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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3739 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 20, 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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When I look at news in the Wall Street Journal or the NY Times about the war in Ukraine, all of the reports seem to betray an anti-Russian bias. Is this an organic situation that reflects the actual views of the reporters, or the editors employed by the newspapers? Or is it a result of US government interference pushing their anti-Russian agenda in the domestic news? How much freedom do reporters have to publish their own pro-Russian views, if they were to have any? Does the US government intimidate or otherwise control newspapers into not reporting news that paints Russia in a positive light?

I oft-handedly mentioned that master's degree holders have a higher average IQ than bachelor's degree holders. My friend said "No, that's not true," and so I went to Google to prove my point. I have found random people pulling out numbers without citation, and I have found published papers and magazine articles showing average IQ by major, but not by degree level.

Anyone who can find a reliable source showing the difference in average IQ by level of post-HS educational attainment gets a hug.

There are a bunch of plots out there, mostly using the NLSY97. See for example the figures under "IQ/test score by educational attainment level" here.

Edit: Also pretty interesting, the paper Scott linked to a while ago separating cognitive and non-cognitive factors in educational attainment. The paper abstract seems to imply the link between cognitive factors and educational attainment is well established.

Can somebody write up a CW post about Jordan Peterson being required to take social media training by the Canadian Board of Psychology? Shit is wild https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jordan-peterson-court-case-decision-1.6943845

So.. what's it like in Haiti?

I just found out that their government collapsed. Because I've spent my whole life in America, I don't know what that means. Is it pure anarchy? Do gangs control various parts of the country and know to stay out of each other's turf?

Various Reuters and UN articles seem to suggest that it's anarchy in the capital, with different gangs violently vying for control. A cursory search doesn't reveal anything about the situation outside the capital.

Thank you for the links, and it's too bad that you dislike me.

One of my own qualms with homeschooling is that it interferes with/stunts socialization with other children (one of the reasons it has never really gained much popular traction in Japan, where arguably socialization is the main role of schools from K-undergraduate.) If this is also one of his qualms and he is not simply humorously lumping all of homeschooling in with a certain demographic of fussy, imperious mothers, you might offer up a rebuttal of how you might deal with the socialization issue.

Also I have to assume based on your wording, possibly presumptuously, that you may be either expecting (in which case, congratulations!) or moving toward trying (in which case, best of luck!)

Look into co-ops in your area, identify the curriculum that interests you, and do your research. Build up the case for the specific curriculum and in-person meet ups you could use. Instead of making a fear-based, "public schools scare me," case, try to convey what about homeschooling excited you.

For example, if I get to homeschool, I will use Memoria Press and weekly music/art classes at a local coop. It's easy to look at Memoria Press' website and get excited about the curriculum. Think of how sophisticated your kid would be, reading the classics in Latin by the time they're 14!

(I'm sure the actual reality of homeschooling is not so rosy, because anything involving kids can be like pulling teeth, but this is the sales pitch.)

But also, if you show that you're willing to defer to some sort of external group as to what curriculum you are going to teach your kids, it shows that you aren't going to be a, "I know everything better than anyone else" kind of homeschool mom.

Well you’re one of the good ones obviously, he’s going to make the unprincipled exception for his wife, you don’t need to defend a thesis here.

They think they’re smarter than everyone else, so the rules don’t apply to them.

They think they're smarter than the government. One would expect a (house-repair seems to be implied in your comment) contractor, who deals with onerous permit requirements on a daily basis, to be intimately familiar with how stupid the government is.

It also may be worth pointing out which specific parts of government schooling you object to. He may be thinking of the stereotypical religious homeschooler, who sees no fault in the government's teaching process but has disagreements with the government's curriculum, for mostly subjective reasons. You could present yourself as a more reasonable person who would more or less adhere to the government's curriculum but avoid the dysfunction of the government's teaching process, which you can demonstrate to be objectively bad.

He may be thinking of the stereotypical religious homeschooler, who sees no fault in the government's teaching process but has disagreements with the government's curriculum, for mostly subjective reasons.

Umm, homeschooling mothers, even the stereotypical religious homeschooling mothers, see a lot of fault in the government’s teaching methods, not just the curriculum.

Yes, finding fault with public school methods and process is obviously self serving for these women(and yes many of them are… difficult to deal with, but they also have children who run amok and sometimes make things difficult for contractors, with ‘bitches be crazy’ usually a more palatable statement than ‘securing a jobsite against an eight year old is a pain’), but they will explain at great length how the public school system is doing it wrong.

I know we've discussed voting policies at length, but something I keep returning to mentally is how it ever became an acceptable norm to implement mass mail-in ballots. Republicans (especially Trumpy ones) go on and on about susceptibility to fraud, and I certainly think there's something there, but it's not even my real objection. Even if you implement a system that I think incontrovertibly filters out all examples of identity fraud in voting and manage to get a full 1:1 match between the name on the ballot and the voter, I will still think that mass mail-in voting is an inherently corrupt system. The secret ballot is of such importance that it is enshrined in multiple international law settings; not that long ago, without the current valence of mail-in voting, I think I could have gotten almost everyone to agree that removing the secret ballot in favor of "assisted" voting inherently increases opportunities for coercion and vote-buying. Once we include ballot-harvesting, where low-propensity voters are "assisted" by people from campaigns, this is unmistakably a serious weakness to the traditional concept of secret ballots, with ample opportunity for intimidation, coercion, vote-buying, or using the mentally incompetent.

What puzzles me isn't so much why my opponents have decided that having people go door-knocking to collect ballots is a very important civil right, but why I don't really see anyone from the broader right arguing against this as a form of corrupt machine politics. Instead, they harp on about fraud, which might be a real concern, but is hard to prove and can't be scaled up the same way as sending political operatives around to do now-legal corruption. Why is there no organized campaign on the right to restore the secret ballot?

I have posted about secrecy in voting here before, and I included a discussion of the historical reason for adopting the "Australian ballot". This iswas a hugely important issue for a very long time, not in the sense that it was an important and controversial issue. No, it was hugely important and not controversial, at least among generally free countries.

Unlike how organizations like the ACLU officially changed course and explicitly disclaimed their prior views on vaccine mandates, my sense is that most organizations still overtly claim to value secrecy. Just a casual web search provides things from IPU:

Acknowledging and endorsing the fundamental principles relating to periodic free and fair elections that have been recognized by States in universal and regional human rights instruments, including the right of everyone to take part in the government of his or her country directly or indirectly through freely chosen representatives, to vote in such elections by secret ballot, to have an equal opportunity to become a candidate for election, and to put forward his or her political views, individually or in association with others,

From the Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), U.S. Department of State:

Free and fair elections require:

...

Secret ballots — voting by secret ballot ensures that an individual's choice of party or candidate cannot be used against him or her.

USAID helpfully cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 21.3:

The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures

and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 25:

Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 231 and without unreasonable restrictions... To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors.

They call "secrecy of the ballot" a "core election-related international obligation" and define it in the annex as:

Secret ballot: Voters should be able to cast their ballot in secret without fear of intimidation. Ballots should not be able to be linked with individual voters.

If those organizations are a little too America-linked, here's OSCE, circa 2010:

Voting by secret ballot Voters should mark their ballots alone, in the privacy of a voting booth, and in such a way that the marked ballot cannot be seen before it is cast and cannot be later connected with a particular voter. Exceptions can be made only under specified conditions, such as at the request of voters who require assistance, e.g., disabled or illiterate voters. Any voting outside of a voting booth compromises the secrecy of the vote. The presence of more than one person in a voting booth should not be permitted, as it compromises the secrecy of the vote. Open voting or unlawful voting by proxies are violations of the secrecy principle. Arrangements for voting by members of the military and by prisoners should ensure their votes are secret and not subject to coercion.

Reading their COVID-era publication sheds some light on the difficulty:

The right to cast vote by secret ballot is another cornerstone of a democratic electoral process, enshrined in:

 1990 OSCE Copenhagen Document, paragraphs 5.1 and 7.4;

 1948 UDHR, Article 21;

 1966 ICCPR, Article 25;

 1996 UN HRC General Comment No. 25, paragraph 20;

 1953 ECHR, Additional Protocol, Article 3; and

 2002 VC Code of Good Practice, sections I.3.2 and I.4.

Effective protection of secrecy of the vote is one of the key challenges posed by some alternative voting methods, particularly when voting takes place outside the controlled environment of polling stations, such as postal or Internet voting, or when voters' choices are revealed to their appointed representatives, as in the case of proxy voting. Secrecy should therefore be at the forefront of decision-making when introducing or expanding the use of alternative voting methods. It requires safeguards in law and regulations, as well as due care and proactive steps by polling staff to protect it and to prevent any breaches. The importance of the secrecy of the vote, as well as measures taken to protect it should be addressed in civic and voter education programmes, as well as through prompt investigation by law enforcement bodies of its potential violation.

Secrecy considerations are also central in the context of polling station layout and set-up, equipment used, as well as in voter processing and flow management. They need to remain as one of the priorities when considering adjustments to polling station arrangements, including any special measures to mitigate public health risks

They continue in detail:

The secrecy of the vote may also be challenged by remote voting systems like postal voting, as it takes place without the presence of election officials or observers. Postal voting also provides for less oversight of certain behaviours, like influencing the vote of others and family voting. States, nevertheless, have an obligation to take measures to ensure that the principle of secrecy is maintained.

Ballot delivery, marking, and counting systems used in postal voting present considerable and unique challenges to the integrity of elections. There are several commonly used procedural safeguards for voting by mail, such as ballot secrecy envelopes, witness requirements and signature verification. However, these technical solutions may not be enough to instill confidence in postal voting if there is diminished public trust in electoral processes and administration.

