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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2860 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 8, 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 do you become a better writer ?

I think and speak in a casual rambly manner. It is good for story telling in person. I'm animated and do quite a lot of voice modulation, so long sentences don't feel as bad. It's allowed me be quick on my feet and can give an impromptu speech with zero notice.

But, in professional settings, it feels cumbersome. I hate reading my own writing back to myself and my elevator pitches feel lacking. The sharp edge of a well-made point gets lost in the layers of qualification and verbose filler.

I want to get better at being concise and pointed. Any suggestions for where I can start ?

I find my writing much more clear and concise when I make a detailed outline first. It helps to get the thoughts out of your head and onto paper where you can begin to fit them together in a more coherent way. I tend to find myself writing in rambling ways when I’m tap dancing around either something I’m not sure about, or that I don’t quite understand. If you ramble in an outline or in scribbles on a piece of paper, you’ll tend to find those things quickly and you can research them more or think more deeply about the point you’re trying to make.

I find Jordan Peterson’s guide (https://www.mr-sustainability.com/internal-stories/2021/jordan-b-peterson-essay-writing-guide) rather useful for nonfiction, and if you want to do fiction, get a good beat sheet ( I use Harmon’s 8 step story circle) and use character sheets from RPGs or the like.

To cut it very short, everyone’s unedited prose is rambling. If you want to be better at writing, you need to learn to plan before you write and edit afterwards. Pantsing in either fiction or nonfiction doesn’t really work unless you’re writing a zero draft you intend to basically cannibalize for good ideas to put into your real writing. Or at least that’s how it ends up for me. I’m sure there are a few natural writers who can actually pants a coherent piece on their first try. It’s rare, and so unless you’re already pretty good at writing in your chosen genre, it’s better to learn to structure your writing first.

Write a million words.

William Zinnser's On Writing Well is by far the best book on concise writing. You end up learning to edit as you write.

Write more, edit yourself more, and find someone who is a strong writer to help you edit your writing. Be merciless and aggressive with the editing. "Kill your babies." Also, read the works of people who are strong writers in the style you want to achieve and emulate them.

Read On Writing. The second half of the book is a nuts and bolts description of how to write better (mostly fiction, but broadly applicable). The first half is mostly biographical but still fascinating.

Classics like The Elements of Style are also useful; perhaps more so if you're trying to trim the fat from your prose. There was a similar book that got me through grad school, but I'm blanking on the name at the moment. This genre mostly taught a style that was dry and concise, optimized for conveying information with the least amount of text possible.

Write and share it with people whose opinions you trust for feedback.

  1. Read well-written books and articles. What you read is just as important as what you write.
  2. Learn grammar. Understand sentence structure and using the correct words.
  3. Learn punctuation. Your writing will improve when you understand, for example, when to use a comma versus a semicolon.

Writing more helps. I really like CGP Grey's half-marks for habit forming. Basically, you make a calendar that has a empty circle for each day and each activity you want to improve on. For each activity you write down the criteria for full effort (fully colored circle), and for partial effort (semi-colored circle). But the cutoff for partial effort is not 50% of full, it's more like 10%. So, for working out you might put: "do a full upper or lower body workout" for full effort and "do one set of bodyweight squats or push-ups to failure or spend five minutes stretching" for partial effort.

Do the same with writing. Have "write a page of text" for full effort and "write a single sentence or edit two" for partial effort. Then print the calendar out and start coloring in the circles. You look at your streak of circles every day and it's really easy to start writing or working out because if you're not feeling it today you can just do a little bit and stop while awarding yourself partial credit.

My advice would probably differ from most of the others here. I believe that your unique “voice” needs to find its own “truth” for you to be seen (or see yourself) as “a better writer”.

For some people this will be more direct and concise. For others this will be more “verbose” and “rambly” to use your words. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about long sentences. Charles Dickens often wrote long sentences. David Foster Wallace was seen by some as the greatest novelist of his generation and some of his sentences were pages long. The key thing that set both of them apart was they wrote what was absolutely true for them. Ernest Hemingway (who typically wrote in short, direct, pared back style) had some famous advice for writers: “Make every sentence the truth.”

That prompts a different question: “How do you know what’s true?”

My belief is that this is a matter of feel and intuition. Your mind might not always tell you what’s true. But your body will. Something somewhere in your body, some wave of small emotion, some inkling that might even express itself in the formation of a tear or two behind your eyes, will communicate itself when you find words that express a truth.

Also, this is not a 0 or 1. There are a million decimal points on the journey from falsehood to truth in your writing. The staircase stretches far far into the hazy distance and you can never see the top, you can just keep climbing.

Also, good luck.

How do you become a better writer ?

Humourously I often ask myself the same question for precisely the opposite reason. I am concise to the point of cutting vital details, I find it extremely challenging to write at length. I'm two sentences deep into a comment and already getting writer's block. It's awful.

I’m also like that and I shudder when I read about how long essays seem to be required from American college students. My masters thesis had barely more text than some of those essays (and Google Scholar lists a bunch of citations for the thesis, so at least some people found it good).

Kill commas and and's.

Seriously. Comma splicing caveats is common. Interspacing additional phrases is natural. Doing so is often unnecessary compared to just shortening one sentence to make two or using a single adjective. Don't ask how to be concise and punchy. Being concise is the punch. Adding 'and punchy' was what made it less so.

Obviously you don't need to always write like that, and commas can help merge things together, but it's a crutch habit that leads to weaker writing.

To answer your question- the way to becoming a better writer is by writing. You can start by trying to rewrite your post with as few 'and' and commas as possible.

(No, seriously. Try it and reply with your rework.)

To answer your question-

Kill the dash, too.

The em dash is probably one of the most misunderstood punctuation marks. It works well when a comma is too weak but a colon or set of parentheses is too strong. It puts a nice pause in the text — and it is underused in professional writing.

The em dash is like a delicate but dangerous tool: reckless use can lead to injury. They're great for inserting non-related information in the middle of a sentence -- I do this a lot -- but as a way to pause text? No way. A period is sufficient in most cases. Single em dashes create unnecessary whiplash in a sentence.

Non-glowing brain: " - "
Dimly-glowing brain: " -- "
Moderately-glowing brain: " – "
Brightly-glowing brain: "--"
Galaxy brain: "—"

Or at least don't use a hyphen.

How do improve at writing ?

I ramble. My sentences are long. My claims are laid with qualifications. In person I modulate. So sentences don't feel long. Works for impromptu speeches, but is cumbersome in writing.

I've come to hate my writing. My elevator pitches lack punch. The sharp edge of a well-made point gets lost in verbose filler.

I want to improve at conciseness. Where I can start ?

Thanks. I tried.

It's a little jerky, but is much improved.

but is much improved

No it isn't. This is much worse than what you had in your OP; the "improved" version is horribly stilted and unnatural. What you had in the OP was already fine and it wasn't in particular need of any further corrections.

"Be concise" is one of the most actively harmful "principles" of "good writing" in common circulation, almost on par with the utterly nonsensical "show don't tell" (a word is worth a thousand pictures - there are many "tellings" that are more profound than any "showing" ever could be). Concision is principally valued by those individuals who have neither the constitution to digest substantial amounts of authentically individuated writing, nor the ability to produce it. In some cases, a norm of terseness may function as a defense mechanism. When we tell the empty-headed dullard that he should "be more concise", what we are really telling him is that he should simply not write as much, so that we can spare ourselves the exposure to his writing. But this does not thereby transform the bad writer into a good writer - it merely makes him less of a nuisance. A minute quantity of poison is still poison in its intrinsic constitution, even if it has been reduced to a level where it is no longer dangerous.

Burn all the style guides; they're no good. Read your own writing in good faith, and honestly evaluate the degree to which it is in conformity with the law of your own taste. If you have good taste, it'll lead you right. If you have bad taste, then everything is hopeless from the start, so it doesn't really matter what you do.

Seconded, the original was fine.

This is a start- now look to where some of these are overlapping points that could be consolidated, but without relying on commas. The point of this exercise is not to have the shortest sentence possible for final presentation, but to break what you're trying to say into its constituent parts.

For example

I ramble. My sentences are long.

Can combine without a comma or 'and' by

My sentences are too long because I ramble.

While the later half of this-

In person I modulate. So sentences don't feel long.

-isn't actually a sentence, and breaking it apart isn't required to avoid the 'and' or ,.

In person I modulate my voice so sentences don't feel long.

Meanwhile, these-

I've come to hate my writing. My elevator pitches lack punch. The sharp edge of a well-made point gets lost in verbose filler.

I want to improve at conciseness. Where I can start ?

These are better. They could be improved- a general point of good communication is to avoid vague figures of speech ('lack punch') because they don't mean a specific connotation and they often don't translate- but these are all distinct thoughts that can be distinct sentence.

Consider use of linking words beyond 'and,' which may be a different word or just using a necessary word in a different form.

For consideration-

I've come to hate my writing.

