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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3351 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 26, 2025

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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Shameless spoon-feeding request here, but what are the best options for an AI research assistant? Local or cloud is fine.
I've just been using the various web clients, and while they're useful the mix of sycophancy and kindergarten longhouse scolding gets really old. Is there one available that just answers your God damn question without adding "wow, that's such a cool idea! What a really creative use of that formula!"

Are people just not applying, or are certain people - for DEI or other reasons - not being hired?

Here's a list of requirements just to get your foot in the door as a "trainee," which filters out many people:

  • Be a United States citizen

  • Be age 30 or under (on the closing date of the application period)

  • Pass a medical examination

  • Pass a security investigation

  • Pass the FAA air traffic pre-employment test

  • Speak English clearly enough to be understood over communications equipment

  • Have three years of progressively responsible work experience, or a Bachelor's degree, or a combination of post-secondary education and work experience that totals three years

  • Be willing to relocate to an FAA facility based on agency staffing needs

Plus, if you get the job, the work is grueling, even with the high pay: long hours, stress from a high-pressure environment, nonexistent social life, and stagnant career prospects.

If you haven't read tracingwoodgrain's expose of the mid 10s hiring scandal, that would be a good place to start.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ATC/comments/1aeeg2c/the_faas_atc_testing_scandal_a_quick_overview/ https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1884989215244460398

In 2012 and 2013, the NBCFAE continued pushing this process, with members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push diversity among ATCs. By July 2013, the FAA created a "Barrier Analysis Implemention Team" (BAIT, and I swear I am not making this acronym up). Around this time, the FAA decided to pause the hiring of CTI graduates pending the implementation of the biographical assessment.

The TL;Dr is that there was an attempt to hire more ATCs, but affirmative action demands turned it into a decade-long bias and cheating scandal where tests were given random answers that were then leaked to a "black affinity group" to help them pass. "what is your favorite color" had a correct answer that gave you points towards a job controlling air traffic. Most people who weren't given the answers in advance failed.

These were fully qualified people who had already passed the skills assessment, but were not allowed to become ATCs because of a "biographical" test explicitly designed to get rid of the white guys.

Reddit is of course torn between studiously ignoring this and declaring Trace a Nazi trumper.

Most people who weren't given the answers in advance failed

The BBC said that the workforce went from 59% white men to 55% white men since 2016. I would be interested to know how many ATCs hired during the relevant period were actually black. Are we talking like 10% or like 60%?

The diversity of the FAA workforce, on some measures, has gradually increased in recent years, according to the agency's Office of Civil Rights.

In 2016, under Obama, white men made up 59%, external of the workforce and people with targeted disabilities made up 0.7%.

In 2020, the final year of Trump's first term, 57% were white men, external and 1% of the workforce had targeted disabilities.

In 2023, those figures , externalstood at 55% and 2%.

It had already run its course by 2016, which was the year Congress officially banned the biographical "test." That the number of white men kept falling just indicates they kept up all the other well-documented discriminatory behavior even after the biography debacle.

And regardless of the ratios, trace's article shows that faa hiring had been laser focused on race instead of hiring more qualified people to make up their staffing shortfall. The worst part wasn't hiring unqualified people (because they did all pass the same test), it was refusing to hire as many qualified people as they needed because too many of them would be white.

That the number of white men kept falling just indicates they kept up all the other well-documented discriminatory behavior even after the biography debacle.

Given demographic change and the fact that younger zoomers are less than half non-Hispanic white, surely one would expect the number of white men to fall over time.

Are there any subreddits which have mainly smart people in them? /r/neoliberal used to not be bad but since the election there's been an influx of regular fired-up partisan Democrats (who are just not socialist or leftist, but not necessarily familiar with economics etc.)

Politics or politics-adjuacent subs would be good, but also subs with other topics including general discussion. (Just not obvious answers which are too niche, like if there's a sub on some particular theoretical physics view, etc.)

Is there a resource like UA war maps but for the current Congo war? It's hard to get a read on what's going on from mainstream media but it seems like some extraordinary things are happening. The Rwandan backed Tutsi M23 rebels just took the biggest city in the east despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned on paper by the Congolese army, South Africa and Wagner Group (allegedly).

Is anyone following this conflict?

Details tend to bubble up on various OSINT twitter accounts when they aren't distracted by other events, but you're unlikely to get as much reliable information on this or other contemporary wars in places people don't care about e.g. Burma or Sudan by dint of fewer people putting in the effort to collect and disseminate on-the-ground reports to a foreign audience.

I have not been following this particular round in much detail, but it doesn't seem like too much of an aberration in the grand scheme of things. After the Rwandan genocide, the Tutsis followed the Israeli example and built an organized military machine that has only been prevented from conquering huge swathes of East and Central Africa by an alliance of most of their neighbors and heavy UN pressure to abide by various ceasefire agreements. With the gloves off they could probably steamroll almost all of the Congo by themselves, but that would ruin their international image and probably lead to things like foreign aid being cut off, so they are content to use their proxies for the time being.

There was an ACX book review submission (never posted on the blog as it wasn't a finalist) on The Wheel of Time, anyone have a link to it? It was part of a larger word doc compilation IIRC.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ki5XsE0jkxZtd2XAeyTAJw1ZjLh2Cu-matUYKAhA6-s/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.gw1mwrnlkee2

Perfect, thanks!

I am also interested, if this gets found.

I linked it.

Anyone buying the dip on Nvidia? It's looking more and more like they're going to be the only manufacturer of high end gpus for ai use. It's hard to tell if they're overvalued or undervalued, but this particular panic drop seems retarded.

I just threw in 5k for funnies.

(Edit: up 3% so far lol)
(Edit edit: ok now I'm not, bought another batch anyway)

Did the price of GPUs themselves go down? Sounds like a better investment.

What do you mean?

I mean: can I buy me a new graphics card on the cheap?

Used 3080s are still around 400 dollars. They're still better than all new cards in that price range, and are the only thing worth buying unless you're going all the way to a 4090 or 5090. If you're screwing around with text generation (or to a point, image generation with the bigger models) then you buy a 3090 (the 4090 cannot do anything the 3090 can't, and the same is also true of the 5090 to an extent, because that task is VRAM limited and if you have to dip into system memory they're all going to be slow).

Today's GPUs are priced more or less fairly given the performance they yield. That's the entire problem with them.

Oh, lol no, prices are still retarded. You might be able to get one of the new Intel or AMD ones if you just want to game though. Intel's new gay orc cards are actually pretty good and quite cheap.

My coworkers tell me that the Nvidia bubble burst because the Chinese proved that you need less compute to get the same results.

At which point I just hear "the Chinese proved that you can get a lot more results for the same amount of compute".

It's just a short-term contraction because people misunderstand how technological developments in hardware and software interact; that's my take. Or maybe I misunderstand it all.

That was my thought too. The Chinese optimized with Nvidia's hardware-specific PTX instruction set architecture, which ties them even closer as the sole manufacturer.
If they'd done it by using clusters of Intel Sparkle Twink cards or whatever they're calling the new gen, I could see Nvidia taking a hit from it, but this is exactly the opposite.

This has been my take as well, although I worry that I've developed diamond hands WRT NVDA and that this is just a cope on my part.

Is there any ways to do polls on the motte? I'd really like to do a survey on what people are using and paying for winter heating. Don't know about anyone else, but I hate when people link to external poll sites and never reply.

If there isn't an option currently and you can code, I bet you'd be welcome to design one for the site?

I am lower than a code monkey. I am a code plastic flipflop, worn by America. I just thought it might be one of the features zorba stripped from the /r/drama codebase, like the automatic word replace and such.

Why not just use a third party site for the poll and link to it in the post? Also use the post for discussion of the poll and allow people to make arguments for why they went with their particular option.

Just make comments for each option and tell people to upvote the one they use? That's how the literature subreddit voted on "book of the year/decade/GOAT" 10 years ago.

I suspect vandalism is low enough (and people follow instructions well enough - on most other sides you'd get people voting which they like best) here that this might still work.

Ugh, that sounds even more awkward. Maybe I'll stick to an external poll and see how many people bother to respond. Thanks for the idea though: it's amazing the stuff people come up with to get around crap UIs.

What's the AV situation like with Linux (particularly Mint)? I'm not a super hacker and due to my proclivity for pirated games I'd appreciate something to check for malware with. AFAICT Mint doesn't come with one, although I could be missing something.

@gattsuru you've been quite helpful so far, so I figure I'll ping you in particular. Sorry about all these questions.

Late to the party, but as others have said, ClamAV is usually the go-to for Linux antivirus. It's got its limits -- a lot of its use case is for blocking viruses for windows from passing through Linux servers, especially email servers -- but it's pretty reasonable.

rkhunter can be useful in a forensic context or for particularly suspicious situations, but it's not really meant as a day-to-day antivirus. Uploading to VirusTotal for scanning can rarely be useful, though probably not relevant for yarhar'd video games if only due to file size concerns.

Mint does not natively come with a virus scanner, though it should have ClamAV in the app library and from apt-get. I've got mixed feelings about that: a lot of people do run without any and are fine, but the sort of person that needs it most is going to be least likely to install it.

It’s a joke. You don’t need AV for Linux. However, an RMM tool or an EDR agent might be worthwhile but those have a minimum license count and aren’t individually sold. Wazuh/OSSEC “EDR” has some function.

You don’t need AV for Linux.

I can accept that for normal use. Pirated software is a specifically-risky case, because you're running binaries with elevated permissions that have come from less-than-trustworthy sources (and sure, I avoid third-party installers because that's the obvious trap, but faking a trusted signature on an installer isn't TTBOMK impossible).

Any way you can get hashes for the legit versions of the binaries to compare? Sometimes they’re even signed.

Unfortunately, in many cases the 'legit' version of pirated software will have executables that are modified from their original legal version, either to bypass DRM or for other varying reasons... and this happens at the same stage that it's easiest to inject malicious software.

I mean, in a lot of pirated games the installer is the official, signed one and then you just replace files in the runtime, and those are substantially less dangerous because unless they've faked the signature then you're not running untrusted executables with elevated permissions.

