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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   4490 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 16, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Anyone else have long Ethernet runs out of their house?
I have several going to outbuildings, long range wifi bridges set up past the tree line, the perimeter security cameras, that sort of thing.
Right now they're all running through a hole in my exterior wall to a patch panel inside, and this sounds like the normal way to do things. But that makes swapping or adding cables a huge bitch once you foam-seal the hole!

Is there any downside to adding a weatherproof patch panel outside and running my exterior-rated cables to it?

I've done long, ourdoor ethernet and fiber runs for business. Never used an outdoor patch panel. Honestly, we never even considered it. It's not that bad to remove foam seal, run some new cables, and add it back. If you're willing to splice cables, you could run a few extra unterminated strands out before sealing it up, but given how infrequently we changed our setup, we didn't even do that. Often we'd add a hub to an endpoint if we needed a few more drops at a single location. Climate control and security are always better inside buildings than outside them.

That's what I figured the industry position was. Although you're brave to say "always" without seeing my shitbox with vents to the crawlspace plugged with rags...

Some extra strands is a good idea. My issue is if I want to add extra cameras or control units at the property gate, I'm going to have to either add another batch of Ethernet for PoE to individual devices. Or run 120v in another conduit and a local PoE switch in an enclosure, at which point I may as well switch the whole thing to fiber.

But hell, why not just run some extra lines out there just in case, good idea. My time is more valuable than 5e (but less than 6).

Just gotta do a last check to make sure I've got my solid and stranded connectors right, and this damn project should finally be done.
Btw, do you have a favorite fitting for running out of a wall to conduit? I, uh, was going to "improvise"

My time is more valuable than 5e (but less than 6).

lol

do you have a favorite fitting for running out of a wall to conduit?

For the life of me, I cannot remember what kind of fittings we used there at my old job. I think we used 1" metallic conduit like this stuff all over the place, but it's been too long. I do remember we had a good system with pull strings so there was always one in the conduit: attach your pull string to the end of the cable you're pulling and to the end of a second pull string, then you pull them both and have a pull string ready for the next one if you ever need it.

On my suburban house with 4 POE security cameras, I literally just have a 1/2" hole with a bunch of ethernet cables running into my living room that has a glob of silicon caulk keeping for not letting air through. It works fine.

I possibly need a new, but probably related, username and need ideas.

People here keep giving me shit and assuming priors of ironclad strength along with deliberate shit-stirring due to my username EverythingIsFine, which was only partly foreseen. As I explained elsewhere:

I was trying to come up with a new nick for the new forum to disallow cross-looking, I knew a prolific redditor with a similar and memorable nickname, and I was at the time of the opinion that signifying prior inclinations in a username would be helpful information on the forum. So it was a deliberate decision, not an indication that I'm some sort of status-quo warrior.

Spoiler: people think I'm some sort of status-quo warrior.

So far I don't think anyone has gotten the reference to the meme either, which was meant to be at least partly tongue in cheek and self-deprecating, and have taken the whole thing very seriously instead. No, actually, I'm just a pretty consistent centrist, who thinks more accurately that rather than everything being fine, that everything will work itself out and be fair-ish in the current system. In fact there are a few things I'm decidedly un-fine about. But... I am sort of an old school constitutionalist in the sense that I think the US political system was deliberately designed to be some balance of slow to respond to public feeling, but also fast enough to reasonably reflect what people seem to actually want and care about, by revealed preference. And it does just that! Actually kind of well! As evidenced by its long-term stability and good outcomes for most Americans. With some partisan combat that happens along the way, which is fine to participate in. I lean probably just slightly right on a more traditional values spectrum, but slightly left in the current political environment. I've volunteered for both two Democratic campaigns (2020 Biden, and a local candidate) and two Republican ones (two state candidates), all of them moderates in their fields. I tend to go for the most moderate primary candidate in national presidential primaries, though I probably have a soft spot for Bernie, and I also generally tend to be relatively dissatisfied by the field as a whole for a decade. I have changed my stance on a handful of important issues over the years. Right now Pew puts me (though not very strongly) in the Democratic Mainstays, make of that what you will. Maybe a cross between that and Ambivalent Right and Outsider Left, though I am much more politically active than the norm.

My original idea is that it is in fact helpful in a discussion to have a rough sense of someone's priors beforehand, but I didn't want it to be this ironclad thing. I don't consider my beliefs above to be stuck, just strong. Do you think I was wrong about a username like this? Does having an opinionated nickname help or hurt dialogue here?

So yeah, ideas welcome. Should I keep the general format so people know it's still me? Or just go for something way different?

As someone whose username, if overthought, has more-or-less the same connotation as yours, you're putting WAAY too much thought into this. As long as your username isn't obviously trolling or actively offensive, I dont think it matters to anyone. For what it's worth, I assumed your name was a reference to the "this is fine" meme of the dog in the burning room, which seems like a perfectly appropriate tongue-in-cheek name for a forum like this.

You could consider setting your flair to something more descriptive.

darwin2501

I would have assumed your name was sarcastic rather than an actual indication of your beliefs. Are there really that many people here who interpret things literally?

Imo his handle is a bit too on the nose for his posting habits. This forum is primarily filled with incorrigible contrarians soapboxing about everything that is wrong, so with his stated views he does end up constantly posting that, well, everything is fine.

Well, obviously, your username is fine.

Just lean into it and change your name to “StatusQuoWarrior”

Realistic Randomizers

So I have a project where sprite elements (head, hair, colors, several body bases, clothing) get composited into a character, and I want to add a random function to it. Call it an NPC generator.

The problem is most programs like this produce a jumbled mess: black-skinned blondes, children with beards, etc., and the end result looks like a Portland street camp.
Does anyone know a standard way to sample from multiple correlated variables to give realistic results? I'd prefer that over hardcoding a bunch of rules or templates, which is what most people default to.

A simple example of the handmade mechanic I already use is age+sex+race= height distribution.
The first 3 are uncorrelated and picked randomly unless a selection toggle overrides it. Age multiplies the mean of the normal distribution, then sex multiplies both the mean and standard dev, and finally race does the same. Height is then generated from the modified normal distribution with cutoffs.

Is there a better way to do this for e.g. hair color or presence of freckles? Someone much smarter than me must have encountered this problem and come up with a solution.

Ideally I'd just like to make a huge n-dimensional joint probability distribution to sample from. This would probably be a lot easier if I'd paid attention in linear algebra.

yeah, a bayesian network lets you just specify the conditional probabilities directly between nodes (nodes being character features here).

https://pgmpy.org/detailed_notebooks/2.%20Bayesian%20Networks.html

https://aima.eecs.berkeley.edu/slides-pdf/chapter14a.pdf

A Bayesian network might make sense here. ChatGPT can generate some reasonable sample code to give you a sense of what it'd look like ("Please write some sample code for pgmpy that uses a Bayesian network to generate characters for a game. Particularly for the traits age, height, sex, race, and having a beard").

Imagine you're Hlynka. Or better, a version of Hlynka that cooperates. I ask you to give examples of individuals or groups that are high in intelligence (rated by you) and have despicable (rated by you) personality. What do you answer?

  • -13

Blues generally. They clearly aren't stupid, by my rating or anyone else's, and their values and tendencies are quite despicable by my rating at least.

This doesn't seem like a hard question to answer.

"Calling out" other posters is something we frown on generally, and starting a thread just to bash someone who's permabanned and can't even answer for himself looks like bad faith trolling to me. If you want to know what Hlynka thinks, go ask him on reddit - he's still there.

The most obvious contenders are the kinds of people who write angry editorials about all the -ists in their country, and complain about how they aren't as wealthy as their parents, despite mostly contributing by spending college partying and deplatforming people and writing angry articles online. Many of these people are, nonetheless, probably smart enough, having come from successful, functional homes that were able to send them to the colleges in question.

As a group, I recall he used Russians as an example of a high-IQ group held back by a terrible culture.

he mentioned many times that IQ isn't intelligence

Ukrainians are surely the best example, given their average IQ and (pre-war) pitiful GDP/capita. Them and North Koreans, I suppose.

Russians have a half-standard deviation IQ advantage on Ukrainians, I thought. And North Korea arguably doesn’t count because government oppression makes it suck as much as cultural stupidity.

I’m very skeptical of that IQ differential.

That’s fairly reasonable, although even with the IQ gap isn’t Ukraine still a worse GDP to IQ ratio than Russia?

Russia is so heterogenous that I think estimates are pretty poor across the board. European Russians are likely higher scoring than Ukrainians, but not by 7 or 8 points.

I thought estimates in Siberia showed ethnic Russians having IQ’s similar to Germanic peoples or western slavs but lower than the Finno-ugrics? That is indeed seven or eight points higher than the national average IQ for Ukraine. But I suspect Ukraine’s national average IQ is understated a bit by shithole country effects, so who knows.

Scott Aaronson seems like the prime candidate.

This question would be way easier to answer if Hlynka were here.

I'm afraid he doesn't want to answer that.

He said that the dysfunctional slavic territories were a good example when I asked him.

Had he said this before, or you asked him specifically (e.g. on reddit)?

I asked him when he was still posting here. He pointed to the Slavic speaking lands.

How much of a pay decrement would you take if —

  • you never have to worry about school quality, healthcare, crime, or drug abuse among your children

  • the area where you work is beautiful and stress-reducing

  • you can walk a pleasant street to obtain the necessities of life

  • the people who you meet daily are kind and have good etiquette

This is pretty much my life already tbh. Our district is literally called "university district" and the demographics are exactly what you would expect, we have a giant park in front of us that is overall very clean and has multiple nice playgrounds, my "commute" is <10 mins (by bike) to my daughter's daycare and <5 mins (by foot) to my work. We live in an historic city with a beautiful old town center that we can visit in less than 30 mins (by bike, again).

The pay admittedly isn't great for our level of education but still far above average and easily enough to get by with a family. There is a minor crime issue, mostly stealing bikes.

Who here doesn't have this?

This sounds like regular middle class things.

Walking a pleasant street to necessities is not easy to achieve in suburbia.

My current lifestyle to money ratio is fine (could use a bit more money), but I suppose if I moved somewhere else to have a lifestyle more like that, I would see what the local monetary expectations were, and adjust accordingly. Like, if I didn't need a car there, I would need the car payment or insurance, so it would be fine to decrease pay by that much, minus whatever I would then spend on public transport. There clearly isn't any abstract answer, because most income is used to buy those things anyway.

None, as I have that in Poland or I can skip that (stress-reducing work is not needed, without not necessary stress is good enough).

(OK, first not fully - but it would require magic to have that and I prefer to avoid running untested magic on my children)

  • the area where you work is beautiful and stress-reducing
  • you can walk a pleasant street to obtain the necessities of life
  • the people who you meet daily are kind and have good etiquette

These three I have already got covered. I can get a $400k mortgage with $2k payments to move to a gated community with private amenities to solve #1, which is about what I am willing to pay. Maaybe $2.5k to cover healthcare forever.

