Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
1hr ago
Seconded, many of these adjective pairs aren't really synonymous. Many people are active (in the sense of being physically fit) but not talkative, and vice versa. "Carefree" to me suggests "lacking in neuroticism/anxiety", not lacking in moral principles.
Folamh3
16hr ago
Paging @DuplexFields. As previously discussed, you owe me a mea culpa.
Folamh3
21hr ago
Why do you need sync if you're only going to write at the disconnected setup?
I'm not. My first preference is to write at home on my laptop disconnected from the internet, but I'll also need to write on my phone during my commute.
I started reading Kafka's The Trial yesterday, and I was reminded of Jonathan Franzen's Ten Rules for Novelists:
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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
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Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
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Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
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Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
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When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
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The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
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You see more sitting still than chasing after.
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It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
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Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
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You have to love before you can be relentless.
I disagree with a lot of this, but #8 jumped out at me. I have ~65k words of an unfinished novel that I want to finish in February. I've been writing it in Google Docs specifically so that I can work on it on my phone on the train. Ideally, I would like to work on it on my laptop with the internet disconnected, to avoid distraction. I understand that you can work on a Google Docs document offline, and the document will sync automatically as soon as you reconnect. My question is, can anyone recommend a piece of software that will prevent my computer from connecting to the internet for a fixed period of time? The workflow I'm envisioning is, I get home from work, sit down at my laptop, disconnect the Internet and set this up such that I can't reconnect for an hour or ninety minutes or whatever. If this piece of software could also block me from opening certain applications (e.g. Steam, VLC) during the period as well, that would be even better.
Folamh3
1d ago
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra just for you.
Last week I finished Katalin Street by Magda Szabó. It was pretty good, though I doubt I'll read it again. On Thursday I started Boy Parts by Eliza Clark and it was so compulsively readable I had it finished by Saturday. It touches on a wealth of CW topics: female violence, the male gaze, false accusations of rape, whether there's any meaningful difference between fetish art and porn. Ultimately ends up feeling a bit like an extremely online, gender-flipped version of American Psycho. Very impressive, especially for a debut from such a young writer, even if I did feel like Clark was pulling her punches slightly.
Started The Trial by Kafka last night.
Folamh3
1d ago
I am not a particularly rich or exceptionally handsome guy, but some of the girls I could date easily were definitely the top of their societies in these aspects
If I'm parsing this correctly, you mean that you're not particularly wealthy in your home country, but were unusually wealthy relative to the typical standard of wealth in the countries in which you were travelling. A sort of comparative advantage?
Folamh3
2d ago
we have no problem with other types of sexual tourism that don’t involve money. Rafa told me a story of one of his German friends who used Tinder Plus as an alternative to hostels in Latin America. Although all these women were consenting to this German man sleeping over and presumably having sex with them, the relationship was no less exploitative than if cash was used. Dreams of being taken away to the West, higher status in one’s local community (for bagging a Blanco), are two big non-amorous factors at play in this situation that many would find just as damaging to the individual women and the local community than if cash was exchanged.
I don't see how this is meaningfully different from any sexual/romantic relationship between a wealthy man and a poor woman which doesn't lead to marriage (or an otherwise committed relationship). What you're describing is a critique of the sexual revolution, not a critique of the relationship between the global north and the global south.
Folamh3
4d ago
I suspect the dominant reason for the lack of eskimo rocket scientists is, firstly, lack of eskimos, and secondly, a culture that doesn't value education because they're still partly a traditional culture and the more urbanized ones are, well, impressively culturally dysfunctional.
Also the extremely high rate of alcoholism. There are very few rocket scientists who are functional alcoholics.
Folamh3
4d ago
I think a more interesting subject is why these difference exist. Is there any settled science on this?
I think rate of consanguine marriage is a major contributing factor. I haven't read it yet, but my understanding is that this was one of the main conclusions of Joseph Henrich in The WEIRDest People in the World: Europe became a dominant economic power in large part because it had a headstart in banning cousin marriage. If you compare a world map showing the average IQ in each country with a world map showing the rate of cousin marriage in each country they look very strongly negatively correlated.
Hes mentioned it again since, and I think he believes it - but this doesnt mean he is anti trans.
No, but "gender dysphoria is a very recent phenomenon almost entirely parochial to the West" contradicts at least three of the core tenets of gender ideology. I don't think hardcore trans activists (who are a penny a dozen in the circles in which Scott moves) would appreciate the nuances of a statement like "gender dysphoria is probably a culture-bound mental illness, but that doesn't mean trans people aren't deserving of respect and shouldn't be entitled to do with their bodies as they please", and I think Scott knows this better than anyone, which is why he's so cagey and evasive whenever the topic comes up. People have been smeared as transphobic bigots for much less.
This is the guy who was ground zero for the HBD therefore socialism argument.
I think a more accurate gloss of his position as I recall it is "HBD therefore UBI". I appreciate that there's significant overlap between socialism and UBI but I don't think they're interchangeable or that one necessarily implies the other. "He who does not work, neither shall he eat" was a popular slogan in the early Soviet Union, after all.
I sincerely doubt that there's are any Dark and Heretical ideas he holds but is forced to deny or decline to defend.
I suspect that he's far more sceptical on the trans issue than he lets on. This article was staggeringly evasive. "Yes it's bad that everyone is coming out as trans and we should try to understand why it's happening, but people who investigate why it's happening have had their brains broken by the issue, and the fact that two of the parties in a seminal court case on this issue have silly names means that you're silly if you pay any attention to this issue. Yes it's bad that confused teenagers are undergoing irreversible and disfiguring medical procedures they will likely come to regret, but the precautionary principle demands that we should allow them to even though the evidence base is so weak. Even if it doesn't pan out, in the scheme of things when it comes to medical malpractice it's not that big a deal, and the fact that so many European countries are taking steps to prevent teenagers from undergoing disfiguring medical procedures is just proof that they're all Stalinist nanny states. Anyway I'm not an expert on this so take everything I say with a pinch of salt" - when has "not being an expert on something" ever stopped Scott from expressing a definitive opinion on a contentious political issue, whether it's Covid treatments or rape culture or sociology or criminology or...?
There's also the tail end of this article, in which he alludes to transgenderism possibly being a Western culture-bound syndrome.
Folamh3
4d ago
He all but admitted to being a HBD enjoyer when reviewing Freddie deBoer's book The Cult of Smart: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart
Freddie deBoer drew a comparison with Huberman too: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/maybe-this-is-why-you-shouldnt-have
Folamh3
6d ago
I've never heard of this before and I like Douglas Adams, thanks for the recommendation.
I'm curious why you ask "I'd like a partner who is..." and two of the options are "educated" and "uneducated". Surely the response to one of these on a Likert scale is just the inverse of the response to the other?
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