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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3605 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 30, 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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This is a request for recommendations. I am dimly aware that after (and during) the H-bomb development, there was a bunch of game theory being done (RAND comes up a lot) to understand the U.S.'s strategic situation. What are good things to read about this? I'm interested in all/any of: technical reviews, pop-level history books (in the vein of Rhodes's "Making of the Atomic Bomb"), and any source at all that discusses the Soviet equivalent of these activities.

National Lab (LBNL) results support LK-99 as a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor.

Simulations published 1 hour ago on arxiv support LK-99 as the holy grail of modern material science and applied physics.

Tweet 1

First claimed successful replication of LK-99

Accomplished by a team at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and posted 30 minutes ago.

Why this is evidence: The LK-99 flake slightly levitates for both orientations of the magnetic field, meaning it is not simply a magnetized piece of iron or similar 'magnetic material'. A simple magnetic flake would be attracted to one polarity of the strong magnet, and repelled by the other. A diamagnet would be repelled under either orientation, since it resists and expels all fields regardless of the polarity.

Tweet 2

Hypothetically, if LK-99 turns out to be what it claims to be, what do you think will be the major visible consequences and changes for general humanity in the next 1 year, 5 years and 10 years?

How do you react to unfunny jokes? Not because they are offensive, just lacking any comedic value.

I simply.. dont laugh. Its not that I didnt get the joke or anything, I got it, but I didnt GET it.

My coworkers are getting the impression im a hardass and add the disclaimer "im just joking",etc, all the time now.

And thats pissing me off because I got the joke, you dont need to walk on eggshells! How dumb do you think I am.

I have too much self respect to fake laugh.

An obviously fake laugh doesn’t do the trick?

I may be your worst enemy. I only tell intentionally bad jokes at work, really awful forced puns and jokes where the setup is overly long for a weak punch line. A portion of it is sadism for sure, but the other portion is giving my team a momentary distraction and a common enemy to fight against. It’s actually pretty good for unit cohesion. On the flip side, if someone laughs at my joke, I know that they’re either an idiot or a kiss-ass and not to be trusted with important tasks.

I agree, bad jokes are a time-honored work tradition.

A playful "ba dum tss." A smirk and a nod. Blowing air out your nostrils (in a fake laugh). A finger point and an "I see what you did there" noise (ayyyy [what a comedian]). A friendly, dry "har har."

You don't have to laugh, but you don't have to stonewall either. I usually give friendly deadpan responses.

EDIT: ayyyy*

I don't have a solution but just wanted to say I have the same problem. I refuse to engage in totally fake behaviors. If something is kinda funny I can force a laugh, but if it's totally unfunny I won't do it. Some people seem to think that if you don't laugh at their shitty joke it must be that you simply didn't understand it. They don't see that maybe it just wasn't funny, or that we have a different sense of humor.

I have found “I see what you did there” as an effective way to acknowledge that you understand that a joke was told without having to commit to a judgement of the quality.

Can anyone recommend a good resource for learning Russian? I had been using Duolingo, but I didn’t feel like it was truly helping me become conversational in the language. I would take night classes, but I have a side job that requires me to keep most of my weeknights free. Something I could use while at work would be optimal, but I’m open to whatever recommendations people can provide.

Input before output. Listening before speaking. Reading before writing. Quality immersion is important. I would get an audiobook and a physical book of a non-fiction book you're interested in narrated by a speaker you wish to emulate. If you're male, pick a male, etc. Folks tend to sound like their parents, so pick a quality parent. And then just hammer it. Rinse and repeat. Do Anki. Maybe check out Refold.

You could start a Russian language culture war discussion thread. Duolingo has managed to create a system that provides a very strong illusion of progress: all these stages, ingots, stars and what not end up making you believe you're getting somewhere, but all they do is mask the lack of real progress.

I’ve never used it myself, but was shocked at how passable my coworker became at basic conversational French from scratch using Duolingo every day.

Uh, no offense, but do you yourself speak French or was this a case of impressing the non-francophone?

I speak better (not fluent) German, but passable French, and (very) amateur Russian and Spanish.

Well then I guess my question is ‘are we sure it was just Duolingo and he doesn’t have eg his old high school French textbook lying around that he uses as a reference’.

I believe her when she says it’s purely the app, she didn’t study languages and is otherwise English (they tend not to speak another language).

It seems likely to me that Duolingo works, gamification obviously works (Snapchat Streaks, Reddit Karma etc) and it pretty clearly drills you on vocab and sentence structure which are the most important things for beginners.

It’s good for very very basic stuff. But it encourages bad habits, and also creates the illusion of progress.

What Duolingo teaches is pattern recognition. You see a phrase in English and then pattern match it to whatever language you want to learn. This does work for very basic stuff — stock phrases, greetings, vocabulary. The problem comes when you’re unable to use the word banks, and worse need to generate a sentence not specifically covered by Duolingo’s course. You want to tell someone to do something? It’s not really covered in the Chinese course, so too bad. You need to say that you plan to do something next week, or that you’re thinking about doing something? It’s not covered in the pattern matching.

The second problem is a false sense of progress. It’s designed to feel like progress. To feel like learning. This is their business model, to be honest. They’re not selling “you’ll be able to read a newspaper in your target language,” but “you’ll finish the course and know enough stock phrases to feel smart.” It’s actually perfectly possible to be able to pass a lesson without being able to read the language. You just have to more or less recognize the shapes of the words or the hanzi or kanji or whatever. If you learn to recognize 你好 as “hello” that’s good enough for Duolingo— even if you have no idea what the word is. You can get pretty far that way. At least until you want to use it in a conversation. You’ve “learned” a lot of words and stock phrases, but unless the person you’re talking to sticks to the script and you don’t want to say anything off script it’s going to be a problem.

Finally it encourages a lazy attitude to learning a language (and other skills as well). You cannot learn if you’re not focused on the project. Fifteen minute sessions is far too short to do any deep work or meaningful practice. And this is exactly the gamification model. Just casually do a problem a day and be a math wizard! Spend two minutes a day and learn Spanish. It’s not possible to learn complicated topics without putting in the work. And for any topic that includes the logic of the system — something Duolingo and other gamification apps skip because it’s boring to learn grammar or to learn the axions of math or the laws of physics. They’re necessary, but it’s memorization and drilling until you get it, so it’s boring and left out because people won’t keep using the apps if you include boring stuff.

I’m not sure how much I agree. All learning (all human intellectual ability, really) is pattern recognition, as the success of LLMs show. Teaching grammatical rules (even the ridiculous ones that exist in certain languages) by rote is unnecessary if someone can do full immersion, which is ultimately the only way to truly learn a language if you’re not a polyglot (and even then, most “I can speak 20 languages” type people have done exactly what you decry and learned a bunch of canned phrases from books and vocabulary using anki). It’s why young adults who are very online from non-Anglophone countries often speak excellent English without ever even trying in (and often failing) English classes as kids, because they literally just consoomed thousands of hours of English language TV and video games and YouTube content and their brain just pattern matched grammar, no rote learning of verb tenses necessary. Recognizing the shapes of eg. kanji/hanzi is obviously a core part of learning those languages.

