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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1355 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 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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Anyone have a good source on the false-conviction AND false-acquittal rates in the U.S. justice system? It's not especially important, I was just rewatching 12 angry men and was curious about it. Some quick googling says the false-conviction rate is estimated somewhere around 4% to 15%, but any attempts to find false-acquittal rates just talks about false-conviction rates. I understand that in practice that would be extremely hard to measure, because when somebody gets a not-guilty verdict and then new evidence comes out the government can't relitigate and then find them guilty in the same way they can for a false conviction. But informally you could still try to get a ballpark guess. Is it on the order of 4-15% also? 50%? 90%? Do we have any idea what fraction of people who actually committed a crime and choose to go to trial instead of plea-bargaining end up getting lucky and going free anyway?

It's probably too low brow for this site, but does anyone have a good thread of jokes about the Fuentes / Destiny sex tape?

... The what now?

Over the weekend a tape of Nick Fuentes having sex with Destiny leaked online. I haven't actually watched it.

Destiny made a short video statement about a friends account being broken into, which makes it less likely to be some sort of deep fake.

It's possible that this is all some sort of prank that I didn't pick up on. But "a male streamer leaks sex tape with Fuentes because Groypers keep attacking him online" lines up with my priors for Nick Fuentes.

I haven't seen it myself (thankfully), but it looks like people are saying that it's Destiny and we don't know who the other guy is.

Kind of disappointing. Killing off Fuentes' influence woud have been nice, and without something stronger, I don't know that this will be enough.

I certainly heard a lot of people speculate Fuentes was gay, this would certainly provide evidence for it.

Why is there such a high number of far-right figures who turn out to be homosexual? Is it something about not being interested in women freeing them up to say things wildly outside of the overton window without worrying about, as the kids say, 'scaring the hoes'?

Scaring away women isn't seen as a big loss. Being the centre of attention for a large number of young men is a huge plus, even if they are lower class.

A straight Fuentes would have focussed his energy and charisma into making money in sales or something like that. Once you factor in the major effort needed, being a far-right figure doesn't get you money or women.

In order to accept the idea of fucking another man, one must necessarily have freed oneself from significant social pressure already.

Compared to the thought of telling my dad I like it in the ass, the thought of telling him I hate black people or that I want to fight for world revolution seems minor.

Is it a high percentage or is it the homophobic pastor effect- being gay is now news, not a simple fact or regrettable character flaw, depending on perspective.

Has anyone found a good text-to-speech for books? This technology seems far behind where it should be.

Does anyone have good resources (textbooks, article collections, etc.) for understanding various supply chains (i.e., the interactions and dependencies of different economic sectors)? For example, if I wanted to trace the inputs required for chip manufacturing, where would I go to figure out the manufacturers of intermediate components all the way to which raw materials are needed/how are they extracted, as well as the associated transport, energy, and diplomatic needs?

SPLC <GO>

Oooh, this is a good one. The information in question isn't exactly secret, but nobody involved has an interest in publicizing it. Hedge funds are legendary for getting alpha from physical reconnaissance.

So much hedge fund activity is the subject of blatant mythmaking lol.

The information in question isn't exactly secret

I wouldn't be too sure about that.

At work, we manufacture, assemble, and resell widgets, and our suppliers are considered sensitive information. If our big customers knew who our suppliers were, they'd try to cut us out of the middle. (Our small customers want to order parts by dozen instead of the thousand, so they wouldn't necessarily care.)

Has anyone been tracking H5N1 bird flu? I see occasional doomposting updates from accounts like https://x.com/outbreakupdates/ and I'm trying to figure out if we're all sleeping on something about to go very bad, or if it's "under control" and/or likely to burn out. Haven't seen any recent posts about it on LessWrong, and I'd expect to if it were something (since they were right and early on SARS-CoV-2).

Yep, you'll see posts on Meddit every once and awhile.