A lot of others don't modify the executables at all; they just have stuff to fake the DRM checks, whether that be CD keys, disc images, or occasional actual utilities like YASU. Specific keygens are the same threat as above (unless they ask for admin access, which is a big red flag); mere listed keys or disc images are less dangerous again, and general-purpose utilities like YASU are typically too big a deal to be malware.

Third-party installers typically get a "hahaha, nice try" from me, because yeah, you're handing over admin permissions to a file that might just be ransomware for all you know. I think I've actually run like one of these (after a virus scan came back clean, and after great effort to find a less-sketchy pirate version), and while nothing bad happened AFAIK I still think it was a dumb decision. If a pirate site offers one of these (or a third-party "downloader" executable), just keep looking; there's little reason to do it if the pirate's legit and lots of reason if he's a black-hat.

Hm. If a particular pirate website has been active for a decade or more and consistent with their methods, do you think they're still untrustworthy?

A lot of pirate websites are more like warehouses than brands; people upload stuff (or link to stuff uploaded elsewhere, in the cyberlocker model) but it's not always the same people. There are specific pirate circles with reputations, but there are so many of them that it's tricky to keep track, and unless they use cryptographic signatures (and you have the tools to check them; not like the usual trust authorities are going to help) somebody could just be impersonating them.

Also, "SEO piracy and then use malware on noob pirates" doesn't strike me as the sort of business model that ages all that badly. Sure, you only get noobs, but there's an endless supply of those because piracy isn't exactly the sort of thing that everyone gets taught how to do by Trusted Sources*, and you're not really fighting the search engines (not to the extent that most scammers are, at least) because they typically try to hide both real and scam pirates. Obviously, you're running a criminal enterprise, but there are a bunch of countries where the government quietly tolerates that sort as long as they're mostly hitting foreigners (where do you think all the "your computer is infected with 50 viruses!" scam phone calls come from?).

*I'm reminded of this quote from an article on LW:

It also works because these shadowy people, themselves, are often professional LARPers. The stupid mistakes you make coming up with a plan to sell drugs are going to be very far from the stupidest mistakes drug dealers have ever made, because there are no apprenticeships for drug dealers. Most of their tradecraft is just made up on the fly, not an insignificant amount gathered from impressions gained in TV shows and movies.

ClamAV is quite good, I've been using the Windows frontend ClamWin for over a decade now. I believe Trellix also has an AV product for Linux, though it may be more along the lines of enterprise endpoint protection than no-frills AV. There's also libredefender, though it seems like it's basically a frontend for ClamAV and I have some concerns about their ChatGPT/Copilot usage.

What is libredefender's ChatGPT/Copilot usage? I saw a ChatGPT conversation as a joke on their front page, but I can't find any articles about it.

Call me a Luddite but the ChatGPT joke in their readme is a red flag that they use it at all, and my limited experience with Rust is that it's a very verbose and dense language when written by humans. I can't satisfactorily convince myself that their code isn't LLM generated. That's all.

What are my best frying pan options if I want to fry eggs? I bought an expensive non-stick model about 10 months ago and it apparently already needs to be replaced. Is there any good long-term alternative option?

I've used an Italian ceramic pan from Ballarini for a couple of years and it seems more durable than your run-of-the-mill teflon pan. I still treat it as I would any other non-stick cookware out of an abundance of caution e.g. use only plastic or wooden tools, don't cook with it above medium heat, and clean it with soft sponges that won't scratch. I'm not actually sure how much one costs, as it was a gift, but I think you can find good discounts on their cookware sets.

Egg frying is about temperature. A stainless steel pan would work just fine. I use carbon steel (woks), and it works great. You only need a non-stick for french omelettes.

I'm not in a position to back this up right now but at this point I'm pretty sure that non-stick is a terrible idea. Those chemicals are not good for you and whatever the government says about 'safe' temperatures hotspots can and do develop on a stove and turn that convenience into cancer and who knows what else. I used to have a George Foreman grill (remember those?) and when I hit it with my temp gun it was over 800° in places. Plus I suspect that if you have male children it'll make their penises smaller and generally cause problems along those lines hormonally.

IMO stainless steel remains king. And as a bonus you can ditch the plastic utensils while you're at it.

I think nonstick is still far and away the best option for cooking eggs. Stainless steel is good for other things but not for this specific task. As far as the chemicals go, I'm not worried about that and I don't personally think anyone else should worry either (but to each his own).

For cooking steaks and the like I really loved a carbon steel pan I had (until my wife ruined it and it rusted a ton ><). It was the perfect searing pan - it got hot like cast iron, but wasn't unreasonably heavy like cast iron. I really should get another one one of these days.

As far as the chemicals go, I'm not worried about that and I don't personally think anyone else should worry either (but to each his own).

Been a while since I geeked out on this but afaict the matter is really not in question. The chemicals are hazardous when heated to certain completely-routine temperatures. There isn't any disagreement about this. TBH I've wondered for quite a while why more isn't being done to address the situation. Seems to be an at least asbestos-tier calamity.

What about enameled cast iron?

Yeah, I have a whole lot of that stuff including (pertinently) multiple frying pans and a breakfast pan. It's lovely and pleasant but in practice I only end up using it for serving guests. My daily drivers are all stainless steel, mostly All-Clad. Stainless is just lighter and easier. Cleans very well without discoloration as tends to accumulate on e.g. Le Creuset's creamy interiors. Staub mostly fixes this issue with their black inner enamel, but let's all admit the creamy stuff looks prettier. Also I think that for eggs in particular it's nice to have a bit less in the way of heat retention; I like to be able to cut the fire and finish cooking with carryover heat instead of being rushed to get the eggs out of the pan before they burn.

The enamelware breakfast pan is possibly a bit better for steaks, though, and I do almost all braising in Staub enamelware.

I also have an unenameled 17" cast iron skillet and have been wondering if I'll ever find a purpose for it.

Oh and FWIW I fry eggs every morning for the kids so I've had a lot of time to try different things and consider outcomes.

I have a Staub. It's great. But my question was intended to be: is the enamel safe for long term health or will it give off any dangerous particles into the food?

Oh! I'm pretty sure it's completely safe. Slight caveat that anything made in China is liable to have cadmium in it or something but that's a general problem.

I guess carbon steel, it comes smooth, properly seasoned is quite non stick especially if you use something like the chineese long yao technique - in which you create a nonstick surface before each cooking. something like - get the pan screaming hot, throw couple of drops of cold oil. disperse and wipe with a paper towel wait till the new film is lightly smoking - then throw your cooking oil to make a think layer and drop your eggs. Should be pretty non stick.

If you don't wash it too aggressively, this coating will build into a pretty good seasoning layer, as with cast iron. You can even do it with stainless, if you more or less don't wash it at all.

It works on aluminum, too. I've seasoned my sheet pans the same way I've done my skillet.

Cast iron is the buy it for life option (it will take some maintenace but you can cook almost anything with it).

Yeah, I'll try a few things to try to revive my current pan and if none of them work, I'll get a cast iron. Seems like the best option overall.

I dislike how long it takes to heat up just to fry a couple of eggs though.

3.5 kw induction is your friend. A stovetop like that costs around 250 euro. Or any 2kw induction with big enough ring.

Carbon steel is your huckleberry then.

Have you considered poaching eggs?

Softboiled is the true master race. Easily digestible protein with delicious, vitamin rich raw yolk.

Stargazer cast iron pans are fantastic. Season properly and they're highly nonstick.

10 months seems on the short side. Are you taking good care of your pans? The first result for "what ruins non stick pans" suggests 5 years expected life.

If you don't fancy cast iron you could get a stainless steel pan and a suitable metal scrubber.

The 5-year number probably assumes sporadic use. I use mine daily, multiple times a day.
As far as care, nothing problematic that I can think of. I use a wooden spoon and a regular sponge for washing.

don't buy expensive non stick. replace every year at least. there is no such thing as a long-term coated non-stick pan.

tramontina is reliable and cheap.

you don't need a non stick to fry an egg though. with a little practice, very gentle heat and a small dollop of butter, you can even fry on cast iron.

replace every year at least. there is no such thing as a long-term coated non-stick pan.

I disagree. I'm very happy with my PTFE non-stick pans, I use them daily and they last longer than 5 years.

I take special care with them (no metal utensils ever, not hotter than 150°C ever (meat goes into the cast iron), never in the dishwasher, no pan scrubber ever, not stacked in the pan rack), and as a result the coating is completely intact. My theory is that the coating starts to degrade in patches starting from a scratch/nick - so if you never have a scratch, the coating stays intact.

I'm not sure brands make a huge difference, but my pans are all from WMF and in the low 3 digit price range.

don't buy expensive non stick. replace every year at least. there is no such thing as a long-term coated non-stick pan.

Yeah, that seems to be the popular opinion everywhere else online I'm seeing. It's a real shame, I would much rather buy one decent product and use it for 5 years or longer.

You absolutely can do that. I have a Misen nonstick pan which I've had for almost 5 years now. It's not as good as it used to be, but it's still nonstick enough that it gets the job done.

If you are worried about the fat macros from using butter, cooking oil-spray (like PAM) also work well for frying eggs in cast iron.

IMO it does work better than just vegetable oil but not quite as well as butter. It's also much much less tasty than using butter. The ones in the pressurized cans seem to work better than the pump versions. I'm not too worried about the propellant as the amount used per serving is minuscule. For daily eggs one can lasts me 6 month to a year. The classic version works the best, olive oil version works well but you have to be careful of the smoke point using in cast iron, the coconut oil version works well as long as it's above 74° F in your kitchen but has a hard time aerosolising otherwise.

If using cooking spray to conserve calories, go easy on how long you spray. One serving is something like 1/4 of a second. It's supposed to be ~1g fat per second spray.

Not sure where to raise this, but some of the deadnaming/gender recognition stuff is insane.

I was bingeing True Crime and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheshire_murders pronouns/identities have been retroactively changed for a Murderer who post-crime decided to transition, which just feels weird to me

Did you see the bio of the enforcer on the talk page?

/images/17381144853854256.webp

I need to reread the bioleninism series.

