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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3920 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 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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Layoffs slowed down in tech I think.

It was really bad in 2023, not so bad now. But all of that is relative to the insane market of 2021.

It’s slowly picking up but is overall fairly healthy relative to other engineering industries. Even the 2023 market was probably way better than the market for industrial or chemical engineers has maybe ever been?

Younger people in tech definitely have it worse, no doubt about that. Even if demand had stayed static there are just way more people studying computer science now so the competition is insane. At the Big-ish Tech company I work at, internships only go to both the best and brightest students from the best colleges but also those with referrals. If you don’t have a referral you’re toast.

Seems very field-dependant. Finance is seeing slow recruitment and some layoffs, but 2018 was worse and 2007-2010 was in a different dimension entirely, and there are still places hiring aggressively. I would put it this way, in 2008 a lot of people spent a year or two looking for a job and then left the industry entirely, like retrained as lawyers or chefs or went into (non-finance) sales or opened a small business or became accountants or did coding bootcamps or became high school teachers or whatever. There were no jobs at all. Maybe it’s like that in tech, but you don’t see many experienced engineers leaving tech entirely for now I think.

Are introductions a thing here? Should I just start poasting? I've lurked for some time, but decided to start commenting. There have been some posts recently (and in this thread) about a slow decline in the users here, and I feel compelled to state "it's not all bad" for the record.

I have a younger sister who is, I suspect, considering a conversion to the religion of trans, and I'm wondering if anyone else here has some experience with a family member doing so, and if you have any thoughts on such. I'm usually pretty reserved, and to be honest, I'm pretty chill with people who disagree with me about a great variety of things. My current plan is to try to avoid any major disagreements of faith and the associated language, but I'm pretty uncomfortable with lying directly if asked.

I have a cousin who is pretty far down a FtM transition and I regularly feel uneasy over not having made at least a token effort to... I dunno, present alternative solutions to their unhappiness? This is of course predicated on my bias towards assuming a high probability that transitioning will be regretted at some later point in life. And I really don't know if I could have had that discussion without causing massive family drama.

Best of luck to you and your sister!

Intros? Haven't seen many of 'em, but you're welcome to. Post away by all means!

FWIW, I've tended to think we're probably doing fine just as we are actually and not to sweat too much over periodic variability of CWR comment count. I think it's probably a good thing that even our more real-world famous posters don't advertise the site much, as it would probably draw in a lot of low-quality posters who break the rules, make more work for the mods, make the experience worse for current posters, etc. I think people who make good-quality posters are more likely to find us on their own. How did you end up here?

I think Motte-style debating is usually a good template, or good practice, for discussing such topics as trans-ness as a new religion with potential adherents who are otherwise close to you. Avoid sneering and weak-manning, but point out real risks and challenges. Like to what extent is the excessive enthusiasm about the topic encouraging young people to take more radical measures that they're not really ready for, some of which will have life-long consequences.

My current plan is to try to avoid any major disagreements of faith and the associated language, but I'm pretty uncomfortable with lying directly if asked.

I do not have any direct experience with this sort of thing. But based on what you said here, I think it's likely that there will be a time you can't both be agreeable, and avoid saying something that you think is a lie. You don't need to decide now what the answer will be (and in fact I would say you shouldn't), but it does deserve some thought. If it comes down to it, which do you think is more important - getting along with your sister, or the truth? Just something to ponder in the back of your mind.

I don't know that I ever introduced myself, but you are certainly free to, if you wish. It's always good to see new users.

How old is your sister, roughly, if she's transitioning?

Mid 20's, lives on the other side of the country. I'm not sure when she plans to 'come out' to the family (or if, honestly - though it might become obvious depending on how far she goes physically).

Might the emphasis that certain cultures place on family and clan commitment inadvertently cause selfish / sociopathic genes to flourish? If you have children with varying levels of sociopathy, then the most sociopathic of kin would benefit from the activity of the least sociopathic of kin, as they are both morally incentivized to benefit the family or clan as a whole, but the sociopathic one is a free-rider. If instead you have a culture without family or clan commitment, and instead relative free association, then the most-empathic / least-sociopathic progeny can form mutually beneficial “societies-in-miniature” with those from other families and clans, provided they have some method of weeding out free-riders and the hidden sociopathic. I think we could imagine such a shift happening when religious communities colonized North America. If this phenomenon is legitimate then it would weed out the sociopathic across generations.

People really, really like the idea of group selection but from an evolutionary perspective, it just doesn't seem to work out. People have tried it to model it, but it always ends up collapsing. The problem is precisely the "weeding out free-riders and the hidden sociopathic". Kin-selection does so automatically, since if you're cooperative, your relatives tend to be as well and if not vice versa. Furthermore, clan structures can and do weed out free-riders directly as well.

Btw, this does not mean that free association and broad cooperation is impossible long-term; It just means that you need to structure it in a reciprocal way so that everyone benefits.

I assume group selection works on bees and such? Are there any other society structures where it works? I was wondering if genocides could be such a selection mechanism, but it would have to be one's that do not involve taking all the women.

No, worker bees are sterile and afaik share half the genome of the queen, so serving the queen is in their direct "genetic interest". This is classic kin selection.

Is sterile the right word for something that can't reproduce sexually, but can still give birth? They start laying unfertilized drone eggs all over the place if there's no queen scent.

As you say, supporting the queen maximizes a worker's individual reproductive fitness, until there is no queen. Then it's every bee for herself.

Huh, you're clearly more knowledgeable about bees than I am. The queen suppressing the workers' reproduction with scent reminds of an argument I've heard; That, while the gay uncle hypothesis doesn't make evolutionary sense for the gay uncle himself, it does make sense for his siblings. Meaning, effectively castrating your brother so that he has to invest into your offspring is a viable strategy. It wasn't a very popular argument, however.

Nah, it's the opposite. Psychopaths can only thrive if they can meet new people to victimize. A close-knit community that stays together for a long time is the best defense against psychopaths.

The problem with genes that increase sociopathy is that if you've got one, your relatives more likely has it too. If you have a gene that causes you to steal resources from your sibling in a significantly negative-sum way, then that gene will on average reduce your own fitness too.

In any case this would only apply if children with more resources go on to have more children than those with less resources. That was probably true back when America was colonized, but not so much today.

Is anyone betting on the election? I'd like to put a pile of money on Biden, but the odds are so even that I'm worried exchange fees would make leaving it in a money market fund a better investment.
Can anyone who's done this before give me a rough idea of costs, especially hidden or opportunity ones a beginner might miss?

I hope you waited.

Oh yeah, much better odds now. Still convinced it's a good call

Why?

Look how smoothly they reinstated the narrative after that disaster. It's been a day and it may as well never have happened, complete memory-holing. Just go to /r/politics and it's wall to wall "undecideds now support Biden after debate!"

Dems control everything in this country. All we can do is point out the spreading cracks as fast as they paper over them.

Are we going to win against a political machine that collects as many mail-in ballots as they need to win any election?

May as well make a bit of money off the spectacle at least.

I don't think there's mail ballot fraud at the scale needed. Do you have any reason to think so?

Ballot harvesting isn't even "fraud", any more than busing people to the polling center with a list of people to vote for and then taking them to a free concert. It's just a lot more efficient.

It's how the whole system works in WA now.

Ah, that makes sense, I'd misunderstood.

Well, be sure you don't take Washington as the national baseline. Trump's up in all the swing states, though by an admittelly small margin in several.

Biden certainly has a chance, though.

I honestly hope betting on these kinds of things never becomes normalized. Seriously, the amount of radio commentary that revolves around betting and fantasy teams makes me wonder if anyone watches sports purely for pleasure anymore. The last thing we need is for our political ecosystem to devolve to the same level of discourse.

To actually answer your question, only bet if you think the odds the bookie gives you are wrong. If the odds are even and you think the election is a toss up then don't bet. If you think Biden will win in a landslide then put a few dollars down. If you're rooting for Trump and you're hoping that a financial stake in a Biden victory will make you feel better if he wins, keep in mind that never works.

Why doesn't that work?

Because you're still going to be pissed about whatever you lost either way. The amount of money you might win due to a Biden victory probably isn't going to be life changing, and if it is, then you're going to be rooting for Biden anyway and not caring too much about the politics. It's like betting against your favorite sports team.

Will certainly be a fun ride to watch the action.

There's been a lot of speculation that Biden will be "hot-swapped" after he malfunctions during the debate. So even if, based on your posting history, you think the Democrats will rig the election, a Biden bet might not be a sure thing.

Personally, I'd bet on Trump.

Yeah, I should have said "bet on dem victory" rather than Biden specifically, but that pushes the odds they're giving even further towards no-profit coinflip

Can anyone explain to me what this image is supposed to be about?

The flag in question represents the bear culture among gay men, which prizes fatness as a sexual feature. Presumably, the widespread adoption of Ozempic would mean less bears, which is not the preference of the maker of this meme.

Is it about fatness? I was under the impression that bears were about being masculine (in contrast to the stereotype of gay effeminacy), in particular by valuing beards and such.

Suddenly my twitter is full with left wing/ pro biden accounts in force? Has anyone noticed something similar? Their campaign suddenly got active or the algorithm confused me with undecided?

The SCOTUS just ruled on the Missouri v Biden case about the government interfering with social media. The SCOTUS wussed out and declared no standing. Twitter / X probably realized it was going to go the government's way when no opinion was released last week.

So we're back to the government juicing "appropriate" narratives.

Just the general twitter algorithm being crappy I'd guess. I recently made the mistake of liking/interacting with a math puzzle tweet, and now I get tons of these retarded "99% can't solve this: 100/5(4-2)" engagement bait questions.

The exact same thing happened to me, but a few "Not interested in this post" clicks fixed it soon afterward. It still don't know how clicking "like" on some topology theorems could convince the algorithm that I really wanted to witness order-of-operations-confusion train wrecks too, but at least it was temporary.

And, whoa - did I manage to do the same on Facebook??? Last time I was on there I finally snapped, and instead of clicking "Block" on only the first "Suggested For You" slop before exiting, I went down my timeline and blocked AI image purveyors one after another after another. And now that I reconnect, to get a count of how much of their feed is algorithmic garbage as a negative contrast to Twitter, the count is 0%? Today there's literally nothing there but posts from friends and (not too many or too stupid, even!) sponsored ads. I'm not even seeing anything from the less repulsive sorts of "Suggested For You" that I hadn't blocked. Did Facebook happen to change their algorithm right as I got most fed up with it? Is their algorithm too dumb to guess that I won't want to play "find all the physically impossible or architecturally stupid details" in 20 AI log cabin pictures in a row, but not too dumb to realize when they pushed me over the edge? Could I have fixed this long ago if I'd just been more exhaustive about it earlier?

Probably close to a year ago, I noticed that Facebook has become better at serving me content I enjoy than it has been at any time since around 2010. The algorithm still isn’t perfect, but it’s gotten remarkably good.

