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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3564 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 18, 2023

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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I want to get Tinder data before Tinder stops working in Russia, but i cant get working https://account.gotinder.com/data returns 404. Does it even work?

With Wagner in the news I’m wondering why they named themselves after a German composer? I can’t find anything on this on their Wikipedia page explaining it and it doesn’t make any sense to me. Why would a Russian merc outfit name themselves after a composer who is sort of a symbol of German nationalism.

“Wagner” was apparently the call sign of Dmitry Utkin, the founder of the group, while in the Russian special forces:

Utkin, who reportedly has a passion for the history of the Third Reich, had the call-sign Wagner, allegedly in honour of Richard Wagner.

Resistance…to what? Reddit?

I have no idea what you’re talking about, so I guess that makes me surprised, too.

Oh. I guess that is pretty Reddit.

The only idea I’ve seen floated for malicious compliance has been “reopen but it’s porn.” Thus removing ad revenue.

When listening to someone speak, do you tend to look at eyes or at the mouth?

People who maintain permanent eye contact always come off as very creepy autists who watched a YouTube video about how to talk to people. I think the norm is that you want some eye contact to come across as more trustworthy and less shifty, but then also look away, look past them, focus on the mouth or head, generally don't appear to be staring at your interlocutor.

People who get eye contact wrong come off as autistic, because it's a classic symptom of autism. But they can get it wrong by having too much or too little.

The correct amount of eye contact varies by culture. New Yorkers make remarkably little, and Irish tend to make quite a lot. I was showing a crew of New York Jews around Dublin last year for a wedding, and the eye contact differential was striking

Mouth, instinctively. When I realise I'm looking at their mouth I make a conscious effort to look in their eyes.

Forgive me if somebody else has already posted about this. What’s going on with that submarine that tried to tour the titanic wreckage?

Is it a stupid idea in the first place? Is there any chance they’ll be rescued?

I’ve been fascinated by the fact that even the richest among us are only surviving because Mother Earth decided not to crush them today. Seems like these people just had their luck run out, and maybe made a really stupid decision?

I’ve been fascinated by the fact that even the richest among us are only surviving because Mother Earth decided not to crush them today. Seems like these people just had their luck run out, and maybe made a really stupid decision?

Honestly having hung out with a bunch of HNW individuals in Startup & Trading spheres, having low impulse control and the urge to go all-in on hare-brained schemes is one of the chief paths to being outlier rich... though obviously leads to a bunch of collapses along the wayside that nobody particularly cares for.

The more I read about it, the more idiotic it seems.

First, using the Titanic site as a tourist destination seems a little tacky. It's a gravesite, after all. But hey, Modern Times, make money out of dead men's bones, why not?

Then the details of "billionaire paid to go on trip" and the cost, and the details that they used a repurposed game controller to drive the thing.

Now, maybe that's actually feasible, but somehow it doesn't give me a good impression of the entire operation.

I hope the people are rescued, I don't want any deaths, but I also hope this stops this kind of ghoulish monetisation.

a repurposed game controller

This was an excellent decision. Using the two millionth product of some mass-manufactured part, under shirtsleeve conditions like those where the part has already been heavily used, is almost always going to be more reliable than using the first or second product of some custom design.

it doesn't give me a good impression of the entire operation.

The stories from David Lochridge and David Pogue, on the other hand, suggest many other much, much less excellent decisions. Normalization-of-deviance is a slippery slope.

I’ve never understood that logic of game controllers in such high stakes situations. A device like a wired in console made specific to controlling a ship seems the better option as they’d be more likely to have failsafes built it than something designed for a game where failure is more an annoyance than a life threatening situation.

If the controllers are 99.9% reliable, just bring a couple of backups. The chance of losing all three of them is 1 in 1,000,000,000. That's one of the benefits of standardization and mass production.

I dunno, were I in a tin can going to crush depth, I think I'd prefer if they steered the death trap with something a bit more advanced than "Oh crap, the wifi's dropped out, gimme a sec" (not even a tin can, they were using carbon fibre or something?)

Aside from all that, the stepson of the British billionaire (queried) is reaching Hunter Biden levels of "dude, what the hell?" He has no right to be surprised when the will is read and he is cut off with a shilling, since he can't even bring himself to pretend to care about what is going on. Instead of being at home with his mother, sister and half-brothers in some kind of show of family unity, he's heading off to concerts and messaging Only Fans and the like.

It's /r/Drama but honestly, this is indeed tabloid territory and the best place for it. How stupid is this guy? Has he no self-awareness? "Oh, (Step)Dad is probably dying horribly right this minute, I guess Mom and my brothers will be really upset about that - well, time for me to head out and have fun! All in the name of self-care!"

I think I'd prefer if they steered the death trap with something a bit more advanced than "Oh crap, the wifi's dropped out, gimme a sec" (not even a tin can, they were using carbon fibre or something?)

You're still thinking about it backwards. Wifi and carbon fibre are "advanced", when my life is on the line I'd much rather have something primitive.

my life is on the line I'd much rather have something primitive.

Agreed. Good old fashioned steering wheel bolted on. But the problem is that this company seemed to want to push the envelope with advanced tech (that also let them do things on the cheaper end) and that does not seem to have worked out. I have no idea how they're financed, but I'm getting the impression that they needed to hire out their submersibles to rich guys wanting a thrill-seeking jaunt as well as filming for movies/research etc. in order to get money in order to do the research on their new materials etc. They couldn't wait, they couldn't do testing, it was "we'll find out as we go".

And now, God help them, they have found out.

not even a tin can, they were using carbon fibre or something?

Titanium end-caps, carbon-fibre cylinder. Carbon fibre can be much stronger than steel, much less tin, and they'd successfully made several dives that deep already ... but composites are harder to engineer with than metals, and the short history of composites for these ultra-deep dives is worrying. Compare:

"The design of the Cyclops 2 hull, says Spencer, is based in large part on the strategy applied to Fossett’s DeepFlight Challenger" (Spencer Composites was OceanGate's original choice for the hull manufacture, though they say it wasn't their hull in this dive, I can't seem to find what later manufacturer was chosen)

to:

"Based on testing at high pressure, the DeepFlight Challenger was determined to be suitable only for a single dive, not the repeated uses that had been planned ..."

