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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5649 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

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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April 2021: First dose of Moderna.

May 2021: Second dose of Moderna.

December 2021: First, and so far only, booster.

November 2022: Finally get COVID.

Should I assume that I would be in worse shape if not for the vaccine, or has it been so long that it makes no difference? And once I recover, should I get a fourth shot?

Should I assume that I would be in worse shape if not for the vaccine

If you're over 40, then yeah, probably. If you're under 40, it's a coin toss at best.

And once I recover, should I get a fourth shot?

I was happy to get the original Moderna shots. I initially planned on getting a booster when they updated it for Omicron. By the time the Omicron-specific booster was out, there no longer seemed to be any point. It seems like some people are saying once you get a bivalent booster you're done, others are saying you should get boosted every year, or six months. Does an infection count as a dose? Who even knows? If so, I'm already quadruple-dosed.

So I haven't even gotten my third shot, much less a fourth.

I seem to recall Thomas Kuhn claimed evolution was not science but "a metaphysical research program", but I can't find the quote or his thoughts on evolution for that matter. Does anyone what I'm talking about, and if so, point me to what Kuhn thought about evolution?

Where's a good place to put low-six-figures of loose cash right now?

I don't want to plunk it all into equities, because I already have enough losing value in those. Treasury ETFs? CDs? Fucking money market funds?

Bluetooth Headphones: Threat or Menace?

I love my Jabra bluetooth headphones both on the go and sitting at my desk; not having cables wrapped around your neck is incredible. But I've wasted hours with the common "paired but won't connect" error after the PC wakes from sleep (often having to pop the case and un/plug the usb header on the bluetooth module to get it working). It works pretty reliably on my android potato. Did I just buy a shitty wifi+bluetooth card, or is there some better alternative entirely?

I'm nervous of USB dongles, because I've had really awful static interference from them before, albeit on an old case with badly shielded headphone jacks next to the ports.

@FiveHourMarathon @aqouta Sorry for the ping, but this is basically a reply to both your comments about earbuds in the thread below.

Bluetooth chips are famously shitty. I specifically looked for a mobo with an Intel chip when I was assembling a new PC last year, and I still ended up with a few outages that could only be solved by unplugging the PSU from the mains and letting the charge dissipate.

I have Jabras, but I use them 99+% with my phone, rarely with my laptop or tablet. Seldom enough that immediately after using it with something else I go into settings and forget them from my laptop so I don't have to listen to that lady go "connected" over and over as I walk around. No connection issues when not confusing the phone or headphones with multiple connections.

One thing I'll note, though, I dislike about them that over a multi year timeframe they're disposable. There's no real way to repair them, when they're done they're done, and they wear out. I've had the Jabras for probably 4 years now, and they're starting to wear down on battery from hard use. I also have some old airpods I got out of lost and found sale and my wife used for a few years, they're so quiet now they're useless for anything other than listening to Ovid in bed when I'm stoned. Before the Jabras I had cheapies that went bad after a year.

So it might just be something wearing out?

Thanks! I should buy some earbuds and see if the PC has the same problem with them. That Jabra voice does get on your nerves, doesn't it! Especially the "battery low" that kicks in starting at 50% charge(!) on the Moves. Luckily there's a button combo to disable the voice entirely, or I'd have binned them by now.

I've had mine for... a good 7-8 years? Had to replace the pads once, and the battery needs daily charging now, but they've held up remarkably well considering the abuse they've gone through.

I mainly use Sennheiser brand ear buds and headsets. They can sometimes have had the problem where the connect but then don't actually take over the audio for desktop but not phone. I suspect it's frequently caused by the fight my phone and desktop get into over who gets to control the headset. I've found turning my phone bluetooth off when using my desktop bluetooth helps. as for dongle I had used a cheaper desktop one for a while but have switched to this one which gives me much better range through multiple walls allowing me to continue, with some slight quality loss, listening to my basement desktop from the second story of my house. One strange thing that tends to cause me audio problems is the spotify desktop app sometimes spins up a bunch of weird process that need to be killed and those processes seem to hold the audio hostage or something.

Thanks, that dongle's cheap enough that it's worth a try just to ditch this awful PCI card.

Shouldn't the phrase "{low/high} {risk/reward}" also include {high/low probability} ?

Else buying lottery tickets sounds like a "low risk, high reward" good idea. Or is the risk/reward an expected value?

Modern risk theory holds that Risk = Likelihood (probability) x Consequence.

Probability is already factored into risk.

"In simple terms, risk is the possibility of something bad happening." - Wikipedia.

I don't know why I found that funny.

Ironically enough, its also the chance of good happening with a subset of risk theory called positive (opportunity) risk.

I'd define low risk high reward as synonymous colloquially with using the term Lottery ticket.

Like one might call a baseball team pursuing high upside lower level minor leaguers as "stocking up on lottery tickets."

Whether something is a good idea is kind of separate from whether it is low risk high reward. If you bring probability into it such that it must have a positive expected value, it doesn't really communicate anything beyond being a good idea.

The reward is typically an expected value, as far as I know. So the lottery is low risk, low reward because the likelihood of a payout is quite low.

Yeah brainfart on my side. Winning the lottery is low risk high reward, not buying a ticket

What do you think it would take for a boycott of ADL and all affiliates? Hearing that the ADL is pressuring twitter advertisers, can’t you just boycott any and all ADL donators, backers, all related organizations, and so on?

A large national organization willing to put the boycott together, that could avoid an infestation of nasties that would cause everyone sane to back away slowly.

Call it...the Defamation League.

This is a bit of a sidebar, but should we care about Twitter advertisers?

Their speech doesn’t seem unusually valuable compared to anything else the ADL has opposed. It seems like the kind of product which should be incredibly fungible, too—can’t another ad take its place? It’s hard for me to get worked up at the price of eyeballs-on-ads dropping a bit, or at the prospect of Twitter continuing to fumble with revenue.

I suppose I’m broadly in the “Twitter delenda est” camp to begin with.

You can try, but the best organized right wing boycott of that sort to date is of planned parenthood, and it has failed pretty badly.

In general boycotts work best when they’re directed against a single target, and even then it’s dicey. Boycotts against planned parenthood, the ADL, election denying politicians, whatever won’t work because it entails boycotting 2,000 things that are indirectly connected.

Did Minotaur get banned? Too much advocating political violence?

They caught a two week ban from me here and shortly after that got permabanned for ban evasion and name-calling.

Thanks for clarifying. Seems fair to me.

It seems like lots of artists and creatives are going right wing lately. I suspect it's due to their (or our, speaking as one of them) predisposition to stand against mainstream culture, as it's impossible to miss the mainstream/capitalist adoption of left wing ideology lately. There's just no excitement or energy in trying to champion leftwing causes when every leftwing cause has been coopted by mass media and tech giants (which are also criminally censorious to creatives currently) and wall street corporations. The artists and creatives who continue to work within the spaces of leftism are increasingly boring and uninteresting and creating work that parrots the capital line more than any genuine transgressive feelings within the artists' vision.

Anyway, my point in making this post is to ask if there has ever been a situation like this in the past? I am interested in history but it's not my strongest subject. It feels like perhaps there are parallels with the French Revolution: wherein the masses were increasingly disgusted with the nobles and quickly defected. I remember reading that even Louis XVI was criticized as being out of touch by vaccinating his family against smallpox, as an aside.

Looking at figures like the Red Scare girls and their whole scene, (which has spiraled out to include Kanye and tons of other millennial thinkers from MIA to David Rudnick) it looks like the disillusionment with leftism is huge. I wonder how much of this is actually an interesting signal that 20th century leftism is dead, or if millennials are simply getting too old for the naivety of that ideology and we're seeing a generation go more conservative which happens with every generation.

I fully empathize with people who are sick of the leftist chokehold on discourse and culture over the past few decades (culminating in the Trump presidency) but I wonder what it leads to. Optimistically, it seems like a "back to basics" situation where people are seeing the contradictions of the recent past and trying to correct them for a new, more coherent ideology, but I also feel like it's a bit of a bizarre situation when a class of people who basically banked their entire social capital for decades on progressive ideology and LGBT/racial inclusivity are starting to tear it down. I applaud it but when has this happened before? In a way it reminds me of the shift in European art from being purely religious in nature, funded by the church, to suddenly having wealthy private clients in the Dutch merchants of the late 1500s.

Sorry for the rambling tone of my post, I just like to read the things posted here and I wanted to kind of post this as a prompt to have some discussion to expand on some thoughts I've been having lately. As an aside, no one in the artist or creative scenes I frequent seem to be able to articulate this shift, as most are still afraid of cancelation or being put out of work or shunned by social media or deplatformed or the many other situations one can get into when defecting from mainstream opinion. Or alternatively creative people are not as invested in the specifics of politics as much as people here are and would rather not engage with the situation from a political lens but rather from their personal/creative artistic angle.

I’m wary of social hypotheses that start with “it seems...”

Right-wing creators, black antisemitism, effective altruism. That’s just this week. A month ago it seemed like woke advertising was hitting a peak; a year ago, maybe it was Democrats, or election deniers, or lockdownists.

This isn’t a dig at your post, because I think discussing the possibility is worthwhile. I’m trying to keep in mind that “it seems” does not imply “it is.” Maybe it’s the filter/algorithm/Current Thing. Seeming is a natural hedge when we aren’t actually sure, and I’d like to skip to the part where people ask for and provide sources.

The third paragraph in my post was an attempt at pointing to some of the evidence I have seen of the rightward shift in art and culture. Others would be the podcast The Perfume Nationalist, countless tumblrs I've seen lately that glorify poor white underdog Trump's America type imagery and identity, and so on. Also the Barragan Spring 2023 fashion show, and the fashion brand called Praying. Brandy Melville. Recent Prada.

As I said in my last paragraph, most of the people in the scene are sort of doing this shift covertly and hiding behind a mirage of ambiguity as to what they are doing (for example, the Red Scare subreddits are filled with people who have no apparent awareness of the rightwing nature of most of the talking points presented on the show.) So it makes evidence difficult to point at. Indeed, much of art and fashion is based on "seeming" rather than anything overt. For example, I can look at Nicholas Ghesquiere's recent collections from Louis Vuitton and see his weird ugly belle epoque-meets-18th century panniers as a kind of rightwing trolling misogynistic hostility against modern women, while the same modern and progressive feminist women can look at the same garments and imagine them as empowering pieces to help them be single mothers with, or whatever.

