domain:astralcodexten.substack.com
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
Thanks. This was my first.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Family connections bring actual literal benefits; it's probably better to be the lower earning partner in a couple than a higher earning single person. Like the whole thing about a housewife is that it's being a housewife meaning she's married; if a sufficient amount of relationship security is available then this is a rational decision, and given that divorce risk is not distributed equitably then many women- and I would estimate most who consider the stay at home mom route- should proceed under the assumption that they have sufficient relationship/family security to make the SAHM route a more rational decision.
And most adults are not that estranged from their parents, even in early young adulthood, nor do most marriages with a SAHM end in divorce. The median 'retired housewife' is happily married and posting instagram photos of her grandchildren, not alone and working at walmart to pay the bills.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2hr ago
I didn’t think I’d make it, but I submitted my entry for the ACX book review contest.
I’m a terrible procrastinator. I have been planning to write my entry since the contest was announced several months ago, and I’ve been intending to enter since the last contest ended, but beyond putting together an outline I didn’t actually start writing until this last Monday, a week before the due date. Still, better last minute than never!
Anybody else enter this year? I don’t have much hope of being a finalist, but I’d like to improve on my performance last year (54th out of 145).
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
2hr ago
Did you mean www.thepsmiths.com ???
2rafa
2hr ago
Even in 2015 the Tories won the Jewish vote 50-29, and that was when the Labour candidate for Prime Minister was Jewish.
Jews voted more for Labour in the mid-20th century because many were poor recent immigrants from Eastern Europe and voting at that time in England was still very class-and-region based.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Nope, it was definitely not intended to be a reply. Omw likes sending private messages to engage in a point for some reason.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Mackenzie's contributions to Amazon were a lot bigger than just "being Jeff's wife".
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
A significant minority of women likely do not have this instinct or have it in a much weakened form. Through human and pre-human history women really haven't had that much of a choice on whether they bear children or not, so selection for enjoying motherhood is probably not as strong as you might think.
Children and especially babies require an immense amount of attention and in the premodern environment child mortality was extremely high. There was obviously a strong selection effect for women who enjoyed childcare because their children died less often from neglect.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
This paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00589-6
has a nice visualization of the flows of inputs.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Sure, income isn't, but stability of income probably is. Male teachers make unimpressive salaries but probably have a good TFR compared to similarly paid servers(and high end servers routinely make teacher money in the US because tips, it's just not very steady). Every butcher I've ever met has had a wife and usually kids if over 30, despite unimpressive salaries, because it's a very stably-paid position. Roadies, bartenders, and other such drifters might have a far-above-average number of partners because they move from social circle to social circle regularly. But I'm skeptical that any of these partners have a kid with them.
Terracotta
2hr ago
Oh, I agree that it's a curse of middle-aged womanhood in general. Underneath that, likely just the bitter animal truth that humans only seek the favor of other humans when they (a) have something to gain from them or (b) have something to fear from them. Men are more physically intimidating into midlife, thus retain the power to command respect and amity for longer.
However, given the choice to be a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a fat bank account, a nice apartment, some social clout and active power over one or two resentful underlings... or a widely-reviled middle-aged woman with a menial job, no money or future prospects, and the wistful memory of long-ago baby cuddles with grown adults who are now far away living their own lives, calling maybe once or twice a year? It doesn't seem obviously rational to choose the latter.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
While I enjoy the image of chicken drives with mounted riders moving their herds flocks of chickens from pasture to pasture I suspect there are reasons this isn't done.
Absent cows it's more likely the forage would be consumed by other existing ruminants, bison, deer, elk, moose, etc.
SSCReader
2hr ago
The average creative writing major should expect to get a mostly-unrelated job or need more education. The average screenwriting major should expect to essentially not get into the film industry at all.
But most people in almost every field except STEM, don't end up working in their degree field anyway right? A lot of white collar jobs are gated behind a degree, but it doesn't really matter what degree you have, as getting the degree is the signal. There simply are not many actual psych jobs or politics jobs, so most people getting any of these are going to end up an office manager or something similar. Might as well study something you are interested in at university level unless you have a very specific plan, and even in a lot of those instances there are simply not going to be enough jobs in that field and you will end up doing something else. And my experience (and I work in academia) is that applies to most of both men and women.
