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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3387 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 2, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How's the housing market in your neck of woods?

There's hardly a week in Finland without stories in the news about the extremely sluggish state of housing market, which we've been familiar with due to reasons of selling our three-bedroom apartment to buy a four-bedroom one. We got lucky and managed to sell after only 2-3 months on the market due to my extensive friends list containing a guy looking for a new place matching our specs with his roommate, but we had to accept a lower price than planned (still sufficient to allow for a mortgage to buy a new one) and I've heard stories of friends-of-friends who have been selling for over an year with no catch.

Obviously a large part of this is due to interest hikes and the cost-of-living crisis making people extremely careful about large life decisions like this, plus housing prices being sticky and not falling fast enough to get the market working again, but I've wondered whether it's quite as bad everywhere else. There have been several decisions in the past years that might contribute (running down mortgage rate deductions, increasing loan collateral requirements etc.).

What city has the best combination of high nominal pay and short commute time?

Does this site have some sort of new users queue? I made a post yesterday, and I don't see it when I sort by new.

I asked others recently, since my current account is quite old, and they said yes. I think yours needs to be approved by someone before it shows up.

What about comments? Do they get hidden for new users also?

Can't say for sure but I obviously saw yours, since I replied to it.

What does "affordable housing" mean in America? I tried looking at the wiki article and it's absolutely massive and I feel like it's almost designed to obscure what is probably a simple answer. When some new building is going up and you hear somebody praise it, "oh, it's going to be Affordable", what is going on? Is it subsidized? Something else?

affordable housing refers to housing rented at below market rates. Usually available to single mothers, blacks, natives, low income or some other government defined condition. affordable housing is usually a "scratch my back i'll scratch yours" agreement with local politicians where developers only get to build when they commit to some percent of government rules.

It's Affordable if it's a government-run project to make housing affordable. Otherwise it's not Affordable.

Strictly speaking, 30% of income. Practically? Keeping in mind that everything is relative?

Multifamily units. Doesn't have to be run as Section 8, doesn't even have to be advertised as budget. So long as it's not specifically angling for "luxury" apartments, it probably counts.

"Affordable" usually implies they're being measured against 1) legacy, gentrified neighborhoods or 2) suburban housing. Both are pretty tightly constrained on supply. A lot's worth of mediocre apartments is going to be more "affordable" than that same lot turned into 2 bedroom houses.

This conversation is loudest in housing-starved cities like the Bay Area. Not coincidentally, California also allows certain developments to bypass normal red tape.

I can't believe today is not Sunday. I have the day off work, and I have to work tomorrow - surely today is Sunday, right? But it's not.

Happy Independence Day, American mottizens.

Is it possible for longterm use of a digital keyboard with predictive text input to degrade its quality?

I've noticed that after some time, my current keyboard of choice, SwiftKey, has a very annoying tendency to turn perfectly normal and grammatical correct words into something entirely different.

Right now, I wrote "on" somewhere and autocorrect turned it into "of" without any obvious reason.

Is this somehow a consequence of my high perplexity writing style where I constantly inject unusual words into the vocabulary? I am under the impression that such apps use Markov chains, or very small neural nets, is something funky going on in there, where consistently surprising the model makes it overcorrect?

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The box office is not doing well now, despite it being the summer

All of Hollywood is keeping an eye on the weekend when Barbie and Oppenheimer come out.

My mom is a massive Harrison Ford fangirl, and I managed to successfully talk her out of gracing the skinwalker wearing the skin of the Indiana Jones franchise with her money by pointing out that the whole movie is a soapbox to dunk on Tired Old White Males.

Shame that Phoebe Bridgers is involved, I liked her in Fleabag.

Shame that Phoebe Bridgers is involved

Is that a joke?

Not really, I only knew her in Fleabag.

The creator of Fleabag is Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Phoebe Bridgers is an unrelated indie rock singer-songwriter. (Don't worry, you're not the first person to mix them up.)

Oh dear. Thanks for the correction!

Shame that Phoebe Bridgers is involved, I liked her in Fleabag.

She probably leveraged her connections from producing Killing Eve and co-writing No Time To Die.

Modern TVs are marvellous. A huge 4k screen with stunning colours and high contrast is now easily affordable. Going to the cinema for the big screen experience is no longer as justified.

Expensive: Movie tickets are expensive and are an easy item to cut back on when impacted by inflation.

The abundance of entertainment. There is no longer a single song, movie or book that can define a generation. There availability and choice is to great for there to be a must see movie. The same goes with sport. The question did you see the game last night is less clear when people can stream whatever sport they want. Many people saw "the game" just so that they could fit in. When "the game" no longer is the topic of conversation fewer people will watch it causing a death spiral

At least in India, movie tickets are comparably priced to the costs of buying or renting a new film, so if you don't have the best home theater experience, nostalgia for the theatres or consider it a family bonding thing like I do, it's still perfectly fine to go and see something new there every once in a while. (Just don't buy the popcorn) I also don't have a home theater setup that can match a decent cinema hall.

Of course, I'm an absolute cheapskate who pirates everything and only buys the things he can't pirate (sigh, would that I could download more RAM), I usually watch only particularly good movies anyway unless dragged there by family or friends.

My wife and I thought about going to the movies the other day, briefly. She was having a tough day at work and texted me saying "Hey let's do something fun, let's go see a movie." So I looked up movie showings, there was one that I'd maybe consider seeing (that Jennifer Lawrence raunch-comedy) showing at 5:00, 7:15, and 9:40. 5:00, no chance, I'm not off work yet. Well I ran a little late, would have had to get ready in five minutes. That's not practical. Now we're trying to go the 9:40, but that throws off the next day, I'm up until midnight for this movie, throws off my morning workout and all. Less appealing.

So instead we streamed Crazy Rich Asians on our colossal HDTV in our living room.

As streaming options get better and better, and big TVs trickle down to lower and lower prices, the standard a movie theater needs to reach to make me actually leave the house gets higher and higher. At this point a 70" tv runs $500, a Bose soundbar is $200. Combine the two and that's $700 for a damn good home theater experience, certainly plenty good for a comedy, not bad for an average action movie. And that's not just competing against however many movie tickets, it's probably something most people buy anyway for sports/tv/etc.

The value add has to be so high for me to schedule my night around it, it's pretty tough.

And as the value add has to get bigger, ticket prices have to climb, which has a further inflating effect on minimum value add.

I will now reveal my normie tastes in movies...

Looking at the lists, in addition to Avatar II doing well, Mario Bros also did really well, suggesting that people just don't want to see Elemental or the new Indiana Jones all that much. I watched Mario Bros on streaming (and enjoyed it), but might have gone to the theater if circumstances lent themselves. It has about the right combination of nostalgia for those who grew up with the games, actual fun and an alright plot, Jack Black making a fool of himself, and no particular wokeness. Everyone likes super talented Peach, it's pulled off well, with humor and fondness.

The rumors are, Indiana Jones is about setting the franchise up for Harrison Ford to be replaced by a younger woman. I don't know if this is true or not, since I haven't watched the movie, and don't plan to, but it certainly doesn't make it sound fun. I also didn't see Black Widow, because it sounded like it was about setting it up for Florence Pugh to take over from Scarlett Johansen, or that series about the guy with the metal wings taking on the mantel of Captain America, or the special about a woman taking over for Hawkeye. In general, movies about someone taking up the cape of someone else sound boring, it's much better when they just show up with swagger and without much explanation, like 007. This seems to be a common failure mode of long running hero shows. Assuming the rumor to be true, I don't think the recent trend of replacing older male heros with younger female heros is necessarily about wokeness per say, but more about stodgily following the tropes of the moment, even when people are tired of them and they've become stale.

Elemental looks... probably fine? Kind of like Zootopia, but for elements? I liked Zootopia, though not enough that I would have bothered seeing it in theaters. I haven't heard any rumors about it, it just seems kind of basic. Looking at a mainstream review, it sounds like they tried making a ham fisted racial allegory, but it didn't really fit, only fleshed out two of the four elements, and even the mainstream reviewers don't like ham fisted racial allegories. That's kind of how Bright was -- there was an attempt made, and Will Smith is fun enough to watch, but it was also kind of a mess. I'll probably watch it in a year when it comes out on Disney+, but will wait until I'm subscribing for a month for other reasons. I'm not sure if it makes sense to shorthand this to "woke," since the complaint is coming from the mainstream reviewers -- interracial love story (but with elemental spirits! who are not particularly magical, and basically just New Yorkers) probably just not a great concept, and would be really hard to do so well that a mass of people will go to the theater to see it immediately.

As an aside, I see that Spider Man: No Way Home did really well, and having watched it: why? It's terrible! So bad! Apparently fan service, done right, does bring in the cash.

As an aside, I see that Spider Man: No Way Home did really well, and having watched it: why? It's terrible! So bad! Apparently fan service, done right, does bring in the cash.

The same brain-dead Marvel fans who threw money at the first animated Spider-Man, like all movies in the MCU, had no problem doing the same for the sequel.

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That's a shame, I enjoyed the first animated Spider-Man and I was thinking of seeing that one. Life's just been too busy lately.

Beyond the Spiderverse, which is the sequel to the animated one, is pretty damn good.

though I would suggest that "stodgily following the tropes of the moment" is actually a key part of wokeness in organizations -- it's the movement of the hour, and so organizations follow it because it's what creatives seem to like and they don't see the elements (heh) of it that sometimes alienate audiences.

Maybe that's the problem. When it takes 18 months or more to make a movie, by the time your movie comes out the movement of the hour is last year's news. Even if the idea was fresh in the planning stages, it is completely played out by the time it is screening in the movie theater.

That's a shame, I enjoyed the first animated Spider-Man and I was thinking of seeing that one. Life's just been too busy lately.

I disagree, and happen to think that the second movie was just as good as the first. Catch it in theaters if you still can.

I liked it a lot, but I wouldn't say it's crazy to skip the theatrical release. Vague spoilers:

IMHO nobody's really seen the whole second movie. We've only seen the "Across the Spider-Verse" half, and that part has too much of a cliffhanger to be properly called a complete movie. I enjoyed this half-a-movie, cliffhanger and all, but now I'm stuck waiting for March 2024 for the rest, and how can you safely pass judgement on a movie before it's even resolved more than half of its central conflicts? Sometimes the resolution of this sort of pseudo-trilogy makes the penultimate part much better in hindsight (Back to the Future III...); sometimes much worse (The Matrix Revolutions...).