I don't think that art and fashion, or the politics of people who participate in creating culture, is the sort of thing that you can study, so I don't know how I could provide sources other than by relating my personal anecdotal observations. I'm not going to dox myself but I can tell you that in the least, I'm very interested and personally invested in the creative industries and read themotte enough to be able to identify newly emerging rightwing patterns when 5 years ago you would have gotten you canceled to the ends of the earth for the same thing.

As an aside, I posted in the small scale thread because I didn't really want to attract the hostility and pedantry of the main thread but it seems I've attracted it anyway. I enjoy themotte because I think most of the posters are smart and have unique points of view but the aggression can really be a lot to take when I'm just looking for a more friendly conversation sometimes. I wish there was another thread that was more low stakes than this one, but the friday fun thread says it's not for culture war content so I don't know what to do.

Post as a standalone text post. It doesn't get nearly the engagement typically, only the interested people are clicking.

On your thesis, I think the problem with the evidence for "The Creatives are turning to the Right!" is that it's very "The Boy who cried wolf!" if you've hung around the dissident right wing internet for a minute. It's the Right wing equivalent to "Goldbugs have accurately predicted 14 out of the last 4 recessions" or (if you're familiar with fashion blogs) the way between 2010 and 2020 I read post after post calling that the skinny silhouette was over and it was all about loose pants now. The same articles that are written about the stylish RedScare girls were written in 2015-2016 about how Richard Spencer and Milo represented a new, well read, funny and good natured, nattily dressed and undercutted white nationalism. That wave didn't happen.

Now, in the year of our Lord MMXXII both the goldbugs and the loose pants posts have become right, we are seeing ruinous inflation and skinny jeans are "off trend." So maybe they're just ahead of their time, but when it comes to fashion how do you distinguish "ahead of your time" from "just plain ol' wrong?" I'm not sure. And how do you time it? I'm really not sure, or I'd be richer. Fwiw, I'm still not sure inflation is even a valid concept when so many goods are so much cheaper (or higher quality) than they once were, at the same time that other goods are vastly more expensive; I'm not sure we're seeing inflation as much as price divergence, and the internal mechanics of calculating the CPI are going to have bigger effects than ever, so even then the goldbugs aren't really right.

In this case I find the evidence of the shift to the right among creatives to be weak. The redscare girls are cute, but the "big break" their fans are panting over is a secondary character's love interest on one premium cable TV show; not even a starring role off Broadway or something. Righties are dreaming on Kanye and Kyrie as "big gets" for their team. Kanye's best years are behind him, kids conceived when their parents hooked up at a party listening to "Gold Digger" are 17 now; for us oldies it's equivalent to, when I was 17 in 2009, the right wing celebrating getting Eddie Van Halen to shift Right wing. Kyrie's politics just imploded a high priced superteam that was already selling finals tickets. Whatever your thoughts on the vaccine, Shaq had the best line on it from an NBA perspective: "I played with Kobe, I played against Michael; if Kyrie tried that shit on them they would have pinned him down in the locker room and injected him themselves."

Now maybe Dasha gets the Oscar in a big film next year, Kanye comes out with his Blood on the Tracks coming off the wreckage of his marriage like Dylan before him, and Kyrie and Ben Simmons lead some team to the finals and win co-MVP next year. But I'm not sure I see it.

It seems like lots of artists and creatives are going right wing lately

Which artists? And 'right wing' how? Ten artists on your twitter timeline going RW is different than, say, half all existing elite artists 'going RW' / a new cross-societal group of elite talented RW artists. Is there a RW riefenstahl today? Leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking? And how right-wing - is not being a brain dead liberal and reading Sowell enough?

Looking at figures like the Red Scare girls and their whole scene, (which has spiraled out to include Kanye and tons of other millennial thinkers from MIA to David Rudnick)

Red Scare and their 'scene' did not cause Kanye to be antisemtic, or anti-left. MIA is barely a "thinkier". Idk who runick is, the first google result was ... ballotpedia?

Where's the New Right Eighth Edition celine, or pound?

To answer the question directly - artists have 'moved from left to right' a lot historically, and the mainstream RW artistic presence was, for most of history, way more prominent than it is now, and the movement you see is very small.

Which artists?

Artists/creatives ranging from the people I mentioned in my post to friends of mine who are not famous but are artists.

And 'right wing' how?

I don't know, as right wing as losing a billion dollars for antisemitism and talking about race science openly on a podcast, which in the grand scheme of /r/themotte isn't probably very rightwing but in the grand scheme of like, NYU grads, is basically literally hitler compared to ten years ago

Ten artists on your twitter timeline going RW is different than, say, half all existing elite artists 'going RW' / a new cross-societal group of elite talented RW artists.

Yeah, I see the mainstream elite talented artists as still being deeply left aligned, but the people with less exposure and fame diverging from that. I don't care if Yayoi Kusama or Jeff Koons goes right wing tomorrow because I don't care about their work. I care about people who have always made interesting work to me veering away from liberal ideology because I care about interesting work and seeing where it fits in the political spectrum.

Is there a RW riefenstahl today? Leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking? And how right-wing - is not being a brain dead liberal and reading Sowell enough?

There aren't even leftwing directors leaving a deep mark on all filmmaking today so I think asking for a rightwing one is pretty out of the question for now

Red Scare and their 'scene' did not cause Kanye to be antisemtic, or anti-left.

Everyone in the NYC/LA fashion/art scene basically knows each other, Kanye is definitely getting exposed to these people and I've heard his rants where he explains that he thinks leftists/BLM are coercing the Kardashians into believing/saying whatever they want. If Patrik Sandberg/DIS Magazine people/Ryder Ripps/Azalea Banks/Red Scare girls/Walter Pearce/a handful of other people in the scene weren't all collectively looking into vaguely alt right ideology Kanye West wouldn't have any idea about it either.

MIA is barely a "thinkier".

She has a platform and a creative oeuvre and is daring to say something other than the democrat party line so I feel she's relevant to the discussion at hand

Idk who runick is, the first google result was ... ballotpedia?

He's a talented graphic designer making interesting work, you spelled his name wrong

Where's the New Right Eighth Edition celine, or pound?

I don't know, I'm not claiming there is such a person

To answer the question directly - artists have 'moved from left to right' a lot historically, and the mainstream RW artistic presence was, for most of history, way more prominent than it is now, and the movement you see is very small.

What are some examples of artists moving left to right en masse? Historical precedences for this, specifically? That's what I was curious to know about.

You may characterize the movement I see as small but I don't see the movement ending where it is today. It's gaining enough traction with enough tastemakers and cultural producers that are young enough that it could be the genesis of some broader right wing thing moving forward and that's what interests me, not really in just the small shift that's happened already.

One possible understated trigger for such developments: COVID lockdowns, and their effects on artists. At least in Finland, whenever there were COVID measures (while other measures were usually pretty light touch, the government often resorted to closing bars, or limiting the bar opening hours heavily, during COVID waves), the artists were one of the biggest constituencies to protest this, organizing several demonstrations against the bar closing hours. Of course the reasons are obvious, bars are where presenting artists perform, and the novelty of "online gigs" and such wore off at warp speed.

While this issue was not as heavily tribalized as in United States, there was still a lot of anger from the artists specifically channeled at left-wing parties for "their parties" betraying them, and I'd imagine that in more tribalized countries there might be even more similar reactions? OTOH many artists were quite happy when the COVID passports were introduced, hoping that they'd at least allow the bars to function, even if they'd lose some part of the clientele (often stereotyped as the most rowdy and problematic part anyway).

I do think the political shitshow behind COVID had a radicalizing effect on creatives but I don't know that it was the lockdowns specifically. I'm sure it screwed over a lot of performers and musicians and people who rely on art shows and in person events but lots of people also simply took a few months off or switched to their side gigs or sold online or got unemployment or did something else to make ends meet, at least in the US. Everyone is going to have a different take on this but from where I was, the thing that irritated me the most about the pandemic wasn't the governments restrictions, which were somewhat minimal where I was, but instead the peer pressure/social politicization and having to navigate the newly emerging social realities of the pandemic. Most creatives tend to be socially awkward or isolated to begin with so I can see how dealing with that would have a triggering effect on many of us. On the other hand I do have more resources than most people in the creative class so I could be isolated from the material concerns that many of my peers faced but I think the ideological implications are more galling and degrading than having to find new ways to make money imo

there was still a lot of anger from the artists specifically channeled at left-wing parties for "their parties" betraying them

I did not see much of this but I also have most of this type of person unfollowed or muted at this point, so perhaps I missed it- though anger from the left toward the left is nothing new

Crossposting about finding work in an age of public shaming, because Reddit sucks and isn't helping me.

https://old.reddit.com/r/jobs/comments/xq7bhs/do_employers_google_previous_names/

Depends on the level of scrutiny your employer is going to give, which is entirely up to them, to my knowledge no laws against it or methods to prevent it practically. Big companies with big HR departments managing liability are likely to do more, small businesses or local government agencies are likely to do less, anything that has contact with the military industrial complex is almost certainly going to lead to you getting got if it's anything spicy. The smaller the org, the less likely they are to use sophisticated tracking methods, so maybe just target your search there?

It's tough to imagine somebody going through trouble to find your old name and then doxx your online accounts if you just apply for an engineering job somewhere, but I don't actually know how hard that is having never really tried to do it.

If this is a serious issue for you, maybe the best way to cover up that needle is to get a haystack? Post a whole bunch of shit all over the internet on, idk, sports forums or car hobbyist forums, just generic shit you could probably macro or bot but will get upvoted, so the spicy shit gets watered down.

I'm technologically illiterate, but I would pay good money for someone to do a bot spam of things with my name everywhere, if that's what you're describing.

Exactly what I'm thinking. Make so many generic comments that it drives the other stuff down in the rankings! Like, comment on restaurant reviews saying just Yum it was great, football forums saying go birds! Car forums arguing about Ford vs Chevy.

