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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   2255 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 1, 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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How long would it have taken the Persian fleet to sail from Marathon to Athens during the battle?

According to Google Maps, the sailing distance is around 80 miles.

According to GURPS Low-Tech Companion 2:

In the ancient world, galleys on long journeys relied mainly on their sails, attaining a speed of about 5–7 mi/h with favorable winds or 2–3 mi/h with unfavorable ones. Fleets were much slower—partly because they had to keep together and partly because galleys needed sailing ships to carry supplies. A fleet could make 2.5–3.5 mi/h with favorable winds or about 1.5 mi/h with unfavorable ones. In an emergency, a trireme could sustain a pace of 10 mi/h for a full day under oars; a penteconter, 8 mi/h. This meant extremely hard labor for the oarsmen, however. Normally, they would row in shifts, with 1/3 of the rowers being enough to achieve 2/3 of the speed.

So the travel time could be anywhere from eight hours to fifty hours, depending on what your assumptions are.

What's the deal with RFK Jr.? I haven't paid too much attention to him, and considered him kinda minor player whose appeal probably entirely lies in his last name, and even then it's not that much of it. But I read a lot of commentary that treat his endorsement of Trump as some kind of a big deal. Is it actually a big deal? Why? What is his significance?

The press have refused to interview him and the DNC cancelled early primaries because they were afraid of him winning a few of them.

Polling wise he was doing much better than Nader ever did. As a spoiler candidate he was putting Biden - Harris in a position where they would have do dump campaign resources into moderately safe states. So there's been an unprecedented legal effort to keep him off of ballots.

Basically he's an outlet for disaffected hippy-ish Dems who have objections to the Big Government / Big Corporate administrative state policies in things like agriculture and health that are currently unquestionable in the DNC. Also things like should we really be pushing for war against Russia and Iran. Or is having "ex" CIA agents as reporters really a good thing. Or is having the FBI & feds identifiy "misinformation" or "malinformation" on social media really a good thing.

He has a bunch of connections to lib left people in tech.

The big thing is that it will give social cover to people on the left who aren't keen on Kamala. It undermines the whole "anything to stop Hitler" message. It's easier for people to not donate now and speak out against some of the "thumb on the scale" stuff Google has been doing in elections.

It's another example of a moderate Democrat getting disillusioned by the party's authoritarian streak and then eventually supporting Trump. But I doubt he moves the needle much. Having yet another free thinker move over to Trump probably doesn't matter, IMO. The election will be determined by normies and their emotional reactions to pictures and videos.

Democrats tried to keep him off the ballot because they were worried that older Democrats might vote for a Kennedy. But then they decided that he wasn't a threat after all and are now trying to keep him on the ballot against his wishes.

In terms of his views, he's a bit of a kook. Although directionally correct about the sad state of America's health, I'm not sure he has any answers. And some of his beliefs are pretty out there. He believes that exposure Wifi has harmful effects, for example.

The election will be determined by normies and their emotional reactions to pictures and videos.

100% this. Always.

As far as I know, I've heard he's got a decent chunk of people willing to vote for him as an independent candidate, so if half or so switch to Trump and the other half don't vote, Trump gets an additional 1-2% in the vote, something like that. Haven't been following it too closely.

I am reading a lot of reporting now about "fentanyl vaccine". I am not sure what's going on there, can anybody explain it to me? Specific questions:

  1. I understand that vaccines work by training the immune system to recognize certain proteins associated with pathogens and have other immune cells to bind to them and destroy them (not quite sure how but maybe not important). But fentanyl is a relatively basic compound, wouldn't training immune system to grab on something this simple also have a danger for it to react on many other simple compounds and disrupt the normal function of the body chemistry? What happens to fentanyl once the immune system recognizes it - is it broken into basic hydrocarbons? Somehow captured and expelled? How does that work exactly?

  2. I assume it is supposed to somehow fight fentanyl addiction. However, assuming it's effective all it would do is make the addict not to be able to get high from fentanyl. They however still will stay addicted, both physiologically and physiologically, not? Wouldn't they immediately seek to get high on some other drug, of which there are dozens? Wouldn't they still suffer withdrawal since their body still craves fentanyl but now is not getting any effect from it - wouldn't that make them take higher and higher dose? Also, would any drug addict voluntarily undergo treatment that would leave them as addicted as before but without any ability to get a fix? How is it supposed to work to solve the problem?

From the article you linked:

Our vaccine is able to generate anti-fentanyl antibodies that bind to the consumed fentanyl and prevent it from entering the brain, allowing it to be eliminated out of the body via the kidneys.

This seems to be blocking the fentanyl crossing the blood-brain barrier. I haven't read much about this specific process but there's something called antibody conjugation that does this. From the article human clinical trials have not been done, suggesting this might not even work on people. (lots of things happen in rats that don't in humans.)

As for the second question, yes, lots of other problems, but that's not anything new. No one pill sorts out everything about one's life. Except Ozempic TM.

(This post brought to you by Novo Nordisk!)

  1. My lay guess would be something something expelled kidneys, since that happens both to non-immunized users today and is pretty much the standard. They threw some related drugs in for cross reaction, though the risk of unrelated immune response is probably something that can’t be seriously tested until later.
  2. While not a tested endpoint for this study, a lot of the paper nudges and winks to theorizing a small number of shots that would a) have a very long term effect, months if not years, b) reduces the high from fentanyl, and most importantly c) reduces the heart and lung function impact of fentanyl.

The latter matters a lot to harm reduction proponents. To their perspective, the problem is not that people get addicted, but that addicts often die, as the drug has a thin range of of recreational use before health risks kick in, and because it is often used as a filler/replacement for other more conventional opioids. These harm reduction proponents probably assume (hope) that users will substitute other drugs, at least some of the time.

(Charitably, they’d would provide this as an option to general opioid users to protect them from developing an addiction to fet or an acute case of death if encountering adulterated drugs. Less charitably, a three dose regimen is the sort of thing that could be judicially ordered, or even put in the kits with Narcan. Though the latter has enough legal risk cynics don’t have too much to worry about.

Also, would any drug addict voluntarily undergo treatment that would leave them as addicted as before but without any ability to get a fix? How is it supposed to work to solve the problem?

There is a medication that works this way for alcohol and some alcoholics do willingly take it.

A pill means you only need self control 2 minutes a day rather than 24 hours a day.

But you still are free to take other drugs, including other opiates? For an alcoholic, there's no easy substitute I presume.

The press release claims it's specific to fentanyl and that morphine in particular isn't affected, so that those opting for the "vaccine" can still get pain relief.

Morphine is probably harder to get on the street, but if memory serves heroin is an alternative, and it does get metabolized to morphine before it starts acting.

Disulfiram, the analogue for alcohol, isn't related in terms of how it works. It basically switches off the enzyme that makes it possible to break down alcohol, causing the mother of all Asian Flushes, and basically makes taking alcohol too unpleasant to countenance. I see no mention of such a mechanism here, it claims to simply bind up the fentanyl and stop it causing any effects on the body from what I can tell, but I'll have to read the paper later for more insight.

What is going on with the church fires in France? The noticer accounts are not-so-subtly implying that they are due to arson. Is this the old Chinese Robber falacy, an artifact of France having lots of old highly-flammable churches wired with 220 volts, or actual arson?

Looks like the police have arrested a man who was 'known to authorities'.

Could be an Islamist, or maybe a 2000s-style atheist edgelord like in Norway, or maybe just a guy who likes fire.

What search engine and browser are you currently using for your default?

I've been using Google and Chrome due to decades of inertia, but the deterioration in result quality and ever escalating frequency of intrusive pop-ups for new nonsense functions I don't want have finally hit activation energy for a switch.

Chrome seems to be pushing in a strong anti-ad-blocker direction lately, so I'm on Firefox.