I mean, the part that did come out was worth watching, and while the ending was cliffhanger, I'd say that two good movies in a row at least raises my expectations enough to watch the next!

COVID-19 and streaming services training people to stay home and wait for a streaming release instead of going to the theater. Folks tightening their belts due to the economy and inflation and spending less on entertainment in general. Competition with Youtube, Twitch, TikTok, Steam, Playstation, Xbox, Nintendo, Spotify, etc. Crowded release schedule. Particular IPs and/or franchises overstaying their welcome (DCEU, Indiana Jones, Disney Remakes). Certain diversity castings not going over well (The Little Mermaid possibly). People tired of mediocre films.

Another real estate question: has anyone looked into equity stripping? Does it offer much protection? What are the costs involved? Does it provide much value over an umbrella policy? Who would you go to to do it?

Got an economics question:

I was watching 'Margin Call' the other day, and there is a scene where two day traders are lamenting the (then incipient) 2008 financial crisis. The senior of the two gives his justification for existing to the other:

the only reason they [normal people] all get to keep living like this is because We've got our fingers on the scale in their favour. I take it off, then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that.

Is there anything to this? if so, how does that work? I always assumed that day traders basically created no value and just shuffled wealth around to nobody's benefit.

Government subsidies for housing are massive:

  • You get to deduct the interest and property tax (conditional on exceeding the standard deduction today). However many urban homes are going to be close to this so it doesn't take much charitable giving to exceed the standard deductions.

  • You don't pay capital gains on your homes appreciation. Up to $500,000 fo couples.

  • Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will buy most mortgages offering a guaranteed rate for 30 years that can be refinanced without penalty. The government will directly buy riskier mortgages.

  • The standard mortgage offers 4:1 leverage (or 32:1 for the government options).

These reduce the cost of housing and give strong incentives for people with high incomes and higher marginal tax rates to invest heavily in housing. The system kind of broke when those homeowners figured out they could vote in local governments that would also limit construction.

Deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes increases the price of housing, rather than decreasing it, by increasing demand. They de facto increase the ability of buyers to pay higher prices, by reducing the monthly cost of home ownership. Ditto re Fannie and Freddie, since they have the effect of lowering mortgage rates.

The monthly cost of their lifestyle was how I interpreted the quote's point. "We (society) put our fingers on the scale to make people's lifestyles more affordable" in the context of the 2008 financial crisis it ties into housing, so I view the topic as essentially "how does society put their finger on the scale of monthly housing costs to make normies lifestyles more affordable?"

Oh I was referring specifically to "These reduce the cost of housing"

Ah I should have said carrying cost! Thanks

A few more subsidies...

  • When you sell with a capital gain you have a couple years to buy a new house and avoid paying the capital gain

  • As in investor, you can do a 1031 exchange to sell one property and buy another without paying capital gains

  • As an investor, you can earn cash-free tax flow. This is because you are allowed to "depreciate" an appreciating asset. This lets you lose money on paper even if you earn money on practice.

  • Using "cost segregation" you can depreciate these appreciating assets much faster than the official schedule allows

  • Investors can finance up to 5-10 houses with similar rate advantages given to buyers of one home

  • A couple where one spouse is a real estate professional and the other has high income (such as doctor) can use the fake real estate "losses" of one spouse to offset the earnings of the other spouse and pay very little tax.

  • When you die, your heirs get a step-up basis. So if I bought a house for $100k in San Jose in 1973, my heirs won't have to pay capital gains when they sell it for $3.7 million in 2023.

Probably a lot more than I missed. The whole thing is a racket.

Here's how it works: Most mortgages are 30-year loans. This means that the person giving the loan isn't made whole for thirty years. Nobody wants to wait that long to get their money back, not even banks. The only reason ordinary people can get mortgage loans at palatable interest rates (5-8%) is because of the secondary market for mortgage debt. The bank that gives you a mortgage doesn't hold that loan on their books for 30 years, they sell it almost immediately to a firm like the one in Margin Call, and the only reason firms like that are willing to pay so much for mortgages is that they can do Wall Street Magic™ like chop them up into highly liquid, officially rated, mortgage-backed-securities that can be easily sold to pension funds, other banks, or whoever else wants to buy it.

This whole process dramatically increases the demand for mortgage debt, which drives the price of mortgages up and the interest rate charged to the consumer down. Thus, we arrive at the scene in question. The only reason people are able to afford anything as extravagant as a 30-year mortgage is because of the very bankers and processes that caused the financial crisis.

Firstly, the widespread availability of mortgages for ordinary people predates the boom in MBS issuance by decades. The boom in MBS issuance occurred as a result of the GLB Act in 1999. There was a specific period of a few years when the vast majority of (certainly privately-issued) MBS ever issued were issued (or, from Wikipedia). Certainly, securitization (including of mortgages, although usually commercial mortgages) had a very long history, but the MBS market that exacerbated/caused the financial crisis wasn't responsible for people "being able to afford" a 30-year mortgage, no.

Secondly, while MBS prices certainly affect interest rates on new mortgages, I'm less sure that the existence of the MBS market itself was 'responsible' for rates being lower than they would otherwise have been in the early 2000s. That's an unfalsifiable thesis in any case, but I think the default view should be that the lending environment of the pre-crash age was more dependent upon the government, on the Fed and on the wider macroeconomic landscape than it was on the existence of the MBS market.

If long-term investing is good, then day trading must also be good but less so. I might hold an investment for years because I think it has unappreciated value, this helps direct investment to good places, or at least places that people think are good. Someone should react to news, analyse whether recent events should have capital reallocated. At minimum they provide some liquidity for transactions.

High frequency trading is a waste of time though, compared to the brainpower that goes into it.

Margin Call is a great movie but it’s even less realistic than the average Wall Street film, in part because most tend to focus on people more interesting / more on the fringes of finance (like The Wolf of Wall Street) rather than the comparatively more staid PMC culture that exists in bulge bracket investment banking and even increasingly (probably since about 2000) on the trading floor. The bank in Margin Call is based on Goldman Sachs, which partially hedged some of its exposure to the mortgage crisis. But the real life story (and there is some reporting on it) is less exciting than the movie, the events took place over a much longer time, and the drama with the board in the movie was fictionalized. I hope someone makes a similar movie fictionalizing the Credit Suisse collapse though, I think that’s a more fertile ground for storytelling although it would work best as a miniseries that takes place over maybe 3-5 years.

the only reason they [normal people] all get to keep living like this is because We've got our fingers on the scale in their favour. I take it off, then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that.

On one hand, the US did and does have an addiction to cheap credit. The housing crisis was spurred in large part by the Bush administration’s relentless push to ‘end the legacy of redlining’ by pressuring banks into lending to just about anybody without much consideration of their long term ability to pay, and many mortgage salesmen and retail banking compliance/KYC deliberately looked the other way as people lied and were coached to lie on application forms to borrow even more money. A movie about mortgage salesmen in Arizona in 2007 could include this line and I think it would be a fun (and accurate) description.

On the other hand, the credit traders in Margin Call aren’t mortgage salesmen. They have little to nothing to do with the provision of credit. The securitization of mortgages was not primarily responsible for the housing boom and collapse, even though that crash subsequently caused the financial crisis in part because of said securitization. You can twist the words into making a point that credit would possibly have been slightly more expensive if the MBS market had been less developed, but the reason for the housing bubble was primarily the fault of governments and retail banks, not investment banks.

So as a statement, it doesn’t make much sense, no. The thing is that traders at big banks aren’t really cowboys, for the most part these are people who make what they believe to be very predictable, very safe moves to hedge clients’ money. They’re not at a hedge fund or a hotshot at a small prop trading firm. They’re not Jordan Belfort type boiler room operators. They’re not Glengarry Glen Ross salesmen. They’re doing what is, almost all the time, a very low risk job where doing very well means making the bank a very small amount of money on the work they do for clients.

Good explanation, thanks. I thing along these lines I've always wondered:

The housing crisis was spurred in large part by the Bush administration’s relentless push to ‘end the legacy of redlining’ by pressuring banks into lending to just about anybody without much consideration of their long term ability to pay, and many mortgage salesmen and retail banking compliance/KYC deliberately looked the other way as people lied and were coached to lie on application forms to borrow even more money.

My impression is that a substantial amount of the financial shenanigans that led to the crisis were based on all of the various actors who make up the pipeline of financing mortgages trying to figure out some way to themselves not lose their shirts in the environment of all of these sketchy mortgages the banks were forced to make. Where "forced" is not in the sense of "you will go to jail if you don't do this", but a more subtle indication that "we will audit and regulate your bank out of existence unless you do this". So essentially, deep down everybody knows it's going to collapse somehow eventually, and they're all trying to arrange things such that they're not the ones holding the bag when it does, which involves never acknowledging that to anyone else. Do you think this is accurate, or off-base?

It's hard to say, there's probably a few million pages of congressional testimony in which various people might or might not hint at this obliquely, I actually have no idea. I don't think there was any major effort by the majority of loan originators in middle america to limit their exposure to the subprime mortgage market. There were some smart people who did, especially from 2006 onwards, just like there were some smart hedge funds who made the same play, and just as Goldman eventually realized it themselves (as fictionalized in Margin Call). Obviously there were people who predicted the housing bubble bursting more generally, but we're 400 years on from Tulip Mania and there are always Cassandras preaching about imminent doom. It's very hard to tell who got lucky and was neurotic at the right time (like the hypochondriac who finally catches a terrible disease very early) and who knew the whole thing was really a sham.

I'll say that my impression from old hands in investment banking rather than trading is that most did not expect a crash in 2007. The market had barely recovered to dotcom levels, it had only been 6 years since the last crash and 4 since the trough of the 2001-2003 recession, M&A activity was hot but not shockingly so, the housing market was the only red-light indicator, if it even was.