Do you hate you writing, or do you hate something about your writing? If the later, this could be

I've come to hate my writing's [characteristic you hate]

My elevator pitches lack punch.

Punch is a figure of speech which may be appropriate, but also doesn't imply a specific issue. Maybe this is a case where a different word would help, whether the effect your pitches lack, or the effect.

My elevator pitches take too long.

My elevator pitches aren't persuasive.

I am not satisfied with my elevator pitches.

Finally, these?

I want to improve at conciseness. Where I can start ?

These aren't just better- these are good. Distinct thoughts, no fluff words, no unnecessary clauses.

Back to the recommendation for you-

Do this exercise again. Iterate on what you just did and produce a third version. Put the first and third version side by side. A powerpoint works well here since you can put the posts in two different text blocks.

Then print it out and take it to a mentor you trust and ask for help finding a writing coach. Or even ask a boss. Believe it or not, bosses often love to receive better-written reports, and will happily help someone who wants to make their lives easier.

If your job has some form of structured 'train yourself' time, make this a project for a period (a month, a quarter), and use either company resources or online resources. Depending on how your job does its evaluation system, you could even build this sort of thing into your personal training / assessment plan as an annual objective. 'In 2025, I will spend at least one training session a month working on my writing skills' is both a target and a quantifiable performance objective.

Finally, just some rules to think on.

Crutch vs Utility Words

'And' and commas are often crutches to insert more clauses that wouldn't be needed if you chose better words the first time. That does not mean they should never be used. A good rule of thumb is 'it is okay to make the sentence a little longer if it makes the paragraph shorter.'

[Demonstration: This allows the commas to be used for lists. This allows for the 'ands' to be used for sentences that would otherwise begin the same way. This allows for commas and ands to be used for lists and sentences that would otherwise begin the same way. ]

Alternate Linking Words

One way to minimize the unnecessary 'ands' to improve the use of other linking words. 'Because', 'although,' 'or,' and similar words can be used to mitigate needs for 'and' or even commas. They should only be used once per sentence to limit clause growth.

[Demonstration: You may want to use a comma or 'and' because you don't realize an 'or' creates a two-element list that doesn't need either although they aren't necessary for a three-part sentence either.

Clause Order

Rather than starting a first sentence, and then using a comma to create a second sentence that itself needs a transition, you may be able to make a better flowing sentence that doesn't need the comma if you just reorder the clauses. By reordering the clauses you can improve sentence flow from the start in ways that doesn't need a comma in the first place.

[Demonstration: See above]

Remember the Rule of Three

As in humor, so in writing, keep a three-part structure whenever possible. Focus on three key themes a writing, limit to three clauses a sentence, make lists of three as able. This isn't always possible, but when you can, this helps prioritize your efforts, limit scope creep, and keep a steady cadence.

[Demonstration: Note how the last sentence was three sections, with the third section itself being a list of three.] (Note- there is a term in management sometimes called the span of control, which refers to how many people someone can effectively directly supervise. This number is... three to five.

Recognize When It's a Rule (And Not a Choice) There are cases where a comma or and is appropriate and even necessary: when you are making a list, and every part needs to be separated by a comma, and the last element needs an 'and' to indicate that it's the end of the list. However, there's no requirement for an 'and' within those list elements. An 'and' can sometimes be replaced by a comma to create another list element and sometimes the and can replace a comma, but question if you need both.

Hope some of these help.

These are golden. I'll try internalizing them in my future writing.

How is Jordan Peterson still standing without eating vegetables or fruit?

I’ve eaten essentially 0 fruits and vegetables for the last 4 or 5 years. They’re not a prerequisite for survival.

Do you eat raw spleen? Which raw organ do you eat for vitamin c

Do you eat raw spleen?

Never once.

Which raw organ do you eat for vitamin C

I don’t know. Certainly I don’t eat any raw organs. Is there any vitamin C in milk? I drink a fantastic quantity of milk.

Is there any vitamin C in milk?

No, zero vitamin c in milk. Alternatively: Orange juice? Lemonade or lemonade-y soft drinks?

Most vitamins are much more dense and bioavailable in animal products than vegetable products. Exception being Vit C, which possibly carnivores don't need. Also fiber.

Inuit have survived for thousands of years without fruit and vegetables, I think they get the necessary vitamins from fish oils/fats. We’re a very resilient species, survival on suboptimal-but-liveable diets has been very common.

There's the public version of Peterson who makes outlandish claims and pulls ridiculous stunts (no fruits or vegetables) for his fans. Then there's the private version of Peterson who does eat a healthy diet and keeps a messy room.

He's not looking great, and he's also under absurd amounts of outside stress, so I'm not sure there's a lot of evidence pointing either way.

Lots of people manage without eating fruits and vegetables. Vitamin c is the big issue, but Jordan Peterson presumably gets that from fresh steak. Fiber is the other problem but it’s manageable.

Eating a healthy meat-only diet isn’t that hard, though it is expensive. The key is the right fat/protein ratio and eating fresh meat in appropriate portion sizes.

As far as I understand it any vitamin C in raw meat is substantially reduced by cooking, regardless of the freshness of the meat. Maybe he eats extremely rare steak?

There is a hypothesis that vitamin c is only necessary for digesting/using carbs, and that is why inuit/carnivore diets seem to do fine without it.

Wiki says:

Vitamin C is obtained [among the Inuit] through sources such as reindeer liver, kelp, muktuk, and seal brain;

Can't be that hard. I managed it for a good four years of college.

Do trampoline nets reduce the incidence of serious injuries? (I don't really care about minor injuries like sprained ankles).

This study states that, of children taken to hospital due to trampoline injuries, there was no difference between those whose trampolines had nets and those who did not in terms of the percentage who received severe injuries. Therefore

There is no difference in the severity of the injury regarding trampolines with or without special safety measures. Safety nets do not reduce the risk of severe injury.

But reading it makes me think of this famous picture about selection bias. Could it simply be that many children who would have received injuries, serious or not, didn't get injured because their trampoline had a net?

The again, this study suggests that the introduction of safety features like nets and pads didn't actually make any difference in the number of different categories of injury (at least during the study period). Amazingly, this includes falling off, which you'd think is the one thing that nets would prevent.

I grew up with a net-less trampoline (although it did have cushions covering the springs) and I'd like my kids to enjoy the same, but I can imagine my wife being pretty pissed off if we get an old-fashioned trampoline and someone breaks an arm. I'm not sure how amenable she'd be to the 'risky play is necessary for healthy psychological development' argument if our child has a bone sticking out of his arm.

My neighbors had a netless trampoline growing up and the kids there and a lot of the neighbors jumped on it for hours a day and I don't recall any injuries from it, but most of the falls and near injuries were from hitting the part with the covered springs.

On looking it up there are a bunch of different types of trampoline nets, some that are outside the spring portion and some that are inside the spring portion and of varying heights as well. I imagine if the net were arranged within the springs rather than outside the whole of the trampoline it'd fair much better at preventing injuries than ones that are completely outside of the trampoline because you can still fall onto the covered spring portion which was about 95% of how people fell while using the trampoline either hitting the spring portion and falling off or just hitting the springs and twisting their ankle on them.

The most common factor to people--that I can remember--getting hurt but not really injured, on the trampoline, was multiple people using it at once, though.

Helmets don't reduce bike injuries either. Stats show that people drive riskier around cyclists with helmets than they do with ones without. Cyclists also ride riskier when they have helmets on. You can call it 'induced recklessness'.

Recklessness gets calibrated to perceived risk. If I know that falling off a trampoline means broken bones, I'm not going to be jumping as high.

IMO, the riskiest activities are ones that offer the optics of safety without any material gains. Large cars and soft suspensions are a classic example. Jumping into water from great heights is another. Free soloists (people who climb mountains without ropes) are renowned for dying young. Ironically, most of them die from non-free-solo activities. It's because they're willing to try activities with higher odds of failure than free soloing, if they think failure doesn't mean death. But, 1 badly clipped bolt when leading or a gust of wind in a wingsuit.....and you're just as dead.

The funniest use of this is the proposal of Tullock spikes.

Hilarious followup.

Today, J cut myself on an open tin can. I never cut myself on knives because i take the appropriate care. But tins just sit them innocuously until you touch them and they tear you up.

You can also call it "risk compensation".

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

This perfectly captures it !

I grew up with a trampoline without a net. Never did me no harm.

There has got to be something wrong with that study. Some form of survivorship bias could definitely account for it. Lets say a hospital sees half of trampoline injuries from net-less trampolines, and half from net-having trampolines. Well the relevant information is: what portion of the population has nets for their trampoline? Unless its a 50-50 split, then the hospital data is actually skewed.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/medical-professionals/pediatrics/news/when-its-kids-vs-trampolines-kids-often-lose/mac-20431484

  • Ensuring that a backyard trampoline has a net — that alone can cut the fracture rate in half.
  • Allowing only one child on the trampoline at a time. A significant mismatch in size and weight, such as a teen and a toddler, is especially dangerous.
  • Teaching kids not to jump onto the trampoline from roofs and other high places, which can lead to especially serious injuries.

