domain:parrhesia.substack.com
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
8m ago
The term "therapy" has its physiological parallel in "physical therapy." Physical therapy is universally understood to be a means getting part of the body back to a normally functioning state, or as close to possible. Something went real wrong, we gotta fix that.
Physical training is when the body is more or less functioning normally, but you want to improve performance in some dimension.
Your examples of public speaking, personal organization, etc. is much more in line with the "physical training" concept. You want to improve performance and you have a specific and measurable goal towards which to progress.
"Everyone should go to therapy", in my opinion, is literally implicitly stating "everyone has something mentally and/or emotionally wrong and not normal about them and, therefore, we should all commit to professional support for an indefinite period of time."
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
12m ago
I suppose I have. I'm still fermenting this philosophy of mine, but I see it as a good sign that it's led me to solid ground.
More aspirationally, I envision a reworking and expansion of pink-collar work to span a wider gamut of expertise and prestige while remaining distinctly feminine. There still need to be secretaries and receptionists (or not, depending on how AI shapes up), but I'd prefer if more was expected of the average pink-collar worker in terms of embodied competence.
Wohlfe
15m ago
I lament the continued decline in quality for modern media, particularly in writing and pacing. A part of me hopes studios start using AI so it either blows up in their faces and they start valuing quality again, or it creates so much slop some of them focus on quality to stand out.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
25m ago
You may be right that AI basically creates a new sort of entertainment experience (e.g., tooling together a pipeline to create your own homebrew fanfiction). And there is nothing wrong with just doing what's fun. My reaction was mostly just, I guess, a defense of actually caring about literary quality. Not that everything you read/enjoy has to be high quality (I like my litrpgs and cheesy space operas too.)
roystgnr
26m ago
I'm just commenting "Discworld" here because I'm only allowed to upvote @PokerPirate once.
To make my comment less redundant, here's the Discworld Reading Order Guide. IMHO although the best starting points depend on your taste, you can't really go wrong with "Guards! Guards!" or "Mort".
The reading order is worthwhile to avoid missing backstory (or to let you know what backstory you can miss - "The Color of Magic" wasn't nearly as good as his later books), but the books get even better as you go on. I could name several stories that set me on edge from the suspense, or teary-eyed from the tragedy, or laughing from the comedy, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything other than "Thud!" that managed to do all three at once, with a single line that would make no sense whatsoever out of context.
faceh
27m ago
Not disagreeing, and indeed I don't think any legal processes have been invoked here.
But how much should women's feelings be accommodated in these sorts of informal social conflicts? As much as we don't want explicit written rules there's a void left when the
The situation's "severity" seems to me that if he and his organization had stood his ground, said "look I'm deleting everything and I'll take a social media hiatus, but nobody has been hurt and the team is more important" they'd probably have come through alright.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
32m ago
While I do agree with everything substantive and specific you wrote, I think the framing falls into a trap common to a lot of thinking about AI. Specifically, that AI will simply extend or accelerate a given domain and technology. In this case, publishing and fiction.
There's not going to be an AI written book that wins any prestigious award. This is because it would be foolish to simply have an AI write one immutable story. Instead, "AI writers" will be either fine-tuned or wholly trained models that people use to write stories on the fly that still adhere to a central plot, world, and character collection.
To use a common reference point, let's take Game of Thrones. People have their favorite characters, subplots, settings, etc. With an AI-writer-model, you could say "Hey, write a new subplot where that blonde with the dragons and whatnot flies on up to the blizzard place and fucks around for a while." (side note: I never watched or read GoT, ironically enough, so all my references are going to be bad)
Now, you're creating new content that still stays within the "world" of GoT. And it works at innumerable levels of detail. The casual consooomer will write one sentence slop generator stuff - and love it. The aficionado will create complex subplots and tweak small elements of character profiles to see how these reverberate throughout the grander story. I predict that once the cost of GPUs gets low enough (or models get efficient enough) people will literally be writing and producing full scale movies at home.
Instead of human authors and writers being the nucleus of "art" it will be a constellation of models, with humans recombining them ad infinitum. I look at this as a good thing. You can un-cancel your favorite show (The Wire!), Hemingway becomes immortal and produces infinite books. Unlimited GoT fanfic erotic (......yay?)
I know this will happen because I'm already doing it. My mental bubblegum is hardboiled neo-noir paperbacks. Think something in the vein of The Last Good Kiss. Over the course of a dozen 2 - 3 hour evenings, I've put together a GitHub repo of characters, settings, themes etc. I've used an AI toolchain to develop scenes. I then line edit them mostly for continuity issues (which AI still stumbles on) or to make a sudden plot twist because I feel like it. I am not doing this to publish a book. I am doing this because I genuinely find it far more entertaining and exciting that Netflix scrolling or re-watching the actually good stuff. And it's low stakes. I don't really care if the plot doesn't quite hold together. I don't care if a character's motivation self-contradicts after a while. It's fun. It's unlimited fun. Over the 40+ hours I've put into it, I've probably spent $100 in API credits. You can definitely argue that's actually quite a bit less cost effective than Netflix etc. But I believe the received value is excellent.
