ApplesauceIrishCream
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User ID: 882
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
In this particular case, I believe the "novel theory" concerns an aspect of campaign finance law. That entire field of law is about fifty years old. I make no promises how that will (or should!) move your priors, so take it as you will.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
"At will," no. I don't think there are trivial answers here, even though your problem is reasonably common. There are some approaches that work better than others, but a lot of this stuff is context-dependent, which is a serious pain if you have difficulties reading social context.
There's a Youtube channel that I like for this area called Charisma on Command. Yeah, a lot of the video titles are click-baity, but the substance of the channel is a pretty clear exploration of how to build positive social interactions, including when not to. A typical video takes a look at a particular celebrity/public figure, and explores exactly what behaviors project likeability, command respect, and maintain poise.
Often, advice in this area is open-ended, which leads to problems. For example, Chris Hemsworth is very tactile with his friends and coworkers, and is much loved by them. But he's universally tactile; it isn't targeted at one person in particular, which can get creepy fast. He's also sensitive to other people's comfort levels, and backs off smoothly. Touch is a great way to connect with other people, but there are failure modes, and it might not be your style. Keanu Reeves is another example of a beloved public figure, but one who is far more introverted.
Teasing humor can also be a great form of bonding, but only if you know where and how to use it appropriately. It's funny if you aim at someone's strengths, where he has actual confidence, and can shrug off teasing casually. It's hurtful if you aim at weaknesses. Conversely, a compliment will have much more impact if it's both honest and aimed at an area that isn't the other person's most obvious strength. A smart guy or a pretty girl can find someone to tell them "hey, you're smart/pretty" any time--this is expected and takes no insight. So compliment the smart guy on his tenacity for sticking with something that he found difficult, or the pretty girl for her compassion in volunteering at the senior center. Be careful: this can also be taken too far. You're aiming for "I paid attention and noticed this cool-but-not-obvious thing about you," not "I hacked your email/have drones following you/stole your diary."
Hope this helps, and good luck.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
No, it does not matter if they are intended as jokes or not, it still builds the same meme. Especially when the schools are also rife with sincere and unironic efforts to undermine parental authority, the "joke" actually plays out as "haha, only serious."
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
If those quotes are said every day, they are monstrous, because they are setting up an expectation that students should be active collaborators in shielding teacher behavior from parental oversight. Teachers that undermine parental relationships with their children are abusing both their own authority and their students.
As an isolated incident, that sort of "off-hand gag" is in poor taste. If it becomes time-worn, it is abusive.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Right, so it's offensive to a certain subset (admittedly a very large and mainstream subset) of trans activists.
It's not merely the dominant position among alternatives; it won. There used to be a debate, but alternative positions like "trans identity is based on gender dysphoria" are no longer positions that you may hold publicly in the trans activist space.
And such trans activists are not shy about trying to conflate their own opinions with that of trans people in general.
Certainly true, and further, trans activists are frequently "allies," rather than trans themselves.
But such conflation has no real basis, and offending those activists doesn't imply offending trans people in general.
The first part is not true. The basis of the conflation is that the activists are the public face of the community--whether or not they are even members!--and get to define the community, including socially policing dissenters. "Offending trans people in general" simply does not matter; it's the opinions of the activists that carry social consequences for those who challenge self-ID uber alles.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Sure, very likely. The point I was trying to set up with my toy blacksmith example was not just a population group being shoved into a niche ("you're all blacksmiths now") but also that the group had a motivation to lean into the niche ("paying a lot for the best swords"). If a group highly values excellence in a particular area, then individual excellence in that area should be a correspondingly strong status boost.
In your phrasing, crushing status plausibly should lead to lower average performance, but you'd still likely see internal measures of status within the group, emigrants that seek status elsewhere, or other reactions.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I think my own take is a little different--HBDers are correct on the facts, but then seem to conclude that genetic factors are immune to policy, which I do not believe. Is intelligence determined by some combination of genes and environment/nature and nurture/etc.? Yes, certainly. However, I don't think you can split the influences into "X% this, Y% that," because the factors are not distinct--they heavily influence each other over time, to the point that they cannot be disentangled.
Tracing out one example--the impact of culture. Culture is obviously not itself genetic, though it is inherited. At a minimum, a culture contains some priority scale of values, and grants status to those who better exemplify the values emphasized. Higher cultural status is very directly linked to success in procreation, which means that later generations will be more populated by those who achieve more cultural success in earlier generations.
If you have a culture that highly values communicative creativity, then you'll get more competitive wit, wordplay, and language skills that tolerate more complexity in exchange for finer-grained precision in description. Those who perform well generate more of the next generation, which will have more skill at symbol-manipulation on average than previous. If this emphasis persists, the culture will itself evolve to handle an increased number of poets...and lawyers. The impact cycles back and forth between cultural success generating genetic success, which influences cultural evolution that modifies the definition of cultural success, and so on.