When thrown into the deep end of full immersion, the person who has remember thousands of canned phrases and extensive vocabulary is usually much better equipped than the person who, like a Latin student at a Victorian school, has copied out thousands upon thousands of declension and conjugation tables and who therefore has ‘perfect’ grammar (when writing, very slowly, short sentences in the language). The person with the vocab and canned phrases can usually get the meaning of their speech across (even if broken) and over time will naturally pattern match new sentences they hear to what they’ve heard, supporting genuine language learning. Over time, they’ll go from (eg.,) very broken Spanish to broken Spanish to more accurate Spanish once they’re in-country.

Traditional textbook-based language education seems designed primarily for people who would like to read (and, to a very minor degree, write) in another language. If you want to read Camus in French or Dostoyevsky in Russian, or maybe correspond with a Spanish acquaintance via letters, that kind of thing. It feels in many ways descended from the fashion in which Greek and Latin have traditionally been taught. It isn’t designed to front load the basic ingredients for ‘getting your point across’ (even in a broken form) which is actually the most important part of language learning for people planning on moving or spending time in another country, because in those cases being able to understand meaning (via memorized vocabulary) and interact casually in typically rote ways (via canned sentences of the classical kind for ordering food, buying stuff, making small talk) are what unlock the most freedom for a new speaker.

Duolingo seems to be a gambit that the methods in which children learn languages (primarily exposure) can be gamified for adults. I think there’s a reasonable chance this is why it works, you may never be told exactly what the pattern is, but over time your mind comes to recognize it. However, some nerdier people (like Hoff below, possibly like you) don’t like the idea of speaking ‘broken’ [language] becuase of embarrassment, they may prefer in theory to hit the ground running and speak in a limited and guarded but grammatically perfect way to spare themselves the humiliation or mockery of poor practice. But that’s just how learning a language works, it’s not something to be avoided but something to be overcome.

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My problem with Duolingo, at least at the beginner levels of language instruction, is that it doesn’t do a very good job of actually explaining why a sentence is structured a particular way. I would suddenly be confronted with a sentence that looked very different from anything I had previously studied, with no context explaining the theory behind it, and I was expected to basically just figure it out using context clues, and then incorporate that new knowledge into future lessons without ever being told why I’m doing it in the first place. Which, to be fair, is probably a more accurate representation of how adults learn a new language than I would get by studying a textbook. For someone like me who is used to being careful and articulate with the way I use my native tongue, the thought of going to a new country and making a ton of flagrant grammatical mistakes because I don’t understand the formal structure of the language is something I find really icky.

It might depend on how closely related the languages are. English and French are not that different. Turkish, Arabic or Mandarin are a whole another story.

Read through a textbook that covers the grammatical basics, install Anki and use it to memorize the most common ~1-2k words (this can be done at work), and read/watch a ton every day.

Russia today has free lessons that are laid out more like a conventional textbook.

Very practical question today. I'm living in a new climate for me. I'd like to plan out the best day/time to mow my lawn at least a couple days in advance. For schedule reasons and for avoiding hotter temperatures, I'd love to mow in the mornings. However, I've noticed a significant amount of morning dew out lately, which is a real downer.

So, I'd like to be able to have some prediction for the next few days concerning the likelihood of significant dew. The standard weather forecast websites I go to all seem to give the current dew point, but not a prediction into the future. Any suggestions?

openmeteo has good keyless apis for such things

https://open-meteo.com/en/docs#latitude=44.0029&longitude=-69.6656&hourly=temperature_2m,dewpoint_2m

If you're in the US, weather.gov includes the dew point in its hourly forecasts (example).

Thanks! That's nearly perfect. One bookmark click and I can at least get the next two days in view. One more click gives me another two days.

I like https://spotwx.com/ . Zoom in, pick a location. Select the model for the area / time span you want, and then you get a nice readout like this.

Ohhhhh, that's pretty nifty, too! Thanks!

What's a reasonable base/canon of Western literature to be familiar with to call oneself "educated" like a man from the early 20th century? I want to read in chronological order the great works and ideas of western civilization and am hoping Mottizens can help me fill in some gaps. I'm mainly interested in literature but of course there is room for philosophical works as well. Obviously this can be a really wide range of works, but I'm looking for the absolute indisputable foundation, things you cannot skip at all.

What I have so far (very basic in rough chronological order):

Iliad/Odyssey by Homer

Dialogues by Plato

Metamorphoses by Ovid

The Bible (King James version for the literary value?)

Beowulf (already read this one)

Summa Theologica by Aquinas? (Not sure how foundational this is)

Canterbury Tales by Chaucer

Divine Comedy by Dante

Shakespeare's Works

Paradise Lost by Milton

Don Quixote by Cervantes

Moby-Dick by Melville

In Search of Lost Time by Proust

Thoughts? Please help me fill in some gaps!

I discovered this list the other day, you may find it useful:

https://www.booksoftitans.com/great-books/

Start with the Greeks. Continue with the Romans. The rest is just gravy.

I'm only partially memeing with the above advice, but here are some big lists that I would recommend picking and choosing from at least initially as they are genuinely lifetime reading lists. Fadiman and Major Bloom

As for your list so far, a few recommendations on translations + some resources:

Fagles for the Iliad/Odyssey/Aeneid (throwing this in here to round out the epic poetry)

A guide to Plato: https://www.plato-dialogues.org/plato.htm (DO NOT read the Republic first; common mistake. If you've never read him try the Trial and Death sequence of dialogues first: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phædo)

I would recommend the New Oxford Annotated Bible if you're approaching it from a literary/historical angle. Incredible notes.

For Dante, Ciardi is a good translation that keeps the terza rima format of the original and has extensive notes. That said, there are a lot to pick from, some comparisons here.

And a couple of cool websites to accompany you on your journey with Dante and Virgil: https://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/ https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/

Hello fellow /lit/erati. I think you might want to upload that Dante infographic in higher resolution unless it’s just me.

Exposed! Found and added a higher quality upload.

The Summa is a big 'un and unless you seriously mean to delve into mediaeval logic and theology, better to just look up particular queries in it (e.g. what did Aquinas say about X?)

All the thumbs up about The Divine Comedy, especially if you mean to stick with all three volumes and not drop out after Inferno. I would personally recommend the Hollander translation, which is about twenty years old now, but all available on Kindle on Amazon.

You might throw in a little poetry by Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning as well; generally The Idylls of the King for Tennyson as his take on the Arthurian legend. Browning has long poems but also lots of short ones which might be easier to read at a go.

And because I love the sound of the words, even though I can't speak Italian (modern or mediaeval) or Occitan, but just mangle them aloud in a bad French accent, here's a bit from the Divine Comedy:

"Tan m'abellis vostre cortes deman,

qu'ieu no me puesc ni voill a vos cobrire.