AI will not be a linear extension of current industries. I'm not saying it's a step-function for everything either. It will simply be a very hard to predict tangent. In many cases, this will be absolutely good for all parties. In many cases it will be a massive tradeoff and shift in the "center of gravity." I think there are only a few cases I can see where it represents a system-breaking potential.
Anyways, I'm off to writeread about Detective Jar-Jar Binks' latest case involving Anton Chigurh.
I readily admit that there are women out there who enjoy casual sex (I've met plenty of them, including a handful who weren't French) and I'm sure Holly Math Nerd's therapist was exaggerating for comic effect, but I nonetheless think "demisexual" probably describes the modal female experience a lot more accurately than the sex-positive feminist tabula rasa account.
I read Rejection a few months ago ("Pics" was, in my view, the strongest story in the collection) and posted a mini-review here. Curious to see if you agree with any of my points.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
38m ago
I like Holly Math Nerd, but she's got... some issues (as she readily admits). She insists that the number of women who enjoy sex for sex's sake and will not be damaged by having sex without an emotional bond is nearly an empty set. I... have enough experience to believe that is not the case. I absolutely believe Women Are Different and that most women need/desire an emotional bond in a way men generally do not. But there totally are women who enjoy being sluts, and I don't think that number is so very small (though they may come to regret the physical and social costs of their behavior later).
"Demisexual" is a stupid term, and especially stupid to lump under the anything-but-boring-straight rainbow umbrella, but it's not a universal descriptor for a "normal" woman.
nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his.
Tangentially (and fitting my theme of Literary Snobbery), a while ago we had some Discourse about Tony Tulathimutte's The Feminist. I just got done reading his complete collection, Rejection. It's very good, though very Online and Of The Moment. The first story is The Feminist, but the second story is basically a gender-reversed version, with a female incel who goes completely off the rails after an ill-fated one-night stand with her best friend. I think the whole collection is fun reading, and rich Culture War fodder. Tulathimutte, being a Thai-American Stanford grad and feted Literary Author, both capitalizes on and leans into/satirizes every stereotype and assumption you are projecting onto him, in a much more clever and intellectual way than, say, Rebecca Kuang's entertaining but subtle-as-an-anvil-launched-by-catapult Yellowface.
gattsuru
48m ago
It's noisy, but more critically, it's also a signal that's very sensitive to other stuff. I'm not very optimistic about Ames, for example, but despite not being a disparate impact suit itself, I'm hard-pressed to think of any conclusion but a punt on the underlying circuit split that leaves the rate of disparate impact suits unchanged. There's some cy pres stuff that could have an even bigger impact on settlements in general.
Beyond that, a lot of my position is about the policy, itself. The paper matters, both as something that discourages behaviors well before a court case happens, and in acting as cover for a wide variety of other behaviors that would be legally questionable. Maybe that's not something that we can bet on -- a Dem admin blanket-reversing every Trump EO is possible and wouldn't necessarily mean a reversion to 2024 disparate impact rules -- but it seems more relevant.
SkoomaDentist
48m ago
Thou shalt not submit thy god to market forces!
Which book is this from?
I think it’s been a decade since I last read Pratchett and should probably get back to it.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
49m ago
Piranesi - Most books you're on the ride with the Main Character knowing more than you about the setting, characters, etc. This book provides the odd experience of feeling like you know more than the MC while having all the same facts as him. It is beautiful, haunting, all about the process of reading it while still having some exciting bits. Think House of Leaves for people who don't hate themselves.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
51m ago
It often goes back and forth recommending obsolete or unavailable libraries or suggesting moving a line to the wrong place, then recommending I move it back in the next iteration. It's smart and often makes very good recommendations for improving and optimizing code, and it spots subtle bugs and typos very easily. It's also stupid and often makes terrible recommendations that will break your application.
I agree.
AI is indistinguishable from a junior dev.
pbmonster
52m ago
Any purported educational benefits of video games are bogus. All research on transfer on learning is that it doesn't exist.
As an anecdotal counter point: I played through the "Age of Empires 2" campaign at around 13 years old. Not only did it teach me more about history than the entire middle school curriculum, it also awakened my love for history. The combination of both lead to perfect grades in all my history classes till I graduated high school.
AoE2 is an exceptionally well done game, and arguably stands undefeated in almost every metric used to judge a real time strategy game, even today - so this is by no means an automatic result of video gaming. But it is one possible result.