You can just tell that they know that this is a problem. They know that their 2010 position was widely considered to be the correct position for good reasons. They even point out some of those good reasons. But what can be done about it? "Eh." Probably nothing. Why yes, everyone must obviously agree with the position that ensuring strict voter secrecy is, in principle, an obligation of States holding free and fair elections, but it just doesn't seem like we can figure out any specific advice to make it actually work, since it's, like, not 2010 anymore. So, well, if we can't come up with any good ideas to actually implement the principle in the face of the concrete thing that we want to do right now, the "principle" will just be attested to verbally, as a signalling mechanism, while we proceed in just trodding all over it.

It's absolutely maddening from a historical and theoretical perspective. What's worse is that it threatens to be yet another issue where we had broad consensus across essentially the entire free world, but now could end up being another issue associated with "loony Trumpists", making it ripe for the chopping block. The impact may not be felt today, or even in the next decade... but I cannot imagine what the long-term consequences could be of simply jettisoning this principle for the rest of time.

  1. The line between "acceptable" political campaigning and "unacceptable" ballot harvesting is hard to define.
  2. People will argue that systems which are already in place are enough to make coercion and vote-buying sufficiently difficult to pull off that there is not a need to restrict voting to secret ballots. The proper response is to argue that no, those systems are insufficient, but we will make up for the lost easiness of mail-in voting by something like establishing voting holidays.
  3. If the right argues that it is unfair for Democrats to go knocking on low-propensity voters' doors to try to get them to vote, the left will argue that it is unfair for Republicans to spread ideas like Qanon that are not believed in by the vast majority of Republicans who actually make policy but that can also be persuasive to low-propensity voters.

  1. It's easy for me. Have people vote in person, then we don't have to worry about this at all. Ballot harvesting is just a way for political machines to cheat.

  2. Agree, I'm in favor of these sorts of actual compromises.

  3. I don't know of anyone that argues that door-to-door campaigning is an illegitimate tactic. If you can get the idiots from your side, whether they're welfare slugs or Qanon to show up to the polls, more power to you.

What puzzles me isn't so much why my opponents have decided that having people go door-knocking to collect ballots is a very important civil right

My impression is that it comes down to a freedom of speech thing - it's not so much that there is a specific civil right to collect ballots as that a law preventing people from talking to their neighbors about certain subjects would be legally problematic.

That said I suspect "push for a law limiting the number of mail-in ballots a single person can mail in on behalf of others" might be a popular policy for the right to push. We don’t want to stop mobility-impaired granny from having her granson take her ballot to the post office. We want to stop an organized group from going door to door throughout a neighborhood, asking people how they plan to vote and then offering to collect ballots only from those who give the desired answer, and collecting hundreds or thousands of ballots that way.

That said I suspect "push for a law limiting the number of mail-in ballots a single person can mail in on behalf of others" might be a popular policy for the right to push.

It's already in place in a number of states, it's just a matter of the will to enforce it. The footage from 2000 mules was from states that banned third party ballot collection, but there was no will to admit that there was a problem.

Yeah, the whole "this would not be a problem if we actually enforced the laws that are already on the books" thing strikes again.

Though those cases do tend to suggest a course of action that is more along the lines of "apply political pressure towards enforcing existing laws" will be more effective than one that looks like "create yet more laws that will not be enforced".

And "existing laws are not enforced, and they should be" is, IMO, one of the strongest right-wing talking points.

Why is there no organized campaign on the right to restore the secret ballot?

You hear it a lot as a Motte among intellectual conservatives, but it gets wildly drowned out by the Bailey of whackadoodles screeching about voting machines that changed votes* from Hackers in Venezuela or something like that.

I've spoken locally to my Republican party committee and elected reps that their election advocacy should focus more on "2020 was a weird time, it lead to a weird election, let's get back to normal..." than "2020 was actively illegally stolen." There was no appetite for it. It's hard to read whether they are all true believers (I doubt this) or if they worry that signaling less than true belief will lead the base to eat them alive. But the result is the same: the GOP is too focused on allegations of "Actual" election fraud to worry about the procedural stuff.

*I want to be clear here: I interact with people on a daily basis who told me throughout 2021 that Trump was still the president, that he had secretly written a memo that passed all presidential powers to the Military (it is not clear what is meant by this? The JCS? The DoD? Some individual general?) and so it never was given to Biden, and that any day now (in July/August/September/etc) the dominos were going to fall. When I refer to the voter fraud bailey, I mean those people, who are vastly more numerous than motte users generally. If you don't believe insane things like that, but do believe in some degree of voter fraud, quite simply I am not referring to you when I use the term whackadoodles.

My big thing with voting machines is why the hell is their firmware/software NOT open source? That shit is what fuels the conspiracy theorist in my head. At this point, I want to be dying peoples thumbs blue or whatever the fuck they do in Africa, because there are just too many inconsistencies for me to be comfortable.

I've been wondering lately to what extent the whackadoodle ideas are being deliberately seeded as a tool to discredit more cogent complaints.

I realize that this sounds fairly whackadoo itself, but there seems to be a bit of a pattern with recent government actions that might reasonably be criticized:

  1. Mandatory vaccination as an infringement on civil liberties --> "Bill Gates/5g/microchips"

  2. Unauthorized Chinese spy-balloon overflights --> "I'm not saying it's aliens..."

  3. Inadequate/bungled wildfire response + possible manual arson by crazy people --> "Jewish Space Lasers!"

  4. Unprecedented and technically illegal changes to election procedures --> "Dominion/Italian satellites/German servers changing vote tallies"

and so on...

I just now notice that most of these involve space vehicles of some sort -- is it a tell, or am I whackadoodling?

I think it’s an attention getting strategy along the lines of some of the crazier PETA stuff. If you’re not getting attention, nothing else matters. And like it or not, crazy gets attention. If people weren’t talking about 5G nanotubes or whatever, the question of mandatory vaccination would have been a minor issue.

Yes but no IMO.

I think they are seeded, but not as a tool to discredit cons. They are probably seeded by people with a financial interest in creating a media sphere distinct from reality; so people get locked into the conspiratorial universe where Hilary Clinton isn't a made-man venal corporatist stooge but a literal satanic pedophile blood drinker.

The same exists on the left; from tankies and such who aren't content with the boring Marxist critique of capital and has to make the further leap that rich people and the US personally crush third worlders in wine presses for entertainment.

It's the same everywhere and forever 99% of the time 100% of the time: there is no grand conspiracy or narrative; there are individual actors reacting to market forces attempting to maximize profit and therefore coordinating with no coordinator.

I think that is why a lot of these dudes that I am familiar with on the left conspiratorial media sphere spend no time at all attacking Trump/Desantis/the Reps; and all of their time and energy attacking AOC/ "Elites"/ the Dems: because they aren't primarily trying to steer politics. They are trying to lock their audience in by providing a unique product; so their main competition isn't the right, it's the left.

I knew people who were repeating 5g nanotechnology bill gates sterilization vaccines back when the public’s view of antivaxxers was still hippies with scented candles and children with misspelled names. There might have been some amplifying of narratives going on, but I highly doubt that particular constellation of ideas came from the government.

It seems very possible. Though the fertile soil for growing your own Dale-Gribbles is pre-existing, I've noticed a strong personality type among the conspiracy theorists in my life. There's a natural tendency in any extremist community to play "more extreme" as a trump card, so it wouldn't be hard to play into this tendency by offering ever more extreme stories.

I've spoken locally to my Republican party committee and elected reps that their election advocacy should focus more on "2020 was a weird time, it lead to a weird election, let's get back to normal..."

This is likewise what I've tried to encourage in people around me. I frankly think 2020 was a complete mess, but also think that it would be best to let bygones be bygones and give my opponents an easy intellectual out that doesn't rely on them needing to admit to any sort of malfeasance. They may not want to reform elections to improve security (although some might), but the above framing is much, much harder to push back vigorously against than the whackadoodle stuff.

On the whackadoodle note, the guy that really summed it up for me the most was a helpful guy at my gun club. Nice guy, good dude, set aside some time to help me figure out what the hell was wrong with the sighting on my rifle (turns out the scope rings were genuinely awful, needed to be lapped). This was back in mid-November of 2020, and we naturally got to talking about the election, and he was absolutely convinced that not only did Trump legitimately win, but that he was definitely going to figure out a way to prove that he'd been cheated and would remain in office. When I asked how he figured that was going to work out, his eyes narrowed, he got a very knowing look, and simply replied, "He hasn't been wrong about anything yet". I'm basically on this guy's side, but I really have no idea how to reply to that. Trump? The guy that we've all been watching? That guy hasn't been wrong about anything? Well, fuck me, I guess we're about to be in for a wild ride was my thought pattern, and you know what? I haven't been wrong yet.

I frankly think 2020 was a complete mess, but also think that it would be best to let bygones be bygones and give my opponents an easy intellectual out that doesn't rely on them needing to admit to any sort of malfeasance.

My West-Wing type fantasy scenario would be the GOP leadership of 2020, including Trump and Mitch McConnell, getting up and doing a collective press conference where they said something like what an NBA team says after a playoff series where their best player tore his ACL. "Hey, we lost under the rules, but those rules were weird, the whole thing was weird. Maybe some portion of our base refused to leave the house? We'll accept the result, but we will win it next time when the rules/situation aren't weird."

I forgot to note in my first comment, the local GOP is also very heavily trying to get people to vote by mail. So part of the reason they aren't turning against Mail-Ins is because doing so causes their own people to refuse to vote by mail, which loses you some votes relative to the Democrats who encourage Mail-Ins. Even people who really do plan to vote in person forget, or get there and the line is too long, or get sick, or whatever. Where that same person might have remembered to vote by mail. So unless you can change the rules with your current elected officials, opposing mail in voting will cost you votes on election day right now.