I'm not sure reddit is your problem. Your question has already been answered there: yes, if an employer gets access to your "previous name," they are likely to Google it. And yes, literally anything could be sufficient to put them off hiring you, much less something substantial. Beyond that it is impossible to give you direct advice since you have chosen (understandably) to not provide further specifics.

There are a some caveats to this, however. The first is that having your SSN does not necessarily give them access to your name. You can update your name on your SS card if you have legally changed your name. Beyond that, SS fraud is commonplace precisely because having your SSN does not necessarily give employers access to any government records about you. Illegal immigrants often use stolen SSNs to secure employment. The SS department cheerfully collects that money and most of the time asks no questions, though the original owner of the number may sometimes encounter bureaucratic headaches as a result.

The second caveat is that, even if you use a SS card with your old name on it, you usually don't provide a SS card to employers until after you've taken a job. They are less likely to Google your old name (though this depends a lot on how meddlesome HR decides to be) after they've already made an offer. The risk, of course, is that they then rescind the offer, but people are less likely to rescind an offer than they are to pass you over in the first place.

I'm talking about cringe fetish stuff and/or spicy political takes getting posted on Kiwifarms and/or Twitter. I figured that was specific enough.

Wait, my SSN doesn't give them access to my government records? I thought that was the entire point, because that was how they did criminal background checks. This gives me optimism. Quora does make it sound like it's not fool proof, but it is a hurdle I can create.

https://www.quora.com/Do-previous-legal-names-show-up-on-background-checks?top_ans=395229319

Wait, my SSN doesn't give them access to my government records? I thought that was the entire point, because that was how they did criminal background checks.

First and foremost, your SSN is how your company reports their information (how much they paid you) to the government. The government doesn't give them anything in return for that.

Background checks are a different matter. Most companies will not do a real background check; most companies will simply do a credit check. But yes, the Quora answers are basically correct. Even if a company does a more thorough background check, associating your old name with your new one is a step away from identifying that person as you. And I have never had an employer ask me about my relationship to any of the people who would doubtless appear in a background check. If you're applying for a job with, say, the federal government, then odds are pretty good (though not 100%!) that someone will notice. The smaller the company, the more likely they will either (A) never know or (B) never care.

Basically, you're not wrong to feel concerned, but also there's no reason to think your situation is hopeless.

How are women attracted to men?

I have spent far too much time trying to build a mental model that is somewhat of an ensemble model of the Blue Pill, the Black Pill and the Red Pill.

But to be honest, the more I read, especially if its from the horses mouth, the more confused I get. For reasons that I cant say in polite company, I have concluded that just about anything women say on this matter can be more or less discarded.

For example, a lot of women claim that they might not like a guy initially but familiarity grows on them. So is the level of familiarity a variable I should add to my model on top of other variables like looks, height, wealth, status ? Because I am extrmely skeptical it is a variable at all and see little evidence of it. Maybe it passes through some kind of non linear activation function..

Or when they talk about "emotional connection", yesh wtf is that? Its probably an activation function not a variable.

I dont know... My absolute lack of contact with any humam female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Or when they talk about "emotional connection", yesh wtf is that? Its probably an activation function not a variable.

Is everybody turning into a robot all of a sudden? Have you never been in love? Or the other way around, have you never met an objectively attractive woman that you just couldn't vibe with?

Sure, women are confusing, but this is the least confusing part.

Women, including GenZ women, love sex, just maybe not with you? Seems like the simplest explanation.

Unless your definition of "want sex more" means something like "wants sex with more partners" in which case you would be talking past most people on the subject.

The way OP expresses bewilderment at women's behavior might tempt to fire some jabs, but if you're seriously saying women have as strong a sex drive as men, you're being equally, if not more, silly.

It's a wonderful web of motte, bailey and strawmen.

Women's anatomy on testosterone is way hornier than women's anatomy off it, so it's safe to say men are hornier. This is of course, uncontroversial. Whenever anyone says this, there is a coalition of shouting to inform him that, "women love sex too, just not with you," as if the person had claimed, "women don't like to have sex."

OP seems to say, "women are not attracted to men," which is just absolutely insane. "Women are not as horny as men" is uncontroversial true, but OP makes claims way stronger than that.

I was also uneager to repeat the essays-back-and-forth downthread, by just stating in one sentence what took them paragraphs to write.

I have concluded that just about anything women say on this matter can be more or less discarded.

This is true about just about everything. People are really really bad at revealing what truly motivates them in any aspect of their life. Most people don’t know themselves (myself included). If they did know, then why would akrasia be a thing? Why would anyone fail a diet? Why would meditation be interesting at all?

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Ahem, personal miniscule sample size anecdata not surveys but...GenZ women are just as horny as their foremothers were at that age. If they don't seem so, it's because you aren't finding them in the right context, but that's been the case throughout history. Whatever happy nonsense they bring up in public, they get horny when they're presented with an opportunity to feel sexy with a man they find sexy.* I've had enough experiences of girls who went from frigid to freak, or girls who one partner described as uninterested and their next partner called insatiable. Get really blasted and watch Eyes Wide Shut; the whole movie is about the Tom Cruise character realizing that women are horny too. The giant high class orgy in a castle is a psychological metaphor/hallucination of a man who previously thought of women as frigid and withholding sex suddenly seeing that women will also want to fuck, that's why the journey into the night starts with him finding out about his wife merely having the passing desire to fuck some navy officer which blows his mind; he slowly realizes that women are sexually available all around him, but only to men who also realize the secret that women are sexually available. The masks provide a thin veneer of respectability separating their quotidian identities from their sexual selves, playing a sexy character, as Dan Savage has put it BDSM is playing cops and robbers with your pants off. After journeying through the implications of this realization, the protagonist then rebuilds his relationship with his wife on the basis of this realization.

For example, a lot of women claim that they might not like a guy initially but familiarity grows on them. So is the level of familiarity a variable I should add to my model on top of other variables like looks, height, wealth, status ?

A guy grows on you because you learn more about him, it's not an independent variable it is just enhanced knowledge. This might improve your knowledge of his status, some forms of status are immediately legible while others become apparent only after exposure. A lot of valuable facts about you aren't immediately legible; your background, your hobbies, your personal care for those around you. If I met a woman at a dive bar where I was watching MMA, she wouldn't know from looking at me almost any of my personal traits beyond appearance because I don't talk a lot or make jokes anyone gets at a bar, she might even think I'm kind of slow or not particularly intelligent because my thoughts are unintelligible in a loud bar.

You also need to balance within your model likelihood of interest in/commitment to the woman involved. The FDS game is to get the highest status man you can get to commit. Women might get confused about balancing those, but that always plays into it. Familiarity tends to show that a guy is genuine and likely to stick around in a way that nothing else can.

So to give my answer to your question: what do women want?

Different things at different times. "I am large, I contain multitudes." Girls just want to have fun, offer them an adventure, a romance story. Our brains are built to run on narratives, give them space to write one, and the opportunity to feel like an archetype.

For reasons that I cant say in polite company...

Come on, this isn't polite company, at least give us a hint. Change names and dates to protect the innocent, but there's no reason to make a secret of your sex life here if you're going to trade on it.

I have spent far too much time trying to build a mental model that is somewhat of an ensemble model of the Blue Pill, the Black Pill and the Red Pill.

I'd be curious to hear what you've come up with. Genuinely.

I dont know... My absolute lack of contact with any humam female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.

This is a serious problem, nip it in the bud now before it hits a year and gets worse.

I'd be curious to hear what you've come up with. Genuinely.

I've come up with not much.

To summarize I would say that there is varying degrees of wheat and chaff in all 3 competing views of sexual relations. The wheat and chaff are as follows.

Red

  • Wheat - Status is important. Extremely important. Proxies of social status can be emulated and transmitted effectively if done right.

  • Chaff - Macho bullshit like "spinning plates", is of dubious value. Machismo is signal of weakness not strength.

  • Wheat ratio - 75%

Black

  • Wheat - Physical Attractiveness is probably the single most important variable.

  • Chaff - Anything to do with Penis size. Not acknowledging that its not all looks even if looks are 90%. Failure to explain the remaining 10% can throw the explanations way off base.

  • Wheat ratio - 75%

Blue

  • Wheat - Sometimes a girl likes you just because. Those reasons can be as mundane as the shape of your thumb. Being a "good person" TM doesn't hurt.

  • Chaff - That doesn't mean attraction is completely stochastic. Being a "good person" TM doesn't help either.

  • Wheat ratio - 15%

I'm not in the state of mind to write out a mathematical formula right now because the thought of syntax formatting in this comment is giving me a nightmare, but imagine a formula with 50 delta signs, many nested activation functions, and many piecewise functions. If I were given infinite time and money, I would turn this formula into a reality because I am not at all convinced that attraction is stochastic or chaotic enough that it can't be predicted at all, if anything, I think given the data, predicting it should be trivial, to the point that simple statistical/ML models would be enough had the data existed.

My gut instinct tells me a tree based model would be excellent at predicting attraction.

This is a serious problem, nip it in the bud now before it hits a year and gets worse.

Impossible. I WFH and am far far far too busy with gym, house errands, helping aging parents, side hustles, applying to grad schools, for anything that would require any significant time commitment.

Come on, this isn't polite company, at least give us a hint. Change names and dates to protect the innocent, but there's no reason to make a secret of your sex life here if you're going to trade on it.

I think there is a certain programming in the female mind that just makes it impossible for them to clearly lay out what they actually like in a partner. This is in contrast to most men where they can tell you exactly what makes a girl attractive.

The anecdotal literature on this is vast. What they say they want and what they take are often totally at odds [Henry]. It might be a case of fish being in water that what they want is so obvious that it needs not be said. For example in this book the author actually puts effort into making a list of all the things she wants from a guy. She later confesses that not only are items in the list contradictory, no such human probably exists to begin with.

In simpler words, I think we are asking women a question they are not equipped to answer because firstly the answers are not socially/cultarally acceptable. And secondly I genuinely do think the female mind is incapable of answering the question. Given that the most accurate answer is provided by just about THE MOST male-brained woman to have ever existed (she's a rationalist, you might have heard of her recently).