And in 2020 the Titan "had to be completely rebuilt after tests showed signs of ‘cyclic fatigue’" ... just from testing? They've had successful trips since, but not nearly enough that I'd be confident they've figured out fatigue.

I've probably watched too many episodes of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" where getting to crush depth is something you don't want to happen, and that high-tech super-sub was not made out of carbon fibre composites.

God rest the dead, but this all does seem like an avoidable tragedy.

"Crush depth" is pretty much defined as "the depth where it's something you don't want to happen". "Design depth", still well below "operating depth", is where you planned for crush depth to be, and most of the time it's not quite as deep, because surely you built your design with tolerances all on the safe side rather than the quick+cheap side ... but based on everything reported up to and including the debris discovery, that doesn't seem to have been the case this time. RIP. At least they went instantly.

Yeah, my jaw dropped when I went to the website and it was cheerily "our prototype predecessor model went to 500m. This time we're heading for 4,000m."

I mean that is some scaling-up without intermediate steps in between! But God rest them all, they paid the price. Including the CEO, so it's whoever is left behind in the firm is going to be carrying the can for this one.

As I recall James Cameron's (steel) sub was designed to shrink a few inches when it got to the bottom of the Mariana Trench -- granted this is something like three times deeper than the Titanic wreckage, but it sounds like a really bad environment for carbon fibre fatigue.

The only thing inaccurate about the scene in Down Periscope where the guy stretches a string across the engine room, and it sags as they dive? He states that you wouldn't see it on a nuclear sub, which is wrong. I'm pretty sure every submarine is designed to compress under water pressure, and combat subs don't dive nearly as deep as exploratory subs.

Yeah -- CF is bad in compression generally and (in my non-materials engineer opinion) probably especially bad when it's evenly compressed around the whole surface. (and then decompressed whenever it surfaces, of course)

I could imagine ways to overcome this (laying up the fibre under pressure?) but it seems very process dependent -- "Trust in Steel" OTOH is time-honoured.

Is there even any downside to using a giant steel ball for a submarine pressure hull? You're not paying to shoot it into space, you literally just want it to sink. I know the Soviets used titanium, but they did a lot of crazy stuff.

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As long as you have backups and appropriate procedures for them, the use of commercial game controllers is not by itself a problem. There are several good reasons that serious (indoors) military hardware is starting to do this and even better reasons for any organization smaller than that to, vs trying to develop their own hardware which can be much more stupid and dangerous. It's similar to the reason why billionaires, princes and presidents all use the exact same iPhone you can buy at the drug store.

Potential problems around it are:

  1. Bluetooth. Insane.

  2. Passing it around in that insanely cramped space, both because it could be dropped (especially with those huge stick extensions), and in apparently giving control over to passengers (depends on particulars of their culture around this, but no clues are public that it was very good)

  3. No alternate backup control system. Uncertain that this is the case but looks likely. The problem here would not be not having something "more advanced", but rather not having something that's much simpler.

  4. ... okay maybe there could conceivably be some issues about its functioning in weird atmospheric conditions, it really depends on the specifics which I don't know, maybe it's just perfectly normal surface temperature/pressure/humidity/composition and fine. But the problem wouldn't be that they used the controller, it would be whether and how they tested it.

Perhaps the most telling indication about any of this is the story of how they didn't discover some thrusters were installed in the wrong orientation until they were already down at the Titanic. With a culture like that, it’s possible that their fatal error was something more mundane than anyone is imagining.

(but it was probably just the hull)

First, using the Titanic site as a tourist destination seems a little tacky. It's a gravesite, after all. But hey, Modern Times, make money out of dead men's bones, why not?

Thus has it ever been.

MUMMY, n. An ancient Egyptian, formerly in universal use among modern civilized nations as medicine, and now engaged in supplying art with an excellent pigment. He is handy, too, in museums in gratifying the vulgar curiosity that serves to distinguish man from the lower animals.

By means of the Mummy, mankind, it is said,

Attests to the gods its respect for the dead.

We plunder his tomb, be he sinner or saint,

Distil him for physic and grind him for paint,

Exhibit for money his poor, shrunken frame,

And with levity flock to the scene of the shame.

O, tell me, ye gods, for the use of my rhyme:

For respecting the dead what's the limit of time?

—Scopas Brune

Unless there's government regulation, the deaths will if anything make the whole trip more popular in the future. Risky sports are cool because they are risky, they allow men who never face any required risk to show their mettle. Repeat deaths on Everest have not slowed climbing on the mountain.

Well there is a difference between "risky" and "this is certain death, please sign the waiver form that your family won't sue our asses off when you kick the bucket".

It's a horrible kind of karma that the CEO of the expedition company was on the submersible as well. I'm hoping they're okay but the realistic view is that they're dead by now.

How was it certain death? Hadn't they done quite a few prior dives with the same equipment that didn't result in catastrophe?

In retrospect we can all giggle, but it wasn't certain to fail in advance.

How many is "quite a few"? Vox says this is only their third tourist trip to the Titanic. Other sources say they did "more than 50 test dives" years ago, but of course there's a huge difference between "went underwater" and "went under 3700m of water", and I can't find out how many times they did the latter. They had to rebuild the hull already due to fatigue from testing, and I guess the bright side of that is it's proof they're pushing their tests to some significant depth...

A reddit user claims to have been involved in the project in an earlier stage, has been commenting frequently with novel information about it: https://old.reddit.com/user/cowpunk52

edit: another: https://old.reddit.com/user/vangro

I thought they might be ok, until the Washington Post explained that "Humans can’t survive without oxygen at the Titanic’s depth"

That made the situation sound much worse.

I have this question too because the press has this morbid countdown timer "until the air runs out", but the fact that the sub vanished from communications 2 hours into the dive surely suggests that the hull imploded and they've been dead since Sunday, right?

If it was merely the communications equipment that failed, the sub would have surfaced just fine. If it was sinking or had suffered some non-fatal flaw but still had communications equipment, they'd have sent a mayday or relayed some issues. Apparently they had many backup systems that should have surfaced the sub even in the event of an oxygen issue or all the crew being incapacitated.