So essentially, deep down everybody knows it's going to collapse somehow eventually, and they're all trying to arrange things such that they're not the ones holding the bag when it does, which involves never acknowledging that to anyone else.

Peter Wallison says that (1) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac misleadingly categorized mortgages as subprime only if they were issued by a small category of "subprime lenders" (rather than the more typical definition of any mortgage made to a person with FICO score worse than 660), so (2) the banks never even knew that the situation was in the toilet.

Without understanding Fannie and Freddie’s peculiar and self-serving loan classification methods, the recipients of information about the GSEs’ mortgage positions simply seemed to assume that all these mortgages were prime loans, as they had always been in the past, and added them to the number of prime loans outstanding. Accordingly, by 2008 there were approximately 12 million more NTMs in the financial system—and 12 million fewer prime loans—than most market participants realized.

Appreciate the post thanks man. So let me see if I've understood this correctly:

Day traders as depicted in Margin Call do/did perform some modest (probably very modest) service to society in that all the jiggery-pokery and complicated financial instruments have the effect of making investments more appealing, which in turn would reduce the downstream cost of credit to borrowers which is good because all other things being equal cheap credit is better than expensive credit.

It's also not completely fair to lay blame for the financial crisis at the feet of traders/investment banks, at least no more than any other bankers, because they weren't fundamentally responsible for the rotten mortgages that were the root cause of the crisis. At worst they simply didnt look too hard at the numbers because they were making money quite handily from the status quo.

But it certainly isn't true that credit traders etc. give 'Joe Everyman' a big advantage over his global competitors.

Day trader typically means private individuals who trade with their own money from home, like on WallStreetBets. The traders depicted in Margin Call are professional sell-side traders working for an investment bank, whose job is to trade on behalf of the bank's large institutional clients (major corporations, pension funds, hedge funds, university endowments, other banks). To limit the bank's risk, they hedge these trades as they make them. If they're good at their jobs, they make a small amount of money for the bank in the process, but on huge volume, this can amount to a large profit for the desk / their team, which is why many top traders are paid very well. Sometimes, as with the MBS the bank itself issued (a consequence of the GLB Act passed in 1999), their job would also be to trade/sell the bank's securities. I actually don't remember whether the MBS the credit traders in Margin Call were selling had been issued by the bank itself; it might not even be mentioned in any detail.

It's also not completely fair to lay blame for the financial crisis at the feet of traders/investment banks, at least no more than any other bankers, because they weren't fundamentally responsible for the rotten mortgages that were the root cause of the crisis.

Traders in general had relatively little to do with the 2007 crash. Lehman Brothers, the largest casualty, collapsed because of decisions made by its leadership to directly enter the mortgage market by acquiring mortgage lenders, to keep acquired mortgages (including commercial ones) on its books for longer before packaging and selling them, and even to some extent to directly enter the commercial real estate market in 2006. None of these decisions were made by even senior credit traders, whose only job was to (try to) sell the securities.

But it certainly isn't true that credit traders etc. give 'Joe Everyman' a big advantage over his global competitors.

Sure. There were huge mistakes made by senior bankers (although even more by regulators) in the run up to 2008, the biggest of which was a total failure to consider the possible catastrophic implications of a liquidity issue / credit crunch caused by a seizing up of the US housing market. There are ethical issues on the trading floor and in investment banking/advisory (ie. M&A, equity and debt issuance and so on), mostly to do with bankers taking advantage of management that doesn't know what it's doing. But the financial crisis is hard to lay at their feet.

I'm not opposed to sharing extremist left or right news sources as talking points, but Counter Currents is very lowbrow even compared to say Unz/AmRen/most of dissident right twitter. I think a few years ago it was slightly more erudite, but it's kind of degenerated into hysterical /pol/posting and neo-nazi bait that - like this article - cherry picks stats badly from official sources without understanding them (see @Gdanning's comment below) to make a very much exaggerated point.

In general, the far right misses the forest for the trees in the Rotherham affair. This essentially occurred in the rust belt of England, the victims were underclass girls, largely children of single mothers, many of them were in care because their mothers were addicts or otherwise couldn't look after them, high levels of multigenerational poverty, zero opportunity, zero faith or traditional values, essentially some of the most hollowed-out, atomized, empty, unproductive, valueless and dysfunctional communities in the Western world. So yes, it's an indictment of the mass immigration that occurred to these areas, I don't think that's something that can or should be ignored, but these communities' issues go way, way beyond that and most have little to do with Mirpuris moving to the UK.

In general, the far right misses the forest for the trees in the Rotherham affair. This essentially occurred in the rust belt of England, the victims were underclass girls, largely children of single mothers, many of them were in care because their mothers were addicts or otherwise couldn't look after them

People are upset that the state refused to fulfill it's most basic duty to it's citizens for ideological reasons, and the "forest" they're supposed to be missing is poverty and single motherhood? I'm sure the father that tried to bust his daughter out of the brothel, and got stopped by the police, will be relieved to hear that.

Yeah, the forest is the huge societal decay that begat this whole thing. If mass immigration had never happened, Rotherham would still be a huge shithole filled with the dregs of British society. That, to me, is as much (if not more) of a problem.

I can just as easily say that if you have a police force that refuses to protect you for ideological reasons, that's a more fundamental issue, even if you live in a low crime area. So on what basis are you deciding that this is the forest?

In general, the far right misses the forest for the trees in the Rotherham affair.

The key factor that the far right cares about is the betrayal aspect, that police were too afraid of looking racist to do anything about it. They tried hard to cover it up, disappearing the evidence. And they succeeded for at least a decade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_exploitation_scandal#Weir_report_(2001)

Having a poor, unemployed, faithless underclass is one thing, having a poor, police covering up for the criminals is quite another.

In two of the cases we read, fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves when police were called to the scene. In a small number of cases (which have already received media attention) the victims were arrested for offences such as breach of the peace or being drunk and disorderly, with no action taken against the perpetrators of rape and sexual assault against children.

https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham

The police were incredibly useless and unhelpful, all the young people in Rotherham knew that taxis drivers were abusers yet none of the officials who had these extensive liasons and meetings managed to do anything about it (like taking away their licenses, for example). Or the police thought doing anything about child molesting was 'a waste of time'. Or check 10.11-10.18, page 85 - it paints a rather disturbing picture of someone inside the police force helping an abuser blackmail a young girl by threatening her 11 year old sister. Concerns about this expressed to the District Commander were thoroughly ignored and witnesses were silenced.

Yes, I didnt mean to say that those other two were particularly 'highbrow'. In general, once people get into outright virulent racism (in the traditional definition) the quality of their writing drops significantly. I think this is mainly because smarter dissident right figures have actual aspirations to involvement in real-world politics, and even a reactionary government in the US or Western Europe is going to balk at someone with a long history of Turner Diaries-esque posts online. See the Finnish economy minister who just got cancelled for making oblique nazi references, for example.

He’s still in a cabinet position in Finland.

Very technically - he's going to stay as a lame duck for some weeks until the parliament's summer break is over.

He’s a prominent figure in the party; like Höcke in the AfD he can’t just be fully removed. But if he hadn’t made those comments he’d have much more power than he now does. You’re not going to send a guy with a Counter Currents posting history to negotiate favorable new trade deals with Israel or Ghana or whatever. Propriety still matters.

Hm, let's see:

According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention, in Sweden, in 2013, 700 women, and 300 children, were raped by Muslims in the first 7 months of the year. . . . Therefore, one could extrapolate that if rape rates hold true across Western Europe, 43.44 (the ratio of the total Western European population vs the total Swedish population) @ 142.857 (rapes per month in Sweden) = 6,205.896 white women and children raped per month by Muslims in Europe.

Note that the original claim is re ALL women and children, not WHITE women and children. Also note that the source cited for the data says that there were about 1000 TOTAL rapes in Stockholm County to date (ie. the first seven months of 2013), not 1000 rapes by MUSLIMS.

Therefore, one could extrapolate that if rape rates hold true across Western Europe

Sweden's rape rate is in fact apparently unusually high.

Edit: I note that one of the comments to the post uses the term, "jewsmedia." And that is one of the less inflammatory comments.

Therefore, if rape rates in Rotherham were equal per capita to the rest of Europe, there would be over 7,000 European women raped by Muslims every hour.

For the sake of the argument, let’s posit that the rape rate in Rotherham was 10 times worse than what it is in Western Europe as a whole.

That "IF" could sink an aircraft carrier along with it's escorting ships.

So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist. It has been on the backlog for a while as an influential book, but a careless thought has finally given me a reason to be interested: I wonder what impact wokeness has had on highly successful minorities.

Paper I'm reading: Thiele's Things Fall Apart: Integrity and Visibility in Democratic Liberal Education.

Last night I finished reading Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time, which my girlfriend bought for me because she said I reminded her of the protagonist, Pechorin. I'd never read a Russian novel before (unless you count Lolita and Ayn Rand's novels, which is a stretch) and I'd heard they had a reputation for being slow and dull, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that it's pacy, engaging and even funny in places. When I started reading it last night, Pechorin had just arrived in Pyatigorsk, and to my surprise I found it so engrossing that I stayed up past my bedtime to finish the whole book. It was oddly moving and I'm still digesting it.

Pity that Pechorin is such a dickhead. I guess the comparison doesn't reflect very well on me. If anything I'd say he's both braver and more charismatic than me.

I read Dracula when I was in primary school. I found the whole sequence of Harker in Dracula's castle to be really gripping (if not necessarily scary) but as soon as it left the castle the book sort of ran out of steam and became ponderously Christian and a chore to get through.

I like reading seminal genre classics. They're like the ultimate prequel after growing up in a world of derivatives.

Jonathan Harker takes ages to realize that his host, an extremely obvious vampire, is in fact a vampire.

Keanu Reeves’ portrayal of Harker somehow makes this more believable in the 1992 movie.

At the same time, Reeves’ infamous accent and stilted line delivery in this movie can serve as a character-building exercise for a viewer not to tap out due to cringe.

It can be oddly inspiring though, if you’re a young person combating imposter-syndrome. If Reeves can make it through filming and production as a late 19th century Englishman, surely you can make it through [whatever].