I think it requires a level of decoupling and DEEP DEEP introspection that most women are just not equipped with.

Emphasis added:

I think there is a certain programming in the female mind that just makes it impossible for them to clearly lay out what they actually like in a partner.

…

For example in this book the author actually puts effort into making a list of all the things she wants from a guy. She later confesses that not only are items in the list contradictory, no such human probably exists to begin with.

In defense of the opposite sex, this is not just a problem that women have. The Madonna-Whore Complex is something a non-negligible number of men have.

Free, endless streaming pornography I suspect has exacerbated things. Videos of two, flawed human beings cohabitating, compromising and working through the occasional petty disagreements are probably not popular.

In defense of the opposite sex, this is not just a problem that women have. The Madonna-Whore Complex is something a non-negligible number of men have.

Honestly this whole thread is redpilling me on TheMotte as a space of intelligent, self-reflective men. The 2005-Dane-Cook-Bit level of "Men are simple! Right bros?" being preached is hilarious. So many men think they know what they want, until they get it. Men all "want a virgin who is a whore", but when they get her they wonder where she learned it. I've seen so many men get overwhelmed by getting the woman who acts the way they've always said they want, I'm shocked this is still even an open debate if you have any experience in life.

This may have been a clever plot in the somewhat victorian early 20th century where this story is from, but nowadays most boys grow up being taught this “secret” as gospel, and the orgies don’t materialize. Except for gay boys obviously (spot the difference…) . If anything, women’s sexual desire is massively overestimated nowadays. As an example, FDS has a purely materialistic point of view, I don’t see any space for female desire in there.

...the orgies don’t materialize.

But they have materialized. They're all around us, if he can't see them I guess it's two movies on one screen? Arguing that sex isn't available, that women don't want to have sex, feels so strange to me, like arguing that America is impoverished.

women’s sexual desire is massively overestimated nowadays.

Tiresias the seer who lived as both man and woman, when asked by Hera and Zeus whether men or women enjoyed sex more, said that "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only." Chanakya in India tells us that women have "Four times the shyness...and eight times the sexual desire." It isn't just nowadays. Women have been thought of as coyly hiding a ravenous sexual apettite since antiquity

Buddhists teach that there are three kinds of knowledge. There's rote knowledge, memorization, the ability to repeat a fact: Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. There's understanding the causes of a fact: Brasilia is the capital of Brazil because it was founded to be a city of the future in the mid-20th century, to pull the government of Brazil away from the existing primate cities of Rio and Sao Paulo. Then there's understanding a concept at a deep level, where you look at the world differently knowing what that fact means for the world you live in: walking down a street in Brasilia and looking around and seeing the world around you in terms of the history of Brazil, the economic tensions and choices that lead to what the city looks like today.

Consider that these men may not believe what they say they believe about women. They understand it at the first level, as a fact that they parrot, or maybe even at the second level of talking about multiple orgasms or a woman's sexual prime or whatever. But they don't look at a woman and see someone who wants to fuck them, they think they have to trick them or convince them or cajole them, they view it transactionally. And that's the totally wrong framing, it's not a transaction, it's a mutual benefit, we both want to be there.

I dont know if you are taking those ancient tales seriously but FtM trans people almost unanimously confirm that the sex drive with increased levels of testosterone is orders of magnitude more than what they had.

So those ancient stories probably do contain some wisdom, that is applicable in some contexts, in the general case they are way off.

I do take ancient traditions on the human condition seriously, much more seriously than I do mad science experiments involving pumping a woman's body full of test and seeing what happens. A trans man still has female anatomy, pumping it full of exogenous hormones doesn't make it male anatomy. That's before we even get into the impact dysphoria, however framed, has on psychology and sexual desire.

So, yeah, critique citing mythology and symbolism all you want, but hard science doesn't have an answer here.

If you prefer ancient traditions to any actual modern evidence, you could go read the bit in the Book of the City of the Ladies where de Pizan discusses the idea that women are more lusty than men, and points out (in more polite terms) that there are no female-serving whorehouses. As her basic premise remains true today, cross-culturally, etc, it seems like she's in the right and Tiresias is in the wrong.

Sex for het men is of course available, but not freely so, and in a limited amount. It doesn't nearly cover the demand, like it does for gay men.

The hierarchy of human couplings by amount of sex exchanged goes: gay men (high demand, high supply) > het couples (high demand from men, low supply from women) > lesbians (low demand, low supply).

Plus the well-known experiment of taking an attractive person and propositioning members of the opposite sex gives wildly differing results.

Tiresias the seer who lived as both man and woman, when asked by Hera and Zeus whether men or women enjoyed sex more, said that "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."

What other useful knowledge have you gathered from your study of mythology? Aside from fictional evidence, Tiresias has real-life counterparts, and trans men report vastly increased levels of sexual desire when taking male levels of testosterone.

They understand it at the first level, as a fact that they parrot, or maybe even at the second level of talking about multiple orgasms or a woman's sexual prime or whatever. But they don't look at a woman and see someone who wants to fuck them, they think they have to trick them or convince them or cajole them, they view it transactionally.

That sounds like bullshit my man, like that movie where michael caine is drunk fake Sherlock, where he explains how he solves crimes "others see, whereas I see and observe".

Plenty of gullible men spend years waiting for women to show the same kind of sexual interest they feel and express.

What other useful knowledge have you gathered from your study of mythology?

Tons. Certainly more interesting, to me, than pumping a woman full of testosterone and asking her how she feels.

It fundamentally doesn't matter that lots of men aren't getting laid, or that lots of men want to have sex but can't, that doesn't really impact my little point of mysticism, any more than the existence of people who can't shoot a basketball disproves the existence of basketball. A minority of men is getting laid all the time, it ain't because all these women are just cosmically confused that I'm going to start spending money on them any second now. The whole point of the metaphor within the movie is that it's an exclusive club of men who "get it," who know that there is no second password. When you get it, you get it, and then you can get it.

OK I'm sure you drown in pussy, that proves nothing, I don't see any argument that supports your thesis.

You've gotten a number of good answers, but one that I think is overlooked is that women prefer men who conform to their in-group. With few exceptions, religious people get married at much higher rates than the religiously unaffiliated, particularly in faiths that explicitly value marriage and children (Mormons, Hindus, Jews, and Protestants--minus Historically Black Protestants--top the list behind the link). Congregations are often quite good at pushing low-status males and low-status females into one another's company, and browbeating high status males into monogamy and responsible fatherhood. This can result in mismatches of various kinds, of course, but that's a concern mostly if you're going to refuse to make any compromises in your life. Some people can afford to be that demanding of others, but in my experience, most people can't.

My absolute lack of contact with any humam female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.

Join a club. Join a church, better yet. It seems like I'm always pointing out that congregations like the Universalist Unitarians do exist; you can be an atheist and still have religion, these days, though the politics might bother you. If that doesn't appeal to you, you might consider that the same attitudes that make group worship unappealing to you, make you unappealing to a large percentage of women, who tend to be much more sensitive to social standing.

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Check the stats on church attendance, you'll see why you're right. Society has relentless messaging on the centrality of your sexual tastes to your identity, and on never compromising anything for the sake of a romantic relationship. This is a recipe for disaster because male and female sexual preferences barely overlap at all. This is an exaggeration, of course, but... not much of an exaggeration, I suspect. (Yes, yes, not all men are sex addicts, many women desire and enjoy sex, etc. but population-level differences are readily apparent).

tl;dr if you want to find a romantic partner, worry less about what you want and more about what they are likely to want.

It seems like I'm always pointing out that congregations like the Universalist Unitarians do exist; you can be an atheist and still have religion,

The problem there is that you might think about it, and then you see a photo of the local UU group and if it were just one person with a bad physiognomy, maybe. But the whole thing looks completely nuts. I've been to sex addicts anonymous meetups and the people there are less weird.

The biggest issue IMO is mismatched attraction. For example, you might be type X and like women of type A, whereas type A women predominantly prefer men of type Y, while type X is more popular with type B women. Your options are:

  • adjust your demands and tell yourself that "type B is fine too", whatever that type B is

  • keep looking for that type A outlier that prefers type X. Might take a very long time and you must always be on the lookout, since they will be snatched off the dating market

  • turn yourself into type Y and live a life of constant deception

If all these types are confusing you, you need an experienced wingman who can tell which women are attracted to you and point them out, as well as estimate your chances with women you are attracted to.

The most important thing to remember is that not all women are the same. Much like how not all men are the same. A guy who is extremely attractive to one women could be repulsive to another.

That said, vast majority of women are attracted to physically attractive men. E.g strong jawline, muscles, height. There are exceptions but generally women are attracted to stereotypically attractive men even if they say they're not. Maybe they just don't have a good grasp of just how tall tall actually is or how bulky a muscled guy is, I don't know, but being conventionally attractive is huge.

The rest is very variable. Sense of humour, good conversation, "good vibes", an exciting sense of danger, the details all vary woman to woman.

The one very consistent thing that women are attracted to is physical appearance. If you want to have sex, or even just an easier time making both male and female friends, go to the gym.

I recommend https://putanumonit.com/ too he has some good blogs that I think will click with you.

The best answer I can give:

They want to know that you are a good target for a relationship, and that you won't rape and murder them.

It is basically impossible to know these things about someone without already being in a relationship for a while/ getting within muderin' range.

The only way to figure it out is to ask the dude "Hey, are you put together and not fucking c r a z y?", which has some obvious problems with it.

So, what they do instead is poll the target using lizard brain bullshit viz. their position on the relationship/murder compass, which amounts to looking for high confidence and high sociability.

The red pill dudes are right about Chad, but disqualify themselves from Chadhood by being very poorly socialized.

You do it subconsciously all the time, unless you are an autist like me and had to train yourself to notice that style of bullshit.

It's why scamming is the real oldest profession; if you have high confidence and high sociability while also being an asshole (but secret!), you can go far.

I think it's variable, but you can usually trust individuals to know something about themselves.