The reasonable conclusion is that the sub imploded and they're all dead. Hope I'm wrong and they're rescued, but if they're not I hope I'm right, since spending four days in a tin can awaiting likely certain death sounds pretty awful.

the sub vanished from communications 2 hours into the dive

The only way the sub could have any communications while in actual dive would be with a long cable (at which point the almost exact location would have been known all the time). Radio doesn't penetrate deep in water without extreme measures (antennas tens of kilometers long with megawatts of transmission power - obviously limited to ground to sub transmissions only).

They have a sonic modem -- a crappy one apparently, but they are not completely retarded.

Cameron was able to communicate with his mission control from the bottom of the Mariana Trench @ six miles or whatever -- this particular problem is well solved.

Why did they send the mayday after supposedly losing contact with the sub 2 hours into an 8 hour dive, then?

Aren't submarine implosions loud enough to be picked up by hydrophones all the way across the ocean? Before the invention of waterproof distress beacons the navy experimented with giving pilots tin cans designed to sink and implode at SOFAR depth, which could be heard and triangulated by shore stations.

Maybe sound from a trench doesn't transmit as far, or maybe the US government isn't hurrying to inform a tourism company.

Apparently the Navy did pick it up, and probably informed the seach team despite it being protected tech, but you have to search anyway in case it was something else.

I don't think the Titanic is in a trench. Though I'd also kinda dimly thought it was, probably just Mandela-Effect-style confusion with the Mariana Trench. From either half-remembered childhood Deep Ocean Facts, or their more recent James Cameron connection.

Thanks for the correction. Ocean depths are unfathomable to me, so I struggle to keep them straight.

Nope. Flat oceanic plain.

It sounds like their communications failing was a semi-regular occurance (YIL that they've been doing this since last year, and took David Pogue down there at some point) -- to the point where they may not have aborted the mission 'just' for that.

The problem with surfacing later is that if their comms have failed, it's possible that they are bobbing somewhere in the North Atlantic and nobody can find them -- compounded by the fact that the sub is bolted closed from the outside, so they can't even open the hatch and set off a flare or whatnot.

It's faint hope; they are probably crushed -- but the fact that they've been going down there semi-routinely makes me think this is less likely than when I thought it was a maiden voyage or something.

The fact that they don't have backup comms or a way of signalling for rescue from the surface makes me think that they are even dumber than I'd thought yesterday though -- which raises the chance that some other dumb thing bit them in the ass.

Totally agree that it seems something catastrophic happened and there’s very little chance they’ll be rescued or even found. They’re probably already dead.

May I get the Voice of the People on this:

Am I in fact a Thundering Bitch?

I'm currently having a kerfuffle with an absolute infant elsewhere (claims to be a rough, tough, absolutist monarchist; gets their knickers in a twist when faced with some very mild 'this is what absolutism in practice would look like') and really the bad effect of German philosophers on the growing mind, I blame Thomas Carlyle for being a gateway drug, Protect Our Kids Now!

But aside from that, I'm enjoying myself way too much teasing them and they are currently frothing at the mouth. I should stop it. I will stop it. So long as they don't yap some more little ankle-biting miniature dog yaps at me.

But am I a bitch? Be frank, be honest, be as Absolutist Monarchist as you wish!

We all contain multitudes. I'm sure you have some Thundering Bitch tendencies, we all do.

In my mind, internet forums are a proper forum for letting out one's inner Thundering Bitch. Personally, I love to troll opposing sports team fans in season, but Absolutists are equally fair game.

So the question is, are you really having fun? Is this good for you? Is it bleeding over into other aspects of your life where Thundering Bitch is a less appropriate affect? Are you hurting people close to you? If the answers are Yes, Yes, No, No; then you're fine, go at it.

If it's the sort of place where people are making fun of each other all the time, then no.

If it's your nephew on Facebook or something, then yes.

Anyway, how did it end up? Did they give up and go to eat or something?

They sort of stopped with a final insult and I left it at that.

It amused me more than anything, and that's the danger signal for me. If I get really mad, I'm liable to steam in with both fists swinging and pick up a warning pretty quickly.

But when it's 'twelve year old in the schoolyard' level insults, that makes me find it funny to poke at them. Like a cat playing with a mouse. Not very nice on my part. I should just depart with my head held high trailing clouds of dignity as I mount my high horse to head for the moral high ground, but ... "will this silly person keep calling me names and for how long?" is too too tempting.

I'm not sure what kind of response you are looking for here, or what is your sincere intent in posting this question. Do you want people to say "Yes, you're a Thundering Bitch" so you can get properly fired up and respond in kind? Or "There, there, no, of course you're not"? Are you doing genuine introspection here, or are you just curious what your public image is, or were you bored and felt like seeing what kind of responses you'd get?

I do not think you're a "Thundering Bitch." But I think you know perfectly well why people (elsewhere, without rules forbidding such personal attacks) might call you that. You like being belligerent and you like a good brawl, and once you're pissed off you think you're in a street fight and all rules go out the window. We've had this conversation many times. I would find your antagonism less aggravating if you were less thin-skinned about it.

Are you doing genuine introspection here

I'm trying to. I do want feedback on the impression I leave. I don't want "oh no you are funny and we love you" and I don't want "yeah fuck off cunt". But I do want to work on my flaws where I can. I know that only reporting half of a conversation doesn't give much to really go on, but yeah: am I being a bitch, or just having fun?

Well, yes. For a certain definition.

When you really get rolling, you have a certain self-righteousness. I assume it’s part and parcel with how much fun you’re having. A reasonable person might describe that as bitchy.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, unless you think it falls under “wrath.”

I would never describe you this way based on your posts here, but the fact you felt the need to come here and ask would indicate you're feeling a bit guilty.

Not guilty as such, but am trying to rein it in because the other guy is a one-track mind type. E.g. does not realise that "abuse" is a term that also encompasses "abusive language" such as calling someone "you absolute filth" and so he's very busy yelling "you accused me of abuse then pretended you said 'abusive language' you liar!"

