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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   4722 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 24, 2023

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

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

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

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How does one in tech move to the UK?

Did you look here? https://www.gov.uk/browse/visas-immigration/work-visas

Sorta a low-effort post, but this is the place. It would seem like there is no rational reason to be ethical, from a practical or game theoretic perspective. It's only disadvantageous if everyone or most people are unethical, but if only a few people are unethical they have a major advantage by not playing by the rules. Consider that unethical people can sometimes act with impunity for a long time before facing any consequences, assuming they ever do. Second, the victim(s) has to meet a very high burden of proof for someone who is unethical to be punished. This means gathering evidence, time to process evidence, etc. And finally, a lot of unethical people , having achieved success, then transition to becoming legit and covering up their history. The philosophical argument for being ethical fall short. yes, if everyone were unethical society would collapse, but there are enough people who are ethical that this does not happen.

  1. There's a negative feedback loop here that prevents this from being reliably true. That is, in an environment where it is possible/easy/profitable to consistently get away with unethical behavior, more people do it until it becomes common enough that people respond and become less trusting in order to protect themselves. This is largely what distinguishes high-trust societies versus low trust. Additionally, the expected cost of unethical behavior is the probability of being caught multiplied by the penalty, which means that you can stabilize at higher levels of ethics by ramping up the penalties, be that financial, reputational, or justice. I think this is largely why upper and middle class communities tend to be higher trust than lower class communities. If you have lots of money, stable long-term friends, and a job that relies on maintaining a professional bearing and reputation, then you have more to lose even if you do unethical but technically legal things. None of my friends have, to my knowledge, ever shoplifted in their lives, and if I found out they did I would lose respect for them and shame them for it. Because that's not the kind of person I want to hang out with, even if they were stealing from some soulless megacorp and there's no risk of them stealing from me. Ethical people who can reliably recognize each other and group together can create better. happier, more stable subcommunities by filtering, which creates a hard-to-measure cost to being unethical.

  2. The rational game theoretic perspective says to maximize your utility function, which if you are not a sociopath might itself contain a term for ethics. Don't fall into the trap thinking that people are profit-maximizing corporations, sometimes good deeds are their own reward. A large part of why I do ethical things even if I might get away with it is because one of my terminal values is the desire to be a good person. I feel guilty when I do bad things, and I feel good/proud/accomplished when I do good things, especially if there was a temptation to do a selfish bad thing and I chose to do the right thing anyway. Most people have something like that. The philosophical argument that you should be good because if everyone is bad you'd be worse off is weak, it was always weak. It's not the actual reason to be good, which is that it is good to be good, and if you're not an evil sociopath your utility function will care about that in its own right. If someone is an evil sociopath then there's not much the rest of us can do to convince them to care, all we can do is arrange society such that unethical behavior is punished harshly enough that the rationally selfish unethical behaviors we can't punish are rare and minor.

ever shoplifted in their lives, and if I found out they did I would lose respect for them and shame them for it. Because that's not the kind of person I want to hang out with, even if they were stealing from some soulless megacorp and there's no risk of them stealing from me. Ethical people who can reliably recognize each other and group together can create better. happier, more stable subcommunities by filtering, which creates a hard-to-measure cost to being unethical.

That seems a little harsh to cut off a friendship over that. yeah, rape, for sure, but that seems too harsh given how common it is . If someone stole from me personally after I told him or her to stop, then that would be another matter. Interesting point...goodness is its own reward. It does not need any justification beyond that.

I wouldn't straight up cut someone off if they were already a friend for other reasons and that was the only thing about them I disliked. But it would be a yellow flag which would make me less comfortable around them. Because stuff like that rarely shows up in isolation. I've never actually had the issue show up, because the type of people I typically hang out with are so far from that archetype that it's not even a remote possibility.

Second, the victim(s) has to meet a very high burden of proof for someone who is unethical to be punished. This means gathering evidence, time to process evidence, etc.

Pretty dubious.

In fact, it's pretty telling just how much energy civilization dedicates to making it hard in specific contexts, precisely because people WILL rush to judgment. We are handicapped in judging people, but it's an artificial handicap.

Outside of the oasis of the legal system though...people are less constrained. They don't need to meet some insane burden. They just have to suspect you and/or convince others. For most of our history and even today, that sort of social sanction can be pretty bad on its own.

There's also the concern that, if you're the sort of person who flouts rules, you may not be able to keep the contempt that attitude implies from leaking out, which makes it easier to damn you. Not everyone is a high-functioning sociopath.

The philosophical argument for being ethical fall short.

The universalist or absolutist argument does. It's just not plausible that doing something wrong is never of benefit, absent some dubious concept of an afterlife.

That is not the same as it not being beneficial to be moral in general.

The universality of trying to justify morality (and the drive to justify our sense of it as overriding via philosophy) is telling imo.

If ethics weren't effective in some way, they wouldn't exist. They might not be consciously rational but they still work.

You have to also consider game-theoretic consequences between societies and not just within them. Even short of an internal collapse, a society with a higher proportion of unethical people will eventually be outcompeted due to inefficiency. Of course, this can take many lifetimes.

Note that this only works if migration flows are small. If they are large, then equilibration negates between-group competition.

Most people aren’t smart enough to consistently get away with criminal behavior. This includes very smart people. In addition, the psychological burden of looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life for all the enemies you’ve made, and for the law, can be taxing.

As for non-illegal unethical behavior, the lines are more blurred, but you’ll still make a lot of enemies. And all it takes is for one of them to snap, and it’s (as we’ve discussed here before, I think) very easy for a committed, vindictive person to ruin your life, provided they don’t care much about their own.

I know one guy who did. I'll call him the Carpenter. He dealt a shit ton of weed in the 90s and made an assload of money before he went legit and had a big carpentry business.

There are always more successful criminals than we think there are because a very big part of being a successful criminal is that as few people as possible know about your crimes. This is also why many people in law enforcement think criminals are stupid; all the criminals they know about are stupid. While its true that always "watching over your shoulder" can be burdensome for many, being successful at something you can never tell people about is often too much for many otherwise "smart" people. The instinct to brag and broadcast success is too much for many and often proceeds their detection.

Most people aren’t smart enough to consistently get away with criminal behavior. This includes very smart people.

hmm as others alluded below, but you don't hear about the ones who get away unless they choose to confess

'look at all these idiots, blindly following society's prescribed recipe for cassava. I bet I could do a way better job!'

Society is older than you, even if you might be smarter. It's developed all kinds of tricks to trip up the unwary defector. This isn't to say that the system is unbeatable... but it's harder than it looks.

It's hard to tell, because there are a very few tiny fragmentary stories that come up in searches and I haven't been checking front pages for it every day to see if they've been highlighted, but it seems like effectively no general-interest major mainstream news organization has really said much/anything about the rollout of ChatGPT's vision capabilities yet.

LLM vision was already obviously 100% set in the pipeline so its arrival should not be that surprising to anybody who's been paying sufficient attention for the last year-and-a-half, but that's almost nobody. Given how much the next several normie-tiers down from that, including normies who matter, do seem to be relatively engaged with ChatGPT and its consequences, and they almost certainly had (and from this still have) no idea this was coming, shouldn't it be at least some degree of international frontpage news that it's even been announced?

I guess they're waiting until it gets actual wide user release over the next few weeks, but it's not like the media here are sober conservatives about not jumping the gun on things that will obviously eventually be enormous consequential news to their readership. What's going on here?

Can you use it as a toy to dick around with while at work? If not, no one will care.

What Car Should I Buy?

I'm beginning the process of shopping for a new car. I will beat this decision to death, I expect it will be several months until I actually make a purchase, including many test drives of different models and digging deep into Consumer Reports and Car and Driver's archives. Figured I'd throw the question out to theMotte and see if there are any models I'm not thinking of or should give more consideration to. As I write so much word vomit, I realize this is also an exercise for me in writing out what I'm looking for.

Strictly speaking, I don't need to buy a car and if I don't end up finding one I like, I won't buy one. I'm in kind of a unique situation for a variety of reasons, I have a work vehicle (crew cab 4wd pickup) that is low mileage and that I will continue to use to regardless of any other purchase; I also maintain my dad's car collection with him, so I have no desire for a crazy sports car because if I want to drive a convertible that gets to 60 in 4 seconds I can just head over to his house and borrow it. But I set this date on my calendar a couple years back, and I'm seeing evidence of it all around me, it seems like now might be the time to pull the trigger on a new car. As I stated in a previous post, my early teen years the industry was just emerging from a nadir for the American car market, things have gotten better pretty much every year since. But lately the tech in cars is becomingly increasingly baroque, and the features are becoming harder to avoid or turn off, I'm worried that if I wait another year or two until I need a car I might be forced to endure features I don't want and unable to find a car that has what I do want. Increasing government targets on fuel economy etc are also a threat. My theory being that I'd rather buy a new or low mileage car now and not have to worry about this again until I'm 40 or so (pending accidents or whatnot).

For starters, located in the USA, so sadly no GR Yaris' or Renault Meganes around. Northeast, so AWD has always been a preference of mine, but FWD will work, RWD is probably a no go but I could be persuaded for the right car since I still have the 4x4 or my wife's car for bad storms. Looking for a four door, but it doesn't need an adult sized big back seat. My wife has and will continue to have a bigger car for comfortably transporting multiple adults, so this one just needs to be theoretically capable of doing so more than actually needing to regularly. But with carseats, I probably don't want to bother trying a 2+2. Cargo space isn't a huge concern, but I do like hatchbacks. I want to avoid SUVs, I just don't like driving them as much, really looking for a sedan or small hatchback (though I am kinda pondering the Kona N as factually more hot hatch than SUV). I want something reasonably quick with good driving dynamics, but I don't need a ton of horsepower (I'm basically looking at stuff between 200-300) and I'm unlikely to take it to a track day beyond fooling around at a local autocross on street tires. I could talk myself into a manual, but I'm fine with a conventional auto, CVT I'm iffy on. I'm probably leaning gas engine, but I feel like I should cross-shop a few EVs because they are the new hot thing.