Ieu sui Arnaut, que plor e vau cantan;

consiros vei la passada folor,

e vei jausen lo joi qu'esper, denan.

Ara vos prec, per aquella valor

que vos guida al som de l'escalina,

sovenha vos a temps de ma dolor!"

Poi s'ascose nel foco che li affina.

'Your courteous question pleases me so much

I neither can nor would conceal myself from You.

'I am Arnaut, weeping and singing as I make my way.

I see with grief past follies and I see,

rejoicing, the joy I hope is coming.

'Now I pray You, by that power

which guides You to the summit of the stairs,

to remember, when the time is fit, my pain.'

Then he vanished in the fire that refines them.

The Summa is a big 'un and unless you seriously mean to delve into mediaeval logic and theology, better to just look up particular queries in it (e.g. what did Aquinas say about X?)

On the other hand, a good introduction to Thomism would help clear up a lot of the confusion a modern person would have going into Aquinas. Edward Feser is a good contemporary Catholic philosopher whose books are very illuminating.

For a broader book on medieval thought, Etienne Gilson's Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages is tough to beat.

Can someone please explain to me the point of reading translated poetry? It’s terrible. It straight-up doesn’t work. The aesthetic form is gone, and what’s left reads as clunky for no reason as a result.

Since I don't have those languages, I can't read them in the originals. So it's English translations or remain ignorant. The Sayers translation is very good on the problems of trying to turn terza rima into English rhyme, she's good on the technicalities (the resulting translation may not be the best poetry but hey, I can't write poetry either).

I agree that if you can read in the original, there are all kinds of nuances you get that are missing from translation, especially if you compare the original with the translation and see the word choices and why the translator picked this not that, but it's really 'half a loaf is better than no bread'.

Learning all the languages of the world on a level that enables one to appreciate poetry is kinda hard. For that reason, people choose to use translations, while realizing that they are not the same as the original, they still can be enjoyed. Sure, the Iliad is best in its original Greek. But if you don't understand ancient Greek, you can still appreciate it in a good translation. There's no reason to be a snob about it and declare that anything short of genuine performance by a genuine rhapsode is not even worth trying.

I found the Iliad at least engaging in Greek and grindingly boring in English. On the other hand, I found Beowulf quite engaging in modern English, so maybe it’s translation quality+how close the languages are.

Of course, the quality of the translation hinges on the quality of the translator, among other things. There are two schools for translation - one says "stick to the original as close as possible not matter what", other says "get the inspiration from the original and try to achieve the same result by whatever means you find necessary". I have seen both ways have pretty strong successes and dismal failures, and sometimes a strong translator completely overtook over the author and made a good work - but very different from the original. When I can read the original, I usually would prefer it, but since I'm not learning Greek anytime soon, I'll take as good a translation as I can get, maybe even multiple ones. Sometimes taking a half-dozen of translations and comparing how they dealt with a certain piece is even more fun than just reading it once.

You can get rhyming translations that try to maintain the spirit of the poem while making it amenable to English ears.

I don't buy it. The aesthetics of a good poem go much deeper than rhyme.

I've seen the breakdowns of poetic translations by their authors, and the rabbit hole goes much deeper than just getting the words right and making them rhyme. Yes, there are self-centered translators, usually well-known poets themselves, that just freestyle, but that's basically counts as reading a new poem by them and not a faithful translation.

The ones I'm speaking about actually break down the poem to identify all the tools the author used and reproduce them in the translation. Enjambment and an accompanying caesura? Alliteration? Metric deviations? Internal rhymes? All of this is examined, analyzed and reproduced so the translation has the same effect on the reader as

Of course, the further you get from your own language family, the harder it gets. How do you translate a kireji in a haiku?

It's a whole new poem if the translation is decent, and if you do not know the language of the original, why not?

Of his dialogues, I'd put Plato's Republic as the most foundational one.

Historian Will Durant had a list for this. It includes some secondary sources and some of it is outdated (you can skip Kellogg imo), but it's a good starting point.

http://www.greaterbooks.com/durant.html

That's a whole shelf of doorstoppers you've got right there. I think I've read only a few of them:

  • Moby-Dick (and it feels like it's the odd one out), everything else I can only claim partial credit for:
  • Iliad (War Nerd's version)
  • The New Testament (thanks Gideon), gave up on the Old one somewhere around the 25% mark
  • Don Quixote (it was in the children's library, no idea why, got bored to death, maybe I should revisit it as an adult)

If you want more doorstoppers, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I've read both, but I prefer writers that can get on with it. Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment are recommended.

If you want something like The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron is probably a better pick, the former being more of an Anglo-specific work. Or just go all the way back to The Golden Ass.

I will reaffirm reading War Nerd's version of the Iliad. The novel format communicates the humor, frustrations, and desires very clearly for anyone who isn't already intimately familiar with a more formal translation. It is simply fun to read.

For Don Quixote, the translation is very important (moreso than Dostoevsky, I’d argue, although obviously you wouldn’t have read that in English). Assuming you’re reading Don Quixote in English, did you read Grossman’s? I’d say it’s by far the best.

It was obviously in Russian, as I was a child when I last tried to read it.

My assumption was wrong!

Right off the bat, random order, sticking to stuff I have read:

Gilgamesh is a must, before the Old Testament. It all starts here, and one of my ideas of why you read the Canon is to be able to trace themes and ideas through history. Might as well start at the beginning. Pairs well with the Old Testament, it's one of the few contemporary works left to us.

Aristotle's Ethics, this and the Summa I wouldn't hesitate to use primarily excepts used in philosophy classes. It's like a million pages and bone-dry boring otherwise.

Augustine between the Bible and Aquinas. Paul and Augustine are the bridge between the Greeks and the Old Testament.

Morte D'Arthur, the Alexander Romance and Tristan and Isolde before moving on to Dante Shakespeare and Cervantes, helps to set the scene and they're easy reads. Otherwise the Canon tends to get a little too barren during the dark ages.

Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch; inserted between Homer and Plato. Gives you the territory of the historical moments you're talking about.

De Bello Gallico is one of the few great literary works that are first-person written by first-tier world historic personages.

The nineteenth century Germans. Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche are all essential reading.

If you're going to read Shakespeare, you owe it to yourself to listen to audio performances or watch filmed performances. You can't make them dead letters on a page.

Joyce and Hemingway are both essential. Hemingway's short stories are very readable and capture the essence of his larger works, Joyce you have to go with Ulysses, ideally after the Odyssey.

Opera: Mozarts Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, Carmen and La Boheme, Wagner's Ring Cycle; then pick up musical theater at selections of Gilbert and Sullivan through Cole Porter to Hair Westside Story Cabaret, Rent, and (sigh) Hamilton. Watch or at least listen to these, don't read them.

The early psychologists are a must. Freud, Jung, Frankl. Reading anything after Freud or Marx without understanding Freud or Marx puts one in the same position as reading canon western works without knowing your Bible or your Homer.

Beyond that, I do think it is worth your time to explore some other traditions as part of your curriculum once you are grounded in the Western Canon. The Quran, Avicenna, Confucius and Mencius, the Sutras, the great Hindu epics. All throw new light or alternative interpretations on our own history.

