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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2509 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 14, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Here's a fun and educational video about vocal fry: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yL2GezneU

Buy your own Motte & Bailey, comes with 10 bedroom house. Only £1.7MM

https://www.knightfrank.co.uk/properties/residential/for-sale/bronllys-brecon-powys-ld3/WRC012361727

https://content.knightfrank.com/property/wrc012361727/images/7f42e827-2472-44e8-b356-ae7e19d82fb3-0.jpg?cio=true&w=1200

Always good to have a sewage works within your bailey...

My wife gets similar listings on some Facebook group all the time, and I'm constantly struck by how it's possible to live like a literal English lord in North America on basically middle class incomes, or less -- I have more acres for something like 20% of that price, even after the recent property value inflation. No subdivision across the street (nor caravan park!), and certainly no sewage works within 20 miles.

No keep on mine, but come on man -- put a roof on that thing!

I read that Chuck Palahniuk built a small tower by hand on his place as a Covid hobby/bodybuilding program -- how hard can it be?

The price is higher in the UK because it comes with serfs that you can oppress for fun and profit.

Migrant workers are even better -- once you are done with them you just send them away, none this noblesse oblige bullshit.

Saw Mission Impossible 7. It was a good movie but I did not like it as much as John Wick 4 or the previous MI movies, maybe it is just action movie fatigue setting in. I sorta have been finding it harder and harder to actually find any joy in most activities but still recommend that others watch the movie. Cruise is in his 60s and still performs some of the most dangerous stunts one can, that too without having the need to do them. Have to respect that immensely. I saw the movie on the first of its release and did enjoy it. It is a two part finale so they left it on a sort of ambiguous ending.

I will also meet a few friends for coffee this Sunday. Has been a while since I have had coffee, the place I kinda intern at has an instant automated espresso maker of sorts and I have to admit that I quite like the taste of it so looking forward to visiting a coffee shop. I just avoid going to any and all places in my town as my mind just hates me for taking time off and enjoying life because of how far behind I am thanks to my bad habits so hopefully I will be able to enjoy a peaceful Sunday and recharge myself.

It was a good movie but I did not like it as much as John Wick 4 or the previous MI movies, maybe it is just action movie fatigue setting in.

I thought it was noticeably worse than 6 and 5. The plot did not seem compelling and was hard to follow. The character decisions were bizarre, specifically the sidelining of a quite captivating female lead character in favor of a less interesting and more annoying substitute. The spectacle at least was fun, so there's that, but overall it was missing the other factors that make Mission Impossible feel like a fun adventure you get immersed in, rather than just a sequence of cool set pieces you're looking at.

the sidelining of a quite captivating female lead character in favor of a less interesting and more annoying substitute.

Who said it was their choice? That person has at least two major roles I can name off the top of my head that may have conflicted with filming either this movie or the sequel. I don't think Cruise would just throw that character overboard without a good reason.

Also, that new character's type can so often fail but I actually enjoyed her this time.

I think the difference is that the "annoying" character is both competent but also shown to be out of their depth. The driving sequence really sold this. TBH they probably should have sold it more (she's implausibly successful at many other points where she shouldn't be) more but it was enough that their constantly annoying behavior (in another movie she'd basically be the teenager the Rock had to care for) didn't bother me.

Yeah, I thought maybe it had something to do with scheduling conflicts so I don’t mean to be too critical of the filmmakers on that. Just ended up being kind of disappointing and felt oddly executed. But I’m really looking forward to Dune and something has to give, I’m sure.

Trying to stretch a movie into two did it no good either.

I’ll join you in not being nearly so into action movies as I used to be. TBH I suspect it’s that these movies are simply bad: illogical, no real coherent plot, terrible character development, and really, what exists of plot and characters is barely brought up in transit between highly choreographed and improbable CGI heavy fight scenes that make no sense.

I am sick of all modern media in general. Music, movies, tv, comics etc everything feels worse than before and I enjoy reading older things more now it seems. We have an overabundance of entertainment at this point, that alongwith internet surfing probably just raises ones expectations enormously.

