RenOS

RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 1m ago

But even a quokka (did I use that term right?) in an ivory tower like me who would prefer color-blind policies can see that there is a big narrative difference between 'a third of Louisiana voted for Democrats and not win a single Representative' and 'the Blacks of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, and yet did not get a single Representative who is Black or a Democrat'. Both are bad, but the Blacks are a much more coherent group than people who vote for Democrats. You don't know if your coworker voted for Democrats, but you can certainly make an educated guess about their racial identification.

I can understand this perspective somewhat, but I struggle to see how to decide which groups are considered important for this purpose doesn't either end up a complete clusterfuck or worse, vindicates the ethnonationalists' fears of the inevitability of multicultural spoils systems. There is also even plenty of examples where it works out the other way around - special interest minorities who care a lot about an issue and coordinate well reliably outcompete even much larger majorities if those don't care enough, through a combination of lawfare, lobbying and (local) special elections.

I think the root of the problem is that states are competing for national attention, and doing the sane thing and awarding EC votes or Representatives in proportion to the state-wide vote will guarantee that a state will not be worth fighting over. If Colorado decided to do that, national parties would just ignore it completely. "To win one measly EC vote through campaigning, I would need to convince another 10% of their population to vote for me instead of the other guy? Hard pass."

Instead, it is the interests of states to be battleground states. "Half of our voters prefer Democrats, and half Republicans. The tiniest margin will decide who gets all of our EC votes and Representatives. So you better try hard to send gifts our way to convince the marginal voter to prefer you."

If doing the sane and stable thing leads to you being ignored and borderline flip-flopping makes you the center of attention, then states will behave as if they had BPD.

I think a large problem is also the centralisation of power in most western countries. Politics is often better the more local it is since the problems of one place are rarely the problems of another. Europe is, as usual, even worse on this account, since a lot of power got shifted into the EU which is at best difficult to understand for the average citizen, and at worst employs committees and courts that are entirely out of the citizens reach. Not that central politics is entirely bad, it has an important place especially for large-scale international trading, warfare or diplomacy. But this is often piggybacked unto for much more general power, and nobody ever lets go once granted.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 1d ago

I don't think there is anything as crude as a treatment for this particular issue, especially if you're feeling fine about it yourself and are no trouble for others. If that is your genuine personality, you'll likely continue to feel that way for a good while.

But from having watched some people grow old and dependent there is a general rule that the less family & friends some has, the more pitiful the state you will end up in. There is very little as disgraceful as the actual reality of elder care homes. Friends can at least keep you active and mentally aware for a while longer. The best cases I'm aware of invariably involve the presence of a personal caretaker who genuinely knows and likes you, and the regular visits of friends and family. Maybe you'll get lucky and stay in full possession of your mental faculties as well as sufficient physical capabilities until you die relatively suddenly, who knows.

So even if it may feel like a hassle, I'd strongly suggest trying anyway.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 1d ago

How do you know we’re not already glorified pets in some societal experiment and/or universe simulation?

Strictly speaking I don't, but in the same way as I don't know whether there is a invisible teapot floating somewhere in space. I've never considered arguments along these lines particularly convincing; No matter how omnicient and omnipotent a being might be inside it's perceivable universe, you can always claim that it's all just an elaborate fake orchestrated from beyond. The possibility should be kept in the back of one's mind, but unless there is particular evidence in its favour, I'm fine with just dismissing it.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 1d ago · Edited 1d ago

That may be another avenue of argument, but netstack's claim that I was contesting was that inevitability does (not) overrule a dystopia.

To your point, I might prefer to have a gracious owner as opposed to a hostile one, but not being a pet in the first place takes precedence.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 1d ago

The problem to this view is that, as far as I have read Iain M Banks own comments on The Culture, he seems at least positively inclined, and he definitely is the kind of leftist that could plausibly like a society such as The Culture. So the most likely conclusion to me is that it is his best attempt at the kind of utopia he personally would want to live in, but with enough intellectual and moral integrity that he tries to seriously challenge it over and over again, as opposed to choose the easy way and give it challenges tailor-made to look good against..

