roche
9mo ago
roche
9mo ago
This place is still a paradise compared to /r/ssc which has become Quora. ACX comments are looking rough too. I looked up to these people? Yeah, it's bad.
But another thing: You've grown. Communities don't grow, but individuals can. There's a chance you've absorbed whatever lessons TheMotte had to teach, and you're in a class full of students waiting for a new teacher. Stagnation is the fate of all adults, and like illness the best we can do is delay it. We are all destined to become boring, vegetative adults unless we have some process of continuous, lifelong self-transformation. Don't ask why TheMotte is failing to meet your needs. Ask how you're failing to meet your own needs, and then find a new teacher.
roche
9mo ago
Do we have any humanities-brained fellows here?
In Rationalist groups, I feel like an odd duck. My passions are philosophy and the arts -- especially moral philosophy -- but I see them coexisting side-by-side with the intellectual world in a sort-of symbiotic, 19th century German way. This is a rare attitude among humanities-brains though. There's a weird, depressing tendency of the humanities towards absolute self-exile now. As if studying the humanities means adopting a milquetoast belief in "human nature" divorced from any serious biological or psychological context. You must accept as axiom that literature is important, even though this literature has no tangible message to give, no way to prove its importance; the Western Canon matters but no one knows why. Undeniably, books would be an amazing way to make sense of this confusing age we live in, but that requires admitting the sciences actually matter, which is an awful blow to the ego.
Okay, I didn't mean to rant. This is my way of saying, damn I wish I'd gotten into the sciences sooner. This is a topic that has 0 exposure, but the way we segregate our intellectual disciplines is, IMO, very damaging. When everyone engaged with a thing has the same thinking style, and interacts with it in the same way, blind spots form. Maybe we need some organic amount of cross-pollination to keep things healthy.
Sure it happened. What country would this not happen in, when the entire foundation of their world view is rocked? When you go from dominating your half of the planet, and viewing your emperor as a literal god, to becoming an economic vassal state of foreign powers and everything you believed in was violently flushed down the toilet? I can't imagine any scenario or any culture where this goes smoothly.
The fact it only took 25 years for all conflict to die off is amazing. There's no residual fighting, no scars left over from the transition, no one really cares about American military bases or the treaty or communism anymore. It didn't involve some enormous deal-with-the-devil style compromise cough Korea cough to lift them back up. They had the perfect opportunity to go apeshit and tear up the country for their beliefs, but it simply didn't happen. When Mishima committed suicide in 1970, he was laughed at for his extremism like he was Chris-chan. Bear in mind, this man was a teenager when Kamikaze pilots were killing themselves for the emperor. His extremism is nothing like a Civil War LARPer trying to revive the confederacy -- it's like a guy born in Alabama in 1845, waxing poetic about the Antebellum era, and getting laughed out of the room by Reconstruction-era southerners. Japan's entire world view collapsed and they moved on like it was no big deal. 25 years is amazing.
Since 2020, I've been lurking Japanese websites regularly. Easily the biggest contrast between the English and Japanese net is the total lack of any real CW or political energy over there. Japanese people hardly vote, they don't follow politics, and if Marx is brought up they'll discuss him calmly from a historical/economic perspective rather than an ideological one. There's a palpable sense that Japanese are somehow immune to the Culture War -- that it's just fundamentally never going to happen, barring a World War II-style shakeup, and even then I seriously doubt it.
So why are they immune to the CW? The keyword is society. Japanese people (and other Asians) have a fundamentally different relationship with their society compared to Westerners. Over there, "society" is basically a sprawling, abstract, ephemeral organism that's almost like a father figure. You may not always like his authority, you definitely don't understand him, but if you listen to his rules and obey his commands, you will probably be happy. You'll be safe, you'll have clean streets, a wife, a career, expendable income, medical care, good food! Society is -extremely- stable, so virtually all risk is removed. Trust in society, and you'll be happy. Disrespect society, and you'll be shamed on national TV.
Western society -- especially America -- is the opposite. As authority is stripped away from the social body and granted to the individual, society loses its ability to fix norms and values, and so every individual is left to determine his own truth rather than inheriting some default opinion from above. The more atomized and individualist a society is, the smaller the corpus of collective knowledge/belief gets, and the more pressure is placed on each person to find an answer themselves. This is why even in Scandinavia, CW potential is much lower because they're collectivists, despite being very developed, terminally online, and fluent in English. For CW to become truly big in Scandinavia, their collectivist culture would have to decay.