It's like asking people "why do you like your job?" (and asking them where their boss might hear). You are going to get a huge range of answers. A lot of times they might be lying to sound good, maybe they just want the money but they make up something about how solving programming problems is fun. Sometimes they might give you something super specific that is too hard to generalize, "I like working with Sally". Other times they'll throw their hands up and say "your guess is as good as mine".

If you are looking for love try to be the best version of yourself, make male in person friends first (it's both easier than finding love, and can help your chances when meeting women), and try to stop overthinking the issue. Humans have been successfully reproducing for quite a while, and without as much analysis.

Women are primarily attracted to men that other women are attracted to. Your best bet is replicating the record company paying young women screeching in excitement for the Beatles to land in America (before anyone had their records in America, or radio broadcast)***, but on social media, without obvious tells that you're paying for it.

***This account was apparently inaccurate, and exists as only a pop culture legend. Particular other instances of paid or otherwise incentivized enthusiastic 'actors' to appear as fans may be real.

I knew a guy in my frat who did this. It actually worked pretty well for a while, we all thought these super hot blondes who went to state schools in Ohio kept commenting on his posts that they "missed him" on all the posts about going to conferences and shit.

He even posted, then took down and apologized for, a photo of his penis cumming on a girl's face "#sheknowsimpostingthis." And some of the dumber brothers were briefly like, wow respect!

That was his downfall, however, as someone recognized the dick from pornography and began taking the whole fugazi mess apart. Pretty soon we knew all the posts about conferences were stock photos from Oxford or Harvard's website, all the blondes didn't exist; not long after he was expelled for living in the college club offices over the summer, and filling the rooms with jugs of urine.

Today I guess the play would be to hire onlyfans types to do it, right? Then they're "real".

Speaking as a gay man this is extremely accurate. Once you start noticing that most gay guys are competing for whoever they all think is the hottest guy around you can't stop noticing it. I've noticed if I'm with another guy who likes me, but isn't hotter than me, I get way more attention from other guys than when I'm out by myself. Alternately, when I'm out with a guy hotter than me, he gets all the attention and I get none. This is basically Rene Girard's concept of memetic desire in play.

I know your reply is a joke but I think if such a model were to be crafted, preselection would have a lot of weight as a variable.

I tried wording it as a humorous direct response more than pure joke, and apparently I bought into an unfounded rumor regarding the beatles landing, but you've put it better than I could in terms of preselection being a strong attractive factor (at least initially).

I have this theory that it's evolutionarily important that no one knows what women want—including women—because then it could be exploited and optimized for.

Why would that be a problem?

Wouldnt optimization benefit the sole point of sexual selection? Continued procreation?

Or is there some long term short term tradeoff. All in all interesting theory but I dont think evolution is that smart.

Goodheart's law. You would optomize for the cheapest way to appear to have what women want, which may have little to no overlap with what they want/need, but would confuse their ability to detect the real deal.

Yeah, it's kind of glib, but I think there's something there.

It's not like women are shy about saying what women want, but it seems clear that they're wrong about that. So we need to explain this somehow. I can think of at least a few explanations, and one of them is that they don't actually know what they want.

This could be beneficial because who really wants to know what women want? Men. We already know that women are at least willing to pretend to tell the truth about what they want (of course they could be lying, etc.), but what if they actually knew and told men the Truth? And what if that Truth made it clear that a lot of men aren't wanted by women? That might be bad for civilization.

It might be better for civilization that men and women are both in a constant state of confusion about women's desires, and instead of everything being out in the open and clear, men are forced to try a variety of things to win women's favor. There are too many variables to control for, so no one can ever make any progress on the problem, and so it goes on being a mystery.

I think they know what they want but their filters are like the proverbial fish trying to describe water, and they don't realize that their statements are only true for guys who pass. When a woman describes her ideal mate it's so obvious it goes without saying that he would be attractive to her peers, she's describing characteristics she wants in addition to that, not the exclusive list of things she wants.

That makes a terrifying amount of sense

I don't understand it any more than you do. I fell in love precisely once and it had nothing to do with money, status, or looks (he had none at the time, though he did have intelligence and wit.) I married a principled, honest man who I can be entirely myself with. Even when he's talking about something I don't care about (football mostly), I'm interested in what he's saying because it's him saying it.

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Well... don't underestimate how much extremely online people are different from your average, ordinary person. I wouldn't worry about this too much. Odds are that there will be plenty of zoomer women who are interested in pursuing relationships with men.

But as to your general question, it's hard. People have been asking "what do women want?" for literally hundreds (probably thousands) of years, I don't think there will ever be a definitive answer. My intuition is that the answer would be a set of different criteria, which different groups of women (based on culture, age, personality variance, etc) all value differently. But I really don't know.

None of those things are a challenge if we were to model the process naively atleast. Its not quantum mechanics.

Im of the opinion that if a sufficiently large dataset with enough variables about both partners were to be created. The question could be answered overnight in less than 100 lines of python code.

If it were actually that easy, then why hasn't it been done yet? The fact that it hasn't happened suggests that it is not in fact that easy.

Because what attracts women is not a good research question relative to all other questions that can be asked. The kind of dataset that would be required to model the target would be far too labor and time intensive to create for dubious benefit to any real research question.

It should be like Man_{n} features, Woman_{n} features, man and woman n are couples.

So then, it's not actually that easy.

Yeah, I said it would be easy had such a dataset existed. Easy in the sense that you won't need much advanced math to find the answer.

Sure, but I think that the phrasing there is kind of hand waving away the hard part. It's like saying "it would be easy to walk over there if there wasn't a wall blocking the way". Technically true, but the phrase "it would be easy" tends to connote a certain sense that the problem is easier than it actually is.

The better we became at compiling such a dataset, the more restricted we became in how honest we can be about what we actually seek for in a mate, both with a dispassionate survey taker and even with ourselves. Social desirability bias towards not appearing shallow is so great as to make this sort of survey a non-starter in my view.

was there any existing discussion of Bryan Caplan's new project "Dont be a feminist"

https://youtube.com/watch?v=d4C-Rz3Wv5c ?

It's alright but it feels like it might as well have been put out 10 years ago. Nothing said was news at all to any skeptics but perhaps it'll be a new skeptics first introduction to this information from someone who is well presented and reasonable articulate.

I watched it, it's fairly short and enjoyable, but it's almost entirely preaching to the choir, I find. There wasn't really any support for helping de-program the other side. (The factoid about prison rape was new and interesting for me though).

Most interesting was the very first slide, where he says the dictionary definition of a feminist ("wanting to men and women to be treated equally") is wrong, in that almost all men agree with this, but only 1/3 of men consider themselves feminists. He instead proposes (paraphrasing) feminists think that "men are treated unfairly better than women" and notes that essentially all feminists would agree with it, but most non-feminists (including ones who agree with the dictionary definition) would disagree.

The rest is kind of the classic stuff -- men die on the job more, are affected by violent crime more, commit suicide more, the pay gap is BS, the "women are wonderful" effect etc. He notes how no one sees anything wrong with the Ukraine not letting any men between 16-60 out, which is a powerful contemporary datapoint.

It's also nice that he notes he wrote this book for his daughter, because he sees the feminist ideology leading to self-pity, antipathy, and injustice, which he sees as bad, and also that he briefly explores why he thinks it so popular, which he sympathetically phrases as "If so many people disagree with me, why do I think I'm right?"

Is there a name for referring to a person or other living being as a noun referring to a situation that it was involved in? The two examples that come to mind are:

  • "a suicide" as opposed to "a person who committed suicide".

  • "my dog was a rescue" as opposed to "my dog was rescued".

nouning

(ironically 'nouning' is an example of verbing)

I've never heard anyone say "my dog is a rescue" and the only times I've heard suicide used as a noun would be cops saying "it was a suicide" and I think its referring to the situation, or its just an idiomatic it like "it's raining outside."

Could you give another example of what you mean?

Northeastern USA it’s common to hear people refer to their dogs as rescues in my experience

It does have a historical basis.

I think the suicide one is from Sarah Perry's old blog "the view from hell" and rescue one is something I heard an acquaintance say.

I've heard people say "my dog is a rescue" all the time. For the suicide example, best I can do is dialogue from Kingdom of Heaven. A priest at the beginning refers to a dead woman, saying "she was a suicide, cut off her head".

I feel like suicide, and other -cide identities, are more old fashioned. Like old books referring to Cromwell as a regicide, or Oedipus as a patricide.

Synecdoche?

What was actually going on with FTX political donations? SBF by his statements seemed to have plans to make himself a dem Kingmaker in congressional primaries (and he planned to donate huge amounts in 2024 dwarfing his $40MM for the midterm), but his partner Ryan Salame donated ~$27MM exclusively to republicans. FTX looks like it was playing both sides, but only got attention as a dem donor because of SBF's outsized profile. Were they attempting to divide up authority between each other and control the whole game? Salame's own Super PAC, ADFA, was initially reported as a "Crypto PAC" seeking to boost primary candidates more amiable to crypto-friendly legislation, but his twitter feed does have a right wing touch to it. Was Ryan just playing with the smaller capital he had without intention to go bigger latter like SBF? Does anyone know Salame's relation to the EA scene, or how coordinated the two CEO's actions may have been?

Someone looking to steer politics from a particular position would probably see value in influencing both party's primaries. If you just give money to any crypto friendly candidate you're going to hit both sides of the fence although it was probably more sophisticated than that. I'd imagine it's this way for more policy questions that haven't cemented themselves as being divided by party.

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Can someone steelman mass mail-in voting for me? I racked up reports and a mild mod wrist slap over the weekend for referring to Nevada system as a "fucking stupid way to run an election" without further elaboration. In retrospect, I agree with the reports and with @cjet79 for the callout on it - it's an admittedly low effort swipe and I didn't do anything meaningful to justify it. Nonetheless, I really do think that this is an incredibly stupid way to run elections and I genuinely forget that other people apparently think it's basically fine. The reasons that it seems obviously stupid to me keep popping up in this election. A few of them:

  • Not requiring the ballots to arrive on or before election day means that we don't have a reliable denominator, which will persistently fuel speculation of cheating.

  • Colorado is apparently going to have to need to deal with tons of ballot curing, a process that also strikes me as absolutely bizarre, in which documents that are missing information or filled out incorrectly are remedied after the fact.