I think because of the CGI available and the ability to do showstopper stunts, more action movies seem to skimp on writing. Star Wars: A New Hope really had no choice but to be well written simply because the special effects available in 1977 were not all that great and were much more expensive (because they were all practical effects requiring miniatures and matte painting and sets that actually blew up. If you didn’t have a strong plot and interesting characters, rotoscoped swords and miniature ships weren’t going to save it. Leía, Luke, and Han made it. The characters came alive, and you wanted them to escape, you wanted the Death Star to explode. The writing was tight enough to give everyone stakes in the outcome and to make you care. What forced that was that you had no choice but to tell a story. If you’d take Rise of Skywalker and redid it with film technology available in the 1970s it would be a complete failure because without the ability to do crazy things in cgi, there’s nothing to sell. No stakes, no redemption arc, no real, fleshed out villain to boo and hiss.

Apropos of the dudes talking about climate change last thread: It went from 76 to a cool one hundo plus from one day to the next where I am, meaning I was out at five in the fucking morning building all my nightshades a god damn shanty town of palm fronds and tarps and shade cloth so all the flowers don't cook off.

This has always happened from time to tome, but now it's happening all the god damn time and is annoying as fuck. It's way worse with cold snaps, but that isn't as much of a problem in socal.

Are there any good (preferably free) driving simulators to practice driving on different sides of the road in preparation for an international trip? Just to work on the muscle memory.

It's low resolution and janky as heck, but I still love Accolade's Test Drive III: The Passion from 1990. Don't choose the Pinafarina, it's a manual. Stick with the automatics.

You can of course practice this any time you like in your real car...

I regularly drive at left and right sides of the road. It’s fairly easy to switch especially with automatic. A useful trick is to make sure the passengers are constantly reminding you to drive on the left first 10 mins or so of your drive. Then it becomes normal

Ask your local driving school? They might have a flip switch on their simulator.

I would like a sanity check:

Is ChatGPT4 getting very noticably worse? My impression is that it has gotten much worse since it's release, in most visible areas such as engaging with questions without very elaborate prompting, answering them correctly (again without elaborate prompting), lying about what it knows and doesn't know and how to works, etc.

Questions I would get quick answers to before can barely be answered anymore (not CW stuff). Am I just imagining things or are they RLHFing it into uselessness?

Stanford says it has gotten worse.

https://fortune.com/2023/07/19/chatgpt-accuracy-stanford-study/

Thanks for the link!

I tend to find myself implementing my Wikipedia ruleset: trustworthy/useful on things that are not remotely political.

I currently use it for cooking recipes. Since most recipe websites are such garbage experiences that I'd rather trust the AI to slap together a recipe. I made a banana cake from an AI recipe.

I also still use chatgpt 3.5 haven't heard a compelling reason to use 4.

The chat also tends to have an annoying tendency to have a 3 paragraph answer minimum.

Does the AI get ingredient proportions right all the time?

Maybe?

Hasn't been horribly wrong yet. My banana cake did come out a bit closer to a banana bread in taste.

Verifying the instructions would require me to go use the horrible recipe sites I avoid.

FWIW, they claim it's the same model. Some people believe it may be difference in sampling strategy – speculative sampling, early exit decoding or some other tactic to cut costs.

How are you guys accessing ChatGPT4 anyways? I've used ChatGPT a couple of times and I was under the impression that GPT4 is only available via the commercial API with significant costs. Are you all paying for it, or is there some other site that lets you use it for free for some limited amount?

My employer has an account with unlimited gpt4 api access. I use the openai playground.

I recommend everyone use that short of making their own custom UI. It's way better than the ChatGPT web app interface.

You can sign up for ChatGPT Plus for $20/month. It comes with limited access to ChatGPT-4 (25 messages every three hours). That's a pretty fair price for having access to the most powerful AI in the world.

I'm not super against paying for it, I'm just a little reluctant to when I don't have any idea what to use it for that's actually useful. I've mostly used ChatGPT for things I might otherwise google for general explanations. It does mostly provide better results than whatever you'd find on Google.