On the rare occasions I need to search for something, it's usually a Google search using "site:reddit.com" to eliminate SEO spam. I haven't seen any real gains using alternative search engines, and Google is at least familiar.

Brave and Google (for now).

  • Brave: Someone recommended it to me last year and I love it. It’s quick, light, syncs pretty well across devices (although I don’t do a lot of syncing) and most of the Chrome extensions I had been using are compatible. I love its playlist feature where you can force it to download lots of media from different places (YouTube, podcasts etc) and play them while offline.
  • Google: I still search lots, but usually for something that I know has a specific destination page/answer. I.e. I don’t Google-then-browse-and-scroll, which I probably did for years and a lot of people probably still do now. I also use lots of advanced search operators both on Google and in other “search engines” like Twitter/X and Reddit.

On my laptop, Vivaldi, because I have too many tabs. Duckduckgo for the default search engine.

Did they fix the "moving the mouse in the menu crashed the browser" issue? I loved it aside from that: most functional out of the box browser I've ever used. Didn't need to install a single addon.

I don't know about that bug, so no idea.

Brave (browser), DDG/Startpage (search engine). I've heard about Kagi but haven't actually tried it yet.

Also worth noting that Brave is a great mobile browser given how few adblocking solutions there are for mobile platforms.

I don’t use a search engine I just ask AIs to search for me

Safari + Perplexity.

Safari is simply because it works great on the iPhone and I like the syncing functions enough to endure the somewhat worse desktop browsing experience.

I am surprised nobody mentioned perplexity actually. It works great for a certain type of query especially with the pro mode enabled.

Firefox and DuckDuckGo.

Using Google Search and Google services on a Google browser (i.e. all of them except Firefox and Safari) is a bit too centralized and vulnerable for my tastes, so I went to the closest alternatives.

Using Google Search and Google services on a Google browser (i.e. all of them except Firefox and Safari) is a bit too centralized

I mean, yes and no. Having a lot of orgs have some of your data is worse from a privacy perspective than one org having all your data, because usually "some" is enough and then you have more possible points where somebody could use it against you (or be hacked by somebody who will).

From a "transition cost" perspective... well, Google's unlikely to block you from search and I'm not sure they even can block you from Chrome.

Sure, Mozilla, Google, and DuckDuckGo each know about me, but what are they going to do with it?

In the Google-Google-Google world, they can gather data from the services, put ads and "customization" in search, and prevent adblockers in the browser. I made the switch before AMP and Manifest V3 existed, so I'm feeling pretty vindicated with my decision.

Brave + Kagi

There's no point in going on the internet now without an ad block - that's like going naked for a run over a landfill full of medical waste. Thus Brave + Privacy Badger.

Google as the search engine has been going down in quality lately. I've used duckduckgo and brave search, but Kagi seems to be cleaner and results for me are better, and I like the search engine when I'm the customer, not the raw material to be processed and sold.

Does Kagi do the same political filtering on search like google and duckduck? (sorry, I mean, "helpful weeding out of misinformation")

They actually took a stance against doing that. Vlad is CEO and responding to arguments in that thread.

Most relevant:

The very basic question of what do you police (or don't) next is not answerable. For example 'how to kill an animal?', 'how to rob a bank?', 'how to hack a computer?' - although objectively less impactful than the original example, would eventually draw attention from sufficently large groups of people who will passionately call us out on not doing something about these queries on the same moral grounds. And again this never ends, you end up being in the business of pleasing everyone. Good luck with that.

Thus the best option for us is to simply refuse to make the first precedent no matter what the pressure is and stick to search being search. Perhaps one day Kagi may become your 'assistent' with personalised biases, but for now it is just a search engine.

Not that I noticed any. Of course, I have my own bubble so I can only answer within what I tried to search for. Also, you can tune the rankings - e.g. say this site is more trustworthy and this is less, so it would rank according to your preferences. E.g. if you don't want to see a lot of reddit, you could downrank it, or vice versa. But I haven't noticed any helpfulness of the sort you mention there.

They have a free trial plan so I definitely would suggest to try it out before committing with payment. I upgraded to paid when I tried it out and saw that when trial was over I was upset I can't use it anymore.

Edge + Bing. This is a result of both a decision I made a while back to rebase my digital services with Microsoft, and a gradual comfort with the windows default settings from reinstalling windows many times.

Edge and DuckDuckGo. Google used to be better than DDG, but now both are equally full of SEO spam. I would use Firefox, but Edge is (or at least used to be) much less power-hungry, which is important when one of my primary PCs is a Surface Pro 9.

Google still has a lot longer archives than DDG if you're looking for old forum posts and such; I frequently wind up resorting to Google after DDG fails.

Firefox and Kagi, the best browser-search engine pairing in 2024.

Another vote here for Brave, both as browser and as a search engine.

I use Brave, and Kagi. Brave because it has the benefits of Chrome as a derivative (but with a built in ad blocker and at least attempting to care about user privacy). Kagi because I appreciate their attempt to align their incentives with users, even if there's no guarantee it will last (as plenty of paid businesses inject ads in a race to the bottom).

I just switched over to Firefox from Google Chrome. I agree that Chrome has gotten significantly worse, particularly the amount of ads on Google searches and YouTube. YouTube started becoming completely non-functional, so I decided it was time to switch over. I installed Firefox and downloaded uBlock right away. Now I don't experience any sponsored results when using Google search or YouTube. It's glorious. Firefox was also really easy to transfer over passwords and bookmarks so it was a fairly seamless transition. The more challenging part is that Firefox doesn't work as well for iOS, so I'm still using Chrome on my iPhone for now.

Have been using Floorp for several months as a browser. It's transparently Firefox with some enhanced security and features that I like.

Searching is now more about parameters than whichever engine. Learn how to use things modifiers like site, filetype, timerange etc.

I will admit the hole is still in finding good news articles. For me, that means a mixture of trusted twitter accounts, blogs, and pay legacy media (WSJ primarily, although even they have a slant and aren't immune to "current thing" dynamics).

Chrome should be avoided at all costs because of how invasive Google is. If you took all of the branding off of it, it would look like a piece of malware.

I'm still using Firefox, although it's increasingly nonfunctional. Tmk it's still the only browser with good tab management systems.
Been meaning to give Vivaldi another try. Heard they fixed the bug where moving the mouse too fast in the menu crashed the browser...

Google and Yandex for search, the latter whenever my "censored results" sense goes off.

yandex also just has great image search, for whatever reason. maybe because it isn't passing everything through a pc puree

I increasingly suspect that google's image search is artificially handicapped less for political reasons and more for copyright lobby reasons. Reverse image search barely works as originally conceived and the ability to find alternative crops and resolutions for an image you already have is long gone. I don't have much of a reason to believe this other than the fact that these two features seem like they'd attract a lot of ire from stock photo publishers and media publishers in general, and these two features are also the most conspicuously broken/absent.

Yandex notably still has perfectly functional versions of both features.

Brave as a browser (exactly same feel as Chrome, it's built off Chrome) and still Google for search engine. As for result quality, I'm not sure I've noticed a decline too much, but I mix Google up with Yandex and Bing and Brave search if Google isn't turning up what I want.

(exactly same feel as Chrome, it's built off Chrome)

Don't sell it short! It supports vertical tabs, which Chrome does not, and has a built-in adblocker that will survive the coming manifest v3 Apocalypse.

Vertical tabs are nice, btw, recommend to try it out. Takes a bit of time to adjust but surprisingly more convenient for a tab hoarder as myself.

I adjusted immediately. It's a feature I had no idea I needed, until I tried it out.

Guess I'm not a power user, I didn't know it supported vertical tabs! But agreed on the built-in adblocker.

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Conquest of Bread. Picking up Toffler’s Future Shock.

The Magician's Nephew with my daughter. Still just as fun as when I first read it. It might be my favorite book of the series.