  • Mail-in ballots pretty thoroughly demolishes the ability to vote without coercion. This could be exploited in abusive relationships or with people lacking the mental capacity to determine their own vote.

  • Mail-in eliminates the near guarantee of a one-to-one relationship between voter and vote that is ensured by in-person identification.

Maybe I'm wrong about these being big problems, but what exactly are we getting in return that makes it so valuable? I can see the case when it comes to military ballots and people who genuinely can't leave their homes, but why create these sorts of potential problems for people that can just head over to their local poll place? I have some criticisms of early voting, but it still seems substantially more secure than spamming ballots out to the last known address of every registered voter. I know I'm still being fairly snarky, but I'm also trying to actually understand why anyone thinks it's important to do elections this way.

An argument you can make against mail in voting is that voting is a proxy for a civil war without the associated costs and so requiring people to get off their asses and vote in person is good, while letting anyone with a heartbeat vote is actually bad.

This of course must be understand in the context of trans- and cis-democracy.

@QuinoaHawkDude stole a lot of my thunder, but I suspect that the attitude of "Why can't people just head to their local polling place?" comes from being in a position where doing that isn't particularly inconvenient. I can empathize with this because I, too, live in a place where voting is convenient and additionally I work from home most of the time which means I can usually waltz in mid-morning and not wait at all. That was the plan this year until I had to make an unanticipated trip into Pittsburgh and I didn't get to the polling place until after 6pm by which time there was a line. Not a long line, mind you, but it was still probably 10–15 minutes, and was rather irritating. The one time I went early it was a longer line, probably 45 minutes to an hour, for the reasons @QuinoaHawkDude says.

Unfortunately, people in other places aren't so lucky. While stories of people waiting ridiculous amounts of time to vote certainly aren't representative of a typical experience, the fact that it happens at all is cause for concern. Numbers I saw from 2020 suggest that a little under 15% of in-person voters had to wait more than a half-hour and a little over 6% had to wait over and hour. While these may not seem like terribly high percentages, keep in mind that that equates to about 12 million people, or a population the size of Pennsylvania, that had to wait more than 30 minutes. And this is in an election where nearly 50% of the electorate voted remotely. Now imagine that you know that you'll be waiting in line to vote at least a half-hour and possibly an hour, and your polling place is like mine where there's nowhere to wait inside and it's 38 degrees outside and raining a little, and you have to work all day and can't risk being late so you'd have to wait until after work, sit in traffic on the freeway, come home, pet the dog, kiss your wife, frisk the kids for marijuana, eat dinner, and get motivated enough to stand in line to cast a ballot that, on its own, it almost certain to be statistically insignificant. Maybe you'd still go, but it's understandable that a lot of people would forget about it at that point.

Not requiring the ballots to arrive on or before election day means that we don't have a reliable denominator, which will persistently fuel speculation of cheating.

So don't count them; a lot of states don't. But even in ones that do they make up an extraordinarily small proportion of the total. In PA in 2020 there were about 10,000 of these, or about 0.19%, and this was the state with by far the largest proportion of them. The ever-changing denominators that have fueled fraud speculation this go around in Arizona and Nevada all involve ballots that arrived on-time.

Colorado is apparently going to have to need to deal with tons of ballot curing, a process that also strikes me as absolutely bizarre, in which documents that are missing information or filled out incorrectly are remedied after the fact.

Again, ballot curing isn't an essential part of the process. Pennsylvania law is silent on the issue so in 2020 we had to deal with a situation where some counties offered it and others didn't. It wasn't an issue that would have affected the vote totals, but if it bothers you that much then just get rid of it.

Mail-in ballots pretty thoroughly demolishes the ability to vote without coercion. This could be exploited in abusive relationships or with people lacking the mental capacity to determine their own vote.

Is this a real issue? I'm sure it happens but the theme of all of my responses is whether these problems are big enough that it's worth making substantial numbers of people wait in long lines over them. If someone could show me that the number of coerced votes was at least somewhat in the ballpark of the number of people who waited over an hour to vote, then I could take some arguments seriously. But no one has done that yet.

Mail-in eliminates the one-to-one relationship between voter and vote that is nearly guaranteed by in-person identification.

Does it? For all the hand-wringing over people casting multiple mail ballots in 2020, all that could be uncovered was a few isolated instances. In Pennsylvania, at least, the number of phony mail ballots in 2020 was IIRC comparable to the number of phony in-person ballots in 2016, though we're talking single-digits here so make what you will of it. And this was in an election where one side was loudly proclaiming fraud and had every incentive and motivation to do the necessary legwork to uncover these fraudulent ballots that were supposed to be so easy to cast, and they came up empty-handed.

That was the plan this year until I had to make an unanticipated trip into Pittsburgh and I didn't get to the polling place until after 6pm by which time there was a line. Not a long line, mind you, but it was still probably 10–15 minutes, and was rather irritating.

I don't find this very responsive. OP was criticizing mail-in voting, not early voting. Why not simply go early vote in person a week or two ahead of time, on a day and time that is convenient for you?

Because Pennsylvania doesn't have early voting. Okay, we sort of have early voting, but it's a cumbersome process that's really just an extension of mail-in voting. I would have had to find time to go to the Board of Elections office in the county seat during business hours (I'm assuming; the BoE website doesn't have any information about the process or even post hours), apply for a mail-in ballot in person, the fill it out there and have a guy check the security envelope before he turns it in. This whole process, had I even figured out how to do it properly, would have been significantly less convenient than simply standing in line. It also ends a week before election day, at which point I was still under the assumption that I would have been free that day. In any event, it wasn't a huge deal for me personally; I was simply making the point that a lot of people don't have any choice but to vote at peak hours, and I understand how that can be inconvenient in some cases.

The recurring theme seems to be that it's a less than optimal way to counterbalance frictions in the voting process that don't exist in countries with more efficient elections. If there was much less on the ballot to vote on, and if polls could be provided with sufficient density on a weekend, the case for universal mail voting would be less likely to stack up.

Related to the point around 'dramatically increasing election funding' per @urquan below, a lot of what reduces the number of polling places on the margin, is the cost of hiring venues for each new location. Moving elections to the weekend makes it vastly easier to cheaply expand polling places, because you can use basically every public school at cost, which are already ideally distributed across the electorate.

Before I moved to a state with universal vote-by-mail, I pretty much only ever voted in Presidential and (maybe) midterm elections. Since moving, I've voted in every single election I get a ballot for. Being able to vote by mail, without having to ask for the privilege, removes a lot of friction from the voting process. You might say it's not that big of a deal to go vote in person, but where I was living, even if I did early voting it was going to mean about an hour standing in line (either because I got there way before the polling location opened to be first in line, or because I didn't do that and had to queue behind everybody else who did).

For those concerned about fraud, it's perhaps worth noting that I was kind of casual about my signature on a recent ballot, and my ballot got challenged because the signature didn't match my driver's license signature, and I had to go re-sign in person.

Thanks for the reply.

You might say it's not that big of a deal to go vote in person, but where I was living, even if I did early voting it was going to mean about an hour standing in line (either because I got there way before the polling location opened to be first in line, or because I didn't do that and had to queue behind everybody else who did).

That is, indeed, exactly what I would tend to say! But yeah, if it's actually going to an hour of standing in line, that's not great. I'm inclined to agree with @urquan below that the appropriate solution isn't to give up on in person voting, but to figure out why it's not working correctly and endeavor to fix it. I would be highly supportive of measures that make it quick, easy, and secure to vote in person. Solutions that include weekend voting and/or voting holidays seem entirely reasonable to me.

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We need more polling places, and more poll workers. "Ending universal mail-in voting, and dramatically increasing the number and staff of polling places in urban precincts" seems like a great compromise that would make everyone happy.

If nothing else, we'd find out whether Republicans really favor in person voting or just want it be difficult to vote and Democrats really just want it to be easy or have other reasons for wanting mail-in.

Like you, I haven't experienced the giant lines in person. In fact, I've now voted in:

  • Rural village with heavily red voting

  • Moderate sized city that's about half black demographically and votes blue

  • High income suburb that votes fairly (but not exclusively) blue

  • Downtown in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the bluest places known to man

In in none of them have I ever had any meaningful wait at all. The extent to which I've never had to wait makes it very hard for me to believe that the problem with in-person sites is fundamentally intractable. Maybe it gets harder in very dense urban areas, but it also seems like the available infrastructure in these areas should be excellent.

Can an American please explain to me how very long voting queues can be an issue in practice? So from what I understand this happens in very Democratic urban polities, where both voters and the politicians are Democrats. Why not make it as easy as possible for your own voters to vote? Is it just incompetence?

The only datapoint I have here is that a lot of the places that supposedly experience this are places with incompetent administration in general.

Surge planning for anything is tricky.

Couple that with limited funds, dependence on volunteers, and procedures which may be set by a hostile state government, and city or county hands may be tied.

Living in a small town, there are probably single buildings in NYC that house more people than my entire precinct. In order to have a polling station you need some common/semi-public area like libraries or whatever, and there are probably fewer of these per Capita in cities than suburbs/rural. That's what makes cities more efficient in the first place--usuay fine except the when Everyone simultaneously needs to do a thing.

This doesn’t convince me. Aren’t elections mainly held in schools there? (That’s what happens in Turkey at least) Surely the ratio of population to school space is roughly equal in almost everywhere

I dont think they are "mainly" held in schools, although I assume some are. Election day is a school day here, so much of the school space would be otherwise occupied. Cities also will have fewer children per capita, and per square foot building cost is higher in cities, so I don't see why school floor space would proportional, as a rule.

People voting is good.* Therefore, if we can lower the burden of voting at a reasonable cost, we should.

I don’t think proponents expected this sort of mess, or plotted to exploit it. Instead, we took an immature technocratic solution and rushed its implementation, since there was a hard deadline involved. The reasoning was something like “we already do this for the strongest cases (military), how hard can it be?”

The one-to-one ratio doesn’t strike me as a big issue. Not compared to loss of surety or consensus. Similar arguments apply to Voter ID and other laws claiming that in-person doesn’t cut it.