My wife and I are looking to start having children shortly. As you might imagine being dual-income professionals, we left it to somewhat later in life (32 for me, 30 for her). I was diagnosed as a child with Asperger's Syndrome (now high-functioning or Level 3 autism, I believe), and her brother is severely disabled with low-functioning autism (she also has a lot of the classical traits, but was never diagnosed).

I've been scouring the internet for the last few hours but haven't found anything useful in terms of research - is there anything out there talking about the chance of having low-functioning autistic kids if you're high-functioning yourself?

We're tossing up going down the IVF route, maybe taking a trip to Greece and getting female embryos implanted to avoid the worse outcome, but it's difficult to make that call without knowing the odds.

If you're going the IVF route seriously consider getting your embryos screened for autism via Orchid genomics. It costs about $1200 per embryo but can easily save you hundreds of thousands in money and emotional worry from having to deal with an autistic child for life.

No links to Orchid, they're just the only ones I know who do polygenic screening for tism at the moment.

They do now? Nice, didn't know that.

Unfortunately "low functioning" has become a bit of a no-no term, everyone is either "high functioning" or just has autism (which still includes plenty of "medium functioning"). There's a few newish papers using the term, but most are older, and none are about what we are interested in.

But as usual in science, you can read between the lines. Generally speaking, autism is nowadays considered a continuous range of impairment, literally called ASD (autism spectrum disorder). One of the more popular ways to measure it is the social responsiveness score (SRS), which is then transformed into the SRS T-score (corrected for age, gender etc. similar to how IQ isn't just a raw test score but normed to 100). The T-score is normed to 50 with an SD of 10, so 60- is normal, 60+ mild, 65+ medium, 75+ severe. There's also quite a few other measures, but understanding at least one makes reading the papers a lot easier.

I'd say the closest to what you want to know is the heritability of these quantitative traits (1,2). TL;DR: the SRS T-score is moderately to highly heritable, in fact most measures of ASD severity are. In particular, I'm a big fan of monozygotic vs dizygotic twin comparisons since they sidestep many of the usual complaints, which in this case leads to a high heritability estimate of ~56-95%. There's a few other concepts you can take a look at, such as familial risk (which often don't include a measure of severity, only an ASD yes/no which is imo outdated at this point) or autism prs scores, but the results are mostly consistent between them.

So, in short, your children will most likely have an autism level similar to your own, with maybe a slight correction towards the mean and with a significant variance. Which necessarily implies a substantially increased chance of severe outcomes given the continuous nature of the disease. Exact numbers are difficult to give without knowing more, sorry. But chances of 10% and upwards, depending on where you make the cutoff of what you consider sufficiently problematic, aren't implausible.

On a sidenote, my favorite approach is measuring the degree of relatedness between siblings (for those that don't know, siblings, unlike parent-offspring pair which always get almost exactly 50% of each parent, can in theory range from 0-100% in genetic relatedness depending on which part of the parent's genome they get, though in practice it's a normal distribution around 50%) and then measuring the heritability based on that. Since this is doable for the majority of society, it further sidesteps some complaints about twin and/or adoption studies such as non-generalisability or different treatment between obviously different siblings.

I appreciate this greatly - I'm going off to do some more reading and we're going through the SRS together to try and figure out where we might sit and what that heritability might look like. Given the chances at play, $20-30k for a few rounds of IVF for gender selection doesn't seem very unreasonable at all, but I'll start drilling down into the numbers a little more.

As an aside - ultimately my concerns are more about nonverbal children requiring constant care. We make the sort of money that a child being mostly homebound or unable to work but mostly functional is within the risk we're willing to take, but we won't make that kind of money if we're suddenly in full-time caring roles.

What does gender selection have to do with it?

Autism is ~4x more prevalent in boys than in girls. This is true for a lot of genetic diseases due to the relative size of the X chromosome meaning girls can have one copy of a allele that causes issues and have it 'error-checked' so to speak by the other.

Activity does seem to be declining, with 750 comments on the last CWR. Any idea why? This is, at least to me, the only place online that has good generalist discussion other than the posts (not comments though) of some substacks.

Hard to find this place.

Some low level recruiting would be interesting.

I don't know what it is, but I'm finding the subjects people choose to talk about here increasingly boring, to the point where often a whole week goes by with nothing interesting being discussed.

The discussion has largely been had. It will likely pick up around the election, but the long term trend is decline.

I think it's just natural churn. Life gets in the way, and long time users will eventually fall away. I know I've been purposely trying to reduce my 'arguing on the internet' time.

On Reddit, this wasn't a problem because there was a constant source of new users. On here that's not the case.

I guess the future of the forum is to decline to nothing or go back to Reddit (and maybe get banned for wrongthink there in a few years).

Reddit feels very hollow these days too

I may be overgeneralizing my own experience, but IMHO it's at least in part because while many people came together to discuss their apparently irreconcilable differences over the last 10-15 years, ultimately they found that their differences were indeed irreconcilable, and left disappointed and/or righteously angry. Most Mottizens, and I'd argue truth-seeking netizens in general, are now very familiar with the basic shapes of both sides' arguments, and so when CW issue de jour #2567 pops up they can usually predict with some accuracy what each side will say. The conversation is therefore mostly no longer interesting. Battle lines have been drawn in the wider culture, and now we're all just waiting for (or actively working towards) one of the factions to emerge victorious.

ultimately they found that their differences were indeed irreconcilable, and left disappointed and/or righteously angry

I mean if someone asserts (insert your demographic) here should be marginalized and stripped of rights for the good of society(read to advance my political agenda) There isn't really to much of a practical point in responding to that in anyway other that "May thy knife chip & shatter"

Well, occasionally, arguments have been known to work, if you think they're wrong. If you agree that they are in that person's interests, though, there isn't all that much to be said.

Yes?

I was voicing my support for your opinion and offering what I thought was a practical example of something like that playing out. Sorry If I was being obtuse.

No worries, maybe I misread. All good.

Yes, we’ve been in the unceasing trench warfare phase of the culture war for at least a couple years now. I think COVID / George Floyd was the last straw for a critical mass of people and the whole thing just became absolutely calcified.

2012-2016 was a war of maneuver, 2017-2020 was a war of position, now it’s just an endless knife fight. I’m not complaining, as I consider myself a part time culture warrior. That’s just how it shook out, and those still interested in the culture war like myself find it more useful to just knife our opponents in between the ribs, rhetorically speaking of course.

I’ve never felt the culture war is more important than now, but it’s also more boring than ever.

Honestly the whole period felt like nerds who didn't quite get it saying "what exactly do you mean by declaring all of us Moral Mutants to be Exterminated by Progress?"

I still hope something more productive things can be discussed now that everyone's finally realized. There's lots to talk about beyond litigating Current Thing attack #6836865 as if there's any questions about intent.

Good example: that Guardian journalist we talked about last week who was posting "hanging Mussolini" threats at people. Nobody said "oh wow you'd better not do that, people might think you're advocating violence", they just posted dead Che Guevara and Rosa Luxembourg's rotting corpse back at him, suggesting he'd enjoy the bottom of a canal so much he'd never want to leave.

There's a bracing level of mask-off bloodthirsty hatred that wasn't there even in 2020. Feels like living in the first chapter of a William Luther Pierce novel.

From my perspective, the bloodthirsty hatred is well earned. I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time, I feel the siren song of a genuine FedPoasttm calling me.

I know a lot of digital ink has been spilled in this place accusing large amounts of people using civil war coded language as “LARPing”, or puffing their chest as keyboard warriors, but it seems to me something really has turned.

For me personally, I find myself relishing in the suffering of those who hold me and people like me in genuine disdain and act maliciously toward us. This is new, and it’s not just the product of some tweaked algorithm or exotic status game; I’ve never truly felt like this before, it feels true and I really gain nothing from it, in fact I’d be deeply penalized if I broadcast it widely.

Something interesting has happened in the few times I’ve expressed my genuine, undiluted desire for serious misfortune to befall members of the PMC that I blame for our current decadent state; at first, people are slightly alarmed. Then, utter relief that they aren’t crazy and someone else feels the same way as them.

rly makes u think

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, if you can express them without breaking the rules. I think you've identified a real thing shared by an increasingly large number of people. I think about the issue frequently, but am not sure I have a full post worth of thoughts.

I think you can use <sup></sup> to make the text suprescript. Like this: tm

Thanks, big dog.

Honestly the whole period felt like nerds who didn't quite get it saying "what exactly do you mean by declaring all of us Moral Mutants to be Exterminated by Progress?"

I don't think it's really accurate to analyze the Culture War as just "nerds and aspies who didn't get the memo". (At the very least, we can always ask, why this particular memo, with this particular content?)

I was around 20 when all this got started. That's really young! I was naive and I didn't know shit back then. (I still don't, but I hope that I've learned at least a few things since then). So I believed a lot of false/stupid things and I had to figure things out through trial and error.

People aren't born with an innate knowledge of history, politics, and philosophy. It has to be acquired - both on an individual level and a social collective level. Memes propagate through society and help people avoid the mistakes of the past. Social phenomena always happen for a reason - it's a mistake to think "well if people just did X Y Z then we could have avoided all that mess".

I don't think it's really accurate to analyze the Culture War as just "nerds and aspies who didn't get the memo.

There's something to it, but I agree ultimately it's a mischaracterization.

It's wrong because we didn't "not get the memo". Nerds and and aspies were the first to notice the changes in political discourse and culture. Normies were the ones insisting that nothing is happening, and if it is it's overblown, etc., etc. If anyone didn't get the memo, it was them, and all the old liberals getting canceled for not jumping on the train fast enough are proof of that.

It's correct in the sense that we obviously overanalyzed the whole phenomenon. Normies just assessed who is on which side, and stayed loyal to their tribe. We spent entire years debating if all this really means what we think it means, did we miss something, are we not being uncharitable, etc., etc., etc. With the end result being us just following in the steps of the normies, even though we realized first that something is changing.

You know, I'm no genius, but more and more I find that when I see a general culture war question I want to reply to, I end up linking back to or quoting a comment I made or someone else made years ago. My new posts tend to all be about books I've read or great movies I've watched recently.

Religious nonsense taking over. No one wants to post to a place that denies reality.

  • -25

This is a large component of why I've withdrawn from posting on a regular basis. Very boring and tiresome dynamic with Christians more and more spamming their respective sect's catechisms, constantly squeezing in extremely disrespectful shade towards atheists and secularists while advocating theocratic intrusion into government, then even mild atheist pushback or criticism of religion getting dogpiled and jannied. Cue an evaporative cooling effect. I encounter enough of that in daily life to be turned off by additional online exposure at the levels found here of late.

I tried checking your history to see what sorts of things you like to post about, and in what tone, but couldn't.

So, anyway, what sorts of things do you like to talk about?

No thanks, I keep private mode on to hinder profiling and dox attempts.

Well, if you won't explain or let me see examples, I have no way of knowing whether your own assessment is accurate in my view, or if the reaction is warranted or not. (Assuming things like that are what you like to talk about, which I did, because you describe it as a major factor.)