I'm looking mainly at the Asian carmakers. Toyota, Honda, and Subaru all seem to make vehicles that simply run better longer and are much easier/cheaper to fix than the German carmakers; I'd be open to an American car but there aren't many out there that really appeal to me right now. I've had BMWs, Audis, and MBs for years now; it's not so much that they break down all the time, though I am under the impression that they do, it's that when they break down I need to special order the fan belt from the single nunnery in the Alps that makes them for thousands, while when Japanese or American cars break down I can choose between $50 in stock at the dealer or $35 at the local Autozone. I'm tired of it, I'll probably look at a few Audis and BMWs just to cross shop but idk that I'd pull the trigger on one. I'm open to buying a used car, hell I buy used shoes, but I like the idea of having something under warranty for at least a few years. Also the used car market for most of the cars I'm looking at is so out of whack, I see two year old and 30k miles on Subarus that are less than $2k off what I could buy a brand new one for at the dealer. I'm not in a hurry, so needing to order one from the factory and wait a couple months is nbd to me. Budget is realistically somewhere between $30-50k; I could afford more but I don't see a lot of cars that make me want to reach out of that range, and I want a car cheap enough that I don't worry about it when I use it, which I don't think I could do with a $60k+ car.

Prior cars I've daily'd: 1991 Ford Bronco, 1996 Ford Explorer XLT V8, 2000 Subaru Outback Wagon XT Manual, 2000 BMW 323ci Manual, 2004 Audi A6 Quattro 2.7t, 2003 Mercedes-Benz C230 Wagon, 2005 Audi A4 3.0t Quattro Cabrio, 2005 Toyota Camry. I currently drive a 2008 Chevrolet Avalanche LTZ most days, it just crossed 60k miles so I expect to have it for the foreseeable future and honestly I expect to have it until it is illegal to drive it in the city. My wife drives a Lexus RX, which we will trade in the near future on a new Subaru Outback.

Current Contenders:

Acura Integra. Pros: Small, hatchback, Honda guts, great MPG, luxury badge, drives well, strong CPO warranty and availability near me. Cons: CVT unless you go with an up-charge package, weakest engine of the cars I'm looking at, expensive for what is ultimately a civic in a sport coat, FWD.

Subaru WRX. Pros: Fun to drive, manual, great AWD, resale price, Subaru around me is kind of the perfect stealth luxury brand among PMC types, I got into a horrible accident in my prior subaru and survived so I have good vibes towards it. Cons: Not designed for comfort, boy racer looks are a little heavy handed, need to get the manual because the CVT is right out for this car I'd think.

Hyundai Elantra N. Pros: Performance monster for the price, hilariously long powertrain warranty, customizable settings galore, polarizing looks but honestly I love them when I see them. Cons: Hyundai badge carries no weight, reliability may not be there so even with the warranty I don't actually get to drive it, FWD.

Mazda3 Turbo Hatch AWD. Pros: Hatchback, AWD, good speed, gorgeous design, actual automatic gearbox offered. Cons: Small.

I'm kicking around other ideas from trying to find a GR Corolla to a Toyota Crown to going Tesla 3 or Ford Mach E, and like I said I'll cross shop things like BMW or Audi but may not go for that. Leaving aside budget, I'd probably get something like a Tesla S or high end 3, higher end Mach E, or a Rivian or GMC Hummer EV, just because I think they're the coolest fucking things on the road right now.

What are your thoughts? Anything I'm missing that I should consider? Any experiences that you'd like to share with some of the cars I've listed?

Every time I see a car-related discussion I am reminded how different the US market is from the Euro one. Anyway, I was going to recommend something in the Impreza-Outback-Forester range, but it looks like your wife is already getting one.

I wouldn't wright off the Legacy either if sedans are in the mix. Its a shame they don't offer the MT anymore, but you can still spec one with a turbo, and it'll be more refined than an Impreza. I personal liked the old poorly placed inter-cooler with the functioning hood scoop, but the newer ones have less of a boy racer aesthetic. OP, let us know if you test drive one, I'm interested to know how responsive the newer CVTs are. As far as CVT reliability goes, I would change the transmission oil wayyy more frequently than called for in the US maintenance manual. Like every 25k miles or so.

OP, let us know if you test drive one, I'm interested to know how responsive the newer CVTs are.

Will do. Probably get in to test drive the Acura and WRX CVTs in the near future, those dealerships are real close and they have those in stock.

That was my own dislike of sedans showing through. Kia K5 and Stinger are probably the only modern ones that I like. The rest look like they are chosen by people that use a spreadsheet to compare the total cost of ownership for 20 years when buying their next car.

I don't need a ton of horsepower (I'm basically looking at stuff between 200-300)

That sounds like a contradiction.

I could talk myself into a manual, but I'm fine with a conventional auto, CVT I'm iffy on.

I've seen people on 4chan's /o/ board say several times that, though CVTs often have reliability problems when they're attached to too-powerful engines (such as in Nissan cars), this is not a problem with the 76-horsepower Mitsubishi Mirage.

Not so much concerned with CVT reliability as driving dynamics. I think it's theoretically possible to have a CVT that produces a strong driving experience, but all the ones I've actually driven have been sludgy, kinda boring, slow to react. I'd probably prefer a well executed dual clutch automatic to a manual.

Worth noting for those who don't know that CVT and ECVT are totally different things. A CVT on a non hybrid car is a mechanical variable ratio pulley system, and these have had reliability issues of the type you mentioned. Hybrid vehicles instead use a system of dual electric motor generators, which, by varying the power or load, can operate as a planetary gear with variable ratio.

It's quite a clever technology, actually - having a single planetary gear with the motor generators allows you to delete multiple other planetary gears, the reverse gear, the starter, the alternator, and the torque converter.

1999 Suzuki Grand Vitara

I drive a Buick and I really like it. Every time I see the last-gen Buick Regals I drool a little bit. There's a station wagon version that looks simply awesome to me.

If you value reliability over performance then you should probably get a Honda or Toyota. If you care about having an electric vehicle they make plug in versions of many of their cars which I think gives you the best of both worlds in that you can have an ev for most regular driving but can still take road trips easily.

I currently drive an older rav4 hybrid, if I were getting a new vehicle I would likely buy the plug in version of the current year model.

If cost were a bigger concern I would just get a plug in Prius (or non plug in Prius). I had a 2004 prius for years while in grad school with over 300k miles on it (I don’t know how many miles were actually on it because the odometer quit working at 299,999). Minimal maintenance, and only real downside is if you get a bad battery pack.

Also you should do some research on hybrid vehicles post lithium switch over. Older nicad Toyota hybrid battery packs could be reconditioned fairly easily (and cheaply). I doubt this is true on newer hybrids/plug in hybrids with lithium battery packs, which might impact the calculus a bit.

Toyota, in my experience, is the king of reliability. The Long-Term Quality Index agrees with me. Honda is second; still very reliable WRT engine and powertrain but some of the craftsmanship on some of the components is not exactly bulletproof. Things like the AC system and door locks are only average in reliability. Door locks outright suck on like late 2000s Hondas.

Since you're looking at Acura, you should check out the Lexus IS 300 AWD or the IS 350 AWD. I drove the IS 350 AWD a couple months ago and it was fun to drive, the modern safety features weren't overly annoying and the guy told me you can turn many of them off. My memory is it gets ~25mpg. The IS has either the 8 speed automatic or the six speed automatic Toyota has used for a while. It has a decent amount of space without being a large sedan and I think it meets all of your requirements. If I was buying a sedan, it would probably be this one. I've owned BMWs in the past and they're reliable but if anything goes wrong it's going to be $1000+.

Also, since you're already looking at the Hyundai, you should check out the Genesis G70. A friend has either that one or the G60 and he's quite the fan.

Both on my cross shopping list, along with the ES and the LS (unlikely, but just for funsies)! Thanks for the cosign on the IS. Honestly, I've had such good experiences with Lexus products that friends and family have owned, that the IS and ES would be the top on my list if I didn't hate the cowcatcher grill they have on the new ones so much. Even if they were merely boring, I'd stomach it, but the weird hourglass things looks like the car the Riddler would drive in an old Batman comic.

I bought a used V8 GX 460 about five years ago and I still own it and still love it. I will probably drive it until it dies which can easily be over 300,000 miles. Whenever I need to tow something, it performs wonderfully and is a great road-trip vehicle. A friend of mine owns a V8 LX480 which is still going strong with 340,000 miles on it. I love Toyotas despite their ~decade long obsession with ugly noses, the aardvark noses and the hourglass noses; besides, I think the hourglass grill styling looks better on the sedans than the SUVs.

I say get a bright green one and own the Riddler theme!

I bought a used V8 GX 460 about five years ago and I still own it and still love it. I will probably drive it until it dies which can easily be over 300,000 miles.

That's a sweet ride. Land Cruisers and LX's are the most common scam cars on craigslist around here these days, because everyone (including me) wants one.

I recently bought a Mazda3 hatchback. I like it, but the safety features are annoying and I am going to see if I can turn them off. The seatbelt chime will immediately go off if you don't have your seatbelt on before you turn anything on, even just the electronics so you can open the windows or turn on the A/C and even if the car is in park. The lane assist and automatic braking occasionally activate when they shouldn't, which is dangerous. Also, the visibility isn't great. Pedestrians are sometimes hidden behind the A pillar. Otherwise, it's a good car. It's a smooth ride and I don't find it too small despite being very tall. I also like the design of the electronic controls.

The Ford Maverick also sounds like what you're looking for, albeit as a hybrid pickup truck.

100% what I would buy if the Avalanche died, they're such a great vehicle and as someone pointed out to me the other day, Ford hasn't even advertised the damn thing, they just sell out all on their own! I'm no expert on car logistics, but it's amazing to me that Ford can't manage to churn out more of those. Although I'm feeling like I should have bolded and underlined "really looking for a sedan or small hatchback" and "good driving dynamics."

I don't own a ford maverick(although it will definitely be my next truck- I drive a used compact truck from a Japanese brand), but my dad does, and it drives like a hatchback. This is also the report of everyone I know who owns one.

It's not a hatchback, but I suspect a hatchback version of a maverick is coming in the next few years.