Once you realize the majority of people are going to end up working in a field unrelated to their major then creative writing isn't much worse off. The truth is the vast majority of graduates are going to end up in some kind of mundane office dronish position, unrelated to whether they want to become a writer or an astronaut or a journalist.
ratboygenius
i came here to be alone
2hr ago
Book recommendation thread? I picked up and read The Eternal Front as recommended from last week's thread, and found it quite enjoyable - very often I find sci-fi loses me within its own scope, but Blaire's writing felt much more human in scale with far lower stakes than what I ordinarily read. I think sci-fi shines brightest when telling stories about the individuals navigating the cultures and battlefields forged through genetic, technological and/or cultural isolation - the actual bedrock upon which every setting rests. Anyway Eternal Front is a good rec and I'll just second @No_one's writeup for it.
Maybe my awareness of the often unnecessarily grandiose scope of sci-fi is the result of serendipity, as I also (finally) got around this week to reading Peter Watts' Echopraxia after having read and reread Blindsight several times over the years, and for as much as I love his writing he doesn't really do people very well. Maybe he just finds them awkward and somewhat unnecessary to the tale he's trying to tell (this may be a literary flourish of his, kind of the point, I've only just recently been introduced to the concept of "media literacy" please understand). Regardless, if you read/enjoyed Blindsight and haven't read the sequel yet, I'll stick a hearty recommendation onto it. If you haven't read Blindsight and you like hard sci-fi then I don't know what you're doing here. Go read it (it's available for free on Watts' website) and curse/thank me later. Pretty sure our actual future looks more like his vision than Gene Roddenberry's.
Continuing down the vein of galactic scale sci-fi that I like but feel a little lost in the sauce, I enjoyed Alastair Reynolds Inhibitor Trilogy, though when reading it I couldn't shake the feeling I was reading a grimdark Culture fanfic (albeit a thoughtfully and competently written one). A fun read if you have nothing else going on, some interesting semi-hard concepts get trotted out and played with, a few logical conclusions to the laws of physics (and breaking them) are portrayed in fairly comprehensible prose. The first entry, Revelation Space, is fun enough by itself to be worth a read; if you want more of that, then each subsequent book expands on those same themes and scenarios. A medium-strength recommend.
Speaking of Iain Banks Culture series, I suppose I'll register some disappointment with everyone who told me Consider Phlebas was a weaker entry in the series than Player of Games, could not really disagree more - PoG was an interesting look into alien anthropology and cultural hijacking but I found it to be bit of a slog. Phlebas, however, scratched that itch I have for a story about a person doing person things in a great big future. Both were good reads though, and I have a fresh copy of Use of Weapons now sitting on top of my stack.
I'm not sure I see evidence for this. Men and women are both created in the image of God.
Women historically had been protected or privileged over men in things likely to result in death like drowning on a sinking ship, or serving in combat.
This is the point that @omw_68 made to me in a private message that was perhaps meant to be a reply here.
... if a society has a choice between sacrificing a random woman and sacrificing a random man, most choose a man. And that's been the case for thousands of years based on looking at who is expected to do dangerous jobs such as military service or mining coal.
In other words, it's pretty clear to me that to the extent one had to choose who is seen as superior, at least in terms of value and at least in the West, women have always been seen as superior to men.
distic
2hr ago
You can feed it to some other animal then, the cow is the worse.
Lewis2
2hr ago
Doesn’t that likely have something to do with the Labour Party under Corbin being pretty openly antisemitic? The numbers might have been different otherwise.
To_Mandalay
2hr ago
Mary is a goddess, it's not really comparable.
you-get-an-upvote
Hyperbole is bad
2hr ago
I agree it'd be nice to have a "job in your field" statistic. It'd be nice if OP would provide one before baselessly claiming that one gender is delusional.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
Much of the the forage would exist in any event.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
100% of businesses that go bankrupt were started
100% of successful businesses were also started
I'm not sure this a a very descriptive or useful corralation.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
Do you have any data? All the graphs and studies I've seen seem to show tfr declining with increased education / work outside the home.
That EA paper I linked suggested that the reclaimed land be paved over to reduce "wild animal suffering." Because if the earth is a lifeless void there will be no suffering.
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