domain:slatestarcodex.com
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
11hr ago
I was thinking it's been a few years (maybe 5 or 6) since I watched a full season of SP, but then I realized the last one I watched was season 17. That was 12 years ago. How times flies.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
11hr ago
I’ve just… never encountered this stuff. Maybe it’s just my religious background or my conservative community or maybe it’s happening under my nose and I don’t know it, but “married woman has an affair with a lothario” just… is not something I’ve ever encountered in my circles. Where are you observing this stuff?
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
11hr ago
Why do so many people think it's trivially easy for a "new religion" (as opposed to a new church/temple/whatever you want to call it within an existing and well-established denomination) to get tax-exempt status in the US?
Most people have zero understanding of the law in general. You can adjust "most people" to "almost 100% of people" if you're discussing a particularly fine point.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
12hr ago
That said, it’s bewildering how… lacking in instinct for manipulation a lot of young women are.
You could amend that to "women." The amount of 30something married women I've seen fall for very obvious manipulation from a lothario is painful to contemplate.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
12hr ago
How do you all interact with LLMs?
I don't. I do my best to avoid it at all costs. If it's built into something I otherwise need to use (search engines, Westlaw, whatever), I either disable it or ignore it.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
12hr ago
How long have you been around rationalist-adjacent spaces?
I found Scott in 2013 or 2014, possibly via LJ. I remember discussing "Universal Love Said the Cactus Person" with a friend IRL who brought it up and he previously had never mentioned reading SSC. Somewhere in there I found /r/SSC because in 2016 I saw a notice for a meetup taking place 5 minutes away from my house and didn't go because I found many people active in /r/SSC off-putting. I stopped paying close attention to Scott after the 2017 Kolmogorov entry. I remember /r/theMotte being created and then /r/SneerClub with the latter being distilled perfection of what I didn't like about so many /r/SSC posters to start with plus reddit overall. I guess that's about where I stopped paying close attention because it was only much later that I became aware of this site starting separately to escape reddit, the TW/schism hullaballo, and some other subsequent happenings.
Because I have a strong memory that works in strange ways, it's a bizarre feeling to recognize a few user names from ancient /r/SSC days (Zorba, Hlynka, gattsuru, etc.), or look into /r/SSC now and see a few users I dislike still plugging away, and realize I've been paying attention (or at least mildly aware) of their written output for a decade.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
12hr ago
Battlefield Reclaimer (Guardians of Aster Fall book 1) by David North.
For anyone that's also reading the Hollows series, by Kim Harrison, I want to freely confess that in an abnormal twist, my brain has subbed in not one but two real-life actors for certain folks in the series, due to their particular mannerisms of speech:
Grant_us_eyes
12hr ago
"I would rather be a temporary fleshlight for a 9 or 10 than a permanent sex slave and housekeeper for a 5." says one woman, and I can only really fucking hope that this is the opinion of an extreme minority.
I hope I'm right. I'm terrified that I'm wrong.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12hr ago
· Edited 10hr ago
I know of a great many men from older generations, and even in this generation, who are not Chads by that definition yet have had long relationships with women who care for them. I probably couldn’t string along 4 women even if I really, really tried — but I’ve had women ask me out before, I figure if for some sad reason I became single I could find a meaningful relationship within a year or so, and the women I’ve dated have shown every sign of cherishing the relationship. I relate to the feeling of hopelessness and marginalization, but not to the feeling that literally 100% of women are only and exclusively interested in a very small group of men regardless of how poorly they’re treated by them. The reason why “wait until marriage” (or some measure of commitment) works is precisely because many women actually desire that. Not because anyone forced them.
The situation for men is far from great, and the inequality between the haves and the have-nots is quite large, but I’m not convinced it’s so bad that it’s literally impossible.
Any suggestions for books to learn more about the modern conflicts in Israel, especially wrt Gaza? I figure that requires some amount of covering history, but my actual objective is to be able to understand the modern state of affairs, rather than to understand history for its own sake. Maybe 2-3 suggestions, to capture a range of political viewpoints.