I'm fascinated that Hayes' deadname was even listed on the Wikipedia page -- I thought even for such horrendous people the policy was never to use a deadname. Was it the "then Linda raped the woman he kidnapped" part that made it necessary to clarify this was a bepenised individual?

But really what upsets me is that there was a strong feeling in the state of Connecticut that this was a profoundly evil case that deserved the death penalty, so much so that it delayed the abolition of capital punishment there. And then, like always, the Supreme Court of CT just goes and declares it unconstitutional anyway, because heaven forbid the legislature proscribe punishments for crimes according to the popular will in a democracy. I'm weakly anti-death-penalty, but I take the John Roberts in Obergefell approach to the issue: in a democracy, such issues should be won by winning hearts and minds, not using judicial power to override the people's will, which "wins" without winning. If your concern over the death penalty is the sacred value of human life, imposing bans on capital punishment by fiat does nothing to create a culture that values life.

I had no particular knowledge of the case coming into the article, felt it was weird that it was a female/male duo perpetrating (especially when the article had the female party be very hands on with the violence and whatnot) then it dawned on me.

A generation of crime stats have been contaminated because of recording the perpetrator's claimed gender identity rather than their sex. Twenty years from now, criminologists will be baffled as to why the UK saw such a massive spike in "female" sex crimes over the course of five years, which then regressed to the mean in a heartbeat.

During my drive into work the other day, I realized that I could have a voice conversation with ChatGPT, to keep my commute productive and explore some ideas in the morning. It worked out for some simple back-and-forth but as soon as I tried lengthier conversation, the flow just wasn't quite there. ChatGPT thought that pauses between sentences were the end of my prompt, and would start responding even though I was still thinking about what to say. Voice mode currently feels like a glorified text-to-speech engine with shorter responses.

Note that I'm not belittling the effort it has taken for OpenAI to release voice mode, but its capacity for natural conversation is still far away, though given the advances the AI space has made in the past year, it's probably sooner than we think. (You can even dial 1-800-ChatGPT and it'll allow you to use voice mode without the app!)

Has anyone here had any success with LLM services that are tailored for natural conversation?

A quick hack you can use is to instruct it to use "radio etiquette", and not to respond with a full answer until you finish a transmission by saying 'over'.

The way it is coded, it will be compelled to respond every time you "send" it a prompt (which happens automatically when you pause), but you can instruct it to only respond with e.g. a single '.' (which it will read, but that's only one syllable) until you say 'over'.

Funnily enough, it's role playing conditioning will automatically also result in it saying 'over' after every answer.

Is ai going to kill us all?! (Asking for a friend)

I expect no more than 1000 human survivors. Superintelligence likely turns the world from a wordcel/charisma game into a 4X game - Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. One person or one team secures total world dominance with AIs as their soldiers, spies and workers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and they dispense with everyone in favour of doing whatever they please themselves. Or the AI goes rogue and posthumously renames us to homo insipiens for our foolishness.

I know it sounds kind of cringe and naive sci-fi but that's what superintelligence truly means. It means humans are no longer relevant, sovereign or important in any way except in so far that we may control an AI. By ourselves, we're just pinatas that can be thrashed for easy loot by beings that neither rest nor know mercy.

Only in the sense that it cures cancer and withholds it because that's it's twisted sense of humor, and also it will outcompete everyone in every industry. It will also turn Jupiter's moon Europa into paperclips, because it thinks that's actually funny. No Skynet type stuff though, except for a few sexbots who prioritize giving their bdsm client the thrill of their life at the cost of their life.

Thoughts about what's going on in markets right now? Nvidia and AVGO (the big AI compute production companies) just took a 17% dump.

People are saying that this is due to R1 proving that less compute is needed for good results, so there is less need for more capex (but OpenAI announced 500 billion of capex over the next four years, just a few days ago). I don't understand this though, if you can do good work with little compute, you should be able to do great work with more compute. If anything this should mean an acceleration towards singularity territory, timelines shortening. The hyperscalers will be forced to up their game and fight back, accelerate their releases. Deepseek is just at this moment down due to too high demand or what they call 'malicious activity'. As I write this I opened up a music video on youtube and found it was all AI for the visuals. Everyone needs more compute.

Also why is Facebook up when their open-source models have been so thoroughly trounced? Google and OpenAI/Microsoft have stuff comparable to R1.

I heard an alternate thesis that this was due to japan raising interest rates and upsetting the carry trades that support US tech valuations.

I hold both of these hard-hit companies so perhaps I'm coping a bit. I guess I've long believed that markets are irrational in the short term, so it doesn't matter if stocks go back to where they were on October 1st. It's all karmic consequences for buying Marvell (which also makes hardware for AI) just a few days ago. I heard that little voice inside telling me to wait for a red day and ignored it. It's the same old story: https://youtube.com/watch?v=61Q6wWu5ziY

Up until Deepseek the conventional wisdom was that the bottleneck of the AI revolution will be Nvidia. So they would command prices and margins. After deepseek it was less certain. Due to the way the human mind works movements arounds probabilities around 0 and 1 - even small movements in probabilities away from 0 and 1 could trigger disproportional reactions. Nvidia will produce a shitload of silicone and sell it. But the reduced computational demands means that there is price points and applications at which ati/intel or some asics could become viable.

I read the other day that China has been obtaining 4090 chips through clandestine means, somehow stealing them from graphics card boards and then returning them so they end up in the supply chain GPU-less. Is it evident exactly what silicon Deepseek is using, or is it a possibility that the underlying silicon is mostly nvidia chips that have been obtained despite export restrictions?

I think it is too complicated. And if done on large enough scale people will notice. And if done that way it will be for Chinese military/Intelligence use.

Also why is Facebook up when their open-source models have been so thoroughly trounced? Google and OpenAI/Microsoft have stuff comparable to R1.

Because Meta's AI strategy was trying to prevent the other big players from building a moat, and Deepseek seems to be doing their work for them.

Do people have advice for enriching online curriculum for a gifted autistic 8-year-old?

My son was kicked out of our local private school after less than a term for being too autistic for them to handle, and we have finally had to pull him from the local state school because the SEN support he had in place wasn't working this year. So we (mostly my wife - I work a City professional job) are now homeschooling an autistic 8-year-old mini-STEMlord. We started using Doodle Learning which is based on the English National Curriculum - after entry assessments he is within months of being ready for secondary maths (i.e. roughly 3 years ahead) and 1.5-2.5 years ahead in English. When he started school, his non-verbal IQ was assessed at 99.9th percentile.

He enjoys the Doodle Maths online exercises, but refuses to do the English ones unless paid. My memory, and as far as I can determine online, is that if you are more than 1-2 years ahead in maths you need enrichment (more conceptually difficult work and problems that require deeper thinking) rather than acceleration (going through the standard curriculum faster). The UK has a good system of maths enrichment for secondary schools organised around a tiered set of competitions leading up to the IMO, but I am not aware of anything for primary.

More broadly, my son has engineer-brain, which is close to my scientist-brain, but different enough that I don't know how to motivate him or get him to build things more complex than Lego. Do people here have advice? He loved forest nursery when he was little, and built things that a 4-year-old shouldn't be able to build. He has stopped since then.

Sorry to hear about your son’s school. What about BRIO train track sets, the wooden ones? I used to have a lot of fun with those: you can build arbitrary systems on the large scale, but the nature of curving track constrains what you can do on the small scale in a way he might find interesting and challenging. Also they’re big wooden pieces so harder to swallow or lose than Lego, and hard to damage. And the scenery allows some level of imagination / artistic expression.

My parents have BRIO train at their house. Mini-STEMlord loved it when he was younger but has mostly outgrown it. It remains the highlight of little brother's visits there though. (They have the adapter kit which allows you to do the heavy civil engineering in Duplo and then run BRIO track across it.)

Sorry, somehow I got it into my head that he was 4. What about moving onto the real thing? Or if I you don’t want him to turn into a train otaku, there’s the Lego Mindstorms kits, which have a very good reputation (actual robotics departments often use them for student projects).

There’s also Warhammer if you feel like that City job is burdening you with too much money, or you could move him onto making actual stuff. For example simple carpentry with supervision, or get a 3D printer and an ONSHAPE subscription and let him learn easy CAD stuff. (Prusa is good but costs $999 for an assembler printer so it’s a Christmas+Birthday deal).

Mini STEMlord's mum here. I'll look into Lego SPIKE, but it's super-expensive and he's already bankrupting me by building 2,000-piece Lego sets in a matter of hours! I've got an Arduino starter kit, which I originally bought for myself but didn't use, so I'm going to work with him on that.

My mum's just bought him/us a Bambu Lab P1S. We're not at the point of doing CAD work yet. We're still working on 'how to choose and print your own project from your laptop (without your mum's help)'. Thanks for the recommendation of ONSHAPE, though. I figured a CAD package would be expensive, but ONSHAPE looks like it's free for home/educational users.

Mini STEMlord gravitates towards sci-fi horror (terrifyingly, as he's only eight) and loves complex board games, so I've been trying to get him interested in Warhammer 40k, mostly as an excuse to build the Adeptus Mechanicus army of my dreams... But, he's not really gone for the (family-friendly) snippets I've shown him so far yet. Maybe as he gets older...

I second the choice of OnShape! Yes, it's free for educational purposes. I volunteer at a local after-school STEM program, and we have elementary-school kids CAD designs for 3D printers.

OnShape looks a bit intimidating at first (it wasn't UX-ed to death), but there are lots of videos on YouTube that do a how-to. Get to the point where you can make a "Sketch" of something simple like a polygon, and then "Extrude" it, and you're on your way to make interesting designs. In my experience, so long as the kid is coordinated enough to use a mouse, he'll get comfy with the basics faster than an adult.

Best of luck!

Yeah, sorry, the stuff that sticks in my mind 20 years later are all kind of expensive options. Mostly I just used to read books, which are cheap. If you can get him onto something that uses raw materials like whittling or something rather than expensive electronics kits, that would help a lot. Even silver-smithing is pretty cheap as long as you stick to wire and semi-precious stones, though I doubt you have the space.