There are also multiple success and failure modes for a given population, as well. A culture that presents multiple high-priority values that exist in some natural tension with each other may find itself less subject to culturally-influenced genetic drift, and therefore more stable over time. Whether this is a success or failure mode depends on the surrounding circumstances--is there a need for more rapid adaptation? A population may find itself in a sociological niche that favors specialization, and can become distinct from nearby genetically separate populations remarkably rapidly. (If a clan is told, "you guys are all blacksmiths now, and we're paying a lot for the best swords," I'm going to expect the great-great-grandkids to have unusually developed upper-body musculature, and probably pretty decent heat-tolerance.) Or a culture may decide to pick super-hardmode, and deprioritize procreation as a value. The hedonic draw of sex isn't enough to guarantee replacement-rate fertility; cultural support is necessary.
Tl;dr: 'natural' selection is culturally mediated.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
The problem is, "not submitting to the 'self-ID is definitionally correct' standard" necessarily implies that some fraction of the time, self-ID may be overcome by an outside judgment, and this fatally undermines the activist position that self-ID is definitive. Admitting the existence of bad actors casts a shadow over every trans person's self-assessment of his own identity as the exclusive and inviolate basis of her social persona.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
There's also the UNCF, and the N does not stand for National.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency.
Already addressed.
I'm not saying you should like or even tolerate a lack of plot or agency--I agree that any work meeting your original description (or even close to it) is crap. The common modern failing is to replace the missing plot and agency with wokeness, which is why I brought it up. But you are painting with too broad a brush to say there aren't any female authors in SF/Fantasy worth reading, which is exactly what you did here:
It's a bowl of poison with a few... mediocre candies.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Motte, meet bailey. This is a very much narrower and more defensible claim--yes, the awards are owned by woke activists. "Hugo-winning" is still an unmistakeable mark of quality, but not good quality. But even if we narrow to SF/Fantasy--you originally made claims about fiction written by women generally--there are still female published authors who are not woke, or are even anti-woke. Baen is the obvious place to start; Sarah Hoyt is one example. (No promises that you'll like her writing, but if you don't, it won't be for woke reasons, and she actually likes men!)
There's also good stuff to be found outside traditional publishing, both indie and web serial, though as always, a random grab will not serve you well. The Wandering Inn is a web serial with a pseudonymous author (though I have high confidence she's female), and it's excellent. Unfortunately, "The Wandering Inn" and "limited reading time" are not concepts that work well together.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Citizens United was about corporate independent expenditures, not individual.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Come on, this is ridiculous. Are there books that meet that description? Unfortunately, yes. But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency. I've read romances that defeat your description in detail. Random example--no exploration of the mystery genre is complete without hitting Agatha Christie.
I can't guarantee you'd like any book or author I'd recommend, but your tastes are extremely narrow if no female author would qualify.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
A large amount of creative output is dreck, of course, but man, when you find the good storytellers...it's worth the hunt.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Probably a reference to Emmanuel Goldstein from 1984?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
No. McConnell was centrally important in getting Trump's nominees confirmed, and Leonard Leo from the FedSoc was in charge of vetting the nominations, but it was Trump that put Leo in charge and selected candidates from Leo's short list. Putting Leo in charge of judicial nominations was a key part of Trump's strategy to attract the votes of the Republican base--which was not part of his initial core support--to the benefit of both.
Trump will get credit for the actions of his Supreme Court appointments as part of his legacy, just like every other President. He also deserves this credit no less than any other President, as Leo was his choice to vet nominations, and Trump himself decided which candidates made the final cut.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Have you read his other stuff? My favorite is the Imager Portfolio, though I also liked Recluce and Soprano Sorceress.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Was there ever a less convincing* religious panderer than Trump?
I think this is true but inaccurate. Yes, Trump trying to sell the line "Hello, fellow Christians" would be ludicrous, for all the obvious reasons, but that wasn't what he was selling, or what the Christian base of the Republican Party was buying. He was selling "I will represent your interests," and the much-publicized examples of Trump's sometimes-awkward association with Christian ideas and symbology are better understood as costly signaling. Both Trump and his Christian supporters are aware that the Left hates them; Trump signaling support for Christianity makes it less likely that he'd be politically able to mend fences with the Left and betray his Christian supporters on the Right.
This isn't the usual dynamic. Most of the time, politicians actually are selling the argument "I won't betray our shared interests, because I am one of you, and your interests are my interests." Sometimes this argument is even honest! But most of the time, it's got some level of pandering to it. I'm saying that Trump didn't realisticly have this option at all, recognized the fact, made a different pitch to his Christian Republican audience, and was successful in doing so.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
There's a significant character that breaks the overwhelming trend of "Eldar are beardless"--Cirdan the Shipwright!
