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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2596 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 17, 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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So, what are you reading?

Still on Paradise Lost. In my opinion, all epic poetry should be printed as prose. It reads well reformatted. So far it's hard to think of it as a cautionary tale, though this dubious crowd of lost gods do not inspire full confidence.

Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.

Paper I'm reading: The follow-up paper from Quandt et al., Dark participation: Conception, reception, and extensions.

I bought my girlfriend The Secret History a few months ago, and she enjoyed it so much I thought I'd read it again, having not read it since I was a teenager. If anything it's even better than I remember, the day I started reading it I was 80 pages deep by the end of the day. Tense, atmospheric and erudite, with impossibly vivid characters.

I'm reading The Atrocity Archives on @self_made_human's recommendation. It's pretty great, lots of good ideas. It tries a little too hard to be funny sometimes, the main character quite frequently blacks out and misses all the action, and the plot is a bit scattered, but it's a very enjoyable read. The writing style feels SO SIMILAR to @self_made_human's own--is there a whole genre of books like this, do you just really like these ones, or am I imagining things?

The writing style feels SO SIMILAR to @self_made_human's own--is there a whole genre of books like this

Can you link something they published?

Ex Nihilo, Nihil Supernum over on Royal Road:

Dr. Adat Sen has been having a bad week.

Not only was his teleporter wife drafted to Alpha Centauri to fight a K2 offshoot of a K3 civilization, his promised pay raise hasn't come through, and it turns out that someone has it out for him to the extent of trying to kill him with a Basilisk hack. Who would have thought that being a a cyborg psychiatrist for the UN would be this stressful?

Then there's the matter of publish or perish, handling nasty cognitohazards on a daily basis, convincing suicidally depressed superhumans not to take everyone else with them, and living under the shadow of hostile advanced aliens building a Nicoll-Dyson laser in the solar system next door. Oh, and the one Superhuman AGI that humanity produced might be out to get them.

Welcome to the world of ENNS, where superheroes have actual jobs and don't run around in costumes fighting muggers, humanity faces existential threats around every corner, and Adat has the bad luck of finding himself fighting threats way out of his pay grade.

It's probably my best work, and I'm about to resume posting after a few months of hiatus (during which I wrote a Xianxia novel of all things).

That's high praise, since Stross is a great author, and I consider my best efforts only a pale imitation at best.

Truth be told, there are quite a few similarities between my work and his. There's a certain way of approaching massive, epoch-altering events from a realistic, mundane perspective, and both our protagonists are bureaucrats who kick ass, while hardly being the top dogs in their relative spheres. There's a strong dollop of black humor, hard scifi intermeshing with insanity, and then figuring out how that plays out. Strauss's recent works are significantly restrained in exploring the absolute bonkers shit that would happen without writer fiat, but I can hardly hold it against him when he wrote Accelerando, a great example of how shit goes weird during a singularity.

I don't know how much to chalk up to him outright inspiring me, versus me liking his works and thus reproducing similar patterns when I write, because I explicitly write the kind of books I want to read.

Sadly there's no real genre of similar works to read, that I'm aware of, because I'd be reading more of them instead of exhausting the well and being forced to write one myself!

I'm reading the webnovel A Practical Guide to Evil on @official_techsupport's recommendation.

The story is good, characters are okay, but god the prose and spelling and grammar are fucking awful. It's honestly embarrassing even for webnovel standards.

That being said I've been doing a lot of heavy reading recently so a fluff piece or two will do me good. But I'm teetering on the edge of stopping because the author is just so bad at prose. If you write a webnovel, PLEASE at least run it through an LLM to fix basic spelling and tense errors. I'm begging you.

I'm reading the webnovel A Practical Guide to Evil on @official_techsupport's recommendation.

For the record while I can recommend several webnovels, I've never read this one and also have a very low tolerance for badly written stuff.

Heh that's fair. I'm actually really enjoying it now even though it's still littered with errors. At least the pub I got is.

Didn't mean to ruin your reputation ;)

I might have recommended (or would have recommended) "The Rise and Fall of the Dark Lord Sassaflash". It has the Mule protagonist character who talks like Snakes. Also it turns out that MLP canonically has a pony with SS lightnings as her ponymark or whatever it's called. Also it's pretty good.

FWIW I recall it getting better as it goes on. The first few hundred pages are pretty painful in more ways than one--everything up until Catherine is done with military training was pretty boring IIRC and then it really improves.

Which chapter it is? I am willing to start in the middle, I am not willing to slog through hundreds low quality pages.

It's been too long for me to know for sure. The military training ends with the end of book 1, so starting with book 2 might work. Unfortunately there's no hard cutoff-the story just steadily gets better, especially as the writer focuses less on the military side of things.

This just reads to me as generically how people act. Self reflection is rare across the board. Getting all of your experiences validated and listened to is rare too. All of us go through life trying to open up to people, even those we are close to, and often being disappointed with the results. Those that get super upset by this are usually codependent and can't hold their own beliefs steadily without others validating them.

It goes to show that with the arrival of therapy culture and BLM, the white progressive is no better than they were 10 years ago. Validation only goes so far, and too much demand for it breeds codependency.

From Zvi's Elephant in the Brain Review:

Choosing the best policies is not what most politics is mostly about. Politics is mostly about being in coalitions and showing loyalty to that coalition. In many times and places, members of the political outgroup are not taken kindly to, so one needs to show loyalty to the ingroup and its political viewpoints.

That doesn’t mean politics isn’t ultimately largely about policy. These coalitions involve many actors who do care deeply about certain policies, often out of narrow self-interest but also often as genuine do-rights. The policy wonks and idealists are real, and views on issues often do shift for the right reasons, not only the wrong ones. We all understand that a politics completely about alliances would result in the rapid collapse of the republic, with devastating consequences for almost everyone.

And

You should do the same actions you see, because they have hidden social motives and purposes, and people will punish you for acting differently even if they don’t know why acting differently might be bad here.

This helps explain DiAngelo's observations. Everyone is mostly disincentivized from going on a journey of self-reflection because then they would uncover issues and this would conflict with their goal (which they may not even be consciously aware of) of fitting in with their political ingroup.

I also think what DiAngelo is pointing out can often be generalized as something like:

  • There is certain knowledge that you can't fully understand without having personality experienced it. Like riding a bicycle or living life with a disability.
  • It is often disadvantageous to admit that you aren't fully knowledgeable about a topic.
  • For coalition building it is also often disadvantageous to admit things are nuanced and human nature is messy.
  • In the political coalition the people designing the policy aren't always personally impacted by that specific policy.
  • The policies are designed based on a model built with missing knowledge and assumptions about what those impacted by the policy would want. The mental modeling of the policy is further complicated by the hidden agenda of the policy advocates: looking good in the eyes of the political ingroup.

Ultimately, you then end up with policy and activism that is misaligned with what those impacted by the policy really want.

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