Dick & Jane with my boys. Simple is best. They like the simple, classic art and it's easy for the older boy to read.

The Shadow of the Torturer has been on my shelf for a while. I got 20 or so pages in a while back and put it down. I need encouragement to pick it up again.

I need encouragement to pick it up again.

The writing style took some adjustment on first read but The Book of the New Sun ended up as probably my favourite book, and Wolfe my favourite author. It's even better on re-read.

The Shadow of the Torturer has been on my shelf for a while. I need encouragement to pick it up again.

Personally, I enjoyed books 2 and 3 of that series more than books 1 and 4. But I am far from a cultured reader.

Finished The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester (1956). Cyberpunk avant la lettre - if you can have cyberpunk without computer networks. Very 50s and very pulpy - it's no surprise that Bester also wrote comics - but well written with a manic energy that's the polar opposite of the likes of Asimov. You can just imagine the author smashing the typewriter keys while chomping a cigar. Reaches for the stars and sometimes grasps them.

A fantastic book. The fact that it's pretty heavily influenced by The Count of Monte Cristo doesn't hurt.

I didn’t like it for that reason- people always claim it’s the greatest sci-fi book ever and I was thinking the whole time reading it I might as well just read the original goven how derivative it was.

I've been put off the idea of reading The Count of Monte Cristo by people complaining about how long winded it is. Maybe I should swallow my pride and try an abridged version...

I'm about 90% done with Howling Dark, the second book in The Sun Eater series. I'm giving it a 3/5, but I enjoyed it a lot more than Empire of Silence. Demon in White, the third book, is up next.

Reading Journey to the East by Herman Hesse. It's pretty incredible, and quite short.

Finally finished The Goldfinch this evening. 6/10. Ending dragged on interminably which probably knocked a whole point off the score.

Not sure I ever got to the end of The Goldfinch but wow I love how Donna Tartt constructs a sentence.

Don't even bother with the film adaption.

So I've heard. It's pretty funny that Tartt hated it so much that she fired her agent.

She probably got a nice pay day with the adaption rights. Now, she can spend the next decade writing her fourth book uninterrupted.

The Goldfinch came out in 2013, she's already overdue!

The book came out in 2013, but she was busy with book tours, award ceremonies, speaking engagements, interviews, etc. Those activities took at least year and a half of her life. We could guess she found time to sit down and start her new book in 2015, maybe 2016. So, based on her publishing history, we could expect a new book by 2025 or 2026.

What's your favorite small indulgence? Something that is pure luxury, occasional, but small.

-- Scheduling a day so that I can work out with no time crunch at precisely 10:00am. That is the PR time. Fully awake, stretched, nothing can fatigue me yet, ready to go.

-- Taking the long way home to drive through the woods with the windows down, with some kind of iced beverage. With a podcast, with my wife, with my dog. Just depends on who or what I'm hiding from.

-- Buying end of week out of money options on whims and hunches for small sums of money, then spending all week monitoring them to figure out the exact moment to sell. Very very narrow net positive over time, but it's fun in the way poker is fun.

  • Greek yogurt. One of those 500g tubs with 50g of protein and packing it all down with berries, nuts and honey. Quality grubbing. (Also: 1kg tub of cashew butter. Stuff is ludicrously good, but I need to be careful as I can go overboard.)
  • Midweek afternoon at a movie. Don’t do it often, but I almost never regret it. Trouble is, most of the cinema chains don’t show any quality movies nowadays, and I can’t be bothered watching something Marvel. Years ago I watched Coen Brothers movies or arthouse or foreign language pics on a Wednesday at 2pm. Good times.
  • I enjoy doing f* all work in January. Lots of other people are hammering through the fake New Year’s goals. So several days in January I might chop some wood, light the fire and read a whole book in the short daylight hours. Bonus marks if it’s a book set in winter. The Brothers (short book by a Finnish author about Finnish-Russian wars in 1800s) and Julius Winsome (about a man who lives in the woods with his dog until he gets some unwanted visitors) both ticked all boxes.

I found cashew butter to be underwhelming. Peanuts are quite plain and peanut butter is delicious, so seeing as cashews are already delicious I was expecting cashew butter to be even better. Turns out it was kind of plain.

It's an acquired taste, I found. Initially I found it to be ... unusual. I really like cashews, which are sort of creamy / tasteless, but cashew butter had a much stronger taste (for me!) But I soon loved it and ate way too much straight off the spoon. (It was really hard to get where I for 2-3 during Covid, and supplies have not returned to pre-pandemic levels just yet.)

Idk about your local theaters, but ours have started showing a lot of classics. You pretty much have to check the website to find them.

Am outside the US (assuming you're inside...) But our local cinemas show almost nothing that isn't mainstream and current. Unfortunate, but also it's providers responding to the market. The great films I watched in those places years ago, often it was just me and a couple of others who showed up.

Having a Sunday morning breakfast by myself at the local diner counter, with bottomless coffee and taking 90 minutes or more to eat, drink, and read.

Prefer the booth against the wall so no one can come at you from behind.

Prefer the booth against the wall so no one can come at you from behind.

How’s life in the Wild West?

  • A kebab, chips and Coke from the kebab shop around the corner, which for my money is the best kebab shop in the city.
  • Coming home from work and knowing I have my house to myself to do whatever I want
  • Eating a good burger with fries and a soda
  • Enjoying a video game or book when it's raining outside
  • Adding a text file to a 3GB folder called "Arguments Won"
  • Feeling good after doing a workout I nearly talked myself out of doing
  • Sitting in the middle of an empty theater

Say more about “Arguments Won”?

Cigars! I've been getting into them since I stopped smoking cigs/spliffs/vaping and man they are so nice. The occasional cigar, especially with friends and a nice beer or glass of whisky, is hard to beat.

Also, ice cream and a bubble bath. Mmm.

Diet soda.

Have you tried Coke Zero?

Yes, there was Coke Zero, but now there is just Coke Zero Sugar with a slightly different taste and formula.

I’d say the bulk of my diet soda consumption at various points has been Coke Zero Sugar.

The number of calories and sugar in a regular bottle (or can) of Coke is eye-popping when you start paying attention.

What's your favorite small indulgence? Something that is pure luxury, occasional, but small.

I spend an entire day without internet or phone, except my Kindle. It makes for a good mental reset.

Listening to other people’s conversations. I’m extremely curious, so if I have a spare half hour somewhere in public, it’s a fun indulgence.

Cookie butter.

Darn Tough socks.

Reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality again (again).

EDIT: Posting on the Motte!

My wife and I are thinking of having kids, but we’re both somewhat on the fence. My wife leans more into the NO camp and I lean a bit more into the YES camp.

Factors to consider:

  1. I have family nearby but the relationship between them and my wife is not great. My mother in particular is kind of insane. Her family is in a state that’s about a 10-hour drive away.
  2. Financially we are stable upper-middle class (I work in Big Tech and she has a stable fake email job) but no housing that we actually own (we rent out an apartment my mother owns). My wife wants a bigger place for kids but housing prices are insane (we can afford it though) and I think buying a house at the same time we have kids would stress the budget a bit more than I’m comfortable with.
  3. I always saw myself having kids but I’m not sure I can really commit to losing all of my independence and free time. I tend to need a lot of down time from my job and I don’t know if I can handle being always “on” with a kid in the mix.
  4. Seeing some other younger family members in the extended family become absolute pieces of shit as they enter adulthood (lazy, no ambition to get a good job, sit at home on their phones all day, hang out and just do drugs constantly) despite coming from relatively stable middle-class homes and no real traumatic issues has me seriously considering if it’s worth pouring myself into children only for them to end up as human lay-abouts who parasite off of my hard work (honestly seems like a 50/50 chance based off of my extended family). My wife’s only sister is also a horrendous mentally-ill psychopath who is addicted to drugs and hates the world for existing, lives on welfare, hates my wife’s parents for no reason despite them being decent, hard-working, and good people who gave them a good home and lots of love. You likely know this type of person, just human garbage. And all of this despite her parents giving them a good middle-class life in a good school district in suburban America (the easiest place in the world to grow up).
  5. Terrified of having a severely disabled (like non-verbal autism) child which seems like a tremendous ordeal for little reward.