I really have no idea how to reply to that. Trump? The guy that we've all been watching? That guy hasn't been wrong about anything? Well, fuck me, I guess we're about to be in for a wild ride was my thought pattern, and you know what? I haven't been wrong yet.

I couldn't have phrased that any better.

Huh. That is a good question.

My best guess is a side effect from Trump boosting specific claims. If the court cases and Raffensbergers had found fraud, his gamble would have paid off. Since they didn’t, it became an attack surface. Now complaining about the election is coded as defending Trump’s claims, specifically.

It’s a shame, because I’d like to see emphasis on the secret ballot. I’d vote for that platform like I’d vote for FPTP reform.

I would too, actually; if polling places where selected at random then pared down by population density and there were mandatory voting holidays.

The voting place where I was got fucking annihilated by population density on the weekend and I'm not even in the city, it was actually faster to drive out into the country then drive back than to wait in line in the 'burbs.

Curious: are there any serious studies/papers/books/etc. on what constitutes beauty and physical attractiveness, particularly for women? (Would also be fine w/ a personal write-up). I'm interested in something relatively layman, but not boring party line platitudes like "beauty is subjective" and such (or, OTOH, incel-adjacent dorks sperging on about "canthial tilt" and such crap.[1])

For a while now... I've been feeling disoriented about my inability to verbalize when I find a specific person physically attractive, beyond broad, almost-meaningless (and shallow—makes me feel vaguely uncultured) descriptors like "thin", "good face" or "young". It's like I'm lacking control, unable to even articulate what I feel; it's a very torturous feeling.

[1] perhaps I'm being uncharitable here. But I'll admit I do feel an almost-atavistic sense of disgust toward them, for reasons I cannot really fully articulate why (but is perhaps related to their being incel = low social value, ergo disgusting, or something crude like that...yeah, I know. Irrational me 😿)

Survival of the Prettiest, the Science of Beauty (book) talks about the different features we find attractive (primarily in women). The reasons we like paleness, certain body ratios, symmetry, etc. Mostly it boils down to neoteny, health, and sexual dimorphism.

It also talks about how you can exaggerate those features and end up with Jessica Rabbit, who technically looks ridiculous, but she still seems sexy. I guess all of anime bears out those tendencies as well.

For a while now... I've been feeling disoriented about my inability to verbalize when I find a specific person physically attractive, beyond broad, almost-meaningless (and shallow—makes me feel vaguely uncultured) descriptors like "thin", "good face" or "young". It's like I'm lacking control, unable to even articulate what I feel; it's a very torturous feeling.

Read old poetry. We used to have language to talk about all those things. About what kinds of eyes, noses, cheeks, skin tones, hair, the poet found beautiful. In these degenerate times, we stopped talking about Aquiline faces and just ask whether you're a tits guy or an ass guy.

This sounds like a good idea, perhaps it's just a lack of vocabulary. Do you have any specific suggestions? Not well-acquainted with poetry in general; older poetry even less so.

The ‘cel adjacent stuff is rarely entirely wrong, it’s just that obsessing over your wrist diameter or canthal tilt / whether you have ‘hunter eyes’ is extremely personally destructive behavior.

In general, most people without physical deformities are at least moderately attractive (facially) with clear skin, low body fat, symmetrical features, small noses, high cheekbones and a defined chin/jaw (the last thing in part determined by body fat anyway). The other stuff is relevant at the extremes but obsessing over it is, as I said, destructive.

Body type preferences seem to have more variation but in general again not being fat, wide hips and ‘curves’ for women, height and shoulder width for men are probably the most important things.

What's always confused me is where beauty becomes subjective. I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.

Where it gets confusing is wondering how many other people see the women I find attractive the same way I see Margot Robie. When I look at the row of canonical "10s" (sorry, "9.5s") linked at /r/truerateme I'd swap their placing with the 7s. For example Taylor Hill (whoever she is) could be an average checkout assistant. I say that because I used to work as a checkout assistant and had half a dozen colleagues who were more attractive and I still wouldn't have rated them as "1 in 50,000 ultra attractive top tier super models". Taylor Hill looks directly comparable to Summer Glau but with a slightly lower hairline, but Summer Glau is rated as 5.5 there!

I suppose no matter which way you cut it there will always be a degree of subjectivity that can't be captured in an objective description.

The best method I can think of to begin to start getting a handle on the matter would be to have people subjectively rank the set of faces in that chart and then figure out where the results overlap and where they split into groups who prefer different "types" that still share a lot of overlapping ratings within those types. Probably somewhere like that website (amihot.com? I can't remember) would also have a reasonable dataset. Until that question has more detail the "beauty is subjective" platitudes make an important, if overstated, point.

I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.

I get the same feeling, which is why I’m sympathetic to the idea that what we are “socialized” to find attractive and what we actually find attractive are two different things.

In a way, this is to her benefit. I can’t see Barbie being as successful as it was if the lead was distractingly attractive like some other Hollywood actresses.

I haven't bothered to see Barbie, but I respect Margot Robie as an actress; she's very skilled, and as a person seems very vivacious. I agree that most of her appeal and talent is lost in stills; she moves amazingly.

But Florence Pugh's couple seconds of having her tits out in Oppenheimer did way more for me that Margot ever has.

A confounding factor is that she’s no spring chicken at this point, well on the wrong side of 30.

You’ve also likely seen her engaged in various degrees of hoetry across multiple films, which may have killed any sort of warm feeling you might otherwise have had toward her, potentially even inducing a sense of male ick.

I've seen a lot of women a lot older than Robbie engaged in a lot more unattractive roles that I nevertheless find much more attractive. It's not about age or the reputation of the characters she plays, it's about having different levels of response even if the subject is objectively "beautiful".

When I see Katey Sagal or Monica Belluci playing mama bear to a crime family I don't consider that their character is dangerous and low class, or that the actress is in her 50s. I see an attractive mediterranean brunette with nice tits. That's my type. When I see Robbie I see a photogenic blonde woman with an average body. That's a nice type, I can see that, but it's not mine.

One thing about Robbie is that I think she's more videogenic than photogenic -- looking at an image search she doesn't look like anything special, but in the moving pictures she's quite good at portraying hotness. This is a valuable trait for a movie actress I imagine.

Are y’all really this age-obsessed? There’s plenty of actresses in their 40s who I still find extremely attractive. Amy Adams is 49 and is still substantially more attractive to me than Margot Robbie

A fairer comparison would be comparing Robbie to her younger self. I would say she's significantly more attractive in Wolf of Wall Street than she was in Barbie.

Amy Adams has aged extremely well, no doubt about that.

Truerateme’s chart is literally just the personal preference of the guy who made it. The ‘10s’ are all pretty, certainly, but everything above 8 is completely arbitrary.

That's how I understood it, which is fine if it's understood as such but from what I've seen he vigorously mods anyone with a different opinion from his "true" ratings. I'd say the arbitrariness is already beginning at the 3s, but that only speaks to my point about teasing out personal preferences from broader agreement.

It's a bit of a wasted opportunity because that sub isn't exactly unknown so it shouldn't be too hard for him to put together a survey, pin it to the top of the sub, and gather a statistically valid amount of responses. I suspect that there'd be some interesting disparities where some people really like certain types that others are basically indifferent to.

Maybe not what you’re looking for, but the most accurate heuristic I found is “health” broadly (inclusive to sexual fitness). So you can understand bodily attraction this way — fat in the right places is conducive to healthy children (the fat stores are transferred to the child), good skin quality is conducive to hormonal bonding with a child which takes place from skin contact, face can signal someone’s mental health. Then there’s “personality” which usually comes down to high energy (a consequence and costly signal of health) and stress resilience (a consequence of health). Innocence can be attractive because it means a woman is capable of a healthy level of sexual bonding, and at the same time a dominant personality can be attractive because it signals good health and high energy and high stress resilience. I haven’t found one thing commonly considered attractive that does not signal health. Even gait signals health and you can diagnose mental status by someone’s gait. Dressing beautifully means the intelligence to discern beauty from ugliness which actually requires skill in pattern-matching (there’s a reason humans under 16 will usually dress silly).

I'm not sure of a source that is both serious and targeted at layman. Awhile ago, possibly on a related forum, there was a thread discussing the pair of articles "Why Are Women Hot?" and "Dispelling Beauty Lies: The Truth About Feminine Beauty".

I'm pretty sure not everything claimed in those pieces is supported by the academic literature. There are a bunch of academic studies, though it's unclear how repeatable the results are. From memory, generally people prefer faces that are close to but not exactly symmetric. Composite images of population average faces score highly, but not highest, on attractiveness. People tend to approach a "8s" with traits they find particularly compelling rather than "10s."

I'm pretty sure not everything claimed in those pieces is supported by the academic literature. There are a bunch of academic studies, though it's unclear how repeatable the results are. From memory, generally people prefer faces that are close to but not exactly symmetric. Composite images of population average faces score highly, but not highest, on attractiveness. People tend to approach a "8s" with traits they find particularly compelling rather than "10s."

This actually meshes well with what "J. Sanilac" writes. In my opinion, both men and women having an individual "type" when it comes to faces is the more important message than "men overwhelmingly prefer figure-eight female bodies". The typical heart-shaped face that is common in AI-generated art is attractive, but it doesn't make you go "hnnng" if you know what I mean.

People tend to approach a "8s" with traits they find particularly compelling rather than "10s."