Not if you can get api access

I've paid.

I don't know if ChatGPT 4 is getting worse, but I've been using the base GPT-4 API or thin wrappers over it from the beginning, and can't point to any deterioration myself.

https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-gpt4-ai-model-got-lazier-dumber-chatgpt-2023-7

There's been a lot of anecdotes about it lately. A thread in the orange site as well.

I see. Perhaps it'll get better in the future but the current version seems to have passed an inflection point in performance where it's not worth paying for or even using anymore.

Anecdotally I've seen it stop being able to transform markdown text into hyperlinks for some reason. Haven't used it much otherwise.

I've seen a people who use it saying so on twitter over the last months.

IIRC it was even addressed by OpenAI who said they improved performance because it was too costly.

I think our expectations have gotten so much better that its flaws are more visible. It’s hard to say how much RLHF (by customers, since release) is changing things.

Maybe so, but I've tried asking questions I've asked previously and it takes a lot of effort to make it answer, when it's at all possible, what it previously just answered.

Not exactly fun, but this too short and unserious for the Culture War thread.

BRAKING NEWS: Twitter removed it's login wall. Nitter is again functioning normally.

Twitter removed it's login wall.

Not for me. Trying to access twitter.com/POTUS (for example) prompts me to sign in.

Don't know what to tell you:

/images/16893460614022179.webp

EDIT: Hold I think I know what happened - I think they reverted the login wall back to allowing people to see specific tweets, which allows Nitter to mostly work again. Try this:

https://twitter.com/POTUS/status/1679578947233742848

They’ve reverted to one of Musk’s previous stages of pressure, where you can access tweets but doing anything more than looking at a tweet you’ve been linked triggers a login wall.

That works. Too bad that the profile page is still locked. I like the autotranslate feature which nitter lacks.

This site replaces all Nitter links with Twitter, or vice versa depending on your settings, so I can't give you a direct link, but just replace "twitter dot com" with "nitter dot net" (or check the URL in my screenshot), and you'll be able to view the profile. Much better way to use Twitter, IMO.

Ah I see the problem.

twitter DOT com single tweet: works

nitter DOT net single tweet: works

twitter DOT com profile: doesn't work

nitter DOT net profile: works

The reason I prefer twitter over nitter is because it has the feature of translating tweets and while chrome has integrated google translate support for every page, I use firefox.

It looks like on Firefox, there’s this extension that supports Google Translate and DeepL. Never used it, though, so I can’t vouch for its quality.

I've been surprisingly impressed with the Firefox Translations extension, which does the ML translation locally.

Apparently, that extension doesn’t support Mandarin or Japanese (among other languages), so I refrained from suggesting it (in case the OP’s primary use case for Twitter translation is, say, understanding what Japanese artists are saying on their feeds).

Regardless, the fact that it works locally for the languages that it does support is still a testament to the pace of NLP research. How does it compare to something like DeepL, in terms of translation quality?

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What's fun today? Well, the Tour de France is headed up Grand Colombier, snaking back and forth up this brutal climb. If you've ever had even a passing interest in cycling, this is one to flip on or catch highlights of later! Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard have won the last three Tours between them and are expected to dual head-to-head to the finish. Cycling is a team sport with individual awards, but once the grade tilts all the way up, there is a very good chance that it will turn into a pure one-on-one race between these two.

Probably too low-brow for the normal thread but apparently the RFK Jr campaign dinner was a real gas:

RFK Jr. Press Dinner Explodes in War of Words and Farting

I'm amending my will to make sure my epitaph reads "Beer-Fueled Sex Rocket".

Edit: fixed formatting

I think this marks the first occasion I have seen the phrase "polemic farting" used anywhere. While the immortal "I fart in your general direction" can be considered prior art here (yes, I noticed the pun potential, and chose to ignore it) the specific name for this technique is new for me.