????? Where???

Russia, obviously.

What is the alternative we are comparing this to? I already have most of these things, so not much. Less than 10%.

(pulling numbers roughly out my ass here) Private gated apartment rent: 48k Private school for 2 kids: 32k Private insurance: 12k (double the 6k average to get Premium) Pleasant social and work environments: basically just remove hazard pay incentives. Call that a 18k hardship bonus that is off the table. Private security: most of the need is obviated if the above are all satisfied, but call it a 6k annual fee split across however large your little community is.

Just on the face of it thats 120k worth of 'good stuff' you're paying to have if you don't have it already, and thats the minimum state you are envisioning here. We can postulate that the average positive externality per household in a functioning society might be worth this much and could theoretically be achieved with greater economies of scale, but lets table that thought experiment for another time.

The end state is the 'what is your job on the commune' ideal made manifest. Most disgruntled cynics, sorry realists, here look askance at this utopia because of accurate concerns regarding the likelihood of such a utopia being targeted for 'diversification' by larger powers that be. The reality though is that the disgruntlement and skepticism is an outgrowth of current degrading circumstances rather than hostility to this nice idea to begin with.

We all want our bag of escape money so that we can hide in Belize or Vermont when things hit the fan, and are just coasting through the enshittification of our local environs, getting as much out of it as we can while eyeing the escape hatch. It is a very cynical approach, and it saddens me that civic engagement is such a thankless exercise.

Unfortunately, in equity-focused societies oversensitive to disparate impact, I do not see any recourse. The only real solution is to hide ones utopia lest a horde of foreign and domestic migrants descend to enshittify it thoroughly. Best to be like a mumbai mansion: filthy on the outside but paradise within.

Around two-thirds to three-quarters, because, along the lines of what other commenters are saying, that's what I'm paying now vs the counterfactual where I live in a low cost-of-living locale.

Interestingly, this describes the situation in Taiwan nearly perfectly except that the buildings are kinda ugly.

Pay seems to be about 50-75% less than U.S. norms, partially compensated by much lower prices on nearly everything.

describes the situation in Taiwan nearly perfectly

Don't forget the looming threat of a Chinese military invasion, or, as the kids are calling it now, a "special military operation."

I wouldn't, because realistically the deal would (Lando mutter) keep getting worse all the time.
Wil Stancil clones would come along to slap down favelas in your village as revenge against class enemies for living comfortably, as we've seen him announce as his actual goal.
A huge brokerage account backed by political power is the only thing that can't be taken away, and that means I don't get to take it easy if i want my grandchildren set up in an enclave free of murder and dysfunction.

I think it depends on how much of a support network exists in the community. If I take a job that doesn't give me enough money to afford basic necessities, will there be a food pantry, farmer's market, cooperative drug store, etc. available?

The great social division is economic. So no, if course not. "People can be poor somewhere else." is the near universal revealed preference.

Of course, but with the housing market being what it is, being able to afford living somewhere where I get all this is what I need more money for.

Yeah, the actual figure is pretty easy to measure by comparing peoples' actual takehome pay after mortgage and property tax.

For sure in the US. But the thought experiment is also interesting from the standpoint of measuring intranational quality of life and proposing higher taxation. If, at the greatest extreme, a person would sacrifice two thirds of his extraneous income (after housing/food) in order to live in this utopian social environment, then we really ought to be comparing social environments instead of economies when considering quality of life between nations and states. And this probably has some moral application to taxing the wealthy more.

I would take a significant pay cut if I could be assured of having this, maybe half. The hobbies I have that make me truly happy are pretty cheap. But I'd need guarantees that my children and their descendants would have the same deal. Because it's important to note that with less money for myself, there would also be a lot less for me to leave to my children, which means that if that community collapses or regresses, they won't necessarily have the egg nest to make a pleasant life for themselves elsewhere.

BUT I don't think it's a realistic prospect, short of fully automated luxury gay space communism (post-scarcity society). I think this is the deal of capitalism, you can't really modulate it to specific levels. We might get the impression it isn't so because this can take a couple of generations for the problems of "social democracy" to be obvious. Life is pleasant and orderly because other people work to make it so for others in society. They work because they are rewarded. If you reduce the reward, they won't strive as hard, making quality of life drop. And with the workforce mobility we currently have, the highly motivated, quality individuals will easily be convinced to move to a pleasant gated community where they will be surrounded by other highly motivated individual AND also get more money, and your community is going to be slowly only populated by the least ambitious and driven individuals, which will erode the very qualities that you thought you were compromising for.

Does anyone know how to really turn off spelling correction in Windows 10?

I've already turned off "autocorrect/highlight misspelled words" in Settings/Typing.

But, in certain apps, when I type anything in my native language (my Windows is in my second language, English), all the words get those red squiggly lines under them. The apps in question do not have a spellcheck function. They get it from Windows somehow.

This actually brings up a question I've had for a little bit: does autocorrect seem like it's somehow been getting worse for everyone else?

Not at all no. At least not on Android.

Autocorrect does not seem to be getting worse for me. Feels like it's been pretty consistent over the past few years, and slightly better than it was 5+ years ago.

They may be using a web component. Maybe try turning it off in Edge.

That was my first thought too. I've checked that it's off in Edge (and the browser I use, Firefox).

Something I recently noticed - increased push to implement ranked choice voting everywhere. What is more strange, it always seems to be Dems promoting it and Republicans opposing it. My question is - why? First of all, why push it now, and second, why the partisan divide? I mean, if it, say, gave advantage to the minority party, then you'd expect minority Rs push it too somewhere. But it's not what I am seeing.

The press tends to have a "no enemies to the left" policy where even the most radical leftists are seen as well meaning but misguided. More broadly this view seems to be common in a lot of university grads.

So the right has an inherent disadvantage in communications. They have to spend effort talking up their candidate and attacking their opponent to get to the point that the left gets to for free. Smaller right wing candidates tend to not do well because they don't have the resources or institutional support to get positive exposure.

If the right starts winning then the left can shift it's support from the centre leftist to a farther leftists who's already branded as a "good person".

So for the left it tends to let the press blow wind into multiple sails, while the right has to face cannons from multiple angles.

Additionally no one has the time to do a deep dive on multiple candidates for things like congressional races. Voters won't know much about candidates besides their ethnicity, so it promotes racial politics.

IRV won't really reshuffle the political landscape if implemented. Okay, maybe some of the blue seats in solid blue states will flip green, but I doubt the Libertarian party has enough popular support to flip any seats yellow without charismatic nominees. There is a possibility that these first Green congressmen boost their party's visibility to a level when enough people across the country vote G>D>R in the next election, but I wouldn't bet on it.

That's why the Democratic party is free to promote IRV. As others have said, they are the party of trying new things, so it fits their profile.

Things like multi-member districts where two top parties get their candidates in, or a German-style "pad the parliament with party list candidates to match the national popularity of the parties" system are reforms that really challenge the current political landscape and that's why no one on the DNC/RNC proposes them.

The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started? Long ago when I first looked into better voting systems, it seemed like nobody could make that mistake: people who had also looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they'd get it right, and people who hadn't looked into better voting systems wouldn't mix up those terms because they didn't know the terms.

Are we just at the far end of a branching/viral game of telephone, here, where person A carefully explained about tactical voting and Smith Sets and the DH3 scenario and on and on, but persons Z1 through Z1000 barely managed to get "ranking good" and "plurality bad" out of all that?

My personal beef with IRV is that it claims to make it safe to vote for 3rd parties, but only does so if the 3rd parties have no chance of winning. I'm not sure whether the possibility of "tricking" voters into an untactical split vote would be likely to hurt the Democrats or Republicans more, though; I think Democrats are just more pro-IRV right now because when you feel in control you feel like it's safe to trust wonkish ideas, whereas the minority party has more cause to fear that complications are a way to hide trickery.

I'm a fan of Approval Voting, where the optimal tactics are "look at the two front runners and vote approval for the better of the two as well as anyone you like more than them", not much harder to understand than plurality's "look at the two front runners and vote for the better of the two", and where there's pretty clearly still no trickery hidden in "the person who gets the most votes wins". It's not as good as a Condorcet method in the absence of tactical voting, but since there won't be an absence of tactical voting I think it makes sense to settle on something where the tactical-voting failure states are as benign as possible.

How did that get started?

I don't know but I haven't seen any popular discussion of it that didn't call it that. So I'm not about to piss against the wind here...

The seemingly now-universal popular habit of calling Instant Runoff Voting (a term that specifies one particular voting system) by the name Ranked Choice Voting (a term that applies to IRV, but also Condorcet methods, STV in multi-winner elections, a ton of other methods, and I guess technically even plurality voting), is weird to me. How did that get started?

It's an intentional propaganda campaign by FairVote, which is the only at all effective organization pushing for alternative voting systems in the United States. They actively fight against any voting system other than Instant Runoff Voting (or Single Transferable Vote for multi-member districts, but the US doesn't really do those) and intentionally use that language to obscure the discussion.

It's a little hard to take FairVote as good-faith actors given they're acting exactly how you'd design an organization to prevent the adoption of any alternative voting systems by pushing the worst choice for an alternative voting system and bad-mouthing all of the others.

It's a perennial topic that tracks the election cycle, can't say I've noticed it getting particularly more air time this go around. While there have been a few higher-profile instances of election swinging against dems seemingly contingent on certain third party candidates, I don't think it would broadly advantage one party over another in any enduring sense. As long as gun rights and tax are highly salient and polarised (and as weed becomes less salient), I'd imagine most libertarians would preference the GOP even as Green party voters would preference the dems. The net result would likely be a wash, and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery.

So I don't think the partisan appeal of RCV/IRV tracks strategic advantage necessarily and is mostly just borne by cultural affinities where lib educated types are more interested in theorycrafting on the government as an institution and happier to knock over fences doing so.

The fact that it's largely an affectation of educated wonk types rather than strategically advantaging dems qua dems means that it's actually one of those issues that may be easier to implement obliquely/non-politically in a cross-partisan way, to the extent that wonkish types are relatively more present in the republican electeds than their base.

and the bigger impact would be intra-party, e.g. moderating dems by letting them shed extreme positions to a clientalised periphery

This is probably a good explainer for the partisan split- extreme views hurt democrats and they’d like to get away from them, but republicans have no way of doing that.

Yeah I don't really have a coherent opposition to RCV per se, but nevertheless am weakly opposed, just because it's the loud people who tend to love terrible, expensive ideas who seem most excited about it. If all these obnoxious college kids like it, my stupid monkey brain tells me there must be something wrong with it. Like the Radiohead of public policy.

I have a non-monkeybrained reason to oppose it - I know that my species, including myself, are a bunch of monkeybrains, so we react angrily when we don't understand something and think we're getting tricked. In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power, making people feel as though they at least have a say in what goes on. To that end, having the absolute simplest system that everyone can understand is immensely beneficial. As a result, I am broadly against anything that seems convoluted or that people could plausibly interpret as unfair. Even if RCV is actually a good idea for some reason, very few people can model it effectively and people absolutely will feel like their opponents just devised a system to cheat the first time that someone gets the most first-place votes and loses anyway.