All of that said, I love kids and wish I could share a lot of my interests and pass down traditions and see the world through new fresh eyes and have a family to give me meaning as I get older. But seeing how it often (seriously, a 50/50 shot in my extended family) turns out horrifically, I’m not sure it’s worth rolling the dice.

Can I solicit some feedback from mottizens on if you have kids, do you regret it, how is it working out?

Father of five, one of whom has significant special needs. I wrote about him here on DSL) and I think I touch on a number of your questions in that post.

@naraburns nailed it, in particular the discussion of how parenthood is transformative. Those of us on one side of the transition really can't explain it. I will note that it is very easy to imagine all of the ways in which being a parent is a drag and a bore and very difficult to picture how it will radically transform your life for the better.

To your points:

  1. Our respective families are similarly about 1,000 miles (or 1,400 miles) away. It's definitely hard and we treasure time with family as a result. Invest in babysitting early and often.

  2. This doesn't matter at all. People used to raise families in single-room cabins. Our first apartment (while I was doing graduate school and my wife was doing nursing school) was 640 sq. ft. Finances matter much, much less than people think. All of the horrifying news articles you see about how expensive it is to raise a family are fundamentally flawed. The financial hit is less important than radical shifts in the way you have to live your life ... which naraburns already spoke eloquently about. I've opined on this topic before.

  3. Your independence and free time will assuredly be sacrificed as a parent, but you'll be a better person after the tradeoff, I promise.

  4. Well, you have some influence in whether or not this happens -- Bryan Caplan says (correctly) in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that your children are pretty likely to turn out like you and your spouse, so if you want more people like you in the world ....

  5. See my link above. It is a tremendous ordeal. I cannot overstate how much of an ordeal it is. But it is also a tremendous opportunity to grow in virtue and, dare I say, a blessing and a gift ... although it took me many years to understand why.

I have no regrets. Have kids. Be a parent. The world needs good parents and good families. It's the greatest and most fulfilling adventure you can imagine (with the possible exception of marriage).

I always saw myself having kids but I’m not sure I can really commit to losing all of my independence and free time.

This seriously becomes less of an issue when you actually have the kid. A lot of the stuff that you spent that independence and free time on just naturally loses meaning - not all of its meaning, but definitely goes down on priority list.

I enjoy being a dad even though it's been horrible for my life by all measurable indicators. Free time, health, marriage, finances, everything's much worse now. I'd still do it again. @naraburns covers the details of it. You're not actually a real human being connected to the human world you seemingly inhabit until you've become a parent. My wife regrets it, but my wife also still clings to her pre-parent identity as a hedonist who exists to consume product and gratify herself for the rest of her life.

1 I have family nearby but the relationship between them and my wife is not great. My mother in particular is kind of insane. Her family is in a state that’s about a 10-hour drive away.

Not having a grandma on standby will be a problem, and you will have it noticeably harder than parents who do. But you have money, so you can hire help or make do by working less.

2 [Housing]

Stop worrying. A baby doesn't need a big house. Having an extra room won't be an advantage at all until the child is a few years older.

3 I always saw myself having kids but I’m not sure I can really commit to losing all of my independence and free time. I tend to need a lot of down time from my job and I don’t know if I can handle being always “on” with a kid in the mix.

You can. Or rather, the person you will become under greater pressure can. The more years you've spent independent, without constant responsibility for others, with lots of free time in which to do as you please, the harder the adjustment will be, but you will sweat out a lot of inefficiencies and time-wasting behavior, you will shed many of your lowest priorities, and it will work out. You are not a delicate flower, or a creature made for leisure. To lean on the evo-psych armchair, something like that would never have survived.

4 [Risk of Faiilure]

Yeah, this might be a problem. It's always a gamble how kids turn out, and having bad genetics or a family history of problems doesn't help the odds. That said, it's your job to learn from the mistakes of your forebears. What could they have done to not screw up your relatives? What would you have done in their shoes? You will raise zero kids better than they did if you don't have any.

5 Terrified of having a severely disabled (like non-verbal autism) child which seems like a tremendous ordeal for little reward.

It might happen. It's unlikely. Everything in life is a gamble, but the odds are in your favor here. I know several families who have dealt with this kind of issue, and they all took massive damage over it, no matter how much of a smile they put on, and I wish there were some way to, to put it crassly, put such kids out of everyone's misery. But somehow the parents themselves seem not to think that way. Even that can be dealt with. But again, to repeat, it's unlikely.

Stop worrying. A baby doesn't need a big house. Having an extra room won't be an advantage at all until the child is a few years older.

It is actually an advantage if the grandparents are willing to stay and help with the baby

If you're going into it with the mindset of "they better not be parasites" then probably don't. Don't expect gratitude or repayment because they never got to agree to that deal.

Also worth considering that if those kids ended up human layabouts, then despite "no traumatic issues" their parents must have done something wrong.

FWIW I have seen several human parasite layabouts turn out to be somewhat adequate parents themselves when push came to shove. Certainly far from par, but not exactly abject failure either. Not something to be proud of as a progenitor, but at least they give the next generation after them a chance to do better.

Can you explain what exactly a fake email job is? Sometimes I worry I have one lol.

This may help.

Ok yeah no, I bring in millions for my company pretty directly every year. Jesus I didn't realize how fake some of these jobs were... absolutely absurd.

I bring in millions for my company pretty directly every year.

What do you do?

@naraburns said pretty much everything I would say, only he said it more eloquently and in more detail. My sons are 13 and 15. My wife was 26 when she had our first, and I was a few years shy of forty. I have heard guys say they'd never have kids if they were too old for fear they couldn't throw the ball around with their sons. To that, I say pick up some goddam weights or go for a jog. It's fine. I also noted, as did nara, that your wife may lean toward No but at the same time extenuating circumstances may be what's contributing to that. Not some fundamental unwillingness to be a mother. Though of course you know best.

I would also suggest the timing is never perfect (true of most anything.)

Many women and girls get pregnant by "accident" and don't want the child, or the dad bails, etc. etc. Of the universe of couples who could have children perhaps you two are of the lot who should be having them.

My children are the absolute best thing I've ever done (with help). I can't tell you what to do, but I can say that.

I think you shouldn't have kids unless you are both at least tentatively in the "yes" camp, personally. It's a big commitment which requires a shitload of sacrifice. If your wife is leaning towards "no" at the moment, is she going to be able to embrace the freedom she will have to give up to have those children? It seems to me like it'll be a lot harder for her.

My wife and I don't have children (and can't, as she had to have a hysterectomy a couple of years ago). I do not personally have any regrets. I think that children are a burden, not a blessing, and I am grateful that we don't have that weighing our lives down. I have two nephews (whom I love a great deal), and they scratch the paternal itch pretty well for me. We may come to regret it as we reach old age and have nobody around for us, although to be honest I don't really imagine I will live that long so the point may be moot. But for now, no regrets at all.

To take this a step back, my wife and I are constantly confused by the married couples who got married without being on the same page beforehand. I understand that things can change (especially from a no to a maybe to a yes).

But watching people start their lives together with a 'we'll see what happens' or even worse (which we've seen) - agree to disagree, is maddeningly self-inflicted strife.

I think you shouldn't have kids unless you are both at least tentatively in the "yes" camp, personally. It's a big commitment which requires a shitload of sacrifice. If your wife is leaning towards "no" at the moment, is she going to be able to embrace the freedom she will have to give up to have those children? It seems to me like it'll be a lot harder for her.