The natural rights / social contract classics (Leviathan, Second Treatise, and The Social Contract), On Liberty, and The Wealth of Nations.

Whatever you decide to read, I highly recommend taking notes. I find I forget everything I read unless I really take the time to summarize and write things down.

Missing some Russian and French classics (And so am I, I'm trying to read them also); Dostoyevsky/Pushkin, Dumas. Dostoyevsky is especially interesting IMO.

I was gonna say Cervantes but you got em there already; I think Don Quixote is important as fuck in a literary sense.

King James is a political as fuck translation, and is worth reading in that context IMO.

I recommend taking a look at the Saint John's College reading list (https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-books-reading-list)

What perfumes do you guys use/like?

I got curious about the scent world bc of smell's association with memory and such; got a few samplers from here, where they send you a few mL of a bunch of different scents to try: https://www.theperfumedcourt.com/C

Mostly wear Terre d'Hermes; it's unique without being too unique, and has a fresh woodsy smell that isn't at all 'aqua.' Cool water is great and all, but every damn cologne doesn't need to smell like it.

Special occasions I'll whip out a few things but am partial to Montale Black Aoud. Great middle ground between evoking the middle-eastern style scents while still remaining acceptably in the Western tradition.

Celine Dans Paris. You can get good cheap knockoffs but I get mine for free with clothes and shoes (never bags, interestingly).

Adidas Moves, and not very often.

I vary based on season. Living in the American south, the temps strongly affect whether a scent is overbearing or weird in my opinion.

Winter - Burberry London

Spring - Guerlain Jicky

Summer - Guerlain Vetiver or Burberry Brit

Fall - Guerlain Habit Rouge

I never understood colognes at all. Could someone explain it to me? Under which circumstances does a man want to wear cologne? What does it buy him by doing so, vs just wearing nothing?

Smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory. The perfumes in your cleaning products can't, and shouldn't be as sticky. As your hair and body wash regimen changes, your cologne should stay the same.

People will associate the scent with you, especially if it's positive. Multiple women have mentioned how powerful being around me & smelling the cologne again is, even after years of being apart.

It's tempting to put too much on, I do 2 sprays max. One on the chest under my shirt, and one shared between my wrists and behind the ears.

I also have two scents - one for the spring and summer (Light Blue, which is amazing), and one for the fall and winter (Coach, which I like but don't love but was a gift from my wife). I've been using the same ones for a little over a decade.

If you're not interested in creating memories and associations with yourself, there's still the reality that cologne scents are far more refined and higher quality than the old spice bottle you have in the shower. Having multiple ones that you enjoy smelling is worth it anyway, IMO.

None. My wife likes musty/stuffy smells, so I can't rely on her taste and ask for a present, and I can't be bothered to shop for a phial myself because she won't like what I like (something like a sea breeze blowing through a pine forest) and I don't really care about smelling beyond not smelling to wear it for myself. Maybe if/when I get around to fixing my nose...

Odorless. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to wear cologne then another person should have to be within kissing distance to smell it. If your fragrance fills an elevator then it's entirely too much. The one exception is patchouli oil, which either detectable at 100 yards or absent entirely. That being said, patchouli has certain cultural connotations in the United States and one should be aware of those connotations before partaking.

My wife turned me on to the Replica line by Margiela, which are marketed as unisex, and reasonably priced when I can get them at Costco. I've liked everything from them I've tried, and because it's unisex you can gift it to a girl and she'll find it infinitely romantic when you say to wear it when she misses you.

My wife turned me on to the Replica line by Margiela

By the fireplace is amazing. Once when I was wearing it someone told me I smelt exactly like the chateaus she used to visit on holiday in Chamonix back as a child.

My favorite winter fragrance, excellent taste

That's exactly the one I have.

Once when I was getting dragged to Sephora, I sat at the Replica display and came up with a conspiracy involving all the locations and dates, MMM trying to send a message to those who could read it.

I’m just envisioning the “food critic flashbacks” scene from the climax of Ratatouille.

I like Guerlain Bois Mysterieux, but as it’s the summer I’m wearing Dior Homme Cologne(2022) and Guerlain Neroli Outrenoir more often.

Currently wearing Xerjoff Fiero, it's an excellent citrus scent.

Yesterday was Serge Lutens Fille en Aguilles, it's hard to get your hands on a bottle but I highly recommend it to all woody scent enjoyers.

Very fancy upper shelf taste

Ah what can I say, I'm a sucker for exquisite scents.

I've been wearing Lacoste Essential since I was a teenager. I've never found one I like as much since.

Off brand replicas; mainly solids 'cause I'm sensitive to strong smells.

I like a good old fashion bay rum smell; not to be a basic bitch about it.

A girl I used to date used Comme des Garcons 2 and I found it absolutely intoxicating. I think probably anyone could wear it, but I think it's more feminine than masculine. I also like floral/rose/fresh scents for women, but one I love doesn't currently come to mind.

I mostly wear Terre D’hermes. Funny enough, a girl I used to date also wore this perfume because she loved the smell of it and I've been wearing it ever since.

Santos de Cartier--I like the spices over woody scents Before that Givenchy Pi it's pretty sweet smelling but it worked.

Why do East Asian restaurants have such massive menus?

Restaurants in East Asia, or restaurants of East Asian cuisine abroad?

Here in the west if a restaurant has a giant menu it's usually a bad sign because it means nothing's really good. But I think for East Asian cuisine restaurants abroad, they feel kind of forced to serve a few (often westernized to hell) "staples" of asian food else people complain. Like I see a lot of korean or vietnamese restaurants serving sushi because people just don't know or don't care. Thaï restaurants will be forced to serve general tso's chicken, all noodle restaurants will be forced to serve pad thai, etc...

I asked the owner of the local Chinese place here in the US about this and she said the following, condensed for brevity. All the food they make is composed of a limited number of ingredients. 3-4 types of meat, 2-3 types of rice, 4-6 different sauces, 2-3 types of noodles, 7-10 types of veggies. You ignore the menu entirely if you are aware of what is on offer and just state what you want: pork in white rice with broccoli, cabbage, and carrots in ginger sauce for example. The menu is huge b/c they often try to explicitly list every possible iteration of these ingredients with a name and price. If you look closely most of the dishes are extremely similar but with a different starch (rice or noodle) and different meat. They list theirs by the base starch: white rice, fried rice, lo mein, chow mein, etc. Underneath these subheadings is a list of basically they same meat/veg/sauce combos reiterated under every starch type. The stuff they consider the good combinations are usually under "House Specials".

Specifically, Chinese restaurants in Canada.

Some fraction of it is formatting.

The last time I had Chinese food, there were >100 items on the menu. Six of them were fried rice (vegetarian, with pork, with chicken, with shrimp, with beef, or "deluxe"), and that wasn't the only duplicated dish. If you pared it down to distinct dishes, then it's much closer to Canadian restaurants serving other cuisines.