Even if RCV is actually a good idea for some reason, very few people can model it effectively and people absolutely will feel like their opponents just devised a system to cheat the first time that someone gets the most first-place votes and loses anyway.

In some ways, you could even say that the purpose of all these complicated systems is to ensure that the guy with the most votes loses.

In my view, elections do not improve governments by selecting high quality leaders, but by increasing the legitimacy of power

Big reason I'm a fan of compulsory voting (though I think it does moderate politics as well)

More zero information extremely lazy people voting? Not sure how it would solve any of the problems.

Majority R's have floated it in Georgia, where libertarians(who can be expected to lean R, especially in a state like Georgia with a democrat party blacker than Africa) throw races which matter into a runoff regularly enough to want a 'R's automatically win a runoff' button.

Elsewhere in the country, republicans might have bloody primary fights, but unite behind a general candidate even if he's definitely not the favorite. This means that normalizing third party voting is bad for republicans, especially in minority heavy districts. In Texas, whose politics I know best, there's a contingent of well to the right republicans whose support is absolutely necessary to keep winning. Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win. Conversely, local democrats have little interest in a third party because they're heavily poor minorities; the green party gets its support from college educated whites. That's also why Texas abolished straight ticket voting: a straight d button was getting pressed too much and republicans were thought likely to manually select the republican in every race.

Convincing them that voting constitution or libertarian is a valid option would throw races to the democrats where normally republicans are guaranteed to win.

Presuming they preference republicans ahead of dems, what is the assumed mechanism for this?

In 55% R districts where democrats select D as their top choice?

That shouldn't matter, even if you have e.g. 45% D, 30% R, 15% L, 10% C in first preferences, minor parties get eliminated first and their votes are added to the R tally.

The failure mode of IRV looks more like 45% D, 10% R, 25% L, 20% C where the Rs are the voters sufficiently disengaged and ignoring third parties to not put down a second choice or write D as a second choice.

In other words, if almost everyone selects different obscure third-parties they really want first and the realistic choice second, then IRV gets nonsense results because the realistic choice gets eliminated even though everyone expected their votes to get reallocated to them. In practice this isn't a real problem because no one proposing IRV seriously expects any meaningful votes outside of the two-party duopoly.

Democrats are already likely to be opposed to the electoral college and to be more vocally opposed to gerrymandering, so I imagine that plays a minor effect.

Then, I think some of the main factors that make Democrats more suspicious of ideas are if they're Republican-coded, in some way hurt any of the groups they care about, or if they seem in some way to be good for corporations. This is none of those. Rather, it's supported by nerds experts.

Republicans are less likely to trust ivory tower ideas, so there's a little more suspicion.

Of course, on both sides, the direct incentives for the leadership is against, as shaking up the electoral system is usually bad for getting reelected, but the fact that such systems are genuinely better means that they occasionally can be implemented at some level.

The DNC always appears to support RCV unless it's an election year. Then they're hell-bent on telling people to vote for the lesser of two evils. Why not campaign on RCV and voting blue?

It's currently an election year, and there's plenty of news articles about RCV.

Dems currently are the ones more commonly pursuing the narrative that everyone actually agrees with them and if they don't it's because they've been tricked or because they're presented with a bad false set of choices.

A quixotic affection for alternative voting methods reflects this theory: if only we had the correct voting system, then the REAL preferences of voters would find their way out, and Democrats would win.

Think of it as an attenuated form of mistake theory: if only we properly captured voter preferences, the correct candidates would win. There's no problem with our positions, or even how they're marketed, only the system.

My cynical take is that ranked choice voting is preferred by the more "wonkishly inclined" because it's less intuitive/provides more opportunity for gamesmanship than simple FPTP or Approval voting.

The partisan split is thus explained by the majority of journalists and academics being Democrats, and the Republicans being immediately suspicious for precisely the same reason.

It also makes a certain amount of sense in that (in the US at least) the left has been more prone to schism than the right and thus alternatives to FPTP can be reasonably characterized as helping the left more.

Oh, yeah, I really, really like Approval voting. Kind of has a lot of the FPTP upsides in being very intuitive, feeling fair, few startup costs, easy public education, prevents shenanigans a lot of people dislike, what's not to like? Very little wonkery going on. You just say, vote for everyone you like, and that's it! Done!

Sure. It can hurt if you have a "true favorite", but if they are your true favorite, you can always just vote for them alone, easy. If you like one more than others, but are okay with others, that's kind of fine, it still does what it says on the tin. And if most people end up just doing single votes, that's mostly the current system, so doesn't feel like a big loss. It's also almost as expressive as IRV or other RCV formats with fewer downsides. The only major downside I can think of is that it makes it slightly harder for vote-counting, in the sense that we can clearly see by published totals if something is fishy. But even there, the security really isn't much worse than the current system, and in practice I think election offices are going to be releasing the overall ballot numbers anyways.

Why would journos/academics prefer gamesmanship?

Personally, I don’t care about RC vs. approval vs. other wonkish competitors. They’re all better than FPTP!

The important part is picking a rallying point, and RCV has some early momentum. We can hash out the details once we’ve reduced the influence of a two-party system.

Because expanded opportunities for gamesmanship increases thier power/status relative to the stereotypical "low information voter"

it's something that came out of the academy

Did it? It has been in place for over 100 years in Ireland ever since the UK wanted to boost the minority Unionist vote, maybe this all started with an academic paper but it seems like the academy got interested in something that already existed.

But adding on to that, ranked choice voting is something popular in Europe (which means +10 interest among Democrats and -10 interest among Republicans),

Not really, although I agree that is the vibe. "Ranked choice voting" isn't a technical term, but the specific system that people talking about RCV are actually talking about is usually the system called IRV (instant runoff voting) in the US and AV (alternative vote) in the rest of the world. This is a better way of counting a single-winner election like a President, Governor, directly-elected Mayor or legislator elected from a single-member district. Most of Europe is Parliamentary with the legislature elected by proportional representation, so they don't have single-winner elections that matter, and therefore don't need to think deeply about how to count single-winner elections.

The only country that uses IRV/AV in an election that matters (as opposed to non-executive figurehead Presidencies) is Australia.

The other system that Wikipedia gives as an example of RCV is STV (single transferrable vote) in multi-member districts. It is used for the lower houses of the Irish and Maltese Parliaments, and the Australian Senate. It is also very widely used to elect the governing committees of mass membership organisations like unions.

Continental Europe almost entirely uses party-list PR to elect its legislatures (some systems, including Germany, have constituency MPs but the top-up is designed so that the constituency results don't usually affect the party composition of the legislature). France uses actual runoffs in single-member constituencies, and Italy uses a hybrid of FPTP and party-list PR.

Ranked Choice Voting describes a kind of ballot design where candidates are preferentially ranked, Instant-Runoff Voting describes one way to decide a winner from such ballots.

Australia's had RCV/IRV for federal elections since 1918, and voting in federal elections has been compulsory since 1925, so it's been around a while. There's definitely better ways to decide winners than IRV from a theoretic, Bayesian regret perspective, but what's often missed about the historical popularity of IRV (and particularly its enduring path-contingency in Australia) is that it's dead simple to administer and tally compared to otherwise better methods such as approval/range. IRV solves (or solved) many of the complexities handling preferential voting in simultaneous counts across multiple voting locations in an auditable, non-destructive way (which remains one of the advantages of FPTP, for that matter). Relatedly, Australia's always voted and counted by hand (no voting/counting machines) and has generally done so quite efficiently.

Ranked Choice Voting describes a kind of ballot design where candidates are preferentially ranked, Instant-Runoff Voting describes one way to decide a winner from such ballots.

True, but the only vaguely effective lobbying/activist group for alternative voting methods in the US is FairVote and they are strongly against any voting method other than IRV and one of the ways they actively try to confuse the issue is by using term "Ranked Choice Voting" to refer to Instant-Runoff Voting, as you can see on their website.

it's dead simple to administer and tally compared to otherwise better methods such as approval/range.

I'm confused: IRV is notable for being one of the only voting methods that fails the summability criterion making it by far the hardest to tally. Does this issue just not appear in practice because there just aren't ever that many candidates so the factorial of the number of candidates stays manageable? Or is it handled some other way?

IRV is simpler to tally and audit in low-tech scenarios because the votes themselves are the physical record of the count, an advantage it shares with FPTP. In FPTP, you sort and bundle votes into e.g rubber bands of 20 and boxes of 1000. You can easily verify a count by checking that a box indeed contains 1000 votes, and they've been sorted appropriately. It's easy to update your count report just by seeing you have X boxes and Y bands.

Approval voting, Score, Borda etc require you to maintain a store of the counts independent of the physical ballots, which introduces more room for human error and complicates recounts/verification. You need to increment up to N counts for a race with N candidates, and even approval voting has 2^N-1 ballot variations that complicates sorting.

If you're thinking of terms of low-tech boxes and counting processes, IRV is an intuitive extension of FPTP because you're just opening up eliminated boxes and resorting them. Practically, it's rare for this process to go particularly deep or be particularly sensitive, and the count of votes rarely exceeds twice the votes cast.

I think we're now able to have do much better than IRV and I think there are potentially clever ways you could do tear-off perforated ballots to make the counts under approval/range more reliable, but a lot of (sometimes conspiratorial) questions about the popularity of IRV miss that it was an intuitive and practical solution at the time. If Australian preschoolers can vote on schoolyard activities with IRV, I'm sure American adults can manage.

Oh, counting votes by sorting ballots never even occurred to me. American elections almost always have several races on the ballot, so that's not really a feasible way to organize the counting. The counting is almost always done by machine anyway, with hand-counting only for recounts.

Does this issue just not appear in practice because there just aren't ever that many candidates so the factorial of the number of candidates stays manageable?

Not sure about Australia, but the UK traditionally transported all of the ballots in one race to a central location and mixed them before counting them in order to obfuscate the precinct-level results. (This is logistically trivial if the largest race is a 65,000 elector Westminster seat). So summability is not relevant. For the London Mayoralty (which used an IRV-like system where voters are only allowed 2 preferences) running the whole count at one site is a logistical headache - when the Tories changed the counting system to FPTP this allowed the counters to count the mayoral vote at borough level and sum.

The largest single IRV/AV race is the Irish presidency. Does anyone know how that is counted?

Okay, fair. I didn’t realize Europe was almost totally party list based, I’m familiar with the push for alternative voting in the UK and thought that was an attempt to align with the continent.

There is no push for single-member AV in the UK. Reform and the Liberal Democrats support moving to a proportional system (we prefer STV to lists, but the rhetoric is about the principle of proportionality, not the details of the system); Labour and the Conservatives want to retain FPTP. There was a referendum on moving to single-member AV in 2011 (which failed) because that was the best offer the Conservatives were willing to make to bring the Liberal Democrats into a coalition.