I don't really think the average person wants a Culture War. They just have this void in their lives -- no social organism they can feel proud contributing to, no God that brings purpose to their life, and 2008 butchered any remaining Y2K optimism with an axe. Seems natural that mass political utopianism is the move.
roche
9mo ago
The single most sympathetic place on earth to autists is 4chan
Honestly doesn't feel like it (except for spammers). Genuine autistic posts online are much rarer than they used to be, and even on 4chan they get mocked. Being autistic is fine, but doing things like failing to read the room, writing awkward infodumps, having a weird emotion, etc. will get teased ruthlessly. I would bet most autists retreat to writing short, simple posts in public now if they write at all.
roche
9mo ago
The members of the stack are chosen specifically because (1) they were discriminated in the past, and (2) attitudes toward them have changed. Politically they make an effective bludgeon because insulting them makes conservatives look terrible. There's definitely support in some circles for autists, like on college campuses and discord circles, and these are the same groups genuinely worrying about ageism, ableism, and so on. It has no utility in politics because conservatives lack a reputation for treating autists poorly (even though they do, like most people). It would be nice if universal equality was the actual driving force in progressive politics but it's really not.
roche
9mo ago
Have any of you noticed the "Lookism" trend gaining in prominence? Motte is likely mid 20s at youngest, but apparently an insane emphasis on looks for both men and women is now standard among Late Gen-Z. Terms like "canthal tilt" and maxillo-squillo-I-don't-fucking-know have flown out of 19th century physiognomy handbooks and into TikTok feeds. High schoolers apparently use words like mogging and looksmaxxing now on a regular basis. The youth are approaching S. Korea-levels of fixation on bone placement, skin quality, eye-squintiness and height.
Two thoughts:
(1) Getting older is weird. Seeing tiny little currents that flowed beneath the surface in your own adolescence blow up to become tidal waves years later. It's like how the beatniks presaged the hippies, or like how the late-80s Seattle scene probably felt when grunge blew up. Another current example is the increased popularity of specific anime like Nichijou, Lucky Star, and S.E. Lain among late Gen-Z. These shows always had an audience, but the fact they're so popular now seems to mean something. Baton-passing is guaranteed with any popular-enough media, but increased popularity for an old thing tells you something about the new generation. Maybe it's trite and mundane, but it will always tells you something.
(2) This is awful. Morality aside, you could pick any trait of yours from a hat, and it would be more open to modification than your looks. By that same token, even attractive people aren't happy with their looks. It's all fun and games up until around 25, then it's a real fight to preserve what you have -- new exercise routines, new clothing, new cosmetics. You spend years cultivating your outward self and neglecting your inward self, so when you "hit the wall" it's a double tragedy because you have little else to offer the world. Many beautiful women struggle through this process and have their ego shattered, but come out the other side as excellent people as Ben Franklin points out. If guys are getting in on this too, I honestly see it as a generation-wide tragedy. This is a giant arrow pointing away from what actually matters in life, it only benefits 20% of people, it's long-term untenable for 100% of people, and it's happened before. Perhaps genetic engineering should take us in the other direction instead -- so that no one is too attractive, and instead of mewing and bone-smashing we'd be cultivating virtue and writing proofs. Or we can stop acting like jackasses and realize looks are a small part of life. That works too.
roche
9mo ago
Yeah, '97. There's a great video that breaks down why, the gist is the way the cubes move makes no sense.
roche
9mo ago
What are some of the most wildly original premises you've encountered in fiction? I love Cube (1999) because damn what a cool idea, even though the filmmakers screwed up and the puzzle is confirmed impossible to solve.
roche
9mo ago
If the pills don't work, you're kinda S.O.L. There were actually two meds I saw mild results on -- Nortriptyline and Tranylcypromine. I told this to my psych, but rather than perking up she frowned and said "I can put you back on the NTP but the parnate's too dangerous". It has to be a downer when your patient finally responds to a drug, but all you can say is, "Didn't work well enough, onto the next one". And maybe that's the best option. I've seen psychs try to write smartly-designed protocols online, but they still boil down to "This pill is effective for a lot of people and we don't know why", with directions on how to safely use it, but you're doing the same thing as all other psychs. c'est la vie
roche
9mo ago
Having a rare problem definitely changes how you see the medical world. Not in a pessimistic way though. More like, it's amazing our protocols work as well as they do. If you have a toothache, any doctor can give you a painkiller + antibiotic and the problem will just vanish. That guy's story kinda paints ordinary doctors in a bad light, but if there is no protocol for solving your problem, then doctors aren't really prepared to help. This criticism gets levied against psychiatrists a lot, but doctors operate the same way -- they just appear better because doctor protocols are much more advanced. Medical consensus has taught our doctors everything they know, so when it comes to fringe issues like ME which aren't acknowledged by the medical world, it only seems right to defer to consensus and ignore it too rather than go out on a limb & explore.