I always get annoyed when I read articles or see pictures of the well-heeled hobnobbing at 10K a plate dinners or whatever. Like every year when they do the Met Gala thing and you find all these pictures online and I think "Assholes, all of you." Especially because these days you look at them and they're like gargoyles. Maybe it's the high resolution of camera tech. Anyway that's off-topic to your post, but did anyone, anyone shout that all these flying farts were contributing more methane to the atmosphere? If not, opportunity lost.

The gentle strains of a Soviet anthem fade in...

I agree that the photography is particularly ghoulish. Tabloids probably have a vested interest in making their subjects look eldritch, so maybe they use a different flash? RFK Jr. looks like he was built out of Legos no matter who is photographing, though. Curious.

Too much juice too late in life makes your head look weird.

Come to think of it, why is that? The skull is pretty much the skull once you hit your twenties; and there isn't much meat on the bone there. I wonder what mechanism works to make the shape differnet.

I have no particular insight on RFK Jr., but If by “juice” you mean testosterone and other androgenic compounds, it’s not that.

The “shit that makes your fucking head grow” is HGH, which can stimulate bone formation and accumulation in adults. This causes one’s head, face, hands and feet to grow (hence Bonds’ hat size inching larger while he was in the MLB) and possibly develop a mild version of the acromegalic Andre the Giant look.

My suspicion is that they use a worse flash than they would at a photoshoot so that the event is bearable for attendees. But that results in the HDTV era soap opera look.

Part Deux of this post

The return commute from work is more hectic--the crepuscular calm of the 5:03 (edit: I realize belatedly that crepuscular actually means twilight, which would be the opposite of dawn, but I am not changing it because I like the consonance.) is miles away from the rush hour bustle of the late afternoon trains--I avoid the buses on this end, usually walking the leisurely half hour to the station, then again walking home on the last leg, which takes about 20 minutes. I do a lot of walking, every day. I have come to understand that although walking burns just as many calories as running (at least in the brief walks I take), it doesn't provide any real sort of cardio unless the walk is strenuous, and even then, once you reach a certain threshold, in order to get the benefits you may want you probably have to go ahead and run. I don't. It's just too damn hot.

We are in summer now. Started June 21st. It hit 90 on my walk to the first return station the other day. I had foregone the jacket and tie for a polo shirt like Daniel Craig in Haiti in the misjudged and underrated film Quantum of Solace. When I am LARPing in that particular getup I like to scrape my keys off the table in Craig fashion, and wait patiently for someone to ask if someone is a friend of mine, so I can remark without humor: "I don't have any friends." As it happens I do, but the line was a good one. If you haven't seen the movie you have no idea what I'm on about.

The first train ride takes me to a commuter hub, where you can actually travel to one of the international airports in my area. You see a lot of Chinese, Korean, Thai, probably other Asians as well. I recognize the first three first on dress and style, then usually on language--I don't understand Chinese, Korean, or Thai, but I know them when I hear them. The Chinese tend to sit on the train expansively, two members of the family on one side, two others on the other. They speak in regular speaking tones on the train. They don't make themselves small or seem to care if anyone else needs a seat (perhaps they do care, and care very much, but they don't show it in any way I can understand.) The Koreans are usually wearing expensive watches and rather fashionable clothes, if of a sort of nouveau riche type often with conspicuous labels and such (very similar to many Japanese, though the labels are slightly different), and have smart haircuts and very well done plastic surgery, in particular the women. The Thais are louder and fewer, and probably much more fun to talk to. Often any of the above will, if I scootch over (my computer is telling me scootch is not a word--maybe I am spelling it wrong?) anyway if I move over they will say "Thank you," to me in very well-pronounced English. Japanese people never respond to me in English--well, almost never.