I've gotten stuck in a rut of reading Lit-RPG recently, which I really need to extricate myself from. Just finished the published books of Defiance of the Fall, which was a nice mix of the Chinese cultivation genre with lit-RPG. Still, if I just read 3,000 pages of something with more substance, I imagine I would feel better about my reading habits.

I'm in a literary rut waiting for enough time to pass to reach Malazan again ... What's LitRPG?

Wikipedia says:

LitRPG, short for literary role playing game, is a literary genre combining the conventions of computer RPGs with science-fiction and fantasy novels. The term was introduced in 2013. In LitRPG, games or game-like challenges form an essential part of the story, and visible RPG statistics (for example strength, intelligence, damage) are a significant part of the reading experience. This distinguishes the genre from novels that tie in with a game (like those set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons), books that are actual games (such as the choose-your-own-path Fighting Fantasy type of publication), or games that are literally described (like MUDs and interactive fiction). Typically, the main character in a LitRPG novel is consciously interacting with the game or game-like world and attempting to progress within it.

There's something about the genre that's just really easy. Takes very little effort to pick up the story compared to normal books.

I never got hooked by Defiance of the Fall but if you liked that you might like Primal Hunter, which is very similar overall.

Recently read Blindsight and it's sequel Echopraxia, and was immediately struck with flashbacks to Eclipse Phase; apparently Blindsight was a big inspiration for the game.

Blindsight has aged incredibly well for sci-fi from pre-2010. I highly recommend reading it; it's freely available, the audiobook is good, and it even has a short film that functions as a trailer https://youtube.com/watch?v=VkR2hnXR0SM

(The events of the book are presented in reverse order in the trailer).

Blindsight was a bit tough for me to get into. I think Watts went a touch too abstract with his plot and it was something I felt I had to force myself to finish.

On the other hand, Solaris by Lem conveyed the same idea of the absolute alien nature of non-human intelligence in a very evocative and beautiful way.

I think I'm about due for a reread of Blindsight - I read it years ago online and loved it, but at the time I hadn't read much about consciousness. My (vague) recollection was that it mostly elides the hard problem of consciousness. I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

In the era of LLMs, that seems pretty silly, since ChatGPT (or at least the un-neutered Bing) can do a great job of pretending to experience. But maybe there was less hand-waving than I'm remembering?

I remember there was an idea that the crew's linguist was able to prove the non-consciousness of the aliens from their text communications.

IIRC (and it's been over a decade, so take it with a grain of salt), they were able to prove that the aliens' communications and actions were separate. They used the Chinese Room analogy after discovering that "threats" weren't matched with aiming weapons, "negotiations" weren't matched with fulfilling the terms, etc. I don't think that would prove non-consciousness (and I can't remember if they claimed that), but it's certainly a step in that direction.

They figured out whatever they were communicating with initially was a chatbot made from intercepted human communications

Path of Ascension and Dungeon Crawler Carl: Eye of the Bedlam Bride. Spoilers for Path of Ascension below.

The former is pretty good, mid-tier litRPG. While some parts of it are predictably weak, it has enough going for it that I think the first three books at least are worth reading. Characters, dialogue, etc. are pretty weak, but everyone at least has their own motivations which are internally consistent. Also it's set in a galactic empire that is quite competently run, which is very refreshing. However, the galactic empire is so well run that it removes a lot of the tension from the story--the main characters are very rarely in serious danger, and basically always have godlike beings personally and directly watching over them 24/7 to prevent any serious injury. This is somewhat nice because the main characters are allowed to lose every once in a while, but it doesn't make up for the absence of any real stakes. The author almost goes out of his way to remove any stakes from the story--not only is nobody ever going to die, but even when wars happen, they are supervised by godlike beings and any permanent injury or death on either side is prevented. This makes sense narratively but I need stakes in my stories.

I really have low standards for these books; they never seem to be written all that well but are fun nonetheless. Even compared to the industry standard though, the pacing of these books really struggles, especially post chapter 130ish. Chapters are full of characters talking to each other in the same voice, explaining elements of the world around them, and discussing their recently gained abilities, while the plot grinds to a total halt. I've taken to skipping paragraphs after reading the first couple of words and don't seem to have missed much so far. So that's a big mark against it.

On the bright side the book does mix up common tropes in new, fun ways pretty frequently. For example, at one point the characters must choose whether to support the prince of a corrupt empire. The prince wants to reform the empire, but is quite ruthless and will do anything to make that reform happen, even if it means stealing from and killing innocent people. This on its own is a very well-trodden trope--do we support the principled villain or the ruthless hero?--but then we learn that the prince is also fairly incompetent and liable to waste whatever support he gets. I've never seen the trope twisted in such a way and I found reading through it to be pretty interesting, though the author didn't spend nearly as much time on that dilemma as I'd have liked.

Anyways I'd say it's a good timewaster but there are much better books out there.

Just started DCC so not much to say about it except that the previous books in the series have been very fun.

Time to Orbit: Unknown, a recommendation from /r/rational I've been enjoying.

It's set in a colony ship to a distant system where the protagonist gets woken up early in the middle of things going to shit and has to grapple to fix them. It's really well written with good characters and interesting worldbuilding, except for one part that makes me pull my hair out:

It always severely exasperates me when scifi stories written as late as 2022 depict AI as being dumber than GPT-4 (or GPT-3, going by what was SOTA at the time of writing).

Or the utter lack of robotics, so far. Seriously, a few remote manipulators and some things barely more advanced than the products of modern Boston Dynamics would be nice to see!

And the technology seems quaint given how far in the future it's set. You'd think they'd have full immersion VR or something like that.

I can forgive this in a novel written before, say, 2015, but when the characters bloviate about how AI can never replicate human intelligence and apparently neural networks can't do the work of a brain, I'm going to piss and cry and shit myself in frustration.

Seriously, I'm reading chapters written in Feb 2023 and the issue persists, it takes my suspension of disbelief and hangs it by the neck till it's dead.

Oh, apparently the AI isn't good enough to reliably identify things from video footage, when that was a thing 2 years ago. Ah, it can't do more than basic logic, and is apparently incapable of lying because it's too dumb. Fuck me sideways. It's 2023, even the Somalians have likely heard about ChatGPT.

Of course, I'm unusually sensitive to authors being pussies about advancing technology in their nominally scifi novels, which is why I wrote one myself and threw everything and the kitchen sink into it. Nobody can say I don't put my money where my mouth is in that regard!

Ahem, diatribe out of the way, it's a good story, I'd rate it a 9/10 if not for this point which forces me to penalize it to an 8/10. I know, I know, I'm sorry for being so harsh.

My favorite series of novels set in a sort-of colony ship still remains the Sunflower series by Peter Watts, where the AI in charge is intentionally made dumber than it could be so it can't diverge from its directives over literal millions of years and needs to rely on its human crew as form of checks and balance.

Of course I'm still reading Reverend Insanity, at chapter 1186. Yes, four digit chapter numbers are run of the mill in the genre. At this rate I'm still going to be reading it till the sun swells up and boils the oceans.

No sci fi really captures the possibilities inherent in generative AI because they’re so significant. Even far-out stuff like Culture or Revelation Space doesn’t really.

The problem is that there’s limited room for human protagonists’ agency when AI (or AI + decent robots which all science fiction generally assumes) and this is kind of the core of storytelling. It’s the same reason why sci fi struggles to move away from human pilots and captains and soldiers and so on. I think moving forward a lot of science fiction will be retro-future stuff that imagines we went to space with something like 1960s to 1990s technology and that AI wasn’t invented, or at least not in the way it was here. Starfield seems to be taking this approach.

I'm so, so tired of stories that follow human narrative sensibilities. Are there any books that ask the reader to fall in love with a well crafted structure that completely defies human narrative convention? That aims to map the reader to the alien rather than mapping the alien to the reader?

Stenislaw Lem's Solaris might be worth a read if you haven't already. It doesn't play with a narrative convention at all though, but conveys a sense of something truly alien.

I'd say there are, but the more you do this the more avant garde / surreal things become, and the more skilled a writer you have to be to make things work. I guess Flatland is probably one of the most famous examples.

Flatland was good. I was also a fan of the aliens in slaughterhouse five, though they weren't central. I like nature documentaries- but I don't think they go far enough. Ant youtubers who get really passionate about morphology and behavioral analysis are ok. Sometimes I get my jollies just by reading ML whitepapers. Animorphs had a lot going for it, though I read it all as a kid and don't know if I would again.

No sci fi really captures the possibilities inherent in generative AI because they’re so significant. Even far-out stuff like Culture or Revelation Space doesn’t really.

I'm really not asking for much, just that an author writing in X AD account for something that was clearly in existence in X-1 AD.

Or at the very least, it would be trivial for the author to make up some excuse for their absence. Say, normally the AI was a standard AGI, but it was intentionally sabotaged during the flight and is in a crippled position. Or the section carrying all the heavy robots in storage was hit by debris that made it past the shielding.

At least some sign that the author is aware of the issue and is attempting to placate my suspension of disbelief.

As per Yudkowsky's take on Vinge's law, it's pretty much impossible for a human to write a compelling superhuman intelligence in the first place, so I am willing to look the other way most of the time.

Still, I was so ticked off at this point that I went to the Author's discord, and boy did I end up on the wrong side of the tracks.

They/Thems for miles (even the author, which I sort of suspected from the emphasis on neo-pronouns and weird additional genders, but I actually don't mind that because it's set hundreds of years in the future and it would be weird if there weren't any running around).

I was confused to see half a dozen bot accounts replying to me, before someone informed me that this was people using "alters", some kind of DID bullshit I presume, since the bot's description explained it was a way for people to talk to themselves as a different persona (???).

I more or less copy pasted my complaints, and was immediately inundated by more They/Thems spouting the absolute worst takes on AI, to the point my eyes bled. At least they were mostly polite about it, but I'm sure they're already well acquainted with accommodating people with weird personal quirks, if you count my intolerance for gaping plot holes as one.

Then the author themselves showed up, and informed me that they were aware of modern AI, yet apparently disagreed on their capabilities and future.

This pretty much killed me outright, so I politely agreed to disagree and left. I am unsure what mechanism he's using to extrapolate the future that requires AI to he worse than they are today after hundreds of years, and I'd rather not even ask.