This is something like what the old OKCupid blog found. There, it was that people whose physical attractiveness ratings averaged out as an "8" did much much better if that "8" was an average of very high and much lower ratings than if it was a simple low-variance "everyone rated them 8/10". Their hypothesis was that it was a game theory thing, that each person has better odds going after someone they find uniquely attractive rather than someone who is equally generally attractive ... but based on the data in this other blog post I can't rule out the hypothesis that everybody was just disproportionately messaging their own personal 9s and 10s and the general 8s were thus at the back of a lot of lines.

OKCupid blog found.

I think that is the source I was thinking of. I'm glad my description was at least accurate enough to dig up the correct post. It's a bit tricky to recall nowadays, especially since so many of the original blog posts have been memory holed.

Going to second “Dispelling Beauty Lies”. The guy who wrote it gives off serious quack energy, but pretty much everything in the article rings obviously true to me.

His whole deal on twitter seems to be tilting at strawmen. He seems to think he's addressing women who could be curvy sex goddesses but instead choose to be flat-chested stick-girls.

The reality is that nobody has that much control over their body shape. Keira Knightly isn't going to become Christina Hendricks just by putting on a few pounds. They're both working with what genetics gave them.

Women already know that curves are attractive.

Although he is right about long hair.

The reality is that nobody has that much control over their body shape.

Or do they? He quite specifically calls out stick-girls and tells them to get a titjob and wear skirts that flare out instead of emphasizing how much they resemble a closet door.

Nolan got kicked off the Pizza Party Podcast almost three years ago, so it's certainly "old news" at this point, but a comic someone made about the incident surfaced on my Twitter feed this weekend, as someone was using it to illustrate the concept of fetish mining to people who are unaware.

The first link is the original posting (AFAIK) of the comic. The second is what appeared on my feed. I'm including the second because the person's bio says "Transmale Aro Ace/ He-They", which is interesting given the circumstances.

I'm starting to lose track of grooming and why it's bad.

My understanding is that grooming is the act influencing kids to make decisions they're not prepared to make, with the implicit understanding that they technically won't make these decisions until they've reached the age of consent, even though they've already been acclimated to the concept for years prior. This is why some consider teaching kids about gender to be a form of grooming, and why an adult talking to a minor with no clear intent of romance is seen as potential grooming.

Commissioning an underage artist to draw a character wrapped in a spiderweb is so many steps removed from sex that, regardless of whether the commissioner gets off on it, I don't know why it's any worse than just talking to the child about cartoons. Nolan was openly talking to children on social media before he was #cancelled because most of the fans of the podcast were children. It only became a problem when he commissioned artwork for his niche fetish from them.

If anyone can provide a steelman against Nolan that isn't based on disgust, I'd be interested in hearing it.

(Also, I don't think grooming is a black or white thing, a "you did it or you didn't do it" thing. There's no clear line that makes something grooming or not grooming. Defining it by intent is pointless, because you can't prove intent, and defining it by outcome means that you can't identify grooming until it's come to pass. It's always a judgement call, unlike actual child molestation, which I'm sure we can all agree refers to engaging in a necessarily sexual act with a child.)

If I have an apple fetish - I get off on pictures of bright, shiny apples - and I especially liked having kids draw me pictures of bright, shiny apples, then clearly there is no direct "damage" being done to the kids, and there is nothing wrong with pictures of apples. But I think people aware of my fetish would be rightfully disturbed that I wanted to involve children in providing kink fuel. Regardless of whether I had any intention of "cranking it up," as that cartoon puts it, it's definitely a valid concern. If I just want to get off on apples, why I am bringing kids into it?

If I just want to get off on apples, why I am bringing kids into it?

You probably aren't actually bringing kids into it, you probably just happened to ask an underage artist because there are a lot of underage artists, and various internet users imagined you were disproportionately asking kids because 'sex + kids' sets people off.

So the argument isn't that he's doing any harm in the present, but that his decision to solicit children to produce his artwork, rather than adults, is a red flag. That makes sense.

So the argument isn't that he's doing any harm in the present, but that his decision to solicit children to produce his artwork, rather than adults, is a red flag.

If I send you an email claiming to be a Nigerian prince who will pay you millions for your banking info, one could say that I haven't harmed you yet. In the same way, when I put a worm on a hook and cast it into the water, I haven't harmed the fish yet. And yet, both the email and the baited hook are preparation for harm, and when that harm can be foreseen, people want to treat it harshly.

Grooming is a general term for older or more socially-influential people building inappropriate relationships with younger or more socially-vulnerable people, where the latter end up vulnerable to exploitation. It is used without controversy to refer to gang recruitment of adolescents, cult recruitment, relationship abuse, and a variety of other contexts. Fraud and scams commonly exhibit the same psychological tricks, and in all these cases, the problem is well-understood and entirely uncontroversial: maneuvering people into positions where they can be easily exploited is bad in and of itself, and nothing good comes of it.

The red-flag works on two levels. At the object level, you cannot be sure that @Amadan specifically and his specific apple arrangement will remain purely channeled as he describes without any leaks.

On a broader level you are regularlizing and normalizing a fundamentally very unstable system. Providing open channels for to regularly interact with adults in two-way exchanges and providing, while normalizing adults requesting erotic-adjacent material from the former group, and destygmatizing then entire frame work around eprsonal kink shame, is basically asking for abuse all over the place.

One of the biggest concepts of conservatism vs liberalism is maintainance of the broad social value of institutional infrastructure and moral framework. When you erode that because isolated instances don't cause harm, you ignore that the only way to allow those isolated "harmless" incidents was to either open the same exact gate that does allow the harm or to be coupled with an extreme totalitarian surveillance against any harm.

Essentially you can't have safe, high trust neighborhoods, and no locks, and no social reprecussions for trespassers. You can only pick two. But the trespasser then points to harmless trespassing and uses something somethign "moral disgust" as a frame for why proscribing trespassing is arbirary.

You have a fence, a chesterton's fence. And some people believe they should be able to harmlessly pass through the fence. It is in fact an affront to their freedom that they cannot. Of course there are people who would do harm if they could pass the fence. So your choices are to 1. keep the fence, 2. remove the fence and accept, address, or police the harm on the other side of it, or 3. Put a high security gate in the fence.

Any version of 3 that still let's harm through is just a flavor of 2.

One might, in an appeal to liberty suggest that 2 is the only righteous solution. OK, make that argument, though I vehemently disagree. But we cannot frame 1 as simple disgust, aesthetics or moral dogmatism.

Some people, conservatives and progressives, prefer to live in a society with strong hegemonic barriers against harm whilest allowing a different kind of freedom and security inside the society dependent on that scaffolding.

On another level, this is probably your 'moral disgust' level. Regardless of whether @Amadan 's example would ever harm someone, what he is doing in the hypothetical is disordered. And is further involving a minor in their disordered act and there should be the highest reasonable obstacles from him doing so. Different definitions of reasonable are going to be socially navigated (you'll have burka's in one culture and open decadence coupled with a Terms of Service click through in another). I don't think reducing this social proscription to disgust or aversion tells the whole picture, remotely.

Essentially you can't have safe, high trust neighborhoods, and no locks, and no social reprecussions for trespassers.

What, exactly, is the point in having a high trust society if you still need to act as if you're living in a low trust society?

The point is that you don't if there are social repercussions for trespassers. High trust society doesn't mean no consequences society.

Essentially you can't have safe, high trust neighborhoods, and no locks, and no social reprecussions for trespassers. You can only pick two. But the trespasser then points to harmless trespassing and uses something somethign "moral disgust" as a frame for why proscribing trespassing is arbirary.

Brilliant analogy. Thank you for your post. I'd aware a delta if we did that here.

This isn't the first time I'm seeing this 'moral disgust / aesthetics' dismissal in this kind of space, and it's nothing more than the intersection between a strawman, question begging, and isolated demand for rigor.

Are you interested in following the causal logic of an outcomes and effects argument? Then ask that plainly. Are you interested in hearing someone defend the issue deontologically? Then ask that plainly Are you're really intereted in someone's basic beliefs in their moral framework? Then why conveniently begin the discussion, dismissively, with an issue you disagree with.

All moral arguments will ultimately fall into essentially 1 of 4 categories, beneath the level of basic beleifs: theological / deist, arbitrary nihilism, aesthetic, or motivated self interest.

Even if you are Mr. Consequentialist, you eventually have to argue 'why' the good outcome deserves the term 'good', and you have one of the four options to pick from above. And all four of these can arguably collapse into the others (or lack of other).

"Ha! Your perception of good and bad is based on 'aesthetics'!" Isn't quite the trump one might thing it is.

theological / deist, arbitrary nihilism, aesthetic, or motivated self interest.

What about group interest? Even if I'm selfish enough to prefer "I get to steal stuff and my targets get to suck it" as a moral rule, I obviously can't negotiate for that, and "nobody gets to steal stuff" is a much better Schelling point for me than "everybody gets to steal stuff". Technically "nobody gets to steal stuff" is still motivated by self-interest, since I'm picking what's better for me among realistic alternatives, but it still seems like it belongs in a different category than the "I get to steal stuff" rule.

And all four of these can arguably collapse into the others

Though this still seems true, for all five of these. In particular in this context, we can have evolved to feel disgust at things we expect to violate group interests, and we can have negotiated group interests that include effort to avoid triggering group members' innate disgust reactions.

I'm not sure I have enough of this context, though. I don't know who any of these people are, and when I google nolan "pizza party podcast" fetish the top video hit is "The DIAPER FETISH SONIC Special", which appears to open with the "Superfuckers" theme song. This is the show where "most of the fans of the podcast were children"? Perhaps I'm not giving it a fair shake, closing that window 10 seconds after clicking the Youtube link, but frankly I'm just hoping that Google and Youtube respect my incognito window and don't corrupt future search results or algorithm recommendations.