Exactly this. I've seen too many marriages and relationships fall apart on the divided question of children.

Can I solicit some feedback from mottizens on if you have kids, do you regret it, how is it working out?

My children are grown. I have no regrets. I am proud of how they turned out. I do sometimes experience disappointment in them, too, but mostly in a self-recriminating way. "If I had only known then what I know now I could have been a better parent"--true, but I would not know what I know now if I had not been a clumsy parent then. I do not know where the quote comes from, but I find it to be accurate:

When you're a kid, you don't realize you're also watching your parents grow up.

So I watched JD Vance's "cat ladies" tempest in a teapot with some amusement. It was not well put, but I think he was broadly correct. People who don't raise children never really become adults, in the sense of being robustly full members of a community that existed before them, and will persist when they are gone. They simply do not, and likely cannot, value the world in the same way. Now, probably some people who do raise children also never really become adults in this sense; there are no guarantees! But people who never raise children, whether by chance or by choice, are different from people who raise children. There is a shift in perspective that cannot be replicated through mere exposure to the relevant ideas. One must have the experience.

The difference is perhaps best captured in Bertrand Russell's "knowledge by description" and "knowledge by acquaintance." L.A. Paul explores this with specific reference to parenting in Transformative Experience. The book is not long but even so it is a bit padded. The basic thesis is this: you can't really know what it's like to be a parent, until you have kids. (Paul also uses the example of becoming a vampire!) Consequently, you can't decide to have kids based on what you think having kids would be like for the person who you currently are, because the experience will transform you into a different kind of person, and you can't know in advance whether having kids will be good for that person. Rather, you can only ask yourself whether you value the possibility of transformation.

I have seen such transformations play out in ways large and small. Parents of disabled children are routinely subjected to harrowing difficulties, and yet they are often some of the most humble, charitable, pro-social people you could ever wish to meet. It would be strange indeed if nature only gave disabilities to the children of people who were already amazingly virtuous! So I can only conclude that while these people would not have chosen to have a disabled child, it is nevertheless a worthwhile transformation to court.

More specifically, why do you lean toward "yes?" Why does your wife lean toward "no?" In most cultures, your wife will bear most of the opportunity costs, but it sounds from your post like her objection is really just "want a bigger house." How big? I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I would descriptively call that a "shallow" objection; it's a 100% solvable problem if you want it enough to prioritize it over other things. Plus, babies don't care how big your house is. This, basically.

All of your concerns meet similar responses. What if your kids are lazy? Well--what if they're not? What if your kids are crazy? Well--what if they're not? The risks of parenting are real, but so are the rewards. All you can do is decide whether you are ready and willing to undertake the transformation (with the additional caveat that the transformation will be different if you wait--the best time for a woman to have babies is in her 20s, maybe 30s, and hesitation will only increase the eventuality of the risks with which you are specifically concerned).

There are probably some specific situations in which people should choose to not raise children, but those people should also understand that there are some perspectives and emotions that this really will close off to them. This does not make the childless less human, but it does give them less exposure to the totality of the human experience. Some people who have children "fail" to grow in these ways, or through no fault of their own (or perhaps fault of their own!) produce regrettable offspring. There is no cosmic scale on which you can weigh your possible futures in advance! All you and your wife can decide is whether you collectively regard the project of raising children as intrinsically worthy, regardless of how it turns out. In my experience, it definitely is! But of course: your mileage may vary.

I don't think we should be assigned disabled children to improve our character. I think parents of disabled kids are probaly nice for the same reason fat people or disabled people often are. They have to be or no one will help them.

I'm pro kids, but not for improving your own character. I know plenty of selfish terrible parents. It doesn't see to cure any character defects that I've ever witnessed, I've certainly seen adding kids to the picture make it worse.

I don't think we should be assigned disabled children to improve our character.

Nor do I, nor does anyone I know.

I think parents of disabled kids are probaly nice for the same reason fat people or disabled people often are. They have to be or no one will help them.

And while that is bad in various ways, it is possible to notice the tradeoffs, no?

I'm pro kids, but not for improving your own character. I know plenty of selfish terrible parents. It doesn't see to cure any character defects that I've ever witnessed, I've certainly seen adding kids to the picture make it worse.

You seem to have missed all the parts of my comment where I already accounted for that. It's true: having kids won't necessarily make you a better person! But having children, even healthy ones, has a way of confronting us with our own limitations, and expanding our circle of concern beyond our own immediate desires in a very non-hypothetical way. If you have never seen a selfish woman become "selfish" on behalf of her children instead, or a disinterested father become a doting father at the first sight of his child, then you simply can't have observed very many parents in your life. It's a cliche for a reason: having kids really can change you.

But as I said several times: it's not guaranteed, which is why the choice to become a parent has to be grounded in the possibility and pursuit of a worthwhile transformation, rather than in the certainty of any particular [whatever].

I have kids and feel like they are the best decision of my life.

I would say that you should prepare as much as you reasonably can beforehand if you don't expect to get any support. Alternatively, is it at all possible to move closer to your wife's family if they're nice and supportive? Would that solve the house situation as well maybe? Is the lack of support that makes your wife apprehensive?

Have kids. I have a severely disabled (like non-verbal autism) child, and I still think it's worth it.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these- what are your small-scale conspiracy theories? Not big stuff(eg jewlluminati secretly controls the world) not culture war par excellence- what small scale conspiracy theories do you hold to on a gut level?

A few of mine-

  1. US schools routinely skip math prerequisites to cover up for poor instructional practices on an institutional basis, allowing a face saving way to have students repeat entire levels in college.

  2. gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain. Damaged wheat crops are harvested with roundup to kill the plant, thus drying out the wheat, and TPTB would rather blame gluten than roundup.

gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain. Damaged wheat crops are harvested with roundup to kill the plant, thus drying out the wheat, and TPTB would rather blame gluten than roundup.

The other possibility is folic acid fortification, which started in 1998.

  1. Cops know pretty much everything about the drug trade, but don't shut it down because farming is easier than hunting

  2. Most vegetables in the US taste horrible because fitting tasty veggies into the industrial process is too expensive and people wouldn't buy them

  3. Everybody in education gave up on educating anybody decades ago (I mean if you want to learn, or you parents want you to, they won't stop you, but if you don't, they are 100% fine with it and really have no preference either way) and schools are basically warehouses to keep kids relatively unharmed while parents are at work and make them socialized enough they won't resort to cannibalism and serial killing if left unsupervised once graduating.

  4. A lot of people in tech are getting tons of money for furiously doing nothing important or necessary because big tech can afford it, and one of the reasons Musk is hated is because his actions threaten to reveal that fact. The correlation between income and quality of work pretty much doesn't exist.

  5. About 99% of stock analytics explaining daily stock movements by certain events are either vacuously trivial ("stock drops on bad news") or complete bullshit, any nontrivial movements are truly random and nobody can consistently predict it or meaningfully explain it.

  6. Gell-Mann amnesia is the sole reason why "journalist" and "unfunny clown" aren't largely synonymous.

  7. Nobody knows how to do hiring properly. All the interview techniques and trainings are groping in the dark and hoping it'll work out (which it usually does because the ultimate interests are aligned) but it pretty much doesn't matter what happens outside of the extremes (no filtering at all and excessive filtering which just filters out people who aren't desperate enough). Most value hiring agencies and consultants provide is CYA and allowing to blame somebody else if things go wrong.

  8. The entire field of nutrition and dietology is fake. Outside of treating some well-defined deficiency or intolerance diseases (like, if you allergic to X, avoid foods containing X) they can give no useful advice to an average person that would have higher than random chance of succeeding. Once medications like semaglutide become common, the whole field would occupy the niche between tarot reading and feng-shui furniture arrangement.

gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain.