I mean, in this circumstance it is very damn tempting to hit him over the head with several dictionaries and tell him to go learn how to read in order to understand fluid and literate speech, but that would be going too far.

Didn't read what you are speaking off, but getting too serious/personal on pseudonomous forums is clownish behavior.

Has anyone looked deeper in this research - [1] [2]

Looks like a gold standard RCT showing significant and lasting positive effects of VMT (swabbing the child with the mother's vaginal fluid if baby is delivered via c-section).

Noob question: Can someone explain to me why arguing for something you don't believe in can sometimes get you modded or at least warned? I've witnessed it a few times and don't understand what the personal beliefs of the author have to do with the quality of an argument.

Example:

https://www.themotte.org/post/530/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/108271?context=8#context

It's worth mentioning that it's fine to present arguments against what you think if you're transparent that that's what you're doing (correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain), so that shouldn't really hurt your ability to make any argument.

If person A is arguing thing B I disagree with because A believes B, I may want to write a thoughtful reply convincing A of !B.

If person A is arguing thing B I disagree with for some other reason, I definitively don't want to write such a reply, because A already believes !B and doesn't need convincing.

If P(person A believes B|person A argues B without noting devil's advocacy) drops significantly below 1, it therefore becomes a much-less-good deal for me to make those kinds of replies - which are at the core of the kind of discourse theMotte attempts to nurture. I risk wasting my time and feeling stupid.

To troll is to drag a baited hook through the water, punishing those who bite down. If you want to encourage people to bite down on food, therefore, it's best to forbid baited hooks. Signposted devil's advocacy is fine, though, because the hook's not baited.

You have to realize on the internet, when you arrive in a space your first original idea has probably been done a hundred times before and become annoying.

If I go on a Sixers fan forum and suggest trading Tobias Harris, the regulars will jump in with a million jokes about my ability to sustain an erection or mocking me for thinking they'll trade him straight up for Ja Morant. Trading Harris is super obvious and most sixers fans kinda want to see it, but it's been gone over a hundred million times already anywhere fans congregate.

Patterns emerge of bad content, even if it seems fine to a newbie eye, which will get noticed by mods.

First, the guy’s arguments were terrible, intentionally so. He never stuck arounnd to win any debate, and he had some weak opponents.

Second, why is lying bad, is that your question? It’s a very lossy, costly form of communication. Imagine if a sizeable minority of the people here were just aping their opponents to make them look bad or to troll, and this was accepted practice.

The other commenters would have to spend energy figuring it out, and then either : respond in kind with even stupider arguments, which will attract actual idiots, thinking they are in good company. Or call out the dishonesty, which is against the rules – you can’t have both the expectation to be believed and the normalization of lying.

But okay, say you favour the latter and consequently the mods should get rid of the charity rule. Every statement woud have to be double-checked and evaluated against all of a user’s other comments to maintain the coherence of his presented worldview. The coherence of even honest opponents’ worldviews would be called into question. Every debate, not just those presented by a few suspect users, would devolve into the question ‘is he lying?’.

So ironically, if we take the statements of likely liars at face value, all statements would no longer be worthy of being taken at face value.

Lying leads to suspicion, and the more suspicion, the harder it becomes to discuss the object level issues, “something-lurker” .

To me, devil's advocacy, false flagging and lying are not synonymous. I often use it in my personal life if I'm genuinely undecided on an issue or want to make sure my understanding of my "enemy" does not amount to a strawman.

That said, from the other replies I gather trolls can use it to waste time. I don't understand the mechanisms completely but I'll just trust the more experienced posters for now. I also didn't know that it's fine to argue for anything as long as my real worldview is stated for context, which resolves any issue I have with this rule.

All of our rules, but especially the requirement to speak plainly, are meant to encourage good faith engagement where you can reasonably assume that the person you are talking to is being honest and straightforward with you and not playing games, trolling, collecting examples of "bad responses" for future use, or trying to spring a gotcha on you. We are extremely permissive about allowing almost any argument, but we are very strict about how you present those arguments.

If you want to play devil's advocate, or steelman a position you don't necessarily endorse, you need to be up front about it.

Additionally, mods often see things you do not, which also informs our decisions about whether we believe someone is a bad actor.

This weekend, I became obsessed with the question of whether Scientology chief David Miscavige (who grew up in Scientology and took over upon Hubbard’s death in 1987) actually believes in the mythos. If I have time, I’ll write a moderate effort-post, but I’m curious since I know there are other scientology nerds here (it is one of the oldest ‘very online’ hobbyist topics, after all), what do you think?

I wouldn't say I'm a nerd about it, but I read through operation clambake and a lot of the other online resources years ago. The "church" as it currently exists is fairly depressing, but I find the accounts of Hubbard's early life much more interesting. His apparent ability to either con his way past peoples' defenses or else select those without defenses is remarkable, and that paired with Tex's thesis of the Christmas Effect, combined with problems like the Replication Crisis, is something it seems to me more people should be paying attention to.

Any explanation of the Christmas Effect that's faster than 1.5 hours?

Some people can lie on a scale that beggars all belief, with very serious and very obvious consequences, and get away with it in ways that seem completely inexplicable.

Dr. Christmas wanted to be a titan of aviation. He designed a plane that he claimed would be vastly superior to anything else flying. He had no actual idea how to properly design a plane, but he talked his way into control of considerable financial and material resources sufficient to build his plane, and then send it up with a human pilot for a test flight. It immediately crashed and killed the pilot, in the process destroying a scarce airplane engine loaned to him by the government explicitly and exclusively for ground tests. All this happened very publicly, under the auspices of a major airplane manufacturer, and he simply lied about it to the press, who believed him unquestioningly. He continued lying until he'd amassed enough resources to build another plane, which likewise immediately crashed and killed its pilot. This again happened very publicly, but he again simply lied a lot, often to the press, and escaped all consequences. He learned nothing, and continued pushing shitty airplane ideas for the rest of his life, while being lauded as a sort of hipster pioneer of exciting aeronautics ideas in the press and the public. He testified to congress about how his planes were the best planes in the world, and all the other planes the US was buying were garbage by comparison.