Of course, it doesn't really matter.

I'm fine with that. I spoke up to register that AhhTheFrench is not alone in his observations of increasing Christian preaching and having objections to that trend.

Fair enough.

Hey we agree on something! I think one should have their posting history open for assessment, we don't have much to go on during anonymous internet discussions, it is hard enough to know if someone is acting in good faith or worth responding to even with a post history. Without one, they can be as mercurial and changeable as they wish for good or (more often) ill.

Fwiw, posting history is always open to the mods. While I personally dislike it when people make their profiles private, I understand some people do have legitimate doxxing concerns. Also, it's really annoying when people do the reddit-style "I just searched your posting history and found you posted something months ago that I will now use as a stick to beat you with."

True, but you shouldn't have grown that stick off your branch if you were concerned about being beaten with it. (Has a more tortured metaphor ever been created?:)

My God™. Please, give the topic a rest.

The more you bang on this pulpit, the more you fall afoul of the rules on charity, consensus, and discussion. I know you think religion is wrong. Rumor has it some people disagree with you. We are not going to privilege your position just because you feel really, extra strong about it. I guarantee you: there are people who feel that strongly about things you think are even dumber.

So I beg you, kindly stop nailing your theses on every thread.

I’m a committed atheist, it’s incredibly obvious that this space is many times more secular than a typical space, especially on a global scale.

Although there does seem to be a bit of a teapot in a tempest purity spiral going on in the dissident right now about Vitalists vs Christians, although it has a whiff of fakery / enemy action to me.

It me.

I have ended the Culture War. The Roundup just hasn’t caught up yet. :)

/r/TheMotte or even the CWR thread in /r/ssc was a very lightning in a bottle thing. People can claim it was THAT attribute or THAT SET of attributes, but I don't think anyone really knows what they were. So by extension, I think it's also going to be pretty hard to dissect why themotte isn't being like it used to be.

I personally don't use the motte as much as I used to because:

  • I don't learn as much as I used to. If I have a burning cultural question in my head, more often than not, I can for the most part come up with an explanation that will be >90% complete of the aggregated motte response. I feel that I have outgrown the level of commentary here. And yes I do take more than I give, that's just how it be sometimes.
  • Overly US centric. CW discussions were for the most part more abstract back then. We discussed issues and ideas. Now we discuss the makeup and actions of the SCOTUS, BORING. Or some niche thing that happened in some irrelevant county in bumfuck flyover state. Like okay buddy, I'm sure you feel REALLY PASSIONATE about this one thing, but the world shut itself down for 3 years and we are still coming out of that, whatever this is, isn't even crossing the baseline level of crazy or unprecendented we are all accustomed to. So probably some information satiation/fatigue going on. I also DONT CARE, I have to either remmember this stupid event that happened in your stupid neighborhood or some stupid edge cases about some cursed yaml file at work, at least the second one makes me money.
  • I've also accepted the CW is a waste of time. I don't live in the US. And I am powerless against the stuff that leaks over anyways. Humans are stupid enough to shut down the world for 3 years straight, NO AMOUNT of modelling them is going to do me any good when the stupid simple model of "people be retarded" has so much explaining power for almost any and all CW issues.

I still find myself going back to hacker news and less wrong because there is new, useful and original content in both those places. I think the motte would benefit (ME) if there were more abstracted discussion on things as opposed to just what's happening.

Now we discuss the makeup and actions of the SCOTUS, BORING.

Sorry.

Evidently not boring to me, but fair enough, it makes sense that it is to those outside the United States, as well as to most in the country as well.

For what it’s worth, I find those discussions very interesting.

Now we discuss the makeup and actions of the SCOTUS, BORING

Maybe it's that we've (not just TheMotte - the ratsphere, the 'dissident right', the internet at large) have picked all of the intellectual low-hanging fruit, and only more specific, complicated things are left? I find SCOTUS discussion interesting and read all of it, though I don't have much to contribute.

That might also contribute to the feeling of wasted time - all the discourse happened, and what changed?

That might also contribute to the feeling of wasted time - all the discourse happened, and what changed?

Unsure about the direction of causality, but Elon Musk was two handshakes away, and he bought Twitter.

The people who participated or observed the proceeings have been thinking of different thoughts than they would've if the trousers of time had bifurcated differently and we'd gone down the right leg. Or perhaps this is the right left leg?

It’s not that it’s complicated, it’s just mostly irrelevant to people outside the USA. For better or worse, my country essentially banned guns fifty years ago, so the back and forth on the Second Amendment doesn’t really hold much interest.

Incidentally the reduction to legal battles is both the strong and weak point of constitutional government IMO: it sublimates important questions into legal ones. The important work of convincing people ‘guns are important weapons against tyranny’ vs ‘guns aren’t worth the extra murders’ has nothing to do with textual debates about what exactly an ‘arm’ can refer to.

Is there anything interesting happening out there in the world this week?

I probably wouldn't know, since I use this site for news.

The war in Ukraine drags on. The conflict in Gaza drags on. Pride month drags on. A few people were shot at Juneteenth celebrations, but not enough to invite a lot of attention. There are some marginal improvements in LLMs. The Supreme Court has ruled on some things, and some posters have done write ups for them. There were some blog posts put up as top level comments. They probably got more engagement than they would have on people's personal blogs, anyway. I vaguely remember some disgruntled writing about relationships.

Anyway, I'm not sure it's just the message board, so much as the actual world that's in a bit of a slump.

I probably wouldn't know, since I use this site for news.

Well that's certainly a news filter.

One of the things I use this site for is trying to find some balance to news that sounds really bad for the right when reported by mainstream/left-leaning sources. Very few such news items have gotten any discussion at all here in the past several months. Of course, I could write my own effortposts to try to get the discussion going and I don't, so this is partially my own fault.

What are some of the things you are thinking of? (No need to write at length, I'd give my thoughts on a short list.)

Hmm... I definitely remember thinking that multiple times, but I don't remember specifically about what. Some general categories:

  • Various bits of news from Trump's trials. There's been some discussion here, but not a lot.
  • Project 2025. Also has been mentioned here, but not taken seriously.
  • Aging-related gaffes. It seems like both sides think the other candidate is obviously senile and theirs is fine. I'm curious what the debate will look like, but it seems likely both sides will think the debate proved their candidate is great and the other is incompetent.

Honestly, I've hardly paid attention to all of those. My general perception of the trials was that the document one was real, but the others were mostly politically motivated, conviction notwithstanding.

I haven't looked at project 2025, really. I should. Any concerns you find particularly worrying? I know people are concerned about the one day dictator thing, but my read on that is that he's honest on that: he wants to do a lot on day one, not seize power.

I haven't seen the gaffes (except the shark vs. electrocution one, but that mostly just seemed like him rambling on with an idea that didn't make sense, not age issues). I'd guess that Trump is more competent than Biden, but that's purely vibes. I'm not a huge fan of 80-year-olds in the white house either way.

I'd be happy to be elucidated on any of these. I expect to vote Trump, but that's more just because I think Republicans will handle things better in office (student loans, affirmative action, general wokery, maybe foreign policy). I'd love if someone shrunk the government and put substantial effort into fixing the debt problem and reducing welfare, but it sounds like none of those will be happening any time soon (Republicans are slightly more likely, but really not very. It'd be unpopular and anger the old people, who vote red.). I know people are worried about Trump doing political prosecutions and lawfare, but I honestly think that's less likely when Republicans are in control, given the occurrences against Trump, Musk, Alex Jones, Bannon, etc. I do think the events surrounding January 6th (the Pence stuff, not the riot stuff) were pretty bad, though, and wouldn't have minded too much if the supreme court had ruled that he could be taken off the ballot for that under the 14th amendment, though I'm not quite convinced that it was an insurrection.

What are the reasons that you would point to voting for Biden/not voting for Trump?

My general perception of the trials was that the document one was real, but the others were mostly politically motivated, conviction notwithstanding.

The documents trial definitely seems like the most clear-cut case. And there's been drips of really bad-for-Trump-sounding headlines like yesterday "Special counsel probed Trump Mar-a-Lago trip that aides 'kept quiet' weeks before FBI search: Sources". The /r/politics commentariat is pretty convinced Trump and Kushner literally sold classified information to foreign adversaries, but I'd like to think if the government had anything resembling proof of a crime of that magnitude they'd actually indict them on it.

I haven't looked at project 2025, really. I should. Any concerns you find particularly worrying?

I'm not sure how much to read into it as really different from his first term, but it sounds like a more organized attempt to destroy the functioning of the federal government, so possibly even more effective at stopping a lot of important government functions. Not sure exactly how this interacts with the Chevron Deference case that presumably will get a Supreme Court opinion in the next day or two.

What are the reasons that you would point to voting for Biden/not voting for Trump?

The above bleeds into the general policy issues that are more Republican Party related than Trump-specific: a Republican Party controlled federal government effectively means a 4-year pause on any chance to make improvements in anti-trust, climate/energy, environmental regulations, transportation, voting, public health, healthcare, USPS, IRS (e.g. Direct File), and I'm sure more areas that didn't come to mind writing this list. I don't expect to fully agree with Democratic Party policies, but I can generally expect them to not be actively trying to make things worse and there's a possibility of convincing them to do things better.

Trump's foreign policy in practice didn't seem to be majorly different, but he seems a lot more likely to do something stupid. And with the active wars in Ukraine and Palestine there's more opportunities for him to do real damage.

There's also some culture war-y issues that I'm likely shielded from living a Blue state, although could cause problems if I ever travel to/through a Red state. But a Republican Department of Education following Florida's lead could make it difficult for many of my friends to keep their jobs as people who are both teachers and queer. And many Red states making it difficult for people trying to have children to access healthcare and some national level politicians talking about want to make federal laws along the same lines make me worry about friends who want to get pregnant in the next few years. Also, more Republican appointments to the Supreme Court, among other problems, possibly results in Obergefell being overturned, although I'm not sure how that interacts with the Respect for Marriage Act.

Republican Party controlled federal government effectively means a 4-year pause on any chance to make improvements in anti-trust, climate/energy, environmental regulations, transportation, voting, public health, healthcare, USPS, IRS (e.g. Direct File), and I'm sure more areas that didn't come to mind writing this list. I don't expect to fully agree with Democratic Party policies, but I can generally expect them to not be actively trying to make things worse and there's a possibility of convincing them to do things better.

It's good that someone is voting on national issues. I'd love to do so, but I think that would be naive of me.

The Democrats have made pleasant noises about high speed trains and carbon reduction, but in spite of the billions spent on CAHSR and Biden's electric charging stations, zero passengers have ridden CAHSR and only one charging station per billion dollars spent has been built. Millions of DEI hires have probably been made though.