First of all, why push it now, and second, why the partisan divide?

Ranked choice voting seems to many people like a reasonable solution to increasing political polarization and pressure to e.g. "vote blue/red no matter who." Regarding the partisan divide, Republicans seem to have an easier time banding together behind a single candidate even if they have personal issues with them, whereas Democrats seem more likely to either not vote for or at least suffer significant mental anguish about making political compromises by voting for someone who even slightly diverges from their ideal platform. Changing to a ranked choice system would therefore bring in more undecided or otherwise nonvoting Democrats who can signal their desired policies while still pragmatically supporting someone who has a chance of winning, while Republicans don't need such a roundabout method and just vote pragmatically from the start.

Republicans seem to have an easier time banding together behind a single candidate even if they have personal issues with them, whereas Democrats seem more likely to either not vote for or at least suffer significant mental anguish about making political compromises by voting for someone who even slightly diverges from their ideal platform

Is it true though? There's significant "nevertrumper" movement, for example, but I never heard about "neverbidener" or "neverclintoner" movement. I remember recent competitive Republican primaries, including Trump's first one, but I don't remember much meaningful competition on the Dem side once Obama settled the question against Clinton whose turn it is now. In fact, do we have any estimates of how many Dems really abstained from voting D because of political disagreements, rather than threatening it and then voting D anyway? Mental anguish doesn't count - it's what they do, like 90% of their platform is feeling mental anguish about one thing or another, nothing exceptional there.

From what I've seen, Never Trump is mostly an elite phenomenon and does not really reflect typical Republican voters. See for instance what happened to the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. The Democratic coalition, by virtue of being more diverse, contains many interest groups who can threaten to abstain if they don't get what they want, as in the case of Muslims angry over Biden's position on the war in Gaza. That's not to say there isn't a core of stalwart Dem voters (mostly older and/or Black), but the fickle progressives and minorities are at least perceived by the party leadership as being important to get on side to run up the numbers (even though they may not flip many states).

They may threaten, but would they ever deliver on their threat? I'd assume they hate Trump much more than they disagree with Biden, so at the end they'd do what they are supposed to do and vote Dem. They may sacrifice some low-level congressmen if needed (it's pretty low cost since Reps have the majority anyway) but the Presidency is too important. I don't deny some voters may move to the other camp, eventually, but not just for day-to-day matters. So, frankly, I don't believe the leadership is scared of those fractions. I'd rather believe they are doing what they wanted to do anyway, pretending they are scared by the fractions, to save face for everybody involved - and if they weren't going to do it anyway, they don't.

tactically in places like Berkeley it seems like it allows Dems to cooperate with/coopt fringe GOTV groups for third party candidates. That brings communists who would otherwise disengage and form genuinely competing groups back into the party machine.

"Vote for Antifa McSlaughterkulaks, but make sure Embezzlea Demqueena is your second choice!" is an easier sell to low turnout leftist voters in those places where wiki says ranked choice has been implemented. Saves having to make the "vote for the greatest evil that still has a chance of winning" arguments we see so much of in presidential elections.

It fits the theme of "managerial democracy means making the voters feel heard without any risk to single party rule by the Serious People."

I think we can expect to see masses of performative fringe and ethnic parties that serve to A) smoothly introduce radical policies to moderate dem voters, B) shift the Overton window of what moderate means, while C) maintaining unity with radical factions and minor ethnic blocs by making electioneering cooperative rather than competitive.

Similar to how the parliamentary system works in Europe really, but in some ways even more effective because the minor parties don't have to be brought into a ruling coalition. They can be given non-policy sinecures reviewing Racial Equity Progress Reports from the DEIB offices of city departments

But wouldn't Rs benefit from "vote for Freedom McSovereigncitizen but put Square A. F. Establishmentor Sr. as your second choice" somewhat too? There are some very colorful right-wing fringes too, maybe not as colorful as antifa, but still they exist.

Vote for Antifa McSlaughterkulaks, but make sure Embezzlea Demqueena is your second choice!

That's one helluva bumper sticker.

Is manifold markets extremely slow for anyone else? For weeks now, even opening up a second tab on desktop or mobile would freeze the browser.

A little. Not horribly slow, but it's still noticeably a web app.

No, it's pretty fast for me

I think you need to realize that Aryanism was much bigger than Naziism, and contained multitudes.

To my top of head memory, I think I've recalled every nationality other than Australian Aboriginals being theorized to have either an Aryan origin, an Aryan remnant in its ruling class, or being quote unquote bona fide Aryans.

There were dozens of theories from hundreds of theorists. Tibetans, Comanche, Tutsi, Mayans, pure blooded Mongols were all at times considered Aryan by someone. Maori but not Aboriginal Australian. Some said Chinese but not Japanese, most said Japanese but not Chinese.

The third Reich didn't represent the only or even the majority view of Aryanist theories, and the theoretical basis for the Nazis was far from rigorous. These weren't settled questions. Read old RE Howard Conan and Solomon Kane, they're full of Aryan references ("before the rise of the sons of Aryas") but in ways that are often orthogonal to Naziism.

So while we tend to lump every Aryan reference under Third Reich policy points, the world of Aryanism was much bigger. Neo Nazis might be to the third Reich what Trots or Bukharinites are to the USSR, those who feel that forgotten theorists had the real dope.

All of which is to say, it's only a minor fudge in an ill-outlined portion of Nazi theory to say "Oh actually Ukrainians/Poles/Whatever are pure True Aryans while Russians are Asian Mongoloid trash!" It's not a big contradiction that's hard to figure.

And Hitler himself wasn't the most objective or scientific of people when it came to the issue either. Many think he only started having a true hatred for Jews originally because he blamed them for the WWI loss, which ended pretty abruptly for the average German soldier; coupled with anti-Communist views that at the time jived well with these theories, and adding on top a dose of common ethnonationalism, we can see it wasn't a theory-first approach, it was a politics-first approach that found convenient bedfellows.

In fact I think an understanding of Nazism should always start with these historical roots: a broken economy, a weird time for German nationalism, common popular disorder, growing controversial appeal of Communism, a feeling of international persecution and disrespect, etc. At least personally, I think our modern conception of Nazism as a wholly theoretical and radical construct appealing to closet racism and abetted by apathetic masses misses the mark quite widely when it comes to why Nazism was popular and/or able to take over a whole country to such an extent.

I found this stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan_certificate

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1 (the official holocaust encyclopedia)

Popularly, however, it continued to be used inside and outside of Germany to refer not only to Germans, but also to other European nationalities, such as Italians, Norwegians, and Croatians. Although Poles, Russians, and some other Slavs suffered brutal persecution under Nazi rule, they were considered to be "Aryans." Race scientists and anthropologists too considered Slavs to be composed of the same races, including Nordic, as Germans. They were deemed to be of related blood.

However in Mein Kampf we find:

By handing Russia to Bolshevism, it robbed the Russian nation of that intelligentsia which previously brought about and guaranteed it existence as a state. For the organization of a Russian state formation was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs in Russia, but only a wonderful example of the state-forming efficacy of the German element in an inferior race. Numerous mighty empires on earth have been created in this way. Lower nations led by Germanic organizers and overlords have more than once grown to be mighty state formations and have endured as long as the racial nucleus of the creative state race had maintained itself. For centuries Russia drew nourishment from this Germanic nucleus of its upper stata. Today it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated....

I think the questions are, “did Nazis consider Slavs more inferior than was normal to the 20th century,” “did Nazis consider Slavs sufficiently inferior that their conduct in war was motivated on racial superiority”. You probably have to also consider that dehumanization is common to war. Even today, Israeli politicians are calling the Palestinians “seeds of Amalek”, and both Ukrainians and Russians are dehumanizing each other, and Americans pretty much dehumanized the Pashtuns as barbaric savages stuck in the past.

The most famous alleged product of anti-Slavic literature is supposed to be the 1942 pamphlet Der Untermensch. Despite the fact this pamphlet is widely cited, it's nearly impossible to find an English translation. Figures. I was only able to find a partial translation here.

It doesn't mention Slavic peoples at all. "Subhuman" is a mistranslation, and is not used here in a racial sense but in a cultural sense. It's meant to be more of a Nietzschean "underman" concept than the modern day notion of a racial subhuman.

The narrative of that pamphlet is similar to what you mentioned: a German elite brought a Culture to Eastern Europe, and Bolshevism is the modern-day representative of the "underman" threatening the light of civilization.

So just as the plough, modern tools and the concept of hearth and home helped to form human society and create the family, the people and the state. So then must mankind become good and great, rising above all other living creatures. Dwelling in the realm of God!

However, along side of mankind dwells the subhuman. This subhuman hates all that is created by man. This subhuman has always hated man, and always secretly sought to bring about his downfall, first like a thief, and then like a brazen killer.

The subhuman is united with his peers. Like beasts among beasts, never knowing peace or calm. The subhuman thrives in chaos and darkness, he is frightened by the light. These subhuman creatures dwell in the cesspools, and swamps, preferring a hell on earth, to the light of the sun.

But in these swamps and cesspools the subhuman has found its leader – The Eternal Jew! The Jew understands the desires and needs of his fellow creature. The Jews endeavors to corrupt and manipulate this horror of inhumanity until they are rallied towards a common goal in the destruction of true man.

Beginning as early on as the destruction of Persians, the Jew has glorified this destructive nature. Even honoring it and declaring the holiday Purim that celebrates the organized mass murder of 75,000 Aryan Persians, who died as victims of Jewish hatred and evil.

Even now world Jewry still glorifies this terrible act - as its greatest religious holiday. The eternal hatred of the subhuman for mankind exists; they envy the clean and noble character of man. So they have tried to destroy what they hate, and from out of the vast deserts and endless steppes they have gathered hordes of their Huns whose leaders Attila, and Genghis Khan descended on western civilization bringing with them violence, fire and death, to every part of Europe they came.

The subhuman hordes would stop at nothing in their bid to overthrow the world of light and knowledge, to bring an apocalypse to all human progress and achievement. Their only goal is to make a desert wasteland of any nation or race that shines with creativity, goodness and beauty.

The only goal of the subhuman is chaos.

So for millennia this law of nature, the conflict between man and his anti-man, the subhuman has occurred. Over and over a new Attila, and new Genghis Khan, appears at the gates of Europe attempting to wreak havoc and destruction on mankind and his creations.

But today Bolshevism is the new Attila, the personification of the subhuman horde and its destructive power! But Bolshevism not a phenomenon of just our time, not a product of our modern era. Neither has Bolshevism evolved within the framework of human history.

Bolshevism is as old as the Jew itself! Lenin and Stalin are only two who have prepared the way for this new horde!