He never suffered significant consequences, and the truth never caught up with him.

The Christmas Effect, as I understand it, is the way in which our protective social systems don't actually work all that well, allowing dedicated liars to do absolutely absurd things as long as they lie the right way. People here are doubtless familiar with Mitnick and Abagnale, but those guys were small time. With a resume consisting primarily of swindling old widows, L. Ron. Hubbard talked his way into no-shit command of a literal US Navy warship, in wartime, via one flight where he ended up sitting next to a senior federal politician. That's a bit beyond scamming checks or plane tickets.

I've read a few books about Scientology, including Beyond Belief, by David Miscavage's niece. She doesn't seem to have been close to her uncle, but she grew up in the church and says that nowadays, most die-hard Scientologists are those who, like her, grew up as children of Scientologists and have had little exposure to the world outside the Scientology bubble.

The degree to which high-ranking believers really believe in everything the church teaches is certainly an interesting question. Tom Cruise, when he reached level "Operating Thetan" or whatever and was told the secret Scientology history of the universe, including all the stuff about thetans and Galactic Overlord Xenu, reportedly said "What is this sci-fi bullshit?" And yet he stayed.

Scientology's biggest problem, and the reason recruitment has plummeted since their peak in the 90s, is the Internet. With ex-Scientologists putting all the Xenu nonsense online for everyone to see, it's pretty hard to get a full buy-in from newbies who won't go Google it and say "What is this sci-fi bullshit?"

Personal anecdote: I visited a Scientology center once, out of curiosity, and took their personality test. They were very nice and polite, and of course tried to get me to sign up for some of "Mr. Hubbard's" courses. I asked the Scientology lady about Xenu. She politely deflected in a way that made it obvious they were used to people off the street asking them about the crazy shit. I figured my skepticism must have been apparent because they didn't try a hard sell, but I got a letter three years later asking if I would like to come down for another "assessment."

Miscavige strikes me as someone with full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. And narcissists don't think like non-narcissists. They really don't care about objective truth. Words are merely a means to an end. They're tools or weapons, like teeth and claws. Used to manipulate their environment in order to get what they want: narcissistic supply. They'll tell a useful lie and then instantaneously believe it. It's more convincing if it's believed.

"Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia."

There's no inner core. They're predators running on subconscious protocols/impulses.

Think of narcissists as solipsistic alien hiveminds. You are merely an extension of them. A conduit of their psyche. The leg does what the brain says. That's why when Jim Jones decides it's time for him to commit suicide, it's everyone's time to commit suicide. Cult leaders and family annihilators have the same thought patterns.

I'm rambling, but I would say he doesn't think like you or me in the same way that spiders don't think like you or me. His beliefs are useful delusions. He doesn't believe in the mythos in the same way that I believe the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

EDIT: Whatever is useful in the moment, he believes. They're amorphous.

I sometimes wonder if the Pope actually believes in the mythos. Not at the level of "yes, God exists and wants us to be good, but everything else about the doctrine is waves hands", but at the level of creed: "of course God is triunite, of course Jesus was true man and true God in one person, of course the Holy Ghost proceeds from both the Father and the Son, of course it's the blood and body of Jesus that we use for the Eucharist" etc.

I'd expect many have. In recent history, I know Ratzinger, at least, wrote a lot on theology.

Yeah.

I don't really know enough about Catholicism to say, but I assume that that advancement of clergy to higher positions doesn't directly select for who seemingly believes the hardest in the doctrine. I mean, those who genuinely lose faith are probably going to self-select out, but someone who doesn't really have a deeply-held belief in the truth of the Bible could still be a loyal cleric simply because they see the church and its' teaching as an overall net good in the world that should be maintained. Or because they personally gain from it.

And that element of belief also seems like the easiest part to fake?

I mean, assume that you commit to the cloth out of a true belief in the divinity of Jesus, the supremacy of the Pope et al., but after many years you simply do not observe the evidence that would support the churches' teaching about God (I do not make a comment on whether he exists or not, here), and see the churches' failures up close. Do you continue to present yourself as a believer on the basis of simple inertia, do you double down on your faith, or do you decide to simply 'game the system' and see how far you can get?

The whole thing about martyrs is that they demonstrated their ultimate belief by maintaining it in the face of the most serious oppression and sanctions which tends to make it quite obvious that they were acting on a true belief that held serious meaning to them. We don't see many martyrs for Christianity these days.

So returning to the topic, I also would guess that Scientology does NOT select for 'true believers' in terms of who gets leadership positions, and the whole thing seems even more prone to abuse than most other mainstream religions, so I would absolutely bet in favor of Miscavige being a fairly convincing charlatan, if you were to stick him in a high-resolution brain scanning device and probe the nature of his actual vs. stated beliefs.

you commit to the cloth out of a true belief in the divinity of the Pope et al

If you did that I'd be exceedingly concerned because we don't believe the Pope is divine 😁 Might I suggest you go next door where they're offering free personality tests and clearing sessions?

Think I mixed that up with Papal infallibility.

The whole thing about martyrs is that they demonstrated their ultimate belief by maintaining it in the face of the most serious oppression and sanctions which tends to make it quite obvious that they were acting on a true belief that held serious meaning to them. We don't see many martyrs for Christianity these days.

We don't see them in the West much because it's rare for people to kill Christians qua Christians these days. Not that it never happens, but it's rare. In other places, such as several Muslim majority countries or anti-religious authoritarian countries like China and North Korea martyrs are still quite common.

Yeah.

I don't really know enough about Catholicism to say, but I assume that that advancement of clergy to higher positions doesn't directly select for who seemingly believes the hardest in the doctrine. I mean, those who genuinely lose faith are probably going to self-select out, but someone who doesn't really have a deeply-held belief in the truth of the Bible could still be a loyal cleric simply because they see the church and its' teaching as an overall net good in the world that should be maintained. Or because they personally gain from it.

And that element of belief also seems like the easiest part to fake?