The bad news: It's really really bad (as much as 50% CFR) and it's likely going to happen sooner rather than later. This is a real threat that will probably happen, BUT-

The good news: We actually have a vaccine stock already (only 5 mill doses IIRC), everyone is mad about the new vaccine type but we can roll that out fast if need be, and we really understand flu rather well. Flu mutates more frequently because of its structure but we know a lot about that, and what to look for in terms of human to human transmission and all kinds of other junk.

This is much less of an unknown and the U.S. would likely be able to do a safe and actually temporary lockdown (that...obviously a lot of people wouldn't listen to) that would solve the problem.

Other countries may be fucked.

If we know how to make a vaccine for it, why was it not included in the annual flu vaccine this year? I was assuming the reason is that we don't know how to make a vaccine for a potential future H5N1 that can sustain human-to-human transmission because it doesn't exist and may be sufficiently different from the currently known strains that a different vaccine may be necessary (or, worse, that immune imprinting may mean a future vaccine against the pandemic strain wouldn't work as well).

Uhhhhhh I don't want to do a lit review so please forgive me if I get some of the details wrong but basically they try and predict well in advance which mutations are going to be prevalent the next year (like almost a year in advance) and make all the vaccines accordingly. The mutations are typically pretty well understood, that's what the H and Ns are about.

This is also why the flu vaccine doesn't always stop the flu, you can end up with one of the other variations, which annoys people to no end and makes them feel like it's pointless, it's not.

I believe the specific issue with H5N1 is that it stays trapped in the lower lungs which makes it even more dangerous (because you get more ARDS) but less contagious since you have less of the virus carried in cough and so on. The specific elements responsible for this are not necessarily in the same place in other animals, which can be why something is virulent in pigs or whatever but not humans.

My favorite example of this is the fact that allergic reactions for dogs are more diarrheal as opposed to throat closing, because that's where the histamine receptors are mostly located in dogs.

Uhhhhhh I don't want to do a lit review so please forgive me if I get some of the details wrong but basically they try and predict well in advance which mutations are going to be prevalent the next year (like almost a year in advance) and make all the vaccines accordingly.

So it's more that a year ago or whenever they were actually selecting the strains for this year, H5N1 wasn't looking as scary, but maybe it could be included in next years' (assuming we don't get a pandemic and manage to rush a separate vaccine before then)?

Yeah my understanding is that we are sitting on a stockpile of at least 5 mill doses, and our routine process could be reasonably effective at dealing with this without resorting to "novel" technologies, but it's very severe and potentially a fast moving problem.

Where are you getting that bird flu might be 50% CFR? I thought it hadn't spread to humans yet

+1. 50% CFR is a rather extraordinary claim. Data varies, but I am seeing 60% CFR for ebola.

Random flu combinations is a yearly occurrence and something that is tracked by global public heath authorities. Also reminder that the flu is really fucking bad but we mostly forget about that because at risk persons are strongly incentivized to get flu shots.

Here's a link-

https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wpro---documents/emergency/surveillance/avian-influenza/ai_20241025.pdf

It is worth noting that the type of flu most likely to result in human to human transmission does have a strong possibility of resulting in lower lethality.

However we've had presumed mammal to human transmission in the U.S. already, IIRC.

The problem is when it goes human to human (which it may not).

I'm tracking it from time to time.

My suspicion is there is a solid chance we're going to get a pandemic sooner or later.

The spread in animals is not under control at all. The avian flus get more and more chances to mutate into something that transmits from human to human. So far we've been lucky, but how long can that last?

According to some experts who spoke at a WHO webinar I watched, we're in a "low risk situation that can suddenly become very high risk"...

Vaccines are being developed, but it remains to be seen if we get them quickly enough, or if not, if enough doses can be manufactured in time to at least reduce the damage done.

Vaccines are being developed, but it remains to be seen if we get them quickly enough, or if not, if enough doses can be manufactured in time to at least reduce the damage done.

And if people will actually take the damn thing after the fights across the country about COVID that are just now cooling down.

If the death rate is much higher than COVID, which appears increasingly likely, people will forget about those objections pretty fast.

Uh, hate to break it to you, but no we won't. Maybe the bodies will teach us to trust public health again, but it'll be too late.

We’ll see, I expect that if Trump comes out in full support (like last time) you will.