Isn't the hatchback Maverick just the Escape? Or is there a significant stance difference? Personally I'm curious to see if they bring out a high hp street-truck Maverick ST

Personally I'm curious to see if they bring out a high hp street-truck Maverick ST

I doubt it, partly because it's technically difficult but also because the problem the maverick exists to solve(fuel efficiency standards making it hard to create a pickup of a size with significant unmet demand) doesn't apply to high horsepower trucks.

A new car? Why?

If, in two years, you're worried about Google listening to your radio stations, buy a 2023 car. Or a 2015, or...I won't suggest going back as far as 1999, but the point is that the well-designed ones won't disappear. They'll just have more mileage plus a corresponding discount.

Disclaimer: I drive an '07 Corolla. Decidedly not GR. So perhaps I have different tastes a higher tolerance for looking poor.

There is very little value in buying a late model used Subaru or Toyota near me. Buying a WRX with 30k miles barely drops $2k off the MSRP around here. At that point, it does make sense to buy one fresh off the lot with warranties, that you know hasn't been abused, etc.

So perhaps I have different tastes [or] a higher tolerance for looking poor.

Probably, yeah. I'm at a point in my career where it isn't cute to be hassled by "my car is in the shop;" and I'm in that in-between point where I can't put a client/partner in an '05 Beige Camry with cloth seats. Five years ago I was young and poor enough that it would come across earnest, insh'Allah ten years from now I'll be rich enough that it will merely be eccentric; today I need to meet social standards and seem like I have my shit together enough to make a regular car payment. Not quite to the degree where I'm going to get a realtor car (leased Range Rover or BMW SUV being the classics, ewww), but it would help to show up in something late model and reasonably comfortable sometimes.

Personally I've just been enjoying all the cars I couldn't afford in the oughties at sub $10k pricing -- this was peak car IMO; the computerized EMS problem was solved, manual transmissions still widely available, 2-300 hp easily available and plenty of creature comforts with no widescreen TVs on the dash.

But I take your point that this may be the last time you can buy something new that isn't too cucked -- indeed you may almost be too late. I think Mazda is the only manufacturer with a (stubborn) corporate policy around physical controls. (as opposed to touchscreen, or that awful BMW dial that controls the thing that should be a touchscreen but isn't)

I guess "Mazda3 only bigger" is a Mazda6, but then you don't get the hatchiness; interior seems... OK? At least there are real gauges: https://imgcdn.zigwheels.ae/large/gallery/interior/25/250/mazda-6-sedan-dashboard-view-246339.jpg Discontinued because of course it is, but you could pick up a like-new GT one (250hp) pretty easily I'd think.

Honestly the WRX might be your only choice -- unlikely that you will be able to get a manual transmission for love or money within a few years, so why not?

I agreed with you on the former for the last ten years, but I'm at a point in my life where I am A) Tired of stuff developing mysterious problems that take too long to figure out and B) Lack the combination of time and skill to do it myself, plus C) if I want to borrow my dad's C5 vette I can just go do that, I don't need to own that car. I'm looking for a reliable pleasant daily driver, easy to park, that gives me just enough engagement to enjoy taking the scenic route every now and again.

I put this date on my calendar two years ago when I realized I had the money to buy a new car but didn't need to, largely on the theory that it was going to get harder and harder to fix a car from 2005-2008, but if I buy a car today from a reliable brand I can hope to drive it until 2030 at least, at which point we'll likely be in a very different place in terms of car culture.

Yeah, I feel you -- my wife is the same way, and we've been shopping for/driving newish things lately. It's just hard to be impressed with anything in the last ~5 years, I feel like we are in a transitional period between car-cars and techmobiles -- and the techmobiles aren't quite there yet, while the attempts to move in that direction have ruined the carness of current models. Also the standards of interiors in high-end shit seem to have gone downhill somehow? Recent model BMWs just don't feel that nice inside, for instance -- even though the driving experience continues to advance.

I don't know what to suggest other than the WRX TBH -- my wife is more in the 'large crossover that won't absolutely destroy you on gas' zone, so we will probably get some sort of plug-in -- but 'mid-size sedan' is just dying.

How about a Caddy?

The ougties versions of these (in AWD) are something that I haven't touched on yet in my odd-yssey, but am actively monitoring -- a new one should be pretty nice if you can afford it. (and handle the grandpa jokes)

You exactly hit on the transition period.

Also the standards of interiors in high-end shit seem to have gone downhill somehow?

The older ones feel more special. The difference and care was obvious in my e46 or even the old C class wagon. The control felt nice in your hand. When I've sat in modern luxury cars they feel plasticky, with a big-ass screen to make up for it. One of the reasons I'm not that interested in any of the luxury brands, just don't want to pay for something that isn't special.

Good call, I should probably give the Caddy a shot. I get all the old man jokes anyway.

Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat malaria. It is also used to prevent malaria infection in areas or regions where it is known that other medicines (eg, chloroquine) may not work. Hydroxychloroquine may also be used to treat coronavirus (COVID-19) in certain hospitalized patients.

Using this medicine alone or with other medicines (eg, azithromycin) may increase your risk of heart rhythm problems (eg, QT prolongation, ventricular fibrillation, ventricular tachycardia). Hydroxychloroquine should only be used for COVID-19 in a hospital or during clinical trials. Do not take any medicine that contains hydroxychloroquine unless prescribed by your doctor.

What's going on here? A hat tip to the crazies who really want to use it despite lack of evidence, or has The Science changed, and I should pray they do not alter it any further?

HCQ, when taken with zinc, has always been the silver bullet. It worked wherever it was tried. People were sneaking it into the hospitals to give to their relatives. I guess the Mayo Clinic finally had to bow to actual science.

Anecdote:

Since I couldn’t get any HCQ, I took tonic water (quinine water) with lots of zinc, plus horse paste (ivermectin), vitamin D, and vitamin C during my first bout (probably Delta, Nov. 2021). I remember the final night of the fight, when I felt the characteristic flu-like aches, and took aspirin. The next morning, I felt far better than the previous week, and I was on the mend; I lost my sense of smell for a year, but didn’t have brain fog or long COVID. My dad and mom, squarely in the risk zone of their 70’s, took a similar medicine regimen and also both survived without long COVID.

On my second bout (summer 2022, Omicron), I got a week’s groceries and prepared for another long haul. Vitamin D and zinc, plus tonic water and walking outdoors in direct sunlight, but to my surprise it was over in three days. Not only that, I felt great afterward! I felt better than I had before the illness, oddly.

Can you provide any clinical data to support this “silver bullet”?

This pre-print, as reported by Yahoo News in 2021.

This study in Nature is about HCQ alone, and suggests it would have been even better during Omicron than previous waves due to the different pathways Omicron takes.

This study in Clinical Infectious Diseases of a "prospective, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled multicenter trial" on zinc alone, with positive results.

This extensive examination of Zinc's use with HCQ for COVID by Alberto Boretti in Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology Volume 71, May 2022.

This ScienceDirect study on the so-called "Zelenko Protocol" of zinc, HCQ, and azithromycin (AZM), with astounding results.

Disclaimer: I used dogpile.com to find this clinical data, which doesn't have the restrictions on misinformation (and "misinformation") of Google. I don't have a list of citations at hand, so I did this search in approx. 1 hr.

Disclaimer: I used dogpile.com to find this clinical data, which doesn't have the restrictions on misinformation (and "misinformation") of Google. I don't have a list of citations at hand, so I did this search in approx. 1 hr.

Thanks for the recommendation!

I'm not convinced brain fog or long covid are real anyways. Incidence of each in Covid survivors seems to basically match base rates.

(Unrelatedly, I somewhat dislike referring to abuse survivors, rape survivors, suicide survivors, etc. by that name while 'survivor' otherwise has such a powerful connotation, so a fun way to play with those terms is to use 'survivor' where it is slightly, but only slightly, more obvious that it's inappropriate)

What else do you not believe in the existence of?

Plenty of things, what are you looking for?

To some degree some long COVID is psychosomatic. It correlates strongly with political ideology and a minority of people reporting long COVID have no COVID antibodies.

Being sick weakens you. So to some degree some portion of people have long COVID. But also I think many (most?) people suffering from long COVID are imagining it. They truthfully feel down or slow. And they blame it on COVID. But COVID is an unusually mild cold to most people and given that some of these long COVIDers never even had COVID, I think there is much hyperbolic doomerism about it decoupled from the facts.

At this point I doubt long COVID exists in any significant portion of the population, outside of some trivial sense that getting sick makes you feel worse for a while.

This seems very insensitive to me, a person, who like billions of others, is a survivor of the common cold.

I’m still not seeing evidence that it works, much less that it’s a “silver bullet.”

2021: literature review as of the Delta variant finds null effect, albeit with “low confidence”. Taiwanese authors.

2021: meta-analysis finds no clinical benefits with “moderate” confidence. Brazilian authors.

2022: Another Brazilian study and meta-analysis. No significant effect on outpatients.

2023: No significant effect. Most recent meta-analysis that I’ve found. American lead authors.

2023: Indian RCT (n = 594) finds insignificant effect. This was the most recent individual research I found with a casual search.

I don’t think anything has upturned the consensus. Sites are still reporting that HCQ doesn’t work and may also make you poop yourself. Not sure why Mayo has a different line; perhaps they’re just hedging?

Based on the page history at archive.org the "certain hospitalized patients" line was added in May 2020, with the "should only be used in a hospital or during clinical trials" part being added around a month later. At the time it seemed plausible that it would work.

Thanks! Didn't think of checking the history of the page.

Can anyone explain the (apparently) imminent government shut down? It looks like it's driven by disagreement about spending cuts between different Republican factions in the house, but I haven't found a good breakdown.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all? Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship. Therefore, what good is a man, in a relationship, if he is not willing and able to endure a hardship or challenge of similar difficulty? Chad compensates for this by being very good-looking and very determined; there is a good chance he would do well in a war, too. But for us mere mortals? Our existence is legitimized and our desire for romantic relationships stops being completely base, disgusting, and hypocritical when we have proven ourselves worthy through being conscientious, dedicated, and determined enough to suffer greatly for no damn reason - even, perhaps, to die for no good reason. The poets of the First World War, and the soldiers there, died pointlessly but admirably for a few inches of mud; they embodied all that is admirable about masculinity and lost their lives in the mud of Passchendaele and Verdun and the Somme.

Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle. It's like Fight Club, except you expect and are prepared for - as much as anyone can be prepared for, which may not be much - entering what is essentially Hell on Earth and surviving it. Once you survive, you are now worthy: you have endured, you are willing to endure, therefore you now have business asking someone to endure a deep visceral biological disgust day after day to make you happy, and for the good of the next generation. And you, too, will suffer, or may suffer. Maybe it's a dangerous job, maybe it's your wife shooting you and putting you in the ICU, maybe it's figuring out how to deal with it when your wife becomes a raging alcoholic, maybe you really do get the life of domestic bliss. But probably not - you're not Chad, and as such you do not deserve domestic bliss, much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you and chooses this as her least-bad option, making peace with her inability or unwillingness to be Stacy.

  • -16

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

If convicted felons can have romantic relationships that clearly indicates that moral worthiness is not a requirement for all romantic relationships.

Sometimes in marriage you have to endure suffering "till death due us part", but that is a special case where you voluntarily are taking a romantic relationship to a higher level. Even then there are socially acceptable reasons to end the suffering via divorce.

Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing

Many women in relationships do not ever have children. Men still enter relationships with women who are past child-bearing age.

Every man, now, needs to choose their own struggle.

No. You just need to live a lifestyle and have a personality that a single woman finds attractive and worthy of a relationship, and you have to initiate communication and make her aware of your attractive traits. The idea that you have to endure great suffering will be off-putting to most women. Based on other posts of yours here are some suggestions of things you could focus on:

  • Become a local activist on a subject you are passionate about. This will cause you to connect with like-minded people who will find your passion attractive.
  • Become a local expert on something and start a group where you are the leader sharing your expertise.
  • Join a mental health support group where talking about your struggles is seen as an admirable quality. Additional benefits include: getting advice/support from people that struggle with similar issues and gaining additional perspective that allows you to see your struggles as more tractable than what some of the other people in the group are facing.

Yes: moral worthiness is not necessary or sufficient for a romantic relationship.

Also you don't have to endure great suffering - just be visibly capable of doing so.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

This is one of my favorite poems. I like and admire the aesthetic of these men, who sacrificed so much for so little. In the end it is one of the reasons why I like the Hock and believe in its transformative power: the Hock, freely and willingly chosen, purges weakness from the soul. Sometimes the body dies, too much weakness entrapped within it. Everyone chooses their own Hock - or not.

Hock my balls.

If you really believed these men were noble, you would listen when they told you that you were buying in to a lie. Really listen, instead of mining their words for what you already believed.

They may well be some overlap between “necessary” and “dulce et decorum”. Trench warfare ain’t it.

It is meaningless. These men believed that what they were doing was glorious, but instead they got ground into paste in the trenches for a few inches of mud. I contend that freely and willingly entering this Hell is itself noble, admirable, pointless, and perhaps idiotic.

I contend that freely and willingly entering this Hell is itself noble, admirable, pointless, and perhaps idiotic.

What about the soldiers who were drafted?

As I understand it people were quite enthusiastic about it for the most part. Draftees that were ambivalent or worse were just unfortunate people in a terrible situation. The Hock is best if done willingly and freely.

I love this poem, and I've just noticed that Owen rhymes "drowning" with "drowning". Seriously, Wilfred?

I wanted to excuse it with the line break, but it really has to be paired with the preceding stanza. And then you’ve got the 12-line conclusion. Maybe there’s some printing artistic license involved…it’s impossible to tell from the manuscript.

I do think that hardship is necessary for men and that a lot of men are too soft these days. But I don't think it has to be arbitrary hardship.

There is still plenty of useful hardship to be found if you look for it, and perhaps the issue is that our modern societies do not make it clear that there is hardship. While circumstances like disease and war use to take a good chunk of the male population out, there was still some competition and finding a wife or a husband was something that was emphasized throughout people's education. If you are serious about finding a spouse, having children, then what are you doing about it? If you do not want to go below certain standards of attractiveness, sanity, personality, and your current geographical area is not providing an adequate supply of potential willing mates, then have you tried expanding the area?

If you are too poor to travel, then here's your hardship, make more money.

If you are afraid of linguistic and cultural barriers, then here's your hardship, figure out a way to tolerate different mores or find a combination that suits you.

If you are afraid that an apparently willing mate is attempting to scam you, then here's your hardship, learn to make yourself vulnerable, get ready to lose everything and bounce back...

Overcoming hardship only gets you more women if the side effect somehow increases the pool of mates or your attractiveness. For example war campaigns take (some) men to war-widows ("love you long time"), colonization to riches, artistic struggle to fame, industriousness to stability, etc... Ultimate survival hiking might make you more attractive to some women, but they're probably going to be quite crusty themselves. Is that what you're looking for?

Well since you asked, I think it's retarded. I also said that in more words the last 5 times you asked.

More effort than this, please.

I can't say I disagree, you have to work very hard and think with all your brains to be this flagrantly stupid.

So basically the Hock is an example of unusually refined stupidity. 99.99 percent pure reagent grade dumbass, not like the 80 percent pure stuff a peasant gets drunk on.

You keep tossing out "the Hock" with no explanation like it's common cultural knowledge. Yet Google returns nothing.

What is it? Where are you getting it from?

The Hock is my own creation. I believe that the Hock purges the weakness out of people's character through adversity and challenge; a necessary component of the Hock is the risk of death.

"The Hock" is an idea he is enamored with, where young people get dropped into extremely hostile wilderness conditions, relying on their survival skills, persistence and general strength of character to make it back to civilization without freezing to death or otherwise getting themselves killed. He believes that surviving such a challenge will make one more interesting at parties/otherwise increase one's socio-sexual market value. Most of his posts lately seem to revolve around this subject in some way.

He believes that surviving such a challenge will make one more interesting at parties/otherwise increase one's socio-sexual market value.

In some way, yes. Leaving aside any benefit that comes from surviving life and death struggle, consider what a person who boards the plane to embark on the Hock is like, compared to how he was a year ago:

He is more physically fit, having worked at strength training and aerobic conditioning.

He has carefully considered his selection of outdoor gear and equipment, building his planning and preparation skills.

He has made peace with his own mortality and considered deeply what was meaningful in his life.

So too: the Hock tests. Those who have garbage conscientiousness, or who are physically unfit, or who lack a certain relatively low level of intelligence...do not survive the Hock.

Therefore, I would argue that the median Hock survivor would be more attractive than average...or at least, this would be so if you simply rounded up a bunch of random people and offered a million bucks to those that survived, or just forced them to Hock but gave them time to train.

People who have been revived from an opioid overdose with Narcan have survived a life and death struggle. They too have often made peace with their own mortality. The fact that they survived does not make them more attractive, instead it makes them less attractive. It signals that they do not exercise good judgment and are unable to find a healthier way to cope with the problems in their life.

I feel like surviving the Hock will not have the attractiveness increasing benefits you are predicting. Instead, people will question why you feel the need to engage in such risky behavior with such a minimal payoff. If they deduce that your participation in the Hock was due to your inability to find healthy solutions to the struggles in your life then they may question what crazy thing you will do next time you face a struggle.

Instead of the Hock you would get more benefit from the socially acceptable forms of extreme fitness like: Ironman, CrossFit, triathlons, etc. They have the added benefit of having existing social structures where people can help you train and provide motivation. Technically, they are life and death struggles since people have died while participating in them.

But. If you OD AND THEN GET CLEAN you might have perspective and wisdom and maybe be more attractive. I think it would definitely hold true if heroin dealers only sold to those that had first climbed a mountain or run a marathon in a decent time or something. Have to have done at least one Feat to buy dope. A clean former mountain climber might be okay.

Is the Hock addictive?

Ah, seems pretty novel.

My brother in Christ, you invented the "Hock". You have every opportunity to think of something 10% as stupid.

What would you think - as a person and a future psychiatrist - of a man who attempted the Hock and lived to tell the tale? Would you admire his strength and resilience, while condemning his stupidity? Would you find it amusing? The Hock is at least a testament to hard work and...brainpower, even if possibly misguided and foolish.

I believe that the Hock provideth for all who attempt it, either through victory or death.

condemning his stupidity?

Yes. That about sums it up ngl

The idea I got is that /u/SkookumTree wants it to be stupid, because it's noble to do stupid shit or something.

Needless to repeat, I disagree. Doing retarded shit isn't noble, it's retarded. When women do become attracted to a man after he did something retarded, it's in spite of retardation - it's because it was also cool (the "Hock" isn't) or netted him value (the "Hock" doesn't) or was noble-noble not "retarded-noble" (the "Hock" is not).

By the way, /u/SkookumTree, before you show your idea to anyone else, please don't call it some cringy neologism that sounds like one of the worst terms PUAs coined because they thought it's gotta be original and catchy.

When women do become attracted to a man after he did something retarded, it's in spite of retardation

I do wonder. Perhaps the Hock is Jackass meets Into the Wild; however, was Johnny Knoxville more attractive for riding off rooftops in shopping carts? I would think a high-school sophomore might be more attractive to his peers for doing so. A grown adult? Maybe if he makes a bunch of money off of it or becomes notorious. Then again: consider the fate of Eugene, Oregon's Nutsack Man, a man who suffered brain damage in a motorcycle wreck and then spent several years riding his bike around Eugene, yelling "Eugene Transit can suck my sweaty NUTSACK! NUTSAAAAAAAACK!" He certainly gained notoriety, although I have no clue if anyone was attracted to our hero. I heard tell that he had a girlfriend at one point - and this while sleeping rough and screaming NUTSACK at passersby.

Also, the origin of the term "Hock" is simple: Hock participants are chucked or Hocked into the Alaskan wilderness. "Hock" is a slang term that can mean "to throw".

You're also telling me that a solo cross-country journey in temperatures as low as 40 below zero, on skis, with a homemade sled and a bunch of gear, isn't at all cool? Hell, there are other people who did things like this, solo or in groups, in the same terrain...Andrew Skurka isn't cool for his journey? Chris McCandless wasn't noble or heroic for his ultimately futile attempt...and would it have been different had McCandless survived his adventure to return to society? Jon Krakauer was just a dumbass for trying to use a couple of curtain rods from a hardware store to protect himself from crevasses during his 1977 solo climb of the Devil's Thumb?