I mean, assume that you commit to the cloth out of a true belief in the divinity of the Pope et al., but after many years you simply do not observe the evidence that would support the churches' teaching about God (I do not make a comment on whether he exists or not, here), and see the churches' failures up close. Do you continue to present yourself as a believer on the basis of simple inertia, do you double down on your faith, or do you decide to simply 'game the system' and see how far you can get?

I know this is a tangent, but the selection of senior clergy in the Catholic Church is interesting because it doesn’t work quite the way you expect. Future bishops are selected before the end of seminary(by grades and connections) and early assignments(right out of seminary; priests marked out as potential bishops spend decades building their resumes, largely with experiences that they themselves don’t pick) determine a lot of the career progression. Becoming a bishop is also a major, further commitment that lots of priests decide they don’t want to make after doing their several decades of necessary experience and further degrees.

There certainly are ambitious career climbers in the upper clergy(and the current pope wasn’t one of these as an archbishop), but these guys knew by the age of, say, 25 that they had a good chance of hitting very senior positions and they’re in their sixties now- and at each step of the process they knew what the next step would be. And the evidence suggests that while less than 100% of them believe in 100% of catholic doctrine, the ones who lose their faith entirely usually leave the clergy- with the archbishop of Paris being the most recent example here. Remember that highly intelligent(nearly all RCC bishops have graduate degrees) senior citizens are a carefully selected population.

Interesting. It sounds like the Vatican is looking for a set of factors which contribute to the long-term success of the church.

Considering the history of the Catholic Church, making sure the well connected yes men are actually competent is understandably a priority.

Moreover, the other big fact of Catholic Church internal politics is really, really long terms of service. It just makes sense to filter in potential candidates for authority positions ahead of time when you have decades long terms of service whose ends can be predicted to within a few years(all senior clergymen submit their resignations at 75 but Vatican bureaucrats processing them act with typical Italian inefficiency).

Is there a poll surveying opinions on the ADL, particularly from Jews? Googling "ADL opinion poll" just found me polls done by the organization, not about the organization.

If any poll was ever going to suffer from social desirability bias, it's this one.

I can't find anything about Jewish attitudes specifically but here's something at least. +13% net favorability among the US general population (as of September 2022), broken down to 27% favorable / very favorable, 14% unfavorable / very unfavorable, 27% neutral and 32% unaware.

There are crosstabs by race, gender, political party etc, but nothing specifically for jews

You'd think that the opinion of Jewish people would matter more than the opinion of any other group. Thanks for posting, though.

I’d guess the only organization that does that kind of polling is the ADL when looking at fundraising strategy, and they probably keep the numbers to themselves.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/389834/statement-from-so-june-5-2023-moderator-action

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/390106/moderation-strike-update-data-dumps-choosing-representatives-gpt-data-and-wh

There's some sort of mod strike happening on stackexchange too. Does anyone know the details beyond the histrionic statements?

“AI detection tools” really don’t work. There is no tool that can consistently detect GPT-4 generated text. The text that looks ‘obvious’ does so because it defaults to the lowest common denominator of professional writing, overuses adjectives etc, like a high school essay. This isn’t actually ‘obviously AI’ per se, it’s just that few people write in a high school essay style online.

But even one or two descriptive terms (‘in the style of a Vanity Fair article’, ‘concise; few adjectives’) in the prompt is usually enough to mitigate this entirely. The only possibility is that OpenAI and the other major providers hide markers that ‘AI detection’ tools can read. Even then, people would just run the output through text rewording tools or use other LLMs.

The smart approach is to ban low quality and low effort content, whether AI or human generated.

The smart approach is to ban low quality and low effort content, whether AI or human generated.

Speaking for StackOverflow specifically: when it comes to technical questions, there's no easy heuristic that a non-expert can use to distinguish between a low effort post and a good post.

Posts that look good on the surface can still be bad. You can supply a 50 line block of code that compiles and seems to work, but it can have subtle problems that won't present themselves until later on. Or you can write a post that would be perfectly good in another context, but it's the wrong approach to this particular problem because of X Y Z non-obvious reasons. And of course LLM-generated answers can have these sorts of problems.

The site is based on a relationship of trust: if the post looks good, and it's upvoted, and the user has a high amount of karma, then the post was probably written by a human expert who is aware of the sorts of pitfalls I mentioned and knows how to avoid them. If you just have a blanket policy of "yep, AI is 100% allowed, go nuts", then it starts to erode that relationship of trust. More non-experts come to the site who start posting AI-generated answers without understanding them, they accrue karma, it gets harder to distinguish the signal from the noise.

In the limit case, human experts get disincentivized from posting because, well why go through the effort of spending 30 minutes writing a detailed answer when the AI posters will post 5 different (equally long and detailed, but perhaps subtly incorrect) answers in that time and the OP will probably just accept one of those answers anyway. That's the fear.

Whether a total AI ban is actually enforceable is another question. But this is the reason why people would want a full AI ban, instead of just a "low effort post" ban.

More non-experts come to the site who start posting AI-generated answers without understanding them, they accrue karma, it gets harder to distinguish the signal from the noise.

How is this different than the classic StackExchange / Quora regular who knows nothing about the topic but spends 20 minutes on Wikipedia and then writes out an answer as an expert?

If it takes 1 minute with AI instead of 20 minutes manually, that seems significant enough to affect volume.

Obviously we don’t want people to do that either.

Exactly, they're both bad and both deserve to get the banhammer, the only difference is in volume/prolificacy.

I think it's as simple as: SE is positioned as a high-quality Q and A site above all else. In particular high-volume users and mods are particularly prideful about this and really, really hate low-effort stuff (plus, again, pride). SE rightfully banned chatGPT and AI content both in answering questions as well as (AFAIK) posing questions, both in generation as well as clarification. This lead to the site more or less continuing as before as well as a lot of bans and mod action to preserve this, coordinated with the site/network as a whole. They then did an about-face, threw the gates open to AI content, and have forbidden mods for banning people (or even doing more regular moderation) for AI content-related stuff. The manner in which this was done feels to some like shoving it down their throat.

So the mods and hyper-active users are unhappy. It should be mentioned that although SE feels like a Wikipedia-type site, and operates similarly in some ways, it's NOT. It's owned by a for-profit ed-tech company.