How much higher do you figure it has to be? I think trust in reporting and statistics has gotten so low as a result of COVID that nothing will resurrect it. Unless and until it reaches the point where people actually know the dead. When it's probably too late.

Yep, one of the big reasons I'm so angry about our COVID response is it absolutely slaughtered trust in public health for nothing. They cried wolf, and now if a wolf comes, we will be utterly unable to strike at it.

Grim, but about where I'm at too. Thanks for the cross-check.

No problem!

Will you do any prepping?

So far I've just bought a bunch of ffp3 masks and I'm slowly building up a store of a few foods that don't perish easily.

Last week I said that Twitter was better than ever. I was wrong.

Let me preface this by saying that most Twitter hate is just political signalling. Support for BlueSky is incredibly astroturfed (the social network equivalent of Brat Summer). It's doomed to fail because of network effects and because the deranged leftists will drive the normies away.

That out of the way...

It appears that Elon is trying to turn Twitter into Tiktok.

I deleted my well-curated Twitter account a couple months ago and then (like a degenerate junky) came back a couple weeks ago. On the new account, I followed Elon, Scott, Cremieux and a couple other people. But since I wasn't following that many people I have mostly been using the "For You" tab.

The quality has been extremely bad and it's getting worse. I keep seeing lots of videos of butts, boobs, and black people fighting. And you're already ready to say "this just proves you are engaging with trashy content, loser". You're right, I guess. It's hard to look away. But when I see this stuff I flag the post as "Not Interested" and block the account. It doesn't matter. They just keep showing me more.

So, what's going on here? One possibility is that Elon just doesn't care. His plate's a bit full at the moment. But another possibility is that Elon is seeing the massive influence of Tiktok and is trying to do a similar thing. Most people still get their political opinions from emotional responses to pictures and videos. A video based platform could have a lot more influence than a text one.

If anyone has any better theories I'm all ears.

EDIT: And like that, it's gone. Not a boob or butt in sight. I guess the A/B test didn't work.

My account is following exactly zero people and all I get is Musk, crypto, Alex Jones, random establishment politicians, people drawing themselves with Grok, Cristiano Ronaldo and something in Arabic. Which is about as useful as the front page in Edge that is tries to spring on my from time to time. But no NSFW stuff.

New account or old? But the differences could also be A/B testing.

Old, but it spent a lot of time being suspended for inactivity.

My feed is also full of asses and boobs, but not that kind.

The quality has been extremely bad and it's getting worse. I keep seeing lots of videos of butts, boobs, and black people fighting

Seriously, how do you do that? I also follow Elon and a bunch of other accounts, and I don't get any butts or boobs. Don't get me wrong, I know where the sites with butts, boobs and much more are, just my experience there is so different... My feed is suitable for the most judgmental grandma on the most prudish family gathering (well, maybe some coarse language will be there, I admit). I am not complaining, I am just confused why the outcome is so different. I just follow a bunch of people that post stuff (mostly political stuff but not exclusively). I don't do anything special.

It’s a new account. I don’t know. My old one didn’t have any of that content.

Have you tried replacing Twitter with Substack Notes? It's clearly more bereft of content, and the algo isn't great, but at least I'm not getting a lot of porn in my feed.

Funny you should mention that, I was browsing Substack Notes earlier today and saw some rando complaining that Notes kept showing them porn.

(Haven't seen any porn pop up in my own Notes feed yet, tbf.)

My For You has always been fine, 95% of it is just people i follow already. It's a bit too consistent tbh. I imagine this is because I mostly use Following, so the algorithm's just learned I like that.

Yeah I said something similar on Friday. There doesn’t appear to be any line in terms of keeping stuff you wouldn’t want to be seen watching in public, especially porn, away from the normal side of the site. Even Reddit has seemingly managed to do this, so it’s unclear why Musk hasn’t.

My Twitter feed is right wing actually-political politics and actually-religious Catholicism, with the occasional conspiracy theory or obvious racism on the ‘for you’ tab. Clearly if you follow enough people for the algorithm to learn your interests it doesn’t do that.