My daughter is turning 6 and she wants her birthday at a Trampoline park. I'm dreading it, because I don't want to host the party where a kid gets seriously injured. And the party feels somewhat out of character for her. Since her other preferences are for butterflies and princess themes at the party. Or maybe its in character for her since butterflies fly, and she recently watched the Gymnastics Olympics where the women wore "princess" outfits.

Falling off is basically only part of the danger. The other danger is just that you can get a lot of height on trampolines, and that height can all come down in the wrong place or the wrong angle. Sometimes the wrong place is "on another person" sometimes it is off the trampoline. The wrong angle can break or sprain ankles, wrists, etc.

Either way, its maybe a good intermediate step for you to go to a trampoline park, watch your kid closely, and see how fine you feel with their safety in an environment that is monitored and modified for maximum safety. If you are uncomfortable with their behavior there then it will be even worse with an at home trampoline.

Have you thought about taking her to a trampoline park before her birthday to test the waters, so to speak? This way you won't be stuck there if she tries it for a minute and doesn't like it at all. Tell her it's a party rehearsal.

She's been before. She went for another kids birthday, that's how she got the idea.

Ah, okay. Has anyone injured themselves at that party?

Two minor injuries that resulted in lots of tears. But nothing permanent.

I had a trampoline with a net as a kid, and never got a serious injury. I also kind of liked having the net, you could jump up high and grab on to it like Spider-Man.

(Kids will do anything to make their play unsafe.)

A question on voting. Ireland, where I live, uses the "single transferable vote" system. Irish people often favourably contrast it with the "first past the post" used in the UK. I was trying to explain the differences between the two to my girlfriend and illustrate the weaknesses of first past the post relative to STV. One weakness that jumps out even at a casual inspection is that first past the post massively incentivises tactical voting, which by extension likely gives a home advantage to incumbents. Are there any other significant weaknesses to first past the post? Conversely, are there any weaknesses to STV that make first past the post preferable?

There's a lot on this. First past the post isn't a very good system. See wikipedia on voting methods for an intro—there's a bunch of different desirable properties, only some of which are compatible.

  1. FPTP punishes smaller parties, meaning that the breadth of political belief in a country cannot be truly expressed. You'd better like the red or blue rosette parties, because nobody else really matters.

  2. If you vote for a smaller party, this punishes whichever of the main parties you support most. If you vote hard right, you get a left wing government, if you vote hard left, you get a right wing government.

  3. Governments can easily get 1/3 of the votes and 2/3 of the seats.

  4. FPTP rewards separatists, nationalists and regionalists disproportionately. The Nowherestan independence party can get 2-3% of the country-wide vote, and 10% of the country-wide seats because all their voters are concentrated in one region.

  5. Conversely, smaller parties with support that is spread out evenly across the country are punished. A party can get 20% of the vote and 1% of the seats.

  6. FPTP leads to major parties setting their opponents up to fail. In countries where coalition governments are normal, ruling parties have an incentive to act in the long-term interests of the country, as they could well be part of the government governing it for decades. In FPTP countries where power switches sides every few elections, ruling parties have an incentive to leave things in as bad a situation as they can, so that their opponents get blamed for it.

  7. FPTP leads to safe seats, which leads to individual MPs having less incentive to work hard or keep their views and policies responsive to the public.

I purposely used generic examples, but all of these things have happened or do happen in the UK.

Conversely, are there any weaknesses to STV that make first past the post preferable?

Eventually, parties start publishing "slates" which suggest to their voters the full order they should mark candidates in. Then it pretty much boils down to negotiation between parties for positions on each other's slates.

STV proponents assume that individual voters will have individual opinions on the different candidates. I.e. some Conservatives will put the Liberal party second, but others will put the far-right party second, and that proportion will determine the winner. But voting as a bloc is too strong a tactic. Very often an election will end up coming down to which parties can expect great fidelity to their slate.

So you end up with a vast increase in complexity and a great decrease in transparency, just to get the election decided by more backroom negotiation.

In Australia less than half of voters strictly follow their preferred party's official slate (how-to-vote card), though this is still enough to be important.

I would rather have negotiation between parties than the stonewalling we get here.

Plus, even if slates make STV converge on two parties, shouldn’t it break down more elegantly? By voting similar to the slate, you can tune how much you penalize the main party. That reduces the cost of coordinating a switch.

What do you consider a strength or weakness of a democratic system? Does the voter knowing the coalition that would come into power before the election matter? Does a leader having a majority of affirmation votes matter as a matter of legitimacy or political influence? Do party platforms that are harder to abandon on grounds of coalition negotiations count as a strength or weakness?

Different systems do different things, and the nature of the vote-counting is just part of it, as is the nature of the party structure itself. British FPP is based on a parliamentary party system in which there are strong parties and weak ministers who depend on the party to run on the ticket, which is a stark contrast to American FPP where the candidates are far more independent of party control.

Ultimately there is no 'best' system because any system has grounds for being criticized as flawed and illegitimate. Legitimacy is what people make of it, but there's no counter-argument if faith is lost.

The central problem with FPTP is similar parties. Splitting on a single issue is usually electoral suicide, forcing your supporters to choose between a genuine vote for your party or a tactical vote for the one which might actually hit plurality. The more similar, the worse. You can imagine splitting a 66% majority evenly and losing your seat to the remaining 34%. More realistically, it gives you “spoiler” parties which peel 1 or 2 percent off whichever big boy they hate the least.

This sucks! As a voter, you can’t express your first preference without actively hurting your second. As a politician, you can’t break with your party, because you will never be rewarded with success outside their envelope.

There are also effects on ideological coherence. “Big tents” of unrelated policy are encouraged because coalition building happens before voting. As a result, some bizarre issues have been coupled together for historical reasons, and now we’re stuck with them. I would argue it’s also less responsive than allowing coalitions to form within the government.

I feel it's unfair to compare FPTP to STV directly, because FPTP in the UK is used for single member constituencies, but STV is used for multi-member constituencies. I think it's the bigger and more important difference. A multi-member district is much less susceptible to gerrymandering (you can still do packing, which isn't a problem by itself, but cracking is much less efficient when there are four winners and instead of packing 49% into a district you can only pack 19% and can still lose a seat if your candidates aren't perfectly balanced).

However, STV is a pain to process. FPTP is "bigger pile of ballots wins", while STV requires a rather involved procedure where you have to keep track of a combinatorial explosion of expressed voter preferences or recount them multiple times.

First past the post is easily legible and, until the recent drop in voting plus new parties, made sure that the prime minister had been voted for by a near-majority of people.

A medical question. I've often heard it said that one is far more likely to contract HIV as a result of gay sex than straight sex. Is this statement true purely as a result of the incidence of HIV infections in the gay male community (i.e. the proportion of gay men who have HIV is vastly higher than the proportion of straight people) - or is there also a mechanical component that makes the virus more likely to spread via certain sexual activities than others? That is to say, supposing Alice and Bob both have HIV, and they've both had it for the same duration, neither are taking PReP. Is Carl more likely to contract HIV as a result of having anal sex with Bob than as a result of having vaginal sex with Alice? Moreover, if Carl had anal sex with Alice, would he have the same risk of contracting HIV as he would if he had anal sex with Bob? Lastly, does it make a difference who the receptive partner is - is Carl more or less likely to contract HIV from Bob if he's the bottom than if he's the top, or does it make a difference?

Semi-related: in African countries in which it was and is predominantly straight men and women with HIV (to be clear, gay men in these countries still have it at higher rates, but they are not the majority), it was predominantly prostitutes who served as reservoirs for the virus. While the rate of infection was low, it was high enough that, over time, ever larger numbers of straight men (and then their wives and eventual children) became infected.

Lastly, does it make a difference who the receptive partner is - is Carl more or less likely to contract HIV from Bob if he's the bottom than if he's the top, or does it make a difference?

Yes, tops rarely contract HIV through performing anal sex on bottoms (though it is thought to be marginally more common in uncircumcised men than circumsised ones.) Bottoming is the main cause of contracting HIV among men who have sex with men.

I don't know if there is any research on whether a woman receiving anal sex is more, less or the same riskiness as a man receiving anal sex in terms of HIV transmission rates but I'm curious to know the answer.

Unfortunately, most studies specifically looking at heterosexual anal intercourse are either explicitly or implicitly about Vulnerable Populations, which leaves little reason to trust it can be meaningfully compared with the typical study of gay intercourse. Or they just use gay numbers directly for estimates.

There's mechanical and social reasons that it could be riskier for bottoming men (guys on average like it rougher, the prostate exists) or women (less likely to stretch themselves recreationally, selection effects on partners), but it's probably not a knowable number, and my gut check is that it's probably not an orders of magnitude difference.