I'll start by saying I'm no philosopher. But as you describe since, these can all collapse into eachother (in postive or negative formulation), I don't see why you couldn't have five. I'm going to flippantly call these all different faces of "The Axiom", some starting point of the good that's self-justifying in some way.

That said, I was personally thinking of group interest as essentially in terms of self-interest. Where I was going with self-interest was "this moral / value proposition" isn't based on some extrinsic good, but on what outcome I prefer. So if one thinks that said given moral proposition isn't based on some theistic derivation, isn't arbitrary, isn't derived from some evo-psych or naturalistic attraction, then it's motivated self-interest.

That said, again, I see no reason, this couldn't be expanded out as a fifth face.

I appreciate your response and aspire to your level of rationalism. I'd say I'm most interested in following the causal logic of an outcomes and effects argument, though I wouldn't mind the other three.

Moral disgust, like other kinds of disgust, is often best recognized as a heuristic. A general heuristic that [people who get off on kids' behavior are disgusting and dangerous to children] is a good one. Such people are far, far more likely to be predators than your average person.

That makes sense. And if you place a higher value on protecting children than on not shaming adults for their behavior, then I can see why shaming Nolan would be seen as justified. If I understand you correctly, the steelman wouldn't be that he hurt anyone or was trying to, but that there needs to be an enforcement mechanism to disincentivize this behavior. Am I correct?

if you place a higher value on protecting children than on not shaming adults for their behavior

This is a fundamentally different worldview than mine. "Shame" is a strong word, but I think consequences (including social) for people's actions benefit those people in the long run more often than not. Whether [shaming adults for their behavior] is negative at all has to do with what that behavior actually is, independent of any other factors.

If I understand you correctly, the steelman wouldn't be that he hurt anyone or was trying to, but that there needs to be an enforcement mechanism to disincentivize this behavior. Am I correct?

I'd abstract a level further. Sexual abuse of children is bad (citation needed). We want to prevent it, so we disincentivize actions likely to lead to it. Involving kids in personal communication online is already bad enough, but then to make that communication sexual is way over the line, whether or not it actually leads to predation.

Other commentors have done a better job at describing this than me but honestly I'm puzzled what part of this is confusing at all to you.

Because I had a hard time imagining how the spider web thing would translate into him harming an actual child. They were very segregated in my mind, and my immediate revulsion towards anything that looks like cancel culture prevented my attempt to understand the steps involved in extrapolating harm from an abstract fetish.

So, what are you reading?

I'm rereading Watts' The Way of Zen. It's one of the most profound books I've read, though it is an idiosyncratic view of Zen, which he admits. This time I'm taking notes.

Paper I'm reading: Riskin's The Naturalist and the Emperor, a Tragedy in Three Acts; or, How History Fell Out of Favor as a Way of Knowing Nature.

I just ordered four books from EBay: Beloved, The Count of Monte Cristo, Nixonland, and Snow Crash, the latter two of which I believe I received recommendations for on this forum. I spun the roulette wheel and started with Beloved, got three pages in and said, nope this one can wait. I pivoted to Snow Crash and also found the first 50 or so pages painfully dull. But I’m now about a quarter of the way through and am slightly more intrigued. Looking forward to all of them.

Count of Monte Cristo is in my top 5. Hopefully you got the translation by Robin Buss from Penguin Classics. The older public domain translations are very antiquated.

I pivoted to Snow Crash and also found the first 50 or so pages painfully dull.

I thought that was the intent of Hero Protagonist as a character.

Beloved is incredible but definitely not a fun read. Snow Crash i thought was mega fun but I think I was hooked earlier in.

I finally read the Anabasis, wow what a work. I don't know how I missed it up to now.

Now I'm debating diving back into Clarissa or getting back into Kapital as my new ebook.

I'm reading Emanuel Mayer's The Ancient Middle Classes - I happened to travel with Professor Mayer some time ago, and learned a tremendous amount about Classical urbanism, art, and life in that time, most of which I've not encountered in my other history reading. Heard he had a book published, so naturally decided to give it a look. Also dipping into the print version of Land's Xenosystems published by West Martian Press, a great little outlet which I encourage Urbit folks, dissidents, and internet weirdos to support.

The Ancient Middle Classes

What an interesting sounding book, thanks for the recommendation

I'm reading The Essential Jung which is a compilation of Jung's work by Anthony Storr. Jung is pretty mind-blowing, even though I've heard a lot of hype he definitely lives up to it, and then some. I'm shocked Freud still gets so much cred for his work in psychology, because my admittedly early understanding of Jung makes his work far more important and far-reaching than Freud.

I've finished all 2300+ translated chapters of Reverend Insanity and it's left me with a gaping void in my soul. I crave more, and I'm planning to start the author's other work, Infinite Bloodcore. Fuck the CCP for forcing him to terminate RI, especially at a cliffhanger.

Wait they forced him to terminate it??? Why?

They were cracking down on politically incorrect web novels, and his promoted a particularly nihilistic worldview in their opinion, leaving aside that he had thinly veiled allegories to real life and politics in there.

Baen has a DRM-free collection of Poul Anderson science-fiction stories on sale. I'm reading The High Crusade, an entertaining book where a pack of medieval Englishmen preparing to fight in the Crusades happen to catch a landed alien spacecraft by surprise, fly it back to the aliens' nearest colony, and defeat the entire alien civilization.

Data science is genuinely so fun with ChatGPT 4, Copilot and a decent modern GPU. Interesting paper, but no public GitHub/code. Pasted in 2000 words about their pipeline mostly copied from the paper, GPT 4 reproduced the (relatively complex) pipeline perfectly (in that I was getting almost identical results to the paper). Once I was having issues and I guess image support isn’t yet accessible (for me) in the OpenAI API, so I described (in a paragraph) a diagram and it understood it first attempt.

Copilot makes importing and processing data a joke, I guess there are probably more advanced ways to do it but I literally just #comment what I want it to do, press Enter, and press Tab, and it mostly figures it out. Tell it to make some interesting visualizations, it writes them, ask a query about the data, it can answer it. I’ve also been using copilot to generate clean CSVs from shoddy or otherwise messed up data that would be a nightmare to clean manually.

One of the best uses is finding old papers from pre-2015, pulling the original dataset if it’s public, briefly explaining to ChatGPT what the structure of the data and experiment is (I’ve tried this with copilot and it works sometimes, but actual ChatGPT (4) is more consistent, there are also people who have tried to automate this with the GPT API, but when I tried this code the results were inferior for some papers), and then just asking it to rewrite the approach a modern pipeline. Admittedly I guess this means a late 2021 pipeline given the GPT training set, but it’s enough to yield huge improvements in predictive performance.

I think this has underscored how much of the value moving forward will be in raw data. Foundational models with automated tuning will be used for everything, and LLMs will be able to tune, clean, prepare and modify code to make them work. “AI” is going to be cheap beyond compute costs, which will come down hugely anyway if everyone’s using the same small number of pretrained models (part of the reason why I think Nvidia’s bull run is going to end in tears) and software engineers are increasingly automated.

Instead, the money might well be in people who can navigate bureaucracies to acquire data, or who can collect/generate it themselves. I guess this explains Elon’s obsession with trying to prevent AI companies scraping Twitter, although anything online is going to be a free-for-all except the very largest datasets that people might pay for (sometimes). Niche datasets that you can’t just find on the internet or pull from Kaggle are going to valuable, especially because they might only be saleable once or a few times. The ‘AI layer’, critical though it is, will be almost impossible to make margin on if you’re not a bigtech, all the margin will be in the data itself.

(Also, how funny that I should have learned how to program like 3 months before it ceased to be useful)

Do you have a good CoPilot guide ?

I use it with VSCode, but I feel like I don't use it to the fullest of its abilities. It pretty much just serves as a worse GPT-4 for me.

Are you following the basics by using explicit/obvious function names and descriptive docstrings to start off with ?

I'm a data scientist/engineer and I use Gpt a lot. Like probably 95% of the code I wrote in the last 6 months was drafted by Gpt.

It's made a lot of things that would have been a 6-month-long NLP project into 2-3 day projects (the dev ops timeline is also much shorter because we just use the Openai API). And the results are far far superior. NLP projects are a breeze now and some things that were just straight impossible a few months back are easily done in a week or two (RLHF helps). It's actually amazing. I can't be spilling trade secrets but I can assure you with a bit of creativity you can get a lot more done than just making a chatbot or text summarizer (we use it in production for 5 different tasks that used to be done by people, our CEO is kind enough (can afford to) to keep them around for now, albeit with different responsibilities).

I do feel the need to defend the honor of my profession here given you have spoken about how we might just get the boot because Gpt can automate us away.. Color me this. Who do you think people are turning to to make things with GPT? I might even put "Prompt Engineer" in my LinkedIn bio soon.

Also, for NOW, it's not as simple as;

Hey GPT, here's the problem.. solve it!

It's more like.

Hmm this problem can be broken down into steps A,B,C,D...

GPT, write me code to do A -> GPT write me code do to do B ... NO! NOT LIKE THAT -> Write me code to do ...

When you have to deal with real-world data and not stuff you download from Kaggle. There are database connections to make (and no tech lead in his right mind is going to let you connect to the database with an external API that you post to somewhere in the code !!), queries to be batched because the replica db times out, json parsers to be written because the field you want is within 15 nested jsons, etc; It's an impediment if you let it take the wheel.

I really wanted Code Interpreter to be useful for things past the simplest of Exploratory Analysis, but I don't think good EDA code that asks the right questions (the answers to which make money), is open-sourced. . Once again, it's alright. But its analysis skills are that of an undergrad who took 2 stats courses and uses techniques from the 1980s. I don't expect Gpt to become competent at statistics anytime soon given most of its training data is written by amateurs ( Good Data Science code is usually not open-sourced for obvious reasons).

