domain:forecasting.substack.com
cjet79
5hr ago
I agree with all of this. There are always tradeoffs in life, and in product consumption decisions.
Tree
5hr ago
“scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations”
The thing that gets my goat in most romcoms is, after the meet-cute, they put in a music montage of them talking at a diner. That was the entire ‚they fall in love‘ scene. You had one job. I know writing good dialogue is hard, but this is the heart of the movie.
Then they move on to the stupid obstacle/reason why they can‘t be together of act II which would never happen in a million years. Then it‘s time for the excruciating ‚it was so stupid, I love you‘ ending dialogue.
Who watches this and for what purpose? romcom enjoyers must want to see attractive people humiliated by the terrible dialogue and irrational situations. It‘s like in fight club when tyler bashes blondie‘s head in.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
Well, I can’t speak for what most men would want. Maybe it’s just me and… maybe @Primaprimaprima and like a guy I know from school in the corner, but no, I’d want romance content as the main enchilada.
...Have you tried Kage Baker's The Company series? If not, I'd recommend it, and let me know what you think if you give them a try. I read them years ago and have been waiting all the time since to find someone else who'd read them as well.
Hell, I'd recommend them generally as very good and extremely interesting books. The romance is a big part of it, as is mystery, and a heaping helping of Phillip K Dick.
MathWizard
Good things are good
6hr ago
See, that would have made sense. Assuming the magic sex change spell carries fertility with it (not sure how that interfaces with chromosomes, but maybe you can handwave magic that), I can easily imagine oppressive social norms that forces everyone to do like a clownfish thing. They have to be female in their late teens and early twenties to have a bunch of kids and then when they get older they turn male and go off to war to protect the society, with the most successful (and surviving) war heroes getting rewarded with breeding the younger females. Oppressive and constricting to be forced into as a citizen, but super beneficial for the society and the people ruling it since you get the advantages of both sexes, and maximizes chances of survival against an enemy force that outclasses you. (It especially makes sense in a LitRPG context where you can do easy fights and level up while young and will be multiple times stronger when you're older)
I'm not saying the author needed to make it be a rationalfic and actually do that. I can suspend disbelief enough for them to have a relative normal medieval culture or something close. But it makes no sense to make everything about the world gritty and harsh except for their gender norms.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
6hr ago
You have to get halfway through the Discord article before you get this section:
Many of the parents CNN Business spoke with said they did not enable any of the offered parental controls at the time, mostly because they were in the dark about how the platform works. If enabled, those parental control tools, including one that prohibits a minor from receiving a friend request or a direct message from someone they don’t know, likely could have prevented many of these incidents.
"Yes Discord does provide parental controls that would have prevented these incidents, but we didn't use them so it's still Discord's fault!"
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
6hr ago
If the shot at a successful and independent life means that I could also, with equal or even higher probability, end up destitute, i'll take the deal so long as I am in control of myself
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3xjgM7hcNznACRzBi/the-jackpot-age
I think this is more true today than it used to be. Zoomers seem incapable of enjoying a story in which a character has values different from theirs, and furthermore they are prone to assuming that the author is endorsing those values. (This is a generalization and I hope I'm not right, but it's what I gather from most young book reviewers nowadays.)
One of the other commenters here recommended the book Middlegame some years back, and I bought it and read it. I was disappointed and edified in roughly equal measure; the concept and writing and worldbuilding seemed quite excellent, but the villain was a naked ideological caricature to a degree that it deflated much of the climax for me, to a degree that the experience was itself likely worth the price of admission. The author was writing a wild fantasy, but they very clearly wanted core elements of both the heroes and the villains to be intimately familiar to both themselves and their audience, and so they wrote what I presume to be their ideological worldview straight in. Not sharing that worldview, the dissonance was sufficient to shake the whole narrative apart for me. Then again, maybe it's no worse than confirmed atheists experience reading Narnia.
You say you enjoy the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch because of "values-consonance" but how similar are those characters' values to yours, really?
I may be deceived, but my assessment is "pretty close". See various discussions of the Cardinal virtues versus the theological virtues; we Christians hold the latter to take precedence, but prize the former as close runners-up, indispensable, intertwined and of extreme importance. With regards to the Iliad, if you haven't seen it and don't mind video, this this seems a good summary of the consonance. for those who prefer text, the real kicker:
Priam is an old man, and one night he with a colleague get into a wagon, puts some ransom in the wagon and quietly goes out to the enemy camp. He takes this tremendous risk, going out to the enemy's camp and finds Achilles' hut, and he enters it, kneels at his feet, and kisses the hands that murdered his son. He says, "I a man old man, and I had fifty sons once, but most are dead now, many by your hand... and I had the greatest of sons. I had Hector, who was magnificent, and you killed him. Please, may I just bury him? Please, can you just give me this one thing? Give me my son's body, so that I can take him back and bury him."