"Subhuman" is a poor translation of the "Untermensch" term which would be better to translate as "Underman" or a foil to the Nietzschean Overman. The fact this was used in a cultural/intellectual sense rather than a racial sense is clear throughout the pamphlet where modern art, Zwei Untermenschen ("Two Undermen"), is contrasted with Zwei Menschen. The pamphlet also regards Roosevelt and Churchill as Untermensch, also pointing to a Nietzschean interpretation rather than a racial classification of "subhuman" as is commonly claimed.

Although usually considered to have been coined by the Nazis, the term “under man” in the above-mentioned sense was also used by American author Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 pamphlet The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.[8] It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book’s German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).[9] The German word “Untermensch” itself had been used earlier, but not in a racial sense, for example in the 1899 novel Der Stechlin by Theodor Fontane. Since most writers who employed the term did not address the question of when and how the word entered the German language, “Untermensch” is usually translated into English as “sub-human.” The leading Nazi attributing the concept of the East-European “under man” to Stoddard is Alfred Rosenberg who, referring to Russian communists, wrote in his Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) that “this is the kind of human being that Lothrop Stoddard has called the ‘under man.'” [“…den Lothrop Stoddard als ‘Untermenschen’ bezeichnete.”][10] Quoting Stoddard: “The Under-Man – the man who measures under the standards of capacity and adaptability imposed by the social order in which he lives.

So even what is supposed to be considered the most iconic Nazi propaganda demonstrating their belief that Slavs are subhumans doesn't even mention Slavs at all. The menace is unambiguously Bolshevism, which is compared to the Huns threatening Europe, with propaganda throughout contrasting conditions under Bolshevism with "Aryan Europe." And Bolshevism is regarded as Jewish throughout. Russian Women are portrayed crying, as victims, before the last line "Wehr dich Europa!" - Defend yourself Europe!

It's obvious why it's so hard to find a translation for this pamphlet: it actually disproves the conventional wisdom that German aggression towards the Soviet Union was driven by the belief that Slavs were subhuman and proves it was always about German opposition to Bolshevism, which was widely regarded as Jewish, even by Winston Churchill himself by the way.

The mythos surrounding WWII is lie, after lie, after lie, after lie.

I was with you until the last line. There's no secret conventional wisdom about it, nefariously upheld. I read all of Eric Tolman's biography of Adolf Hitler, and it's manifestly clear that anti-Communism was a strong motivator for quite a bit of Nazi beliefs. Other historical works of any seriousness all conclude the exact same thing.

If we're talking about popular understanding, however (a significantly lower bar), wartime propaganda was of course quite mixed when it came to this, due to the first sorta-enemies and then sorta-allies and then sorta-enemies again relationship between the US/UK and the USSR. Of course popular historical understanding got a little distorted in the political Cold War aftermath of WWII. The popular mythos about WWII doesn't attempt to grapple with the USSR, or communism at large, almost at all. You could call that a lie by omission, I suppose.

However, Nazism being anti-Slav is not a narrative I remember ever seeing as a focus. For example, the Minority Victims of the Holocaust page identifies only Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, people with disabilities, and to most casual observers (i.e. mythos subscribers), Nazi racism is indistinguishable from the Holocaust. Note that Slavs do not fall in this list. Of course, that's not to say that conflation is not present at all. This wikipedia section seems to do something similar to the conflation you are upset about. But I think the popular narrative of "why did Hitler invade Russia" has more to do with a desire for power and a hatred of Communism than some racial agenda. In fact, if you simply Google this question, you will see that racial theories do not feature very prominently. Well, to be precise, a lot of answers put reasons such as food and oil and such first. They sometimes mention "subhuman Slavs" like you point out, but it seems to me that usually there's also a connection to "Jewish Bolshevik overlords" right there alongside, so I don't find it particularly counterfactual.

I do not give a fuck what nazis wrote in their pamphlets given they managed to conquer Poland and did what they did.

This doesn't explain why millions of Soviet PoWs died in German hands instead of being treated like human beings and provided with food and medicine. This doesn't sound like Hitler wanting to liberate Slavic brothers from the Judeo-Bolshevik menace and bring back the light of Aryan culture to them.

The Wikipedia article on the so-called "Hunger Plan" includes this part:

The most reliable figures for the death rate among Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity reveal that 3.3 million died of a total of 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945, most of them directly or indirectly from starvation.[20] Of these 3.3 million, 2 million had already died by the beginning of February 1942.[21] The enormous number of deaths was the result of a deliberate policy of starvation directed against Soviet POWs. The German planning staffs had reckoned on capturing and thus having to feed up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war, i.e. roughly the same number as during the Battle of France in 1940.[22] The number of French, Belgian and Dutch POWs who died in German captivity was extremely low compared with deaths among Soviet POWs.

Based on the last two sentences, it seems to be that this case of mass starvation was due to two erroneous assumptions based on faulty and insufficient military intelligence data, namely that the Red Army is much smaller than it actually was, and that it can be defeated in 8 weeks, that is, before the autumn rain season begins in 1941, rendering most roads in the Western USSR practically impassable.

Well, if you believe that all German war crimes on the Eastern Front were actually malicious lies made up by Jews and it was really all sunshine and roses, that contradiction resolves itself quite easily.

Hyperion claimed that Germany killed millions because they did not consider Baltics and Slavs Aryan. This is plainly wrong, as their racial theory did consider them to be Aryan. They were pan-German nationalists, not pan-Aryan nationalists. The notion that the Germans killed millions of Slavs because they weren't considered Aryan is fictional, like other allegations here of a "Hunger Plan" or plans for mass extermination of Slavs because of German racial theory. That's Steven Spielberg History and didn't happen, like other absurd and salacious claims that have basically no evidence to support them.

The fact is over a million Slavs volunteered for the German war effort. The notion Germany had some secret extermination plan for after the war is total fiction, but it's a very easy story to tell in order to make the conflict appear black-and-white to masses of people. They had multiple versions of very early proposals for post-war resettlement, which is a common feature of all wars, including the current Israeli war in Gaza. This has been spun as a "secret extermination plan" in Spielberg History, but the fact is something like 12 million Germans themselves were subjected to resettlement after the war.

But Hyperion's claim was simply wrong, you can downvote all you want, doesn't make it true.

is fictional, like other allegations here of a "Hunger Plan"

I wonder which claim you claim to be fictional.

or plans for mass extermination of Slavs because of German racial theory

Maybe it was not German racial theory but regular German imperialism, but mass extermination and oppression was already running during war.

Regarding the “Hunger Plan” I already commented on one aspect of it above in another response, and I’ll only add that if you check out the Wikipedia article on it in general, you’ll see that it essentially lumps together multiple aspects of Nazi policy that are objectively not closely related, I think. And what it markedly does not argue is that the plan was designed with the deliberate genocidal aim of starving masses of Slavs to death, or that it was ever implemented on a larger scale:

By the end of 1941, plans to starve the entire civilian population of some areas had been abandoned, due to the failure of the German military campaign[1] and the impossibility of cutting off the food supply to cities without causing major uprisings.[6] Except in isolated cases, the Germans lacked the manpower to enforce a 'food blockade' of the Soviet cities; neither could they confiscate the food.

Also, any lengthy Wikipedia article that almost entirely hinges on just one official document, in this case a policy proposal made during a meeting of state secretaries, is rather suspect in my opinion.

Regarding the so-called “Generalplan Ost” it was actually not even that, as it was supposedly an early resettlement policy proposal put together in multiple versions, but not one copy survived the war. Only second-hand sources and commentaries on it exist.

it essentially lumps together multiple aspects of Nazi policy that are objectively not closely related, I think

Even assuming that this claim is 100% true, I am quite confused how it changes things substantially.

The "Hunger Plan" is a term that was never officially used, and was instead invented as a reference specifically to the supposed Nazi masterplan to exterminate the Slavic peoples of the USSR through manufactured famine. You'd think that the Wikipedia article on it will provide detailed evidence of this. What it describes instead are 1. the massive death rate of Soviet POWs in general (again, not all of them were even Slavs, and the idea that this was a pre-planned act of mass murder is suspect, as I mentioned in another comment in this thread) 2. Jews in ghettos not receiving sufficient food (again, this was a measure against Jews, not Slavs) 3. famine in German-occupied Greece (which has scarcely anything to do with the matter at hand.) Such Wikipedia articles are suspect in my eyes, because it's obvious that they were written by political activists.

For me it makes precious little difference whether Nazis caused millions of deaths according to some masterplan or through massive cruelty/incompetence/disregard. At minimum, they had no problem with causing millions of deaths in their war started together with their ally USSR.

See also Mao, killing millions through combination of badly broken leadership model and massive incompetence. It is not much better or worse than doing it as a deliberate plan, at most it has some different aesthetic. I guess that makes Mao largest and lamest loser ever and Hitler more demonic figure, but it is only aesthetics of not so great import, both caused terrible evil.

Intent, I think, very much matters if we want to examine if an ethnic cleansing (of Slavs, in this case) took place or not. But anyway, now that I checked this discussion again, it seems the original post was removed, so it's sort of pointless to continue, as it can no longer be seen what the original argument was.

Original post was about claim that Nazis were not anti-Slav. Which seem clearly false to me and does not require fully-deliberate extermination master plan to falsify.

it seems the original post was removed

very poor form

I wonder which claim you claim to be fictional.

I literally listed three right in my comment: the allegation that the Germans considered slavs non-Aryan and subhuman, the allegation that the Germans had a secret "Hunger Plan" by which they planned to genocide the Slavs by intentional starvation, and the allegation that "Generalplan Ost" was a secret plan to exterminate the slavs. None of those claims are true. All of those claims are aimed to misdirect from the fact that the real problem the Germans had was with Bolshevism, which they regarded as Jewish.

The idea their animus was motivated by their racial theories surrounding "subhuman slavs" is just propaganda meant to handwave the fact that the Germans fielded the largest foreign volunteer army in history composed of Slavs also animated against Bolshevism. That would be a highly inconvenient fact, so you make shit up about the Germans having secret plans to exterminate the Slavs and people, even otherwise smart people, completely fall for it. Just like they fall for the cartoonishly absurd claims that millions of people were tricked into entering gas chambers that had been disguised as shower rooms.

WWII mythos is just half-remembered plotlines written by Hollywood Jews.

the real problem the Germans had was with Bolshevism, which they regarded as Jewish.

This is a blatant and clear lie. And you are lying.

If that would be true they they would not cooperate so deeply with USSR. And would cooperate with anti-bolshevik group rather than oppress them.

They had real problem with many other things. They rampaged through Poland and murdered and oppressed so widely that it was counterproductive to what they tried to achieve.

Their behaviour in occupied Poland was unusually bad, no matter how you compare it. Even after excluding what they did to Jewish Poles.

Schooling of Polish children was curtailed to a few years of elementary education, as outlined by Himmler's May 1940 memorandum: "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. ... I do not think that reading is desirable"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Poland_(1939%E2%80%931945)

During the following weeks Polish schools beyond middle vocational levels were closed, as were theaters and many other cultural institutions. The only Polish-language newspaper published in occupied Poland was also closed, and the arrests of Polish intellectuals began.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_culture_during_World_War_II

Including endless executions, rape and murder and destruction would be easy here.