Podcasts/blogs would be OK too, but I'd rather books.
For bonus points, please describe the political viewpoint of the book (left/right, or pro/anti Israel, etc)
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
12hr ago
Working my way through Bret Easton Ellis works (have already read American Psycho and Imperial Bedrooms in the past). Finished The Informers, started and put aside Glamorama (insufferable main characters for the first few chapters and I can't imagine spending 400+ pages with them), and now about halfway through Lunar Park.
FistfullOfCrows
12hr ago
Eh those kinda edits would be fine, but I've seen how people abuse editing on reddit.
aqouta
12hr ago
Not allowing edits would be an extreme form of discrimination against my human right to correct egregious typos.
aqouta
12hr ago
Sure, there are definitely bits and jokes to be told about biden. It's just a lot easier for something like the onion to do so in a headline with a couple paragraphs of puns. Southpark has to commit more to bits, most episodes have something like two plot lines going on and unless they're devoting one to presidential politics it's not super easy to just have a scene where the president is doing something. Family guy with it's reference thing can do that but south park is more situational humor so you need to devote like a whole b-plot to the president, and that's a harder sell for Biden than Trump.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
12hr ago
Like Corvos, I like how you can use AI as a sounding board and maybe get information that’s useful back. I take it with a grain of salt — I notice details in most responses that don’t match the actual facts — but occasionally I’ve gotten some great “deep cut” information on very specific topics that either was sourced to a link I could verify or started me on a course to verify the claim myself.
I don’t really chat with AI as a person, though I do use very human-like language similar to how I write on the motte. I do know people who’ve explored chatting with AI as a person, giving it a name, telling it about daily details to see what it’ll say. But I don’t relate to AI in that way.
I’d compare using AI for brainstorming to the “active placebo” version of rubber duck debugging: it’s a good excuse to actually write out what you’re thinking, with the possibility of something valuable coming back at you, so you have incentive to be detailed. It’s happened to me more than once that I’ve typed out a technical or personal problem as an AI prompt and figured out the right solution in the process of writing it.
erwgv3g34
12hr ago
I think the very traditional advice of "wait until marriage" does actually work here. It may have its other failure modes (well documented elsewhere), but it certainly requires a non-trivial time and legal commitment from a partner that would "tell one of these guys apart."
The problem with waiting until marriage is that Chad, who has four other girls on his booty call list just waiting for a text from him, is not going to put up with that. And women only want Chad.
The only way this works if you have a third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being, such as her father or her brother, in control of her sexual choices.
GoofyGoose
12hr ago
So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.
I agree that there is a lot of information in reports of subjective experience, I think most people would agree. Some people are mistakenly believed to disagree with this just because they believe that it is easy to be led astray by such information.
Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here? I have never tried to read them, and my knowledge comes only from popular depictions (which seem to be unfair, tbh). I did read The Denial of Death, which made quite a bit of sense to me. What’s the best way to learn about the work of Freud or Jung for someone who is worried about it being just woo but willing to give it a chance?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
13hr ago
I've been reading His Broken Body, a book about the ongoing schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, based on someone here recommending it. It's been good, though seeing the differences of opinion laid out I certainly get the impression that the churches will never be united again. Not terribly surprising, but given that part of the pitch of the book is how to heal the divide, it does seem like that part might be underwhelming.
I've also recently picked up a copy of Stranger In A Strange Land, since I've enjoyed the other Heinlein works I've read. Hopefully this one is as good as his other books, but I'm only a few pages in.
wayfarer
13hr ago
as far as I'm concerned Sandy Hook was a hoax
I am curious: why you think so?
a single person can't offset enough energy their entire lives to make up for a jet airplane doing a single cross Atlantic hop.
how that is related to whether global warming is real or not?
they nailed Alex's ass on a technicality
AFAIK he did much to nail themself, his incompetent lawyer helped obviously there was thorough lack of sympathy to him (part for valid reasons, part for invalid in my opinion)
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
13hr ago
I’m a convinced Christian but rather skeptical of “retvrners” mostly because I don’t see a living faith per say (granted this isn’t everyone and im an outsider on a lot of it) I don’t see talk of praying or charity in the name of God, or attempts to live out the faith. It’s got rather a zombie feel to it, as though the person is going through motions and pep talking themselves into it and into doing the trappings but without the faith behind it.