Similarly, I'm sure pleasant noises will be made about anti-trust, but they will only go after political enemies, and big donors like Google will remain unscathed (if they don't actually get given a subsidy or tax break). "Health" funding will of course go to more DEI hiring. "Education" funding won't go to my kids, it will go to forgiving the student loans of AWFLs.

At this point the mask is off.

At this point, it's pretty obvious the Democrats will use the power of purse and prosecution to take from me and mine to benefit the PMC, so in spite of my agreement with their stated positions on so many things, I cannot vote for them.

Yeah, /r/politics is about the most biased pool you could think of.

I think it would be different from his first term, as he'll have way more buy-in. He's generally, through his generating a cult-following and way he handled that 2022 primaries, purged the party of people not willing to be pro-Trump. But I haven't looked at specific policies, to know whether they would be bad. What sorts of important government functions?

Now, my thoughts on your list:

Improvements on anti-trust: Probably a little more pro-corporation than under the democrats, but more hostile to them than Republicans ten years ago. I'm inclined to think people hate on corporations too much, so I don't know that I would be in favor of antagonism towards the largest and most successful companies.

Improvements on climate/energy: I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Our climate policy choices have not been ideal (like why are we not at least considering releasing aerosols into the stratosphere to reduce the greenhouse effect—it's way, way cheaper than reducing emissions). But it makes sense to be worry about contaminants.

Improvements on environmental regulations: I don't have a sense of how much the EPA is doing currently. I definitely appreciate keeping things clean, and the national parks and such. At the same time, I've heard that environmental regulations can be overly burdensome and make it considerably harder and more expensive to build things. Not sure how much of that is state vs. federal.

I don't have a good feel on either of the last two how much a president gets to set policy on those vs. it being mandated by Congress. I'm guessing the president can, with cooperative agencies, do a lot.

Improvements on transportation: Like, interstate highways? I have no sense as to whose administration spends more on them.

Improvements on voting: How exactly? I wouldn't mind requiring IDs. It'd be cool if we let children vote, and parents vote on their behalf, but no one serious would do that. Anyway, overall, how does the administration affect this?

Public health/healthcare: Yeah, our system isn't great. Not sure what's better. The most important thing, on this, though, is that we need to spend WAY less on this. Health care makes up almost a third of the entire federal budget. I'd prefer privatizing a lot more of that, in general, but we certainly shouldn't be spending that much when we're in as much debt as we are, and with as large of a deficit. But no one's going to touch this, because the old people will get mad. I trust Republicans better in a pandemic, given that there seems to be no course correction from the overreaction to 2020, and that Republicans would probably buy-in slightly more to Republican-given medical advice.

USPS: I don't see why you care about this much?

IRS: Is direct file a democrat thing? I hadn't realized it was polarized.

Foreign policy: I'm not sure. I agree that Trump is a little more likely to be unpredictable, but not terribly so. I think he's viewed as more competent, or at least as having more agency (which helps on some fronts), but is more hated by Europe (which hurts on those fronts). Biden doesn't always make good decisions, as seen in Afghanistan. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the ongoing foreign conflicts would have been less likely to take place if Trump were in the white house. At the same time, it wouldn't shock me if he just ceased support of Ukraine, which—I don't know that I'm a fan of, but I haven't thought about it sufficiently. He'd be more pro-Israel, I think. I don't know what even is a good resolution in Israel.

Oh, I'd love a Republican department of education. A significant reform in how universities are funded would be great. I have no interest in spending large amounts of federal money on a bunch of radicals. School choice probably is more a state thing, but that would be great too.

I don't expect any restrictions on IVF besides a few states. It's electoral suicide. Abortion restrictions are not nationally popular, and IVF restrictions less than that.

Supreme court is fair enough, though I wouldn't mind another conservative justice, except that that might make the democrats excessively mad and fuel polarization (but I'm not sure how much I should take that seriously, since they're already willing to slander the court as it stands currently). My sense was that Sotomayor's the only liberal who would have any real chance of dying? But she's not that old. Thomas and Alito are older, but they're the most conservative justices. I don't anticipate the court moving further right in the next few years, even if the law does, as a result of their actions. You're right that that could make a difference in overturning Obergefell, if they could convince Barrett they have standing and that stare decisis doesn't apply. Kavanaugh and Roberts don't like rocking the boat, and are enough of institutionalists that they wouldn't touch it, I imagine, but another conservative could make the difference. Not sure if that would happen, though, given Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock. But the marriage act you point to would suffice.

I'll note that the conservative justices, having looked a whole lot at them the past few weeks, seem considerably more principled than the liberal ones. At least, they're less likely to vote as a bloc, and they are more likely to care about what is correct law than whether it has things they view as good or bad.

So I guess that explains why you would prefer to vote blue, but doesn't really work to motivate me.

Here's my best pitch for you:

In general, we need to be spending way less. Social security will run out within ten years, on current trends. [The federal government] is struggling to find lenders to pay off the current spending. This will eventually turn into a sovereign debt crisis, crashing the U.S. economy with presumably negative effects on the world, both economically, and as a result of reduced American influence leading to a resurgence in nations trying to be expansionary. I fully expect this to happen within the next few decades. Let's try to have less of that, and Republicans have a better chance of doing that, even if way less than ten years ago, and even if it's not that high of a chance that they do that, instead of sleepwalking off an abyss. Yes, that would involve reducing welfare, but that'll happen anyway soon, as it runs out of funding.

I really wish we had Milei.

Anyway, regarding foreign policy, our shipbuilding capacity is far, far, far, worse than china's. I expect Republicans better to handle that, but not much. (There's so much inefficiency throughout the entire department of defense.) I expect Republicans to be more willing to deter bad action by nations. Republicans are evidently the only ones who might go after the Houthis, which is definitely needed, because shipping lanes are extremely important (Economics matters. People struggling in life is bad.).

I get that that's only two things, but I think those two matter by far the most, as the economy and foreign policy are the things with the largest effects.

Four years ago, I thought Biden would make the country more united. That didn't work, so you shouldn't expect that. Rather, what you see is institutions spending social capital on leftist causes, leading to further-declining trust.

Are there major wins from Biden over the last four years that you could point to that are better than the pre-COVID state of things? (E.g. reducing inflation, crime, a better economy: those don't count unless they're better than 2019.)

As I said, I'm here to understand, not to win arguments. Not that I won't respond, just that my goal here is not to convince you that I am right and you are wrong.

Are there major wins from Biden over the last four years that you could point to that are better than the pre-COVID state of things? (E.g. reducing inflation, crime, a better economy: those don't count unless they're better than 2019.)

The short version is: of course there aren't any major wins. As long as the Democrats don't control Congress (and there's no realistic way of that happening in 2024; not sure what the 2026 Senate map looks like, but generally mid-terms aren't great for the president's party), they can't really pass any significant legislation outside of whatever they can squeeze into a budget reconciliation bill. The downside of a Republican presidency is much higher magnitude than the upside of a Democratic presidency because the Republicans have the goal of breaking things, which is a lot easier to do without legislation (the Republicans are also unlikely to get 60 votes in the Senate).

Improvements on anti-trust: [...]. I'm inclined to think people hate on corporations too much, so I don't know that I would be in favor of antagonism towards the largest and most successful companies.

... do you think anti-trust is just lawfare against entities the government doesn't like? Monopolies result in high prices and bad service for all of us. The government doing something about them makes life better for everyone except the monopolists. Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy by Matt Stoller is a good book on the history of the politics around monopolies. The Biden administration is the first in a while to take monopolies at all seriously.

Somewhat related, Trump actively weakened the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been actually doing things under Biden. I'd rather the financial system actually be restructured around smaller banks, but I don't see any political appetite for that.

Improvements on climate/energy

Geo-engineering isn't a real solution to this problem. Even if we somehow knew how to do it and were confident we had all of the unintended consequences covered and well understood, the geo-political implications of fossil fuel dependence are still bad, as is the fact that fossil fuels getting increasing expensive to extract has been a drag on our economy for 50+ years and response for most of that time was to put our fingers over our ears and say "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU". The US government likes that they understand the geopolitical situation resulting from the importance of fossil fuels and the fact that the US has a lot, so they don't want to change, but that's playing with fire and it's stupid.

Improvements on environmental regulations

The only real headline here is the EPA press release "Biden-Harris Administration Announces $3 Billion for Lead Pipe Replacement". I don't have any other details here; mostly worried about a Republican president discouraging the EPA from enforcing existing regulations, but I assume there's always new things for the EPA to worry about.

Improvements on transportation: Like, interstate highways?

The received wisdom on transit blogs is that a Republican administration probably kills, or at least significantly reduces, federal grants on bus/rail improvements. And probably kills any meaningful discussion on improving passenger rail in general. Inter-state rail seems more obviously the federal government's purview, but in practice a lot of projects that stay within a state are partially funded by federal grants.

Improvements on voting: How exactly? I wouldn't mind requiring IDs. It'd be cool if we let children vote, and parents vote on their behalf, but no one serious would do that. Anyway, overall, how does the administration affect this?

If the Democrats could pass legislation, they could at least try to reinstate the Voting Rights Act. There's the For the People Act, although, of course, what politicians are willing to put in a bill they know will never pass may be different than what do would do once in power. I'd like to go further and uncap the House (perhaps with multi-member districts to have easier minority party representation), but I don't really see that happening, especially as it would likely be seen as a power grab by the Democrats since it would make winning the presidency without the popular vote basically impossible in practice.

Public health/healthcare: Yeah, our system isn't great. Not sure what's better.

Uh, single payer? Privatized medical billing is incredibly expensive and a complete waste of everyone's time. Everyone I know in health care complains that so much of their time is spent on billing instead of actually helping patients, and it's completely unnecessary except to employ a bunch of clerical workers doing nothing useful and funneling cash away from actually providing health care.

I trust Republicans better in a pandemic

Don't get me wrong, Biden's handling of COVID (and H5N1 for that matter) has been awful. But his policy has been to do nothing while Trump's COVID policy was to actively sabotage everything except funding the vaccine development. Trump's pandemic plan is to disband the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (Biden's plan seems to be to shrug his shoulders and say testing cows for H5N1 is too hard, so not a lot better). A sensible COVID policy would have involved prioritizing research on transmission (after vaccines and treatments, of course, but it's not like the same scientists would be studying all of those) and what it's effected by and both communicating that information clearly (e.g. "gathering inside/inside with HEPA filters/outside is fine without masks is fine a X density, with N95s that are actually available at Y density") and providing the relevant equipment (HEPA filters, N95s, etc.). Instead we are watching another possible respiratory pandemic develop and no one's bothered to so much as put some HEPA filters in our germ factories schools.

USPS: I don't see why you care about this much?

I'm not sure where you got the idea that I care about this much. It's one of several items that get mentioned in news articles regularly. There's the obvious problem of it looking a lot like a plot to make mail-in voting work worse to reduce turnout and possibly swing elections. But also, it's an example of Republicans trying to destroy a cheap public sector solution so they can replace it with an expensive private sector one, costing everyone more money.

IRS: Is direct file a democrat thing? I hadn't realized it was polarized.