Chinese restaurants in China also have very large menus.

I couldn't say why Chinese cuisine developed in such a way that led to this, but if you're wondering how they manage: Chinese food has very little mise en place. 95% of dishes in the average restaurant will require little more than chopping up your ingredients and frying rapidly. Take a look at someone like Wang Gang, a professional Chinese chef. The majority of recipes he shoots are <5 minutes, even accounting for editing tricks.

Well, that's specifically what I was talking about too!

If you're in a large city with a big East Asian population with some effort you can usually find the small places that exist to cater to that community instead of "the locals" and they will usually have smaller menus and much better food. But serving Chinese in particular is a tough one because China is big and its cuisine hasn't homogenized the way Japan's did for instance, and Canadians have no idea what Chinese people eat. It's probably simpler for the restaurants to just go with what their customers expect to see on the menu: every single variation of noodles/rice/dumpling/soup with chicken/pork/beef/shrimp, overly sweet sauces that is general tso's flavored, lemon flavored, peanut flavored, fish sauce flavored... rather than have to explain to confused Canadian who felt adventurous enough to go a chinese restaurant, but not THAT adventurous, that she might actually enjoy the braised tendon or the chicken feet.

One thing I've found is that if you can find a restaurant that specializes in food from a particular region within a country, the food will probably be better. E.g. food from a restaurant specializing in "sichuan food" will generally be better than one specializing in "chinese food", which will in turn be better than one specializing in "asian food".

Why do they use such extremely sweet sauces? North American food outside of desserts isn't nearly as sweet.

chicken feet

I had these earlier this year at a Korean place. Mine had a kind of spicy barbecue sauce. They're not bad, just a lot of work. Something to share as an appetizer maybe. They're uncannily like miniature human hands.

Honestly I've never seen the hype on them. Meat's not great, they're annoyingly fiddly to eat and there's no real taste advantage.

Do recommend Chicken Hearts, though.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Herzog's Citizen Knowledge. I can't say I care much for the discussions of actual events, but there are a lot of interesting references, and its position is very clearly written.

I'm also reading papers found in New Directions in the Ethics and Politics of Speech, edited by J.P. Messina (also open access). Currently, Cohen and Cohen's The Possibility and Defensibility of Nonstate "Censorship." This collection at least seems much more self-aware of censorship issues raised in recent times.

I'm about halfway through Eisel Mazard's No More Manifestos. I wish I could find a good review online because I can't do it justice, but it's hard to put the book down and hard to scoff at even if the ideas he's proposing are very radical.

In the last chapter I read he proposed that much of the abuses perpetrated by faceless bureaucrats and cops alike are largely the result of boredom, which induces callousness. He proposes as a solution an expanded version of Aristotle's notion of democratic equality (where civil functions are allocated by lot and any citizen can be called upon to serve say any function of the court) whereby any citizen can be called upon to serve as a policeman for a short period, or any policeman to serve a teaching function, or any surgeon a role as a nurse (suited to their abilities of course, a janitor wouldn't serve as a surgeon and a cop might only be suited to teach very basic subjects).

The goal isn't income equality or even a transfer of skills, but a disruption of the boredom induced by specialisation and a way to inject into the workplace a very practical notion of equality without falling into the terrible traps of aiming for income inequality or equality of status. The doctor will have more appreciation for the hard parts of a nurses job if he has spent at least a short time performing them himself, he will also have a more accurate idea of when they are being lazy and can hold them to the same standards he holds himself. The minor corruptions that are wilfully ignored in any job will be subject to more scrutiny if say cops have to allow regular citizens to work alongside them, and people will have more productive interactions with the police if they understand first-hand how difficult a job it is. The type of loyalty that allows police officers to coordinate on a lie covering up a bungled arrest would likely be disrupted if 2 of the 5 officers present during the incident were just normal citizens on a job rotation.

There's an anecdote about his attempt to join the Canadian military, and how as an artillery officer he would not be expected to know how to operate the guns himself. The lack of hands on experience here deprives officers of the ability to really know when their troops are working their hardest and when they are just being lazy, and the same goes for every type of institution.

The book A Christmas Story, which is a collection of 5 short stories that inspired the movie. It's hilarious, given you find the movie hilarious.

I'm on The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, and just started Violence Unveiled by Gil Bailie.

The latter is so far a staggeringly impressive work - perhaps the most important book I've ever read if it continues to impress as it has in the first third. It's an in-depth discussion of the Girardian scapegoating mechanism, how the passion of Christ turned that mechanism on it's head, and how many of our modern problems boil down to the inability to differentiate between scared violence and profane violence.

Found an annotated paper copy of Pacific Crucible in a used book store in SD that was definitely owned by some retired officer; enjoying the read on paper immensely.

Oho, lucky find. I’m a little envious.

I pick up well-worn histories when I find them. So far the best has been Thunder Below.

I'm at the 2100s in Reverend Insanity, that's chapters, not pages. I honestly have no clue how long it actually is, since I heard that it's technically unfinished, I've been stridently resisting the urge to peek and see how many remain. One of the many advantages of ebooks over dead tree books, which always make me feel a sense of dread when a new novel comes to an end.

And as per usual, I've been working on my own Cultivation novel The Dao of Simulation, which is significantly easier to write than my other unfinished work, which had me sticking to the very high standards of rationalist fiction as best as I could.

In Xianxia, both the reader and the author can usually switch off their brain and the former write whatever the fuck they want, knowing that the latter will read anything that's grammatically coherent (and not even necessarily that, given old machine translations).

My work is a mixture of deeply stupid humor, in-jokes, and occasional poignancy. Spoilers below, but you can look forward to charming excerpts like:

Bruh I say again, these are spoilers

He wisely avoided pointing the laser at the village itself, instead aiming for a nearby tree, which promptly caught fire. Not like the whole thing going up in flames, just a few leaves. He quickly dialed it down, and decided to try using it to signal one of the flyers.

At this point, he quickly learned why the app came with an FAQ explaining why it wasn't FCC or FAA approved, because even reduced in intensity as it was, the beam blinded the rider, and in his pain and panic, he fell off his mount and plummeted several hundred feet into the ground.

Or

"State your name for the Imperial record." The envoy ordered.

"Isaac Kai"

"Kai, of the Isaac clan?"

"Oh, no, it's the Anglicized form, not the Chinese way."

">What's a Chinese?" The envoy asked suspiciously.

"Umm, you're Chinese. I'm like a quarter Chinese myself." Isaac explained.

I'm sure @2rafa will appreciate the deep-cut RSP reference if nobody else does

I'm tired of using spoiler tags

Then:

Hello Adventurer Null Null

Welcome to the Realms of Magic

Please choose a class:

  1. Knight
  2. Wizard
  3. Mage
  4. Nuclear Physicist
  5. Chiropractor
  6. Alchemist
  7. F1 driver
  8. Chimpanzee
  9. Thief
  10. Archer (50 lb draw weight and below)
  11. Lord of Destruction (1/1 available, player only)
  12. Knight (left-handed)

||Isaac was smarter than me, because while I was checking the skill tree for Chimpanzee, my eyes boggling at frankly OP banana peeling skill, he decisively chose "Lord of Destruction".