I think a blanket ban on AI content is stupid.

As long as it's clearly disclosed, all that matters is whether or not the answer is correct, which can be independently verified and better quality answers encouraged through voting.

I've found GPT-4 to be more than competent in medicine, and to the limited extent of my ability to judge, the same in coding and maths when I use it for autodidactic purposes.

The mods are choosing the wrong hill to die on.

As long as it's clearly disclosed, all that matters is whether or not the answer is correct, which can be independently verified and better quality answers encouraged through voting.

The problem with AI-generated text is that we can no longer use eloquence and details as a proxy for correctness. If I write a thousand words to answer a SE question, I probably know what I'm doing. If I write ten words, I can either be correct or not, but it's easier to verify. Now anyone can write a thousand-word reply to a question that will sound very authoritative, but might be as wrong as any of the short ones.

Fair enough, but at the end of the day I still think that GPT-4 is more competent than the median user, and that excluding it outright is a mistake. I think clear disclaimers more than suffice, and worst comes to worse we'll just be asking other AI assistants to spot-check them for us sooner rather than later.

The catch is that top stackoverflow posts probably aren’t the median user.

Wow, I wasn't aware of any of this. Despite being a developer, I don't really engage much with SE. If I find an answer to something there on a Google search, I'll usually prefer it over random blogs, but I don't have much interest in writing questions or answers there.

It seems to me that SE is designed to maximize karma given for fast answers to simple newbie questions, so that's where the great majority of the energy of it goes to. IME, it's very rare to get a real answer to an actual hard question. If I manage to find an unanswered hard question that I know the answer to, I'm willing to post mine, but I don't see much point in asking questions there.

A while ago I queried the Motte about ways to find average SAT by high school. I got good ideas here, but it devolved into a laborious state-by-state search. I'm asking now, specifically about California. Is there a way to find average SAT scores for just Californian high schools? I've found averages from 2016, but it seems like the data was made private afterwards? Thoughts?

ACT data, but not SAT data, by high school for CA is available here: http://www.ed-data.org/ But it is definitely laborious; it looks like you have to go school by school.

Thank you @Gdanning! This is an amazing tip.

What are you guys doing on Juneteenth? I have a random day off. Trying to decide if I want to go for a drive to some random town an hour away. I have no idea if there's anything there - probably there isn't. But it would be neat to find out.

Working. Because I don’t have the day off.

But your idea sounds like as good a use of time as any. Personally, if I had the day off, I’d go play a round of golf.

Could be a fun idea. Report back if you do it.

I did in fact do this today - I visited Ripley, Ohio; Aberdeen, Ohio, and Maysville, Kentucky, three small towns on the Ohio River. Just picked a spot on the map where I could say, "I've never been there."

It was great. Really relaxing - it always feels nice to get some time alone in the car on an open highway, to think about things. Weather was pretty good - a little bit of gentle rain that kept me from taking quite as many pictures as I would have liked, but this also kept it cool. I had a surprisingly wonderful pork tenderloin sandwich in Maysville.

Here are a few pictures I took today if you'd like to see.

https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjAJnhZ

Hey, that’s pretty neat.

My grandmother used to live on Lake Barkley, out in western KY. Wrong side of the state, but similar in some ways. Gorgeous hills and greenery that I really miss.

I live in Ohio now, but I think at the time of the SSC/Motte split, I lived in Bowling Green, KY. I'm not sure if those were the best years of my life but they were pretty good ones. Western Kentucky is a wonderful place.

Wow, nice pictures. Although it definitely gives me a sort of collapsing rust belt town vibe. Glad you had fun.

So, what are you reading?

Still on Coornhert's Synod on the Freedom of Conscience. So far "Gamaliel" has been winning the fictional debate with genuinely inspired words. Though it turns out that he's just Coornhert's stand-in. These words have reminded me of the value of reasonable expectations:

Thanks be the Lord who has allowed us to get this far in our debate.

Armor by C.B. Titus. It's fine, only really worth the time as I wait for much better stories to update.

Friend encouraged me to pick up Days of Rage but the library didn't have that so I got Public Enemies by Burrough instead to see what I thought of the writing style. I'm nearly done, and have really enjoyed seeing how easy it was to rob a bank in the 1920s/30s. The bank robbers all had better guns/cars/armor than the cops and the FBI was completely inept. I'm also amazed at the level of fingerprinting and other forensics that existed even back then, matching bullets and pulling prints from gas cans on the side of the road. I remember watching the Michael Mann movie of the same name but don't recall anything from it other than the cool digital photography and I think I remember the shootout at Little Bohemia (another incredible FBI bungle).

Finished The Darkness That Comes Before. Great first entry, especially considering it's mostly setup for the main event of the trilogy. I did correctly predict that Skeaos is in the Consult.

I always think of that series when I see people refer to non-men.

John Hopkins University was slammed by critics including “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling for switching up its definition of “lesbian” to instead refer to the group as “non-man attracted to non-men” in order to include non-binary people.

I wonder if this means that lesbians have magic powers, and only feel emotions when they betray their friends.

Well, they’ve got the difficulty in reproducing part down.

Heh. Yeah, I didn’t want to say anything.

R.L. Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For some time I've been thinking of writing an effort-post on Stevenson's nonfiction, specifically his essays, as they're very good. I'm a fan of Pulvis et Umbra, though Crabbed Age and Youth for a while was my favorite.

Reverend Insanity, a very popular and widely recommended Xianxia novel with a villain protagonist.

I was very vexed at how slow the first 30 chapters were, but even as a noob to Cultivation novels, I know that's considered a lightning fast start. But what annoyed me was the fact that everyone had hyped up the protagonist as being fucking evil, and the worst thing he did for those 30 chapters was beat up his classmates for their lunch money.

Of course, I stuck with it, and the part where he boiled a kid alive as a handy magical ingredient certainly dispelled my doubts!

Alright, so RI is pretty much Grimdark Pokémon. You've got "Gu Masters", going around with the equivalent of a pokeball inside their body that they keep trying to make bigger and stronger. They try and catch Pokémon and use them to kill their opponents, with the low level stuff being akin to the shitty grass and poison types you find in the early level tall grass, and then progressing till you've got God (Arceus) in a tiny chinesium ball.