Gluten is probably a fall guy for fructans or other difficult-to-digest oligosaccharides that are naturally present in some grains.

At any given time, the FBI knows about up to a half dozen active serial killers.

I mean serial killers in the classic sense; killing random strangers with whom they do not have a prior relationship, not gang, drug, or domestic violence related.

There's zero public announcement of this fact because the FBI doesn't want to induce any sort of panic or deal with the inevitable media circus. More ominously - more conspiratorially - I also believe the FBI is aware they cannot prosecute the cases. They may even know who the killer is. How does the FBI "know" without proving? Data. Sites like The Murder Accountability Project have identified previously undisclosed "murder clusters." Collect enough details about a crime scene and that's almost a tailor-made problem for a basic classification algorithm. Considering there are always non-public details about crime scenes, the FBI should be able to connect murders over even a wide geography fairly trivially with some basic data science plus manual review.

At the root of this conspiracy is the plain fact that solving a murder between strangers is hard. The overwhelming majority of criminal violence occurs between people who know each other and its always over money (or another "currency" like drugs), conflicts of love and sexual interest, or perceived respect and honor violations. Offenders and victims are 90%+ of the time young males. When none of those factors are present, law enforcement struggles to find all the necessary ingredients for a prosecution: motive, means, opportunity, suspect. Unless you more or less catch a serial killer in the act or with a room full of trophies, it's hard to even begin an investigation.

Compounding the conspiracy, I think the serial killers of today are more aware of both police investigative procedures and evidentiary processes. There's a tidal wave of information available anonymously now because of the digitization of various court records. Finding police process manuals online isn't hard. There are hundreds of online communities that discuss various law enforcement methods and the challenges in dealing with the fourth amendment (among others). If we take as our model serial killer a deliberate and methodical individual, I can see how a little bit of Applied Internet Autism could provide a competitive advantage towards "getting away with it."

I have thought about the fact that digital technology does make it fundamentally easier to track movements. If law enforcement can narrow a time of murder down to a few hours and know the place of murder (not necessarily the same place where a body was recovered), they could potentially piece through CCTV footage etc to at least scan for a suspect, right? Surely, with cell phones, they could just see who was in the area?

Well, the latter is an obvious fourth amendment issue. I don't see the FBI trying to get a court to give them a subpoena for cell location data for every human within given coordinates over an hours long timeframe. Certainly not for a single "basic" murder. If the circumstances pointed to a serial killer, I still think a judge is dubious. The FBI appears to be willing to bend and break the rules for highly political cases, but your run of the middle blood-and-guts may not meet the bar for officially sanctioned dirty tricks. The former (CCTV streaming) is a law enforcement ROI problem. Is a detective / FBI agent really going to sit through hours and hours of random footage trying to find some guy going into a park at 9:15 with a hooker and coming out at 10:30 alone? Even if they have a sincere desire to do so, I have a hunch the general case load is so high they can't actually devote a full day to doing it without getting severely behind on their other work. Instead, you're looking for quick access "smoking guns." DNA or fingerprints that get hits own known previous offenders. Cell phone data of the victim that literally says something like "I'm meeting this guy at the park at 9:15" combined with a call log to a dozen numbers the police can easily screen against. If these "level one" pieces of evidence are not present, I don't think the cops throw up their hands and go "it can never be solved!" I think they pause for a moment and think, "how much do we want to sink into this to solve a murder that could be extremely difficult to try in court?"

So, law enforcement and the FBI in particular know about these likely offenders and do not pursue them both because of some very serious difficulty in actually building the case combined with questionable "return" (pardon that indelicate analogy) on a high level of investment of time and effort. This is why I like it for a low grade conspiracy. No grand plots or narratives. No massive coordinate coverups. Just garden variety bureaucracy, poor organizational management and orientation, and difficult problem constraints that all combine to form an abysmal outcome.

I think most serial killer cases today will solve themselves, in that they will eventually turn into pretty open and shut style murders. Serial killers, according to the literature, eventually get kind of sloppy or they escalate and get more brazen, thereby taking on more risk. Eventually, you have a crime scene with a ton of physical evidence, some eyeball witnesses, and a zeroed-in timeline.

(Closing tangent) I've written about some of the basic philosophy of policing before. Leaving how fucked up the execution of law enforcement currently is, I think the philosophy ought to be oriented around crime prevention and fast interdiction of immediate crime. The investigation of already committed crime is always disproportionately resource intensive. Two cops in a squad car rolling through a rough neighborhood regularly might effectively prevent one gang member from shooting another. And that's done at some fraction of the cost of those two cops' salaries plus the cost of procuring their cruiser and the training pipeline it took to get them on the street. The detective work and court work for the prosecution of that same hypothetical shooter - should he actually pull out the gun and shoot - easily gets into the millions of municipal dollars.

I think most serial killer cases today will solve themselves, in that they will eventually turn into pretty open and shut style murders.

Often a victim gets away or kills the killer. It goes down as burglary or attempted rape, since it's generally not clear that the killer was planning to kill them.

I hadn't thought of that, but it tracks.

There's something profoundly destitute about that. A living monster is never investigated because it looks like he was some lower level hoodlum who fucked up an attack. Life goes on.

US schools routinely skip math prerequisites to cover up for poor instructional practices on an institutional basis, allowing a face saving way to have students repeat entire levels in college.

This is perhaps more merited impossibility or celebration parallax than a conspiracy theory: We're not lowering standards in the name of equity, but it's a good thing that we are in helping non-Asian minorities.

gluten is a fall guy for glyphosate in the wheat supply chain

At least in bread, I've always assumed the "gluten" problem was related to moving from relatively long ferments with high levels of wild yeast and bacteria (ie: sourdough) to the now-ubiquitous Chorleywood process.

Those strains do a lot of interesting stuff to the resultant product. I can leave sourdough sitting on my counter for days at a time without it molding, unlike store bread. The fermentation process also lowers phytic acid levels.

Humans have fairly simple guts compared to even other omnivores. Maybe we're better suited to eating something that's been partially broken down already, and acidic enough to keep out more harmful microbiota?

I'm trying to think of new ones I haven't done before.

-- The Hur report by the special counsel who described Biden presenting as "as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" was actually just using bitchy language to get back at Biden for using standard answers. The classic way to respond to a politically motivated investigation deposition is to say "I don't recall." "I can't confirm that, I don't remember." "I don't know which day that was, or who was in the room, or what was said." Refuse to confirm anything, don't give them anything. This is a cliche. Biden did that, and then Hur turned around and used it against him passive aggressively. Biden couldn't exactly argue against it and say "No I can totally remember all that, I was LYING in the interview!" Which, fair play to Hur.

-- Musk's Twitter adventure all started with him intending to buy enough shares to get on the board and annoy people and pressure policy, but he quickly found himself in a mess because he purchased the shares without disclosing the purchase properly and under SEC investigation. Twitter corporate management, knowing that Musk wanted to use his power to oppose, harm, and maybe fire them, got in touch with Musk after his purchase telling him that he would have to act in the best interest of the company if he were on the board, essentially telling him all the things he couldn't say without being subject to a lawsuit for betraying the company, which were all things he was saying all the time constantly. Musk, between the SEC and the reality of getting a board seat, decided that the best way out was through and put in an offer for the whole company, figuring there was a good chance that in negotiations he could get out of the whole thing and maybe get Twitter to buy him out. Then the social media downturn hit, and Twitter wasn't going to let him out of it at all, and now he's stuck with it.