Perhaps the Hock is polarizing; I will also contend that the Hock produces a change in the character and personality of he who survives. The point isn't to go on the Hock and tell everyone about it; I suspect that if you survived the Hock you wouldn't talk about it much except perhaps with people who had survived similar experiences, and then only at certain times. The point is to alter your character and become Hock hardened.

"Hock" is a slang term that can mean "to throw".

Not sure if this is part of your distilled stupidity strategy, but no it doesn't -- 'hock' is either part of a pig's (or other animal's, but usually a pig's) leg, or the act of spitting up phlegm.

The word you may be reaching for is "huck" -- which can also mean vomit, so maybe you are on the right track -- in that none of these things are attractive to women either.

I've heard "hock" being used in this sense. Apparently at least a few other people have. The Hock spawning a slang etymology debate is an unexpected outcome here...

This is unnecessarily antagonistic, don't do this please.

I don’t disagree with you, but, uh, it seems like responding to single issue posters should come with a bit of leeway when it’s the 5th time.

Gotcha, though I hope it's clear that I meant no malice by it. Poor bastard needs a father figure to give him a hug, or better yet, a hooker.

I'm more exasperated at his Eeyore impersonation than anything else.

We're both in the healthcare field: we both know that human beings can habituate to an awful lot of disgusting shit and deal with it with a smile.

Barring cases where there is some impediment to clear thinking, the main judge of your moral worthiness to be in a romantic relationship should be the person entering into the relationship with you. It would be an odd situation if someone were attracted to you but you dared not talk to them because you weren't ready for war, and you may be ready for war and still be morally disgusting to women in other ways.

Sure. It's like being extremely tall and trying your hand at basketball. You don't need to be seven feet tall to play basketball for Duke and there are probably seven footers who don't make the team.

Women do this through pregnancy and childbearing, which I have heard legitimately compared to frontline infantry combat in its level of hardship

Is it still that hard? I'm sure it was that hard back before we had modern medicine. But I gotta say, my wife is an extremely pain averse person (she either feels pain about 5 times as much as I do, or she's kinda wimpy about it and doesn't cope with it well), but once she got that epidural, birth was not too bad. It became more like something that took some effort to do as opposed to something harrowing.

I've heard an American physician make this statement about his wife's experience of being a new mother. The man was a surgeon and no stranger to hard work and long hours.

Indeed, but the man was also talking about his wife's experience. It could be accurate but a married man myself, I can assure you he was heavily disincentivized to compare it to anything less heroic.

Yeah. I've also heard it said that war was to men what motherhood was to women. I agree with the sentiment but it's not Ancient Rome anymore and we can't really win glory and wealth by pillaging and looting fertile farmland and slaves. Thus each man chooses his own Hock.

I think it is roughly correct. Historically only fraction of males reproduced sometimes getting as low a number as 1:17 compared to women. On the other hand even if women reproduced, they had at times 30% chance of dying in childbirth in their lives. So on average we really are in relatively similar numbers of men who were not able to reproduce and women that died after (hopefully) reproducing - if their child was not the first one and stillborn.

There is the saying that only women really are "being" and valued for what they are - the potential of being the mother. The men are "doings" and their value derives from what they bring to the table. It roughly corresponds to rites of passage: women have it simple, they were historically considered adult as soon as they experienced their first menstruation. Males often had to undergo crazy rituals involving pain and risk of death.

Now of course we do live in a different society for some time now, but I do think that the evolution really did not catch up yet. The general attitudes are still the same as they were thousands of years ago.

A minor quibble, the study you reference doesn't mean that only one in 17 men reproduced, as if there were a handful of men with giant harems.

Imagine that you have small groups of related men descended from a single patriarch, plus their wives and children. These clans would go to war with other clans.

If clan A defeats clan B, then all the men in clan B are killed and the women taken as war brides.

When clan A starts running out of farmland due to population growth, it splits and the splinter group goes looking for territory elsewhere.

Rinse and repeat these two processes, and you end up with a situation where someone alive today has far fewer male ancestors than female ancestors, because neolithic women did not face the same selection pressures as neolithic men.

It's also worth noting that weird, painful initiation rituals don't just exist for young men (although they are mostly for young men).

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

I think it's a bizarre concept. It's not even masochism--the masochist presumably at least takes some pleasure, sensual or otherwise, from the punishment and degradation. What you're describing here seems to be somewhere in and among original sin, serious self-loathing, and a deathwish.

It's also not entirely clear to me that once one passes this what you're describing as Hell on Earth, that to be in this same person 's presence romantically would be to endure a "deep visceral biological disgust."

much as your wife is very likely to be deeply disgusted with you

That seems like a big assumption.

It does conflate the life of the average man with that of the unattractive one, and ignores the role of habituation to disgust that people experience.

It's Skookum, that's just one of his axioms. It seems that his goal is to create a pill so black that light cannot bounce off it at all, and then force himself to swallow it. Why? I cannot tell.

Women do not undergo pregnancy for the greater good or the good of their tribe. It's all to benefit their own genes. They choose men to benefit their own genes, too. For men, step 1 is be good looking. Step 2 is be high status. Struggling is not high status. Effortless mastery is high status. So is getting other men to fight, suffer, struggle, and possibly die for you.

Would you describe yourself as an incel, or something close? I don't mean to pry, but your ideas about gender dynamics are a bit alien to me, and I want to understand where you're coming from.

Hmm. I'm a 28-year-old virgin, although I disagree wholeheartedly with the self-identified incels' descriptions of having been wronged. I cannot point to a single person or group of people that have wronged me. If I was forced to say, I might put the blame at the feet of social media or whatever was leading to atomization, but even that is a stretch. I think I am probably just roadkill on the superhighway of progress, dead critter 8,201,974. Nothing personal about it, any more than the Luddites' complaints in their time. It looks like there's a kind of quiet forest fire clearing out the dead wood and the people that would have maybe done OKish under an agrarian patriarchy but suck in modernity in one way or another. Hell, if I was a Luddite, I would not have been a very good weaver - perhaps a passable one, but not a great one.

I don't intend to come off as misogynistic and mean to make it very goddamn clear that I do not blame women for doing what they are doing; I would probably do the same in their shoes. If I was an equally unattractive woman I'd probably be a somewhat bitter and misanthropic feminist writing about how society enabled men to suck and how current systems weren't very well suited for women (or unattractive ones); there would probably have been traumatic experiences as autistic girls and women are very vulnerable to piece of shit predators.

As far as effortless mastery: the Hock may provide this. If you've looked death in the face, been exhausted hauling a sledload of gear through the Arctic mountains, etc. your desk job looks like a piece of cake and you don't really give a shit about a lot of things. So too, "effortless mastery" may be very effortful from the inside...Olympic athletes make it look easy but they're working their asses off while they're doing backflips, professional dancers collapse and gasp for air when they go backstage.

Women do not undergo pregnancy for the greater good or the good of their tribe. It's all to benefit their own genes.

I know some biologists really hate the idea of group level selection, but I don't see how you can declare the idea to be so obviously wrong with such confidence.

It's not my area of expertise, so I'm not going to debate it with you. These debates have all been had at length online already. I would just note that the genes that reach fixation in a species must do so by increasing their own prevalence (by helping themselves or their kin), not by making their group survive. If there are genes for helping the group and they die with the bearer, that doesn't do much good for those genes. Seems tautological to me, but if you want more detail, I defer to the experts.

I think it's dumb.

I think suffering as a human emotion is an over rated experience.

I dislike that shared group suffering is a consistent cheat code for unlocking group cohesion. I was always suspicious of groups that employed this method to bond their underlings.

Certain levels of suffering and pain are my personal proof that a good god does not exist, and never existed with any amount of power over this universe. The suffering present by default in nature is horrific and often purposeless.

Worshipping suffering bring to mind goths that would cut themselves in highschool. Lauding it as a method for social cohesion makes me think that the person is bad at normal human connection and is looking for a cheat code.

So basically the Hock is a cheat code cooked up by a lonely probably-autistic man looking to trade out the pain of loneliness for that of physical suffering, ideally shared.

On the goths: those fuckers formed strong as hell bonds due to the shared intensity of their experiences - arguments with parents, occasional psych unit stays, running away from home to escape said psych unit stays. The bonds lasted a while after high school but five or so years later they frayed after they got the money for sleeve tattoos and decent therapy and grew apart.

But: does this dumbness have a political slant to it at all? If it does, what quadrant is it in politically?

So basically the Hock is a cheat code cooked up by a lonely probably-autistic man looking to trade out the pain of loneliness for that of physical suffering, ideally shared.

I don't think the trade will be successful, they will wind up with both the suffering and the loneliness.

Men don't come back from combat and war and feel that they are no longer alone. They come back missing the level of camaraderie they had. Many of those same men went in relatively fine too.

But: does this dumbness have a political slant to it at all? If it does, what quadrant is it in politically?

No, plenty of things don't have a political slant. If it does have one it is probably an artifact of demographics. Whichever quadrant young men are in is going to be where this is at.

You keep posting the same thing. The fact is, there are many happy couples with very below-average looks. The wife of an ugly man is not, on average, 'deeply disgusted' with him. (I'm not sure what effect this has on e.g. cheating, any observations will be very confounded by the association of unattractiveness with other things).

You're a decent writer, you seem capable of having interesting ideas. Do you have anything else you might be moved to write about? Why not try that? Maybe just vignettes from your life like george_e_hale, maybe some interesting technicality from your job, perhaps a commentary on ancient philosophy. Just anything else.

Unattractiveness isn't just physical. And it isn't always the case... it's just a good deal more likely that an incapable chump has a partner that is disgusted by them.

Its almost entirely physical.

Consider Elliot Rodger.

Imagine if he was 6'2". With the same personality.

Is our hero now average?

He wasn’t ugly even at his height, his own manifesto makes clear that the reason for his loneliness was that he never spoke to women his age and so never created or found the possibility of dating one.