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 1d ago

You can’t compete with the Minds. This is a fact of the setting, rather than a societal choice or a zero-sum game, so it doesn’t move the needle into dystopia.

I disagree and proclaim the opposite. If I write a dystopia about an oppressive one-party state, but then add a lot of statements into the story that in this world it has been scientifically been proven that this is the logical endpoint of any and all societies, does this suddenly make it not a dystopia? If anything it would make it even more dystopian since there's no getting out.

It's the same with the Minds. Humans factually being glorified pets is horrifying, and moreso if the Minds are truly unbeatable. It being a societal choice would make it less dystopian, since that means there's hope yet for humans.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 1d ago

I agree with @gattsuru wholeheartedly on the (absence of) merits, but the reason why the genre gets uniquely trashed is imo the insane output and popularity both in Anime and in fanfic/royalroad-style amateur writing, coupled with a certain level of pretentiousness. Shounen is literally defined by its target group being boys, you don't expect it to be deep and if it is, that's a positive. Slice of Life also is defined by being light and fun. Isekai on the other hand has a very bad case of "this is not like other Isekai I swear" followed very quickly by checking absolutely every trope in the worst way possible. Spoiler: If you try to write seriously in a genre trashy enough that you need to put in a disclaimer that it's not like the rest, choose a different genre. Or just own up to the fact, you probably are just as trashy as everyone else.

For this reason, imo KonoSuba is a decent contender since it's comedy and doesn't pretend to be something it's not. Likewise, Overlord is funny in its complete over-the-top ridiculousness, but it's hard to tell whether the author intended it that way, so probably more a case of so-bad-it's-good.

And secondly, Shounen and Slice of Life are arguably troperific in a mostly-wholesome way; For example, boys loving exciting adventures and people usually becoming friends after fights, that's just fun & nice. Isekai, on the other hand, is frequently quite degenerate, for lack of a better word. Especially the tendency towards harems puts it quite close to erotic dramas just with an inverted target audience.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 2d ago

More seriously, the fact that the perpetrator was stopped arguably shows that security measures were perfectly adequate.

In a certain trivial way you're obviously right, but I increasingly fear that the primary reason it works that way is that this has more to do with the low quality of people trying, as opposed to saying anything about the security.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 2d ago · Edited 2d ago

But on the other hand, without temptation and difficulty, there is no significance to you choosing good. If you're already primed to be good, you just get the archetypical Shin Megami Tensei-style Heaven Ending, where it's all just perfectly ordered and even if people have free will in some technical sense, it's never meaningfully realized, why should anyone ever deviate from acting good?

Sometimes I imagine a God akin to an ultra-superhuman R. Scott Bakker, who, disillusioned with the problem of free will in his own reality with the existing beings, tries to create a world populated with beings that have true free will. After millions, maybe trillions, experiments, he thinks he has been successful. But how do you even measure such a thing as free will? How do you prove it? If it can be measured, it stands to reason that it's a result of exactly the kind of physical processes that do not allow for true free will. Giving these beings temptations, but also giving them the capacity for empathy and reason to understand good and bad, and then seeing how they behave is at least not entirely nonsensical. This neatly solves the problem of evil as well, as long the evil is caused by humans in some sense; God can't intervene, or else he would fuck up the experiment. Maybe being corrected and lectured by literally God will bring most people in line. Maybe learning that any evil will be corrected anyway causes people to behave like shit. Maybe just simply showing yourself and proving the existence of hell will cause even sociopaths to be nice, purely for their own sake. Either way, it's not a true free choice for good, as opposed to bad, anymore.

But then again, I do not believe our actual universe as we understand it allows for free will, unfortunately, so there's that. Of course, this style of god would be a lot more morally ambiguous than the christian conception, possibly even evil by some moral systems.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 2d ago

Thanks for the rec, I'll check it out for sure!