-- European universities that are haughty about open American legacy admits do the same thing, just in secret. Too many obvious examples of social immobility to otherwise explain. This isn't actually a bad policy, I think all affirmative action/DEI type stuff would be better if done in secret, but I roll my eyes when Brits lecture us about Legacy admissions in American universities. Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

-- The entire car industry is secretly confused by the fact that the car is close to being a solved engineering problem. We've converged on solutions that answer basically every question that car companies competed on from 1980 to 2010. Essentially any small AWD CUV with a 2.0 liter turbo four is basically better than 90+% of cars made during that period on acceleration, handling, fuel economy, comfort, convenience, reliability. They all kind of look the same because they've converged on the optimal layout for most users and wind resistance. But nobody can admit this because the whole industry is based on planned obsolescence, brand loyalty and distinction, constant improvement. Car company execs are increasingly concerned with a future in which cars are a commodity product not purchased for any particular reason, but most often on price. Cars are going from deeply personal purchases, like homes, to impersonal and random purchases, like microwaves or non-stick pans or men's undershirts. The flailing around by so many brands that we see today reflects the reality, occasionally acknowledged by Akio Toyoda and Bob Lutz, that the car as we understood it is dead, because it has been perfected. The urge to electrification is both an effort to produce actually-noticeable improvements in acceleration and economy, but doomed to make the problem worse as electrification flattens all those properties.

-- The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!

-- Celebrity romances aren't real or fake, they exist in a kind of human interaction that is completely foreign to non-celebrities, where the human and the economic mingle to a great degree.

The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!

Blacks physically mature a bit more quickly than whites, and there is a real bias against white players at the high school level. Tall white kids tend not to get court time on the high school teams and often go over to baseball where being a tall pitcher is a plus.

Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

Who are these old Oxbridge families?

The royals themselves are split between St Andrews, Exeter, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Cambridge. Hugh Grosvenor, the archetypical old money aristocrat, went to Newcastle.

But that's besides the point, the fact is that university admissions in the UK are handled by either:

a) disinterested bureaucrats who don't care who your father is and are only looking at your grades

b) academics who care intensely about how smart next year's undergraduate class is going to be

The main reason US universities engage in legacy admissions is to ensure donations from wealthy families. UK universities really only started chasing after donors the way American universities do about ten years ago. There aren't any legacy children to admit because the whole thing of children going to their parents Alma Mater just isn't a thing here.

Oxbridge are in fact more meritocratic than most UK universities, because they interview as well as relying on how well you did in school.

Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball:

IIRC USSR had good basketball teams, many great player were from Baltics. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvydas_Sabonis

I don't think basketball correlates with race in any meaningful way, it's more a social phenomenon in the US. Without racism, in the US you'd still expect more black top players than white because sports as venue for prosperity for black players is culturally supported now and also because other venues are less accessible, but you certainly don't expect homogeneity like there is now. And of course among 300+ million people there would be great white basketball players. Just right now they probably would rather do something else then get into the whole racial issue.

The Serbia-USA game proved conclusively that the racial makeup of the NBA is mostly the result of racism. An all white team played the USA all star team to the fourth quarter, a USA team that didn't feature a single white player. There wasn't a single white American who was even particularly close! Yet even if we assume that Slavs are uniquely, among whites, good at basketball: the USA has vastly more Slavic citizens than Serbia. You have to play serious genetic gymnastics to come out with a logical genetic explanation for American slavs relative lack of talent compared to European slavs. We're missing out on a lot of talented players!

It’s not Slavs qua Slavs that overperform- it’s specifically south-west Slavs. I’m not sure there’s as many people from the former Yugoslavia in the US as you think.

Turkey once in a while ends up with pretty good male basketball teams and they are always almost entirely manned by people who (themselves or their families) emigrated sometime in the last ~150 years from western balkans.

Yugoslavia had a very good basketball tradition as well so maybe some of this is simply good sports education. But comparing the physical attributes of your average Anatolian to Bosniak immigrant, it’s not difficult to draw some conclusions.

We also see current NBA stars from Lithuania and Poland. There are more Polish americans than there are Serbians or Lithuanians. There's enough genetic timber that we ought to be developing it, and we clearly aren't.

Balts aren't Slavic.

The two groups that reliably produce an outsized portion of basketball players are balts (specifically Latvians and Lithuanians) and Dinaric Slavs, which both are among the tallest European subgroups, with the latter being literally the tallest group on earth.

You say we see current NBA stars from Poland, there is literally one player. There are more players from Montenegro (a country of some 600k) than Poland.

We see more current NBA stars from either than we see from the white portion of America. There are literally currently none, haven't been in years.

Is this when I note that the one "polish" player in the NBA was born in America, is half black and is not a star?

No this is the part where I admit I got Porzingis' nationality wrong.

Blacks in America are also willing to min/max for athletics. You're right, though, we don't hear slavic names in professional sports in the USA even compared to other whites, which points to a talent pipeline that doesn't cover parts of the population.

Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

Definitely true in the UK, definitely not true in Ireland.

Ok, buddy, every old Oxbridge family just has superior genetics.

This is a misunderstanding of how British college admissions work. Unlike in the US, in the UK you apply not only to a college, but to a degree. If you apply to an Oxford college for English, you are competing with the other people who applied to that Oxford college for english literature, and to some extent to other Oxford colleges for english literature (afaik at undergraduate level the college choice is a preference thing). You are not competing with people who applied to Oxford for physics, or math, or medicine.

The failsons and daughters of the upper classes simply know to apply to degrees that either cover subjects the plebs never even learn or develop an interest in (like classics), subjects that don’t lead to a good living (like drama, literature, and theology), subjects designed for rich estate-owning aristocrats and nobody else (land management and agricultural studies) or extremely obscure subjects that only a rich dilettante would care for (niche sub-categories of art like oriental/asian/middle eastern religious iconography or whatever, for example).

If someone says they went to Oxford or Cambridge, it’s not the same thing as saying they went to Harvard or Stanford. Getting into one of the least-subscribed courses at Oxbridge is easier than getting into many degrees at even third-tier British universities. If they did math or medicine it is fair to say they are probably pretty smart.

mostly the result of racism

There are other explanations besides racism even if there is no ethnic difference in propensity to be skilled at basketball.

Getting into one of the least-subscribed courses at Oxbridge is easier than getting into many degrees at even third-tier British universities. If they did math or medicine it is fair to say they are probably pretty smart.

This is a stretch. I'm not aware of any Oxbridge course that will let you in without a minimum of AAA at A-level, while maths at UEA will consider you with ABB if they're the right subjects (and UEA isn't third-tier). You're right about medicine, but that's a bit of a special case.

‘The right subjects’ is doing a lot here. An A* in History is easier than a C in Further Math. And by third tier I meant still within the top grouping of UK universities, where Oxbridge is tier one, the next rung down is like Durham, tier 3 is like Bristol or Exeter or something.

An A* in History is easier than a C in Further Math.

A-level results in 2024:

Percentage of A* grades in History: 5.7%

Percentage of C grades (or above) in Further Maths: 89.8%

There could of course be a selection effect, whereby brighter students take FM than take History (which could explain why 28.7% of FM students get an A*). Still, I don't think that alone is enough to make the argument that History really is that much easier than FM, given the massive difference in grade attainment.

For what it's worth, Oxbridge students are generally very smart IME, regardless of what they study.

And by third tier I meant still within the top grouping of UK universities,

Fair.

You apply for a degree in the usa as well.

Have you read Tom Wolfe’s “I Am Charlotte Simmons”? He gets into the basketball talent pipeline in some detail.

I haven't, but I love his work so I'll have to check it out!

I should clarify that it discusses college level and below. It is worth reading for its own sake, though.

Very underrated book. Wolfe is so good I remember enjoying Charlotte Simmons immensely.

Regular, extremely intensive exercise in early middle age increases the chance of an early death compared to being healthy, skinny, but doing only limited exercise.

Who's the conspirator here? Big Gym?

Do you think that this effect mostly comes from the relative increase in calorie intake to compensate for the exercise?

What range is "early middle age"?

There is no coverup of poor institutional practices in math. They’re in plain sight, and often equally screwed up at the college level.

