual mentions that it will next produce a big asteroid and hurl it at you, and that there is a big crowd gathered to see a meteorite hit your Earth. Then your probability of getting hit rises, regardless of the historical frequency of small meteorites and the lack of any big ones.

Or conversely, you observe that most meteorites come from some cloud of debris in space that is made of small asteroids, and through observation of other solar systems you conclude that large meteorites almost never happen. And for good measure you build a giant space laser to incercept anything that comes your way. Then your probability of of getting hit with a large meteorite lowers, regardless of the anthropic effects.

The core point is that in the presence of anthropic effects, you can still reason and receive evidence about the latent variables and mechanistic factors which affect those anthropic effects.

What latent variables might look like in practice

Here are some examples of "latent variables" in the real world:

  • Institutional competence

  • The degree of epistemic competence and virtue which people who warn of existential risk display

  • The degree of plausibility of the various steps towards existential risk

  • The robustness of the preventative measures in place

  • etc.

In conclusion

In conclusion, you can still update in the face of anthropic effects by observing latent variables and mechanistic effects. As a result, it's not the case that you can't have forecasting questions or bets that are informative about existential risk, because you can make those questions and bets about the latent variables and early steps in the mechanistic chance. I think that this point is both in-hindsight-obvious, and also pretty key to thinking clearly about anthropic effects.

I'm curious which ones you (or other motte people) think would be most interesting for you in particular, rather than "useful in general".

Why are we not better, harder, faster, stronger

Now here: https://nunosempere.com/blog/2023/07/19/better-harder-faster-stronger/ (on the motte here: https://www.themotte.org/post/593/why-are-we-not-harder-better). I'm curious to get your perspective.

As a capitalist, I want to know what you'd pay for and your consulting rates. Criticism as a demand side problem sounds interesting too. Also hosting an uncensorable site.

My consulting rates are now here: https://nunosempere.com/consulting/. I'll put up a list of bounties in a while; if you are particularly interested, I have an RSS endpoint here: https://nunosempere.com/blog/index.rss (or you could sign up per email, if you are a wimp: https://nunosempere.com/.subscribe/)

I'd be interested in any or all of these, and would pay for some of them if not for my desire to be anonymous. No strong preferences on topic though, which might be surprising, but the content of a post matters more than the topic - I've enjoyed review articles about something as trivial as the chemistry of paint drying before, while the average post on any topic is dull due to lack of inspiration and competence.

would pay for some of them if not for my desire to be anonymous

Happy to be paid in monero. You can reach out to me at nuno.semperelh@protonmail.com with a burner account.

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

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

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.

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 have a lot of stuff that I've been intending to write about but have had so much work and family life etc. going that I haven't really gotten to them. I have had an effortpost about the Orthodox church and Ukraine situation lying around for ages, simply because after writing it, I'm not sure if I agree with it. I have also had a bunch of ideas about the conspiracy theory and its role in society, but this still needs a bit of formation.

I've also been intending to write a series of blogposts on the Covid situation in Finland, but again, that would require a bit of organizing. I have a bunch of themes lying around about AI, but I'm probably going to write about them in Finnish (since a lof of it wouldn't be that fresh in the context of this forum, for instance, but would be fresh when it comes to general AI-related public discussion in Finland, which is miles behind where it should be.)

If someone is interested in some aspect of Finnish society, feel free to suggest.

Would be very interested in the Orthodox Church/Ukraine Situation

If something is bothering me enough I'm usually able to get out a post about it. The writing process can be therapeutic.

There are some things that don't bother me quite enough to get a post out, but they have been kicking around in my head.

  1. When to NOT be inclusive (3 votes). I have a small group of neighborhood guys/dads that I like hanging out with. There is a larger group of neighborhood women/moms that also hangout. I was recently chastised for being exclusive by one of the neighborhood moms, cuz I wasn't inviting the whole group of dads to events. This bothered me a lot more than it should have, and I had some thoughts on why. But talking it out with people in person was generally enough to calm me down. I think it has wider implications, and I might have spun it out to be about people having tribes/families where they belong.

  2. Road name changes. I live on a street that had its name changed. I watched the whole process. I thought it might have been of some interest for people to see a real life culture war play out. Alas, I was too bored and annoyed with the whole thing to even bother following it in real life, much less follow it online. I also would have semi-doxed myself.

  3. Doxing myself (1 vote). Speaking of doxing, since we have moved to this website, and since I have a job where I feel pretty safe from unjustified online harassment. I have considered going public with my identity here. I use a real image of myself in my profile. The danger of someone going after my job is close to zero, but I still have a family and personal security. So I've mostly decided against doing this. About 8 years ago I started writing online as if I'd have to defend anything I wrote to family/friends/co-workers. I live online as if I am about to be doxxed. Its possible I could write a post about this without doxxing myself, but I find I'd be tempted to do it anyways just to make the post slightly more interesting.