The mechanical elements are a major part of it, but the social element is probably larger. I just finished And the Band Played On, which was excellent, and I have an effortpost in my head about the characters that pop back up like bad nickels.

But something that runs through the early years of AIDS is the process by which they kept trying to shut down, or at least soften the activity in, Bathhouses in SF and NYC and other cities, and they didn't do it. There is simply no hetero equivalent, none, for that kind of normalized, regular, random, high partner count sexual activity outside of a brothel. Not all gay men used the bathhouses, but basically all knew people who did.

While there are heterosexuals who engage in that kind of sexual athleticism, they tend to cluster together: whores and whoremongers, rock stars and groupies, etc. So for a random heterosexual, you're fairly comfortable that your partner has no connection to that kind of thing. For a random homosexual in the 1980s, unless you're talking to a virgin the odds are that he's no more than a few degrees of sexual separation from the bathhouses.

Anal is way riskier than vaginal.

What follows was learned over a decade ago in microbiology class and may be out of date.

HIV exclusively infects cells of the immune system through a handful of receptors, none of which are expressed on the mucosa of the anus/vaginal tissue. As a consequence, it needs to penetrate multiple layers of mucus and epithelial tissue before it can reach a cell that it can productively (use to produce more viral particles) infect. Anal sex generates microtears in the mucosa much more readily than vaginal sex and provides more opportunities for the virus to reach the bloodstream/immune tissues. There was also some speculation about 'sensor' immune cells that reach into the epithelium that may also act as a route for infection, but I'm skeptical.

What shocked me in that class was just how rare transmission was; you can see the numbers in the table morgenland linked. Made me think that you have to be either extremely unlucky, extremely promiscuous or just stupid/desperate enough to share needles to get infected.

There are differences depending on the type of intercourse, for sure. Look at the table 1 in this paper. It estimates receptive anal intercourse to be about 17 times riskier than receptive vaginal contact. Also, there is a demographic of homosexual men known to live rather promiscuous sexual lives.

Are there any blogs or forums or other sources for reading about the Japanese right wing perspective on current events in English? The fall of the yen is striking. The last time I was in Japan in 2022 the country was really starting to show its age- visibly falling behind South Korea in technology and superficial "newness." I haven't been to China but I suspect that even Chinese society is beginning to surpass the vibrancy of Japanese society at least in the sense that the Chinese have seen an explosion of wealth and modernization in the past 50 years while Japan has stagnated since the late 80s. Is the right wing in Japan irritated by American influence in their country and the kneecapping of Japanese financial success by the plaza accord? Is allowing remilitarization of Japan really all that wise on the part of the US when Japan could conceivably become anti-American at some point in the near future (I am no expert on geopolitics in any way so feel free to tell me this is ridiculous and an anti-US Japan would be completely suicidal- though from what I understand Japan has shown suicidal tendencies in the past.) 150 yen to the USD is extremely alarming and I don't see how they aren't going to suffer from terrible inflation if they have to buy oil in USD.

I can't think of a great primarily English source for what you request, the best would probably be the interactions of a few larger right wing Japanese twitter accounts (Hashimoto Kotoe in particular gets a lot of exposure to English speaking Twitter) or maybe some small relatively inactive substack. From my limited exposure to those groups (on twitter and on some of the Japanese language imageboards), they don't usually see economic issues within the framing you theorized. They spend most of their time discussing a few minor squabbles with other asian nations (the ownership of Takeshima/Liancourt rocks wrt SK, the return JP citizens kidnapped by NK in the 80s who easily might be dead by now, the issues with vandlism by Chinese tourists that another commenter mentioned). There is definitely anti-American sentiment among the Japanese Right, but it's mostly focused on widely circulated stories of DUIs and sexual assaults committed by American military stationed in the country. I've also seen an increasing amount of explicit Qanon content that has been translated and crossed the Pacific, but that's at least limited to the more ネトウヨ imageboard types.

Noah Smith had a good article about Japan's currency crisis: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-japan-having-a-currency-crisis. The TLDR is yes, it's a very serious issue that with no clear solution. But for what it's worth, the yen has gone up recently in value since they hiked interest rates.

Thank you for the link, I read the intro but the rest is paywalled and archive.ph isn't helping out. The point he makes about a weak currency possibly being an asset in manufacturing is something I hadn't thought of but in the next paragraph he says that a weak currency would impoverish the nation and create problems for the west as well. I guess I am less interested in the economics of the situation and more interested in the social/cultural implications on the issue: are the Japanese blaming Americans/western powers for their financial situation, what are the Japanese going to do in response, etc.

are the Japanese blaming Americans/western powers for their financial situation

I really don't think so. I mean, maybe there's a few reactionaries on the internet who think that way, but it's not normal. Americans didn't wreck their economy, that was just the natural effect of the 80s/90s bubble bursting. Maybe some people are annoyed that certain areas are getting flooded with tourists, most notably Kyoto, but that's about it.

what are the Japanese going to do in response, etc.

Probably nothing. their political system is heavily controlled by one party full of very old men who don't want anything to change. But they did raise interest rates slightly.

when Japan could conceivably become anti-American at some point in the near future (I am no expert on geopolitics in any way so feel free to tell me this is ridiculous and an anti-US Japan would be completely suicidal- though from what I understand Japan has shown suicidal tendencies in the past.)

Strange things have happened in world history but I'd bet against this. Japan is fixated upon China, not America. China threatens their lines of communication to the rest of Eurasia, China hates them for a bunch of reasons and the feeling is mutual. It makes sense to work with the US to counter China, that's what they've been doing. I think they would much rather have some dumb GI's rape the occasional Okinawan rather than give China the opportunity to dish out their revenge fantasies for Nanjing.

Japan is old, they have insufficient agriculture, resources and energy to fight wars with great powers, let alone the US. Despite large rice subsidies and import tariffs they're at about 40-50% on domestic calories. There's a very strong pacifistic element in their society that's slowly being eroded by the China threat. They're reliant on a lot of US military technology. Maybe China trounces the US so severely they decide to change camps and cut a deal for better treatment but that's very, very unlikely. At that point, we have much bigger problems to worry about.

But isn't the economic stagnation humiliating to the Japanese? Watching China and South Korea grow in leaps and bounds in the past few decades while their own country ages and declines has to be embarrassing and I can see them easily taking out their aggression on western allies as much as their dreaded local neighbors. I wasn't really imagining a situation where Japan would ally with China but rather one where China's influence in the region increases so much that Japan begins to get irked and go hari kari on both China and their western allies.

Maybe that would be the isolationist/ethnonationalist wing of Japan's desire but probably is unlikely to occur outside of some neo imperial revival and the realistic situation is more likely to be further stagnation/decline in the arms of western allies in an attempt to stave off the Chinese threat like you said.

The phenomenon you describe is pretty illegible to the salaryman on the street, at least if you're suggesting--as you seem to be--that the Japanese look at China and Korea and think "Wow they're advancing but we're old" and are therefore "embarrassed."

While I can't speak for Japan or Japanese, let me do so anyway. Chinese are largely seen as uncouth, unprincipled vulgarians who scrawl graffiti on venerated shrines and stab honest citizenry for baubles and wristwatches. Koreans get more slack for being somewhat more represented by pop culture (music, dramas, etc.) but there are certainly anti-Korean elements here as well.

Never underestimate the ability of superficial prejudice to cloud the big picture.

Yes, the Japanese perspective on the Chinese and Koreans is poor which is why it would be all the more irritating to see their rise while your own society stagnates. Imagine if the Swiss economy had been stagnating for the past 40 years, the value of the Swiss Franc falling to 1/3 of its former power against the USD and conditions stagnating so much that Switzerland became a viable manufacturing base of low cost workers (all of which describe Japan today) while, let's say, Greece grew to be the second largest economy in the world exporting high tech electronics and a good portion of the world's pop culture during the same time period. (Messy metaphor trying to tie together China and South Korea but you see where I'm going.) Surely the Swiss would be embarrassed on some level to be falling behind the historically dysfunctional country of Greece and begin to regret their situation or rethink foreign alliances at some point, no?

China doesn’t really have the ability to offer much prosperity, and the Japanese see them as dirty subhumans anyways. Japans realpolitik interests and public mood aligns with the USA.

China doesn’t really have the ability to offer much prosperity

What do you mean? Much of America's prosperity of the past few decades has been thanks to the low cost of labor in China. There are 1.4 billion consumers in China today, surely they have plenty of prosperity to offer in theory. Whether they'd be willing to give it to Japan or whether Japan is interested is another question.

Japans [...] public mood aligns with the USA.

Does it? Japan is an insular, isolationist, pacifist country deeply anxious of foreigners with an extreme respect for tradition (manifesting in everything from shrines that haven't changed in centuries to cafes that haven't changed since the early 60s.) This is so far from the US today that the alignment almost seems incoherent. The influence of Confucianism on Japanese society is so great that they are culturally closer to China than the USA on the global scale of things. Though I suppose it is common throughout history for national neighbors to be similar while hating each other and fawning to foreign allies for sympathy.