I’m playing Star Wars Outlaws pretty lazily this Sunday morning. One thing that always strikes me about Ubisoft games is that these things, which surely cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, are held almost entirely back by their poor writing, which must be responsible for a small fraction of even 1% of the game’s budget.

Sure, the gameplay is nothing special, but it’s not worse than the gameplay in, say, Naughty Dog or Rockstar games that have 97 on Metacritic and many devoted fans. The world design, graphics and art are mostly excellent. The progression is less annoying than some previous Ubisoft games, the worlds are dense and populated, the minigames are mostly fun.

The problem, which Ubisoft seems to have had forever, is that they just can’t write. I don’t merely mean in the ‘modern Hollywood is often bad at writing’ way we sometimes discuss here, I mean something leagues below that. It’s not that it’s cringe or it’s woke, it’s that it sounds so alien, so foreign, so not-like-actual-dialogue that I can’t believe it was written by a professional writer. The failure can’t be blamed on Disney either, it’s reflected in pretty much every AAA game Ubisoft has made for at least the past ten years.

Similarly, I find it hard to believe this is an unsolvable issue. Hire a few screenwriting grads with OK portfolios (plenty of recruiters can presumably do this for them), pay them $100,000 a year each (the studio is based in Sweden, I presume this is a good salary there for a creative occupation), and let them write a story that is somewhat interesting.

People that are smart, and are interested in writing, will generally not be interested in video game writing. They'll want to be authors, or journos, or work in more prestigious arts like film.

People that are smart and interested in video games will probably not be writers. They'll most likely be programmers or some form of designer. Perhaps if they create themselves or rise high enough they'll also take on the writing, hence why all the games regarded as being well written generally come from creator figures like Avellone or Ken Levine or the Houser brothers.

As such, you're not going to be getting great talent coming through organically. The other issue video games face is that it is an incredibly popular industry. There are millions of people who dream of making their own video game and are willing to do anything to work in gaming. Thus, supply of labour is extremely high, and as such gaming companies can treat their employees like shit, with terrible salaries and conditions, knowing that there are thousands more out there ready to jump in. The reason why a studio doesn't just reach out to offer a decent salary to a grad is that it will upset the apple cart, wrecking a studio's salary structure - plus it probably just doesn't occur to them.

Now, the sheer mass of willing talent does somewhat counteract the first point, and I expect the passage of time will lead to greater willingness to go into game writing as opposed to the other areas (which are also infamously terrible in terms of pay and conditions).

People that are smart, and are interested in writing, will generally not be interested in video game writing. They'll want to be authors, or journos, or work in more prestigious arts like film.

There was a pretty decent amount of art school grads hopping into gamedev back in the 90's. Thing is that real artists demand autonomy, so if you start imposing a ton of top-down rules they'll rapidly jump ship, and your team of would-be auteurs is replaced by a bunch of video-game loving dorks who doodle orcs in their notebook (no offense). Never forget that Team Silent formed from a group of ne'erdowells whom Konami placed zero faith in because they floundered in that corporate structure.

I assume there is no direct link (or at least perceived direct link) between writing quality and game revenue. Thus, no effort is made to seek out good writers and filter out bad writers, and even if they accidentally get somebody that could do good writing, they would not be doing their best work because why bother if it doesn't matter anyway? And they probably take the cheapest ones and overwork them severely, because "I saved 20% of the budget" looks good in a promotion package.

Similarly, I find it hard to believe this is an unsolvable issue. Hire a few screenwriting grads with OK portfolios (plenty of recruiters can presumably do this for them), pay them $100,000 a year each (the studio is based in Sweden, I presume this is a good salary there for a creative occupation), and let them write a story that is somewhat interesting.

My impression is that the "writing industry" is stark raving mad. A lot of people fancy themselves good writers. Some even are. Most cannot make a living writing; many who make a living writing are not that great at it. Effectively screening candidates for a writing position without reading voluminous samples (of dubious provenance!) is basically impossible.

I can think of a variety of reasons why this might be so, but I suspect it boils down to "most people can write, few can write well, and what separates them is often fuzzy and difficult to establish (but probably g-loaded)." One recent example, a student of mine was hired to the marketing team of a tech startup in 2022. Her degree is in graphic design, they started her at $70,000 annually, and it is a 100% work from home position (coincidentally, I observe that "WFH" used to mean "write for hire" in most employment contexts--COVID changed many things!). But she recently reached out to me for some advice as the rest of her team got downsized. The business degree "marketing lead" and the English degree "content writer" she worked with were let go in part on the theory that the graphic designer can write marketing content, but the writer and marketer could not do graphic design. (We had a great conversation about the ethics of using ChatGPT to pick up the extra work her company was throwing at her as a result!)

Add to that a AAA development environment on a licensed IP and I can imagine that things only get exponentially crazier. If the lawyers and executives reviewing your project don't fantasize about how much better a job they could do of it, then they are fantasizing about how much more cheaply they could be getting it done. How many times will a studio need to go through the onboarding-and-eventual-dismissal process of writers slavering over the possibility of a six-figure salary before they get a writer who is actually both good enough and conscientious enough to rate a six-figure salary? And how long before they expect to be promoted from writing content, to "directing" or "consulting" or "advising" on content, at an even higher rate?

I think it's descoping/rescoping that is to blame.

"Hey, writer, write me a story for a 40-hour game"

"Hey, writer, we can't include the Fortress of Foo in the game on time, replace it with something else stat. Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative"

"Hey, writer, the actress that voiced Baria has been cancelled, we need you to remove her from the story. Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative. What do you mean you can't do it, are you a writer or not?"

No self-respecting writer will stick around for this kind of treatment.

What amazes me more than Ubisoft is Bethesda Game Studios. The former forces its studios to crank out new games like Model T's, the latter has total control over its schedule and total creative control and still manages to release games with terrible, atrocious writing.

Remember, the lines have already been recorded, so be creative

This is one of the reasons that I will die on the hill of partial-voiced, Infinity-Engine style. The flexibility to change things, and the freedom for modders, is just wondeful.

Yes, very much so. I don't think games should be fully voice acted, as a rule. In fact I think no voice acting at all is perfectly acceptable.

Streamers are much more likely to play the game if it is fully voiced.

Meh, who cares? Good games will find an audience, no matter whether streamers play it or not.

People that make them care. Yes, exemplary games will find an audience, but merely good games might struggle to sell enough copies without additional exposure.

They shouldn't care. It's not important.

Yeah, I believe it.

Certain studios like Bethesda or Square Enix get a lot of heat for their poor writing, but across the board we don't see any great stories in AAA games anymore. Great stories require holistic coordination, which is the antithesis of modern game/film design where keeping everybody on the same page is by itself a kind of superhuman feat.

What amazes me more than Ubisoft is Bethesda Game Studios. The former forces its studios to crank out new games like Model T's, the latter has total control over its schedule and total creative control and still manages to release games with terrible, atrocious writing.

See, Bethesda doesn’t surprise me anywhere near as much. They’ve made a lot of money, Howard has complete creative control, and they have a bunch of older guys with no real writing skills who have been grandfathered in over the last thirty years as ‘quest designers’ and so on who are really bad at dialogue but who aren’t going to be fired as long as their games are making enough money for Zenimax/Microsoft not to shut them down.

Ubisoft is more of an actual business concern. They open and close studios all the time, Yves Guillemot is unlikely to be personally acquainted, let alone friends with, his senior writers.

No self-respecting writer will stick around for this kind of treatment.

I would say many, many writers would stick around for that kind of treatment if they're getting paid. Whether they're self-respecting or whether the best writers are self-respecting is of course another issue.

I would say many, many writers would stick around for that kind of treatment if they're getting paid.

Not just that. Many will stick around to have a line on their resumes. The writing industry, especially in game development, is all about who you know, and staying at a company to make connections will yield valuable opportunities in the future.

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