And seriously, the above cannot be understated. In an ideal world, Data Scientists don't exist for writing import pandas and wrangling the shit out of that Data Frame. They exist for the same reason plumbers do...

A plumber charges $100 to fix a hot water heater by hitting it once with a hammer. The home owner, incensed by such a bill for a simple action, demands the plumber justify it. The breakdown is: $1 hammer strike, $99 knowing where to strike.

Gpt 5 might know where to strike. But Im not going to hold my breath because for a lack of training data.

I do feel the need to defend the honor of my profession here given you have spoken about how we might just get the boot because Gpt can automate us away.. Color me this. Who do you think people are turning to to make things with GPT? I might even put "Prompt Engineer" in my LinkedIn bio soon.

I mostly agree with you, but I could also see software engineers going the way of the draftsmen: There used to be a huge sector that focused entirely on taking an engineer's ideas, and turning them into drawings on paper so they could be handed out to the clients. Then Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) software came about, productivity skyrocketed, and the demand for drawings rose modestly. Now there's a small sector focused on drafting, and some fraction engineers do their own drafting in the design stage.

Let's use your example of 40-60x increases in productivity, and imagine that competition keeps salaries at their current level. What if demand for software products only increases by 1000% due to the reduced job prices? The field could shrink to one fifth the size and still meet demand.

This is fascinating, and makes me want to play with data via these tools. I just wish I had an idea of how to get data to answer certain questions, or a better understanding of the infrastructure. Got any data science primers laying around?

Got any data science primers laying around?

Pick up a statistics textbook.

GPT itself is great here, it can very easily (and while explaining as much or as little as you want at every step along the way) guide you through the entire thing, from having a question about data through programming the project and to making pretty charts and interpreting them at the end.

Otherwise TowardsDataScience is good for lots of basics, and if you’re working with text skimming The NLTK Book (a free online thing) is good for understanding the basics of language-oriented ML/data science although a lot of it is currently being made obsolete by modern language models.

What are some great first date ideas? What worked for you guys? Previously I've taken girls to the museum and I think that's fine -- you can always talk about the art if conversation stalls, and it segues very well into getting coffee or iced-cream afterward. Part of me is worried that it's too boring or conventional though -- maybe something with some light activity involved?

On that note, I've recently moved to the UK so punting doesn't seem like such a bad idea for a date -- Lord knows I've seen plenty of couples doing it near my neck of the woods.

The first couple dates are about proving to her that you aren't a fucking phsyco that's going to cook and eat her toes; so something very in public but not involved with the public. A place where you can be seen by other people but don't have to interact with them. Museums are good, going to markets or art shows, the Zoo, the Beach, the Park, etc.

I've blown it before by trying out my favorite thing, which is going on a mountain walk with my dog. Everybody likes dogs and mountains and walks; or at least everyone I'm willing to try tolerating. What's no to like?

The fact that she doesn't know me and I invited her into the murder zone; to a really good place to star in a true crime drama where they find her earrings in a pile of coyote scat. You gotta save that second location shit for the fourth date at least!

Where are you meeting these women? I am quite bad at picking up women through my mostly STEMbrained male social circle and have only cold-approached a few times but I have been on several online dates. Best strategy I've found is first a bigger bar somewhere in the city (sit at the bar) and then a more intimate one closer to your place (where you sit in a booth and can hold her hand/kiss her), both on the first date. Alcohol is a social lubricant and gives her another reason to rationalize sleeping with you quickly. And yes, that is important in online dating because you'll have lots of competition who won't be afraid to move fast. I think the whole idea that it's better to take time and build up to making her feel butterflies in her stomach only applies to someone you met more organically. In the online dating world, strike while the iron is hot or the whole situation will lose momentum.

Edit: mandatory disclaimer that these dates were all in big American cities and dating culture might be different in Britain

Where are you meeting these women?

Church.

I assume you're in Cambridge or Oxford (does anywhere else do punting?). But yes, it's a great date idea. Followed by drinks.

My general advice would be to take her to more than one location. That makes it feel like more than one date and so makes it seem like the relationship has progressed further in the same amount of time. Plus, changing locations makes the experience more novel and allows you to show that you can make decisions. Your best bet is to have a few options lined up and then 'spontaneously' pick one at the time.

I'm near Cambridge. When I first saw it I knew it was a good date idea. Of course, coffee or ice-cream or lunch are easy to tack on afterward, especially if the day is hot and we want a break from the weather. So changing venues shouldn't be an issue.

(Some of the other comments in this thread are straight wild. I can't tell if they're LARPing, triple-nested irony or finewine shitposting, or just ChatGPT hallucinations.)

TLDR on how heterosexual women choose mates can be reduced to "social proof." This isn't all encompassing, but it's the single most important factor. The more you can put yourself in an environment with demonstrable social proof the better. I've written about this before, sorry for the self-link.

I think a lot of guys screw up the first date by making it far too 1-on-1 and not somehow building in that social proof. In my experience, there is a very simple way to get reliable massive social proof without having to stress on logistics or complex arrangements:

Become a regular at a bar.

A couple ground rules. 1. The bar has to be a pretty fancy cocktail bar or hipster style joint. Think rough wood paneling, low lighting, and a bearded gent who knows too much about agave plants behind the bar. 2. You don't become a regular by showing up a few times on your own and getting hammered and tipping heavy.

Here's how you become a regular:

  1. You have to spend time (and money) going in on off hours and figuring out which bartender works on core date nights (Thur, Fri, Sat). The economics of bars being what they are, it's pretty rare for even the "Prime Time" bartenders to not work at least one afternoon shift. I find luck on Sundays and Tuesdays the most. You go in right after work (or as early as about 4pm if you can work remote or have the flexibility). Sit at the bar, get the menu etc. etc.

  2. Have a personality and interesting things to talk about. I know this can be very difficult. Here are some tips - start out by asking their recommendation for a drink / cocktail. They're going to recommend something that's pretty inoffensive (usually a slight modification to a basic manhattan, martini, or old fashioned and their various tequila cousins). If they ask what you like, have an answer ready. When they make it, compliment it and find a road to go down. What does that mean? Don't say "oh, it's fruity!" or "oh, yeah, I like that!" Those are dead ends. Make an observation, and then make an extending comment on that observation; "There's some smokiness in there ... what's another drink where there's more of that (or) what can complement smokiness (or) do people like that smokiness." Oh, goodness, you've just started a conversation. Remember when I said that you should look for a fancy spot where the guy behind the bar knows a lot about agave / bourbon or whatever? This is because if you can differentiate your comment on the drink enough, you can get that guy to shoulder the conversation for the next 30 minutes by letting him go on and on about .... whatever. Listen, ask leading questions, offer light opinions ("I never really liked whiskey because I think it has a bad aftertaste" is fine "GIN IS FOR PUSSIES" is not). Just ... talk.

  3. Ask the guy when he's on again (meaning, when he's working again). Show back up, do the same thing. You'll know you've made a (good) impression if they start saying "What's up, dude?" after you've walked in but before you've sat down. You'll know you're really in if they start to make you custom drinks without prompting to see what your reaction is.

3a. I wouldn't recommend this step if you haven't done this kind of thing before, but I just recently did it at a new bar I've been checking out and it was a lot of fun. If the bartender works an off evening (Tuesday/Wednesday night for instance) and you can afford the day off / hangover the next day - go in and just get hammered. Because it's an off night, it should be slow and they're likely to drink a little bit with you, comp a couple rounds, and open up the conversation topics a little more. This is kind of a "stars have to align" move, but, if you can pull it off, it's awesome.

After regularly (you know, like a regular) showing up to this bartenders shifts for three - four weeks, AND maintaining a good rolling conversation, you're set. Now back to dates and where the fun comes in.

You setup the date to meet at the bar for casual drinks. That's not hard and it's seems a little basic however She'll do the research on the bar and find out that, at the least, it's a trendy cocktail bar and she's not going to some horrible sports / dive bar with awful bathrooms and warm beer. But the magic happens when the two of you walk in and your partner in crime, the bartender, says, "What's up, TollBooth?!" and means it. You'll probably get a better seat at the bar than what the host/hostess would default to. Bartenders interact with and watch people for a living so he'll understand it's a date right off the bat. You're golden. From here, just have a normal conversation with your date and enjoy things like the following, ranked in order of most to least likely:

  • Off menu drinks (that aren't anything special, but the "off menu"-ness makes them appear so)
  • Unordered (but free) appetizers or deserts
  • Unsolicited comments about how funny / wild / smart / "different" you are from the bartender to your date
  • Totally made up stories the bartender tells to wingman you
  • Even more outlandish lies like "Yeah, last time TollBooth was in here, I ended up serving him like four drinks that these girls were buying him, it was crazy."

You have to remember that at these craft cocktail places, the over-knowledgeable bartender is running the show in the eyes of the patrons (it's actually still probably either the head chef or just the GM who's really doing it, but, whatever). So, in the eyes of your date, the most "important dude" in the building is now pumping you up like a hype man. Your date will feel like she's in the center of the attention of the place without feeling like there's a spotlight on her. She gets to feel self-satisfied that she's snagged the most popular dude. What's more, because the bartender is going to make sure service is snappy, it can even come across like you've got some sort of special pull and the dinner is somehow just better than it could be anywhere else. She'll be telling her friends about it and just drink in their envy. Your friendly bartender will also act as a constant refrain point for the conversation if you hit a weird silent phase and run out of things to say. "Rodrigo is such a cool dude," can be said again and again to restart the conversation, and it's also a subtle cue of "remember my social proof."