I guess if all science fiction written after 2024 includes something suspiciously like Butlerian Jihad then be careful what you wish(ed) for?

Well, in my setting, I chose the route of having the initial singularity be aborted by humanity panicking the fuck out regardless of whether the AI was actually aligned or not.

And the justification for limiting the spread of generalized ASI was to prevent that from happening again, with the operational solution being either having AGIs locked to the last human level proven empirically safe, or only allowing narrowly superhuman AGI.

It's a world where Yudkowskian fighter jets dropping bombs on data centers isn't a joke, but they usually go for nukes and antimatter explosives.

I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether that's a bad thing, but at the very least I don't commit the sin of writing about technology worse than today without an explanation of any kind. Butlerian Jihad it isn't though.

'Teach Yourself French' by Sir John Adams and Norman Scarlyn Wilson. It was published in 1938 and so is quite different to modern textbooks, there is very little filler, there are no games or illustrations. The whole thing is self-contained such that if you have completed the earlier exercises and understood the previous chapter you will (they promise) be able to progress through the current one without consulting outside sources. Unlike the book Brighter French, the author promises that I do not even need to be 'particularly bright' to find this book useful.

I used a book from the same series to learn Spanish and helped me quite a lot. In this series there are 3 books, I'm starting on the more grammar focused one and will work through the 'Everyday French' (probably quite out of date by now) and then on to the 'French Reader' translating excerpts of novels and poems.

Is reading textbooks even a good way to learn the language? Spoken French certainly sounds very different to me than what a naive appraisal of the written form would suggest.

Listening before speaking. Reading before writing. Best way to learn a language is by listening, but there needs to be some context to what you're hearing, similar to how we learned language as infants. Audiobook + physical book + translation dictionary is your best bet. Lots of illiterate people can speak a language. Lots of jazz musicians couldn't read sheet music.

Generally, no, textbooks are not good for learning language. After learning proper pronunciation (i.e. listening to spoken) reading intresting books can help your vocabulary and grammar. At that point you've already learned the language enough to understand, speak basicly and read though.

Looking at the book the table of contents just looks like grammar and the first sentance states plainly, "It is impossible to learn French pronunciation properly from a book." so at least they're upfront that you will not be able to speak French. @Tollund_Man4 will probably be able to write basic french online, which might be more useful than speaking online, and "French Reader" sounds genuinely intresting.

@Tollund_Man4 will probably be able to write basic french online, which might be more useful than speaking online

I'm also listening to the Inner French podcast to get a sense for the pronunciation, and thinking of enrolling in a class for a short time just to break through the everyday conversation barrier (my experience with Spanish is that once you reach this point self-study can do the rest).

It's not enough on its own for sure. But while it might take a second to click knowing the grammar and plenty of vocabulary will help you make sense of what you're hearing in spoken French, and making an attempt at voicing what you've only seen written is better than drawing a blank (At least that's the bet I'm making with the time I'll be spending on these books).

As long as you've got some foundation and have a go at it a native speaker can always correct your pronunciation when you try for real.

If I was really invested in learning a new language, I would enlist GPT-4's help.

My Hindi is only conversational and not fluent, so my efforts to get it to coach me were quite successful.

It absolutely blows standard books out of the water, because it can actively catch your flaws and correct them, while building a customized curriculum.

But I wouldn't bother myself, because I don't intend to go anywhere where English + Google Translate won't suffice, and because I expect ubiquitous real time translation in my pocket or ears to be a reality sooner rather than later. (It kinda is, but you have to fiddle with apps. I'm talking something that's just running in the background or in my visual field through, say AR glasses)

If I was really invested in learning a new language, I would enlist GPT-4's help.

Sounds interesting, I suspect I'll need a lot more help drilling grammatical gender exercises so it should be useful here.

But I wouldn't bother myself, because I don't intend to go anywhere where English + Google Translate won't suffice, and because I expect ubiquitous real time translation in my pocket or ears to be a reality sooner rather than later. (It kinda is, but you have to fiddle with apps. I'm talking something that's just running in the background or in my visual field through, say AR glasses)

I'm finding the process very rewarding but it is a big time commitment so I can see why people wouldn't bother. As for real time translation, it sounds like it would be of great practical help but intellectually I do wonder if something would be lost in the process the same way 'I can just google it' has given people an excuse not to bother memorising a large number of historical facts.

I draw a distinction between learning a language simply because it's enjoyable versus learning one for its practical utility.

Sure, there's some overlap, but I fall into the latter category, and so far there's no language out there that offers me enough value that I can be bothered to learn it intentionally.

As for real time translation, it sounds like it would be of great practical help but intellectually I do wonder if something would be lost in the process the same way 'I can just google it' has given people an excuse not to bother memorising a large number of historical facts.

I'm not fussed about that in the least, since I'm the kind of nerd who enjoys learning obscure historical facts, which Google only makes easier, and I see no reason to care what other people get up to.

Something I’ve been pondering lately, is the seemingly paradoxical fact that women tend to find balding men quite unattractive while simultaneously finding greying very attractive.

Both are associated with aging and both are largely genetic, I believe, although balding more so, which might be part of the explanation.

The best I’ve been able to come up with, is that balding, since it is associated (and probably caused by) high levels of DHT, it can be an indicator of aggressiveness to the point where it is detrimental to the woman. Not that every balding man is aggressive, but I don’t think it is a coincidence, that some men will shave their head to seem more tough.

Women generally like other traits associated with higher levels of testosterone, but only up to a certain point, e.g. a study (which I can no longer seem to locate) found that especially large traps are found to be less attractive. These along with the deltoids have more androgen receptors, which makes them more susceptible to growth when testosterone is high.

These muscle groups are also good indicators of steroid use. The almost spherical shoulders some bodybuilders have are not achieved by hard work alone.

On the other hand, greying can happen from stress. I don’t think the exact mechanism is known, but I have a theory, that it is caused by the body’s ability to absorb micro nutrients being diminished during stress and the hair follicles not receiving enough of especially zinc and copper (pure speculation on my part). A man with greying hair has endured and survived stressful situations and his ability to do so is attractive.

It just seems strange, that two things that are somewhat closely related are perceived so differently. Also strange how the pattern with which they present are opposite with balding happening on top of the head and greying on the sides.

Edit: I belive this was the study I was thinking of:

Men’s Bodily Attractiveness: Muscles as Fitness Indicators. Notice the womens very low size preference of the trapezius in figure 1.

Men’s Bodily Attractiveness: Muscles as Fitness Indicators. Notice the womens very low size preference of the trapezius in figure 1.

This chart is useless without the supplementary material they used. I actually downloaded it and yes, the arrow points at Goldberg-like upper traps, not mid and lower traps that fill out your back nicely.

Losing one's hair for any reason other than male aging is definitely a sign of poor health in humans. Starving people lose their hair, poisoned people (chemo) lose their hair, deathly ill people lose their hair. The set "naturally bald people" is a little less healthy than the set "people with a full head of natural hair" because it contains those outliers. Idk which would have been the more common core example of baldness when humanity was evolving? When starvation is a definite possibility, then maybe losing one's hair because of anorexia is more common or more important than losing it because of genetics?

Alternatively it's a thing that differentially impacts individuals, based on facial features that make hairstyles more or less attractive, and there just aren't many men whose faces look good without hair, and vanishingly few who are flattered by hair on the sides only. Consider that most women look better with long hair, but a few look really good with pixie cuts. I can tell you I got a buzz cut a few summers ago, thought it would be easy, holy shit I look bad without hair.

To address the bald vs shaved question: it's one of intentionality and fashion. Making a deliberate decision is nearly always seen as more attractive than the default. Dressing down when everyone else is wearing a formal uniform is considered attractive, as is dressing up when everyone else looks sloppy. The guy who shaved his head made an affirmative choice, the guy who maintains two long tufts of hair is just letting nature do him like that.

Finally, bald guys don't really do that badly. They'd all do better with hair, but plenty get laid.

Something I’ve been pondering lately, is the seemingly paradoxical fact that women tend to find balding men quite unattractive while simultaneously finding greying very attractive.

There’s no real paradoxical fact here. I reject the premise that women find greying very attractive, especially young women. It’s more the case that women, even young women sometimes, can find men quite attractive in spite of greying.

Sure, girls and young women can have daddy issues—and middle-aged women can find silver foxes more palatable than they do young men. Daddy issues or not, it's interesting, amusing, and perhaps disturbing how many young women will automatically call you "daddy" in bed these days, without any prompting.

For the most part, young women prefer older men, but just by few years, albeit they’re far more flexible on that than they are on things like height and status. If you’re famous, an authority figure like her coach/teacher/professor, her boss at any job ranging from fastfood to PMC, or just tall/handsome, a girl/woman who’s supposedly “not into older guys” might suddenly find herself into an older guy. As opposed to men of all ages who generally prefer the youngest women possible all else equal, their datapoints pressed-up against the y-axis like barbarians sieging the wall.

What’s potentially more paradoxical is that women find a full-head of hair on men attractive—and there’s a large contingent that finds bald men attractive—but the in-between, the no-man's land of material balding such as this is universally despised by women. This is often rationalized as such men being too insecure to just shave it all off, thus being a repellant to women for Not Being Confident and Not Being Themselves.

However, this could easily be rationalized differently in a universe similar to ours, that such balding men are brave rebels, who proudly hang onto their few threads and are more secure in Being Themselves than the cowardly men who shaved it all off at the first sign of trouble. I posit that, in our universe, such balding men get pattern matched to suburban dads, basement dwellers, and anything in between and around the potentially radioactive zone. Such men are portrayed as boring, lame, and low-status in pop-culture and mainstream media; girl’s and women’s attraction are highly guided by social cues, so balding men get the shaft.

Obviously, as always, there is substantial Be Attractive, Don’t Be Attractive involved. There can also be some Russell Conjugation: You’re bald/balding, but Jason Statham rocks the shaved head.

These muscle groups are also good indicators of steroid use. The almost spherical shoulders some bodybuilders have are not achieved by hard work alone.