If I wanted to turn Twitter into Tiktok, I would grandfather existing users into a legacy experience and then give new users the new experience.

Perhaps they are but are looking at total engagement and are giving people who engage too little some of the new experience to drive up engagement.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Future Shock and 12 Commandments. Picking up Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.

Tore through three of the Jutland chapters in Castles of Steel.

God damn. This book needs to be required reading for anyone smugposting about military strategy. Oh, why didn’t Russia do X? Surely the U.S. should have done Y! Forget military strategy—I want to suggest this to the sort of person who insists that a failure to adopt some specific tactic means their opponents are stupid, evil, and/or insincere.

Let me back up. For the unfamiliar: Jutland was the first and only major sea battle of WWI. The UK’s Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy had been prodding at each other for nearly two years without decisive action. At the end of May 1916, the Germans set a trap, but the British preempted it with one of their own. As with many actions in WWI, the result was a horrendously bloody method of preserving the status quo. It was also a long chain of failures, some of which were unavoidable, and others of which were COMPLETE BLUNDERS.

The British

  • could read German radio traffic, but underutilized it due to officer dick-measuring infighting.
  • tried to bring an early aircraft carrier for scouting, but accidentally left it at home.
  • repeatedly failed at signaling in new and exciting ways. Flags, searchlights, radio, all botched at key points.
  • didn’t bother to signal at all before pulling stupid maneuvers.
  • kept screwing up their gunnery.
  • allocated their fastest and most modern battleships with the scout force, which left them both vulnerable and underutilized.
  • most famously, had more battlecruisers—until they didn’t, after two exploded from single hits.

Meanwhile, the Germans

  • sauntered into the trap anyway, because they also…
  • had no idea where the enemy was located.
  • brought outdated and slow ships because their commander asked nicely.
  • performed a secret and difficult maneuver with a long German name, turning the whole fleet 180 degrees…
  • performed that maneuver again. Immediately. Sailing right back into the British fleet. Their commander tried to justify this as a surprise attack, but admitted to his friends that “it just sort of happened.”
  • brought better-trained and more durable battle cruisers, but threw them at the enemy in a “death ride” to cover the main fleet’s escape.
  • ultimately snuck behind the British fleet under cover of night, but weren’t caught, making it home with fewer casualties in men and materiel.

In the end, several thousand men died. The German fleet was never allowed to plan something like this again, which suited the Royal Navy fine. Their newfound free time was devoted to infighting. Someone had to be blamed for at least a few of their unforced errors.

Which brings me back to the modern day. As always, it’s tempting to abuse the power of hindsight: ah, the British ought to have known their ships were death traps. The Germans never should have sailed without a fix on their enemies’ positions. So on, so forth, until we remember that it’s called “fog of war” for a reason and rein in our expectations.

More insidious, though, are the fallacies of planning. Even when we recognize that they simply couldn’t have known what we know—we fail to apply this to the present. We ask questions without knowing they’re the right ones, give orders without realizing they’re ambiguous. Plans disintegrate not on contact with the enemy, but on contact with the air, falling apart even as they first escape our minds.

If you find yourself making a plan that relies on rigorous communication, on individual initiative, on specific reactions from outsiders: your plan will not be implemented as you envisioned it. That’s alright; you can still get a desirable result! But if you think it has to happen your way, you will be disappointed.

This goes double when you’re planning for someone else. You have less skin in the game. You probably have less information, too. So if you consider all this, and you still want to insist that a rational person would already have enacted your plan…

Read this book. Or, for efficiency’s sake, read longtime SSC commenter bean’s blog version. You won’t be disappointed.

Finished JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. The second half is more about his experience at Yale Law and how the social connections he made there provided him tremendous opportunity for advancement, along with various musings on what societal and/or policy shifts might be beneficial for his "hillbilly" communities. Nothing super innovative I suppose, but it is interesting to see the issues these communities have getting more attention.