And Achilles is absolutely stunned; he marvels at him, confused at first: "who- what... You've walked into my tent. Do you know who I am? Do you know how much danger you're in?" And then: "oh he's at my feet, he's kissing my hands? What?" And he marvels at the bravery of this king, this old man, and he finally gets peace by saying to the man, "yes, you may have your son's body back," and he even negotiates a truce of 12 days, so that they have enough time to gather firewood and go through all the various rituals and give Hector a proper burial. And the very last words are: "thus held they the funeral for Hector, Tamer of Horses."
It just stops there. That is how Achilles finally finds peace, through forgiving an old man and taking pity on him, seeing almost a fellow spirit in bravery in some ways, seeing the tragedy of what he's done. And it's it's almost... I mean I'm not a Christian but you could say that it's almost like a Christian message in there somewhere: it's "forgiveness brings peace", not glory in war, not killing people, it's suddenly seeing the humanity, appreciating the humanity of your enemy and just extending that Mercy to your enemy. That's what brings Achilles peace and that's what the Iliad is about.
...And from the other side, I am a Christian, but recognize the glory in war and so on which he argues is the other half of the Iliad.
Sure, they fit into the general Western monotheistic tradition, but Bronze Age heroes really weren't much like you and IMO the gap between your values and theirs is probably greater than the gap between your values and the average Blue Triber's.
I've had a bunch of really good conversations revolving around this question and my own thoughts on it; I'll refrain from the usual link spam but this dialog seems on point, at least to elaborate my own perception. Suffice to say, I believe my thinking and values is in fact much more similar to that of a Bronze Age perspective (and a classical perspective, medieval perspective, and so on) than it is to what I understand to be central examples of Blue Tribe thinking and values. One of the reasons I think that is the contrast between my own belief that the wisdom of previous millennia has more-or-less undiminished relevance today, compared to the belief which seems normative among Blues that human thought has progressed, such that the things we know now have made the wisdom of previous millennia trivially obsolete. Likewise, their attitude toward perceived historical enemies, and their judgement against historical populations and their sins and crimes. I may be wrong about this, but I've put a fair amount of thought into it and really don't think so.
Conversely, do you not enjoy the Iliad and the Odyssey? The Tale of Genji? The Ramayana? Even though they express very different values?
I haven't had the pleasure of the last two, but I'm saying I do enjoy them because I don't believe their values are very different. I reference Macaulay, who published his verse in 1842, near two centuries ago and an ocean away, written about a man two thousand years ago and an additional continent away; It seems to me that Macaulay wrote the verses because he perceived values-consonance with Horatius, and I quote him because I perceive values-consonance with both Macaulay and Horatius. Maybe this perceived values-coherence is an illusion, or maybe not. For what it's worth, I've dabbled in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and as far as I've gotten the values there seem much more foreign; there's plenty of what I might call "common humanity" still visible, but there seems to be a strong emphasis on a flavor of might-makes-right pragmatism that I don't recognize in western material till, say, Machiavelli. Those parts feel much more modern than the rest.
But this is what I mean by "having our cake and eating it too"; in general people love novelty, but are comforted by the idea that while the details can vary wildly, there's a core nature that remains the same. It seems obvious to me that when Blues write feminism into a post-apocalyptic fantasy, they're aiming for basically the same thing.
kky
6hr ago
Speaking briefly on ultimata.
The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.
Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.
OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.
For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.
That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.
(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)
jkf
6hr ago
"This is the abuse conciliatory encouragement department -- arguments is across the hall"
There are tons of anime romcoms aimed at men where the relationship between MC and FMC is the primary draw, rather than being a subplot of another genre. In fact, most of them take place in the standard high school setting and have no supernatural elements. Toradora!, Komi Can't Communicate, Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, Tomo-chan Is a Girl!, My Dress-Up Darling, Teasing Master Takagi-san...
I am specially fond of Nagatoro; my heart melted when I read chapter 114. I was so proud of Senpai for svanyyl univat gur onyyf gb nfx Antngbeb gb cbfr ahqr sbe uvz; it's a very beautiful scene that is the culmination of six years of character and relationship development. Likewise, the scene that sold me on Komi was the blackboard conversation in episode 1; I was completely blown away by the music and the animation and the way Tadano and Komi connected with each other. These are not scenes about something else that happen to include romance; they are romance scenes.
I don't see why you couldn't write romance books aimed at men that were similar. Indeed, some of these titles started out as light novels, and to the extent that the novels on /r/romance_for_men successfully appeal to their target demographic, that seems to be exactly what they are doing.
TitaniumButterfly
8hr ago
Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a
He must have died while writing this. Perhaps he was dictating?