Yeah, agreed.

EDIT: I do think that he would probably have been better off had he attempted and survived the Hock. He at least would grok that he needed to work for things, confronted his own mortality, learned that Nature doesn't give a rat's ass about Daddy's money, and become physically fit and determined. Military service might have been even better - especially if he saw combat and got back in one piece and able to hold down a job. These things only work well if they're more or less freely chosen...I don't know how well drafting this dude for Vietnam or something would have worked out.

Disagreed, unless your definition of physical is very literal.

Rather abstracted to unattractive/gross behavioral tendencies plus or minus mental illnesses like schizophrenia and...pretty much every invisible disability to boot. Pretty conceivable that you might look pretty decent on the outside but be garbage on the inside. Case in point: Elliot Rodger. I don't think he'd have done that much better if he was 6' tall, either.

What do you think about the idea that in order to be morally worthy of a romantic relationship, you need to be willing and able to endure great suffering either for the greater good, or for your tribe, or for no reason at all?

What I think? I think you made your own personal religion worshipping suffering for its own sake as holiest thing ever, and try to preach it here, with little success so far. Do not let it dissuade you, keep up the good work.

Does this homebrew religion have a political slant? If it does, where is it on the political quadrant?

I have heard, but don't have the know-how to confirm, that the following tax loophole exists:

  1. Commission a famous artist to create an art piece, for $50,000

  2. Get it appraised to be worth $5 million

  3. Donate it, getting a full $5 million tax writeoff

  4. Profit income_tax_rate * valuation - commission_cost

Is this more or less correct? If so, I have the following harebrained idea to take advantage of it / force the IRS to address it:

  1. Create an accredited 501c "NFT art museum"

  2. NFTs are already naturally WAY overvalued relative to their cost-to-produce, but just to encourage things to remain that way, create a custom NFT collection with a few accredited artists who are the only ones allowed to add to that collection. Make the transfer fee super high so that these NFTs are disincentivized from remaining in the market.

  3. Design this whole thing to be totally sincere. Call it the "Artist and Artist Appreciation DAO" or something. Nominally, the point is to fund the creation of new artwork. New NFTs are regularly commissioned and donated to the art museum, and whoever paid for the commission eats the tax benefits.

  4. Possibly tokenize the whole process so that it's easy to buy a $1 tax deduction for only $0.10. Honestly doubt this would work with the current tax code though even if the rest of the process does work. I think there would need to be some kind of organization filing copyrights on all created pieces of artwork, then legally filing somewhere that the ERC20 represents legal ownership of the artwork. Even then, it probably wouldn't work.

  5. Profit? Either infinite tax write-offs, or the IRS closes a loophole that should never have existed anyways.

Anyways, can anyone tell me why this definitely wouldn't work?

The special sauce is the inflated appraisal value. this is done with real estate too or insurance fraud.

First off: There's no way this would work. I mean, it might work in the sense that you can write whatever numbers you want on a document and hope the IRS doesn't look into it, but there's no way it would hold up in tax court.

Second off: Jesus Christ the tax code is impenetrable. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm usually pretty good at finding relevant citations whenever I need them. I've never seen anything like Title 26. It's obscene.

There's a limit of 30% of your AGI and it can't be things you created (those are ordinary income properties with a different treatment).

Knowing very little about tax code, I think this shouldn't work because the jump from $50k -> $5million would be counted as profit in some sense, similar to if you buy $50k of stock and then sell it for $5 million. I think it's called an "asset appreciation tax"? So your taxable income would go up by 4.95 million from having an asset you paid $50k for go up in valuation, and then down by $5 million for the donation, giving you a net -$50k (because you spent $50k that you then donated). But I'm not certain this is how it actually works.

That's definitely how it should work, but I believe is not how it actually works if you donate it. I'm in the same boat as you though and am not exactly an authority on this.

You can donate appreciated stock at it's stepped up value and avoid capital gains taxes. It's a very good way to make charitable donations. It is however limited to 30% of your AGI though.

From IRS Pub 526

However, the reduced deduction doesn't apply to contributions of qualified appreciated stock. Qualified appreciated stock is any stock in a corporation that is capital gain property and for which market quotations are readily available on an established securities market on the day of the contribution.

The short version is the IRS knows about this trick and has a very successful record of prosecuting people who try to use it.

That looks very different to me since the appraisal was faked.

It seems like it would be hard to pull off this trick without faking the appraisal; if the artist's paintings are for-real worth $5,000,000, then he could just paint them and sell them for that price rather than accepting literally 0.01x that payment from you.

Elsewhere I said:

Just like with regular art, I think the process of donating it to charity actually increases its fair market value. Also, the fact that it was commissioned (rather than being sold directly by the artist) increases its fair market value. Yes, that isn't how these things should work, but art is mostly signaling anyways so in this case you literally get what you pay for; the more you pay the more valuable it is.

So, I think it is evident that there exist situations where I could create, then donate, an art piece worth $5MM, without being able to create and sell the piece for anywhere near as much.

And you need to put at least three people's heads on the block to make this scheme work - your own, someone to sign receipts on behalf of the charity (you only get to deduct the appraised value if the charity uses the donated object as part of its charitable activities, so someone needs to confirm this), and the appraiser.

Well the charity would be a real charity, there already exist online "NFT museums." The appraiser would also be real. NFTs already get utterly absurd valuations, and have gotten multi-million dollar legit appraisals. Generally I'm not planning on actually running a scam, just genuinely taking advantage of a loophole in a way somewhat more blatant than is the norm.

No, the standard is not a "legit appraisal." An appraisal can help establish what you believed to be the fair value the contribution to charity is, but in most cases you would need to show that the item could have been sold by the charity in an open market transaction for the amount deducted. The fact that there would be a recent transaction where an artist was willing to produce the piece for $50,000 would set the baseline case not the $5MM appraisal. The burden of proof would be on you and the appraisers to show otherwise. You would have to make an affirmative case the valuation is justified, the fact that the market is illiquid, so like no one knows the real price man, is not a defense. This is not a new idea, and appraisers and tax filers lose cases regularly where an inaccurate appraisal is used to claim an unjustified deduction.

I'm on the same page as you about all of that except the part about the market being illiquid. I think it would be doable to have a liquid enough market, where 90% of a given NFT collection is owned by the museum, but the remaining pieces are swapped around with some frequency. This is already how normal NFTs work much of the time--their "market cap" is sky high but this is because most of the supply is not circulating.

Yes, I understand none of this is necessarily an ironclad defense of the NFT's value, but aside from the internal IRS appraisers, I'm not sure how much more ironclad you can get than fair market value. I'm quite confident that, given NFT's properties (especially the ability to set extremely high transfer fees) you could set a "fair market value" extremely high without necessarily leading to a situation where people sell their NFTs without donating to them. That said, the IRS does include the stipulation that the market must not be artificially inflated, which sounds like a pretty central description of this whole scheme. Maybe.

In the end, I agree there's still a piece missing, but if it's possible for standard art then it's probably possible for NFTs too.

To me, the part that doesn't work is the idea you can "set" the fair market value. The fair market value is the price a knowledgeable buyer would actually pay for the entire quantity donated. The appraisal value must be for the entire collection donated. If you can today produce NFT's people will actually pay $5MM for a cost to you of $50k. You should, and will make a profit of $4.95M and have to pay taxes on the gains. This is always strictly better than just collecting the tax savings. If the NFT market is not actually deep enough to clear $5MM from selling all the NFT's in an open market the fair market value is not $5MM.

If all you have done is manipulate the market cap up by adding transaction costs, limiting the free float, or trading with yourself or co-conspirators you have not set the fair market value higher. You have just committed more crimes by manipulating the price of unregistered securities.

You have to make an affirmative case for your valuation if the IRS challenges it, which is going to be pretty hard when 79% of all NFT collections ... remained unsold.

Edit: Always strictly better under the current system, Andrew Granato and Tyler Cowen pointed out this would not be the case under the proposed 40% capital gains rate back in 2021.

If you can today produce NFT's people will actually pay $5MM for a cost to you of $50k. You should, and will make a profit of $4.95M and have to pay taxes on the gains. This is always strictly better than just collecting the tax savings.

Just like with regular art, I think the process of donating it to charity actually increases its fair market value. Also, the fact that it was commissioned (rather than being sold directly by the artist) increases its fair market value. Yes, that isn't how these things should work, but art is mostly signaling anyways so in this case you literally get what you pay for; the more you pay the more valuable it is.

So, I think it is evident that there exist situations where I could create, then donate, an art piece worth $5MM, without being able to create and sell the piece for anywhere near as much.

To me, the part that doesn't work is the idea you can "set" the fair market value. The fair market value is the price a knowledgeable buyer would actually pay for the entire quantity donated. The appraisal value must be for the entire collection donated.

Well, what I have in mind is that these pieces are created and donated a few at a time. I once again agree that it should work this way, but in practice this just isn't how art, or really anything, is valued. Is oil's fair market value determined by what someone would pay for all the oil in the world? Generally, no matter the asset, selling the entire supply at once would mean selling at a steep discount. The market doesn't need to be deep enough to absorb the entire supply at once for that to be the fair market value.

If all you have done is manipulate the market cap up by adding transaction costs, limiting the free float, or trading with yourself or co-conspirators you have not set the fair market value higher. You have just committed more crimes by manipulating the price of unregistered securities.

They're certainly not securities, no matter how much the SEC wants them to be. However the rest is valid. Like I said, I do think there's a piece missing before this scheme makes sense at all, but right now it's looking like the piece might exist.

You have to make an affirmative case for your valuation if the IRS challenges it, which is going to be pretty hard when 79% of all NFT collections ... remained unsold.

Meh, they analyzed 73,000 collections. I can programmatically create that many for like $1 and now 90% of collections remain unsold. The "blue chip" NFTs, let's say the top 10, are like 80% of the total NFT market cap.

I'm not trying to 100% disagree with you, I think your objections are reasonable and generally it's the exact sort of thing the IRS would come down on hard, but I do disagree with some of the specifics and think that through that process of debate we can arrive somewhere closer to the truth.

So, I think it is evident that there exist situations where I could create, then donate, an art piece worth $5MM, without being able to create and sell the piece for anywhere near as much.