This is the point in reading your reply that I'm pretty convinced I'm just being trolled, but I'll respond with charity.

Yes, Republicans have proposed defunding Direct File. They didn't want it funded in the first place: the IRS creatively interpreted the funding bill letting them "study" the possibility to run a functional, albeit very limited, pilot program. Republicans are consistently against anything that makes filing taxes easier. They have openly stated their goal is to make the process of paying taxes painful to garner political support for reducing taxes. This makes them a political ally in Intuit and H&R Block who want paying taxes to be painful so they can sell you their products that should be unnecessary.

Also, the Republicans are consistently against funding for the IRS to actually be able to enforce tax law, which in practice results in rich people paying significantly less in tax than even what they are legally obligated to pay. Which is good evidence that they don't actually want to reduce the deficit because actually collecting taxes owed would help there.

Foreign policy: I'm not sure. I agree that Trump is a little more likely to be unpredictable, but not terribly so. I think he's viewed as more competent

Wait, what?! What possible evidence do you have that anyone thinks Trump is competent in foreign policy? The fact that his acting like an idiot didn't accidentally start any wars, so it must have been more calculated than it looked?

Oh, I'd love a Republican department of education. A significant reform in how universities are funded would be great. I have no interest in spending large amounts of federal money on a bunch of radicals.

Really not sure how to respond to that. College has clearly gotten too expensive. The Democrats don't seem to really be trying to address the root causes and the Republicans just want to reduce the public funding to make it even more expensive.

School choice probably is more a state thing, but that would be great too.

School choice is a scam. Private schools that are better than public schools may exist, but they're the really expensive ones that school vouchers won't meaningfully cover, so they'd effectively be bleeding public school budgets to subsidize sending upper-middle-/upper-class children to private school. For the most part, private/charter schools are worse than public schools and the rare statistics showing otherwise are misleading because they're choosing their students. An important part of the scam is that school funding per student is not actually the marginal cost to educate a student in such a way that the funding for gen-ed students effectively subsidizes the much more expensive per-student special-ed programs. Charter schools don't accept special-ed students, so school voucher programs effectively defund special-ed through subtle accounting.

I don't expect any restrictions on IVF besides a few states. It's electoral suicide. Abortion restrictions are not nationally popular, and IVF restrictions less than that.

Not popular, and yet they happen anyway. Maybe the Republicans would keep their religious extremists from passing such policies if they ended up with a trifecta, but it's definitely something I worry about.

Social security will run out within ten years, on current trends.

And Biden wants to raise cap on the payroll tax that is causing this problem.

This will eventually turn into a sovereign debt crisis[...]

The debt crisis is entirely artificial and it has been Republican policy to intensify it for decades because they want an excuse to kill welfare and other government spending. We could just not cut taxes and fund the IRS enough to collect the taxes that are officially owed.

More comments

There's a presidential debate on Thursday; there's two effort posts in the back on my head, neither of them particularly time-sensitive. There's a brewing potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. South Africa's coalition government continues to take shape following their general election. Milei in Argentina claims to have officially solved the persistent inflation problem.

There's a brewing potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

I mean, yes, there is, and I post about it often enough (to the point that I sometimes worry I'm being a broken record/single-issue poster, though that's probably just unfounded anxiety), but to a fair extent we're all just reading tea leaves on the biggest question i.e. "will they do it?". Nobody knows for sure except maybe the CPC and the Five Eyes, and not even necessarily them if the CPC's plan is the highly-sensible "have it ready to go, but call GO or NO-GO based on exactly how much of a shitstorm the US election is" (which in turn means the Five Eyes can't know - "you can't know what I'm going to do if I don't know it myself", or as Sun Tzu put it, "the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.").

I mean, I suppose I could bang on more about my advice regarding this i.e. "the chance is high enough that mild prep vs. nuclear war is extremely, obviously justified; extreme prep may be worth it if you have the means, but moderate prep outside of special cases like 'if you live in an obvious nuke target, you might want to either stop doing that or pre-arrange somewhere else to go' is usually merely an error that doesn't engage a plausible worldline". But, again, I don't like to be a broken record.

have it ready to go, but call GO or NO-GO based on exactly how much of a shitstorm the US election is"

Doesn’t the invasion window end before the election?

Yes, but it's not like there can't be shit flying before the actual vote.

I might agree; we’re in a lull right now.

Shortly before Trump is elected, the culture war is heating up. Ferguson, I Can’t Breathe, They’re Not Bringing Their Best, Lock Her Up, “this is why Trump won,” Russian collusion, Mueller report, MetToo, BAM Covid, everyone goes retarded and forgets that the original deal was just two weeks at home, masks, no masks, masks again, lab leak conspiracy, BAM The Floydenning, cities burning everywhere, He Crossed State Lines, Get The Jab, where’s your vaxpass? Trump dethroned, Jan6 unarmed rioters incriminate themselves as to their whereabouts at the time, Russia does an actual invasion and the resulting war is actually incredibly boring, Hamas gives things a go and it confuses US Jewish interests only slightly.

It’s been a veritable marathon. But now Trump is perhaps once again going to reclaim the throne, and the vibe seems to be shrugs. I’ve seen this movie before, and it was way more shrill the last time. Unless China does something, or some justice dies, I can’t see where the next topic is supposed to come from.

Ferguson, I Can’t Breathe, They’re Not Bringing Their Best, Lock Her Up, “this is why Trump won,” Russian collusion, Mueller report, MetToo, BAM Covid, everyone goes retarded and forgets that the original deal was just two weeks at home, masks, no masks, masks again, lab leak conspiracy, BAM The Floydenning, cities burning everywhere, He Crossed State Lines, Get The Jab, where’s your vaxpass? Trump dethroned, Jan6 unarmed rioters incriminate themselves as to their whereabouts at the time, Russia does an actual invasion and the resulting war is actually incredibly boring, Hamas gives things a go and it confuses US Jewish interests only slightly.

♪♫ We didn't start the fire! ♫♪

Activity does seem to be declining

evaporative cooling?

Last week was a weird week. I can’t be too harsh because I’ve never topposted, but even though more people than ever are complaining about comment length, every toppost was a writing/research project. Also there was much, much more SCOTUSposting than normal. I saw some discussion of US tax law in there.

Looking at it now, it looks like we had 2 more effortposts made in the literal final hour of the thread’s life?

Any twin studies on effect of poverty on criminality?

I want to start logging my mood, then create a graphic similar to the ones on /r/dataisbeautiful but with a bunch of other stats like sleep quality, ability to focus, energy, etc. What is the best software to do this? Preferably free, open source and easy to use.

I used Reporter for iOS.

https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/reporter-app/id779697486

It allows you to survey yourself with custom questions at scheduled, semi-scheduled or random intervals. You can set the answer format for each question to be multiple choice, open, numerical etc. The app does a simple plot for each question but you can also export to CSV and do the analysis yourself.

Incidentally, the stats showed my best moods by a country mile were when I was at the pub with friends. Something of a surprise since I consider myself pretty introverted.

Just log all of that in an excel sheet. You can use any plotting package of a programming language of your choice.

Why block users? I have never blocked a single user on any platform. I cannot imagine getting so asschapped that I need to signal just how upset some guy on the internet made me (and I used to get into some heated arguments in spaces with no rules on decorum). The user in question may even say something interesting later, or I may want to participate in a thread that he parented.

If it's actual spam usually admins or moderators step in.

Some posters are so consistently low-value that it is a waste of time to read anything they write (and usually the discussions the provoke). Gotta protect my time!

That being said, blocks on the motte (as far as I can recall) result in very disjointed threads and so I no longer attempt to block anyone here.

From a different perspective, I get why people would block me here and have blocked me on various forums over the last couple of decades: I’m kind of a huge asshole, and I used to drink and hang out on forums for hours just going back and forth with people constantly.

I used to post on mma.tv (close to 100k posts) and several posters there blocked me on and off over the years. Although now I’m on a discord with several of them and have met up with a few of them over the years. A couple are even close friends.

I found themotte way way back because I found a post by Scott and I started following him because he was so new and interesting, a double rarity for a forum junkie. I had zero idea what a rationalist was. Also I’m not as eloquent or intelligent as a lot of posters here. I just have my thoughts, feelings, and perspectives and they come from a much different place than a lot of people here.

Also, like someone else added, sometimes you need a break from a poster and opinion that you know will start a several hour long ‘ debate ‘ .

I block scammers on steam. I've been tempted to block users on reddit, but usually I keep them unblocked so I can downvote their posts out of spite.

There are some users whose comments asschap me a whole lot. But I can't live with acting on it and blocking them. Not there yet in terms of achieving true nirvanna where I don't get asschapped in the first place, maybe one day.

FWIW, it's not exactly their opinions, as someone mentioned downstream, some posters just have really annoying writing styles. I recall reading a post where some guy almost literally hedged every single statement he made. Motherfucker, just commit to it! Its's not like we can't fill in the "it seems like"'s or "I think"'s using our imagination.

I've also been blocked by 4 different users, 3 of them, never even responded to. I'm quite the asschapper myself (mostly unintentionally?).

I blame my hedging on having read Pact/Pale and getting into the habit of not speaking direct lies or opening myself up to be called on a mistake.

Like urquan and some others here, I also tend to hedge my comments most of the time. In my case, it’s something I started to do in middle school, following the advice of Benjamin Franklin:

While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar . . ., at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. . . . I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix’d in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire.

This method also saves embarrassment, as I think Franklin pointed out elsewhere in his autobiography, on those occasions when what you thought to be so, isn’t.

In this place, people tend to speak more dogmatically and forthrightly, but at least for me, having gotten so used to hedging my words in such a way, it would take a conscience effort for me not to.

This was probably me.

I see my use of the motte less as an attempt to argue and more as an attempt to find common ground with other posters.

I hate argument -- always have -- but love discussion. The difference between those is that the first requires a sort of overconfidence and seeks to win, while the second requires humility and seeks to understand. My goal on the motte is to state my personal experience and views and to find common ground with other people, not to assert that my perspective is universal or try to win an argument. I find arguments infuriating and soul-destroying, not energizing or engaging.

By using phrases like "I think" or "it seems to me" or "my feeling is" or "in my experience", my goal is to demonstrate that what I'm saying isn't something I believe is universal or without exception, but something that is directionally true, an opener for discussion rather than a closed epistemic case.

But I also know, just philosophically, I have a high bar for confidence in claims. The sort of evidence that would convice someone else to make a strong claim often only convinces me to make a weak one. This isn't due to a lack of intellectual confidence -- people who know me IRL would agree to that -- but due to my high degree of skepticism of grand claims. When someone makes a claim with a great deal of rhetorical confidence, the first thing that comes to mind isn't how insightful I think the claim is, but all of the myriad possible exceptions to the claim.