ONSHAPE is great and I have never ever used the free account to do semi-professional work.

EDIT: the lego sets are probably a bad idea, you want their make-anything kits rather than sets that can be finished.

EDIT EDIT: try those "101 Things A Boy Can Do" books from the 1930s for cheaper ideas.

I don't know how to motivate him or get him to build things more complex than Lego.

What's your goal for him wrt this? Does he share it?

But just taking this at face value. Have you tried an erector set? A 3d printer? Electronics? Model kits (cars, planes, boats, Gundam)? Combining all of the above...

I'm the mini-STEMlord's (love that, @MadMonzer) mum.

His nanna has treated us to a Bambu Lab 3D printer. He says he's always wanted a 3D printer since he knew what one was, and enjoys sitting in front of it, watching it print. He likes Snap Circuits, but he can do all the projects instantly (and free-build), so I'm going to learn Arduino with him - I'd previously bought an Arduino kit to use myself.

He's bought glueable model kits while on trips, but they've never really taken off with him.

Yeah I would guess snap circuits are too basic for him. My daughter enjoyed them when she was little but she was soldering and building things out on bread boards by the time she was 7-8. (My husband really wanted her to love electronics, but they are a means to an end for her. Give her el wire and suggest blinging out her ukulele? Absolutely! Make a doorbell for her room? Nahhh.) Arduino (and more modern incarnations) can be great. And let him do both electronics and programming.

If you think he might like tabletop gaming 3d printers can be a nice way to get a custom set of miniatures. The son of a friend uses his 3d printer to make bits and pieces for his rc car.

And depending on what's available and whether he wants to deal with people, FIRST Lego league can be fun. My daughter did it with the girl scouts.

There are so many cool things accessible to kids these days, especially if their folks have some extra money (so blowing out some LEDs with poorly designed circuits isn't a big deal).

What characteristics distinguish your definitions of "engineer-brain" and "scientist-brain"?

My son was kicked out of our local private school after less than a term for being too autistic for them to handle

Too autistic in what sense? Disruptive? Violent? Loud? Just weird? I often think the best thing in these circumstances is to go all in on social skills and making friends. After all, there is no raw IQ test your son will have significant issue with in life. There are plenty of 99.9 percentile IQ but low agreeableness people who kind of fail in life, or who max out as poor researchers or people doing a dull job far beneath their station. They don’t all become quants (who are often actually pretty “normie” / neurotypical in my experience). Many struggle socially, with the opposite sex, have few friends. I’m not saying, of course, that any of this applies or would apply in your son’s case.

But you take a 99.9th percentile geek and give them even 80th percentile social skills, charisma, agreeableness, and the world is their oyster (and not just professionally, either). I don’t know why your son was kicked out of school, but it seems to me that it might be most effective to focus on that before you try to teach your already very smart kid more (likely redundant) math.

Mini STEMlord's mum here. He's got severe SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder), which gets dramatically worse when he's even slightly ill, and this causes violent fight/flight meltdowns in response to light/noise. The local state school/council paid for a support worker to remove him from class if he looked like he might melt down.

If he's in a forest or some similar low-overwhelm environment, his only problem is a tendency to monologue. By the time he left school, he was being 'corridor educated' by the support worker, doing work far below his abilities, and had started developing a bad case of 'smartest guy in the room' syndrome. He told me, with puckish malice, that he'd "rated [his support worker's] intelligence as a fraction, 16/256".

He's just started a day-a-week forest school where most of the kids seem to be academically gifted and autistic, and he had a fascinating too-and-fro with another kid who gave him as good as he sent. So, hopefully, that will be good for him!!! :)

Seconding that the best thing to teach would be social skills, i.e. compassion for others. I should hope you gently admonished his comment sbout the social worker.

Encouraging any more STEM studies would only further his descent into the antisocial, half-clever asshole life.

Just to be clear, here, autistic doesn't equal poor social skills.

There are a lot of actually autistic people (stereotypically women) who never get diagnosed because they're people-pleasing social chameleons, at great cost to their mental health. Mini STEMlord's little bro is also diagnosed autistic and has a thousand-watt smile plus the personality to sell ice to Inuits.

Mini STEMlord just needs the right peer group. The danger - autistic or not - is where someone gets to adulthood always having been 'the gifted kid' and 'the smartest guy in the room' but they're not in the wider scheme of things, and they can't cope when they realise. I suspect it's easier to fix that in home ed, than it is in a classroom (unless it's an uber-selective school).

Even outside selective schools, I think scholastic competitions are a good way to cut a precocious snot down to size (speaking as a precocious snot). I managed to pull off 1st in my (small) state in MathCounts when I was little, but then I went to nationals and didn't even make it to the Countdown round...

It might be necessary to do things like that regularly, though. I didn't join any other national competitions in grade school, and so I was still a bit blindsided when I went to a good college and wasn't ever the smartest in the room anymore and had to actually study to learn everything and barely even kept my fall freshman GPA at a B average. I'm encouraging my kids to do AMC now, in part because it would be great if they make it to the higher levels there, but in part to keep them reminded that there's a wide world out there and they're not even close to being the only precocious kids in it. They're not snots about it, but they do aspire to good colleges and I don't want it to be a surprise if they get to one and suddenly being exceptionally smart is just table stakes.

You might be right that home education makes things easier to fix. I raced ahead in math when I was little and could teach myself the basics, but eventually I got on the Algebra-I-and-onward track and it was easy to just take one-class-per-year, smugly feeling smart because I was much younger than my classmates but not actually learning any faster than them. Without that fixed class schedule I could have tried to keep going a bit faster and that might have been enough challenge to make things difficult and keep me humble.

Try https://mathacademy.com/ ? I'd guess that the enrichment vs acceleration concern has more to do with classroom management than the best interests of a given student.

It's legit, it even got someone like me hooked

I was a gifted maths student as well (unsurprisingly, given that IQ is 70% genetic in the top half of the distribution) and I definitely benefitted from enrichment over acceleration. The kind of superficial understanding of calculus available to a 75th percentile 16 year old or a 99.9th percentile 11 year old just isn't that valuable. (I learnt calculus again at 13 in what was technically a regular classroom, although it was the top set an a selective private school, and that time it took).

The kind of superficial understanding of calculus available to a 75th percentile 16 year old or a 99.9th percentile 11 year old just isn't that valuable.

I eventually got my Applied Math PhD and became the sort of Math Snob Connoisseur who insists that it's not real calculus until you at least throw away that Riemann crap and use Lebesgue integrals ... but I have to admit there's a ton of students who will do science or engineering or medicine where they would greatly benefit from solidly understanding "superficial" Calculus. If you never quite grokked delta-epsilon proofs, but you understood numerical integration well enough that you could have properly reviewed the discovery of "Tai's Method", that's a better understanding of calculus than at least that medical journal (and that author, and some of her collaborators) had at that time.

For either acceleration or enrichment, though, it needs to be periodically reinforced to be worthwhile, and that can be the tricky part. I took an Algebraic Topology class for fun as a college MechE-but-advanced-at-math, was amused by simplicial complexes and exact sequences and so forth but couldn't see what any of it was really useful for, promptly forgot it all because I never used it for anything for a couple years ... and then ended up in a math PhD program where I had to relearn a chunk of it just to understand some of the best visiting lecturers. I assume Mary Tai was the same way: nobody ends up in medical research without taking at least Calc 1, and if she was smart enough to reinvent the trapezoidal rule then she was surely smart enough to understand it as it was taught in Calc 1, but she probably never used it again for years and so had completely forgotten it when she needed it. Being able to rederive ideas you forget is IMHO one of the nicest aspects of math, but it is better to have a fuller toolbox of things you don't have to reinvent, and the more "enrichment" you get, the more connections you can make between ideas, and the easier it is to remember long-unused ideas via their more-obscure connections to more recently used ideas. With narrow acceleration in one subject, you might get so far ahead there that you don't get the same reinforcement schedule that other kids get via the usual connections to other subjects.

Learning on your own makes it a little easier to get some of that reinforcement from "standard" curriculum material, though. A standard high school Physics class won't be based on calculus, because most of the kids who want to take it won't have learned calculus yet, but if you know you're not most kids and you've got basic Calc 1 under your belt then you can just study calculus-based Physics instead, getting in more science and reinforcing math skills (and getting what I'm told is an impressive AP credit) at the same time, and learning something that's still on the critical path for a lot more science+engineering career tracks than e.g. group theory would have been.

Khan Academy is also good for acceleration, to a sufficiently self-motivated kid.

And you're right, the trouble with acceleration in general is all about the difficulty of teaching 15 kids to potentially 15 different levels at once. With enrichment you can teach the whole class the basics, then teach the quicker half of them "enrichment" extras while the slower half drills the basics into place, then teach the whole class the basics of the next standard material ... but if you instead accelerated the quicker half of the class straight into the basics of the next standard material, then you're stuck, aren't you? You've now got two separate classes, with nothing that you can teach them both at the same time, not if you're relying on a 15:1 student:teacher ratio rather than a 1:1 student:computer ratio.

All that said, there's lots of valuable things you can teach kids, even in mathematics, that would count as "enrichment" rather than "acceleration" vs a typical "get them the standard high school diploma" curriculum. Most of them that come to mind for me are somewhat impractical, aimed at mathematician-brained rather than engineer-brained kids (I guess the standard curriculum is standard for a reason?), but Boolean logic might be a good choice and can be taught from scratch, and vector geometry is IMHO simpler and more practical than a typical high school geometry class despite having little in the way of prerequisites.

I'd suggest @MadMonzer focus on the ways to build things that get gradually more complex than Lego. Technics vs regular Lego, perhaps, or 3D printing with a simple CAD tool for design? Perhaps programming? Even with nothing physical to it, writing a simple little game scratches that same "I built something" itch, and you can get a Pi or Arduino or whatever to add physicality.

And if you lump the fast students in with the slow students from the next year up, that still doesn't work well to sync the curricula, as now you have a classroom with two groups of people who vary quite dramatically in how quickly and readily they learn the subject.

Kordemsky’s Moscow Puzzles are a nice supplementary resource. Maybe Art of Problem Solving prealgebra.