If it is ever challenged by the IRS, you will need to make an affirmative case that the value has been increased, not only that there exist situations where it is possible. The price you would be able to sell for is literally the definition of fair value the IRS uses.

Is oil's fair market value determined by what someone would pay for all the oil in the world?

The value if you donate $5MM, marked to last trade or mid, worth of oil futures is very close to $5MM, close enough that you can probably claim the full $5MM. The true market value is close to but less than $5MM. This is because the oil futures are fungible and the market is very liquid, with literally trillions of dollars of notional value changing hands regularly. If you think you can regularly move $5MM of oil futures with literally zero transaction cost to arrival you should go become the worlds best market maker, you have discovered an infinite money glitch. What you are proposing is moving millions of dollars of notional value in market with a few tens of millions of dollars average daily notional volume where each product is non-fungible. Your price impact will be greater.

They're certainly not securities, no matter how much the SEC wants them to be.

Surprisingly the SEC hasn't taken a strong stance on if NFT's are securities, but certainly is way to strong of a statment though since the existing case law contradicts you. It also doesn't change the criminality because of the fact that any artifice to manipulate a price done by computer is still wire fraud even if it is not securities fraud.

The "blue chip" NFTs, let's say the top 10, are like 80% of the total NFT market cap.

There is literally a section titled "The Current State of the Top NFT Assets." If you have the ability to consistently create some of the top valued NFTs you have a very valuable skill, running a tax scheme is arguably a very high risk way of monetizing that skill, but it shouldn't be surprising that there is some way to extract value from that ability.

501(c)s also have to have a non-profit board, with a minimum of three people. The exact rules for how many must be 'independent' and what that means are complicated as hell, but it adds to the issue.

The authority of the IRS is so absolute, and the tax code so complex and yet also vague, that they can and will fuck you for anything they decide they don’t like. That essentially translates to “the spirit of the rules”.

I think this only works because those involved have enough prestige to make it look legit. They can find somebody with letters after their name to back up their claims to artistic integrity. They have friends at museums with respectable names. They have money and by implication lawyers standing behind them.

IRS auditors are required to refer all gifts of art valued at $20,000 or more to the IRS Art Advisory Panel. The panel’s findings are the IRS’s official position on the art’s value, so it’s critical to provide a solid appraisal to support your valuation.

Can you bamboozle the government artist auditors? That's the real test.

IRS auditors are required to refer all gifts of art valued at $20,000 or more to the IRS Art Advisory Panel. The panel’s findings are the IRS’s official position on the art’s value, so it’s critical to provide a solid appraisal to support your valuation.

Interesting, I wonder what the guidelines are for art valued below $20,000. It's really easy for crypto to find loopholes and bust them open; it would be child's play to just create 100 pieces valued at $15,000 or something rather than one piece valued at $1.5M. The whole point is to put this loophole into the Common Man's hands anyways, so a $15,000 tax writeoff is reasonably close to the sweet spot.

I think this only works because those involved have enough prestige to make it look legit. They can find somebody with letters after their name to back up their claims to artistic integrity. They have friends at museums with respectable names. They have money and by implication lawyers standing behind them.

I absolutely agree, but that at least sounds like a somewhat tractable problem. There are some legit museums displaying NFTs, and some other legit museums minting NFTs from their artwork. If legit museums can display NFTs then presumably there is at least a little wiggle room there.

I am rooting for you...but suspect that Uncle Sam is going to be very much not amused and that this stunt could potentially land you in prison. Good luck. Consult a tax lawyer first - the very best you can find.

What is the best way to get freelance web dev gigs? I am an experienced dev and recently quit, moved to a smaller city and want to have smaller projects. I might for example build a website with a backend for a business for 30k dollars that would easily have cost 40k+ at the agency I used to work for. The plan is to not use agencies, as I don't want to become a de facto employee.

The arguments in favour of free trade are convincing, but I've always wondered why we don't see unilateral free trade. After all, if you take at face value the arguments that tariffs on foreign imports hurt domestic consumers more than they benefit domestic producers, it would make sense to completely remove foreign tariffs without waiting for trading partners to do the same.

There are two explanations I can think of:

  1. Unilateral free trade is good, but multilateral free trade is better. Having tariffs gives governments the option of removing them in exchange for foreign countries doing the same. Without tariffs, governments have no leverage.

  2. Politics. Domestic consumers are better at lobbying governments than consumers, since the benefits of lower tariffs are diffuse, whereas the cost of removing them are concentrated on a small number of producers.

Am I missing anything?

Voters don't understand why free trade is good. They think in mercantilist terms where being able to sell things to foreigners is good but buying things from them is bad. They think of free trade as a trade-off, where you make the sacrifice of buying things from foreigners in order to gain the right to sell to them.

Comparative advantage locks you in place at the technology level you're on. In 1955 South Korea might've gone 'oh we should only export rice since the US does all industrial things way better than us'. Indeed, in 1955 that was the case. But they used protectionism to develop their industries so they could eventually compete on world markets in cars, televisions and microchips. There are ways to protect markets without making them lazy, by requiring a quota of vehicles to be exported for example. If someone in a free market wants to buy your cars than they're not totally horrendous.

Furthermore, countries need food security, energy security, domestic weapons production. Better economic efficiency than getting starved or annexed.

Then there's anti-dumping stuff. For instance Saudi Arabia can open up the taps and flood the world with oil to suppress competition. China can do the same with steel.

Comparative advantage locks you in place at the technology level you're on. In 1955 South Korea might've gone 'oh we should only export rice since the US does all industrial things way better than us'. Indeed, in 1955 that was the case. But they used protectionism to develop their industries so they could eventually compete on world markets in cars, televisions and microchips. There are ways to protect markets without making them lazy, by requiring a quota of vehicles to be exported for example. If someone in a free market wants to buy your cars than they're not totally horrendous.

And what's the argument for this not developing naturally in the absence of government intervention?

Well if South Korea had free trade only, how were they going to develop the capital necessary to compete with established car manufacturers? All the machinery they need, all the training they need to do... that needs a lot of money! Who is going to acquire that investment money if not the govt directly or via protectionism?

Look at microchips in the US - a huge strategic weakness exposed because the US allowed free trade in a market it dominated, letting others surpass them by subsidizing and actively sponsoring their own microchip industries. So now the US is scrambling to subsidize in order to catch up.

In 1955 South Korea might've gone 'oh we should only export rice since the US does all industrial things way better than us'.

The problem is that what worked in South Korea doesn't work anywhere else. See Brazil's extreme import restrictions / protectionism which, with the sole exception of Embraer, hasn't created any South Korea level champions despite a 200m+ population. It's entirely possible that with a homogenous, hardworking IQ 105 population situated right between two huge markets in Japan and China, South Korea could have reached first-world status even without protectionism.

True. If there's a group project, no matter how they're organized the smart kids are going to beat the stupid kids.

But government support can help. I'd argue that a high-IQ, hardworking, sophisticated country can do government support better than a stupider and corrupt country, just as they do other administrative/economic tasks better.

If communism can put a country behind, logically good governance should put it ahead. Fostering R&D spending for strategic industries would certainly be helpful. Guaranteeing their domestic markets temporarily in exchange for requiring them to export competitively. I read snippets of Lee Quan Yew's biography where he basically acts like a salesman, going around asking for investment from British and American companies, showing up to conventions... he was really actively supportive of industry in a way few govts are. In the case of China, they have institutionalized IP theft using state cyberespionage, that puts them ahead.

If you want to read more on the economics of reason 2, the technical term is "concentrated benefits and diffuse or dispersed costs".

How do people with long nails wipe their butts?

Most nail salons include a complementary colostomy bag on the way out the door.

They use a bidet.

Wadding toilet paper.

That’s the neat part, they don’t.

They can just scrape off the lingering material with their long nails. It’s like having seashells on you at all times.

I used to date a goth girl with long black nails. A friend with a crass sense of humor asked her that very question directly, but she laughed it off, so I never learned the secret.

She laughed it off because she didn’t want to divulge the secret that cute girls don’t poop.

Serious answer: they wrap huge volumes of toilet paper around their hands, keeping the nails and hand straight (like you're going in for a handshake, except with the palm facing upward) and use a folded-in thumb to hold down the wad of paper / stop it unravelling, then they 'swipe' motion to wipe.

You always deliver quality content, 2rafa, even it's literal shitposting.

I've been playing an online game where you just try to name as many US cities as you can. Here's my map. My goal was to name all the cities over 500,000 people. I am stubbornly short one such city. I haven't looked up the correct answer yet.

Can you guess which one American city over 500,000 people I'm missing?

I've been canoodling around with it for a week or so, and I've been listing generic city names and getting a surprising number of correct answers that way, including some big cities.

You named 2,826 cities, with a total population of 120,814,720 (46.35% of the national urban population in 2020).

I also got 234 of 339 cities over 100,000 people (69.0%).

Edit: I checked, here's the city I missed: Mesa, Arizona

I'm guessing it's one of those overgrown suburbs in Texas, Florida, or California that no one has ever heard of yet it's quietly getting huge.

I gave up and got the answer. It's not one of those states, but I think it is a suburb. I had heard of it though. Mesa, Arizona

I should have gotten that one, as I tried all the other generic landforms I could think of -- Volcano, Plateau, Forest, etc. Missed that one.

Who the hell would name a city Volcano? A Bond villain?

About 2000 Hawaiians. But I can't rule out the possibility that they are a supervillain and his lackeys. Still counts.

Probably, but there’s also a surprising number of smaller cities in Texas with technically more than 50k people but everyone thinks it’s a small town for whatever reason(eg Tyler, Lubbock, San Angelo)- probably because it’s within driving distance of something huge and much, much bluer.

From my experience there, I'd be sure to simply guess all the Texan cities I could think of connected to the energy industry. Lubbock, for instance, isn't in reasonable driving distance from anything except oil, but that's enough to get a lot of people there.

The ones I always forget are the ones which have not been that big for very long. Fresno, Phoenix, the various ones in Texas. It's hard to tell from your map which ones you've already got, unfortunately.

Can you share the game with us? I'd like to have a go myself.