It could also be considered interesting for what isn't in it. There's hardly a word about any sort of substance abuse by Vance himself, not any drug use or heavy drinking, aside from a brief mention that his urine might not pass a drug test when his mother tries to get some clean urine from him to pass her own drug test. Nothing about any sorts of petty crime either. Also nothing about any romantic or sexual interest or behavior aside from meeting and getting with his now-wife.

The positive and charitable take on this is that it's a book that's supposed to be about the economic and social problems of his community and how he overcame them, not a dramatic tell-all. There's also the cynical take that it was written with at least a hope, if not expectation, that it would lead to a bigger career in politics and so anything that anyone might find offensive or scandalous was left out. He does write a lot about how the social contacts and advice he received at Yale opened a lot of doors for him, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume they continued opening doors to making contact with high-level conservative political influencers and launching a skyrocketing political career.

It's been a few years since I read it, but my impression of Hillbilly Elegy was that it was mediocre as a political polemic (mostly because the book was IMO too short to develop the many points it was trying to stab at, be it his political arguments or his personal story), but that Vance's personal story was very compelling. As someone who voted for the Trump/Vance ticket I was far more impressed with Senator Vance's growth through the 2024 campaign trail than the book, movie, or his Senate campaign.

With that, as someone whose background was "Hillbilly Elegy with the details shuffled and maybe a bit worse" I was not prepared for how much reading Vance's story would me down an emotionally ugly trip down memory lane that left me in tears asking God why we had to be like that.

My big reservation with the book is that I came away from it wondering if he was telling a story about Borderer honor culture or multiple generations of Borderline Personality Disorder in a family in a Borderer context. He mentioned having an ACE score of 7/10, and that is sufficiently severe/rare that I would strongly caution against generalizing about a cultural group (even/maybe especially your own) based on living through that.

I will say that I have a fairly critical view of "Borderer honor culture" because I experienced too much of its extreme, aka. the use of firearms in domestic arguments. That's just not okay. There is no circumstance in which it is acceptable to kill your daughter in a murder-suicide because your wife presented you with divorce papers. Shooting yourself dead in an argument with your girlfriend may well be the most dramatic way to make your point short of murder, but doing so makes you a piece of shit for what that does to her. Both of those things happened to close relatives of mine, and it's not okay. I blanched when the book mentioned his Mamaw (I had a chain-smoking Mamaw named Bonnie too.) lighting his grandfather on fire because that was something Mom would've done to us if it had occurred to her and it was fucking terrifying growing up under the thumb of a screaming, constantly threatening banshee. He captured the toxic push-pull dynamic of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw perfectly.

Vance was right to say that his experience of interpersonal/familial relationships was so different from his wife Usha's that they might as well have been from a different planet. In my experience an ACE score of 7 comes with a bunch of fucked up stories that I now hesitate to tell because they're nuclear-level buzzkills in the typical "Millennial complain about your family" session and because I'm at a place in life where I'd rather not dwell on the shit I'm trying to move on from. If I were to write my own Hillbilly Elegy the cover would feature me sitting in a local reporter's car watching my house burn down and all my belongings with it two weeks before Christmas when it turns out that the fire was set by my mother for the insurance money.

On a side note, I wound up befriending a bunch of second-gen immigrants in high school/undergrad and for whatever reasons their first gen parents, be they Russian/Ukrainian or Indian, tended to instantly like me and trust me as a friend for their children who was capable of handling plebian tasks for them like changing a tire, putting out a fire, or teaching them basics like "how to fry an egg" or "how to do laundry". Likewise, as an undergrad I had certain professors who gave me a lot more leniency than I deserved or asked for (concerning turning in assignments late; writing apologetic emails for late assignments was something I developed into an art form as a student) because they perceived me as "not privileged" because I worked a full-time job as a student.

What's with Wikipedia's new (2022) appearance, and its refusal to remember my preferences?

I've told it half a dozen times that I like wide column size and small text...and it keeps on reverting to the "modern" crap that doesn't even show half as much information on the screen.

I'm tempted to do the same thing I did to Fandom.com in order to make it a persistently readable website, but I'm hoping there's an easier way.

(No, I won't reward their arbitrary restrictions and poor UI by making an account. That way lies madness.)