Kerbal Space Program (which reignited my passion for rocketry long after studying mechanics at university) and Dwarf Fortress (which is the source of 99% of my knowledge about minerals, ores and metal smelting) are two other examples I would have no trouble letting my kids play, once they are around... 12?
hydroacetylene
55m ago
Given this, it seems to me that to preserve the dignified utility of woman, her sphere should be expanded to include particular sections of the public domain. You'll notice that this is the stated goal of feminism; while I agree with the early feminists about the root of the problem and the directional solution, my preferred means and ends acknowledge intrinsic sex differences and attempt to work within them when possible and subtly modify them when required.
I’m pretty sure you’ve just rederived the public school system from first principles.
hydroacetylene
59m ago
I’ve definitely noticed that among Hispanics, usually women have better English than men.
hydroacetylene
59m ago
Try The Human Reach- it’s basically Tom Clancy played completely straight in ultra-hard sci fi.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
They failed. There was the 101st airborne, yes, but the majority of the south saw no federal troops deployed. The KKK burned crosses and it didn’t work.
What you didn’t see was mass black terrorism. It wasn’t a thing.
InfrequentPoster
Formerly Lurker
1hr ago
Thank you very much, exactly what I was looking for! I was looking through internet archive version of /r/themotte but did not consider /r/slatestarcodex Obvious in retrospect as I suspected that the term originated with Scott.
FtttG
1hr ago
Agreed. The Little Friend was a massive disappointment. The Goldfinch had a very promising start, and the Las Vegas sequence almost achieved the dizzying heights of The Secret History, but she didn't manage to stick the landing.
I continue to wonder the extent to which this is the Bay Arean egregore poisoning a population for a phenomenon that would otherwise be known as "having close friends,"
I dunno, though. Everyone intuitively understands the concept of an emotional affair, and a lot of women (and probably a lot of men too) would see it as a betrayal if they found out that their spouse was sharing intensely intimate thoughts and feelings with another person of the opposite sex, even if their spouse hadn't yet fucked (or even kissed) the person. I don't know what Scott's love life is actually like, but to me it sounds like he has a wife and also a "harem" of other women with whom he has emotional affairs, achieving a degree of emotional intimacy greater than mere friendship, even if there's no fucking. I could be wrong, though: maybe what he calls his polycule is functionally indistinguishable from a dude who has a wife and a bunch of female friends, who treat him almost like their honorary "gay best friend".
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Slate Star Codex: The Comment Policy Is "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite"
There is an ancient Sufi saying beloved of the Buddha, which like a surprising number of ancient Sufi sayings beloved of the Buddha, originates from a book of preachy Victorian poetry. It goes:
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates; At the first gate, ask yourself, is is true? At the second gate ask, is it necessary? At the third gate ask, is it kind?
Slate Star Codex has lower standards than either ancient Sufis or preachy Victorians, and so we only require you to pass at least two of those three gates.
If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary.
This policy is cited in the sidebars of /r/slatestarcodex and /r/culturewarroundup, but not in that of /r/themotte.
I missed this review when you first posted it, but having just read Rejection, my thoughts:
I generally agree with you that the first few stories are the strongest, and the metafictional ones at the tail end are weaker.
I enjoyed the AITA? story more than you, but I took it as the absurdist satire it was. Yes, dunking on Elon Musk expies is kind of old now, but I still thought it was funny.
About the third story, Ahegao. I agree that the final sequence, describing the main character's increasingly deranged and over-the-top sex fantasies, went on longer than necessary. At a certain point I kind of checked out, just chuckling going "Really? Really?" I think Tulathimutte was probably having too much fun writing it, and the point was that the main character had gone so far down his fetishistic rabbit hole he could no longer see sunlight, and the fact that he just went on and on was hammering home the absurdity. Did it go on too long? Sure, probably could have made the same point with 30% less jizz.
I am not sure how accurate your assumptions about Tulathimutte are. Unless you have some external sources for this, I am always a bit wary of projecting too much into an author based on what they write. Some authors do bleed their hearts out onto the page, others very deliberately write characters and themes that are not reflective of their actual beliefs at all, and some try to fake you out about it, with varying degrees of skill and success. R.F. Kuang, for example, in Yellowface, writes about a white woman stealing an Asian woman's manuscript and literally appropriating her story about the Chinese experience in World War II. Kuang makes it very obvious that the Asian woman is a self-insert, and then tries to hang a lampshade on her by making her kind of unlikeable and fake (and also killing her off in the first chapter), and then she has another Asian woman make a big obvious self-serving villain speech about how hard it is for pampered rich Asian girls with Ivy League degrees to get respect in the publishing industry, but Kuang isn't fooling anyone, it's still an angry book about the publishing industry privileging white women over Asian women. So as for Tulathimutte, he's smarter and a better writer than Kuang, and obviously is, like Kuang, trying to anticipate and deflect inferences like yours (hence the metafictional final story, which I agree did protest too much). But the stuff about him being a rage-filled incel who especially hates white men who date Asian women? I mean, maybe? But I don't think the short stories in Rejection are enough evidence of that.
I have not read Private Citizen, and I think I will.
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