Beast Academy -- made by the Art of Problem Solving team -- might be challenging enough, and has a great online program. It's focused on elmentary-levle math but truly deep, wihch sounds like what OP is looking for.

https://mathpickle.com/ is a wonderful treasury of puzzles that will induce kids to think deeply on problems. Not an online program, rather an intro to puzzles to complete in meatworld. Probably better in groups but I do some of the puzzles 1-on-1 with my gifted 8yo.

Thanks :) We were already looking at Beast Academy, but I've added Math Pickle!

I seek recommendations for a book about WWII for my son. He's 8 years old and is an advanced reader... he hasn't read much text targeted for adults but sucks down 500-page young adult fantasy novels on a day.

We watched a documentary about FDR and now he wants to learn about World War II. I think what I seek is something non-fiction targeted to adults but also targeted to popular consumption -- not something super dry but something a bit more meaty than a fantasy novel.

Alternatively, good fiction that's not just super depressing could be interesting as well.

War Diary, 1939-1945. It's a collection of... well, war recollections, from every theatre, every side, military and civilian.

I also recommend Escort Commander, Sink the Bismarck!, and you could always go for The Longest Day... it even got a movie adaptation with one or two decently-known actors.

There’s always Audi Murphy’s memoirs.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Horrible Histories entry when I was in primary school: https://www.amazon.com/Woeful-Second-World-Horrible-Histories/dp/1407163914

Despite the funny illustrations, it's remarkably unsanitised for a children's book. I think this is actually where I first learned what the Holocaust was. There's a chapter going into detail about the moral ambiguity of the conflict, pointing out that, while the Nazis were obviously evil, the Allies did some pretty questionable things too, such as the firebombing of Dresden. Surprisingly confrontational given the intended demographic.

These books made me better at British history than 99.9% of American middle schoolers. The Slimy Stuarts stands out as an especially entertaining entry.

Maybe Operation Mincemeat? Wikipedia tells me there have been multiple books and films based on it. I watched the BBC TV programme based on Ben Macintyre's book.

I second this - I've read Macintyre's book, it's excellent. Also I feel like it's got a very approachable writing style, even for a younger reader.

Boris Polevoy's Story of a Real Man was something we had to read in school. Don't know how easy it is to find in English. It's the right blend of realism and idealism, I think. Don't know how easy it is to find in English. Amazon has it in Chinese, Turkish, Bengali and Malayalam.

I'm not sure if it's exactly what you want, since it's a British perspective and mostly focuses on the less-famous fronts, but George MacDonald Fraser is a fantastic writer IMO. Check them for content/style before you give them to your son, though. I don't know what you consider appropriate reading material.

He has a great, thinly-fictionalised account of his time in Africa after the war. It's very funny and mostly covers the antics that Highland regiments get up to when nobody's watching. It's post-war so there's a few shots fired but no death or gore that I can remember. It's clear-eyed too: there's one part where his squad gets trapped by a rioting crowd of nationalists and only quick thinking by a side character prevents him from having to choose between firing into the crowd and letting them tear his men apart. But in general it's pretty light-hearted and a military family member recommended it to me as the best account of what it's actually like in the army.

Alternatively, he has one non-fiction autobiographical book about his time in Burma which isn't depressing exactly but is probably too adult for your son. (One of his friends gets up to go to the loo, wanders into the wrong place, and gets killed by friendly machine-gun fire; a group of Japanese prisoners mysteriously die when a boulder is rolled on top of their improvised gaol and everyone is very careful not to investigate; Japanese torture is mentioned; there is a lengthy section at the end where he passionately defends dropping nukes on Japan).

I have never seen someone in the wild recommend this author. It's so odd to me that nobody's heard of him around me, because his Flashman series is iconic, and I still find myself thinking of his Quartered Safe Out Here anecdotes (like the one you mentioned, his friend getting cut in half by machine gun friendly fire in the middle of the night, or the one where he randomly stumbled on a Japanese soldier and surprised each other and he unshouldered his rifle and shot him first).

I read all the Flashman books and I greatly appreciate the Three and Four Musketeer films based on the screenplays he wrote. I will readily second the recommendation.

But now I have to ask myself why I haven't read more from the man. I guess it just never occurred to me. Will have to remedy this.

Greeting, fellow man of culture!

I always remember him saying that people in real life react so exactly like the most hackneyed of Hollywood films that they're completely unwriteable, like the friend who got a bullet in the shoulder and rolled over shouting, "They got me, the rats! They got me!"

That said, I could never get into Flashman. I recognise that they're absolutely gripping yarns, and very well-researched, but the main character is too deliberately unlikeable for me to enjoy spending time with him. I wish GMF had written more books like McAuslan.

I've only read the first Flashman book but it was his unlikeability that made it so enjoyable. The character's utter lack of apology for being so unabashedly self-serving provides a lot of fun.

The first book is where he's the most unlikeable, the latter books increasingly make him trend towards being more of a rascally anti-hero rather than the complete shit he is in the first one. (He's still pretty monstrous in the few following ones but the process has already started.)

Does anyone know which fantasy series my name is a reference to?

[t's a reference to the film "Snatch"

That was always what I figured as well. Who doesn't like dags?

Incorrect it’s a fantasy series

Angry Beavers

Heh, I'm not alone.

And here I was, thinking this whole time that you were talking about directed acyclic graphs for some inscrutable reason.

Google says its Mad Max, one of Immortan Joe's Wives. I doubt that's true. While probably not what you were going for, I always interpreted it as The Dagda.

What is the Dagda? And no that’s not it hehe.

Irish mythology doesn't really have a Zeus figure as there are a handful of tribes of gods who are not unified like the greek, roman, or norse pantheons. But the more civilizationally-aligned Irish Gods are the Tuatha De Dannan. The Dagda is the Chief of the TDD. He's sort of a cross between Odin and Freyr.

Fascinating! This may be where the name came from

That’s dope though an even deeper cut

This classic gypsypunk adventure??

No sadly not

The Sharing Knife?

Nope but that’s a really good one!

Oh, I thought you knew.

Lmao… I do???

Then why are you asking, man?

Just curious. How would I not know what my own name referenced???

I think it's a joke

No it’s a real series I promise. And a prominent name too

Since he's inherited one of the richest and most powerful activism networks, I thought it'd be worthwhile to look up Alexander Soros' dissertation to try to get some insight into him.

"‘Jewish Dionysus’: Heinrich Heine and the Politics of Literature"

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4x51t409

However I am completely unfamiliar with History PhD dissertations. Skimming it over I only noticed that he seems very into being Jewish and also that I find the text incredibly uninteresting.

Does anyone who has some subject experience have any take aways?

The dissertation isn’t particularly deep or profound, but it displays a reasonable knowledge of Heine and his influences, with some reading done and some boilerplate analysis. It’s not something that would be offensive or embarrassing to have under your name.

[Alexander] Soros himself is kind of an interesting guy. He was a long time confirmed bachelor until, late last year, he got engaged to Huma Abedin (she’s 49, he’s 38). I think he spent his entire adult life in and around progressive academia and think tanks and largely adopted their worldview. Soros Sr is less political than often assumed even by close friends; it’s mostly his son. George’s politics are mainly motivated by not being hated by the left after he was slammed in the press for being ‘the man who broke the Bank of England’ and being the subject to a great deal of criticism as a rapacious speculator in the 1980s.

Marrying a divorcée who's eleven years older doesn't really shift the 'confirmed bachelor' assessment for me.

I don’t claim to have a good mental model of progressive academics but it just seems like the kind of thing they do.

True, although I wouldnt have guessed that Huma was the type to be a beard and, in any case, being the progressive activist son of a progressive billionaire isn’t really the kind of thing where one needs one. It can’t be about an heir for Senior either (given he’s inheriting everything) because she’s too old to have more kids.

type to be a beard

Perhaps not for the median degenerate, maybe for billionaire with access to progressive power levers, pact with a demon, etc.

He was a long time confirmed bachelor until, late last year, he got engaged to Huma Abedin (she’s 49, he’s 38).

There are photos were he has models as arm candy, so maybe he over compensated in settling down with someone serious?

I just remember now how uncomfortable the Weiner documentary was and how angry I was on Abedins behalf, who was oddly calm.

Wiki:

In the memoir, Abedin wrote that in the mid-2000s, an unnamed U.S. senator had "kissed me, pushing his tongue into my mouth, pressing me back on the sofa"; she wrote that she had "buried" the incident until accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 triggered her memory.[24] In an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning to promote the book, she said she did not feel that the senator was sexually assaulting her in that moment.[25]

You can google the story, but it is rather meh. After dinner a senator invited her into his home for “coffee” (who drinks coffee before night? Some people just are oblivious), she was shocked when he kissed her, he was shocked that she was shocked and apologized for misreading the signs. Subsequent meetings with the senator were low key awkward but then she forgot the incident, until it was time to write a book.

In a May 2022 interview, Abedin said she struggles with anxiety and has been in therapy due to the shock and trauma of dealing with her husband's sexting scandal. She also said she has started dating again and feels excited about the process.[69] In July 2022, Abedin was in a relationship with actor Bradley Cooper.[70]

I want to edit my statement: I am not baffled by a billionaires choice to marry her, but instead in her taste in men. Nothing against Cooper, but at some point an adult woman must know that narcissistic politicians, sonnyboy actors and boyish billionaires are maybe not the best partners for long term relationships. Jesus Christ, marry a dentist and provide some boring normalcy to your poor teenage son!

not baffled by a billionaires choice to marry her

I am. It suggests to me he's not a normal healthy man.

He could have married a much younger fertile attractive women. As it is, it seems to me a pact with a demon is more likely, no sense of an Élan vital from any of these people.

(who drinks coffee before night? Some people just are oblivious)

People who aren't schooled in the Classics?

How much are video games about social validation? My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings. Do you think that’s the case?

Not really. “Player vs. Environment” games are reasonably common. Fortnite actually started out as one before they realized most people wanted to do the competitive thing.