erwgv3g34
13hr ago
I don't care that it's not fantasy, I've always believed that Animorphs would be a hit if they played it completely straight as a R rated war story aimed at the YA/tumblr audience. Maybe age everyone up to college if the child soldier thing is too violent for TV.
r!Animorphs: The Reckoning already exists; you would just have to get the rights.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
13hr ago
There's a major confounder here that prevents a straightforward liberal vs conservative spin on things: "Science of Reading". As the now-famous (in education circles) Sold a Story podcast helped reveal, a lot of American teachers got suckered into a new teaching methodology for reading that just doesn't work as well (oversimplified: a de-emphasis on phonics). This spread in liberal circles partly through network effects (e.g. the Columbia Teacher's College was a major promoter). It just so happens that Mississippi as part of their reforms made sure to emphasize better practices and follow the neuroscience and good quality research.
Contextually, though I could elaborate, one of the most prominent examples of the trendy but poorly-backed programs was originally focused on reading interventions. However, these interventions sometimes did more harm than good. Infamously you'd get some teachers actively encouraging students to guess an unknown difficult word based purely on context clues and pictures. While that's a good strategy for, say, a high school student encountering a genuinely rare or unknown word, it's a terrible strategy for kids first learning how to read encountering a word that they eventually will need to know. Furthermore, one of those intervention programs had a classifier that was objectively broken. They did a study and found that their assessment of whether a student was actually one who needed help (behind level) or not performed little better than a coin flip compared to more established methods... but kept using it! Ironically, this low-effectiveness intervention program was usually the one well-meaning reading advocates at the time would adopt (or even adapt for general learners, similarly unhelpful there). Notably, Mississippi not only required individualized help for students behind but also required that help follow better, more scientifically validated methods, and so very specifically dodged this issue that plagued the rest of the country.
cjet79
13hr ago
Ave Xia Rem Y (A Very Cliche Xianxia Harem Story!)
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/15193/ave-xia-rem-y
The title doesn't do it justice. It is very cliche in many ways, but it does the tropes honestly. And it can also subvert the tropes in fun ways. Angry young masters have been converted to friends and allies. The powerful masters that rule over everyone can be all too human in their flaws and prejudices. Characters in the story grow and have motivations separate from the main character.
Its a great rationalist story in the sense of having rational characters. Idiot ball plot points are rare. The main character is absolutely not a murder hobo, but instead a doctor and one of the kinder cultivators around. It's easy to like him and want him to succeed.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
13hr ago
· Edited 13hr ago
Yeah, I don’t doubt that’s a big part of the concern. But also, that’s the sort of thing that some say as an excuse — “chuh, no, I’m just looking for validation and attention online to make me feel good about myself without actually having to be in a position of connection or vulnerability” is not exactly a great thing to say about yourself, even if it’s true. I can certainly understand safety concerns about meeting strange men, but having those concerns while continuing to swipe and even to mock the people who are trying to connect with you is simply vicious, based on bad-faith.
The real truth about dating apps is that they’re good for window shopping — and people who like impulse purchases — and not much good for much else, though people do get lucky in the same way people used to get lucky at a bar or a club. Or I got lucky at the college atheist org meetup. (Yeah, really. The history of my romantic life has some wild twists and turns around my spiritual convictions, and not a one of my girlfriends didn’t have something to do with religion, either positively or negatively.)
But the purpose of the system is what it does, and not only the purpose but actually the intended function of the swipe-based matching apps is to facilitate hookups, not deep connections.
A big part of the problem for a lot of older guys seems to be that women with a realistic sense of romance and a strong drive to find a real partner tend to choose early, and confidently. The rest are waiting for something exciting to happen, or just trying to “enjoy life as it comes” same as young men do.
I know many lawyers plus many non-lawyers who are adjacent to the legal field.
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