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 3d ago

As I understand it, you need signatures from people living in a village which would displace them, but you could forge them instead, which is implied to be caught later and so has no bad effects for them. Also, there are a minimum of two other options, one getting Ruby's gun and the other crafting a Molotov Cocktail. But looking at the trailer I think there's no question that EE is a lot more fun, for lack of a better word, than DE. The world of DE is supposed to be quite bleak, if you don't like that it's not the game for you. Always knowing all consequences is obviously convenient, but imo DE's take is not bad once in a while. Though it's not the kind of story I'd always want to play, that's true.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 3d ago

Man, reading up on Caelum Est Conterrens reminded me, despite my many sympathies for their basic attitude, how many rationalists seem to be dedicated to fulfilling the worst stereotypes about the scientifically minded. See this discussion's gem:

So, apparently there's something I'm not getting. Something that makes an individual's hard-to-define "free choice" more valuable than her much-easier-to-define happiness.

There's this idea among the other-ways-of-knowing crowd that science can only ever talk about what we can currently define and measure, and that it is in particular obvious that there are things we will never be able to measure well, so science is limited to only a specific sliver of reality. This leads to the silly caricature of the scientist as a person who is only obsessed with measurable and entirely dismisses the immeasurable. Whereas I'd say most scientists have not only no issue admitting the limited scope of our current knowledge, they actively work on increasing that scope, precisely because they do not dismiss these concerns.

But no, this person just unironically dismisses caring about free choice (even putting it in scare quotes) as opposed to happiness, because the latter is easier to define.

Stereotype accuracy, indeed.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 8d ago · Edited 8d ago

Nah. In particular, they went in to Season 2 with a perfect excuse to write an arbitrarily long, very episodic stretch of filler material, and they basically ignored that, time skipped as necessary, and kept the show pacing tight anyway.

It seems we're talking a bit past one another. I'm not really talking about episodic fillers, though of course those can also be a problem. To me the entire premise of the third and fourth season felt tacked on in the typical style of how tv shows always have to expand the scope from personal adventures to grand, world-saving heroism when they run out of interesting small-scope ideas.

To elaborate a bit (spoiler, obviously): The original premise of the first season was about how the four thought they were sent mistakenly to heaven, but actually it's hell and they're instead supposed to be mentally torturing each other. Then we also find out in the second season that despite getting rebooted over and over, they always find out the truth and in addition, they actually become better people. They then appeal their case to a judge. And ... that's actually already a good story. Imo they should have simply gotten into limbo or maybe even heaven, that's it, with the implication that appeals along these lines are already not terribly uncommon. But finding out that nobody has been to heaven in ages due to an extremely simplistic, stupid point systems was not only completely unnecessary to the original idea, from the start it was imo a bad and rather arrogant premise. This is compounded by how it's solved by exactly those four humans who originally were extremely vapid and self-involved. Them eventually improving to a point that they don't belong into hell anymore is a nice idea; Turning them into moral geniuses that re-design the entire system is, again, stupid and arrogant. The ending of "heaven gets boring, so suicide" is also, again, unnecessary to THAT premise.

Otherwise, I unsurprisingly strongly agree with your earlier post. I'm a solidly in the technofuturist transhumanist "good-things-are-good" camp, and I have nothing but scorn for the showrunner's values. But even independent of that, I think that just keeping the story tightly focused on the original premise would have been much better. If anything, I'd have preferred a few seasons of episodic hijinks along that line to the ever-increasing scope we got instead.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 9d ago

Yeah, struggling on the finish line is common, and mystery shows are the worst offenders. Some shows & movies are great and clearly originally planned as a one-off initially, and then unexpected success results in a bad case of sequelitis. First three seasons of Supernatural, for example.

Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood is imo rightfully one of the highest-rated animes. Very good, self-contained story from start to finish, with minimal fillers throughout. Whatever you might think of the genre in general, this is how it's done.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has a weak-ish start and a few fillers inbetween, but the ending lands. People have already mentioned Gravity Falls, but that is definitely another one.

Blackadder is mainly episodic comedy, but it does not fumble the ending, neither inside the seasons, nor the last season.