WWII mythos

It may come to shock to you but culture exists outside USA. WW II left quite deep wounds in Poland (not surprising with 16% of population murdered, decades of occupation and permanent loss of large part of country area and many other effects).

That would be a highly inconvenient fact, so you make shit up about the Germans having secret plans to exterminate the Slavs and people

Well, you can drop secret here. Invading country, banning any higher education, claiming that any smart Pole who ever lived was German, starting shooting people for flimsy reason or no reason, stealing anything not nailed down and imposing starvation rations etc were hardly secret. And even if you believe your claims that death camps have not existed and apparently Jews teleported to USSR - all other things are enough to present German occupation as being one of extreme subjugation based on their racial/ethical/howeryouclassify theories.

Joseph Goebbels and Hans Frank and Adolf Hitler were not exactly subtle.

the fact that the Germans fielded the largest foreign volunteer army in history composed of Slavs also animated against Bolshevism. That would be a highly inconvenient fact, so you make shit up about the Germans having secret plans to exterminate the Slavs and people

Maybe some people have problems with considering both USSR and Third Reich as monstrously evil as they assume that at least one main player must be good but I assure you that I have no such problem. And I am not going to make claims that there is no comparison to their evil - to not look far, Mao and Pol Pot and plenty of ancient empires handily compete. If you exclude what they did to Jews they were still clearly anti-polish. And "UK and USA did war crimes" is not breaking my brain. "Poles did war crimes and evil oppression" also is not breaking my brain either. And neither changes than in Poland Germany and USSR did far more evil than either of that.

But claiming that "the real problem the Germans had was with Bolshevism, which they regarded as Jewish." is a blatant lie and trying to whitewash German nazi empire. And I am quite happy that your side lost WW II, pity that USSR could not also lose but even USSR was a bit better than Third Reich Germany.

It bears mentioning here that the Nazis did in fact incorporate two Slavic nation states, namely Croatia and Slovakia, into the Axis alliance.

Is there any merit?

None whatsoever. They are lying or obfuscating things as usual. Third Reich was busy murdering, colonizing and fucking things up. And if they claim that it affected only Jews, then they are lying liars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:No_entrance_for_poles1.jpeg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nur_fur_deutsche.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Poland_(1939%E2%80%931945)#Germanization (see also other section)

(and yes, higher quality materials exist)

whether he lives in his native country

Has he missed that Germany invaded together with Russia and split Poland between them?

Or maybe the claim here is that "in native country" is not applying and therefore murdering them is fine.

To be more specific: if someone was eager collaborator then they could get "Volksdeutsche" classification. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksdeutsche#'Volksdeutsche'_in_German-occupied_western_Poland

What quite obviously proves that others were, in fact, considered as worse. (and given that it was Nazi Germany: worse were supposed to be exterminated or at least enslaved)

If the question is did the Nazis hate Slavs as a race as much as they hated Jews the answer is clearly no, as they were willing to work with groups such as the Croatian Ustaše and Ukrainian collaborators when it suited them, and their plans for Russia involved killing and starving the local population not because of their ethnic background but simply because they were there. In a practical sense of course it made little difference to the people on the receiving end of such brutality what exactly was going through the heads of those who ordered it.

Nope.

Whether or not German racial purity laws considered Slavs to be "Aryan" or not isn't terribly important. I guess that's what's actually being argued there. It may or may not be technically true, but it doesn't change the fact that the Nazi regime launched effectively a war of annihilation against the Slavs, seeking to seize "Lebensraum " for the "German race" from them, produced boatloads of propaganda claiming the Slavs were subhuman, and then via the Barbarossa Decree declared that it was in fact a war of extermination and there would be no such thing as a war crime on that front.

And yeah, that's SecureSignals, our resident Nazi apologist. I don't think he'd even object to that label. We do need a little of that, since the anti-Nazi types aren't free from bullshit either, but yeah you might want a large grain of salt on that subject.

for the "German race" from them, produced boatloads of propaganda claiming the Slavs were subhuman

We Slavs are also quite proficient at producing propaganda that Slavs are subhuman.

Though with extremely rare exceptions it was "this ethnicity/religion/nationality/etc is subhuman", not "All Slavs are subhuman".

Barbarossa Decree declared

Unlike Winston Churchill's genocide of Boers or America's extreme attempts to clear out insurgents in Vietnam, Germany was fighting an existential war and was going out hard on insurgents.

How many trials were provided to the people the US murdered with drone strikes?

Germany was fighting an existential war and was going out hard on insurgents.

This is unironically one of the funniest comments I've read all day. You realize that WWII Germany is basically the poster child for aggressive, expansionist war in modern history, right?

Against the 13 colonies of the United states which now includes Iraq, Syria and a bunch of other countries and the British empire and the Soviet union. You realize the Brits unprovoked annexed Iran during the war while already occupying roughly a quarter of the planet. Germany was taking back areas it lost 20 years earlier and that were German.

How that changes anything in terms of "has Germany was anti-slav during nazi times?"

  1. The Germans were so uniquely evil trope is used to justify all sorts of Soviet and Anglo-American imperialism. The Germans weren't uniquely evil or brutal.

  2. The Germans wanting to exterminate everyone who isn't German trope simply isn't true either. Germans wanted to restore Germany and have a more isolationist policy than most other countries at the time.

a more isolationist policy

Invading Poland and the ussr isn't really my idea of isolationism.

I never claimed either of those.

The Germans were pretty evil, but "uniquely" is a much stronger claim that's more difficult to justify. Making it would invite difficult to judge comparisons with everything ever done by every other country, which is why I didn't make it.

I also didn't claim they wanted to exterminate everyone who wasn't German. They treated civilians and POWs of Western allies about as well as you could ask for during a war AFAIK, including even Jews (Jewish soldiers that is, not so much civilians of other European nations they overran). And they were of course allied with Imperial Japan and Italy.

And they weren't quite as annihilationist about Slavs as they were about Jews and Gypsies, but they certainly weren't treated nicely. I think anyone attempting to make the argument that the Nazis were not anti-Slav is ignoring quite a lot of evidence and horrors.

I never claimed either of those.

well, it was reply to person who claimed this

The Germans wanting to exterminate everyone who isn't German trope simply isn't true either.

Well, they wanted to also enslave Slavs that were not planned to be exterminated. And assimilate some of them (Volksdeutsche, Goralvolk etc).

And they were not planning to expand German empire worldwide, they had no plans to invade and conquer say Japan AFAIK. They were not so delusional to plan extermination of USA population on grounds of not being German.

Not that it would make things for Poles/Ukrainians/Russians/etc better if Germans would win WW II.

The Germans weren't uniquely evil or brutal.

Large part of that is more-or-less hidden dual standards. Like with Russia right now large part of anger stems "but in Europe you are not allowed to do that".

(insert that 4chan post about toilet and kitchen here)

Also, there was vision that after WW I we learned better and we will have peace in Europe. France dropping bombs on Lisbon in September 2024 and killing 200 people would not be uniquely evil or brutal either. But I expect that outcry would be massive and far larger than what is triggered by far worse things in Africa. Mostly due to higher expectations.

Their goal was to make Germany strong and big.

I feel like not enough focus is put on what a horrible plan the Nazis actually had and how extremely unlikely they were to actually win WWII. (and this is discounting the trinity test which reduced the odds of a long-term nazi victory to zero)

Any world war by definition entails a European war on more than one front, which the Germans were never going to win and they knew it, never prepared for it because they didn't think it'd either be necessary or even feasible, and didn't think the war they started was going to escalate into another world war. In that sense, you're correct, Germany was never going to win a world war. That, however, also applies to any other great power, or even any alliance of two great powers as well at the time.

Regarding the atom bomb, I think it's worthwhile to point out that 1) the atomic bombings were carried out in a war situation with practically non-existent enemy air defenses, which was not going to be the case in your hypothetical scenario 2) Germany had an extensive program as well to develop and stockpile weapons of mass destruction, namely nerve gas agents and other chemical weapons, which entails second strike capability 3) I wouldn't be so sure to declare that they were never going to develop a functioning atom bomb.

not only there (or in fiction broadly defined) - glorious victory is always more glorious if enemy was strong and you can explain more excesses if enemy is stronger

Imo they get played up in fiction because it's more exciting if the good guys might lose, so people get the impression that it was an evenly matched fight even though it wasn't.

The only good think I could think of to say about the Nazi's plan is that it was less insane than imperial Japan's plan.

Can somebody explain to me in simple, preferably monosyllabic words: what does the expression One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens mean?

An example of this kind of misunderstanding happening is Robin Hanson on sexual redistribution. Hanson compares arguments for redistribution of sexual status & redistribution of wealth but notes the same people rarely are for both policies.

Libby Libertarian, a stout free-marketist, thinks Hanson is saying "sexual redistribution is bad."

Sally the Socialist, who lives in a commune, thinks Hanson is saying "sexual redistribution is good."

As other commenters have explained: A logical argument usually has two ways to take it.

I would reframe it thus; Libby the Libertarian makes the argument that income redistribution is morally equivalent to sexual redistribution. In both cases, the state is forcibly taking something from those who have it and giving it to people who claim to need it. Libby is making this argument because she is against income redistribution and is appealing to the shared intuition she thinks we all share that sexual redistribution is morally monstrous to convince us that income redistribution is evil as well. That if sexual redistribution is rape, then taxation is theft and welfare is slavery.

However, along comes Ike the Incel, who reads her argument, and agrees that income redistribution and sexual redistribution are isomorphic, but bites the other bullet. If it is morally justified for the government to take a bit from those who have more than enough to help the less fortunate when it comes to dollars, why is not morally justified to do the same when it comes to sex? The capitalist bourgeoisie would not have their wealth but that society provides them with free schooling and roads and property enforcement, so it is appropriate to ask them to chip in to keep society going. Likewise, women would not be able to stop men from having sex with them without police to stop rapes and food stamps to stop them from resorting to prostitution, so it is morally justified to ask them to give back by providing sex to the sexless and breeding the next generation. Hence, government mandated girlfriends.

At this point Ike has taken Libby's argument and reversed it from Modus Tollens into Modus Ponens.

Libby:

  1. If income redistribution is justified, sex redistribution is justified.
  2. Sex redistribution is not justified.
  3. Therefore, income redistribution is not justified.

Ike:

  1. If income redistribution is justified, sex redistribution is justified.
  2. Income redistribution is justified.
  3. Therefore, sexual redistribution is justified.

So that when Libby asks Ike if he is in okay with the government forcing women to have sex with men, given that he is okay with the government stealing from people and forcing them to work without pay, Ike puts on his most manly, chiseled face, and replies "YES".

I think you're right, and I guess that means, technically, one of Libby or Sally is making fallacy of the converse.