Once I am at the hub I stride purposefully through the crowds--I have learned over the years to walk quickly and with confidence through massive crowds, like a character in an action film who finds himself in a rousing nightclub--you ignore everyone and everything around you, no matter how interesting, and push your way through as if towards something much more important than the carnal rabble writhing around you. I take a subway, which takes me past the oldest brothel district in this part of Japan, and one of the oldest in the country. If I am lucky, one of the girls has just finished and is getting on the subway home--she will be wearing something either very provocative and ignore everyone--once I saw a girl in a tan/flesh-colored skin-tight one-piece wearing a fucking bucket hat--or will be with another girl and wearing clothes that are almost nondescript, but I always know. Or convince myself that i do. Once I am positive I saw a girl headed to work, though if you were to pin me and ask me "How could you possibly know?" my best answer would be Intuition.

The brothel district is a long street which, at night, has poles with white globes on them. There is a poster on the side of at least one building which says something similar to "Let's keep our brothel district clean!" There is a police box one block outside the district, and police on bicycles cruising through are not unheard of. There is a rather massive apartment complex just east of this block or two of whorehouses, and if you were enterprising and lived in these apartments nothing really would stop you from buying a telescope and camera and documenting exactly who comes and goes. But it's Japan, and something tells me no one does this. I probably would, just as a diversion.

I wrote that it's a street. It's not, really, it's a block or two of parallel streets. These have nicknames, if you must know. One is known as 青春通り (seishun doori or "youth street"). Here you will find girls who are very likely university students somewhere (probably somewhere at least mildly distant) and who are making some extra cash. The signs say the smallest amount of time you can pay for is a 20-minute booking. I have had a discussion with one of these girls, and learned that she gets 60% of whatever is paid. For 20 minutes the price the last time I bothered to look was 16,000 yen, which is roughly 115 USD at current exchange rates.

You walk down the street and you see the genkans--which means the doorway where in a normal house you'd take your shoes off and hang your coat. In these establishments the genkan is open to the air, and while there is a place to put your shoes, instead of a coatrack you will see a girl sitting in a zaisu, a chair flush to the ground with a back, and she may have a blanket modestly draped over her thighs if it's cold. If not, she may be in a bikini, may be dressed like some sort of fairy, may be in a maid's costume, a balldress, even, yes, and you knew this was coming--a high school uniform. In other words, some type of thing that is geared toward the fetish/fantasy of the dudes who end up here. And Japan is nothing if not a fetish/fantasy wonderland. Or cesspool, depending of course on one's perspective. What is remarkable to me is that the times I have beheld this tableau the women have almost all been strikingly beautiful.

Anyway. I don't want to bog this account of my commute down too much with prurient description of the brothel area. I am by no means an expert on the area but I probably know more than a lot of people simply because I have lived here so long, have walked down the street several times, etc. (These stories are less interesting than they probably sound.) Anyway I will leave this whole part of the story in stasis for now. Thank Christ for anonymity online--I only mention any of this because no one on here knows who the hell I am. One reason I like the "privacy" filter or whatever it is. I used to write all sorts of stories on reddit and have now deleted them all (in as much as reddit would allow me). For a long time I liked writing about my life, and I was approached by randos in DMs asking to use my stories in their podcasts. I always agreed with one caveat: Tell me where I can listen to it. They always agreed. And none of them ever got back to me.

Subway takes me to yet another train--my first of the morning, last of the day. Again, in the late afternoon it is very crowded. If I go at a certain time of day and board the right car there is a woman with what I am sure is Proteus syndrome, or what they suspect Joseph Merrick had--her face is incredibly, implausibly distorted. I expect the COVID wave of mask-wearing was a boon for her. She wears a prim blouse and either a skirt or slacks of some sort, and has a bag, and always stands and faces the door, perhaps so she doesn't have to look across the aisle and pretend she doesn't notice everyone forcing themselves not to acknowledge her.

The cars are almost always crowded. There is one woman who always gets on the same car as I do if I have timed it wrong, and she will lunge for any empty seat like a jackal for a wounded bird. Opportunistic bitch. I do not say this. Like everyone else, I stare into the middle distance, or at my phone, or wherever else is convenient to not acknowledge the actions of others. I often will wave another to a seat that comes available and which is within my ass-reach. I have some sort of mental scale which tells me whether I should just sit down or give the seat to someone else. I am sure if I were more Motte-y I would calibrate exactly what quantitative values I weigh in my head in this process. I'm not going to.