There are also a decent number of animes with only 10-20 episodes, but I think that's not what you had in mind when asking the question.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 9d ago

Imo The Good Place dragged out far too much, but I also greatly disliked the direction it went into later for other reasons that are arguably subjective, so YMMV.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 14d ago

Depends on the data and variable, as usual. TFR specifically is a rather synthetic approach that looks at all the women in a given year, records how many had a birth in that year and their respective age, and then creates a synthetic women that sums through these average birth rates for the current year to get a total number of children. This is why it is a lot less stable than actual numbers of children and very sensitive to delayed child birth, at least in theory (in practice, delayed child birth and reduced birth rates are so highly correlated that it doesn't really matter). So no, it doesn't include children they brought with them. But it still shows that after entering western countries, they reduce the rate at which they're having children quite quickly.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 14d ago

I've looked into this a bit, and the politics of having children. Conservatives are also doing fine-ish in most places, still usually below replacements but only at like 1.8 or 1.9. As @IdiocyInAction says, immigrants in western countries are closer to natives in number of children than one may think, but it's kind of a fools errand to put a number on it since they are a mix of different ethnicities from different source countries, some of which are already substantially below replacement themselves. Generally speaking, though, if you restrict it to immigration from high-birth-rate countries specifically, they're still AFAIK above replacement. Urban vs rural is also a very noticeable difference, which also correlates with politics.

Taken together, the implication is that moderates might be more close to one, and especially progressive, urban whites probably have east asian style birth rates. Scott once mentioned that rationalists and polyamorists have substantially < 1 TFR, and I don't think they are exceptional compared to progressives.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 14d ago

I am surprised (again I'm not a good predictor) that such an economically disenfranchised college graduate population (if that 43% is accurate) haven't solidified into any kind of a political movement yet.

Depending on how you see it, it already has, or can't. It's a group that, collectively, has ~~wasted~~ spent a substantial part of the prime of their life, maybe even substantial debt, for credentials of dubious value. They already overwhelmingly vote for parties (generally green & left-wing) that promise them exactly what they want (positions based on "merit, as measured by their credentials", and a fallback of welfare). What should they do, vote for right-wing parties that call their degrees fake & gay?

Also, from their PoV, the economic immigration overwhelmingly doesn't compete with them. After all, they are the ones with the impressive credentials. Only someone who didn't get those would feel threatened by immigrants. You're not one of those losers, are you?

They're not even wrong. Not getting a degree really is strongly correlated with being a loser. For this reason, employers do look at whether you have one. Especially public institutions outright require them. Underemployed also doesn't mean the job is terrible, just below what you might have hoped for.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 16d ago

It's not a scam in the sense of getting your money, it's a scam in the sense of many self-employed people presenting an extremely biased account of their company, for various reasons, including self-justification. My brother-in-law runs a platform providing niche courses in psychology, and he constantly talks about how this kind of platform can create almost "free" money with minimal input from him since he only does the course once and then an unlimited amount of people can take them (and others can use the platform to create their own courses and he gets a cut, even more free money!). Except I know him & his life well enough that he spends a lot of time on it, regularly even on weekends, and from his wife I know that so far including all the running costs, the set-up costs (he isn't a programmer himself, so especially in the beginning he paid a handsome sum just to get the basic framework going), the gear he bought to make professional-looking courses ... he is basically still treading water. Maybe it will change, maybe not, but if you know him casually you might think he is making decent extra income with little work, the way he talks about it.

But maybe your people are for real. It's not impossible, just unlikely.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 17d ago

Can't really give you advice for the US, but at least in Germany you're 100% better of being a wagie. The entire system is clearly designed around you, especially the tax system, but also benefits, insurance, absolutely everything. My wife got a free 10k "stipend" as support from the government for her "women-led startup" when our second child was small so she was still partially in maternal leave. It was extremely stressful since we had to communicate with multiple agencies to find out how this is handled and the majority of their staff literally told us they have absolutely no idea, so we got bumped up to the local boss ... who also told us they have no idea, lol. After a while we found out at least that, despite being called a "stipend" which in academia is usually not considered an income, this one is anyway since there legally is no such thing as a stipend for a business, apparently.