Rather than blaming ordinary doctors for doing their job, I think we need a better pipeline established between rare-disease-sufferers and genuine medical researchers. The problem is that for every person with a genuinely rare problem, there's probably 10+ people who fit neatly into a pre-established disease category, who constantly badger medical workers that they're different. That's why the doctors in that guy's story are so dismissive, they deal with this shit non-stop. Right now there's no simple way to prove you're a genuine outlier. Maybe there is and I missed it.
roche
9mo ago
I've had this problem for a full decade now, so I've tried all the things you mentioned. Did carnivore, ingested a weird chemical powder from China, got blood work, etc. If none of that works, you're left alone to theorycraft some possible cause. Hence the post
roche
9mo ago
Sure. When I'm not experimenting with some routine, it seems that caffeine has a negligible impact on my sleep. But really, in my "normal state" the effects of most drugs are far weaker -- it takes me a lot of alcohol to get drunk -- so maybe one of the improvements was increased drug sensitivity, and I received the full impact of the caffeine which caused insomnia. That's a good suggestion, I'll give it a try. Thanks
roche
9mo ago
I'd suggest they go find a doctor or a bored med student, but it's hard getting an audience with those guys, so we're forced to solve weird medical puzzles ourselves.
roche
9mo ago
I'm one of the unlucky newbs that had his entire account wiped last night. Anyway, I'll open with a mystery for you biologically-minded guys
For about ~10 years now, I've had this issue where I'm generally healthy, but some chemicals don't seem to be flowing right, and so I've lived in a state of sorta-permanent emotional numbness and pleasure deficiency. I've seen many doctors and psychs and none figured out what's going on. Well, I myself had no idea until last year when a few amazing discoveries happened, and I made some theories. I did an experiment where I'd go out, do some intense cardio for an hour, then go back inside, drink tons of coffee and eat sugary snacks, and relax with a fan. Within a few hours some of the symptoms subsided -- symptoms which no antidepressant or antipsychotic could touch. So I took this discovery online and the response was predictable: Everyone agreed that it was the cardio. To me though this was dubious. I had done lots of cardio before and it had no effect, so why now? I believed the fan played a crucial role, but also understood that was odd. Why would a fan improve these symptoms?
Well, several months later I have the answer. It wasn't the fan that improved the symptoms, but the way I positioned my body when I used the fan! After working out, I would slink down my chair out of exhaustion so that my torso was almost parallel with the floor, with my head against the back of the chair, and then use the fan. After exercising, or drinking coffee, or eating sugary snacks or a carb-heavy meal, if I recline like that, before long my symptoms magically start to fade. I regain the ability to smell, my skin is more sensitive, colors are brighter, etc. This would be a miracle, but there's one problem: insomnia. After just one day of doing this, my sleep is worse. By night 3, sleep is near impossible.
Also, depending on the routine I used, different symptoms would improve. On my cardio-heavy routine, I regained the ability to enjoy music, whereas if I sit in my room and chug a lot of coffee, bodily sensitivity (like sense of smell) increases instead. Further, there seems to be no limit on what I can regain from these methods. The cardio method began with increased music enjoyment, but spread to other forms of pleasure after a couple days. When I stopped all methods, all gains also disappeared.
So that's the mystery. I'm no scientist, but my first guess is something blood or circulation related. Lying supine decreases the effect of gravity which apparently helps blood return to the heart. Gut microbes play a major role in producing both neurotransmitters and our sense of smell. But why would gravity affect this process? And why insomnia? It's all really mysterious. So yeah, ideas welcome! I'm afraid until I discover the mechanism at work here, progress is impossible
Yeah, this was the original point of literature. Somehow everyone forgot this. Old literature is still helpful, but new stories to fill the same purpose would be amazing.
More options
Context Copy link