How many Japanese nationals are there who get involved in a custody dispute in a foreign country? A surprising number of people avail themselves of the option when it is available to them. Japan is just the most notorious example, plenty of countries will drag out an international custody dispute for years until the issue is effectively moot. Once a child is 12 or so years old, it becomes very hard to force them to live with an estranged parent they have not seen in years, who lives in a foreign country.
I get your overall point though, most people who disobey custody orders are not exactly masterminds, and likely don't have a foreign abscondment planned.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
8hr ago
Well, I can’t speak for what most men would want. Maybe it’s just me and… maybe @Primaprimaprima and like a guy I know from school in the corner, but no, I’d want romance content as the main enchilada.
Basically, “guy is going about life, meets woman, forms connection with woman, the two understand each other on a deep level, passion ensues.” When you wrote this: “scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations”, well I guess I like the last bit the most. I find myself bored in some action movies waiting for the emotional character moments to happen.
I like romance stories because I like romance, I like thinking about romance not as a reward for what’s actually important, but as something that itself forms people into who they are and is one of the keys that makes life meaningful. Not “I became the best version of myself to gain you,” but “I became the best version of myself because I met you.” Romance isn’t about reward but about recognition; seeing yourself in the other. Becoming complete through intimate union.
But I am literally the guy who will be at a party and go, “hey, these video games are fun, but what if we sat in a circle and talked about our feelings?” So if you’re looking to me to find out what “men” are into, god help ya.
Also — immediately after I wrote my first message I went to cuddle with my girlfriend, and she was telling me she’s been reading a romance novel, “but not like those romantasy books, I don’t understand the non-human thing.” Well, I don’t either honey.
somethingsomething
8hr ago
It's not 1:1 with your example, because he's not swinging while he is hefting it. He would heft it first, then swing. So it would be more similar to "going for a run, he showered off the sweat and went to sleep".
erwgv3g34
8hr ago
It has happened to western authors, too. Andy Weir and E. L. James both started out writing web fiction (literally fanfiction in the latter's case) before getting acquired by a mainstream publisher and making it big. But that was 14 years ago.
Judges do all kinds of dubious things beyond their social remit. Just today I was reading a long book-screenshot thread from arctotherium that touched on this: https://x.com/arctotherium42/status/1956872568637739354/photo/1
"Racially and socially homogenous schools damage the minds of children who attend them" per the judge. And so there was all this white flight and bussing because some judge was allowed to run rampant.
In Australia we had a judge ruling that a minister handling approvals for a coal mine had a duty of care to teenagers who would be affected by the 'climate crisis'. This was later overruled as the Federal Court decided that this was really a matter for legislation and the government rather than judges. But the fact it was even considered is bad. Judges should be limited to obviously legal cases like crimes and straightforward application of law. You can introduce a duty of care argument for any policy if you really try. Duty of care should be restricted to more direct, obvious examples like making sure that stairs in a supermarket aren't slippery and hazardous, not social or economic engineering.
In the Netherlands, courts order Shell to reduce emissions under duty of care and EU human rights regarding 'right to life and the right to family life': https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57257982
Or in Britain they take on the role of Gosplan, issuing decrees on worker's wages under the equality act and wrecking local governments with huge payout bills. There's a pattern of naive/stupid legislators giving judges the right to interpret laws reasonably a
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9hr ago
Well, what would a male romance look like to you? For most men, I'm going to guess it would be something like the classic "Hero goes on a quest and gets the girl in the end." Do men want more "romantic" content (scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations) or do they want action with the girl naturally falling in love with him because he's so cool and brave?
Basically I think what male-oriented romance exists would mostly be found under another label.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
9hr ago
No, that doesn't leave much for the male reader, but I will say that if you want cute love stories with actual functional couples, there seem to be quite a few that do not feature Chad Thundercock or BDSM.
Well, the main point is that “romance for men” would be about a male protagonist who meets a woman and they have a romance. It’s not just about what the male character is like, but about whose perspective the plot is written from.
Unironically, there’s more romance stories for gay men than there are for straight ones. Presumably this is just a market thing, but I don’t know why it doesn’t even seem to exist. Are there a lot of lesbian romance stories?
I’d probably be a reader of this genre if it actually existed. As it is, occasionally I read fanfiction about male protagonists (probably 80% written by women, but occasionally not bad), and take what I can get from the scraps of media that incidentally have romantic content. Japan has visual novels, but they’re too weird and too Japanese for me, but I liked Katawa Shoujo and some western fan VNs are tolerable.
So you say “men don’t buy romance”, but this is a chicken-egg problem: I can’t buy it if it doesn’t exist.
anon_
9hr ago
If you want people to write plainly, you ought to read plainly too.