Can we please write like everyone is reading and we want them to be included, especially those from vulnerable/marginalised communities such as bodybuilding? If you talk to a Person of Bodybuilding, they’ll be happy to tell you that results like cannonball delts come not from steroids, but from eating clen, trening hard, constantly testing your limits, anavar giving up.

My personal belief is that traps are underrated rather than overrated for men looking to increase their attractiveness. As you mentioned, traps along with deltoids are androgenic signals, dominance traits that girls love. Traps are a noticeable distinguisher between lifters and DYELs, even when clothed. They’re like omnipresent evidence that you’re jacked. And men spend the majority of their time around women while clothed (presumably). As a man with solid traps or a woman accustomed to dating (a) men (man) with solid traps, men lacking in traps can look sort of weird, as if there’s a weird gap between their head and shoulders, their necks long like a giraffe or sauropod’s (“three-horns never play with long-necks” — Cera, a body-shamer before her time).

In that linked study, it’s important to note that it was conducted using just survey questions, with a stylized drawing of a man to identify muscles: “’How do you find the [MUSCLE] most attractive?’ using a Likert-type scale (7 = highly muscled to 1 = not muscled at all).” So no (experimentally manipulated) photos involved, no skin in the game (unlike online dating studies). On a funny side note, both male and female self-perceived attractiveness were positively correlated with the import placed upon male muscle size in general (Figure 6) and the correlation being… stronger… for women.

perhaps disturbing how many young women will automatically call you "daddy" in bed these days, without any prompting

It's always awkward having to stop in the middle and say "Sweetie, I don't know how to tell you this... but you're adopted"

Woody Allen/Errol Musk-maxxing, pretty based. There's even a TvTropes article on this, which includes an example of an Eva Green film where the (more extreme than usual) circumstances were reversed.

There’s no real paradoxical fact here. I reject the premise that women find greying very attractive, especially young women. It’s more the case that women, even young women sometimes, can find men quite attractive in spite of greying.

I might be overestimating how attractive women find it. It is mostly based on the response I have received, even from women in their early to mid twenties.

traps along with deltoids are androgenic signals, dominance traits that girls love.

They could love some dominance traits and not others. I think women generally select for a partner that has the visual cues signaling a capacity for violence, but simultaneously isn't overly aggressive. Some traits might signal too much aggression.

men lacking in traps can look kind of weird

Counterpoint: Large traps creates the illusion of narrower shoulders, women put a lot more emphasis on broad shoulders, so the larger traps makes the body seem less attractive overall.

it’s important to note that it was conducted using just survey questions, with a stylized drawing of a man to identify muscles

Good point. They do call it a preliminary study calling for more research.

They could love some dominance traits and not others. I think women generally select for a partner that has the visual cues signaling a capacity for violence, but simultaneously isn't overly aggressive. Some traits might signal too much aggression.

Maybe, maybe not, but we're already in just-so story territory over here. And overly could be doing a lot of work, where overly could vary tremendously depending on the particular woman and the point-in-time within her lifecycle. Undoubtedly there are some women who might get scared off by any muscularity beyond DYEL-status, but men must cast a wide-net if they want any semblance of consistent success, so counting on finding The One who loves you for your DYEL-physique and who you are may not be a prudent strategy.

Counterpoint: Large traps creates the illusion of narrower shoulders, women put a lot more emphasis on broad shoulders, so the larger traps makes the body seem less attractive overall.

I suppose that's theoretically possible, that large traps can function like a wide waist in distracting from the V-taper. However, that's like a zero'th world problem for almost all men, a bridge that they'd have to cross if and when they get there. In practice, I would say from casual empiricism, trap and shoulder development are positively correlated among male gym-goers. I basically see almost no men with what I would say are over-trained traps, or shoulders for that matter, relative to the rest of their physique. However, I regularly see those with what I would say are over-trained biceps and/or triceps relative to their physique.

Chicks are accustomed to squeezing arms to subconsciously or consciously feel-up bicep and tricep formidability, but traps are often a pleasant surprise for them upon squeezing: "wait... wtf kind of muscle is this?! teehee.”

Before you over think it, research suggests that women are far more diverse in their preferences in men than the obverse.

Men tend to be very consistent in their ratings of female attractiveness, with most men concurring in terms of what they like.

I believe the going hypothesis is something to with reducing intrasexual competition for mates for women, since they won't end up coveting each other's husbands all the time.

So you have women liking all sorts of niche and inane shit. Some of them like muscular dudes, some like dad bods, some of them are a fan of androgyny or twinks.

So you might have a small vocal minority gushing about silver foxes while the majority of women are merely meh in that regard.

Before you over think it, research suggests that women are far more diverse in their preferences in men than the obverse.

If I squint a bit I could see how this could be true in a vacuum, hence the concept of niche-maxxing for men on the red/purple/blackpill interwebs. However, in practice, female mate choice-copying leads to women wanting the same men, whether via OLD, social media, or meat-space social circle.

If I had to reconcile the two, I'd say that mate choice-copying works primarily when someone is already predisposed to like that kind of person to some degree.

So, sensitive theater kid gets a girlfriend and that bumps up his value the most for other women who have a degree of preference for theater kids.

research suggests that women are far more diverse in their preferences in men than the obverse.

????

This couldn't possibly align more poorly with all my experience.

There are men who are into cheerleaders, and homely nerds, and fit yoga/gym addicts, and obese landwhales, and MILFs and GILFs, and amputees, and big boobs and small boobs, and every race creed class and color... a quick perusal of any porn site will confirm this. Show me any woman on planet earth and I will find you a man who fetishizes exactly that type of woman.

Not to say that there isn't also a diversity in women's preferences. But suggesting that they exceed the diversity of men's preferences seems nonsensical on the face of it.

I linked the article, so you'll have to take it up with them haha

It doesn't seem so implausible to me, if I had to model it, it would look like women being more uncorrelated with each other, such that say, for any given man only 50% of women agree on his attractiveness. The other 50% have diverse interests.

On the other hand, perhaps 90% of men find the same cluster of women attractive, while the remainder are hog wild and will jerk it to anything that's not a platonic ideal (and maybe even that).

I don't think the study even bothered to test such an insane diversity in sexual preferences, but a few thousand people into midgets and amputees doesn't really disqualify the general idea.

I'm not particularly invested in this, but it at least doesn't seem glaringly incorrect to me!

Edit:

To clarify further, I envision women being into like 50% muscular classically handsome dudes, 30% twinks, 10% KPOP stars and so on. They don't splinter into millions of sub groups with vanishingly small fractions of the total.

On the other hand, 90% of men will fuck any woman who isn't morbidly obese (depending on how many beers they drink first), they might be guys who prefer ass over tits (or cultured thigh men like me), but they're not that picky at the end of the day. And then the rest are a fractal mess of everything else, shemales, midgets, ball busting and whatever nonsense can tingle the overactive horny receptors men are blessed with.

So you can with a straight face say that men are more consistent while simultaneously having far more varied tastes in the corners.

There’s a few different ways of looking at it.

We know that a certain X% of top males end up getting the majority of female sexual partners. So in actuality, women’s mate choices converge a good deal.

Physical attractiveness also matters less to women than it does to men. Social status is more relevant to women. Ask them about the axis they actually care about - “who’s more attractive, this rich CEO or this poor McDonald’s worker” - and their preferences will start converging very quickly.

Finally for what it’s worth, /r/bbw has 760k subscribers to /r/nsfw’s 4mil subscribers. Not an absurd difference.

While I broadly agree, I think it's an error to simply compare /r/bbw to a single subreddit.

There are at least dozens of large subs catering to the "vanilla" taste in female nudes, and a couple more ones for the chubby chasers too.

So the end comparison might be 1 million of the big lads to 20 million of the normal degenerates 🙏

But many of those subscribers are the same people.

More comments

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090626153511.htm

I'm not saying that men are a homogeneous bunch who like only one body type in women, of course there are ass men and boob guys.

What the research showed was that they were significantly less heterogenous than women.

I'll see if I can rustle up the study later.

Edit: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090626153511.htm

Young man with gray hair: cool, possibly interesting/different to the usual

Older man with gray hair: not so insecure or vain that he dyes it, more likely to be comfortable in himself

I think balding is mostly ugly to younger women since most women are primarily attracted to men around their age and balding is often a sign of aging in men. I don’t think it’s universally unattractive in older men from the perspective of older women, but preferences vary.

Conveys better grooming and attention to detail.

Bald is a choice. Balding is not

Symmetry is virtually always more attractive to everyone.

Just-so: partial baldness may have medical reasons other than androgenetic alopecia, like ringworm of the scalp, which indicate weak immune function. This isn't exactly an accurate method (male baldness ≈always has a patch stage) but we have no reason to assume high resolution of those innate priors.

That said, I have no idea whether women even had preference for fully bald men in the ancestral environment.

As a straight guy I just think it looks way better and more aesthetic. I don't think there's a gene somewhere that says fully bald > partially bald or that we need a direct evolutionary explanation for everything.

That's a good question. I can't think of a good reason.

I don't know if this is simply a just-so story so nobody should weight it too much, but the way I see it:

Good hair is a strong signal of sexual fitness, and baldness is selected against even if it's a largely benign condition. Baldness also typically occurs at ages well before greying, even though most men who go bald end up reproducing before it's an issue so the selection pressure isn't particularly strong.

I don't think women like fully grey hair, but salt and pepper in an otherwise attractive man is mildly attractive. I don't think a young man can simply dye his hair grey and get anything out of it. Nor do I think that a middle aged man will significantly benefit from it either unless he's already hot.

The way I see it, baldness is strictly negative, whereas greying is neutral to very mildly positive, until you're an old greybeard.

Now, on a slight tangent I think one of the best things a male doctor can do is go bald or graying, it immediately makes patients more comfortable since they associate age with experience and performance.

This is not the case, and no end of studies have shown that younger doctors in their 30s-40s are better clinicians than their older counterparts who are ossified in their ways and not as abreast of new updates

This is a moderate to small yet highly robust finding.

Wiki tells me I have an 80% chance of going bald eventually since my dad is, but for now I have a nice head of hair and likely will till I can lockdown some poor unfortunate women through false advertising haha, but if I do grey early-ish I won't really complain. Far easier to hide than balding is of course!