We’re also seeing the long tail of the worst-prepared, least organized counties, which I think detracts from the number which managed it fine. It only takes one to ruin it for everyone.

* I realize that some may disagree with this. I was going to write up the case for mass voting, even by the uneducated, but I’ll sum it up as “safety valve for political pressure.”

I was going to write up the case for mass voting, even by the uneducated, but I’ll sum it up as “safety valve for political pressure.”

This makes little sense. First of all, recent events demonstrated that if there's any safety valve, it does not work. Second, most people that resort to violence don't do it because it's hard for them to vote, it's because they think voting is useless. Letting them do useless thing easier, or have more people do the useless thing, is not going to change their opinions. Third, obviously, even if all the previous arguments are false, your premise is good only if we're talking about more individual voters voting being good, not higher numbers in "vote count" column being good. The whole premise of the parent comment is that mail voting allows to disconnect one from the other, which invalidates "voting is good" as an argument for it.

What makes you say it didn't work?

I believe that those pushing for mail voting thought of it as a low-cost way to boost participation, which is viewed as an unalloyed good. This is because participation is an important part of civic pride, helping to preempt unrest or dissatisfaction. Buying into the myth/promise is important.

Given that it had larger-than-expected costs, both literal and in social trust, maybe they were wrong. I remain sympathetic to the premise.

which is viewed as an unalloyed good

This is one wrong premise. Another wrong premise is having more ballots in the box is not necessarily means having more people voluntarily and willingly participating - there's no way to actually verify that part.

This is because participation is an important part of civic pride, helping to preempt unrest

Not helping, as we witnessed having a lot of unrest, including in places like Oregon that has mail voting for a long time.

Also, I don't see how making less effort to participate makes you more proud of it - usually it works the other way.

It’s being done that way because anti-red tribe hysteria is more important than good sense.

There’s plenty of examples of it the other way around, but on the specific issue of ‘how to run an election’, it’s anti-red tribe hysteria that causes insane policies.

I think the US might have to relearn a few hard lessons about why voting was done the way it was. People removed a bunch of Chesterson's Fence type rules around voting because of the pandemic.

I wouldn't be surprised if we get a blown up culture war story in the next year or two about some caregiver illegally mailing in a bunch of ballots for the people they take care of. Or a business owner coerces a bunch of their employees. I'm sure the particulars won't much matter in the end.

Nara Burns is an anime character? I always assumed that your user name was a reference to a historical event involving the burning of Nara, or maybe the annual festival where they burn text into the hillside in Nara.

Exosquad, which was western animation.

Yeah, from the Simpsons.

Anyone have any suggestions for books or the like that helped them navigate their career? Anything pertaining to organizational logic and work related interpersonal skills welcome, also.

I read a bunch of Ask A Manager when I first started getting "real" jobs which was really helpful for calibrating what's normal and how to behave in an office, that kind of thing.

In Balzac's La Comédie humaine, there's a section entitled the Government Clerks (also retitled Bureaucracy today) that described life in a bureacractic environment very well. I found it useful in navigating reform from within large organizations, also it's funny in a similar way to office space).

I know it’s shameful, but I just can’t get over the pronunciation of his name.

The crisis of the third century, featuring Pupienus, would like to have a word with you.

My introduction to him was at a Rodin museum, where there was a piece called collosal bust of Balzac, which I mentally assigned a very different meaning than the creator intended.

It's possible the translators are doing yeomen work, but the little I've read of his work, make it clear someone is a very keen observer of the world.

I actively recommend against it for most people. I think it’s infohazardous. It paints a pretty bleak picture of corporations, and some class of people will be demotivated on actually doing the work they’d need to do to get ahead.

It's a book for low-level and middle managers, the ones that are called the Clueless. "Do your job well, and you will be valued and rewarded" more or less works for ICs, but many people think it works for managers as well. This is a lie. The whole system of annual goals, KPIs and stuff like that exists to weed out crap managers, not to identify and promote good ones. Good managers have their own goals that have a double purpose: some executive at the top needs the result and this increases the manager's visibility overall

What on earth are these animals?

I bought some dog toys from Costco and am trying to figure out what animals these toys are supposed to be.

Here's an image of the pack of 4 animals:

https://richmedia.ca-richimage.com/ImageDelivery/imageService?profileId=12026540&id=1781228&recipeId=728

In case that's not enough, here's a random YouTube unpack video where you can see them in 3D.

  1. The brown top left one, with the ring shape in the middle. Is that a bison?

  2. Top right with the huge ears. Wtf is this? I googled "rodent with huge ears" and then "animal with huge ears", and the closest seems to be a "long-eared jerboa"??

  3. Bottom left. Armadillo?!

  4. Bottom right. That a fox...?

Sorry, I feel like I'm taking a next-gen recaptcha test and failing. I blame the designers who took artistic liberties to pokemonize real life animals. But maybe I'm not human.

Lotta bad answers here. Fucking disgraceful.

  1. Is clearly a Horned Yak that has been shot with a comical 155mm gun; which have that sort orange shaggy fur, straited horns, and large hole through the middle.

  2. Is some sort of disgusting mutated rodent. It doesn't matter what it is, judging by the spots on it's ears it's got the plague. Destroy it immediately and purify your house with burning pitch.

  3. You got it right, that there is a Cusuco. Get rid of the varmint before it breaks all your livestock's legs by digging holes and then gives you leprosy, which they are a reservoir for because Texas and the southwest in general are blighted lands, cursed by god.

  4. A tortured creature, imprisoned in a log by some sort of sadist. Have you dog fulfill his traditional duty and put that fox out of it's misery.

Hilarious. Thanks for the laughs.

Not to deconstruct humor into a dead horse, but is there a name for the trope of your post? Like intentionally misinterpreting artistic representations of real life entities in a way that mocks the artist slash prevailing culture?

Clockwise from upper left:

  1. Moose or distant second elk

  2. Mouse (pulling hard on cartoon mice like Jerry and Micky)

  3. Fox

  4. Hedgehog; possibly an armadillo

Good call on mouse. And I could see moose.

I don't think it's a hedgehog though. The toy has more of a cascading scales in the back, instead of individual spikes.

Sounds more like armadillo then, but I didn't watch the video, this is just based on the photo.

Could it be a pangolin?

I want to write a post comparing Capitalism to a religion, specifically talking about the cult of the founder. Anyone have good reading material on the topic?

Ray Dalio's Principles is a good example of an actual "Bible" of a cult-of-the-founder.

You might want to read The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly. I read it a number of years ago and recall finding it very insightful.

I'd consider myself a pro-capitalist (classically liberal, libertarian, anarcho-capitalist are all labels that apply), but I have no idea about who would be the "founder". I suppose Adam Smith might qualify. His books apparently still hold up, but I haven't read them.

ahh I just realized you were talking about startups. I wouldn't consider that Capitalism, its just small organization formation. Like non-profits can still have cults of the founder.

My favorite line, that I've not heard elsewhere: there's nothing in this world so fascist as a CEO. Startups aren't fascist exactly, but they aren't about the free market, or at least that's not what OP is getting at.

It's always been a question in economics, "if forms are run through central planning and hierarchy, why can't the whole economy be run that way?" There have been a few noble prizes in economics handed out for people that answered parts of the puzzle.

The most efficient form of government would be benevolent dictator (if you could solve the alignment problem).

A startup trying to follow free market economies internally would be quickly outpaced by every other company in the world.

Isn't a startup trying to follow free market economies internally a possible way to discribe companies like Uber, at least for the main worker's relationships.

Interesting counterpoint! It’s tempting to say they’re not employees but that seems like an uninteresting detail. I’m gonna have to ponder on what makes that different.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Flowers for Algernon. Haven't been able to make much progress.

Jon Krakeur's Under the Banner of Heaven, about the Lafferty murders and the larger FLDS sect.

Still on Moby Dick.

I also picked up some Mishima, but I'm not making much progress. I think I'm not well-calibrated for manly authors who write manly books for manly men writing about nothing but emotions and introspection from page one.

Also the Kekulé Problem, which is short, but for some reason I stopped halfway through and haven't gone back for a while.

Which Mishima are you reading? I read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion a few months ago and thought it was great. I couldn't get into it when I tried reading it a few years ago but this time around I found it enjoyable and relatively light but with an interesting perspective. Cool, stylish imagery and a funny takedown of Buddhism that uncannily mirrors a lot of criticism of academia today.

I started with Spring Snow. Bad pick?

I'm not familiar with that one, but scanning the wikipedia article on it it looks a bit more dense than The Temple. I'd recommend The Temple if you want something that's not too hard to get into.

Working through Red Storm Rising, in which the Russians, foolishly embarking on a military campaign over oil, pick a fight with NATO, and, after a brief period of success, fail to achieve their military and political objectives.

It's quite short, if memory serves. I read it in middle school or high school, but never since.

I picked up SPQR from a community sale event, so I'm starting that. No idea if it's any good, and I haven't much background reading in the Roman empire, just hardcore history and YouTube.

Working on reading Death's End, the last book in the three body trilogy. Been enjoying it!

Edit: finished the book. I, uh, am not sure if I enjoyed it in the end. I think that Cixin Liu had a lot of interesting concepts in the trilogy, but wasn't nearly as good at bringing the story to a satisfying conclusion. Also, in the third book in particular he seems to get up his own ass a bit with the high concept sci-fi ideas. I had a very hard time following some parts of the book because the concepts involved were just so abstract. Overall, decent book but I definitely think that the arc of the quality of this series goes down with each book.

I finished Houellebecq's Serotonin over the weekend, it's easily my favorite of his novels now. It has all of his usual topics, atomization, sexual degeneracy, French cuisine, and an utterly defeated protagonist. This time on antidepressants. It's probably one of his most 'normie' protagonists, but one with concerns about missed opportunities and connections that feel more relatable than some of his others. I'm eagerly awaiting his latest novel to be translated.

After reading through some Plutarch, I'm stepping back for a broader overview of Greek civilization and culture with Kitto's The Greeks. I read through Herodotus earlier this year, and am planning Thucydides after this. Kitto's work seems to be tying a lot of the disparate threads together for me already.