I myself find more argumentative or assertive conversation styles to be grating -- it sometimes demonstrates a brash overconfidence out of bounds of what the speaker actually has reason to believe. My impression of such styles is that they alienate rather than invite exceptions and alternative perspectives; they shut down friendly discussion and perpetuate unfriendly debate.

You notice I wrote "sometimes" there; I had a draft where I simply stated "it demonstrates a brash overconfidence..." and I found that to be itself overconfident. This is precisely because there are some times where such rhetorical strength in what one says is warranted; the "sometimes" doesn't hedge the claim (reflecting a lack of confidence in the claim) so much as demonstrate my belief that this is not a universal truth but one that is true only in a subset of situations.

When I wrote essays in college there would be a section of argument but then a much longer section where I walked through all the objections and exceptions. This got me a lot of points for being thorough. Obviously I put more rhetorical emphasis, as my claims were based on evidence or deductive argument. But it also reflected my view that the world is incredibly complex, and when we make claims about social processes or the human experience or the state of other people's minds, we're almost certainly mostly wrong, even if our point lands for a subset of experiences.

It's not that I'm not commited to what I'm saying, it's that I believe the claim is true insofar as my personal experience reveals, and even then for only a subset of things. I tend to use these phrases where I'm making claims about other people's mental states, the situations in far-off places, and broad social trends: precisely the areas where the evidence-to-supposition ratio leans the most towards supposition and speculation. And since I don't have omnipotence, I express a limited or perspectival claim because that's all I'm actually able to speak to.

The point is to express epistemic uncertainty and openness to alternative perspectives.

But I understand it can be grating as a writing style if it's done too often, so I'll work on moderating that.

I think I do the same, not infrequently—I don't want to give the impression that I'm more confident than I am when I'm not entirely sure, so I'll try to qualify things to convey the right level of confidence.

I like both discussions and arguments, if they're productive.

It wasn't you. I don't exactly recall finding your posts grating to read. They are often long and could use some getting to the point, but are smooth to read. The grating ones have a sprinkling of off statements or stylisms that are plain jarring.

On the flip side. I'm a big believe in brevity. Which often reads as overconfidence and argumentative. But I truly do believe that just like code that is too long has a smell, so does text. Preciseness and efficiency with resources is a skill (if not virtue).

I auto append hedging qualifiers to any non factual statement anyways. The sky is blue, but is the state of modern political discourse grim? Of course not, I have already prepended nothing to the first statement and "I think that" to the second statement. No one ever could make an absolute assertion about the state of modern political discourse, by DEFAULT it's a "i think" statement. If you feel the need to spell that out, I think you ought to trust the reader (and yourself) more.

I wonder if this is a product of the type of writing you've trained yourself to do. Coding trains you to be clean and efficient, jettisoning words and phrases that are insufficiently information-dense. I imagine journalists who had the fortune of coming up back when newspapers still had editors have been similarly trained to cut out the fat in service of the almighty column-inch. As a lawyer, it was beaten into me by harsh editors that those kinds of qualifiers are "weasel words" undermining my credibility to the court, so I tend to assume any grammatically qualified statement to be a bad-faith attempt to imply something they don't have the facts to back up if called out on (if you had the goods, you wouldn't bother qualifying the statement and would have simply stated it as unalloyed fact). It's often hard for me to turn this instinct off and remember that most people do not have formal training in argumentative writing.

But for someone with more of a creative writing background, who is trying to write neither efficiently nor persuasively, the connotative difference between a "thought," a "feeling," and a "fact" may often be really important. While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.

EDIT: re-reading this comment, I may have disproved my own theory. Unnecessary qualifiers were clearly not beaten out of me: I literally started this comment with a qualified "I wonder if" in order to insulate myself from pushback stemming from the fact I hadn't put all that much thought into the idea...

While a scientist writing for academic journals needs to be careful not to overstate their conclusions, and so will see qualifiers like "I think" as nothing less than honesty and good form.

You would think, but you’d be wrong. Scientific writing has an immensely irritating (to me) convention of pretending that the writer doesn’t exist as a human being.

You can see lots of ‘it may be observed that’ and ‘it is apparent that’ and sometimes a ‘we conclude’ but never ever ‘I think’ or ‘I can’t be sure but’. It’s a combination of lingering Enlightenmeny pretensions of objectivity plus a desire to deflect professional criticism.

I hated writing like that, it felt deceptive and weaselly.

That's fair. I appreciate the advice. I struggle terribly with limiting my length, which has a lot to do with the thing about pointing out exceptions that I noted above. I also think almost exclusively in text so when I express a view it's usually the culmination of a lot of actual words floating around in my head. When I write a short text it feels... unfinished, like I've left something important out. But, with effort, I'm able to do it, so informal activity like the motte gets the long bois and actual essays or professional writing gets edited-down stuff.

I cannot imagine getting so asschapped that I need to signal just how upset some guy on the internet made me

How is blocking someone a signal that someone on the internet upset you? Is there even a way to tell who's been blocked by someone?

ETA: Apparently there is. Huh.

There are regular posters on some fora with writing styles (or the equivalent of verbal tics) that just grate on me and I got tired of seeing them.

For example, on the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang comment section, there's one guy (who, thankfully, doesn't post every day) who begins every single damn post with a hideous guffaw, "BARHARHARHARHAR!!!"

Unfortunately the Post doesn't have a block feature that I can find, so I have to just wince whenever I see that excrescence at the top of his posts.

Inside the motte: maybe this is small of me, but it chagrines me every time I make it two paragraphs into a post and hit the pivot to antisemitic apologism or whatever, and only then realize I forgot to check the poster. I steadfastly don't care about any of that conversation, and it's the same conversation every time, so it's a few minutes wasted. I already know I'm going to ignore the post; blocking the single-issue poster would just cut to the chase, and would make me feel a little less dumb, on average once every week or two. That said, my blocklist is empty - it's such a minor nuisance, and feeling dumb once in a while builds character.

Outside of the motte (a selective, filtered, moderated community): to a first order approximation, the entire internet is spam, ads, and tribalism. See also: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People. My attention, patience, and cognitive filtering capacity is finite, and the internet is an infinite noise generator that evolves (read: gets louder and more annoying) by consuming my finite resources. If there are mods, they're usually crazier than the users.

I used to have a Tumblr. I blocked every significant nexus word related to politics, most of the fandoms topics, anyone who posted anything even slightly porny, and any specific person who found a novel way to annoy me. It was great!

I basically don't use Twitter, but I know a guy who blocksany person the instant they make a questionable post. His feed is a near-perfectly-curated niche technical community who go to the same conferences and share entertaining or interesting industry stories and papers. It seems pretty great!

Blocking is a crude tool, but it's one of the few scalable solutions to autonomously build a community or interest feed on top of a dumpster-fire social media platform.

Nice flair btw.

Many people have mentioned Twitter, and I have to concede it seems like it would be necessary on that site. I never had a Twitter, so I've had the privilege of never experiencing how necessary it may be.

Nice flair btw.

Likewise!

Beats me. I never block, and I tentatively opine that blocking shouldn't even be a feature on the Motte.

I think being able to block one or two users- say, a pedo apologist, or those single issue text wall posters- is pretty reasonable. But mass-blocking everyone ought to be a banning offense.

It absolutely should not be a bannable offense, that's bonkers. If Zorba ever really feels strongly that blocking users is degrading the health of the community, then fine disable the feature. But a policy of "we will ban you if you use the feature more than we think you should" is some bullshit.

Yeah, agreed on this as well. If it's not meant to be used, it shouldn't be a feature. I mean, I hope that our code mechanics have enough control over the whole thing to be able to disable things that explicitely aren't meant to be used.

I blocked single person here who posts a lot and blocked a lot of people including me.

I am considering blocking our resident SS-man nazi apologist but he is kind of interesting and fascinating, in the same way as Pakistan International Airlines flight 8303 was interesting.

As others have said, I block when the posts of the person in general annoy the shit out of me and make me want to respond in a hostile fashion to no real purpose. Rather than go there, I just block them, problem solved. I expect I've been blocked aplenty for various reasons. Anyway blocking doesn't really signal, since the user never knows you've blocked them unless they are DMing you or subtweeting you or whatever and you just don't respond, and even then they may just think you're taking that dark road and ignoring them.

I can easily imagine blocking the hell out of dozens of people if I were a female. The amount of thirsty horndogs online who figure Why not when considering whether to message a woman probably outnumbers the grains of sand on the beach.

Edit: I do not currently block anyone here. I just double-checked.

Anyway blocking doesn't really signal, since the user never knows you've blocked them

Trust me, you are not blocked by anyone, else you would know that the motte sends you a large beaming red notification about the user who blocked you.

What's the rationale in that choice?

If it's a holdover from the rdrama website code (which Zorba took and repurposed for our site iirc), probably just because it would troll the blocked user.

I can easily imagine blocking the hell out of dozens of people if I were a female. The amount of thirsty horndogs online who figure Why not when considering whether to message a woman probably outnumbers the grains of sand on the beach.

I doubt the Motte, specifically, suffers from this problem. It does suffer from some posters with a very antagonistic and negative interpretation of women as a class, more lately than in the past as far as I can tell.

Women and Jews really get it here, and yet one of our most prolific and well-loved posters is a Jewish woman.

It does suffer from some posters with a very antagonistic and negative interpretation of women as a class, more lately than in the past

It's hard to convey "hate the sin, love the sinner" (or "hate the behavior that is correlated with group membership, love the individual") through text.

And being that I'm not writing in [something akin to] Old Entish, where you actually can cut an accurate line between the individual and the group if you write the entire history of humanity through the initial conditions of reality and all of the grievances that made words mean what they mean before saying a single word (and sure, I could do that but I have other things to do and only a 500,000 character limit; usernames and reputations should be enough for this but they don't work that way in practice as they're not discoverable even to existing users let alone new ones) I'm limited to "women in aggregate do work this way, and that has led to negative consequences X and Y, and costed W lives and destroyed $Z wealth", despite in my personal life being blessed enough to not have to meaningfully interact with a single woman who works that way.

Ultimately, the whole conversation (and every time it comes up) feels like I'm describing marriage counseling proceedings between the statistically average man and the statistically average woman. There's another poster that uses this language between Blue and Red areas of the US but I think it's a far larger problem than that; I think said average woman hates said average man (which is how woman secures resources and power over man), said average man hates the external enemy [either nature or human] (which is how man secures resources and power over women), but there is no external enemy any more (freedom from need has been largely achieved in the West) so only said average woman is able to leverage that hatred effectively (which is why she teaches man to hate himself, and then chooses the bear anyway). That's going to continue unchecked, and the household will be unable to prevent getting wrecked as a consequence, and nobody's going to learn a damn thing about how to prevent that in the future.

I agree on both counts. I have been tempted to counter some of these occasions (e.g. when it is suggested, to upvotes, that the western world go full Afghanistan and deny women education because reasons) but I either have considered it pointless to engage, been too incredulous to respond, or assumed one of the women here would take up the banner (though of course they may disengage for similar reasons).