The best part? Since the staff from the family office was hopelessly out of her depth on how to handle it in general, we structured my wife's maternal leave in such a way that she claimed was best so that we at least know how much maternal benefit we still get (greatly reduced, but at least we get no surprises from the family office). A few months later insurance calls us, and tells us that my wife has fallen out of the public insurance: Due to the structuring she is now considered fully self-employed. To add insult to injury, the way we originally intended to do it would have not led to this complication, it was entirely a result of our negotiations with the family office. Suddenly she has to pay a few hundred € every month that we wouldn't have to otherwise. We recently calculated it out - taxes on the stipend, lost benefits, extra insurance costs - and we got basically nothing out of the stipend compared to my wife being 100% in maternal leave for the entire time. It was a lot of extra stress and work, almost entirely spent on negotiations with legal bodies, for no benefit for anyone at all whatsoever.

Also, by my impression going up the corporate ladder of some BigCorp has a much better floor AND a better ceiling unless you're exceptionally confident in yourself. But it probably depends highly on the field, in some it seems to be unavoidable that you have to do a a jump from wagie to self-employed when going up the ladder, like attorney partnerships.

On the tribes, in very general terms blue is worse on pushing bureaucracy, but red fucks up international business.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 18d ago

On this topic, what Black Mirror episodes would theMotte recommend? I love the idea of the series, and at least a few episodes I watched were great - I'll see whether I can find them again - but so much is way too poisoned by the writer's contemporary politics to really be the incisive commentary on possible futures as it was intended. Orange Man Bad IN SPACE !, basically.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 18d ago

full time employment starting at 21

Buddy, I have bad news for you ...

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 21d ago

I'd turn it around; Libertarians are usually "up to the borders", since you need a body, i.e. the state, to actually guarantee rights and freedom. The ones who go beyond the the borders are the other ones (or depending how you see it, a specific small subtype), the Anarcho-Libertarians, who think they do not need a state altogether. Once you acknowledge such a need at all, you further want to protect that state in some way from outside influence, which necessarily implies border control in a western democracy. Non-western democracies can do stuff like long-term non-citizenship, but I don't think that's realistic for us, and I also consider it unstable with actual open borders since you can simply get overrun and regime-changed; There is a reason that the usual examples of Dubai or Singapore are, if anything, stricter about their borders than the West.

Imo the primary point of being a libertarian compared to other democratic traditions such as liberalism is the general intuition that the state should be as small as possible and concern itself primarily, if not strictly, with the protection of basic rights, since otherwise there is no check to it growing out of proportion since the state itself is supposed to be the control. Trying to micro-manage the affairs of men "for their own good" always seems to go down a slippery slope of going ever more micro for ever more men.

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 21d ago

Bah

It seems somebody has been reading Caplan recently...

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RenOS Falling Outside the Normal Fashion Constraints 23d ago

The first thing that stands out to me is that the abstract uses "conservative" functionally as a slur, and among other points implies that proving something originates from conservative thought is in itself showing that someone is (morally) wrong.

The next is that the implication that anti- vs pro-shipper is the main source of harassment campaigns. At least in my experience, this is completely wrong; The great majority of anti-shippers just avoid the entire shipping fanfiction altogether. On the other hand, shippers are by their nature already involved and frequently highly emotional about which particular ship is the right one. Most of them still manage to get along despite differences, but if campaigns are started, it's by shippers who either consider one particular ship to be especially terrible, or vice versa by people who consider one particular ship to be so obviously true that all others are necessarily awful.

Finally, it's hard not to think that the authors major claim, namely that people’s fictional interests are not indicative of their real-life values, beliefs, and behaviours, is something they would disagree for other media, or even for the same media, but with inverted connotation. Think militaristic fiction, for example. Progressives have no issue implying that enjoying such media is problematic.

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