Good hair is a strong signal of sexual fitness, and baldness is selected against even if it's a largely benign condition.

But the question is why, though? I could be wrong, I don't think there is any evidence for bald men to have poorer health or being generally less capable compared to their unbald counterparts.

I don't think women like fully grey hair, but salt and pepper in an otherwise attractive man is mildly attractive. I don't think a young man can simply dye his hair grey and get anything out of it. Nor do I think that a middle aged man will significantly benefit from it either unless he's already hot.

I think you are right, that fully grey is probably not very attractive. And it might be the case that greying will make an already attractive man more attractive, but do nothing for a less attractive man.

This is not the case, and no end of studies have shown that younger doctors in their 30s-40s are better clinicians than their older counterparts who are ossified in their ways and not as abreast of new updates.

I think this will be true for almost any field, but in the case of clinicians, the confidence a patient has in their doctor is probably hard to account for, but could have a nonnegligible effect. Placebo and all that.

but if I do grey early-ish I won't really complain

I got my first grey hairs at age 20. I thought I would be fully grey before 30 and felt quite down over it for a while. I'm now in my early thirties and haven't gone fully grey, and since I'm blonde it hasn't been very noticeable. It is now at a point where people see it and comment on it, but considering I have multiple friends of the same age, who are balding, I feel lucky, that I have a full head of hair. And comments from women have been compliments, which is what prompted me to wonder about this.

Edit:

I am wrong. There does seem to be evidence that vertex balding is associated with higher risk of CHD and prostate cancer.

Hair is definitely a secondary sexual characteristic that acts as a signal of fitness.

Maintaining hair isn't the most metabolically expensive thing in the world, but it probably does cost something. Poor health often results in hair loss or weak, dry and frizzy hair. Acute or chronic stress can cause hair follicles to stop working and shed their hair, the medical term is telogen effluvium.

Perhaps baldness can be confused with hair loss from poor health and stress as well?

What the hell does it mean to be lindy?

Or a member of TPOT on Twitter? I know they're rat adjacent shitposters with an interest in AI, but I'm sure there's more to it.

The term Lindy comes from Taleb.

Lindy is a deli in New York, now a tourist trap, that proudly claims to be famous for its cheesecake, but in fact has been known for the fifty or so years of interpretation by physicists and mathematicians of the heuristic that developed there. Actors who hung out there gossiping about other actors discovered that Broadway shows that lasted, say one hundred days, had a future life expectancy of a hundred more. For those that lasted two hundred days, two hundred more. The heuristic became known as the Lindy Effect.

https://medium.com/incerto/an-expert-called-lindy-fdb30f146eaf

There are two classes: perishables and non-perishables. For humans, the older you get, the more likely you are to die. For non-perishables, it is the opposite. The older a building gets, the more likely it is to survive. In 200 years, the pyramids will still be standing, the Eiffel tower will probably still be there, and those newly erected apartment blocks almost certainly not. Same goes for books, ideas, countries, laws, and so on. Shakespeare will live on longer than the latest Hugo Award winner.

That's the Lindy effect. The adjective lindy is used to describe anything that's old, that has stood the test of time, and thus implied that is it true or useful or valuable. Or at the very least, a certain lens worth applying.

Video games? “Not Lindy.”

Nightclubs? “Lindy. In fact, deep Lindy.”

Sleek midcentury modernism? “Anytime you get away from fractal patterns and ornate details, it’s not Lindy.”

How about sex toys? “Lindy,” he said, adding, by way of explanation, “ancient Egypt.”

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal? “Some rich guy going around and doing criminal behavior and abusing people? It’s pretty Lindy!”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/style/lindy.html

Thanks, that clears it up!

My understanding is that TPOT is just a group with similiar cultural sensibilities and references, senses of humor, political tolerations (if not political views), interests, etc, that agglomerated together on Twitter. One point of commonality that was found to be extremely widespread among them (though I don't think was explicitly foundational) was that, at some point in the past, most of them had dipped into the rat-o-sphere to widely varying degrees, to the point that "postrat" is an effectively equivalent term.

I see, they make it seem like a much bigger deal than it actually is.

TPOT just means "this part of twitter". Recently there was the second annual Vibe Camp, a tpot meetup, but I don't think there is much more to it than that. I think a lot of it is excitement when people find others that 'get' them.

I think it is a pretty big deal, certainly as far as half-pseudonymous internet communities go. Especially with its strong, early connections with AI development, as AI explodes in importance.

TPOT is the cool kids table at the cultural center of tech. Remember how much of the world was remade around the sensibilities of the kind of people who were early to computers and the internet.

According to urbandictionary Nassim Taleb coined it to mean a form of longevity in which things that have been around for a long time seem to be more likely to be around for a long time yet to come.

I'm not sure if that's just a reframing of the conservative position but thanks for clarifying!

Conservatives wouldn't have much of a need to fight to preserve thier traditions if this were the case.

To strawman:

Lindy - has been around for a long time therefore will be around for much longer.

Conservative - has been around for a long time therefore should be around for much longer.

Why are gays over-represented in the arts and creative fields? Even in tech, I go to an artsy coding meetup and it's hosted in an LGBT space. I go to a discord of people building interesting things and they're 50% furries.

I would presume there's a biological/psychological explanation, if the effect is even real, but it's hard to find good answers. My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior; but then why gay and not bi?

I'll caution that some of this is more alliances than behaviors: a lot of not-very-gay-places will put out the whole flags-and-posters-and-pronouns bit in the interests of outreach. It's not just signalling, but it's also not necessarily a dating club either. You don't want to know how much background drama stuff like this ends up with.

My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior; but then why gay and not bi?

At least for the furries, a lot are bi, or something that you'd probably identify as bisexual even if the furry themselves doesn't. Furscience's stuff gives around 45% bi-or-pan, and I don't think that's too far from realistic. Now, the breakdown for high-recognition artists is probably a little different, but it's also a little harder to find that out quickly (eg, Meesh and ruiadri both identify as straight, which... might surprise readers).

Pulled out of the air: because historically the arts allowed for a degree of flamboyance/non-conventionality and so were attractive to people who didn't fit in with conventional society, like gay people. Add in things like the disreputable characterisation of the arts, and disreputable people would fit in there. Add in the roots in the sacred (like theatre) and representing the gods, and the liminal nature of such matters meaning that men-women or those who straddled boundaries could be both sacred and profane in those contexts.

Then if arts and theatre are perceived as 'safe spaces' to be gay, and gayness is tolerated/celebrated, you'll naturally get more gay people gravitating there than the chess club. (Not that I know about chess clubs, maybe they're hives of scum and villainy). Over time, it gets established for both gay and straight people that the arts are 'for' gays in a particular way that they're not for straights.

Thanks for the link, that is interesting.

Education level. I don't model homosexuality as primarily a mind virus, but being openly gay is certainly a culturally coded occurrence. Education in western academics correlates positively with having been exposed to the idea that gay is a thing and ok. So you'd expect every highly educated group to be a little gayer than gen pop.

My intuition is that creative thinking is correlated with deviant sexuality. Which would include homosexuality.

Even in artsy circles there are still more straights than gays, just going by absolute numbers; but the straights you do find there are more likely to be weird/pervy in some way relative to the population average.

I don't have any hard data to back any of this up, but, it's at least an observation that others have made before:

The gays, good heavens, a full 35 or 40% of major Western authors from the beginning to the present day must have been gay. It would be very safe to assume. William Shakespeare himself would appear to have been bisexual.

a full 35 or 40% of major Western authors from the beginning to the present day must have been gay

Probably exaggerated because for at least half a century now there has been an academic and critical cottage industry devoted to finding gay subtext in everything. And given literary criticism's lack of rigor, people tend to find exactly what they are looking for.

‘Tail populations flock together’

  1. Did you consider that people who do X meetups, more particularly X-Y meetups might not be representative of X? After all that programming meetup was hosted in an LGBT space.. which might just answer your question

  2. Did you consider selection bias? Programming requires a higher IQ, Gays have marginally higher IQ on average. P(Programmer | Gay) > P(Programmer | Hetero) ?

  3. Do you live in California or Washington or Portland... ?

After all that programming meetup was hosted in an LGBT space.. which might just answer your question

This would be plenty of reason for me not to attend an event I otherwise might. Not even out of 'hatred' or whatever. Foremost I'd feel like an intruder in another's place.

Did you consider that people who do X meetups, more particularly X-Y meetups might not be representative of X?

This. Imagine how many meetups you'd go to if there were lots of hot, sexually available girls there. Once gay guys start going in numbers to an event, then any additional gay member is getting the large social benefit or meeting potential sexual partners.

  1. I didn't know it was an LGBT space until I walked in and saw the pride flags and pro-trans slogans. The meetup had been previously held in a neutral space. But this is just one data point. I can imagine that normies enter a discord server of furries and get put off, but then where do they go? I find it hard to find more 'normal' spaces.

  2. Do gays have higher IQ? This is news to me.

  3. No, I don't live in America or a 'liberal' city. But my town is full of students and young people, and we all live in Amerika.

On 2, just from the fact that openly gay men are more likely to be college educated they’re probably higher IQ than average.

Most bisexuals, especially past the age where most people have long term partners (so what, mid-20s?) will be in a heterosexual relationship. Mentioning one’s bisexuality then is weird, especially if it’s not an affirmative action play. You’re not going to walk into a meeting, discuss your wife and kids casually with a coworker and then say “by the way, I also used to love fucking dudes, just so you know”.

Not bi? In my experience a lot of people in these circles were bi.

Can you explain your belief that a dearth of them are bi?

My first guess would be the same loosening of priors that allows for creativity also loosens the heterosexuality prior

I would just call it big 5 high openness. But- your way of phrasing it is valid. Probably better to commit less to a specific model. But it's worth pointing out that the big 5 model does have this category and can pull some weight here.

I don't have strong conviction. More of an assumption on my part. Many may very well be bi, which would fit better with the theory.

Programming is a field that's particularly appealing/rewarding/accepting of autistic people. Autistic people are far more likely to be trans or furries.

Autistic people are far more likely to be trans or furries.