As has been pointed out may times by myself, Scotty and a half dozen or more others in the this space, a forum or online gathering spot that doesn't explicitly ban witches will eventually be filled only with witches, that is what we are watching slowly happen. No offense to my current and future online wiccan brothers and sisters, it will still be fun while it lasts.

Anyway blocking doesn't really signal, since the user never knows you've blocked them

motte interface prominently shows that someone blocked you, on every single of their posts

Today I learned.

I blocked a user for a while because he was writing dozens of extremely negative blackpill comments a day for weeks at the time. He is still very negative, but sometimes has interesting things to say and not quite so constant, so I unblocked.

He is still very negative

huh

I blocked an array of Democrat politicians on Twitter and stopped getting paid promotions to donate to them.

I block liberally on Twitter, but I never tweet so it's less "guy replying and annoying me" and more "this post was incredibly fucking stupid and I see no reason to give them another chance."

Yeah, on Twitter it's necessary to cut down on the garbage.

The internet isn't like real life where disowning a person means you lose all benefits you'd get from associating with them. Blocking a below-average quality user is simply a straightforward improvement when it gets replaced by somebody of average quality from the endless pool.

I don't technically block anybody, because I usually cycle through accounts rapidly and don't bother logging in when browsing without replying, but here at the motte I entirely skip two categories of users by the names I recognize: people with irreconcilably opposing viewpoints, to keep my blood pressure in check, and people who wrote too many things I consider dumb, also because I don't want to risk my blood pressure.

Why have mosquitos that target humans not evolved to be quiet? I will never donate blood to humans, those are overwhelmingly likely to be my political enemies, but I wouldn't mind donating to animals if the disruptions to my sleep didn't fill me with murderous rage.

Huh?

Are you saying an overwhelming majority of humans are your political enemies? Or that your political enemies have a inordinate disposition to needing blood transfusions? This is a bewildering comment.

Okay, you've been warned repeatedly. While being a misanthrope is not against the rules, posting nothing but low-effort rageposts about how much you hate the world is. A part of me feels sorry for you, because maybe you really are this miserable and just looking for "your people," but then I look at all your other recent posts and they're about trying to get around your sitewide reddit ban and how rapidly you cycle through alts. So I think neither you nor we will lose much by this account being banned.

I will never donate blood to humans, those are overwhelmingly likely to be my political enemies

Hemophiliacs, trauma victims, and people who need surgery?

What's the far-right misogynists to not-that ratio among hemophiliacs, trauma victims, and people who need surgery?

Presumably approaching that of the general population.

And thus, overwhelmingly ‘not-that’.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me that someone with fringe political beliefs would acknowledge that 90% or so of people are on the other side of their culture war. Similar to how a Jewish supremicist could easily acknowledge that the world is overwhelmingly non-Jewish, or an extremist Christian sect could acknowledge that “true believers” are a very small community, and so avoid giving aid in ways that will be, to them, mostly wasted on the oppositional general public.

Frankly I don’t know why people got so caught up in that part of his comment.

(The ban was still reasonable due to broader patterns, but this comment was mostly fine.)

The Anopheles are inaudible. A bunch of the others are inaudible to the elderly. Mosquitoes don't actually suck blood that many times in their lifecycles (only pregnant females suck blood). Also, TTBOMK most aren't humans-only.

How do I get a Reddit account, if my latest attempt to register led to an immediate site-wide shadowban? Page not found for the user page when opened in incognito mode.

Why you are even trying? ok-target-7361 posting will get you banned very soon anyway.

Do you mention violent impulses on Reddit as often as you do on here? I'm not a computers guy so I don't know what's to be done with an IP ban. Would a VPN get around that?

It's the inverse, Reddit had decided to dislike my VPN and I didn't want to make an account from my normal connection. Though they might have relented as I mentioned, I'll have to see.

Good luck. But I doubt anything you truly want, when you think about it, will be found on Reddit.

What I truly want can't be found outside of the realm of science fiction. I want to be a GSV or, barring that, the single living human aboard a GSV who humors my whims. I'll settle for an account to post in some approximately replacements subs for themotte, since by the comment count it's clearly dying. Also I want to simp for Elizabeth Rose Bloodflame somewhere.

Is there a particular reason that you are trying to evade your ban?

It's not even mine, Reddit decided that the whole IP block is naughty.

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.

.

I wanted to copy-paste the block screen it shows (with an option to make an account, which leads nowhere, as described) but suddenly the site opened. Maybe I'll try again later, if nobody has tips for roundabout methods.

Stop associating with naughty people then.

It can be easy to circumvent with cursory knowledge of computers and the internet. I humbly suggest that a quick google might provide you with the solution you seek. Should you not wish to self study, a clean machine at a public wifi spot will see you to your new account just fine.

Are there any alternatives to deepgram that are as good? It is a bitch to get working hence the question

I'm looking for theories or just-so story on humans' desire to collect knick-knacks.

A house down the street was having an estate sale. I could tell it belonged to an elderly middle-class couple. The house was a monument to mediocrity. Granted, I got there on the second day, so the family and public had already taken the good stuff, but there wasn't exactly empty space anywhere. It wasn't hoarded, but there were thousands of figurines and collectibles. Some over-studious daughter or granddaughter had put a price tag on every single item. I was actually surprised that I wasn't tempted by a single thing.

Not an uncommon refrain, but this couple had spent a lifetime amassing stuff that no one really wanted. So my question is: why? Is there some misaligned wealth signaling going on? I have my own temptations. I like to buy tools, I want a library someday so I'll probably start amassing books, and I'll probably keep buying guns and end up with more of those three than I need, but I can think of use cases. Am I just rationalizing while I sneer at baseball cards, stamps, Funko Pops, and porcelain figurines?

What are the modern-day Precious Moments collections? Funko Pops?

In addition to the things other people have said, collecting also comes with the thrill of the hunt: if something is rare or poorly-distributed, it becomes a challenge to acquire them, which in terms of personal satisfaction can make collecting cheap tat somewhat fulfilling. You end up developing a knowledge of store distribution and release waves, which appeals to the spreadsheet-sexual among us and is actually kind of exciting if you're into whatever you're collecting. I'm guessing that collectibles brands that do rarity and distribution tricks do much better because they generate that excitement and FOMO.

With older items, it's a lot harder to have that same thrill because eBay has destroyed price arbitrage between insiders and outsiders. Anything valuable gets sold online; there are rarely deals for actually-rare collectibles.

But also, people just like stuff so when it's possible to buy more of it they often will. Believe it or not, grandmas actually treasured their Precious Moments figurines and I aspire to that level of simplicity of heart.

Thinking about elderly people's collections in particular, though: I think it's hard for younger people to understand the environment they lived in for much of their life. In their youthful days, the United States was more agrarian and less urbanized, and they certainly didn't have the immediate access either to facsimiles of the world's greatest works of art or to an algorithmized collection of curated aesthetic delights that we do today. They also lived before the advent of the interstate highway or the wide availability of air travel. For someone in such a less-connected world, the wide availability of mass-market kitsch served as an accessible way to add aesthetic appeal to their world. I get why people hate kitsch. But it's easy to sneer at things like Precious Moments figurines when I can type four words into Google and look at an image of the Trevi fountain. It's much harder when you live in 1940s Kansas.

I guess that's a reason I have trouble relating. My grandma is in her mid 90's, grew up more remote than Kansas with a father killed while she was a teen. She keeps an immaculate uncluttered house with no collectables to speak of.

I think your grandma is the exception. Most of the folks I know around that age are precisely like the people whose estate sale you attended.

My grandma-in-law's house is filled with shit whose retail value is less than the diminished utility they provide her through additional surface areas for dust. The upper floor of her beautiful house isn't inhabitable because nobody has vacuumed in years. But nobody in the family has the backbone to throw it all out.

With older items, it's a lot harder to have that same thrill because eBay has destroyed price arbitrage between insiders and outsiders. Anything valuable gets sold online; there are rarely deals for actually-rare collectibles.

That's why I think it's better to collect stuff where the hard to find stuff is just harder to find and not necessarily more valuable. Consider record collecting. If you're looking for that super-rare Beatles UK first pressing then yeah, you're going to pay an arm and a leg for it, because The Beatles are one of the most popular bands in history and there are a lot of fans vying for the collectibles. On the other hand, if you're trying to collect the complete discography of an independent record company, most of the stuff you're going to have trouble tracking down is the stuff that didn't sell well and accordingly doesn't have a lot of demand; it's the kind of stuff that record stores price at a buck when it comes in (usually as part of a large auction lot) so it isn't sitting on the shelves for a decade. I love Bruce Cockburn and I buy original Canadian pressings of his records when I can find them (though the American ones are of higher quality) but I think the most I've paid for an album is like $7.00. This is the kind of guy who's incredible but little known; a bought a few of his records at a well-known used record store in Pittsburgh and the owner got excited and told me he intentionally marked the records down in the hope that someone would become a fan based on price alone.

On the other hand, while E-Bay has complicated the market a bit, it really hasn't changed that much. While E-Bay has made it more likely for someone who doesn't know what they have to get top dollar for a collectible because they happened to list it at the right time, you can still find deals the old-fashioned way if you have the patience. Most of the old garage sale finds are still garage sale finds unless you're talking about baseball cards or Star Wars toys or Christmas Tree ornaments or any of the other items that seem to only exist as collectibles. If someone has a painting they're under the impression their mother bought at a starving artist's expo in 1966 they aren't going to go to the hassle of listing it individually on E-Bay on the off chance that it's worth something. If you're eagle-eyed and happen to discover that it's actually a Whistler, then you've made the score. In the pre-Ebay days, most of the stuff that anyone thought of having any value was either sold through dealers or through listings in specialized collector's magazines. I'd estimate that the number of people selling genuinely valuable stuff at flea markets, garage sales, and the like isn't that much lower than it was in the '90s.

It’s intrinsically enjoyable to collect things just as a human instinct, hence why so many video games have a collection feature. For those old people, it’s likely two things combined: an enjoyment of the pattern of seeking for an item (this is enjoyable even just for seashells on the beach), and then having memories attached to the items that they don’t want to lose

With older people in particular, the hoarders I think often reflect broad scale deflation in manufactured goods over time. Older people grew up with more expensive manufactured goods. Little nonsense like commemorative plates and snow babies and precious moments probably all fall into the category of things that would have been more expensive when they were young. My dad is a frequent overbuyer, of many things, and when he does it always takes the justification of "that would have been [3x price] back in the day." Especially with tools and things like that, he'll buy entirely too many power drills or tool boxes because they used to be more expensive. Nobody could really sell the little cheap commemorative crap for as cheap as it is today back in the day, so they buy it feeling like it must have real value, even though it doesn't at this point.

Also, the useless stuff is the most likely to survive. The Precious Moments don't wear out, don't get moved around and break often, etc. I've purchased a decent number of laptops and cellphones, and more measuring tapes than I can count. When I die, there won't be many of them left in the house, they'll be destroyed or lost, worn out or stolen.