It is an easy mistake for me to make since Hanson's formulation appears to be symmetrical (biconditional statement)

If we have a phrase:

If A, then B.

From this, one can say, A, hence B.

But some might say not B, hence not A.

This says that, if you make a claim, some might choose not to go with the proof you meant, but choose to say that the first phrase must be false.

Now I will stop with the use of short words.

Okay, more clearly.

In general, when you have arguments, there are assumptions. You can make some argument, and reach the conclusion, and so claim that that the conclusion must be true, this being a form of modus ponens ("the putting way"). But people could instead think the conclusions are obviously false, and so conclude that a premise must have been wrong, which is modus tollens ("the overturning way"). This is pretty much always going to be possible in arguments.

It's a brief way to point out that arguments must be taken to their logical conclusion in order to be properly considered, and people who refuse to "bite the bullet" and address the full implications of the positions that they espouse are either stupid or lying. Below are some examples found with Google.

Example

Premise: All human life is equally valuable.

Observation: I can point to a human life that has approximately zero value.

Conclusion: Either all human life has approximately zero value, or all human life is not necessarily equally valuable. Anybody who tries to take a third position on this issue is either stupid or lying.

Example

Premise: Permanently damaging a healthy human body in order to alleviate a mental condition is bad.

Observation: Sex-change/gender-affirmation surgery involves permanently damaging a healthy human body in order to alleviate a mental condition.

Conclusion: Either sex-change surgery is bad, or pemanently damaging a healthy human body in order to alleviate a mental condition is not necessarily bad. Anybody who tries to take a third position on this issue is either stupid or lying.

The terms “modus ponens” and “modus tollens” come from formal logic. They tell you how to deduce conclusions from statements.

Modus ponens says that if you know that A is true, and that B is true whenever A is true, then you can deduce that B is true. For instance: “If someone is a hunan, then he is mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore, he is mortal.”

Conversely, modus tollens says that if you know that B is true whenever A is true, and you know that B is not true, then A is not true. “If someone is a human, then he is mortal. Zeus is immortal. Therefore, Zeus is not a human.”

The full expression extends these terms to the realm of politics and morality. For a naive culture war adjacent example: “Christianity says that gay sex is bad. Christianity is good. Therefore, gay sex is bad.” This is a sort of moral equivalent to modus ponens as described above. But, if you support gay rights, then you can do this in reverse: “Christianity says that gay sex is bad. Gay sex is good. Therefore, Christianity is bad.” This id the equivalent of modus tollens.

The expression thus can be viewed as saying “if you support a consequence because a preexisting belief of yours says that it’s good, then someone else could just as easily reject that consequence and say that your preexisting belief is bad.”

Let's say you have a statement:

If A, then B.

There are two syllogisms that can be derived from this statement, one of which is referred to as Modus Ponens and the other of which is Modus Tollens.

Modus Ponens:

  1. If A, then B
  2. A
  3. Therefore, B

Modus Tollens:

  1. If A, then B
  2. Not B
  3. Therefore, not A

Where the statement / joke comes in is when you start making an actual argument where the two people agree on the conditional, but one is arguing that A is true and the other is arguing that B is false. Let's say something like:

If morality is objective, there is a God.

The first person takes the objectivity of morality as proof that God exists, but the second person takes the non-existence of God as proof that morality can't be objective. Despite both parties accepting the conditional, they still believe different things.

Thanks, I think that's the best explanation of the three, if I understood it right. A mutually agreeable statement if A, then B can mean that either B is true, or A is false, depending on your other beliefs, right?

Right, so the expression comes from that fact -- the mutually agreed upon statement points in two directions. One person can say "Aha, so we know that B is true." and the other person can say "Aha, so we know that A is false."

I just made a connection after somebody linked here in the main thread. At least in some cases, this is actually just yes_chad.jpg in high register!

So, what are you reading?

I’m reading Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated, an old book positing that the man from Stratford didn’t write the plays, without suggesting a candidate of its own. It is remarkable how little the conversation has changed. Skeptics are still being called crazy reactionary snobs, and orthodox scholars are still being told that they’re appealing to authority, inertia and speculation.

Also going through Clifford’s The Ethics of Belief and James’ The Will to Believe, both short works. So far Clifford’s essay, which posits that one has a moral duty to base his beliefs on verified evidence (or something like that), is beautiful in its initial purity but gets a little confused when it has to make a framework for ethically believing in what others (like experts) say. Well worth reading in light of squabbles over conspiracy theorists.

Finished Clavell's Gai-Jin. It was fine, enjoyable even, but 1200 pages is a lot.

Will pick up and finish The Asian Saga at some point but ready for a change after doing two in a row.

Just started A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity by Michael A. Cook. Liked his Ancient Religions, Modern Politics (an attempt to compare Islam and its impact on politics to other Third World religions) so figured I'd give it a spin. At least, the sections about the emergence of Islam. I care much less about the six hundred pages after that.

Still in the early pre-Islamic period, and nothing is much of a surprise/deviation from the general story of the period as I know it. Interested to see how revisionist he gets, given his association with Crone and that whole school.

Been reading short stories by Kafka. I reread The Metamorphosis for the first time since high school and was struck by how sad it was. I like Kafka; his stories are so bizarre and his characters thought processes so strange, it is like stepping inside the brain of an alien life form.

I finished House To House. Not much more to say about it than what I said last week. The remainder of the book is mostly minute-to-minute gory detail of SSG Bellavia's mostly single-handed fight to retake a particular house in a tricky location from some well-dug-in insurgents. Exciting and engaging stuff for sure. but not a ton of deep insight.

Started reading The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot. Non-fiction, apparently about how Allen Dulles and I guess associates formed a sort of secret government starting in the 60s or so I guess. I suppose I'll see how good it ends up being.

I agree on House to House. It was the first military biography I listened to but tbh not that good. Also it was weird how he went on about "We are America's warrior class"- not a perspective most veterans actually have these days. Especially since it doesn't mesh well with the existence of very numerous support military jobs like logistics and communications that are absolutely crucial for military success but aren't that warrior-y.

You might find the Violent Class post here interesting - it's a good write-up of the "Warrior Class" perspective. I've seen the point in a few other places that, even within the military, the percent of people who actually do violence is pretty small and sometimes seems like a completely different world.

Nothing, but I have Donald Kagan's The Peloponnesian War next up, and right there beside my bed. Anybody read it?

What has been the academic progress on utilitarians in the past five years? What are the hot button contentions?

Do you have any interesting/unusual heuristics to share?

I'm sure this isn't original, but I think I derived it independently--the social status of pedestrians in the outdoors public is inverse to the amount of possessions they carry with them. Someone dragging a luggage is homeless while a backpack means low income. Highly contextual with lots of exceptions of course, but if you're walking/jogging on a trail in an affluent area, chances are people not carrying anything are less a threat than people lugging large bags and backpacks.

  • Men with signs of financial stress/low status can(and usually will) be very helpful with car trouble.
  • African Americans are usually pretty nice if they feel they’re being treated well. African Africans usually take politeness as an indication they can get a better deal by screaming and being pushy.
  • A poor, white woman approaching you in public is asking for money with nothing to offer in return. Anyone else, on the other hand, has something to sell, probably for much more than it’s worth.
  • Opera music playing in public is a sign of a seriously bad neighborhood. The merely poor neighborhoods play mass-market music appropriate for whatever ethnic group happens to live there.
  • A heterosexual man who seems to enjoy showing skin is younger, sometimes much younger, than he appears; full grown men dress more conservatively.

Opera music playing in public

Do you mean a subsidised performance in the park or something like that?

The only time I can recall hearing opera music in the public sphere was hearing Nessun Dorma for the football and World In Union for the rugby, or hearing O Sole Mio blasting from ice cream vans since time immemorial.

No, I mean like ‘businesses playing opera instead of top 40’.

Opera music is the sign of a bad neighborhood? How does that even work? Did all the thugs decide to copycat Alexander Delarge?

The theory is that undesirables don't enjoy listening to it, so it's a cheap way to "move them on" without having security or police actually have to interact with them and risk a confrontation.

At work if someone seems to enjoy meetings too much I just assume they aren’t good at what they are actually supposed to be doing.

If a pretty girl is claiming to be lesbian/bi it’s just a phase. For an ugly girl it might actually be permanent.

Anyone saying something genuinely interesting and smart on the internet is very very likely Jewish.

I find it's easy to clock from the state of the luggage/person. Clean luggage: going to/from airport/hotel/etc. Dirty luggage: hobo. Dirty luggage but looks young and healthy: backpacker/festival/punk type.

If you meet a famous / powerful person (even if they are context-dependent famous) and they are kind of dumb-bubbly in personality (think "human golden retriever) they are probably incredibly smart in either IQ or EQ.

If you meet a famous / powerful person (even if they are context-dependent famous) and they are tight-lipped, only say the minimum, and seem sort of distant they are probably incredibly smart in either IQ or EQ but feel an tremendous amount of imposter syndrome

If you meet a famous / powerful person (even if they are context-dependent famous) and they talk like their context's version of Elon Musk or a podcast bro - they're a charlatan who has mostly gotten to where they are on political maneuvering and deception ..... or you are literally talking to elon musk.

If you have a bachelor’s in computer science degree outside the US and a master’s (but no more) from an American university then you will be the worst programmer I talk to this week.

Your observation is preempted (kind of) by Frank Herbert, when Miles Teg is tortured by the returners from the Scattering, he notices that the man in charge must be high status because of how impractically tiny his briefcase is.

Face tattoos signify a rather fundamental disengagement with the norms of greater society such that I can't imagine becoming great buddies with anyone who has one. This is true to a lesser degree of full sleeves, etc. This is true in or out of Japan.

Sensible shoes or sneakers worn with business attire on commutes suggests a comfort in the wearer with his/her social standing. (Dress shoes on the same commute could suggest the opposite but context is relevant).

Anyone 24 or younger on my early morning commute is going home, not to school or work (unless of course they are in athletic gear in which case it's off to sports practice before school). Exceptions include regulars, or people with large roller bags (small roller bags could still be going home.)

Within Japan, expatriate women from North America (US and Canada) or Europe are either: 1) Divorced 2) married to or the consort of a Japanese man. 1) Will be politically progressive 2) will be neutral, disinterested, or conservative

Women with crewcuts are lesbian.

Guys with little hair but big bushy, Zeus-like beards will eventually annoy the shit out of me.

The likelihood that females with long, really done-up fingernails working at afternoon retail fashion outlets in Umeda are also moonlighting as call girls is non trivial.

The bigger and more expansive the menu the more likely the food is mediocre but probably not terrible. (Depending on your definition of terrible.)

The allure of the smell of ramen shops is inversely related to the hour of day-- meaning in early morning the smell is revolting. Late night, enticing.

The degree to which an American male tends to adhere to modern fashion trends is a reasonable predictor of how politically left he leans.

If I close my eyes before being introduced to your American female cousin visiting Japan, I will predict that she: 1) looks older than her age 2) is overweight by 20 or more pounds 3) leans politically left 4) eats more than I at lunch and dinner.