I wonder if they are. Didn't look this way decades ago (of course there were no above-ground furries). Obvious enough but I think we'll come to look with horror at this blasé liberal acceptance of really weird and historically recent sociosexual patterns as innate traits that «just exist», like there exist left-handed people, paranoiacs or, well, gays – and that somehow just coincide with vulnerability to getting tricked and bullied, cartoonish literalism and over-systemizing mindset, and inability to read nontrivial social cues. We may discover something simple and nasty, though I'm not sure what exactly (probably not transmaxxing).

Oh, and I think the theory that explanation for the explosion in high-functioning autism cases themselves as something that «just used to be suppressed» will be also revealed as total bullshit, and moreover a deliberate coverup by people who knew better, in the way AGP stuff is desperately covered up right now.

Curious as to what you think is behind the increase in high-functioning autism cases.

the explosion in high-functioning autism cases themselves as something that «just used to be suppressed» will be also revealed as total bullshit

The explosion in ‘high functioning autism’ cases is because being on the spectrum now grants you easy access to cheap legal meth. “ADHD” and ‘tism have very similar symptoms, many or most psychiatrists diagnose them at the same time. Among children and college, you also get extra time in tests and additional extras in school (in my school kids with ADHD were even allowed to pause the timer on exams for a while if they ‘needed a break’, plus they got 50% extra time), so parents are extra incentivized for diagnosis. Among adults, autism is a get out of jail free card for a bunch of stuff in the workplace, makes management more worried about firing you, is an easy response to being accused of rudeness or other weird behavior etc.

Society strongly incentivized ADHD and autism diagnoses, so they rose.

Society strongly incentivized ADHD and autism diagnoses, so they rose.

I have no doubt that as it relates to ADHD diagnoses this is true, but ADHD diagnoses don’t necessarily have much to do with actual phenotype- sure, the DSM officially wants a note from a child’s teacher stating that the kid has ADHD symptoms interfering with schoolwork, but I don’t think teachers ever deny those notes, in part because all children have ADHD symptoms which don’t make school easier, and doctors also seem to waive that requirement a lot. Society incentivized diagnoses, not symptoms, and the diagnoses are virtually never denied regardless of the presence or absence of symptoms. Something has to account for the increase in symptoms, and that could be parents don’t beat their kids enough to keep them in line, it could be chemicals in the water, it could be assortative mating or what have you, but ‘people are acting crazy to get crazy pills’ isn’t a good hypothesis because people who want legal meth just lie and say they need it, and doctors don’t call them on it, and being more impulsive and less focused and socially less aware are all bad things that people avoid.

I was going to claim that trends like increasing parental age might cause an increase in diseases like autism and ADHD due to higher mutational load, but on further research I found that the trend seen in autism is reversed for ADHD, with younger parents being a risk factor instead!

I assume that's because of them likely having lower than average executive function if they're having kids that early, but this was a rather non-obvious discovery that surprised me.

At any rate, I haven't heard anyone claim ADHD or autism rates increasing in India, though the former is nigh unknown for some reason.

ADHD seems dramatically less common outside of North America. This is probably because the clinical definition is ‘sometimes impulsive or bad at paying attention to the point that it affects your life’, and for cultural factors America applies that literally while everyone else considers it to be a descriptor for people who are unable to live a normal life under any circumstances due to poor attention-paying and impulse control, which is a group that usually winds up in prison rather than a psychiatrists office.

I'm sure this is wrong because the same pattern of shifted phenotypic norms holds in Russia and elsewhere where you get diagnosed with schizophrenia instead of autism and don't receive «meth» except illegally. Unless you believe that to be mimesis.

I put more stock in Uriah's theory of frontal lobe cucumber-like overgrowth from excess of nutrients.

I'd like to know more about Uriah's theory

I'm not sure I agree. Increased diagnosis seems to play most of the part when it comes to high functioning autism incidence, as a consequence of awareness building. Perhaps increasing maternal age at conception plays a minor role.

I'm sure that for most of human history, most of the high functioning autistics were just held to be weirdly antisocial, awkward yet useful characters, and the population density and degree of networking wasn't high enough for them to develop a particular label for them or a common culture.

Now, furries seem to be a highly Western/US phenomenon. I haven't heard of furries in India, even in the large programming community (there might be a handful), and I think the whole thing is a social contagion that is particularly appealing to the demographic most prone to social contagion, autists. (Teenage girls are too cool to become furries, usually)

Of course a fursuit would likely kill you from heat stroke here, but that's another matter. Doesn't stop people from identifying as one even if they can't wear the suits!

Scott has written extensively on how autists are more prone to being suggestible, and have predictive processing issues that make them liable to dysmorphias.

I personally find furries to be a highly inexplicable phenomenon, but at least the links to autism seem robust.

Edit: Assortative mating of high IQ professionals who are close to but not quite on the spectrum is also likely a strong contributor. I at least recall it increases the odds.

Perhaps increasing maternal age at conception plays a minor role.

Note that in the case of autism, the correlation with paternal age is actually better-attested than that from maternal age. It's not like nondisjunction (Down's/Klinefelter/etc.) where it's specifically the oocytes stuck in metaphase for decades causing the problem and thus only the mother's age matters. It's probably something to do with mutational load, which actually goes up more with age in men because spermatogonii replicate (and have replication errors) during a man's life while a woman's oocytes do not.

I was aware that both are correlated, but I appreciate the detailed explainer, I wasn't aware of the mechanism!

I wonder how related furryism is to being exposed to Disney's Robin Hood animated film at the right time in their development.

Stupid sexy Chanticleer…

My model is that socialization rolls off of autistic people like water off of a duck by default. So they're usually less socialized by the time they reach adulthood. They instead get socialized once they make socialization a special interest.

It turns out one of the communities where everyone's special interest is socialization, and people get technical about it, is the trans community, for reasons I think should be apparent (they have to learn gender roles after losing neuroplasticity and childhood mirroring habits, plus as autistic people accumulate, the norms become more autistic). So Autistic people are likely to gain their first socialization special interest when coming in contact with it.

I also model high functioning autism as more adaptive than it was in the ancestral environment for a number of reasons, which may help to explain its rise.

  • We have more control of our environment, so it is less crucial to be able to filter external stimuli internally.

  • We punish lack of social awareness less than in the ancestral environment.

  • We are more specialized, focusing our entire beings on a special interest is less maladaptive than it was in the ancestral environment.

  • Our world is more technical. High precision behavior, focusing on mathematics, and so on are more important to success than in the ancestral environment.

  • Autistic norms are becoming better accepted and better known. A more accommodating environment also makes high functioning autism less maladaptive.

I think a lot of people underestimate the rate at which humanity adapts to it's environment, and I believe our world contains pressures that push adaptation towards certain traits associated with high functioning autism.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women. Even many women who call themselves allies and post about their support for LGBT rights would find it a turnoff to learn a man sleeps with other men. Female bisexuality on the other hand, is so common (at least among my demographic of Zoomer yuppies) that it wouldn't signal much of a loosening of priors at this point. So it's mostly gays who have their own communities now.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women. Even many women who call themselves allies and post about their support for LGBT rights would find it a turnoff to learn a man sleeps with other men.

I wonder how this would be different if women had perfect transparency into whether a given bisexual man’s solely a top versus if he’s gotten or sometimes gets TOPPED.

Few things give women the ick like submissive men. Bisexual men are a threat to women in that they could “trick” women into having sex with them, men who might sometimes get sexually dominated by other men.

However, I could easily see chicks giving a pass to a Spartan warrior-looking guy who only tops. yes_chad.jpg: “My testosterone levels are so high that other men look like women to me, how did you know?”

I’ve never thought about it in those terms but I think to most women it’s just that their reputation is that bisexual men will always cheat on you with other men and/or leave you for a man when they finally have their mid-life crisis. Most women know someone whose boyfriend or husband left them to come out as gay, even in progressive circles among younger people. That obviously has a psychological impact.

I don’t think it’s directly about physical attraction with regards to top/bottom role. If you look at Yaoi fanfiction largely written by women that involves gay sex, both the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ in these fictional pairings are usually considered as very attractive in their fandoms, it’s not usually that the ‘bottom’ is a stand-in for the woman in heterosexual sex as you might imagine. In Call Me By Your Name, Timothee Chalamet plays a bisexual character (as does Armie Hammer), but it still seems heavily implied that he’s a bottom in his relationship with Hammer’s character in my opinion. That didn’t seem to dent the attraction of so many young women to him.

In general, the kind of bisexual men women are attracted to are more likely to be tops or vers, but this is because bottoms are more likely to be very camp / very effeminate, and thus less attractive to women as male partners. But I don’t think handsome bisexual men have ever had problems attracting women, at least not since general acceptance of homosexuality, even if they’re open about it and even if polling technically says otherwise (I think it’s women picturing a stereotypical camp catty man and thinking he’s not hot, not picturing a hot guy who happens to be bi), and that the main issue is the feeling that he’s going to leave for or cheat with a man.

Male bisexuality is heavily stigmatized among women.

... is it? I'm intrigued. Is this intuition from life experience or do you have numbers? And if it's the former, may I know generally where you've lived/worked/read_posts and received these experiences? This will help me formulate my models of the world. But I understand if you'd prefer to remain more private than that.

As a bisexual guy, there's absolutely a stigma. I've even met bisexual women who say they won't date bisexual men.

Hard numbers are harder to come by. Cosmo had a poll a couple years back that suggested 2/3 of women would immediately write off a bi guy, but of course that's Cosmo. From personal AB testing on OLD platforms, I'd say that overstates it significantly. Listing being bi on the profile dropped inbound like rates by ~1/3. That's in a liberal area and conditioning on women who like my vibe, so you shouldn't take it as the ground truth either.

One interesting thing I found from that test is that women from conservative foreign cultures seemed less opposed to it than the general population and mostly just didn't want to hear anything about it. My theory is that they select for other traits and the entire "fucks men" thing doesn't play much of a role in their attraction process so long as you don't throw it in her face.

Another aspect is that, once you've already met and established a connection with someone, most women just take a day or so to digest it if you wait to reveal it. It's less a deep filter and more of a shallow first pass filter.

I know I’ve seen this opinion before, but likewise, I’m not sure where.

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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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