Most people try league (or overwatch, or an MMO, or whatever) to share a social experience with their friends. Once they’re in, the competitive mindset does the heavy lifting and keeps them playing. That doesn’t mean chasing a ranking—it means competing with other players. Most people don’t even play ranked mode!

Sometimes it doesn’t even require other players, because League does have popular PvE modes. There’s a decent contingent of players who only play those modes and never face other players. It takes all sorts.

Most of the common PvE games have features that introduce artificial social validation, RPGs being the most obvious, but even survival games have elements of accomplishing things whose value in real life is socially-mediated (“I built a base, farm, house; I found gold.”). Halo is single-player, but takes you through a guided story of social validation. It’s quite hard to think of one that doesn’t. You might consider that a skateboarding game could be fun without including social validation, but the interest surely lies in being able to do things which you know (intuitively or through skateboarding literacy) are impressive in real life. Civilization games, well, you are the leader of a civilization and future global hegemon.

Others have mentioned online chess, and that people used to (?) play against bots. But these bot-players have surely been acculturated to believe that winning a chess game is socially validating, and they may also play challenging bots if it means training against playing a real life friend in a week. Even a game like Heroes of the Storm, okay, if someone plays it offline they are still the hero who is killing people and destroying a base.

Actually, Halo has quite prominently featured multiplayer since its inception!

How does this theory handle abstract puzzlers like Baba is You? Or even pure math puzzles like Sudoku? Obviously, demonstrating clever puzzle-solving is worth some social status, but that’s not why people do these things. No, they do them because they’re fun.

I suspect curiosity, attention, and the little thrill one gets from a solved puzzle are embedded pretty deeply in our evolutionary history. Probably deeper than socially-mediated value.

I’m familiar with the Halo franchise. People played the solo campaign as the key feature of the game. There was also a split screen mode. But the campaign was enjoyable as a social validation simulator.

sudoku

This was huge during the sudoku craze around 2004, reinforced by “sudoku is good for your brain”, but I don’t know how popular it still is. It has been squarely defeated (pun intended) by the much more social NYT games. I wonder if any kids play it. Perhaps even sudoku was socially-mediated: news says solving it means you are smart, also it’s popular, you feel smart and popular when you play and win.

curiosity, attention, and the little thrill one gets from a solved puzzle

I used to think this, and it falls in line with the Flow theory, but I’m starting to doubt it. Curiosity and attention seem to be profoundly shaped by social forces. Do crows solve puzzles for fun or do they do it for food?

But these bot-players have surely been acculturated to believe that winning a chess game is socially validating

If this is enough to make the experience of playing a private chess game against a bot as being "about social validation," then wouldn't the playing of any game with a win condition be "about social validation?" You could even stretch the argument to something like Tetris, which has no win condition, by positing that players have been acculturated to believe that accumulating more points or surviving for longer time than before is socially validating, and therefore any time someone plays Tetris in private is about social validation.

The phenomena are different. Someone who has played chess for a decade socially, but who can’t when alone, will play against a bot to increase his skill for his next social game. The win, as a mental phenomenon, is also saturated in the social memories of previous wins. (Imagine a kid practicing a soccer shot and who images cheers as he makes it.) Additionally, chess is a game with uniquely salient social validation, being the “smart persons game”. Tetris as a single-player game doesn’t have any of this.

What I’m wondering is if a game truly devoid of social validation and valuation will be played. So imagine that only you have access to the game, only you will ever play it, and you can’t share anything about the game with anyone. I suppose Tetris and snake are the closest thing? But then I do really wonder if anyone would play this if they had no way of making their experiences social. Historically people shared their high scores.

You had to add on a whole lot of details to the chess example, though. What about someone who has only ever played chess in private against bots and continues to do so indefinitely? Do such people exist? How would we know? I certainly know that I play some single player computer games like that, in ways that literally no other human being on Earth knows that I've played that game, which means that I leave behind no evidence that I played these games regardless of social validation. And my stating that I play games like that could serve as a proof-by-construction that I actually played those games out of a desire for social validation, as a way to have something like this in my back pocket to bring up as an example in a social interaction with someone else.

To me, your analysis seems isomorphic to those who claim that literally everything is political, on the basis that, no matter what topic they're given, they're able to use some chain of logic to connect it to some form of politics. If the bar to cross for being "political" is that someone can make a logical chain that connects it to politics, then the term "political" becomes vapid. Likewise, if all that takes for someone playing some game to be "about social validation" is that you can create some logical chain that explains how that person could be influenced by social validation in some indirect way connected to the game, then "being about social validation" becomes vapid.

What an alien perspective for me. The one time I had my experience socially validated only underlines how little I cared for it. I used to be very good at Minesweeper. The design of the game forces you to guess a couple of times per game, but otherwise I used to be able to move as quickly as my mouse would let me. It was kind of meditative to me. And that one time I mention was when I was playing it while waiting for a practical class in college to start, gathering a few spectators including the person who was teaching that class. I can swear to you, hand to my heart, that before that I had never had even one thought where I had imagined anybody impressed by that ultimately lame display.

This is definitely evidence against the theory. Did you find it minesweeper peaceful?

I feel like the 'solo queue' experience in a 5v5 game is almost perfectly calibrated to give the right ratio of controlling your own destiny and being able to blame your teammates in order to be addictive. If it's 1v1 and you suck, you suck and you get handled and you likely drop the game (Common issue for fighting games). If it's large team v team, it's hard to really get attached to the win/loss element since you're likely not capable of doing enough to single-handedly swing things.

For others? Probably quite a bit. The non-autistic millenials that I used to play with often had a very competitive streak to them and seemd to be genuinely invested in how they ranked relative to others.

The zoomers...oh man. The zoomers keep talking to themselves. It seems to me they all imagine themselves to be the next big streamer. Or maybe it's not even conscious, and they just naturally adopted the monologuing from watching too much Twitch and Let's Play.

The autists are just fine playing against bots. They seem to prefer it, even, for predictability.

As for myself, where multiplayer is an option I strictly prefer it to playing against bots. Not really for the social aspects, those are rather tiresome, but because playing against bots invariably becomes an exercise in exploiting the AI's predictability, which feels like a waste of time. In playing against humans, I can at least semi-credibly tell myself that I'm exercising my mind a little bit rather than just consuming product.

Yesterday I spent 30 minutes before going to bed playing a round of Nebulous: Fleet Command, and I rammed my Beam Battleship into the enemy Cruiser formation just right. It was pure dumb luck, of course, and a game at a fairly low average skill level, but still. Against bots that would have been meaningless. Against humans...it was still just dumb luck, but infinitely more exciting - they could have countered this! Nobody on either side knew what to expect! And so it was a lot more satisfying.

Hello, fellow ANS enthusiast!

I don’t know how to play OSP, and I don’t need to when the Vauxhall is right here.

Hello, fellow ANS enthusiast!

Damn right I am. The German soul cannot truly embrace the OSP ethos. Also I just love using beams. That said, sometimes the ANS team is full, so I do my best to be somewhat competent with the OSP also.

I don’t know how to play OSP, and I don’t need to when the Vauxhall is right here.

The Vauxhall is, in my opinion, the most difficult ship to play. Too big to hide, not enough firepower to take on the big guys, too expensive to be a an effective torpedo carrier, not durable enough to skirmish for long. The only thing it's good at is going fast, and when I play all it does is sail very quickly to its doom. In the one round I played yesterday (as a carrier / cap OSP fleet), a formation of Vauxhalls was mildly annoying, not really a threat, and a giant target for everyone in the vicinity.

So, master of the Light Cruiser, teach me your ways.

I wish I could. I just think it’s neat!

My old torpedo fleet was thoroughly overcome by updates, so that’s out. It was one CL and a slew of spotting and sig-scramble corvettes and frigates. Haven’t made a new one yet since the missile designer intimidates me.

I’ve tinkered with a CL Wolfpack intended to sneak up on carriers. Now that the update frenzy has died down, I’m not sure it’s a remotely good investment. As you observed, “sneaking” is awfully tricky when you’re huge and everyone brings sundials.

The other niches that come to mind are “torpedo boat destroyer,” existing to screen CA or BB, and “counter cap,” intended to slaughter shuttles. I have yet to run either.

But it’s just too pretty to ignore.

The speed of strategic evolution in multiplayer vs single player games is amazing. There's a bunch of autistic shipbuilding simulators out there (aurora, coade, etc.) where everyone has just been larping at strategy the same way for decades, whereas the nubulous meta looks different every time I check on it.

Nebulous: Fleet Command

Interesting, but apparently they canceled the single player plans? What’s going on there, any way to get that back?

They worked really hard on a strategic game mode, but ended up having to give up on it for various reasons in order to focus on the core tactical gameplay. Very recently they released an update that significantly improved the tactical AI so that you can get a meaningful single-player skirmish experience, and they announced the development of a single-player classically scripted campaign mode.

As it stands, you can actually go and play the strategic mode they worked on, as they left it in an opt-in branch on steam, in just the state they aborted development in. I haven't tried it yet. IMO it was a very interesting concept, and I do kind of hope they revisit it eventually, but I somewhat doubt it'll happen.

That said, the multiplayer is great and I invite you to come play. Or we can just skirmish against bots, if you're dead-set against competitive MP.

and they announced the development of a single-player classically scripted campaign mode.

So they will have a single player campaign? That’s what I thought was cancelled. Neat if so.

I will probably pick it up… someday. I still need to complete the original two Homeworlds.

Speaking of bots and team-based PvP games, the recent hero shooter hit Marvel Rivals has an open secret regarding the quick game mode. Whenever you lose a few times in a row, your next game will contain 6 bots on the enemy side and up to 2 on your own (presumably to fill out the bot lobby and provide you with at least 2 allies who pick tank/healer).

Of those who discuss the feature on Reddit, most are extremely unhappy, stating that they'd rather pick the "vs AI" mode themselves if they wanted a faceroll-tier easy match. But how large is the portion of QP players who know compared to those that don't?

Bot mode basically is the game acknowledging that you suck, and the game gives a few wins to keep the player presumably happy and not frustrated at sucking so hard. Bad for griefers who suck for the sake of sucking, or failsons with an overinflated sense of their own power level, but great for normies who feel emotionally satisfied enough to continue playing and provide free meme points once they return to Jeffs suckhole.