I suspect it might have something to do with privacy settings. Wikipedia probably uses pretty short-lived cookies to store your preferences if you don't have an account. I think the cookie lifetime is 1 week. And traditionally Wikipedia is very reluctant to track people that don't have accounts so once the cookie is gone, the info is lost.

That sounds reasonable, but I'd be disappointed if you were right.

They decided that possibly tracking "a person who likes certain visual settings" was too invasive...so they're pushing users towards actually tracking them as a specific individual.

If you won't make an account then it will be hard for a website to remember your preferences across different devices or cookies etc. I imagine your only option is to use an add on for example:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/legacy-wikipedia/

I'm on one device, and don't clear my cookies. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia is the only website that consistently forgets my preferences (regardless of whether I log in or not).

Thanks for the addon recommendation, I'll check it out.

I wonder if modern dynamic IPs work this way for Wikipedia (but not other websites) because Wikipedia logs your IP specifically for edit-tracking purposes. Creating specific demi-profiles for each of them behind the scenes. I don't know anything about networking this is just speculation.

So there's the phenomenon of "hate watching," where people watch a movie or show they know they'll hate, looking for things to be offended by and get angry about. But is there a term for the similar phenomenon of people watching a movie or show they know they'll hate… because it's popular with others, and thus they're afraid of social consequences for not watching?

It's not quite "peer pressure," it's not exactly "fear of missing out." More a "fear of not fitting in." This sort of media consumption habit is usually associated with teenagers (particularly teen girls), but I've also encountered it occasionally with conservative Christian commentators. The sort who will complain about how everything Hollywood makes ranges from leftist propaganda to Satanic filth, and yet watch every popular new release; and when asked if they hate it so much, why don't they just stop watching, find the idea of not being * au courant* with pop culture horrifying, because then what will people who aren't fellow conservative Christians think? (What if your liberal coworkers are discussing the latest episode of Euphoria, and they ask you what you thought? You can't just tell them you didn't watch it' or worse, that you don't watch TV at all. How can you establish yourself as a fellow smart, cultured intellectual, and not get dismissed as an ignorant Bible-thumping hick (like all the ignorant Bible-thumping hicks back home that you worked so hard to escape) if you don't force yourself to watch multiple episodes of Transparent?)

I see it happening too. I started noticing it 10 years ago, actually, and it just got worse since.

I do not know any words for it, but I can describe the phenomenon a bit more:

People used to ignore things they didn't like, and engage with what they liked.

Then they started sharing some of the worst stuff they found, to "spread awareness" of it.

Then they started sharing things which made them sad or angry, because they wanted to share their feelings.

Then people started sharings things that they didn't like, in order to signal hate for it: "Look how stupid this is!"

Then people started engaging with content that they hate, but "ironically". This ties into things like "Shitposting", "Cringe compilations", Lolcows, and other things that seem to correlate with traits that I dislike (nihilism, vulgarity, apathy, mockery, shock humor). If you see somebody "ironically" listening to the National Anthem of the USSR, or "ironically" modding Shrek into videogames, you will recognize these tendencies in them.

I think this change correlates to what we all "brainrot". More psychologically healthy people seem better at ignoring or avoiding that which is unpleasant and to threat it as if it does not exist, rather than to engage with it (and thus fuel it!) or even feel an urge to do so. Healthy people also seem to have a lower tolerance for disgusting things, and to find things disgusting more easily.

And algorithms of the past tended to fulfill positive needs (humor, curiousity, cuteness, awe, creation, community), but now many negative things are included as well, for instance material which makes ones enemies look bad, material which affirms ones beliefs, all kinds of "relatable" content, and even content in which something successful is borrowed in order to promote something which has failed (for instance, modifying a video of a famous person to talk as if he shared your frustrations, or drawing a high-status girl saying something vulgar and low-status. People who cannot create something of value tend to take other peoples creations and to modify them). Two more related ideas are "don't feel the troll" (an old warning against engaging) and "drama" (the result of engaging in troublesome matters, rather than ignoring, or blocking/muting that or those which annoy you)

Whatever the origins of reality TV and celebrity gossip and other "trashy" instances of social dynamics are, I'm fairly sure they're mechanically related to this phenomenon.