When I get to my terminus station I always see two women, striking in their beauty, whose lives appear to be in the reverse order of mine--which is to say where I am going to they are coming from, and vice versa. I wonder if anyone ever notices me in this way. Neither of these women ever look at me and I never say a word to either of them nor do I acknowledge them in any way. But they are milestones on my daily journey. And, oddly, I notice if they aren't there on some days. A cold, perhaps.

Anyway. I don't want to bog this account of my commute down too much with prurient description of the brothel area.

Pardon me for being overly curious, but could you please tell me what's the average height and weight of the whores? Have you ever noticed any outliers?

I pahdon you. (waves fingers) That's because I like Ralph Fiennes, no love of Amon Göth.

I haven't measured or weighed them in some time, and I hesitate to call them whores (though that is exactly what they are, as you say, if the word is to have any meaning). I forgot to include that in each genkan is typically a mama, usually in a 割烹着 or kappogi which is an apron-like thing which I think must have been designed to be as matronly and unattractive as possible. The mamas usually seem to weigh more than the girls. The mamas like to wave people toward their wares more aggressively than the girls themselves, who seem to sit doll-like and silently smiling.

I don't know how tall any of them are or how much they weigh. The average height of a Japanese female is about 5' 2" or roughly 158 cm. I would imagine many are taller than that, very few shorter. One of the silent siren songs they play is sticking out their long legs--I should say that their legs probably appear longer than they are simply because proportion, as many of the women are very petite, even if relatively tall. You might find a BBW in one or another stall just because all tastes are meant to be catered to (though in no way comparable to the large women you would find stateside). You might find on another block women who are much older than the younger ones on youth street. As I say generally the girls are all very attractive, or well-endowed in one or another way. There are exceptions, and of course preferred phenotypes must be considered. I have never seen or heard of a caucasian woman working there. I expect she would be a moneymaker, but that might piss off all the other girls. One of my dreams is to do a deep-dive qualitative study of these women. As a male, however, I don't think I'd get much in the way of their trust or honesty.

Have I said prostitution is illegal in Japan? It is. Just as a nice coda to all this.

As I say generally the girls are all very attractive, or well-endowed in one or another way.

Huh. Odd, perhaps. But maybe as I don't frequent brothels I only get to see a restricted range of prostitutes, as the streets are walked by the least attractive ones.

Have I said prostitution is illegal in Japan?

Japanese laws around prostitution make truly fascinating reading.

Sodomy of any sort doesn't count as prostitution. And if you get a massage first:

Paid sex between "specified persons" (acquaintances) is not prohibited. Soaplands exploit this by providing a massage, during which the prostitute and client become "acquainted", as a preliminary to sexual services.

I have never seen or heard of a caucasian woman working there.

I recall reading big cities had some working there, especially women from former USSR.

As a male, however, I don't think I'd get much in the way of their trust or honesty.

I guess you'd need some sponsor for that. Administering personality tests to a whole street of mercenary women who expect to be paid for their time wouldn't come cheap, and if calipers and cameras were involved to get accurate measurements, it'd be even more expensive plus you'd have to convince them the pictures won't or can't leak.

BTW - do lower and middle class younger Japanese have tattoos now, or is that one custom that hasn't yet spread there? I know of the stigma related to Yakuza tattoos, has that generally prevented the spread of the practice?

Well I don't frequent brothels either, for what it's worth, but that particular set of streets I first happened on by accident more than 20 years ago. It's always fascinated me. I realize similar such streets exist elsewhere in the world but I am a pretty naive country boy at heart.

I've actually never seen any soaplands; maybe they're not as bold in advertising as the pink salons, etc. that you see in the entertainment districts in the cities here. When you mention women from Eastern Europe, sure I've seen them on the escort billboards, burlesque club ads, etc. and walking arm in arm with Japanese dudes. In my experience they're from former Soviet republics, and the ones I've spoken to are quite nice, though of course they have an edge. But that's a different thing. The area I am talking about isn't the run-of-the-mill call-girl service you can do an internet search for. (Though it does have a wiki page.) Also it's possible a caucasian woman has worked there and i've just never heard of it.