The influence of Confucianism on Japanese society is so great that they are culturally closer to China than the USA on the global scale of things. Though I suppose it is common throughout history for national neighbors to be similar while hating each other

From the sacred texts:

So what makes an outgroup? Proximity plus small differences. If you want to know who someone in former Yugoslavia hates, don’t look at the Indonesians or the Zulus or the Tibetans or anyone else distant and exotic. Find the Yugoslavian ethnicity that lives closely intermingled with them and is most conspicuously similar to them, and chances are you’ll find the one who they have eight hundred years of seething hatred toward.

What makes an unexpected in-group? The answer with Germans and Japanese is obvious – a strategic alliance. In fact, the World Wars forged a lot of unexpected temporary pseudo-friendships. A recent article from War Nerd points out that the British, after spending centuries subjugating and despising the Irish and Sikhs, suddenly needed Irish and Sikh soldiers for World Wars I and II respectively. “Crush them beneath our boots” quickly changed to fawning songs about how “there never was a coward where the shamrock grows” and endless paeans to Sikh military prowess.

Sure, scratch the paeans even a little bit and you find condescension as strong as ever. But eight hundred years of the British committing genocide against the Irish and considering them literally subhuman turned into smiles and songs about shamrocks once the Irish started looking like useful cannon fodder for a larger fight. And the Sikhs, dark-skinned people with turbans and beards who pretty much exemplify the European stereotype of “scary foreigner”, were lauded by everyone from the news media all the way up to Winston Churchill.

In other words, outgroups may be the people who look exactly like you, and scary foreigner types can become the in-group on a moment’s notice when it seems convenient.

Evaluate for example the love of white progressive they/thems for Palestinians, and their absolute seething hatred for Trump voters.

Ok, I do think the logic checks out, I don't doubt the Japanese hatred for China etc. etc.. But what I'm curious to know is if the Japanese people and especially right wing/nationalist types in the country harbor any resentment toward the US or regret their close alignment or resent American interference/influence in the postwar period until today. I am looking for firsthand sources on the topic rather than western theorizing or projecting their values on Japanese sentiments though I imagine it'll be difficult to find outside of the Japanese language.

I agree that'd be interesting to find out. And I also think you might be right, and if you're looking for firsthand accounts from xenophobic Japanese... you're going to have to read Japanese.

A good starting point might be to look into the controversies surrounding the Yasukuni Shrine, which Hirohito and his successors have boycotted because it enshrined some Japanese leaders convicted of war crimes. Politicians who visit the shrine signal affiliation with more nationalistic and far-right elements in Japanese society -- for example, Abe, and Kishida (who asked Germany to take down its statue commemorating Korean comfort women). I'm no expert, but really what you want to look into is Nippon Kaigi, which has as its mission to "change the postwar national consciousness based on the Tokyo Tribunal's view of history as a fundamental problem"... i.e. to not apologize for historical atrocities. If they don't hold a great deal of anti-Americanism... safe to say nobody in Japanese leadership does.

I haven't been to China but I suspect that even Chinese society is beginning to surpass the vibrancy of Japanese society at least in the sense that the Chinese have seen an explosion of wealth and modernization in the past 50 years

I have been to China for work and to visit my in laws. I have been on a few work trips to Korea totalling a few weeks. Korea is very far past China on a subjective newness and technological advancement scale. I have spent months working in Chinese factories and rate them well below Korean factories in technological integration.

Also everything is so dirty and half-assed in China. It really dings them on an aesthetic level. You walk up to your apartment and you see when they painted around some fixture they just slopped it on rather than laying down some tape and making it look neat. I've painted a lot in my life and would never do that shitty a job.

There's some ditch on the side of the road and it has lots of trash in it. One of my college educated coworkers eats a packaged snack and just dumps the packaging on the ground at the bus stop. Everything is dirty. You blow your nose in the winter and your snot comes out grey from the pollution.

At the factory cafeteria (which serves great food, 10x better than American public school food, literal communists are effortlessly dunking on what our government feeds our children) a very sick coworker dips her chopsticks into a shared jar of food. It was quite culture shock.

The food is great. They like foreigners. There's a lot of value there. But fresh, clean, technological, modern. Those terms belong somewhere else. I nominate Korea based on my limited experience.

I don't doubt that China today still lags behind most of the first world in terms of cleanliness and modernization. But more importantly, how does China today compare with China 30 years ago? If the average 30 year old in China is living a much better life than the one they were born into, that is more important in terms of outlook than most of the first world where conditions have stagnated or declined in the past few decades. I see this as similar to the boom of postwar USA and Japan compared to the stagnating powers of England and much of western Europe during the same time period.

I concur, although I will say that the comparison is skewed thanks to China's size. Shanghai is clean and modern, Shenzhen is dirty and modern, Dongguan is dirty, full of industrial factories and meh construction. Beijing is somewhere in between but with some of the worst pollution in China.

Food in Korea I found generally better in winter, although that might be personal taste and my love for Korean soups and banchan.

Why is Haiti so much worse than other overwhelmingly-African Caribbean countries? Is the difference between 80% African DNA and 90% African DNA the difference between a functional and non-functional society? Is it because the other countries have residual institutions left over from colonialism, while Haiti blew everything up in the revolution and started from zero?

Why is Haiti so much worse than other overwhelmingly-African Caribbean countries? Is the difference between 80% African DNA and 90% African DNA the difference between a functional and non-functional society?

If you want to look for a genetic explanation, I'd bet the brain drain during the dictatorship of Duvalier is actually more important than that 10 percentage points difference. The human rights abuse of the dictatorship caused most of Haiti's wealthy class to flee the country, taking their material, cultural and genetic wealth with them. And it's hard to rebuild after a dictatorship if most of your doctors, engineers, scientists and teachers have fled the country.

There's also a large number of other factors, the most prominent ones that are completely independent of the genetic angle are:

  • poverty spiral: Haiti is so poor/dangerous, it can't even get its tourism industry off the ground
  • climate: especially compared to the Dominican Republic, Haiti's side of the island is significantly more arid and less well suited for agriculture. The classic West Coast problem.
  • deforestation: the previous point is made much worse by the massive logging operation Haiti executed while trying to pay of its debt to France by exporting timber

Let's compare Haiti to West African countries.

Haiti: GDP per capita PPP: $3185, HDI: 0.552

Liberia: GDP per capita PPP: $1789, HDI: 0.487

Ivory Coast: $6960, 0.534

Togo: $2767, 0.547

Ghana: $6905, 0.602

Nigeria: $6340, 0.548

Burkina Faso: $2682, 0.438

Haiti is a standard-issue West African country in a different hemisphere. Jamaica is in a totally different place: 12K GDP per capita and HDI at 0.7. Dominican Republic: 27K, 0.766 (which seems rather high but they do have gold, tourism and agriculture). Jamaica and the Dominican Republic are less African demographically, there are plenty of mixed and whites, especially in Dominican Republic.

The most important thing seems to be demography, not history. What external problems did Liberia have? The US protected them the whole time but they're worse off than Haiti today. The Liberians were very good at producing their own problems, they didn't need any external threats.

Lots of countries have had external problems and institutional problems. But they don't fall to Haiti levels and stay there. Ukraine has suffered a lot in history, they're at $15K and 0.734 today, during a major war! Vietnam is at a similar level of prosperity and they've done plenty of fighting, plenty of communism. China had about a century where they were constantly pummelled by the world's great powers, by eachother and then by an unusually damaging brand of communism. They blew everything up in a series of revolutions and civil wars, fought half the UN in Korea and skirmished with most of their neighbours: GDP 25K, 0.788.

I did a little research and it looks like Haiti might have Venezuela-tier oil and gas wealth. I don't fully believe it myself, nobody seems to have properly explored it because why would you, Haiti is a shithole. All kinds of crazy stuff happens there, zombies, cannibal gangs. The problem is with the people.

Jamaica

Jamaica is pretty black, where are you getting a huge difference? The main one seems to be that the biracial elite (partially) stayed in Jamaica while they almost all left Haiti between about 1930 and 1965.

A more precise study conducted by the local University of the West Indies - Jamaica's population is more accurately 76.3% African descent or Black, 15.1% Afro-European ( or locally called the Brown Man or Browning Class) , 3.4% East Indian and Afro-East Indian, 3.2% Caucasian, 1.2% Chinese and 0.8% Other.

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

Haiti is 95% black, 5% mixed.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Haiti/Climate#ref54461

That seems like a fairly substantial difference, they still have the mixed whereas in Haiti they're mostly gone.

What external problems did Liberia have?

Americo-Liberians are the colonizers. Despite the country having very few whites, they still wound up with internal political strife akin to Rhodesia, just with the descendants of American expatriates as the elite class rather than European colonists. Liberia is sufficiently odd from an outsider's perspective that it's hard to compare to other countries.