Though Denethor, Boromir, and Faramir should all be beardless, as I believe they had recent half-elven ancestry via Dol Amroth.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
This isn't the right approach to analyzing median life expectancy, because it overlooks the substantially higher rate of child mortality. In India in 1945, your life expectancy would be much higher than 36 if you survived your first three years of life. Child mortality pulls the mean life expectancy down, but also the median as well.
Upper class elderly are not at all a recent phenomenon. As one toy example, modern US Supreme Court Justices don't live significantly longer lives on average than Supreme Court Justices in the early 1800s.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Applying different metrics to different cases seems reasonable, but I'd put more thought into failure modes. I am not at all confident that this sort of tiered system would be resilient against societal pushback--either from those wanting strictness in more cases, or complete self-ID in more cases.
Regarding the article you read by a trans writer, that take accurately reflects the status quo in the trans activist community. There was a debate, but it was resolved.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Little Billy does in fact refer to it as "his house," and he is correct to do so. No, he cannot sell it, but there is a meaningful sense in which it is "his." "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need" is a good approximation of how families are run. If you point to a patriarch in charge of a family, I can point to any communist regime ever with an obvious patriarch at the top of society.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I don't think you need evo-psych, so much as just recognizing patterns. For the most part, people grow up in families, and they are used to socializing gains and losses across the family unit. But you can't socialize gains and losses across too large a structure without destroying the individual incentive to succeed (barring extremely high in-group loyalty). Extending this outward, you get clan/extended family structures, and this is where you start to see the failure to scale.
John is in a poor society, but has managed to scrape together enough capital to start a small food stand. If John's society has a cultural expectation of "family member has food, therefore I have food," then enough cousins come out of the woodwork, eat all of John's food for free, and ruin his potential small business. The only way John's business can survive is if he's got the cultural backing to set boundaries and refuse to socialize his gains to his cousins. (Alternatively, John tries, fails, says "fuck this" and moves to America to get away from his cousins, but more importantly, to get away from the cultural expectation that the cousins have a right to his profits.) This is a very common pattern in poor societies, and I'd say, adequately explains why they stay poor.
So, these people in poor societies look pretty dumb for not figuring out the dynamic that keeps them poor, yes? I'd say yes, but actually no. How does a potential reformer present the message "you need to not automatically share with your cousins" without coming across as a selfish defect-bot? If he's saying we shouldn't automatically share with our cousins, does that mean we also shouldn't share with our children?
This is where Ayn Rand points out that this was her core insight: "greed is good." I think she's directionally correct in many instances, but no, charity is still a virtue. It's not about whether John shares his food with his cousins or does not. It's about whether he has the right to choose to share or not--whether his society permits him to make that choice without penalty. It's a culture where a cousin may ask, but--on average--will accept a "no" without trashing John's reputation, and will himself be seen as greedy if he insists on a right to John's assets. Charity cannot exist without choice. There are various arguments for differing levels of socialism, but "creating a charitable society" is flatly wrong.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Possibly because socialism is extremely common and extremely successful on the very small scale. As a general rule, this is how families work, and sometimes extremely tight-knit groups with very high in-group loyalty, like cults. The problem is that it doesn't scale up, and this is a massive problem when you're talking about organizing a society.
The insight of incentives, free markets, etc. is that you can have net-positive interactions without the reinforcement of high in-group loyalty to control defection. The "problem" is that this type of interaction doesn't scale down--it would be a bit ridiculous to run a family on a barter system: infants don't have anything of value to trade for food and diapers beyond weaponized cuteness. This is an illusory problem, though, when you're applying a system to the matching scale of its competence--socialism for family structures, markets for societies.
While there are characters with anti-Catholic sentiment (and any number with a pretty fierce hatred of Catholics, as you should expect in the middle of the Thirty Years' War), the 'series' is definitely not anti-Catholic.
A major protagonist of one of the branching sub-series is Father Larry Mazzare, Grantville's local Catholic priest. Turns out, it's kind of a big deal when Urban VIII gets a written summary of Vatican II. What follows includes a fair amount of swashbuckling drama--because that's part of the genre--but also an in-depth exploration of faith, obedience, and consequences, both by Father Mazzare and Urban VIII. Urban is not a villain, and neither (despite the visual cues) is his black-robed vizier, Mutio Vitelleschi, sixth Father General of the Society of Jesus. The Spanish, on the other hand....
The 163x collection of books ('series' is a bit inapt, as many of the later books occur in parallel, though in different areas) has several very solid entries, particularly near the beginning. IMO, 1633 is better than 1632, for instance. But the quality of the various branches varies pretty widely; the Catholic/Southern European branch that follows Larry Mazzare and starts with 1634: The Galileo Affair is one of the better ones, but I'd avoid the ones involving Virginia DeMarce.
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