I picked up the books I was missing from Malazan yesterday. Probably won't read them for a bit, because I also grabbed another WWII biopic and some neat...geological historical fiction?

Which books?

I particularly like 2, 4, 3, and 7.

The whole series I'm pleased to have read, once through. I know there are other novels, have you read any of them? The other Erikson books and the Esselmont novels.

4 through 8. I'd only read the first 3, and had copies of 9 and 10 that I got from a garage sale. I haven't seen the others.

Deadhouse Gates was my favorite so far. Its split narrative worked really well, and I found the blending of magic and military to be best executed there. When I recommend the series, I suggest starting with it instead of Gardens of the Moon. Really looking forward to reading the rest.

I particularly like 2, 4, 3, and 7.

This sentence made my head hurt, and yet, it feels oddly appropriate for Malazan.

I just finished I, Claudius and I was...disappointed.

I've often found the use of period-accurate names over modern ones to be obnoxious, but I guess I'm used to it, because the use of modern names here really annoyed me.

I found the whole book to be confusingly boring. It was mostly a recounting of things I already knew, with a few thin fictionalizations thrown in, and no real characters to get me invested.

Any chance you've read Lindsey Davis' Marcus Didius Falco novels? Hardboiled detective fiction in the time of Vespasian. They're certainly less serious, but great fun.

I've heard of them! Maybe I'll try that next!

Can't get enough of them, the Grass Crown is probably a contender for my favorite book.

Honestly the portrayal of historical characters there was just mwah

Look to the West is an alternate-history series that eschews the small-scale format of such authors as Eric Flint and Harry Turtledove. Instead, like For Want of a Nail and The Shape of Things to Come, it takes the form of a series of excerpts from history textbooks that were written in the alternate timeline. Therefore, each book is capable of spanning multiple decades and multiple continents, rather than progressing at a snail's pace through just a few months as seen through the eyes of a handful of viewpoint characters.

Books 1 through 5 are available for standalone purchase. The author writes on the AlternateHistory.com forum, where Book 9 is in progress.

I just read the first book and it was great, just up my alley. The only problem is that there are a lot of things that really demonstrate it's a product of serial writing on AH.com, such as chapters being ended with ellipsis...

I think I'll hold on a bit with the others since I have a lot of work for the coming week and just plowing through all the current books will get me sidetracked.

Seeking (non-technical) input on what I should do with my possibly faulty Google Pixel Buds Pro.

I bought the Pixel Buds Pro three weeks ago on sale for $150 (MSRP $200). It's been mostly satisfactory, except about a week ago, without any obvious cause (i.e. software update, drop damage, water damage), when I took them out of the case and into my ear to take a call, the right earbud suddenly developed continuous noisy crackling. I believe the left bud may have been affected to a much smaller extent. Cycling through the active noise cancellation on/off didn't do anything. The problem seemed to be with the buds and not a phone app, as Spotify and podcasts all had the same crackling issue.

I put the buds back into the case, closed it, and took them out. The problem immediately went away. Great. I thought it was worrisome that such new devices had issues, but hoped that it'd be a one-time thing.

Unfortunately, this morning the same thing happened again. When I took them out of the case ahead of a workout, the crackling returned, mostly in the right earbud. I cycled through active noise cancellation, disconnected and reconnected bluetooth on my phone, and even put it back in the case and closed it. Nothing did the trick. Neither did "forgetting" the device--the unconnected buds crackled while untethered to anything. I checked firmware and it was up to date.

It was only when I hard reset the buds in their case (press and hold bluetooth button for 30s etc.) and repaired that the problem went away.

So my question to The Motte is, what would you do now? Google allows free returns for refunds for up to 30 days, so I have less than a week to do so. Google also has a one-year warranty. I'd rather not bother with finding a box to package the buds, print a label, drop it off at Fedex/UPS, reorder a new pair etc. But I fear that not doing anything now out of laziness will mean the problem returns a week from now, or maybe a month, with me eventually stuck with a lemon outside of the return/warranty period.

Google (the search engine) does not return super obvious answers--i.e., this does not appear to be a super common software problem that will be fixed by a firmware update in a week, or a super common hardware problem that requires a return.

I realize this is a trivial question, but we make trivial decisions every day that have substantive consequences, so I'm hoping to improve my decision making. So what would you do personally if you're in my situation?

What I would do myself: I'd go "yeah I knew it, wireless earbuds are a stupid product" and go back to wired forever. I personally think that wired earbuds are just a flat out superior product and many times cheaper to boot.

I don't suspect that's on the table for you, though (else you probably wouldn't have bought them in the first place). So given that you probably want to stay wireless, I would stay the course for now. Maybe return them to Google if you feel you would rather get another brand considering the issues, but otherwise keep them and see what happens. If they do indeed start acting up again, don't try to fix them or troubleshoot, send them in for warranty repair/replacement. You aren't responsible for trying to fix their broken product, that's what a warranty is for.

I'm as far of the opposite opinion as possible, wires are incredibly frustrating for anything but sitting still. Connecton and battery problems every day are preferable to occasionally ripping your ear buds out when the wire gets caught on something.

I can't say I've ever had that problem, though I'm almost never actually moving around while listening to music or whatever on my phone. Earbuds are for sitting in the car or on a plane or what have you, not for going on walks (not that I really do much of that either, lol).

Right, I'm frequently in a gym with many awkward shaped bits of iron everywhere for wires to catch on or on runs or commuting. Wireless is king when moving. And really it's freeing around the house as well, I have over the ears and buds tethered to my basement desktop and nice Bluetooth radio and can go anywhere in my home while still able to listen. Most of my engagement on themotte is text to speech fed through a wireless headset while doing chores.

Yeah, most of those are simply use cases where I don't actually want to listen to my phone. Barring commuting, where I can easily plug my phone into my car. So no real advantage to wireless earbuds in that scenario. Your last point is especially curious to me, because that sounds like a downright hellish way to interact with anything. I think we are simply wired very, very differently as far as our desired use cases go.

Your last point is especially curious to me, because that sounds like a downright hellish way to interact with anything.

It works out better than you'd think, especially since on the new site there is much less garbage that gets copied when you highlight multiple posts. You can more or less highlight a thread, throw it into ttsreader.com and go wash the dishes or vacuum the house while listening to discussions. I mentally flag points I'd like to come back and comment on. My nemesis are naked links.

It's not much different to a podcast.

Wow, this might be the worst take. Wireless earbuds were a shockingly huge improvement for me on headphones as a product. I spend an astonishing amount of time with one earbud in use cases where I couldn't use wired headphones.

I can't really conceive of wireless earbuds being an improvement, but hey if it works for you then great. For me, there's no advantage in them. Being wireless is useless to me because in the (very rare) case I am actually moving around, my phone is on my person. So for my own usage, there's no upside and considerable downsides in the form of needing charging/connection issues/can lose them easily.

Have you tried them? Genuinely having them changed my potential uses.

No. I'm not really in the habit of spending a good amount of money on something I don't have a use case for, after all. ;)

Get cheap ones. These are 25$ and seem closest to the ones I bought five years ago

So many uses I didn't think of that wouldn't be practical with wired buds. Like driving in a convertible or shopping in a store with one in for a podcast/book without losing awareness.

The car thing kind of confuses me, because cars already have sound systems. Who is using earbuds in the car?

As for the store scenario, I don't listen to things (as in have no desire to) while I'm out and about. So that isn't something I would ever do.

Good to know that cheap ones exist though. I at least would be willing to drop $25 to try it. Most likely outcome (imo) is that they sit in my car/drawer/pocket and get no use, but $25 isn't much of a loss.

Who is using earbuds in the car?

Convertible, can't really make out a podcast on the car speakers over the wind on the highway. Which is something I never would have thought of before owning them, which is the thing: you'll find your use case after you own it.

Kind of like carrying a multi-tool. So many of the situations I use it in were things I didn't even notice before I was carrying it.

More comments

What I would do myself: I'd go "yeah I knew it, wireless earbuds are a stupid product" and go back to wired forever.

I use wired headphones with a USB dongle on my Pixel 6. There's a loud white noise effect that plays whenever the volume falls below a certain threshold.

I refuse to buy any phone without a headphone jack. If they ever stop making them entirely, then I guess I will stop buying phones or something? I don't know, really. But the point is that I don't get phones that chose to reject a universal standard that worked great in favor of making people use a dongle.

I hear that. The headphone jack was a great standard. You could bring along a cheap male-male cable and interface with nearly any device with a speaker.

The good news is that Bluetooth in the current year is that universal standard. It's supported by as many, if not more devices. I initially thought charging the headphones would be annoying, but I find I rarely need to do it. The charging case keeps them topped up. Plus, you can still use your wired headphones with a lapel clip BT adapter. It's much better than trying to use the awkward phone port ones that always come loose.

That's the thing, though, it's not universal like the headphone jack was (or even close really). My car doesn't even have an aux input jack, let alone bluetooth! I have to use a tape deck adapter (which, naturally, uses a headphone jack). Granted, my car is 21 years old, but there are a ton of legacy devices hanging around which don't support bluetooth. Maybe in 20 years bluetooth will be as universal as headphone jacks are today. But for the moment, it is really unfortunate that short-sighted manufacturers have opted to get rid of one of the very few connections you can reasonably expect damn near everything to have.

Are you sticking to wired with the help of USB/lightning phone adapters? Your days may be numbered, since they'll probably be getting rid of all physical ports soon!

I refuse to buy any phone without a headphone jack.

That sounds (ha!) like hardware, not software. A loose connection or degraded capacitor.

Were I in your position, I'd probably do the same thing and overthink it.

I suggest sending it for the warranty. It's not going to get better via an update or anything.

Update: I called warranty and they are issuing a replacement. Ironically, the moment I used the buds for the call, the crackling returned.

Interestingly, when I asked the Google rep if this was a known issue, he actually said yes. He even said it was supposed to be fixed via firmware, but given mine was the latest, they'd have to swap it. I will say that the rep was a little diffident in his delivery of his answer--like I think there is a 20% chance he was making it up and/or just being agreeable when I asked if this was a known issue.

The hope is it wouldn't get worse, but the fool-me-once-fool-me-twice rule probably applies :)


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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