Sure, it's Cityquiz.io They have other places besides the US too.

Yeah, it's hard to see from the map. Most of the major cities are surrounded by smaller ones with generic names that were easy to guess, like Glendale, etc. So they get crowded.

Texas has a bunch of big cities with very generic, forgettable names (like Garland). Also, every single place mentioned in King of the Hill is apparently fictional.

The Dakotas are sparsely populated but full of easily guessed names, towns with like 6 people in them. Lotta towns named after people's names -- Pierre, for example.

Most landforms and terrains that are famous have a city named after them, eg Everglades. The exception is Hawaii, where there is no Maui, Oahu, Mauna Loa, Waikiki Beach, etc. Luckily you can guess a couple towns just by combining the relatively few letters in the Hawaiian language. I got a couple I've never heard of that way.

Spanish-language placenames seem harder to guess. English-origin names like Michael usually have a town named after them. There's no town named Miguel though. Of course any saint most likely has a San Whatever or Santa Whatever town, but other than that, Spanish names are hard to guess. Also, if a county has an English-origin name, there's likely a town of that name too. If a county has a Spanish-origin name, it probably does not have a town of that name.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Paradise Lost. So far God isn't coming off well and Jesus sounds harebrained. On the other hand, Satan seems to have unfortunate ideas about what to do with humanity, which feels personal.

Paper I'm reading: Magnus' Science and Rationality for One and All.

Fellow Tetrapod by Dan Bensen, an absolutely delightful speculative-biology scifi novel. The premise: there are countless parallel versions of Earth, and in many of these sapient species have arisen, each from a different branch of life. There are sapient net-casting spiders that communicate by weaving puppets of their interlocutor, sapient hagfish that move about by extruding stilt-like rods of mucus, sapient crows that ride on the shoulders of domesticated hominids, sapient squirrels whose brain is mostly animated by strains of toxoplasma, and so on.

Two of these species (rotifers that form clonal colonies ruthlessly at war with each other and intelligent robots created by a long-extinct dinosaur race), have discovered how to cross between universes, and created a UN-like organization dedicated to building peaceful trade relations between sapient species. The protagonists are the representatives of humanity in this organization, about half a dozen of people rather neglected by their bosses on our Earth and looked down on by the members of senior, more affirmed species, trying to optimize humankind's position in the multiverse. The author has really done his readings on evolutionary biology, physiology, psychology, and so on; the novel comes with a proper bibliography.

I just finished Freddie DeBoer's How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement which was just...utterly disappointing. It falls into the same normie-splainer genre as Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution which means it's worthless to anyone that is vaguely familiar with stupidpol rhetoric and arguments.

At least his book on education had an idea worth looking at. This one? There's nothing new there. It doesn't help that Freddie is even less willing to challenge his audience on their assumptions (e.g. the injustices of policing, where he basically accepts the progressive frame of "police hunting African-Americans" but with "but #Defund mainly hurts blacks though! Maybe one day but not now, not this way!").

And, add insult to injury, Amazon is wise to my tactics so I couldn't even exchange it. I'll have to wait for another credit to read Hanania and Rufo's takes on the "why 'wokeness'?" genre. They can't be worse than this.

I just started Chip War. Not much farther than the first chapters but it's not actively patronizing me so we're off to a better start. But I am debating just how much of the historical set up I care about compared to the exploration of the post-COVID situation.

The audience for these books are like 64 year old boomer centrists who think Trump is vulgar but “the left seems to be going crazy” (literally my mother). Expecting to get much out of them if you’re very online is fruitless, in many ways they’re written explicitly for people who aren’t.

Yeah, at this point it's my fault for buying books based on liking someone's (less dense) online output and just expecting them to say something different without checking. I got Freddie's cause I liked his first and figured it'd be more of the same.

But this is arguably bad even for the John McWhorter "I'm a fellow tribe member, it's okay. You're not crazy or racist if you ignore these wokes" genre

Of course, in hindsight, part of it may just be that I am (was, I dunno) way more of a normie-leftist on education than crime. IIRC Others here without that problem also complained about some of the same behavior I'm noting here in The Cult of Smart too.

Slowly working my way through McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. It's about the brain hemispheres, and how current Western society is very imbalanced. We use the left hemisphere too much, which inhibits the right hemisphere.

It's a pretty long/dense book. Enlightening though.

No, I'm not familiar with Jaynes or with the Debt book. Intriguing thought though.

There might also be a relation to the broad society swings of culture in terms of art, thinking and literature? From the enlightenment to romanticism, etc. New technologies might promote more analytical or rationalistic thinking (the printing press, the internet). I haven't looked into this at all, it just popped up in my head now.

Literally or metaphorically?

I was under the impression brain-hemisphere research wasn't in a great state. Per Scott:

I am not an expert in functional neuroanatomy, but my impression is that recent research has not been kind to any theories too reliant on hemispheric lateralization. While there are a few well-studied examples (language is almost always on the left) and a few vague tendencies (the right brain sort of seems to be more holistic, sometimes), basically all tasks require some input from both sides, there’s little sign that anybody is neurologically more “right-brained” or “left-brained” than anyone else, and most neuroscientific theories don’t care that much about the right-brain left-brain distinction. Also, Michael Gazzaniga’s groundbreaking work on split-brain patients which got everyone excited about hemispheres and is one of the cornerstones of Jaynes’ theory doesn’t replicate.

Scott should read the book. It seems to make a solid case, although I'm still in the first 20% of it, so I'm not going to start explaining how, at this point. But it already seems clear that there are more than "vague tendencies". Both hemispheres do all sorts of tasks, but how they do it and how they relate to the world is different.

I did it! I finally finished Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. It had been on the back burner for...gosh. Months, now. The final stretch was so atmospheric and surreal that it pulled me back in. I absolutely loved how Strange and Norrell persistently refused to resolve their differences on other peoples' terms, only to come together in pursuit of new magic. The chapter where they first parted ways was one of the best in the book for similar reasons. It's hard for me to recommend the book without caveats; even as a notorious fan of door-stoppers, I found it slow at points, and I was afraid it wouldn't deliver. With the exception of a couple plot threads, I can conclude that it did.

Next up, I'm going to start Banks's Use of Weapons. It's the Culture book I've most wanted to read for a while, and I found a used copy recently.

Though...perhaps something a little lighter? Last night, after discussing stylized prose and pacing in JS&MN, we were flipping through Patriot Games. I wanted to find a Clancyism. And wow, he did not disappoint.

Sergeant Major Noah Breckinridge was the image of the Marine non-commissioned officer. Six-three, the only fat on his two-hundred-pound frame was the hot dogs he'd had for lunch in the adjacent Dahlgren Hall.

God, it's perfect. The peak of the genre. Simultaneously a vivid image and a complete blank slate. It imports a stable of tropes while screening itself with the extra details. They don't matter; they're only there to keep the reader from noticing that he or she has conjured a phantom, fully formed, from the collective (American) unconscious. In isolation, Clancyisms are ridiculous. In context, when the reader stays under keeps suspending disbelief, they make for a vibrant, breakneck read.

If you liked Jonathan Strange I can recommend Piranesi by the same author - also good but much shorter and tighter (though on the downside, from my point of view, the homoeroticism moves from subtext to text).

Finished Conan The Barbarian in The Phoenix On The Sword. Only 24 pages! Phew. Short stories rock.

Over to the other side of the spectrum for Brothers Karamazov at ~900 pages, and Dostoesvky doing his reverse Columbo act of "Chapter 3: I beg the reader's patience, for before I begin the introduction to the beginning, I must first include a preface to the beginning of the introduction".

What is it with old books and these interminable beginnings? It doesn't take that long to set the scene.

What is it with old books and these interminable beginnings? It doesn't take that long to set the scene.

Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880.

I do not believe that these are unrelated.

Is Brothers K really 900 pages? Damn, I'm 95% through on kindle and it flew by (admittedly on commutes and flights). What a book.

Yes it goes faster than anything else by him, but I think that’s because it really is one of the funniest things ever written.

For those who care, about whether or not we're living in a simulation, why do you care? From your perspective, what does this change about your relationship to existence and creation?

If we're in a simulation, then perhaps we should be purposefully trying to serve/help whoever made the simulation. Or try to negotiate with them so they will give us stuff. I couldn't say really what we should do about it, but I figure it'd be at least worth putting together a big think tank to come up with ideas.

If we lived in a top-level, non-simulated universe, there would be no chance of an afterlife, no chance of being a constituent part of a greater self. Reality would be 'as-is'. There'd be no chance of a score at the end of one's life where you get to see how well you did in comparison with your peers. There'd be no point in being justified after one's death.

Why does living in a simulation imply any of that is true, though? Each of the soldiers in your Total War army don’t get a personality score and rating at the end of each game.

Why does living in a simulation imply any of that is true, though

It doesn't, only that it's not impossible. Thus I repeat 'no chance' three times. It's like being a passenger on a train that's heading off a cliff, it's reassuring to know that rescue might come.

Ah, so ‘simulation’ includes eg. all Abrahamic or similar religion in this definition (because God created it)? ‘Top level non-simulation’ is essentially just atheism?

Yes, plus simulation theory has some quantitative reasoning as to the mechanics of otherwise unknowable divine powers. Big computer go brrrr. Thus the three postulates in Bostrom's paper.

I mean clearly, ignoring metaphysical/moral implications (such as that simulated beings are definitely conscious), that has a lot of practical implications on life as we know it. Reality becomes much more tenuous. It could end at any moment, the rules could change dramatically, it could have started last Tuesday.

There would still be normal physics, and then there would be metaphysics where we try and appeal to the simulator to get things changed. Clearly earning the favor of the all-powerful creator will be more productive than inventing a 10% more efficient nuclear reactor (unless the latter is how we earn favor).

I think what a person cherishes and how they act are consequences of internalized metaphors. Metaphors are like the building blocks of cognition. “Living in a simulation” is a bad metaphor because it automatically connotes insignificance, whim, chance, and technology culture. Imagine the difference in feeling between “I live in a simulation” and “I am the beloved creation of an infinitely great benevolent monarch.” Which one a person believes will have huge ramifications for how they treat life.


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