People who keep their calendars updated and full are higher achievers than those who don't. Not always true of artist types.

Creative, artistic people are creatively artistic in multiple ways.

Guys with houses that are like pig pens do not get laid. Unless they are extremely rich.

The chance that the Rolex watch on the dude riding the train is fake is at least 50%. The Omega is probably real.

New acquaintances who are overly friendly want something from me.

Women who are obsessed with and routinely post on social media about the plight of animals do not themselves have children.

Criticizing a woman directly about anything is a mistake that will not produce favorable results.

Face tattoos signify a rather fundamental disengagement with the norms of greater society such that I can't imagine becoming great buddies with anyone who has one. This is true to a lesser degree of full sleeves, etc. This is true in or out of Japan.

I know two perfectly respectable doctors with full sleeve tats, one working in the ER and the other as a surgeon. I'd say maybe 30% of the doctors I know (+- 5 years older or younger than me) have some tattoos on them (at least visible to me) including yours truly, though mine isn't really on display until the shirt comes off.

Then again, I'm lacking the inclination to ink up all of my skin, and as an eventual psychiatrist, I'm expected to be the model of sobriety and decorum, though no doubt going for a more outré aesthetic probably appeals greatly to some of the regulars.

Interesting. I hate tats but it's a personal thing and I hesitate to make grand generalizations. Or, I don't hesitate, I make them, but I realize that's what they are.

Let me guess: Caduceus?

Gross stereotyping and oversimplification time:

Historically in the U.S. each specialty has had somewhat of a character (less so now with the way social justice has infected and homogenized the pipeline. Surgeons are conservative and would never get a tattoo. Lots of psychiatrists have them but only in places where they could be covered in hidden from patients. Pediatrics would have typical girl tattoos. Orthos are bros, and therefore never have tattoos, but ED docs are a very different kind of bro (outdoorsy, Colorado types) and often have tattoos up to and including full sleeves.

If you're interested in making generalizations then you might actually be reassured by an ED doc with visible tats because it means they are conforming to the stereotypes and norms of their speciality and therefore have a higher chance of being a good doctor lol.

Interesting! Thanks for the insight.

Nope. Though I suppose that is a justified stereotype, given that I was/am seriously considering getting a tat that has one in it. Though I've ended up leaning a different way again, I'm not one to get a tattoo done unless it speaks to me, and I'm confident I want it for life (being dark skinned makes laser tattoo removal a no-go).

For what it's worth, I don't know any doctors with Caduceus tats, though to be fair we ought to be using the Staff of Asclepius instead. Then again, that war for the public consciousness was lost a while back.

Gonna leave it a mystery are we? I can keep guessing....

I've already irrevocably sprinkled hundreds of tidbits of personally identifiable information on the internet, forgive me for not putting something that could literally be used for picking me out of a crowd there too haha.

But if you can get it in 3 guesses without cheating by being exceedingly vague, I'll reward your efforts by DMing you the answer ;)

Within Japan, expatriate women from North America (US and Canada) or Europe are either: 1) Divorced 2) married to or the consort of a Japanese man. 1) Will be politically progressive 2) will be neutral, disinterested, or conservative

I have honestly been puzzled by every white woman I've met in Japan. They all seem a bit resentful; my cynical and uncharitable opinion is that they're experiencing for the first time what it's like to not be constantly pursued and indulged. The ones married to Japanese dudes also seemed a bit odd and not very satisfied, although I admit my sample size there is <5 so that might not be a fair generalization.

Guys with little hair but big bushy, Zeus-like beards will eventually annoy the shit out of me.

Overweight dudes with those bushy beards just ooze insecurity and usually act like they've got something to prove. Beards in general mark people as tryhard. Not all beards are bad though, I met a dude in his 50s who was small in stature but very lean. He had a medium length salt and pepper beard that made him look like some sort of frontiersman chad. I guess it works if you'd be equally confident clean shaven and don't seem like you're hiding behind the beard.

The allure of the smell of ramen shops is inversely related to the hour of day-- meaning in early morning the smell is revolting. Late night, enticing.

This goes for any restaurant that does agemono, too. Nightlife districts are putrid during the day. Reminds me of morning on Bourbon street, yuck.

I guess it works if you'd be equally confident clean shaven and don't seem like you're hiding behind the beard.

"Confidence is key" and all that ... but there's so much truth to cultivating a style that works with whatever your natural strengths are. I'm not referring here to natural cosmetic / physical attributes. Let me explain.

I've got a buddy who, from the neck up, is Brad Pitt with a beard but, unfortunately, spider wrinkles and smile lines all over his face. Too much sun for too long. He's mid 40s but, unfortunately, looks noticeably older than that. But He also rocks a full sleeve of tattoos and wears flatbrim ballcaps and hoodies with associated "loud" sneakers. You'd think he's some sort of Cali skater bro ... because he fucking is. He's actually "that guy" who had to grow up and get a corporate job (M&A lawyer) but never actually left his authentic teens-20s self behind. He collects boards and knows all of the esoteric band lore of 80s and 90s punk / ska coming out of SoCal.

He has to fend off the ladies (often 15 years + his junior) like they're swarming the Beatles.

Another friend is mid 30s and bald (not by choice). He leans into it and shaves his head now, but wears a very neatly trimmed red beard. You wouldn't call it bushy at all, and it some how highlights his excellent jawline rather than hiding it. I'm not entirely show how that works. He dresses more formal than is called for for every occasion, but doesn't over do it. (We got lunch over the weekend and I rolled in to the BBQ joint wearing jeans and tee shirt, he had pressed khakis, a tucked oxford shirt, leather loafers). He likes to dress nice, it's kind of his thing. A hobby, a sincere passion. He is aloof and was probably going on 30 since he was 12. He collects and trades rare books. He'll actually read minutes from Fed meetings. The result? He gives off Professor-X Daddy Vibes and does even better than my Skater Boi.

The stereotypical heavyset dude with a homeless man beard often also apes cartoonish relevance to masculinity. "I oil my beard with the blood of dragons" Or something equally cringeworthy. He might get into long winded discussions about the history of specific weapons in LOTR or star wars. They might have an ostentatious pocket knife or .... wallet chain. The point is that they're trying to lean into something that is inauthentic and they're doing it way too hard. This isn't good. Better to reflect your genuine personality - I had another buddy who was exactly this but was just a jolly "I really like drinking beer" dude. Knew a ton about IPAs. Didn't beat you over the head with it but would talk about it appropriately if it came up in the conversation. Now, I can't say he was doing quite as well as my other two buddies (so many buddies!) but he landed a long term girlfriend that was, frankly, out of his league. And I was very happy to see that.

A lot of guys fail in developing style because they try to "dress correctly." There's no right or wrong with style independent of the person who is styling it. I think this even applies to celebrities. Johnny Depp can ransack the nearest homeless encampment and stumble down the red carpet to applause, but George Clooney has been suit 'n loafers for like 20 years now.

Similarly, there's no way to fake a personality. You can rapid fire references to memes all you want, but if you have nothing authentic to say, you're going to lose to the dude who can somehow make The Beige Book interesting. Because he thinks it's actually interesting.

Men's style is still far, far easier than women's because that's a whole other level of complexity (make up, accessories, jewelry, fucking shoes on shoes on shoes) plus the meta-game of following trends or purposefully not following trends as a meta-trend in itself. That shit is literally Martian Hieroglyphics to me.

Criticizing a woman directly about anything is a mistake that will not produce favorable results.

This is so true it hurts. Depends on the woman of course - my wife can take some criticism, but my mom can take none whatsoever. Still, even with my wife I hold back because I need to consider whether I really need to use my limited quota of criticism on this topic.

I have been truly shocked by how sensitive some women are. I made one cry once by suggesting (I thought very politely) an alternative to a plan she was forcing on everyone without consulting them.

I got "You criticize me so little it makes me think you don't care." I'm still going to keep it as near 0 as possible. Similar to, "It's really annoying how you and your friends talk about things and just assume others understand." Yeah... not going the other way on that one either.

Within Japan, expatriate women from North America (US and Canada) or Europe are either: 1) Divorced 2) married to or the consort of a Japanese man. 1) Will be politically progressive 2) will be neutral, disinterested, or conservative

In my experience, the vast majority of North American expatriate men in Japan are also progressive, especially the ALT crowd. Which is hardly surprising since they are almost uniformly liberal arts college grads fresh out of school.

I would agree that that is also my experience. It's hard to tell though. There's no secret handshake as far as I know that says "I am not a progressive" but I do know people will withhold.

There's no secret handshake as far as I know that says "I am not a progressive"

  • Drink mountain dew in public. Loudly.
  • Camo. Camo is the ancient pattern of my people
  • Be named "Kyle"

The allure of the smell of ramen shops is inversely related to the hour of day-- meaning in early morning the smell is revolting. Late night, enticing.

Is this an observation of your internal state or how the smells change during the cycle? (They boil bones for the broth for around half of the day, don't they?)

I think @George_E_Hale is right that they've cleaned or dumped stuff because in the morning they sometimes smell more like a dumpster than a ramen shop.

I’ve noticed this effect with coffee. I love the smell of coffee in the morning, but I hate it in the evening. It could be because I associate the smell of coffee in the evening with some hellish all nighters I’ve pulled.

Coffee smells lovely all the time. It's its taste that is comparable to the worst kinds of medicine. Which is weird, because the cooking nerds convinced me that most of the food flavor comes from the smell.

I felt this way around 20 years old and younger. Coffee smelled great, but tasted unbearably bad.

Now I think coffee tastes great also. Black only please. It is sickly sweet and gross if a bit of sugar is added.

Keep trying coffee and I think your taste will change until it is the best flavor you'll have all day.

I don't take long to acquire tastes, I took to wine and whisky immediately, there's no chance I'm going to ever like coffee without drowning it in additives to an unrecognizable point. Especially cold brew, vile stuff. But so damn effective, I'm literally shaking after a can.

Some of us like the taste of coffee.

Yeah I have no idea what that's about. Similarly, I bought some tea recently which smells divine. It's one of the best things I've ever smelled. Unfortunately, it tastes just as bad as every other tea I've ever had.

Sure it's not an issue with brewing? I used to hate the bitter taste of green tea until realizing I'd been steeping it 30 degrees too hot my whole life. Literally just screwed up every cup I ever drank.

I can't say no categorically, but I don't think so. The tea said to steep at 200 degrees, and my water can't have been that much above 200 (I'm at 5000 ft elevation so it's not like it gets to 212 to begin with). Maybe it was 205 instead of 200, but I have a hard time imagining the margin of error is that tight.

Hard to say. I'm certainly typically more sober earlier in the day. Also there must be some rancid oil or something in the early morning that maybe is taken out or otherwise disposed of in the evening. I don't think I'm alone in thinking the smell can be quite strong, but it may be that the smell is also quite different at these differing times.


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