  4. A divided family (2 votes). My mother votes democrat, my father votes republican. They have long disagreed on politics. It was scary to see how close the Trump presidency got to actually causing my parents to get a divorce. A divorce over politics! They've mostly gotten over that, and they are back to pre-trump levels of political disagreement. I considered a post where I'd go over their history and political beliefs. And then how Trump has been the perfect scissor subject for them.

  5. Beliefs Post. I thought about nominating myself to do one of the posts where you describe all your beliefs. I realized I shouldn't because it looked like a lot of work, and of the 20ish previous posts I only read maybe 2 or 3 of them. I do love navel gazing though.

I would be interested in #4. I am in a divided marriage and I don't see many people even attempting it anymore. I was pregnant in 2016, which is probably the main thing that kept us together during the Trump madness.

I am also sort of in a divided marriage. I say sort of because my wife doesn't hold very strong political views. I also have libertarian beliefs, and I never really expected to find someone that shared my beliefs. So it has never been even the slightest impediment. If I had ever let politics become a barrier to forming relationships ... I'd have no one to talk to.

For my parents it was more of a thing of minor annoyances. It felt similar in seriousness to their arguments about doing chores around the house. The real underlying problem seemed to be that they were running out of activities to do together. The kids had left the nest. They had very few mutual friends and the few they had became either obsessed with hating trump or cheering him on. And while they could sort of stand politically disagreeing with each other, its another thing to tolerate strong political disagreement with a friend. Especially when that is all you are going to talk about. My dad was physically deteriorating, and my mom was extra busy at work right before her retirement. Their one shared project for most of their lives was working on house projects together, my mom didn't have the time, and my dad couldn't physically keep doing them.

Its all ended up better. They got some meal subscription kits, and there are more grand kids now. So they cook and drink together, or watch the grand kids together. They also bought electric bikes and went on a multi-state trip to different parks to bike together and visit some distant friends.

I honestly almost get the impression that political disagreement in relationships is more the norm than then exception, though I'm also from a country with a lot more viable parties so it's much more likely to vote for different parties here. My mom is a family-focused conservative, my dad a strongly pro-union moderate socialist. But they get along very well. Likewise I'm libertarianish, while my wife used to be a card-carrying communist. Though we have moved a lot closer politically over time and over our shared disdain for current wokeness. Her sister is in a similar boat, with almost identical political (dis-)agreements. I know plenty of relationships where it's obvious that the girl is broadly in favor of wokeness but the guy broadly against it.

#1 and #4 are definitely interesting to me! Being in a politically divided family would be quite difficult.

To your point about beliefs post, I feel like that would be almost too large an undertaking to do in one passage. Maybe a sequence? It's definitely an interesting thought exercise.

I would like to vote for #1

What job is that? In our hyper-connected world, the "problematic" things people say online, given the right amount of obsession and motivation by a "wronged" individual, can always make their way to an employer, relative, partner, or school that could lead to unwanted consequences, the worst being termination.

I work at a libertarianish non-profit. Multiple other people in the organization have gone through online harassment campaigns. One of the people in the organization has had multiple New York Times writers go after him. Quite a few people have gotten death threats, and having an online stalker that hates your guts is pretty normal to them. They have also been the target of federal government tax status investigations, legally harassed by local government entities, and have had national bureaucratic institutions ask media outlets to go after them. Many of these "cancellation" attempts have just resulted in more donations to the organization.

Functionally I'd be pretty hard to replace. I'm the only one with my job title and skill set at this place. It wouldn't be impossible to replace me, just difficult, and probably expensive.

One of the higher ups that works there and would likely have input on my firing is one of my best friends.

I can't say anything and get away with it. There are probably still fireable things I could say or do. But mostly anything in the range of what I want to say is speak-able.

I think even being self employed wouldn't offer this level of job security (you can go after customers for self employed people).

And as I mentioned above I generally don't say anything online that I'm not willing to publicly defend with my name behind it. I'd write this same stuff on facebook with my full real name attached. I don't do that because facebook discussions seemed to be mostly a circle jerk or a cess pit of terrible arguments.

At worst, some of my pseudonymous writings would be awkward to attach to my name. I've talked about things you normally don't share in polite company, or on your facebook timeline. Drug use, dating life, family drama, etc. But I think the fact that I attempted to not publicly air these things in my own social circle would absolve me of most of those issues. Close associates would read it like they read a leaked private journal.

I have a few rattling in my brain

1). Silencing adversaries and enemies by hagiography. It’s kind of a weird one, but it seems like a lot of the actual ideas of people get totally lost by the process of turning them into either a Saint or a Demon.

2). On the process of rising and falling civilizations and what changes happen to create the problems that ultimately destroy them

3). On therapeutic culture, self-esteem and mental stability.

4). On memorization as an aide to critical thinking.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 ?

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.

  • 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.

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?

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.

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..

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 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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.