Moreover, it's not false (let alone obviously false), any more than any statement that has an exception, no matter how non central & inconsequential, is false. Applying this level of pedantic precision requires also rejecting as false the statement that "smoking causes cancer" because it not every smoker gets cancer or "summers are hotter than winters" because one July was January. Or if you want an SSC example, to object to "criminals harm society" by pointing out that MLK was a criminal.
If you want to consider this a "retraction" rather than "a clarification that in most polite conversation it would be considered peevish of a listener to insist upon" that's fine. But it's probably among the least enjoyable aspects of discussion on the internet when readers do that.
anon_
9hr ago
Do you think those cases are even remotely representative?
Granted they exist, they are the exception that proves the rule applies to the rest of cases.
odd_primes
10hr ago
It's pretty trivial in some cases, depending on the citizenship of the parent. Japan is notorious for example, there have been hundreds of cases where a parent takes their child to Japan in violation of a custody agreement, and then just refuse to go back. Japanese courts do not take into consideration foreign custody agreements, and strongly favor Japanese parents.
To date, no child has been returned to his/her country of habitual residence as a result of any action taken by the government of Japan.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101122071433/http://tokyo.usembassy.gov/e/p/tp-20100122-85.html
ulyssessword
11hr ago
Canadian judges routinely give lighter sentences to immigrants than citizens for the same crimes. This started in 2013, when an immigrant was convicted and sentenced to 2 years for drug trafficking, and successfully argued that it should be two years less a day to avoid extra immigration consequences. Now, a sex offender gets discharged instead of sentenced after being found guilty.
From another case:
“Mr. Khant [accused of arranging sex with a 15-year old] is a permanent resident seeking Canadian citizenship and professional licensing,” wrote the judge. “A conviction would not only delay his citizenship by four years but could also prevent him from sponsoring his wife and obtaining his engineering licence.
To which I respond: Good. The tests for citizenship, sponsorship, and professional licenses are supposed to exclude sex offenders, and doing so by looking at criminal convictions and sentence length should be a reliable standard. Instead, the judge decided he didn't like what they would do with accurate reports, so he gave a different answer instead.
If I was in charge of the professional licensing body or citizenship and immigration, that would piss me off to no end. I want to know if the accused's conduct was 90-days-of-prison bad, or not that bad. Given that information, I would choose to kick them out (or not). Instead, the judge is taking that out of my hands by reporting whether it's 90-days-of-prison-and-loss-of-licence-and-deportation-and-etc. bad or not. If the judge doesn't share my opinion on the value of a sex-offender-free workplace (and there's no indication that he does), then I can't trust that he summed it up properly.
Also: The Onion hits different 14 years later: Being tried as a black man would be great given how pervasive sentencing adjustments are.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
11hr ago
Your houses seem much more generous than the IPMC. I think it matters a lot more how the space will be used: 8 adult occupants in a sharehome will probably want their own bedrooms, whereas 8 occupants in a family home will probably end up bunking together (married couples) or on bunkbeds (kids). A family will probably be having dinner all at the same time, and so will require a larger dining area than a group of flatmates, but the flatmates might prefer to have more showers.
Speaking of bathrooms, is there a reason you have a bathroom per bedroom? Growing up we had one for three bedrooms, but I guess I wouldn't be surprised if luxury dormitories had one per room.
Corvos
11hr ago
I'm skeptical that there is some breakout male author who could bring in male readers the way these authors bring in female readers (the last truly cross-gender mass phenomenon was probably Harry Potter and even that was a majority female fanbase). I'm very skeptical that publishing would refuse to print it if they actually smelled that kind of money.
The thing is, famous authors start off as un-famous authors. Their reputation is grown by getting good publicity and bookshelf deals from the publisher while they're still nobodies, and they don't want to do this for men as much as for women and minorities. That's why by-men-for-men fiction only thrives in places like Japan and genres like litrpg where it's customary to pluck authors from the highly-ranked webnovel lists, which make it possible to gauge their potential without investing in them.
No, your quote says that the parents didn't know that they existed and that's why they didn't use them. And this matches my experience after reading through hundreds if not thousands of publicly available cases of minors being groomed on Discord. The majority of minors don't have parental controls enabled. I don't have any hard figures but my gut feeling is that roughly 0.01% of minors on Discord have an account that is actually under parental controls, if at all.
I think the main problem with them is that it's a completely opt-in system and the minor has to intentionally share a QR code with the parent in order to be connected. So even if we assume they voluntarily link the accounts or are forced by their parents to do it, at any time they can just create another account that is outside the purview of the parents, and they would be none the wiser.
Discord parental controls look to me to be something that Discord can point to and say "hey, we're safe for children!" rather than actually being safe for children.
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