There were no major war debts, no foreign invasions. What European country can say that? Liberia inherited a successful constitution from the USA and continual foreign aid.

In its 1930 report, the league admonished the Liberian government for "systematically and for years fostering and encouraging a policy of gross intimidation and suppression" by "[suppressing] the native, prevent him from realizing his powers and limitations and prevent him from asserting himself in any way whatever, for the benefit of the dominant and colonizing race, although originally the same African stock as themselves."

They made the decision to suppress the natives all by themselves. They made the decision to fall into foreign debts all by themselves. They were blessed with natural resources: rubber, iron and diamonds. They squandered one of the most fortunate geopolitical/geoeconomic positions in world history.

Not an expert on this issue, but my impression is that conditions there were exacerbated by

  • neighboring slaveholding nations discouraging trade with them in the decades after the revolution -- a de facto embargo being especially hard on an island nation.

  • huge reparations they had to pay to France under threat of military attack, which were such a large fraction (or perhaps initially, multiple) of their economic output for so long that successive governments could only focus on extracting enough wealth from the populace to service the debt

  • early lack of economic development and limited trade led to low-tech dependence on burning wood for fuel, which in turn led to extensive deforestation, erosion, and desertification of the productive lands. Supposedly neighboring DR avoided a corresponding environmental catastrophe during the mid 20th century by having a stronger central government that could, for instance, execute illegal loggers in their territory (while outsourcing their supply of illegally-logged fuel to Haiti).

Don't know if any of these fully explain the difference from majority-black baseline, but the onerous debt -- which they kept having to pay into the 20th century to US investors who eventually purchased it from France -- may have contributed to setting them off on the wrong foot institutionally.

I wonder if a communist takeover in the 1950s would have been a net gain for Haiti. They could've defaulted on their debt while at the same time receiving both education and development aid from the USSR.

I can’t speak authoritatively on the subject, but it seems like corruption in Haiti was simply unmatched anywhere else. That, coupled with the fact that Haiti was essentially a pariah nation from the time of the revolution (1800) until after the Civil War AND the incredible level of sovereign debt they agreed to, left Haiti an incomparably poor country.

Here is a good, quick podcast on the history of Haiti since the revolution. I recommend listening to the entire series, but this is a good, quick recap:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4-19-the-history-of-haiti/id703889772?i=1000367035057

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Conquest of Bread and Future Shock. Also finished Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life, which posits that Wallace was a precursor of intelligent design. The biography was good, though the arguments at the end were sometimes confusing.

Currently rereading R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing series .

Got sucked into reading some passages across both trilogies since I haven't toughed it since the second trilogy wrapped up and finally decided to bite the bullet and just do the whole thing from The Darkness That Comes Before.

So, what are you reading?

Hope on royalroad.

It's a real treat to read, I would describe it as "swords and sorcery fantasy but extra nerdy". And a lot more sorcery than swords.

I tried, but the buy in for the story didn't work for me at all, even Godclads wasn't that thick.

I'm about halfway through "Legal Systems Very Different from Ours". I don't remember where I came across this book, but I put it on my to-read list a year or two ago and recently picked it up. I don't know too much about the author, but it seems like he became interested in this topic and went through a bunch of secondary-source material and compiled this book with his findings. The author put the book on his website: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm

Most chapters are self-contained. Some particularly interesting ones that stuck with me were "Prisoners' Law" which puts prison gangs in a new perspective (might it actually be in prisoners' best interests to have an informal law-and-order system within the prison?) and "Pirate Law" which shows how a bunch of outlaws paradoxically create a new set of laws.

I think I've seen Friedmann on DSL, if you want to talk with him about it.

David Friedman was a regular on SSC and is still active on one of the splinter forums, so chances are you heard about the book somewhere around these parts.

Finished Martin Amis' collection of short stories Heavy Water. Nothing special, the highlight was the sci-fi entry The Janitor On Mars about a billion year old robot left behind by Martians for no other reason than to gloat about the end of planet Earth. Chosen as a follow up to reading Amis' Lionel Asbo, which was probably a biting satire of contemporary British social mores but I found it simultaneously too smug, too vulgar, and too banal, and written using a type of dialect for dialogue that he exaggerated to the point that it became jarring. Or at least I've never heard anyone talk like that.

Starting on a collection of Gogol's short stories. I like short stories. After reading two Clavells and two Dostoevskys in close succession it's nice to get through a whole story in less than fifty pages.

Huge fan of short stories. I find it interesting that unit economics was a key point of influence in making novels a dominant format for literature.

We were brought up on short stories in Ireland. (Frank O’Connor’s Guest of the Nation and Michael McLaverty’s The Poteen Maker two great examples of great stories told across a handful of pages.)

Claire Keegan is a fine current day practitioner. Foster was brilliant and her recent So Late in the Day was top class too. (Both published as standalone books but they’re just short stories really.) Kevin Barry is another. Beer Trip to Llandudno made me go wow. I thought Roddy Doyle’s story Bullfighting was excellent too.

I finished There Is No Antimemetics Division last night.

Overall... Good. Lovecraftian modern horror with a dash of X-files. Excellent writing with atmosphere for days.

Like any other book of this genre I think it starts off strong and then tapers off towards the end in many ways. 4/5 maybe.

For those who read and enjoyed it I think a similar novel was Annihilation. TINAMD was far better in one key way: it never sacrificed being understandable in the name of pushing the boundaries of art, which annoyed (and enthralled) me about Annihilation.

A good review with similar complaints to those I had is here: https://a.co/d/9cLqhP7

On a related note, anyone noticed the hard left turn on recent SCP articles? I occasionally go back to read new highly upvoted posts and the last few times there were a) an apocalyptic story that turned out to primarily be a lesbian love story b) an article literally titled "deadnamed" about exactly what you would expect and c) the most hamfisted allegory for south US anti-black racism I've seen.

It's been years since I've read any SCP articles, but I really enjoyed them at the time. It breaks my heart to hear they, too, have been coopted. Everything sacred must be profaned, apparently.

Thankfully (?) I read this book solely based on its title and cover art. I'm totally outside of whatever community this was/is.

I, on the other hand, wasn't even aware that it had been turned into a book.

"the aristocrats", horrible ravenous cannibal monsters that 1% of humans mature into.

Some story about an industrialist making a huge factory machine thing and feeding his workers to it because they couldn't unionize fast enough.

A rewrite of the "Chronicles of the Daeva", where the deava alternate history merges into our own, and it turns out they weren't a blood-magic slavemaster empire of human-sacrificing necromancers, but actually a peaceful, enlightened matriarchy and everything bad written about them was just an evil plot to convince people to keep them sealed away.

That last one was where I checked out. Chronicles of the Daeva is one of my all-time favorite SCP entries. Look how they massacred my boy...

...As Arjin notes, this was all years ago.

Recent? I'm not following SCPs, so maybe its got better since, and is now lapsing again, but this is ancient news.

I don't doubt that there always has been such an undercurrent, but at least in my impression the most upvoted articles had mostly original main topics and small woke side topics at most. Now it feels the other way around. But maybe I've just missed it.

I could be wrong, especially as I haven’t yet read the last Southern Reach book, but I think the shared DNA is a bit oversold.

Antimemetics, as with many SCP stories, is about experimentation. Ask a question, devise an experiment, observe the results. Very /r/rational. Just because the subject is Lovecraftian doesn’t mean they aren’t approaching it with the scientific method.

Annihilation is almost the opposite. When the expedition members express goals, they’re cryptic, confused, and not necessarily their own. Characters try things for bad reasons or no obvious reason at all. The plot develops with a sort of delirious, runaway feel, because neither the characters nor the reader can know what to expect. These are intentional artistic choices, and they’re very well-executed, but they sell a different story than Antimemetics. I’d call them anti-rational.

This isn’t a counter-recommendation, both because I loved Annihilation and because it does include a lot of the stuff that makes Antimemetics fun. So I’d still encourage SCP fans to try it. I’ll also offer a couple related recommendations.

  • Sam Hughes’ other work is very good. Ra, in particular, sells the worldbuilding. It’s also got a twist that brings it a lot closer to Lovecraftian and a lot further from SCP.
  • The STALKER series takes place in an irradiated wasteland surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It’s filled with horrible creatures, forgotten laboratories, and physics-bending anomalies. While there are some anti-rational elements, it’s played much more like SCP as the player learns to handle and exploit the weirdness. You can play an excellent open-source campaign here.
  • Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a Georgian comedy of manners where several leading characters are magicians. Those characters would very much like to have a rational, cause-and-effect sort of story, but alas! their setting has faeries. I find this book does an excellent job illustrating why such entities are aggressively anti-rational.
  • CORDYCEPS is my pick for a bridge between Antimemetics and Annihilation. I don’t want to spoil it, but it combines character volition with a lot of reasons why that could be a bad, bad idea. Very original. Very good.