After the date, you do what you want. After many years of operating out of the cut-and-dry bachelor dating playbook, I don't try to move towards sex. I don't care. I want to see if I've actually captured durable attention (which is the most fought over commodity nowadays, right?) and, more importantly, if I enjoyed the conversation, feel some chemistry and compatibility, and genuinely want to see her again. Maybe a quick kiss or something and then it's part ways / separate Ubers.

Even more than dates, this works well for (casual) work dinners or happy hours. Although I'm a little hesitant to recommend it for client / sales meetings because some people get the wrong idea and think you're an alcoholic who shows up there everyday.

Some closing thoughts:

  • Why is the bartender actually doing this for you? One, by showing up regularly for a few weeks and many shifts before the date, you are spending some money and signalling you'll probably keep doing it. This is a transaction to an extent. The larger point, however, is that you made good conversation. 80% of bartender conversation is them listening to people talk about themselves and their own lives, or having to navigate petty small talk on sports, politics, and pop culture. And they're on their feet for 8 - 10 (or more hours). If you can break that monotony, they're going to love you.

  • Tip heavy always. This is a business.

  • Throughout this write-up, I've used "he" as the pronoun for the bartender and obviously assumed the bartender is male. That's the harder scenario.

You can do all of this with a female bartender too and, if you do, your date is guaranteed to end in fireworks.

I'm sure that works as you describe - cultivating a reputation, social proof, all of it, but doesn't it feel dishonest to its core? Like, the whole edifice is built on wanting to be seen as the kind of person who is a sociable regular at a fancy cocktail bar and not actually being that person. If you were that person, you'd already have such a place in your back pocket.

What is dishonest about it? Are you someone who hates cocktails and bars? Probably not. Don't veto something until you actually know if you'd be disgenuine about it.

Are you someone who hates cocktails and bars? Probably not.

I find this to be a bizarre assumption. Plenty of people hate cocktails and bars. I’m not someone who hates alcohol on principle, but the few times I have partaken in social drinking, I ended up making a fool of myself.

The idea that one should add alcohol to delicate high-stakes social situations strikes me as nothing less than pants-on-head retarded. How could that possibly end up going well?

I think the recommendation is to drink enough to loosen your inhibitions. Not enough to get drunk.

However, people obviously do not become authentic bar regulars instantly upon hitting drinking age. So when do you start?

Whenever you find a bar/bartender you like enough on their own merits to keep returning, I guess. More genuine, less transactional. Befriend the bartender because you enjoy their company, not because you need to acquire a bartender wingman.

I found just going on a walk somewhere was good. It allows for conversation and less awkward moments of silence. Also what is being observed on the walk can be a point of connection.

It depends on what you mean by "what worked"... If you mean quickly getting access into her pants and the next day very possibly being ghosted, or losing interest yourself, @Sloot seems to be on the right track, or at least of the same mind. Get her in a bikini and go to town, or whatever. If you are looking for something that might build some kind of relationship that lasts a relatively fun period of time and leaves you both feeling like you've contributed in some way to the net authenticity, and, even, romance of male/female interaction, I would rethink.

Alcohol is always an ice breaker, but can lead relatively quickly to undesirable outcomes. I once took a shockingly hot ballerina (mentioned only because I have a thing for ballerinas..I mean a ballerina!) out for dinner at what I thought would be a great restaurant that I had already decided was of good ambience. She said she wanted to eat meat (she was Japanese, this wouldn't have been an unusual thing to say). Only after arriving did I realize the Middle Eastern place I had chosen was largely devoid of any meat dishes. This was bad enough, but after my third glass of delicious red, I was in such an expansive frame of mind that I knocked the table with my knee and spilled wine all over both my side of the table and my left thigh. It's hard to charm one's way out of this kind of situation. It's like coming back from the bathroom wearing a jester cap and gamboling back tableside, then trying to take the cap off and act as if nothing were at all amiss.

Do you cook? If so, decide a menu. Pick her up and take her grocery shopping. Buy wine if you must. The more stops on the way the better, up until your butter begins melting of course. If you can shop and get home before anything has begun to spoil, you're fine. Now go back home (with her, to your own home. WHICH IS CLEAN.) Turn on some sort of music. She can choose, if you have some Spotify thing (when I was in my heyday in these matters I had CDs). Make the dinner together. Eat it. You may or may not successfully "bang her" but you'll get a sense of how well you get along.

NB: If you can't cook, do not do any of this. Also if you know absolutely nothing about this girl and have any expectation that you will not hit it off, you might go the coffee and Ferris Wheel or whatever route, just to guarantee an end point where both parties can gracefully escape.

Whatever you end up doing, and this is me saying too much and probably being presumptuous: Be into it. Feel good about it. Show a little excitement, or at least confidence (thus the caveat about cooking skill. If you are pretty sure you can't, don't.) Also I once had a girl stare at me as I was cutting broccoli and tell me I was doing it wrong. First date. I was in fact doing it wrong but not for my purposes at the time, which were to put it into a soup, but I didn't feel like explaining myself and anyway this was like a window into a future of misery. We had no second date and we did not "bang," though I remember being in a bed with her for some reason. Also the house or apartment being clean bit is essential. Especially the bathroom. Her apartment may be a pig sty and probably is, but do you care? No, you don't. She will, about yours. Fools will say just be yourself, dust bunnies behind the toilet and all. I say rise above.

If you are looking for something that might build some kind of relationship that lasts a relatively fun period of time and leaves you both feeling like you've contributed in some way to the net authenticity, and, even, romance of male/female interaction, I would rethink.

Completely disagree, will just copy+paste from my other comment:

Alcohol is a social lubricant and gives her another reason to rationalize sleeping with you quickly. And yes, that is important in online dating because you'll have lots of competition who won't be afraid to move fast. I think the whole idea that it's better to take time and build up to making her feel butterflies in her stomach only applies to someone you met more organically. In the online dating world, strike while the iron is hot or the whole situation will lose momentum.

There's really nothing about first date sex that would preclude a more meaningful relationship later on in my experience and those of my friends.

Do you cook? If so, decide a menu. Pick her up and take her grocery shopping. Buy wine if you must. The more stops on the way the better, up until your butter begins melting of course. If you can shop and get home before anything has begun to spoil, you're fine. Now go back home

Suggesting cooking dinner on a first date seems more like you're trying to sleep with her. I've done this on a 2nd date and did sleep with her and she was fully expecting that from the moment I suggested it. In fact I find it odd you didn't manage to (unless you were actively avoiding it).

Are we discussing online dating? That's a field I'm not at all familiar with, so I defer to those with experience.

You are probably right that a woman willfully crossing your threshold (I mean literally passing beneath the lintel of your doorway) is an indicator, though I would suggest it's an indicator less of "I am willing to have sex with you" as much as it is an indicator of trust in your behavior. And anyone met online might very reasonably lack such trust.

It may also, of, course, mean she is open to physical intimacy (including sex) but to just assume so strikes me as more PUA/Redpill dogma than anything resembling reality.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that you were wrong in your own assumptions regarding the 2nd date you mention; I'm sure you read all sorts of other signals and followed them to their conclusion.

I would also insert that I am probably adhering to more traditional norms and have assumptions and experiences based on the generation of women I came up with. I am not completely unfamiliar with one-night stands (again, always negotiated in my case via face-to-face meeting, not arranged via dating app or whatever) but I am also familiar with the very quick dissipation of passion that follows, especially if these assignations were fueled (or lubricated, to use your term) by alcohol.

That alcohol suppresses inhibition is of course news to no one. If you just want to get laid, sure, enjoy a few martinis together. You indicate surprise that I would make dinner for a woman and not then screw her, as if that were her tab for the meal. As a man, I don't think I can necessarily say with full confidence that I definitely would have had sex with any number of women (including broccoli girl) had I but reached out my hands to take, because who the hell knows what's in the heart of a woman? And I can count the times I myself have been propositioned on a few fingers, fewer still the times I have said no (though I have, and I don't think this should be surprising.) I say this only in response to your remark that you found it odd or surprising that I did not follow through with broccoli girl. She had annoyed me, and with more than just her vegetable prep tips. As for the bed memory, I recall the circumstances now and they're boring and have very little to do with sexy good times.

Breakfast out, the benefits of a meal but with the expectation you go separate ways for your day.

On that note, I've recently moved to the UK so punting doesn't seem like such a bad idea for a date

Instruction unclear; my date got tired and whiny after a few minutes of retrieving the footballs I kicked.

My go-to date is drinks at my place; no need to introduce unnecessary extra steps. Drinks at the pool of my building is always a great option too, location/season/time-of-day permitting. Pool dates are like catnip for chicks, as they are always eager to get photos of themselves in bikinis for social media. “If it involves a bikini, the answer is yes” reads many a girl’s online dating profile.

Plus, them having less clothing on means a smoother experience getting her naked once you’re back in the apartment/hotel room, and thus it leaves less time for her to think and it increases the general feeling of “omg like one thing just led to another and it just like happened!” for her.

One could also smoothly invite yourself over to her place and hope for visitor’s field advantage, if you deem your place insufficiently cool or there are any other obstacles. Their defenses are typically lower when presented with this idea relative to inviting her over to your place. On the other hand, this option might not be practical if she still lives with family. You also might not know if she lives with roommates and to what extent they might cock-block, inadvertently or not, or otherwise ruin the vibe.

Sometimes roommates can be worse cockblocks than parents. Mothers will often be pleasant, offer a quick chat, and then make herself scarce. Fathers will often just retreat back to their man-cave and seethe in solitude. Roommates, however, might just be sufficiently nosy and busybodied to constantly poke and mosey around. Some might try to involve themselves into the date, to add another person or persons for which you have to court-jester and monkey-dance.