This crashed the entire Simulation. For a few nanoseconds. I quickly managed to fix the issue, something to do with a collection of lootboxes that had been banned for corrupting the youth.

Congratulations on your first Legendary Class!

Lord of Destruction comes with a complimentary assortment of premium cosmetics, but we're sure you're most interested in the unique skill tree and summonable items!

You'll have to put your skills to the test, as your class is marked as PvPvE. But you'll certainly look sick doing it!

Isaac grinned from ear to ear as a sense of unchecked power rushed through his system, he felt himself float a few millimeters off the ground, which while not particularly impressive, still felt pretty good.

The Village Chief fell onto his knees, sobbing with pride, "Ah, if I had known this day would come, I wouldn't have felt so depressed about picking F1 driver."||

Can one forget? :

But what Isaac did find useful was some kind of charging pad, likely what was used to top up their remaining two laser weapons. Documentation was non-existent on why the hell it worked with an iPhone, but I think it's just because the previous dev thought the idea of "Qi" wireless charging being a thing in a Cultivation setting was super funny.

Or my personal favorite:

The Wizard's Tower shimmered in the light, its ethereal appearance half-suggested it would blink out of existence. Under the curious gaze of some Inner Disciples, Isaac was escorted inside, where a revolving staircase led all the way up to the rooms at the top.

There, he met a Cultivator who could have passed as an extra in the Lord of the Rings, wearing a sparkling wizard's robe and a pointy hat with a frog snoozing on top. An ornate plate on his desk announced him as High Chancellor Short Aotian (PhD, CIS, LMFAO), Spirit Master of the Spirit Realm. He was standing in front of a window, gently pondering an orb that spun with arcane flames. In the background, another knock-off albatross patrolled as its operator sprayed a tank of Qi over the neighborhood, reducing the strain on the local Cultivators.

"Sit, Isaac isn't it?" Short Aotian said.

Isaac bowed again, before taking a seat. "Yes Lord Aotian, I am honored to be in your presence."

"We can skip the pleasantries! Your arrival is a great boon, here I was thinking we'd have to shut down the Otherworldly Demon research program, we've got one poor Daoist going on 70 and yet unable to submit a dissertation for his PhD without a research subject. By the way, in your world, do they have wizards?" He asked earnestly.

"Uh.. I suppose you could say that." Isaac admitted.

"Really? What did they wear?" Short Aotian brought out a magical scroll and began scribbling furiously.

"I think it was white robes and pointy white hats for the most part."

"Ah! And can you tell me about any relevant roles and ranks?" The "Wizard" adjusted his reading glasses in anticipation.

"I don't remember all the details, but I'm pretty sure that the higher ups had something called a Grand Dragon!" Isaac said glibly.

"A perfectly cromulent name for such an enlightened people. Can you tell me what kind of magic they used?"

"Mostly lighting people on fire I guess."

"Perfect! Here, have some tea, you come from a very interesting world indeed."

How much time do you spend on writing vs editing? I'm in a love-hate relationship with editing (hate to do it, love the result), and it seems like these endless web serials are just an excuse to do as little editing as possible.

At least a 10:1 ratio. I correct obvious errors as I'm writing, and then do a final edit pass in RR.

I would think that I'm a good writer, and less prone to error than most on RR, so I don't need it all that much.

How long is one chapter of RI? "It's got like 3000 chapters it's this huge" doesn't say much when chapters in web fiction can range from 2 screen heights to 10k words.

About 3-5k words as far as I can tell.

How long is RI going on for? This sounds like a full time 996 job.

You've still got a bit left of RI. Watch out for some 4D chess coming up.

I remember trying my hand at litrpg, only to get a harshly stratified autocracy ruled by people who hoard all the combat classes. Worlds where individual combat power is wildly unequal should have wildly unequal political power IMO, yet nobody else seems to do this.

You've still got a bit left of RI. Watch out for some 4D chess coming up.

I'd be lying if I wasn't already blown away by what the author managed to pull off already, 4D chess undersells it, I'd have an aneurysm trying to keep all the plots straight in my head, and he makes it look easy.

I remember trying my hand at litrpg, only to get a harshly stratified autocracy ruled by people who hoard all the combat classes. Worlds where individual combat power is wildly unequal should have wildly unequal political power IMO, yet nobody else seems to do this.

I'm pretty sure you just described most Xianxia haha, I'm sure there must be a couple that are litrpgs too.

If that excerpt gave you the impression that my fic is one, that isn't actually the case! To skip over quite a bit, the "litrpg" mechanics the protagonist is interacting with here are the decayed and decrepit remnants of when this Simulation was more akin to say, WoW, a system that has basically been left to rot while the rest of the world switched to Xianxia Cultivation for millions of years.

It's played for laughs, since pretty much nothing works, and even a prestige class like what Isaac claims is rather underpowered to put it lightly.

Well Red Lotus has been playing 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel the whole time but FY is about to pull some moves too.

I'm pretty sure you just described most Xianxia haha

Yeah, it was one of those incomplete ideas I had before I even got into xianxia, working from Western litrpg stuff where things are surprisingly egalitarian. One of my thoughts was that a precursor civilization would engineer factories to level up its people (like how in minecraft there are mob farms). After the precursors wipe themselves out (who would've guessed that high levels and a physics system dependent on killing people are destabilizing) we get dungeons. I like having organic reasons for things to exist rather than the whole 'dungeon core' trope collection welded onto medieval Europe fantasy setting. Alternate physics should mean alternate politics and alternate culture, which xianxia tends to get right despite its other flaws.

Why the spoiler dude?? It's unmarked too, not that spoiler marks even work for me.

How is that a spoiler? The moment people are first introduced to Red Lotus, it's made clear that he's a time traveller, that's his whole gig. Plus FY is constantly organizing various schemes. It's not specific to say 'oh you should watch carefully for upcoming schemes from the number 1 schemer.' Anyway, don't go on the subreddit if you're this conscious of spoilers.

Bad:

"By the way, in your world, do they have wizards?" He asked earnestly.

Good:

"By the way, in your world, do they have wizards?" he asked earnestly.

Nonstandard, but useful as an illustrative tool:

"By the way, in your world, do they have wizards [he asked earnestly]?"

I will take this opportunity to rant that I am really tired of bad English. I'm approximately 85 percent of the way through (my scraped EPUB of) Twig, and I find it extremely annoying that Wildbow—a person who has written literally millions of words—(1) makes exactly the same mistake that I explained above, (2) always uses a single hyphen followed by a space (not even a pair of hyphens!) rather than an em dash, and (3) can't tell the difference between subject and object (actual quote: "just behind Jessie and I"). At work, several of my coworkers—a pseudo-subordinate of mine (Cantonese), my boss (Vietnamese), and my boss's boss (Sri Lankan)—are ELLs who routinely verge on sending gibberish in their emails, and I have an "English tutoring" folder on my work computer to catalog the literally dozens of helpful corrections that I have emailed to the first two of them over the past six months (for which they have thanked me).