There Is No Antimemetics Division

Man I love that one. The second half isn't quite as good, but the first half is absolutely enthralling with its new ideas and the tactics the protagonists use to overcome such novel problems.

I'll have to give Annihilation a try. The movie was pretty good.

Finished The Devil's Chessboard. My opinion about the main theme of the book is basically unchanged since my last post on it.

The last section of the book is all about the JFK assassination. The basic theme, according to the book, is that a ton of people around Lee Harvey Oswald and the Book Depository building had "links" or associations with the CIA, anti-Kennedy Republican activists, and anti-Castro activists and a bunch of weird stuff happened around Oswald himself, including being allowed to live in the Soviet Union for a number of years, and move back with a Russian wife, at the height of the Cold War, with basically a rubber-stamp level of scrutiny. Also supposedly the whole Warren report was a whitewash.

To all of this I say, well maybe, but this is a lot of smoke but not much fire. Okay, it seems pretty unlikely that Oswald just up and decided to shoot the President one day. But exactly who did what here, and why? There's no more information on that in here than I had before. And if it was an organized conspiracy by... some groups... exactly what did they hope to accomplish by doing this? Why did they actually pull off an assassination of Kennedy, but not any other American president? Did they just kind of decide that that was too far and not to do it again? Is it like part of the plan or something to be so vague and confusing about exactly what happened that nobody has any idea what to do?

Kennedy was the first time that there had been a major conflict in goals between the newly created security organs/State Department and the President over a question of foreign policy. The conflict had already been brewing for some time: Over the course of his two terms, Eisenhower became increasingly resentful of the CIA for running roughshod over his foreign policy goals in favor of regime change to install anti-communist hardliners. Read Legacy of Ashes if you want more info on that. When Kennedy came to power, the friction between the office of the presidency and the State Department /intelligence agencies finally boiled over. Cuba was a fixation for the agencies. Getting Cuba out of the communist sphere was a huge, huge priority. The CIA never expected the Bay of Pigs invasion to work by itself. It was designed to pressure whoever was president at the time into sending massive airstrikes and possibly ground troops to assist. Kennedy screwed that up. He refused to send anything. This made the CIA absolutely furious. Cuba had now slipped into the Soviet sphere of influence permanently. Kennedy was also furious at the CIA’s attempts to railroad him, and was beginning to plan steps to limit the CIA’s influence on foreign policy. Then Kennedy’s head mysteriously exploded. As for why it never happened again, it did. It just didn’t need to be as shocking and overt. The CIA forced Nixon out of office for abandoning the Vietnam war instead of escalating it to all of Southeast Asia. Woodward and Bernstein were laundering information leaked to them by the CIA. Then they spiked Carter’s attempt at reelection for being too weak overseas. Then they installed a CIA officer, George H.W. Bush as President. Every President after that, except Trump, has had connections to the CIA. Clinton, Bush II, Obama. Mysteriously, the President always just lets the CIA do whatever they want now. Imagine that!

Woodward and Bernstein were laundering information leaked to them by the CIA.

Deep Throat was Deputy Director of the FBI. You can argue that the FBI and CIA were working together against the White House, but that argument needs to be made - conventional wisdom is that the FBI and CIA are outgroup to each other within the internal politics of the US Deep State. To say that Deep Throat was working for the CIA is obviously silly.

How was Obama connected to the CIA? Serious question.

Halfway through The Habsburg Way: 7 Rules for Trying Times by Eduard Von Habsburg. Thus far, a bit like a rad trad 12 Rules, but with more geeking out about history in Eduard Von Habsburg’s voice.

Two thirds of the way through Seveneves. Would have probably dropped it if not for some nostalgia for Stephenson’s older works. The writing is bloated, and the cast before the time jump feels excessively SJW-flavored.

The first two-thirds of the book would've worked as a standalone novel.

Polls for Kamala seems to be bad lately. And Nate silver model is bearish (last prospect is almost 60/40 for trump). And today there was NYT/Sienna poll that showed Trump leading her narrowly. She seems to be sliding almost unexplainable mirroring her rise. And there hasn't been some major errors on her side.

Can anyone toss some suggestions. I don't think that there exist sizeable sliver of people that were enamored and then disillusioned with her.

Nate's model is designed to be bearish after convention, though. Basically, it assumes a candidate ought to get a substantial bump based on historical records, and if they don't, it adjusts accordingly. For Harris, it's arguable that circumstances are unusual enough that having a convention bump exactly like a normal candidate was not to be expected.

Is his model telling us what the probability distribution of the result would be given the election were held today or is it a prediction for the actual election?

Hold the presses, though, because Trump is not exactly a whiz with PR. He has tweeted a happy birthday message. To Mary.

I am guessing he means the Virgin Mary?

Yes, it was literally the feast day of the birth of the virgin Mary.

Why not? https://youtube.com/watch?v=nqw7LxicgPM

Well, the common wisdom in the Dem party has been that Biden is the albatross around their neck, and they'd surely lose the election if he keeps running. That's why they booted him after all. So, after that happened, there was a certain bump of excitement, as befits the removal of albatross from one's neck. However, the problem is while Kamala is the "logical" successor by the internal logic of partisan mechanics, she still is a completely horrible candidate, with negative charisma, no original ideas (and her un-original ideas make AOC seem conservative) and an annoying habit of launching into an irritating cackle when she doesn't know what to say, which is very often. Objectively, she is a bad candidate and her performance in the past elections proved that. However, now that she has been anointed, the party machine has no choice but to line up behind her and power through, to whatever end there would be. And make no mistake, the Dems have a powerful machine which should not be underestimated. We know they can elect a candidate which has been formerly charismatic but now running on mere fumes of the old brainpower. Can they elect a candidate which is as anti-charismatic as Kamala? I don't know, but it's not about excitement, it's about power and execution of this power. This power will be applied in multiple routes, regardless of Kamala's personality which will be only sparsely shown. E.g. the Russian collusion is back, did you hear? Probably some sexual accusation of Vance will pop up too (too late for Trump I assume). It may swing some votes, in general I think very little of what's going to happen for the next two months would be about her and a lot would be about power.

The more people see of her, the less they like her. I really think it's that simple. Every time she's in the public eye for anything other than not being Trump or Biden she declines in popularity.

I mean she seems better than Joe Biden as a candidate, but it's hard to be excited about nothing for a long time.

Once the excitement of her not being Joe Biden wears off, there isn't much she has been saying or doing to get people excited or interested.

Do people have any thoughts, questions on forecasting stuff?

Some things I'd love to have some back and forths about:

  • How to model the chance that North Korea will detonate a nuclear bomb by end of year?
  • Chance that monkeypox will spread to the West? Distribution of expected deaths?
  • How to model the spread of conflict? How to model which states matter in the world?
  • What will happen with Bangladesh?
  • Some states are three families in a trenchcoat. What's up with that? Particularly in the case of Pakistan: it's a nuclear state, but it also just has a lot of difficulty projecting power into rural areas...

Some states are three families in a trenchcoat. What's up with that? Particularly in the case of Pakistan: it's a nuclear state, but it also just has a lot of difficulty projecting power into rural areas...

South Asia just has a level of inequality unimaginable to the rest of the world, with a small elite (in relative terms, they still consist of tens of millions of people) capable of developing nuclear weapons, running a space program, standing toe-to-toe with the West and East Asia in every field of intellectual achievement, and doing everything else you would expect of a developed nation (other than keeping the streets clear of filth) living alongside a much larger population still mired in conditions that range from "bad by Latin American standards" to "bad by Sub-Saharan African standards."

Pakistan has the additional challenge of many rural areas being inhabited by clannish groups that will violently resist any perceived imposition by outside forces on their tribal way of life, and as the ruling class is just barely holding together some semblance of a state with guns, duct tape, and prayers, it has more important things to worry about then e.g. getting polio vaccines to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Single best book for this, imho, is Geopolitical Alpha by Marko Papic. The "constraints based" modeling approach, I think, gives a more consistent framework to forecasting than a lot of the more ad hoc reasoning you see elsewhere.

Then, the basics of compound probabilities and basic Bayesian reasoning. It's not about building a model that get's everything right, it's about building a model you can interrogate and update well as new information arises.

Geopolitical Alpha by Marko Papic

Thanks!

How to model the chance that North Korea will detonate a nuclear bomb by end of year?

On foreign soil 0. Making another test - close to 0. The world has forgotten they exist, they win nothing in grabbing attention.

Chance that monkeypox will spread to the West? Distribution of expected deaths?

Probably 100 to get at least some cases. Extremely low death count, probably concentrated into fisrt gen third world immigrants and immunocompromised people that lead risky lives. Everyone is vaccinated against smallpox in the west and it provides at least some protection.

How to model the spread of conflict? How to model which states matter in the world?