If a girl’s otherwise being difficult, another option is to agree to a date at a bar/lounge near your place, but tell her you’ll meet her downstairs/outside/in the lobby of your building or whatever. You can facilitate this by sending her an Uber/Lyft/taxi/etc. When she arrives, just start talking and walking back to your place like you’re giving a guided tour. Almost always they’ll naturally follow without objection, and you can just proceed like the planned date was drinks at your place all along. Even if you don’t bang her then and there and you do have to take her to a bar/lounge, her having already been in your place means she’ll be more likely to return afterward for the finish.

I can't fathom having sex with a woman who lives with her parents, is this a European thing? In America I think it's your place or bust. Maybe exceptions might be made for Chad.

Not even 100% European, Scandis and similar cultures love to gently, but insistently shove their kids out when they turn 18.

But since college towns aren't really a common thing in Europe, if you're a college student dating a college student, it's quite likely that you're both from the same town the university is in and thus live with your parents.

Is this a joke? I’ve never heard of Pool dates and I probably lived in the building with the best pool scene for a residence in North America (a lus high end hotel). Seems way too aggressive especially since most chicks would seem to think it’s putting them too much on the spot to be in a swimsuit for a date. It does work after you know each other.

The back to place for drinks seems a bit weird to unless it’s a group thing. Boys coming over for drinks before doing something.

Honestly for one on one a decent happy hour seems the easiest.

The first sentence was a joke, clearly. I did not, in fact, take a girl out to a field and make her chase down footballs that I kicked, whether it be the handegg or divegrass kind. However, come to think of it, I do hope to attain such a level of Chaddery some day.

The rest of it is—for better or worse—not a joke; in some ways I wish we lived in a timeline in which it were. The above has been my strategy for several years now spanning across different cities and countries, both when I’ve been traveling and when I’m just otherwise chilling at my home city at the time.

Chicks will happily throw on bikinis to eat hot chip and lie around the pool and the beach, thot around at random pool and yacht parties, music festivals, sports bra and spandex shorts to go to the gym. They actively seek out activities where they have plausible deniability to wear skimpy outfits. It’s hardly putting them on the spot or asking for much to get them into a bikini for a first date. Chicks rather enjoy being sex objects, might as well play it to your benefit.

Chicks rather enjoy being sex objects

I think so, too. I think women often want excuses to show off their clothes or bodies. They're very coy about admitting these things even though it's obvious to all.

Where do you live in the UK that you have a nice pool in your building? Some luxury apartment buildings here do have indoor pools, although they tend to be of the ‘basement gym’ variety (ie Not season/weather dependent), not the panoramic or rooftop variety. I guess there’s that one place next to the US embassy in Vauxhall, but that’s the only one I can think of.

I think the point is he does not live in the UK, thus the term "punting" has a different meaning for him. I could be misreading.

I thought he does, might be misremembering it though.

I always found it weird to do too much for a first date. The point is the conversation right? But then I have never really been into serial dating either so maybe if your target demographic is people who go to multiple dates per week then standing out and being memorable is more important

Museum is good. Flower gardens are nice. Coffee and a walk is a classic.

Can do something like frisbee golf, or putt putt if she’s more into activities.

Putt putt is classic, if a little cheesy. But I think that can be worked to your advantage.

Nazi Germany declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor. So Germany chose Japan over America.

It was also the shape of the previous war, and the US and Britain were more close.

If it had just been Russia vs Germany I think the US might have sided with Germany.

You haven't approved the comment you're replying to.

For those of you who are parents, what were your favorite experiences/things to share with your children? For those of you who aren't, what are your most meaningful memories of things your parents shared with you?

I'm thinking of books/movies/tv shows, camping trips, activities, sports, video/board games, puzzles, family stories, hobbies - anything you can think of that was meaningful.

I’m not a parent but my best memories are generally of us doing active things together. Playing sports (I still suck at tennis, but I had a great time playing it with my brothers). My grandma used to bake, so I remember doing that with her. My other grandma liked to tell stories and would pretty much make them up for us around bedtime.

Reading aloud to your family, particularly when your children are relatively young, is a wonderful and memorable tradition. Of course you should read with your children to help them learn how to read, but that involves sitting with them viewing the page, asking them to sound out words, etc. What I'm talking about is sitting around in a living room, no phones or tablets or other screens, everyone listening to one person read. For this exercise with grade school children I particularly recommend E.H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World, William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues, and a lot of Rudyard Kipling. As children get older, swap in classic novels as well as challenging nonfiction.

Also, assuming you are American, get your children to the Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C. at least once between the ages of about 9 and 14. The museums are free to enter, so you only have to pay the cost of travel. The National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Natural History, Museum of American History, and the Air and Space Museum are especially remarkable. I have been to museums across the country and while there are some good experiences to be had everywhere, ultimately none favorably compares.

The main experiences that I think do hold a candle to the National Mall are either one-off ticketed experiences or noteworthy natural features of the (mostly, western) U.S. (Redwoods, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, etc.). You can't really pack several of those into just a day or two, and that makes a difference. For example, standing beneath the Saturn V at the Kennedy Space Center is a really unique experience that you can't have in Washington, D.C.--but traveling to central Florida, driving out to the coast, shelling out the admission fee, seeing the whole park in 4 or 5 hours, and then wondering whether you should grab a couple hours at the beach or just drive back to Orlando for the theme parks, lacks a density that the National Mall can deliver every day, several days running. (And as a bonus, you might Notice something amusingly culture-warry, like the peculiarly mono-racial character of certain Smithsonian occupations...)

Everything on your list of examples also works, of course, but one you seem to have missed entirely is cooking together. I suppose, given the prevalence of Meal Bars in rationalsphere culture, it is something we tend to overlook, but "family recipes" are a thing for a reason. And I've not thought of this before, but it occurs to me that "going out to eat as a family" was, in my own childhood, a somewhat formal affair, and a memorable one, while today it seems to be quite a commonplace occurrence for many families. I wonder just how much "favorite experiences" and "meaningful memories" depends on a conscious choice by parents to organize a group effort to do something that would be easier to just handle alone, such that it is clear that the real, meaningful point of the activity is to be together.

Thank you for the kind recommendations, and apologies that I've been too busy to revisit this thread until now.

For this exercise with grade school children I particularly recommend E.H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World, William J. Bennett's The Book of Virtues, and a lot of Rudyard Kipling. As children get older, swap in classic novels as well as challenging nonfiction.

Never heard of any of them! I will follow up and probably benefit from reading them myself.

Also, assuming you are American, get your children to the Smithsonian museums in Washington D.C. at least once between the ages of about 9 and 14. The museums are free to enter, so you only have to pay the cost of travel.

I spent some time in DC! I agree, it should definitely be a bucket list item, although I got a lot more mileage out of the monuments, congress, white house, congressional library, etc. than the museums. Perhaps the calculus is flipped at that age.

And I've not thought of this before, but it occurs to me that "going out to eat as a family" was, in my own childhood, a somewhat formal affair, and a memorable one, while today it seems to be quite a commonplace occurrence for many families.

It's true, to the degree that I somehow reached adulthood with a complete ignorance of cuisine beyond meat and potatoes. To a degree that someone had to explain to me what to do with mangoes, cilantro and other not-very-exotic foodstuffs.

The Air Force museum at Wright Patterson AFB in Dayton, OH is also extremely impressive, and free. Not a lot else great around it, but it's in a good location to be a road trip stop.

Going to second the reading aloud thing. My family would alternate who would read the stories between the best readers each night, and it remains perhaps my fondest family memory of all. We would read all sorts of things, but LotR and Of Mice and Men stand out to me. The former because it started a long obsession with Tolkien's work, and the latter because there is nothing quite like sobbing along with your family to a beautiful book as you try to choke out the words.

The word meaningful bears a heavy load, and I hesitate to mention what comes to mind as the activities seem so trite. I'll mention them anyway.

Movies. My mom made some disastrous choices in taking me to films. JAWS was released the year I turned seven, and for reasons I cannot fathom even in hindsight, she took us to see it. Me, at seven, watching that film. It was of course bad enough that you saw the commercial advertisements on television constantly that summer and felt a creeping horror at what might be contained in the film. To actually have to sit in a darkened theater and behold it, then be expected, after the lights went up ( and yes, no one moved until the credits had finished and the buoy raft successfully reached the beach) to carry on with normal life, well. It was by far one of the most vivid memories of moviegoing youth. I feared swimming even in pools for years, as cliched as that undoubtedly sounds.

But she did take us to happy films. I saw Star Wars with her and Superman: The Movie, both of which were very memorable experiences for reasons I will not bore you with here.

Beach Trips. This may sound ironic on the heels of my story about watching JAWS, but we used to rent a cabin every year on the white sandy dunes on the Gulf of Mexico. My best memories are before the first big hurricane of those years (Fredric) which wiped clean the entirety of cabins in the area we had frequented (these were rebuilt, along with the first of what were to be many condominium towers along the coast. It was better before.) I have stores of memories about the beach trips, including fishing off the pier withy dad, eating lots of fried food with hushpuppies, ranging up and down the sea reed dunes, and sitting around on the deck putting together jigsaw puzzles.

These were days before smartphones and the net, when there were often vast stretches of unstructured time not to be filled with staring at electronics (as I am doing now). Games, short of solitaire, were played as a family. It was a different time.

As it happens I am also a parent. My boys are still young but getting less young every day. I have tried, before they got their phones, to establish connections via movies (It's easier now with streaming services, if very different). And bicycle rides, puzzles, board games (which they are still keen to if we can get everyone involved) and beachcombing. Trying to hit the high points. But I have no idea if what resonated or resonates for me will for them.

I also showed my youngest son JAWS.

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