This is exactly my experience, but with sports! I don't enjoy watching sports, I don't care who wins or loses, but I know that 90% of the discussion at Thanksgiving will revolve around the Notre Dame football games so I have to choose to either watch (the highlights) or be utterly out of the conversation loop.

This is not a new problem. I fully suspect that it's what drove the earlier generation to watch the nightly news, since otherwise you're out of the water-cooler chit-chat loop. (How far back do I have to go for a water-cooler chit-chat to still be a thing? 90's?)

Holy crap I just realized I'm in a sportsless filter bubble. I have literally never had a holiday discussion regarding the outcome of sports games. None of my immediate family care much about sports. My dad sometimes watches football, but mostly casually, and none of the rest of us do so what would there be a discussion about. And my extended family also don't watch sports except maybe occasionally. And I suppose this is strongly correlated, because the fact that my grandpa didn't care about sports influenced his children to not care about sports so it makes sense that all of them collectively don't care, which in turn is a component of why I don't care.

But also I spent several thanksgivings at a friend's extended family when I was away at college, and they didn't talk about sports. But my friend was a big nerd, nonrandomly because he was friends with me.

But also I recently got married and none of my in-laws care about sports. Again, this is non-random because I married a big nerd and while her family are not exclusively nerds, they're not sports people.

To be clear, there are a lot of things they talk about on the more normie side that I don't really care about: tractors and hunting and broadway and dogs. But sports is not on the menu, and I never really considered that this wasn't just luck, but also indirect correlations: non-sports people are more likely to be relatives of non-sports people.

A good friend of mine started following college (SEC) football in his mid teens so that he could immediately bond with pretty much anyone (he was a bit of a politician a s eventually went into business). He had no real interest in it before.

When he died at age 48, his wife (who had known only the last five or so years of his life) had a Bama football-themed wake for him, where people were wearing crimson and white and houndstooth and signing Roll Tide etc. in the memory book.

It was an odd feeling for me, having known him almost all his life. Maybe he would have liked it? I kept this all to myself.

How far back do I have to go for a water-cooler chit-chat to still be a thing? 90's?

Before 1890s, probably. It sounded like everyone was reading Dickens for water cooler chit chat reasons.

I think this is simply a matter of watching being the price of admission for (productively) commenting. if you say "these new shows/movies are slop full of woke garbage", and your response to "well, have you seen them?" is "no", your argument loses a lot of weight, even if it's completely correct. As such, there is a complicated line to walk between "I don't want to waste my time with this" and "I don't want to cede this cultural battleground". The latter might sound unhinged, but if everyone refuses to engage, and the normie majority acquiesces as it is wont to do, then you end up in the state we've been for the last decade.

"Keeping up with the zeitgeist"?

“Keeping up with the Joneses,” maybe.

Inspired by a Tumblr post I saw:

Is there a term for a cluster of similar, related items connected by shared traits, but where none of the traits are dispositive, nor is there a central example to which the rest are compared?

That is, for example, where one member of the group has relevant traits ABCD, another BCDE, another CDEF, and another ABEF, etc. So that none of the traits ABCDEF are present in all members of the group — so you can't characterize the group as "things with trait[s] [fill in blank]" — nor is there a "type specimen" X with all relevant traits "ABCDEF" — so you can't characterize the group as "X and things closely resembling X." Just a lot of things which resemble one another in a few important ways.

"ABCDEFish", or if you prefer: things that are approximately ABCDEF, or the points near ABCDEF in concept-space?

Wittgenstein calls this “family resemblance”.

From the Wikipedia intro:

[The idea of family resemblance] argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things.

Thanks, that sounds the most like what I was looking for.

Lesswrong has "cleaving reality at the joints" and "clusters in thingspace" for that concept.

Could you give a concrete example of what you're talking about?

Big tent coalition?

Political beliefs are a bit like this. So is sports team support.

Maybe it's Tribal affiliation, or "mood affiliation" as Tyler Cowen calls it.

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