Magic 8ball is your best bet. The world is moving towards readjustment of the balance of power. It may go totally peacefully, absolute bloodbath or a series of local flare-ups that are contained. We are not exactly in 1914 - I don't think anyone want a real war, but things may get out of control.

What will happen with Bangladesh?

Probably nothing. Modi doesn't want short victorious war right now, so probably will ignore some harassment of Hindus there. The country doesn't seems to move towards civil war, so whomever is in power will probably try to keep things under control too.

Some states are three families in a trenchcoat. What's up with that? Particularly in the case of Pakistan: it's a nuclear state, but it also just has a lot of difficulty projecting power into rural areas...

Nuking a village is a waste of resources. As long as the area 5 km around centaurus mall is safe and under control they mostly don't care.

People are vaccinated against smallpox? I'm not.

Are people still being vaccinated for smallpox?

The smallpox vaccine is no longer available to the public. In 1972, routine smallpox vaccination in the United States ended.

In 1980, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared smallpox was eliminated. Because of this, the public doesn't need protection from the disease.

In my corner of europe yes.

Everyone is vaccinated against smallpox in the west and it provides at least some protection.

Didn't routine vaccination stop in the late 70's/early 80's after smallpox was eradicated, leaving younger generations unprotected?

Yes, that’s the case.

Because of the virulence of vaccina, the virus used to inoculate against smallpox, smallpox vaccines are more dangerous than most other kinds of immunizations. For example, I have chronic eczema, and so it would be a very bad idea for me to be vaccinated against smallpox — there’s a risk of vaccina infecting the skin and causing a major infection.

And it should be noted that we’re seeing a dramatic increase in eczema… so if there were to be a monkeypox pandemic, there’s a huge chunk of the population that couldn’t be safely inoculated with the old smallpox vaccine.

I assume you're including tests in the first portion? It doesn't look like they have all that many nuclear weapons.

Monkeypox is currently mostly an STD, especially between men, right? I imagine, then, you could look at the spread of past STDs. Not sure how you'd try to account for evolution of the disease.

States mattering seems ordinarily to be due either to economic power, or to willingness and ability to use or threaten violence in a way that would have an impact on the global economy (e.g. North Korea, Houthis). Are there other major factors? Israel seems like it might be cared about more than by that simplistic analysis. No idea how best to model all that. Clearly culture is big for willingness to use violence.

Yes, the overwhelmingly most likely case is as a test.

Monkeypox is currently mostly an STD, especially between men, right?

Nope, this was the previous strain. This one seems to be spread by close contact as well, e.g., in families, corpses, etc.

Exporting technological and social innovation is another factor I care about. E.g., the Germans experimented with tanks in the Spanish civil war, and this affected the next war; similarly, I'm thinking about how much to care about Ukranian advances, or about conflicts in Africa developing strategies that are then exported to other conflicts.

The DRC had 2,662 cases over the past week, 25 of them fatal. Of cases this year, 58% occurred in children younger than 15,

From: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/mpox/mpox-escalates-africa-officials-launch-response-plan

This one seems to be spread by close contact as well, e.g., in families, corpses, etc.

So is it like Ebola now where ”don’t insist on completely braindead burial customs” is enough to prevent an epidemic?

Ehhh...

It's in some spectrum between Ebola and smallpox. Largest than the largest Ebola outbreak, much smaller than smallpox.

You have the oppprtunity to give each person on earth the same advice and rules. You wish to improve the world as much as possible. What would be your universal set of advice and/or rules which ensure the most Good? Presume that each person will listen intently, not magically assent and obey immediately.

Many religions already have done this. I'm not sure what could move me to think I could be any better at this than God.

  1. Listen to your elders, because learning things which can’t be taught is not a one step process.

  2. Different people are different, especially between men and women. Don’t expect everyone to think or act the same way you do, and don’t expect yourself to bridge the gap right away. You will probably have to come somebody else’s way, just as much as they will yours.

  3. Treat everyone you run into respectfully, even if their station is beneath you. Pick role models that you can be like, and avoid the company of ne’erdo wells.

  4. Work hard and live below your means if possible. Don’t be proud, and listen to the people around you.

  5. Love your family and stick close to them. Don’t be afraid of expressing it, and remember love is an act, not a feeling.

  6. Be mindful of your duties in life, and adhere to them strictly. Take care of those that depend on you first, before yourself.

While I was nowhere near as big a fan of Hlynka as many of you were, he once wrote "Never write anything down which you wouldn't want to have read out at your funeral" which strikes me as remarkably good and universal advice.

A few thoughts that came immediately to mind (as opposed to a deeply thought out reply):

  1. Taking good care of your mind and body is absolutely the best use of your time, because it influences everything else.
  2. Taking good care of your mind and body is at least a decade-long learning process (and probably more), because (a) even minor changes can take months to show whether they’re working, (b) there are always multiple confounding factors over any short term period, and (c) all long term improvement comes from small changes that compound over time.
  3. The whole point of taking good care of yourself is that you can take good care of other people. We are effectively nothing without the closeness of family, friends and the countless people who might benefit (directly and especially indirectly) from our care-taking.
  4. Time and money are usually seen as the most important resources but energy is the foundation resource that sits beneath both, because without energy, time and money are worthless. Therefore, studying energy in all its forms, from calories to coal, psychology to sunshine, physiology to physics (and investing time and money to do so!) is a rest-of-life pursuit that will positively impact every moment of your life.
  5. The best and most important things in life might not be free, but all are intangible. They include love, respect, beauty, wonder, truth, awe, poetry and art. (Michelangelo’s David and Velazquez’s Las Meninas might be tangible but their vitality is profound and spiritual / metaphysical / intangible.)

That’s my back of the envelope answer. Thanks for the question.

Do we have any blocker app even close to ColdTurkey in terms of flexibility and robustness for Android without jailbreaking?

I use Freedom... but I also know how to log out of Freedom.

Try Lock me out.

There's also Andoff. Andoff is from the same company that makes Pluckeye which is a blocker app for desktop only.

I wouldn't recommend using andoff before understanding how pluckeye works, the very active community can help you with that.

However to install Andoff you will need to use ADB which I'm not sure if it breaks your definition of jailbreaking or not.

I'd like to hear more stories about encounters with people who are really intelligent.

Where did you meet them?

And how long did it take you to realise that they were intellectually gifted?

Having spent a decade in math departments (as a master’s student, then adjunct, then doctoral student), nearly all the professors were way brighter than I, and it was obvious very quickly.

The exceptions:

  1. Some but not all of the math ed specialists.
  2. Some of the oldest profs, especially US-educated ones, were closer to the stronger students in ability - the competition for tenure track positions was not as insane in the 80s.

I know many smart people, but in my life I think I've met two truly exceptionally intelligent people that I knew when dealing with them that they were somehow just different, set apart. Both men, as it happens.

One currently teaches at a very prestigious West coast university after getting his Masters in an ivy league university in the 90s. The other was from a poor white family in Nowhere, Alabama, and ended up 1) being imprisoned for about a year, 2) driving a truck for another few years, and 3) owning a bar in a coastal city The last one may have turned him into a functional alcoholic though last I heard he had sold the place (which is still thriving) and I am not sure what he's doing now.

They were/are different in terms of social class and all the various baggage that entails. I could go into details but it would be fairly easy to work out their identities by anyone who wanted to take the time so I won't.

I also know a family of extremely smart women (all daughters) one of whom is fairly high up in the mainstream press of the US, and the other sister puts me to shame in language learning and can talk circles around me in Japanese (and is even more fluent in Chinese) despite having spent a fraction of the time I've spent in Asia. She's married to some tech genius and their daughter is probably just as brilliant and is stunningly beautiful.

Of the two men, they are both missing something emotionally. I can't put my finger on it, but they don't have a certain set of responses that most people have. The women I don't know as well and therefore I have little insight into their private selves.

What made you think that the guy you knew from Alabama was really exceptionally intelligent?

The fact that he was. A brilliant chess player. When we both worked at a hotel he could do the night audit practically in his head. Widely read in esoteric literature. He once diagnosed accurately the cause of an electrical problem at my house by looking at a couple of wires. Fluent in Russian. Also a really good poker player. A talented writer. Many varied high level skills, a kind of generalized aptitude of subjects that didn't seem to go together in one person.

I notice you don't ask about the ivy league guy. I suppose that's reasonable, but I really do think class issues kept the other guy from thriving in certain areas.

What is the second guy doing now?

We lost touch, though he was married and had a son, so maybe he's just raising his family but I don't know doing what. Emails go unreturned but that might be because he's changed it.

The best indication of extremely outsized intelligence is noticeably-above-normal predictive ability. This is because prediction is pattern-matching and pattern matching is, essentially, intelligence.

So I’d say I’ve met a handful of people in my life who, if not always then certainly to an unusual extent, seem to be able to synthesize information and understand what is going to happen or what needs to be done to get something to happen much more easily and with less information and less prompting than even ‘normal’ very smart people.

Any stories? I feel like I have an intelligence fetish.

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