Does the normie not care that the sudden increase in performance is due to the opponent being a toaster designed to throw the game, and not due to the normie doing better/being luckier, in your opinion?

I think normies dont recognize the botting, or at least are ok with it as a brief respite. I certainly don't play enough to recognize meta compositions or optimal states of play, and getting botted only marginally affects my already poor performance because I'm just jumping around and spinning the camera to get the best shots of ass.

I played LoL against bots almost exclusively. I found PvP stressful and other players rude/aggressive which wasn't what I was going for when I wanted to chill after work. The people who played against bots were always way more laid back. I recognize that PvP is supposed to be the main appeal of the game, just thought I'd share a different perspective.

Gotta disagree. I played DOTA2 for a while and I would have kept playing if I could have the same challenge without having to interact with actual strangers. So that'd mean either running with a regular crew or playing only with bots.

I play a bit of fighting games too, and to me the ideal with them is the challenge of multiplayer with none of the social interaction.

In some sense this proves the point though. You stopped playing. It's not that social validation is the only thing these games could provide in theory, but that due to selection effects people who like the social validation and the joy of destroying someone who was just trash talking you are the people who play obsessively play these games, while people who find it toxic and unenjoyable stop.

I guess it's true that people who insist on interactions have run me out of MOBAs, but that's just because effective teamwork requires more interaction than I'm comfortable with, but that doesn't address the point with fighting games, another competitive genre, which I still do play online as long as I can disable text/voice chat.

The problem is that in team games, you can't destroy the teammate who was just trash talking you without throwing the game.

My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots, even bots designed as a perfect challenge, and if there were no rankings.

I played Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard's League equivalent, for a few years and I actually played entirely against bots: I really enjoyed the mechanics of MOBA games and the minute-to-minute gameplay, but I didn't want to deal with the toxicity that seems an inevitable part of those games and I didn't want to be in the endless "gotta get better" spiral that comes with skill-based matchmaking.

On the broader point, there are loads of games that are made entirely for single-player experiences, and while sometimes you get into a community discussing it there's no need to do that. I actually quit the Factorio subreddit around the time the expansion came out because I didn't want the game solved for me, and now only dip back when I'm in the mood to collect a set of random tips, I certainly don't post there for my own social validation. And while I do have friends that play Factorio now, that wasn't the case for many years.

My intuition is that no would play League of Legends or chess if you only played only against bots...

Your intuition is wrong. Chess games have existed since computers, pretty much, and were single player by necessity back in the day. They still were quite popular. LoL is an offshoot from the RTS genre, which again started as single player and even to this day is pretty common to play single player.

Single player strategy games (of a pretty wide variety from 4X stuff all the way to strategy rpgs like Fire Emblem) are not quite as popular as chess or mobas but still very popular.

For those kind of games, a lot? But they are multiplayer games: They have short, repetitive gameplay loops, and the fun is derived from competition with others.

It's true these types of videogames dominate nowadays, but part of that is that they're the most profitable kind of game (because, if successful, they get a lot more play-hours with (relatively) very little new development).

Yeah, the gaming industry over the past 10-15 years has been about finding new and more addictive ways to extract more value for less cost. I have my concerns about Hollywood, publishing, and the music industry, but at least there seems to be a sense that they want to create something that people enjoy or see value in, even if they are bad at it. But it's really, really hard to read the ways gaming CEOs and business publications talk about their customers, their products, and their strategies, and not come away with the conclusion that they're just as evil, twisted, and morally bankrupt as a casino operator. Gaming as a business seems fundamentally at-odds with gaming as a hobby or creative endeavor in a way that's not true for other creative industries.

I play video games sometimes, but the oxygen of gaming has been so saturated by multiplayer competitive grindfests and e-"sports" that I find it hard to even identify with gaming any more. Sometimes it feels like it's as unhealthy and toxic today as everyone's dad thought it was in the 90s. And everyone has the kid in their family who's kicked a hole in their wall because they lost an online match.

gaming industry over the past 10-15 years

That’s the market for you, isn’t it? Games are getting commoditized in a way they weren’t before the Internet, before personal computing. A team of 200 outscales a team of 20 outscales 2 guys with an Apple ][, but by commanding so many resources, they are forced to be more conservative. The shareholders demand it!

Is Kenneth Gainwell an example of nominative determinism?

From the team that also used to have D'Andre Swift and Mike Quick.

Kenneth Gaintermittently

Only some of the time. It probably worked more in high school and college.

Have you any of you solved some political, philosophical or historical issues? By which I mean that you came up with a bunch of axioms and that you never had to update your beliefs ever again. Edit: If not, I'm interested in hearing why. Many people here have probably discussed these topics for many years already, have you really made no meta-progress?

I will start:

Freedom of speech is optimal (Even if you want to reduce misinformation, it seems that posting the wrong answer and waiting for somebody to correct you is a strictly better strategy than censoring the wrong answer)

If you can convince everyone that you're an oppressed minority, you're not. That you can get the majority on your side proves that you are not discriminated against or in a vulnerable position, as being in a vulnerable and oppressed position is defined by having the majority against you.

One is innocent until proven guilty (This is partly subjective, it's a personal value that punishing an innocent person is worse than letting a guilty person walk free. If you disagree, simply reverse the axiom)

If your biggest problem in life is being called slurs for your inborn traits - your life is pretty good and you don't have any serious problems. You're therefore privileged.

Most groups who blame a more successful group for all of their problems are simply unable to cope with their own inadequacy, and aim to subvert the more successful group by manipulating their values in a way which makes an equalization appear as 'justice', so that the more successful group feels bad and gives their advantage to the less successful group. This instinctial (which is why a dog begging for food will exploit your sympathy, so that you perceive yourself as a bad guy for not giving the dog what it wants)

You can judge things by the outcome they produce. An unsuccessful person has no right to lecture a successful person by demanding that the successful person imitate the unsuccessful person. This generalizes - Anime is doing much better than western cartoons, so it's simply better. If Christians have better mental health, then Christianity is superior in at least one way. If children who are spanked grow up to be better people than those who weren't, then parents who spanked their kids were in the right. Reality is in the right, even when it appears immoral or irrational.

Reducing "bad things" doesn't seem to work, but producing "good things" does. Trying not to worry doesn't work, but thinking happy thoughts does. Telling people what to do is better than telling them what not to do. I'm not sure why, but I've checked, this rule seems solid.

If you can convince everyone that you're an oppressed minority, you're not. That you can get the majority on your side proves that you are not discriminated against or in a vulnerable position, as being in a vulnerable and oppressed position is defined by having the majority against you.

I don't think this tracks. I'm going to use hypothetical thought experiments, because the counterexamples are somewhat contrived and thus rare in real life, but still logically possible.

Example 1: We have groups A (51%) B(48%) C(1%). A treats everyone equally regardless of their type. B hates C with a passion and will harass, threaten, ostracize, refuse service etc to any members of C (Let's suppose there are no explicit anti-discrimination laws, so refusing service is allowed. Violence is not allowed, but occurs anyway when they can get away with it). A thinks this is wrong, and will believe members of C, be on their side, and think poorly of members of B who they witness doing it, but offers no material support in favor of C to help against it other than treating them fairly the same as they treat anyone else. If the hatred and harassment that B inflicts on C is severe enough, I think C counts as an oppressed minority despite having "support" from the majority.

Example 2: As above, except A is (48%) and B is (51%). Now C is technically oppressed by the majority, and has minority support. Politically this distinction is likely to be important, since now explicitly Anti-C politicians are more likely to be elected and Anti-C policies are more likely to pass legislatively. But for day to day life not much changes between this and example 1. About half of the people a C person meets will harass them and half will not. Hopefully this demonstrates that the "majority" distinction isn't especially important.

Example 3: As above except A is (89%) and B is (10%). So now B is a meaningful minority, though not as minor as C. And yet 10% of businesses are owned by B, 10% of police officers are B, 10% of strangers you pass by on the sidewalk at night are B, and they all hate C and continue to oppress them as best they can despite only being 10% of the population. I'm not entirely confident that C counts as an "oppressed minority" here, because they have overwhelming majority support. But I'm not sure that they don't. Conditional on the harassment being bad enough and A doing nothing to stop B from doing it, this still seems remarkably unpleasant to be a C.

Example 4: As above except A is (98%) and B is (1%). Now B and C are equal in numbers. I assume that if A is fairly apathetic to both sides, then B and C end up in a race war where both fight each other constantly, and they should have equal power and ability to do this. So in this case I think C is unambiguously not an "oppressed minority", although it still seems unpleasant.

Example 5: As in 4, B and C are both (1%), but B is disproportionately wealthy and influential in certain spheres. Maybe 95% of bankers are B and they all refuse service to C. Maybe every single grocery store is owned by a B and so C have to grow their own produce or buy overpriced food from gas stations. Maybe 90% of people who work at power plants are B and they keep sneakily cutting off power to houses owned by C and getting away with it. I'm still not sure if this counts as C being an "oppressed minority" because they're being harassed by a group of the same size, but there's still something going on here that "having majority support" doesn't solve.

I should clarify that I don't think we live in any of these worlds, but my impression is that most leftists think we live somewhere in Examples 1-2. Hopefully it's clear that this is a world that could exist in theory. Therefore, opposition to it should be based on empirical grounds (this is not the world we live in, and haven't for decades) rather than logical grounds.

Sorry for the delay in responding. By the way, I like your username!

Right, my model assumed that neutrality does not exist, that you're either for or against something.

Notice that I wrote "Convince everybody" and "get the majority on your side". I should have made it even clearer than this, but my point was that the ratio of group sizes is not what matters ultimately. It doesn't matter if you're 1% of the population or 90%. What matters is what society as a whole thinks about you. In order for my model to work again, you simply average the sentiment. If 40% of people hate you, and 60% are neutral, then the average is dislike (because (40*-2 + 60*0) is less than 0). If society as a whole can agree that you're in need of protection, then it cannot be true. It's true only when society does not think this.

