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naraburns  nihil supernum  6mo ago (astralcodexten.com)   1940 thread views

ACT: Hardball Questions For The Next Debate

astralcodexten.com

I'd guess the vast majority of you read Astral Codex Ten regardless of whether it gets posted here, but Scott's latest culture war (adjacent) post is not to be missed.

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I came to Scott for the based anti-SJ takes and stayed for the mind-bending philosophy and futurism. Between these it's easy to miss that the man is really witty.

He wrote an entire novel-length story and filled it with puns and interlocking/interleaving wordplay, often bouncing between English and Hebrew.

And I'm over here unable to even put together the words to describe how much I wish I had that talent.

IMHO this was a little disappointing; it was amusing, but I went into it expecting something on the level of 2015, 2016, or 2020, which were hilarious.

Kinda funny that the 2020 one considers deploying a $1000/mo UBI is infeasible in the question to Yang, but then later that year the gov't would distribute significantly-sized checks to people with relatively little difficulty due to Covid policy.

Spending huge amounts of money for one year is very different from spending huge amounts of money every year, indefinitely. Imagine you went on a lavish vacation, staying at fancy hotels and eating at expensive restaurants for a week, and then your kid asked you "why can't we always live like this? After all, we just did so with relatively little difficulty for a week."

Not to mention, we've been paying the price for our massive money printing that year ever since with major inflation.

I think that “infeasible” was in the sense of financial solvency, like free college for all, or anything about social security. Not in the sense of the government being unable to mail a check.

I do prefer the older ones myself, even if I'd class this as A tier content, those were S in my opinion.

I was reading the 2015 one and was like "these are kind of clever I guess", but when I got to the Marco Rubio one I was like "wow. Between this and Unsong, writing plausible-sounding fantastical alternate history comes as easy to Scott as breathing".

Wait, how much of the Sword stuff is real? Did Jeb! really give Rubio a sword?

it's real

I didn't think those were nearly as funny.

Different strokes.

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