Is your issue that it's supposed to be "behind Jessie and me/myself"? I'd assume it is a deliberate archaism.

That's (possibly) my autocorrect being annoying, capitalizing the H in he after the use of quotes IIRC.

I'm not overly fussed about minor issues like that, if you think that's annoying, wait till you see what translated Xianxia often looks like!

Does anyone have any recently updated not wildly partisan adversarial stuff re. HBD/IQ inheritance/IQ measurement/ The whole salami?

This is kinda specific, I'm after a single place where there are people disagreeing with each others sources and arguments directly; preferably experts or at least people who can reference experts.

I don't think that what you're looking for actually exists. Nobody on the left would dare actually argue with or debate any experts on HBD - my uncharitable reading of this is because they know that they will come up short, their stated reason is that even deigning to argue with HBD unduly elevates the concepts involved and makes them seem respectable/spread those ideas to others.

Sean did a very convincing evisceration of the Murray book, but said book was always pop science at best. I was hoping there would be something more boring to really sink my teeth into.

EDIT: Re debate: the debate bros do it all the time, but the only people on the right willing to go on stream generally aren't really in any position to be defending anything. It's all bloodsports and no substance.

Do you mean Shaun or someone else? I don't like Shaun's content because he is incredibly boring and uncharismatic, but if he actually did a good takedown of the bell curve I'd love to hear it.

Yup, the dude with the skull logo.

Parts of the argument were iffy, but he did a really good job going source to source and checking every god damn thing.

I was reading a comment about how people that learn rationality often appear unhappy. It caused to reflect and think of a larger pattern.

I think rationality can cause people to go through something like the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. So, while rationality concepts can cause some people to become unhappy it can often be just a temporary state.

Has studying rationality concepts caused you to go through a cycle of emotional states?

Less about rationality concepts themselves and more about my perception of the community. A feeling like watching my intellectual heroes not just stumble, but faceplant: first, a sense of enthusiasm and a sort of pride that there were people (dare I say, "my people"?) looking to transcend their flaws and start looking seriously at the hardest, most important problem in history — how to align a superintelligence. HMPOR is one of the most engaging works I've ever read; despite EY's often odd prose and the weirdness of the characters, it rewards close reading and sets out both a vision and a warning. And with the sequences (not just EY's, but other writers as well), you get a pretty inspiring offer: learn all this stuff, it will teach you how to win, and then deploy that to win the most important problem in history. Then dismay and disappointment as I learned that even these hardened epistemic defenses were no match for Berkeley, that rationalists ended up more interested in polyamorous group houses than solving the most important problem in history, and only slightly less vulnerable to the woke mind virus than the average normie. @zackmdavis' writing on the trans question takes a long time to get to the point, but it's an important one: there is a reality, and even the most ingroup members of what's meant to be the most reality-connected community threw out all of their epistemic standards just to let their friends claim an alternate sex. This seems to me to mean that even if we succeed at AI-don't-kill-everyone, any AGIs/ASIs we do get will be unacceptably decoupled from reality on at least the woke and trans questions, and anything connected to those. Since if you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy, solving the "AI-don't-kill-everyone" problem becomes harder if you don't even allow yourself to see reality while you're solving it.

I'd live in a cult compound group house if I could. It's the most reliable way to avoid dying if WWIII happens, and if you think there's a decent chance of WWIII before AI doom, then you'll want to make sure you survive WWIII.

Of course, you need supplies and guns as well as the cult to be a proper cult compound.

It does seem pretty fun, but you have to tolerate some real weird shit man. Real weird.

What sorts of rationality concepts do you have in mind?

I'd like to suggest that grieving is how we experience the process of a very, very deep part of our psyches becoming familiar with a painful truth.

Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PHnMDhfiadQt6Gj23/the-art-of-grieving-well

So really any concepts that relate to learning about why human nature makes the problems of the world intractable. Examples: Mediations on Moloch, cognitive biases that lead people to act irrationality.

If someone breaks up with you, or a loved one dies it is almost impossible to deny the painful truth of reality. With rationality if you don't go looking for certain things you can remain ignorant of parts of reality. If studying rationality can cause emotional distress then in some cases it may be better not to look under certain rocks.

Nope.

I don't think there is anyone actually "becoming" a rationalist. People have natural inclinations towards being high/low decouplers and that is probably baked into their personality profiles.

To me coming across rationality felt like coming across things I already intuited but formalized and documented.

I think most high decouplers already have a world model and internal epistemic model similar to rationalists, the Rationalists™ don't have a monopoly on... Rationalism.

Not really. Even before I was a Rationalist, I was still regularly dismayed by civilizational inadequacy and how fucking stupid the average person is.

I'm a smart person, and I'm certain that even if I hadn't discovered LW or Scott in my late teens, I'd have wandered into spaces where I'd have heard the same concepts eventually.

To me, rationality is both the art of clear thinking, and as Yudkowsky puts it, winning. Reasonably educated humans usually think quite clearly already when it comes to truly important decisions, so I don't really expect an introduction to formal Rationalist concepts to revolutionize someone's life barring those who go into EA, AI Alignment or sign up for cryonics.

You don't have to be a rat to worry about AI or x-risk, and while I've certainly felt existential terror at times, I cope quite well.

I don’t think it reasonable to call the average person stupid in the sense that they’re incapable of learning it. Most have never actually been taught to think in that manner, and as such lack the skill set. Part of thinking well is the toolset, and part of it is being able to (and choosing to) read widely enough to make good use of the tools in that skill set.

Education, at least in non-elite American schools is not built to create thinkers. Nobody funding the schools or hiring the graduates cares if they can think (and other than the cognitive elite type jobs in high level stem, thinking is a net negative as thinkers are hard to control). As such the system is set up for mostly rote learning— what the classical education model calls grammar. Memorize and recall, perform mathematical equations. That’s all well and good, but that’s not going to create a thinker. There’s the next step where kids learn to understand why that works, or to learn to apply what they’ve learned, and to analyze texts, equations and problems to understand what’s being done and why.

Absent that, most people developed proxies that mostly work. Finding a “priest” type who you trust on a topic, trusting a given set of sources, using the canonical list of fallacies, or trusting the guy in the argument who sounds like Spock. Those sort of work most of the time, provided those you’re trusting are honest and knowledgeable. The trouble is that it’s not hard to know the tricks most people use as rationalist proxies and positioning yourself to appeal to those instincts.

I'm a smart person, and I'm certain that even if I hadn't discovered LW or Scott in my late teens, I'd have wandered into spaces where I'd have heard the same concepts eventually.

Don't be so sure. When I was in college, these places DIDN'T EXIST. It took the internet to bring together the critical mass to make it happen.

You certainly weren't going to be exposed to rationalist ideas on a typical college campus or by reading the New Yorker or the Economist or anything. The gulf between the writing of someone like Scott, and the publications available to a layperson in the 1990s is vast.