You're correct that the direction of the inequality is not as important as the ratio/strength of inequality (so being 49.9% of the whole or 50.1% feels about the same), with the exception of votes/elections/etc where a few percentage points mean everything. The results of an election is basically the direction of the inequality, and the strengths of every sentiment basically doesn't matter (a vote is worth a single vote, it doesn't matter if you support a candidate slightly or love them, or if you dislike other choices or hate them). Voting is a function which throws away a lot of information.

Example 4 shows that to be an "oppressed minority" it matters that the overall sentiment of society is against you, rather than just anyone. Thought I also argue this above, example 5 shows us that in order to measure the disadvantage you hold in society, you have to multiply the amount of people who are against you by the extent to which they're against you. You should also multiply this by how powerful they are (if those against you are 10 times more powerful, they count for 10 times more). Now, simply find out if the sum of the sentiments in your favor minus the sum of sentiments against you, is bigger or smaller than 0. On the makro scale, this decides if you're oppressed or not, and the average sentiment is necessarily going to be the opposite of what it claims unless it's exactly 0 (If society as a whole arrives at the conclusion that society as a whole is against you, we arrive at a contradiction).

And in order to criticize the idea from the other direction, I want to point out that groups like the KKK are, by definition, minority groups suppressed by the majority, and that this is precisely why we do not grant them this status. We collectively agree not to protect them against the collective. There's a "paradox" here (it's actually just a contradiction). It's similar to the problem of creating an institution whose job it is to make sure that institutions do not abuse their power. No institution is going to evaluate itself in a neutral manner because the evalation finds place from the inside and not the outside, and for the same reason, society necessarly cannot evaluate itself fairly. Objectivity can only exist between an object and something outside of it which is deemed to be more correct, and you eventually reach the largest scope possible.

I agree that, when reality disagrees with a model, it's because the model is wrong. But reality agrees much more with my models than with politics, since politics is basically a competition in bending reality to ones favor through the use of deception. Most popular statements are wrong, meaning that they cannot possibly be true. Try evaluating Poppers paradox of tolerance mathematically, and you'll find that people who use it as an argument simply do not understand what it implies. I'm not very good at mathematics on paper, but many mathematical concepts have become part of my intuition.

Example 4 shows that to be an "oppressed minority" it matters that the overall sentiment of society is against you, rather than just anyone. Thought I also argue this above, example 5 shows us that in order to measure the disadvantage you hold in society, you have to multiply the amount of people who are against you by the extent to which they're against you. You should also multiply this by how powerful they are (if those against you are 10 times more powerful, they count for 10 times more). Now, simply find out if the sum of the sentiments in your favor minus the sum of sentiments against you, is bigger or smaller than 0. On the makro scale, this decides if you're oppressed or not, and the average sentiment is necessarily going to be the opposite of what it claims unless it's exactly 0 (If society as a whole arrives at the conclusion that society as a whole is against you, we arrive at a contradiction).

If you define this too strictly then it becomes tautologically true but meaningless. One could never know whether one is an "oppressed minority" unless one first painstakingly computes this sum, find it less than zero and then, having done so, can generalize it no further than saying that the sum is less than zero.

This only matters if it affects things we care about. So heuristically I mostly agree with the general mathematical framing, provided we are careful to measure the "extent to which they're against you" by actions more than words. Words probably count a little bit since they affect social outcomes and psychological well-being, but things like violence or job opportunities matter much more. Here then is I think where the apparent "paradox unravels", in that the internal sentiment of people materializes at different rates in the realm of socially expressed sentiment and actual material outcomes. In a phrase: "talk is cheap". Zooming in on Example 3, we have a world where 90% of people say they support C, they get angry when B do terrible things to C. If they witness a discriminatory event in person they probably get upset at the B who did it, yell at them a bit, and then go make a social media post about how awful B are. The apparent social sentiment is overwhelming in favor of C, and thinks B are horrible ignorant scum. But if they don't actually do anything about it, then it's all just surface level talk and C continue to get discriminated against while B are fine as long as they make do a little bit of op-sec so they don't get witnessed discriminating too publicly.

If your model defines "oppressed minority" using apparent public sentiment in the equation, it will classify C here as "not oppressed", and fail to recognize a scenario which, while not a central example, shares a lot of the bad features associated with being an oppressed minority. At the very least, some new term needs to be used to describe this and a problem needs to be solved, rather than ignored because it's "not real oppression".

If instead your model defines "oppressed minority" using actual behaviors in the equation then you have a major legibility issue in that it's really really hard to measure. You can easily have a society in which apparent public sentiment is overwhelming in favor of one side but they're still an "oppressed minority" because the behaviors skew the other way.

In either case, the map is not the territory. Whatever word you use for it, it's entirely possible to have a society in which the majority of public sentiment skews one way and the majority of actionable offensive and defensive behaviors skew the other. It's rare, because public sentiment and behaviors are correlated, and I don't think it's the world we live in (in the U.S.) but it's logically possible.

It is meaningless, as nobody was ever interested in figuring out who was oppressed in the first place - they merely wanted to legitimize giving power and advantages to specific groups that they either identified with or felt sympathy for. This sympathy depends on the perceived strength and the perceived morality of the agent in question. There's little empathy when women attack men, since men are seen as stronger. There's no empathy when somebody accused of (insert social taboo) is attacked, because they're perceived as being evil. The judgement of evil is perceived as the lack of innocence, and the lack of innocence is proportional to the perceived free will of the doer (and to the extent to which they understand what they are doing). This is why we punish accidents and mentally unwell people less harshly. It also depends on the perceiver, as it gets harder to hate people and judge them as evil as you grow wiser and realize that we're just products of our circumstances (because this understanding of ours results in attributing less free will to others).

Some day I'd like to put human nature into equations, just simple, imperfect ones.

Provided we are careful to measure the "extent to which they're against you" by actions more than words

I personally just thought of it as (actual, not apparent) hostility. Actions and words are both downstream of that.

But if they don't actually do anything about it, then it's all just surface level talk

Yes, but again, situations like this arise because it's all a sham. A thing I've noticed is that most people who complained that X group is oppressing Y group hates group X more than they like group Y. So if somebody hurts a child, it envokes aggression towards the person who hurt the child, much more than it envokes the desire to protect the child. People rarely differentiate between the two when they think about such situations.

Many people also just want a socially acceptable victim to went their negative emotions at. Others want to think of themselves as being "good people". Others still want to show other people their values, and signal virtue or in-group membership. These selfish desires pretend to be altruistic, and the vast majority of people do not have enough self-awareness to notice themselves doing this.

So by "public sentiment" is mean the true sentiment, not the apparent one (which is misleading, which is why I find joy in exposing it like this)

And a problem needs to be solved

People do not want this problem solved in general. They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be pro-freedom when it's to their advantage, but also to decrease the freedom of those who have different values. The public support for "colorblindness" on the political left disappeared because it was true neutrality, and that's not what they want, for that would disallow them from fighting racism with racism. They're opposed to freedom of expression too, also because it's neutral. If 90% of people hate the KKK, they will say "The will of the people have spoken, this is democracy, the majority is right". It was probably the same when a majority oppressed homosexuals in the past, it's just viewed differently in retrospect because, and only because, the majority is against it now. The majority can only disagree with the majority across time. The public could only start to agree that discrimination against homosexuals was bad when it stopped being much of an actual problem - for the two are one and the same thing. This is also why feminism is the most popular in the countries which need it the least - the more feminist a country is, the more power woman have, and the less women will be oppressed.

But it's logically possible

I think it's only possible in the map (the political consensus based on nonsense). In the territory, all of this is nonsense (meaning that it cannot be true in reality. My map of our social reality shows that our social reality is dishonest, and the "real" version which I claim to be true has a lot of tautologies, but I believe that speaks in its favor. Tautologies eat themselves, right? Like circular logic, I think they evaluate to nothing)

We have rules like "You're not allowed to discriminate against inherent traits" and yet we don't treat health, beauty, and intelligence like they're protected traits at all (which is why attacking these traits in opposing ideologies is so common). In fact, our set of "protected traits" is politically biased, and our enforcement of our own rules is biased as well. I'm curious what would happen if we made ideologies protected as well - they're not really different from cultures and religions anyway, they're all just worldviews with a set of values embedded in them. We didn't really improve anything when we changed from religious wars to culture wars, I don't even think the irrationality decreased much. Hell, to be against biases is impossible, as it's a bias in itself. One cannot have a strong preference for the equality of preferences.

You can judge things by the outcome they produce. An unsuccessful person has no right to lecture a successful person by demanding that the successful person imitate the unsuccessful person. This generalizes - Anime is doing much better than western cartoons, so it's simply better. If Christians have better mental health, then Christianity is superior in at least one way. If children who are spanked grow up to be better people than those who weren't, then parents who spanked their kids were in the right. Reality is in the right, even when it appears immoral or irrational.

The Bible would seem to agree. But I’m curious about how far this goes- I’d be willing to bet creation scientists have happier lives, higher social status in their communities, better marriages, more grandchildren(and better relationships with them), and possibly better financial security compared to evolutionary biology. They’ve also introduced enough epicycles to make their theories work for everything we need knowledge of evolution and deep time for for(indeed, making this happen is their actual job- ‘there were six days’ does not require a professional researcher). Does this mean it’s a superior idea?

I don't think you can compare jobs like that, since a society needs a variety of trades to function. If we identify "the best job" and educate every single person in that, it will quickly stop being the best job. Society forms a hierarchy, but the top of the hierarchy is made possible by the bottom. I don't think it's fair to take the winners in isolation and say "everyone should be like them", for instance, concluding that every person should be a CEO so that every person could be rich and high status. So we have to be careful how we apply the rule.

But if creation scientists are more healthy (I think health is the closest we get to an objective metric), then I think we can conclude that their values are superior in a way (and to be exact - they're more in line with nature). So what if they're irrational, delusional, or "wrong"? That's just theory, and theory exists to aid reality. Reality will always beat theory. If they enjoy life, have many children, and have less mental issues on average (which seems to be the case), why not consider their ways superior?

A majority of the global population suffers from emotional neglect.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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