And regarding researching the area, I wouldn't dream of administering something like an IQ or personality test, or even taking very many quantitative measures at al. I can't imagine any statistic less enlightening than the average weight of a prostitute in Tobita shinchi. I imagine a qualitative study, preferably consisting of multiple interviews over a period of time. It is my belief people change over time, and I'm far less interested in what a test that attempts to "categorize" people has to say than digging deep into the whys, whats, and where-to-from-here stories that everybody has. There is what I see as a clear tendency on the Motte to put great faith in IQ scores, for example. As a researcher, I don't find IQ particularly interesting or useful.

Some university students I know have tattoos, but yes, in general tattoos are seen as dispreferred. I can only make this claim based on what I see around me. It is not uncommon to see signs at hot springs and pools that people with tattoos are forbidden. It is also true that I once saw a large man at such a pool with a tattoo and there was no sudden appearance by SWAT to spirit him out. Certain types of tattoos (full sleeves, or even full body tats) are clear indications of involvement in an organized crime group, as you allude to. That said, these same organized crime groups are everywhere. On your way to Tobita shinchi, for example there is a large building with a gang crest on its driveway gate. Just a few blocks from the police station.

I personally dislike tattoos and their ubiquity in the US now puzzles me.

I apologize for having been unclear.

What'd be interesting to know would be data on beauty of prostitutes, personality dimensions and also IQ. (there are easy tests that tell you quite a lot). Is it mostly something done by women who can't make ends meet in the normal market ? What's the share of women like say, Brooke Magnati who went into prostitution because she could earn more in 2 hours than she'd have earned as programmer through the whole weekend ? Does sociosexuality play a role - ? etc.

Interviews are fine, but people lie about why they do what they do, usually to themselves first.

No no, if there was confusion it was probably mine.

There is the idea here that there is one "true" reason why the person joined the profession that a discrete-item questionnaire could unravel. In a qualitative approach the interviews would be long, in-depth, and multiple, preferably over time, and whatever multiple reasons the women had could be explored at greater depth and, I would suggest, in much more satisfying detail. Along with a whole lot of other things.

My main issue with questionnaires as opposed to interviews is exactly this. As you say, people lie. Or questionnaire questions don't take contexts into consideration sufficiently to produce answers that are, in the end, meaningful in any way. Piloting questionnaires to get them to have any sort of validity (to say nothing of reliability) is a fine art, and even if you have a good questionnaire tailored to your subjects, when they answer it, how much time they take thinking about it, to what degree they rush through it or take it seriously, all of these influence the outcome. Personality tests in my experience are troublesome in this way, particularly the abbreviated ones. I'm not a grand proponent of them, despite insistence of their validity. Psychometrics as a field, particularly statistical, really interests me, but seems to have a lot of blind spots. Which is not to say qualitative inquiry produces completely satisfactory data, but done right I find it richer and certainly more interesting to read.

I'm not out to convince anyone, this is just my view and, were I ever to mount such a study, this is how I would do it. I do not intend any pun using the word "mount," I promise.

Thank you. How was your writing when you started? Has it improved a lot or did you start from a high base?

Thanks for your comment. As I have said elsewhere I'm old, so when I started I was about 13, and that was a lifetime ago. I assume I've improved--I know I'm slightly less sentimental. I had really good writing teachers as a younger man, until suddenly they became shit around 1995 and I stopped taking such electives. I wouldn't have continued if I thought I wasn't any good.

Beautifully written like the last time. Your talents are wasted on us.

Pshaw. Kind of you to write, but I enjoy Le Motte mainly because of the high caliber of writing, including yours. I only wish I could contribute long meandering posts of more substance and reason. I like reading Mottizens even when they have opinions that would be otherwise vile to me, just because the writing is often so tight. Even the tedious bickering here is of a higher tier than 98% of reddit. Anyway, thanks.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

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.

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