Haven't thought about this at all, but here's some off-the-top theorizing:

In having a collection of nearly anything, you demonstrate a commitment to something in the past, present, and future and the ability to commit to and maintain the collection itself over time. I think it could be a sort of signalling mechanism for the ability to collection and manage resources without being as crass as "I gotta lotta money!" This would also explain why wealthier people tend to collect more expensive things (watches, cars, etc.). So it's a kind of wealth display sewn together with plausible deniability ("I just really like xyz thing!") ... so this would also explain, perhaps, why women collect more (do they? idk) and why they collect less ostentatious things - knick knacks, figurines.

I don't think you need to dig any deeper than "people like stuff, so they amass it".

Older generations considered collecting utterly useless but aligned in a theme figurines to be a feminine and normal use of disposable income, and it was also seen as making it easy for husbands to shop for birthday gifts. This is where the stereotype of grandma with the looking-at dolls comes from.

My mother really likes Mickey Mouse. It is well-known to her friends and family that she really likes Mickey Mouse.

She now has a lot of Mickey Mouse merchandise.

It goes for men sometimes too, my friend really likes dragons (enough to write dragon-themed fanfiction and explain various forms of dragon lore) and he now has a small but growing collection of dragon memorabilia.

I had forgotten about the gift aspect. Your husband and the rest of your family has a go to gift to get you so that can cause an accumulation over a few decades.

And women setting up gift exchanges, etc. If you collect unicorn figurines specifically so you’re easy to shop for, you’ll accumulate lots of unicorn figurines over the course of 50 years.

So, what are you reading?

I’m on Wadsworth’s The Poacher from Stratford, a now somewhat dated academic book on the Shakespeare authorship question which affirms the orthodox case and studies the skeptics.

I had a lot of time this weekend to knock out Thomas Weaver's Artificial Wisdom (3/5) and Pierce Brown's Morning Star (4/5). I'm pressing on in the Red Rising series, a fun and action-packed space opera, with the fourth book, Iron Gold. I've read the fifth book, Dark Age, is the best in the series, by a mile, and I'm excited to get to it.

I'm reading China Miéville's Iron Council. He's a very descriptive author and I'm curious that more people haven't tried to copy this shtick of Industrial Revolution-set high fantasy. I feel this book is a bit more on-the-nose with respect to hitting the viewer on the head with Miéville's (anarchist) politics which is a bit unfortunate because in the other works I've read from him it's not bothered me.

I've read all of the Bas-Lag trilogy, and tbh I think that Perdido Street Station was one that hit you with the head with the politics the most. The Scar is comparatively apolitical.

The aspect of his politics that appears most throughout his books appears to be fucking xenos.

Ehh, again, I don't think this featured in The Scar, at least prominently. I don't remember that much about Iron Council, but in PSS this particular aspect came off as rather written for shock value.

I've only read three of his books and it featured in Perdido Street Station and Embassytown, but maybe those are the exceptions.

I started Master and Commander this week. I saw the film before, and it's both a perfect adaptation could not be better, and doesn't hold a candle to the book, at the same time. The sheer wildness of the book is amazing. I'm also kind of amused at the number of times Maturin calls Aubrey fat in the book, and I'm curious how everyone else pictures Jack.

After watching the films in theaters, I started the Fellowship of the Ring on Audible, the Andy Serkis reading was available free. What a majestic work. I hadn't read it in years, and I'm so happy returning to it. It's interesting though that Serkis' reading is clearly influenced by the films, when he voices the main characters at times it feels like Serkis-doing-Orlando-Bloom instead of an independent interpretation of Legolas. T

he film adaptation can really close in your mind, in some ways, like the visualization of the Nazgul becomes the canonical view of them. I'm really reconsidering them on this read/listen. When the hobbits raise the alarm in Buckland, the Nazgul scamper, clearly a bunch of farmers showing up with torches and pitchforks would have been bad for them in some way. Were they secretly kinda cotton candy under the cloaks?

and I'm curious how everyone else pictures Jack.

I've always pictured Jack as "beefy" in his frequent weight gains. Like imagine a boxer who has been retired for a year. Muscular and capable of immense violence but also a good 20-30 kg above normal weight.

When the hobbits raise the alarm in Buckland, the Nazgul scamper, clearly a bunch of farmers showing up with torches and pitchforks would have been bad for them in some way. Were they secretly kinda cotton candy under the cloaks?

I think according to Tolkien they just weren't very strong far away from Mordor, as none of them had their rings. Aragorn makes the point that they're physically not very capable and that fear and what they might inspire other ne'er-do-wells to do are their biggest concerns (while in Bree).

I was always a bit confused by how weak or timid the black riders were in the first book. Explained it as not wanting to draw the attention of the remaining powers in the north, either Saruman or Rivendell.

You don't want your guys to find the baggins and the ring, only to meet Glorfindel in a dark alley on the way home east, or Saruman in the gap of Rohan heading south. And that's exactly the sort of thing sauron would be worried about, especially because he knows the enemy knows something (if only because saruman's developed ring-mania and elrond is still around), but not how much.
So even once they find Frodo they want to grab him far from watching eyes and get home quietly (Aragorn says something almost exactly like that after they leave bree iirc).

But it could just be the power scaling of the first book vs the third, as we'd call it today.

Think of the nazguls as leaders and special ops. They're good one on one fighters, and can serve as force multipliers when leading troops (through inspiration or terror), but in the north, they're in enemy territory.

Our gamer minds have been infected by RPGs into seeing power scaling by orders of magnitude, your hero starting as a level 1 with tens of hitpoints and finishing at level 99 with tens of thousands of hitpoints and no reasonable numbers of lvl 1 characters could even come close to representing a serious threat to it. But Tolkien probably had something more like Dark Souls scaling in mind, where super powerful characters are a couple of times more powerful than starting characters, but even beginning trash mobs in the right situation and in the right numbers can still be a credible threat. Aragorn is a powerful fighter and would be almost guaranteed to win a 1 on 1 fight against any other characters weaker than the Lich King or an ancient elf. But I don't think Tolkien had in mind that if, say, 10 average gondorian guardsmen surprise attacked Aragorn their swords would essentially bounce off of him because they're too weak and he's too powerful. Or that he could solo the entire Shire in an open fight. Or think of Boromir's fate; he was supposed to be one of the most powerful human warriors out there, and I think it's probably fair to assume he would have been at least a match for one nazgul that isn't the Lich King, as that was the point of opposing 9 members of the Fellowship to the 9 riders. He was killed not in a fight against another "unique" named enemy, but just tens of orcs/uruk hai.

So your nazguls, if they didn't act covertly, would risk facing a couple of hundred strong hobbit militia, and that's just wasteful use of elite special forces or officers.

Even in the third book though, the Nazgul never actually do anything beyond instill terror in those around them. Near as I can tell, in terms of physicality, they're just dudes in cloaks (maybe even less substantial than that) who can be killed (at least for temporarily? It's implied in Fellowship that their physical forms can be destroyed but that their spirits endure and can eventually reconstitute, but the Witch King is killed killed by Eowyn, who's just a normal lady with a normal sword).

Pretty much every time a character actually stands their ground and fights back against a Nazgul, they either win or fight to a stand-still (see their skittishness early in Fellowship, Aragorn and Gandalf each on weathertop, Glorfindel scaring them away, Gandalf staring down the Witch King in Minas Tirith, Eowyn and Merry).

Merry hit him with the +1 Knife of Fuck Litches first though, which got rid of all his magical bullshit.

In the original Age of Wonders the undead had an expensive Wraith unit that was basically a black rider/witch king. They had mediocre stats but physical immunity that let them kill any number of normies. But since anyone with a magic weapon could kill them, you had to be very careful about when and where you revealed them, or next turn some methed-out hobbit riding a bird would fly out of nowhere and beat them with the purple-glowing stick a wizard gave him.
They were most powerful being everywhere and nowhere, strangling the opponent's economy by keeping him scared that ghosts would walk through the walls and murder everyone.

Thinking about it more, a few explanations jump out:

  1. They really aren't very tough, they're just spooks, scary, and if you're brave enough to face them they run off. One of the big changes they make in the films, in my mind, is that the Orcs in the films are brave and disciplined and self-sacrificing. Their commanders are brutal and have little care for their lives, but the Orcs are more than willing to jump right in and sacrifice themselves. Tolkien views courage, martial discipline, and self-sacrifice as inherently positive "good" characteristics; his villains are all cowards, they'll flee when the good guys stand up unless they have absolute confidence in their success. To a certain extent with respect to the Nazgul, this is probably a change that Jackson has to make in the film, terror aura probably doesn't really translate to film well. It's also probably a change in view from Tolkien's time to ours, we grew up on WWII dramas filled with Kamikaze pilots and last stands in Berlin, on VietCong and Contras, and the films were released (and edited) more or less coterminously with 9/11 and the war on terror stuff. We were very used to impossibly brave and self-sacrificing foes being not just on the side of evil, but a sign of evil itself.

  2. After sixty years of interpreters and imitators, and DnD/Vidya in particular, it's tough for me to realize that scientific knowledge isn't really something Tolkien does. Later authors and Dungeon Masters would have very precise rules about who has what power level, who beats who, and what does how much damage, and what happens to who when they're hit. There's a baseline of scientific laws that are pre-determined before combat starts between characters, deciding what will happen and why. We don't have that, and neither do the characters, in Tolkien. Tolkien's characters don't really know what happens when a ringwraith gets stabbed in the face, or lit on fire, or thrown down a stream. They have guesses based on gathered lore, they perhaps have similar cases they can deduce from. But even the Nazgul themselves don't really know what will happen to them, what can harm them and what can't, other than the Witch King who is pretty confident no man can slay him.

So can the Nazgul be killed by Bucklanders? Maybe, maybe not, but the Nazgul are giving the same answer we are, and they very much don't want to get got.

Aside: it's actually not entirely clear about the Witch King. She definitely disables him, but the last time they got discorporated (to use the Good Omens term) it was some months before we saw them again. The Witch King goes down just a few days before the Ring gets destroyed, so we're not really certain if he would have turned back up given enough time to get it back together. But he was out of commission when it all came down, so we'll never know.

Now on to Rivendell and the Fellowship Roster Moneyball memes

That scene in the special edition--where The Witch King shatters Gandalf's staff and is about to have his Felbeast eat him, until suddenly the Rohan trumpet spooks The Witch King and he flies off--really annoys me. Long time since I read the book but I don't remember that being there.

The Witch-King is apparently on a horse, and he doesn't shatter Gandalf's staff, but the horns of Rohan do interrupt his meeting with Gandalf and cause him to leave the city gates to meet the Rohirrim on the field.

Geoffrey of villehardin’s account of the fourth crusade. It’s interesting because despite the utter train wreck, our author believes that no mistakes were made.

I read Joinville's account of the even-more-a-shitshow 7th crusade in school, so thanks for recommending the prequel series


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