Even today, let's say TheMotte/SSC/LessWrong don't exist. Where are you going to get information that isn't hopelessly normie biased?

Well I’m one of participants that was in that discussion, so I can confidently say yes, learning about rationality (specifically ‘rationalism’ online) has caused me quite a few strong emotions.

I was in the grocery store the other day when I noticed a brand of ginger beer from Bermuda. That struck a chord with me because at some point I saw a cooking show where someone mentioned "a famous brand of Bermudan ginger beer" -- you know how they don't say the names of companies that aren't advertisers, so that was how they described it in lieu of actually naming it. I wanted to try it, so I bought it and liked it.

I was just curious if anyone else has experienced something similar -- an attempt to avoid giving free advertising to something instead drawing more attention to it. I'm certain if they had just said "Barritt's ginger beer", it wouldn't have stuck in my mind at all.

I had a coworker from Grenada who made ginger beer in gallon jugs and brought them to work. It was amazing. The bottled stuff could never compare. Its essentially a peasant drink that seems to defy mass production while retaining any quality.

Circa 2008 Ferrari's F1 team was sponsored by Philip Morris despite a ban on tobacco advertising in the EU. They ran a 'barcode' red and white livery which was reminiscent of the Marlboro logo. The discussion of the ban after the fact and the piqued curiosity about the mysterious barcode provided more media interest about the brand than if the pain old Marlboro logo were on the car.

In Demolition Man (1993), there's a scene where they mention Taco Bell. In the international version, this is dubbed over to Pizza Hut, presumably because it's more recognizable outside of the US. You can still kinda tell that the audio had been changed though, as their mouths don't match.

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have spent much time reading the Taco Bell wikipedia page if that hadn't been done.

Could someone recommend me some good books on 20th century decolonization? Needless to say, I'm dubious on the more mainstream recommendations, but dont want empire apologia either. Perhaps some other sources you found helpful as well.

What motivates you to post on this site? Anything in particular?

I got accused of projecting last night while drunk-replying (always a bad idea) and I realized that's totally right. I project constantly when I write online, and I'm okay with it. A lot of my motivation for writing is to get my ideas out there, test them against the intellectual mettle of folks I respect, and ideally making my ideas into a more cohesive shape.

Testing my thinking, that's really it. If there is a better space on the internet for me to do so where would it be? Nowhere, it's either an echo chamber or an execution chamber everywhere else on the internet. It's really the only place where I can actually test my thinking.

I spent over a decade posting nowhere but 4chan, and whenever I left I would read constantly about how it was a stupid place full of terrible people. I have since gone looking for an intelligent place full of brilliant people, but so far I haven't found any forums as wise or worthwhile as the imageboards of my past. But this place is a close enough approximation and it kind of looks like legitimate work(no big images, no large racial slurs in flashing colours etc), so I post on here during working hours when I don't actually have any work to do.

Some people here know a lot more about certain subjects than people I know in real life, so I can have conversations here that I can't in real life or that there are few people I can have them with in real life. Even if it's a subject I can talk to people in real life about, there is a lot of background knowledge I can assume many people here have which is mostly missing from other people. The inferential distance is much less.

while drunk-replying (always a bad idea)

I post better drunk, so YMMV.

I post because It's a place where I can easily get negative engagement with my values. EDIT: COHERENT negative engagement; I can just look at blue check twitter if I want drooling morons who disagree with me.

The majority of people here are wrong on the facts and have bad axioms from my standpoint, but I might be wrong. So, I come here every now and again to look at the people that disagree with me to see if I disagree with them.

What are some of the values that are contentious here?

non vaccine skepticism, non-full fat capitalist, non-HBD, non-raceblindness, historical revisionism, non-isolationism, etc.

Those are the ones that always get me negative internet good boy points.

The ones where I usually even out to zero are being non-Christiaan nationalist and antitheist, or supporting the left side on any culture war topic (eg, it was bad that Neely got choked to death, etc.).

Ukraine is an interesting one; I get wildly different reactions on being a strong anti Neo-Imperial Russia mark depending on who is online that day.

What motivates you to post on this site? Anything in particular?

Mainly, the people engaging with my post won't have a negative IQ.

I got accused of projecting last night while drunk-replying (always a bad idea) and I realized that's totally right.

Yup, you were overly defensive to criticisms against your post even minor ones.

I have many ideas where I haven’t found another good place to discuss them. Often, they are unrefined theories and I need outside feedback to refine them and find the flaws with them.

My best friend doesn’t have the same interests and background knowledge that I do. Sure, he will let me nerd out about signaling theory or whatever my latest intertest is, but he can’t provide the same kind of intellectual stimulation that I get here.

I also find it to be therapeutic to share ideas that the people around me ‘don’t get’. I’m getting acknowledgment that there are other people that share the same interests and think in rationalist-adjacent ways.

Also, I’d like to give a huge shout out the Wellness Wednesday threads. I really like being able to share a problem/challenge that I’m facing and get multiple perspectives on it. The multiple perspectives help me see multiple ways I can approach something. I feel like there are a lot of high-effort and helpful responses that people have just given me for free and I appreciate that. If I were talking to a therapist or close friend I would get a much narrower (and potentially more biased) perspective.

Funnily enough I got my therapist into slate star codex, and will often give him ‘homework’ of reading an article I find helps describe part of my thinking.

Good therapists are hard to find but certainly worth it imo.

I find it entertaining.

Making a proper, well-constructed argument and pointing out bad argumentation are underappreciated.

This one of the few corners of the internet where I can expect both high quality posts for me to read and expect engaged and intelligent comments on what I've written. The fact that we're allowed to discuss topics that most forums wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole is certainly a big draw in itself.

I write because I have something interesting to say, or because I'm bored, but at the end of the day I like writing or I wouldn't be doing so much of it!

Yep, this. (He comments intelligently).

In all seriousness, it's one of the only places where I can have good conversations with people whose opinions are close enough to mine to be interesting but not so close it's dull. With ordinary friends and family either you spend all your time manoeuvring around the badthink filter or they just don't have much extra to add.

I like writing as a way of working through my thoughts but I find it very difficult to sit down with a blank page and write anything good. Seeing an interesting motte comment gives me the motivation to put my thoughts on a topic into words. Being forced to articulate a thought is itself a way of testing it, then you've got people replying to it trying to find its weaknesses.

Refining my views, finding interest views, getting criticism of my views.

Themotte works as fun training in “quick argument generation” because topics are variable, challenging, and diverse. Twitter doesn’t work like this because of character generation and the emphasis on low-information dunking and insults, Reddit used to be good but not much anymore, and there is no real life equivalent that occurs with frequency. If there were, like, 17th century coffeehouses, I’d just be chilling there instead

Sign me up for the 17th century coffeehouse and salon revival please. That sounds dope. We can even add adderall and cocaine this time.

Boredom, the only thing that really motivates me to do anything, other than spite.

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.

If in doubt, please post it!


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