I mean, they mind rape the Pokémon into compliance instead of training them the old fashioned way, but let's split the difference. Everything else revolves around leveling and evolving them, and fighting other trainers for resources, with an added side of just outright killing them when convenient.

The protagonist is a reincarnator, who had lived for 500 years and struggled to a relatively high position in society until his newfound OP pokémon prompted jealous rivals to gang up and whoop his ass (he may or may not have murdered millions of people).

However, the Pokémon they were after was Time Travel-mon, so he went !YOLO and traveled back to his childhood, and did everything over again with the benefit of foreknowledge. Further atrocities ensue.

Anyway, the book is well written and the translation isn't even all that janky, but the main draw is the tight and intelligent writing, you can really tell that the author thought through the ramifications of his worldbuilding, and knew how to write intelligent and relatable characters yet intentionally made his MC a flaming asshole.

He's a likeable asshole though, highly competent, and monomaniacally driven to achieve true immortality no matter the cost. Cooking children isn't the least of the shit he gets up to, but he doesn't have an easy time.

I'd recommend it, the Cultivation system is certainly a nonstandard one, but nobody reads these things for that do they?

Grit through the first 50 chapters, or ask me for a TLDR, and then it gets really good. If you're worried, his ability to time travel isn't used as a crutch, it's an unreliable ability, and the protagonist is competent enough to get by.

How do people find time and motivation to read novels hundreds of chapters long? A Dance with Dragons had 73 chapters and was already a doorstopper that felt more like a chore by the end.

My biggest gripe with most good novels is that they end far too soon. The one big draw of web serials, including the one I'm writing, is that you are far less constrained by word count and can wring the whole affair dry for all it's got. Million plus words? Fuck yeah

In fact, I'd turn it around on its head and ask why anyone would want a really good work of fiction to end at all, unless it had to. If you're becoming bored or it's a slog, that's a sign of a poor book more than anything else.

including the one I'm writing

Hey that's really cool! Out of curiosity, as someone who'd like to write one myself--

  • Do you enjoy writing? Do you like your own writing? I'm hopeful that my current distaste for writing is because I recognize my own lack of skill in it, which will hopefully improve with practice.

  • If not, how do you motivate yourself to write?

Agreed that the longer the book the better, so long as it's good.

I enjoy writing, but it's much more difficult for me to write cohesively, following the standard conventions of plot and narrative.

The way I get inspired is usually some cool idea or vignette, that I then want to incorporate into the story at large, instead of sitting and storyboarding or outlining and then following along.

Taken to it's natural conclusion, that would be a world building document, and very few people want to read those, so I've had to force myself to package them into a more reader friendly form and end up with a novel haha.

As for my own writing, I'm mostly proud of it, especially in the sheer breadth of the worldbuilding. Most authors, even in sci-fi, tend to only think of one or two novel concepts or themes, or perhaps extrapolate 2 or 3 speculative technologies while leaving the rest untouched.

Have advanced cybernetics? For some reason gene therapy isn't explored.

How much of that is intentional and how much is a failure of imagination, I can't say, but my favorite authors go for breadth as well as depth.

However, even if I enjoy that aspect, and am glad that multiple readers have noticed and appreciated the effort and plausibility of the setting, I've discovered several flaws in my own writing that are difficult or unpleasant for me to deal with. I don't like writing dialogue, or environmental description much. Sometimes I struggle to make characters other than the protagonist and make them feel fleshed out.

I haven't had anyone complain about the above yet, so I don't know how much is me being overly critical and what I do need to improve.

But what I'm proudest of is actually getting the damn thing ready for public consumption, for maybe a decade I've had interesting concepts, vignettes or abortive excerpts languishing in my head or a random Google docs file. It took courage to finally say fuck it, we're going live with this one.

And I'm at 78k words, so nobody can say I didn't stick with it either, though the initial enthusiasm has worn off.

You know the primary motivation for me choosing now of all times to publish? It's because of GPT-4. While still not as good a writer as me, I can see the cards on the table, if I don't prove to the world that I actually am a good writer, it'll be entirely moot sooner than later.

I've tried using it in my own work occasionally out of laziness or curiosity, and am usually disappointed. I still can do way better in fiction, and context windows makes it difficult for it to follow along well in such a large work. Ideally I'd get it to polish up some of the aspects I don't like doing, like descriptions etc.

But I was also care about feedback and recognition, and so far my writing has met all the modest goals I've set for it:

  1. Well reviewed? Check.

  2. Had people outright offer to pay for a Patreon to support me? Check.

  3. Get independently recommended to people on /r/rational? Check.

It would take a great deal of effort from me to improve further and become as good as my favorite authors, but I think that I can compete at least when it comes to sheer inventiveness and richness if nothing else.

And since I've spent so long talking about it, here's a link to the actual story:.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65211/ex-nihilo-nihil-supernum-original-hard-scifi-with

Now I'm not you, so I can't say how much practise or effort you need to be feel happy about it, but I'd suggest getting one or two chapters out even if you're not 100% on them, just for the feedback. If it's surprisingly positive, that's good motivation to continue and if it's not, you've got concrete issues to work with. It's not hard to do, and if it flops just quietly drop it and pretend it never happened haha

Well, that's not the only draw. Another is that they're free and fairly portable, as they're anywhere you have an internet connection. But yes, I'd imagine people wouldn't like them if they didn't like long books.

I'm currently reading A Practical Guide to Evil.

I like the length in that it's a lot of fun things to read, but also sometimes regret the "where did my life go" from bingeing.

A good 3 minute song wouldn't necessarily be better stretched to 10 minutes, and the same goes for stories.

time

Reading is one of many leisure activities that compete for your time. If, at any given moment, an activity other than reading offers to you a greater expectation of enjoyment, then obviously you should perform that activity rather than reading. But, in those moments where no option is better than reading, you should read.

motivation

If reading a particular book feels like a chore, then that book obviously isn't a good fit for you. You need to find a book where you look forward to seeing what will happen next.

I have to say that complaining that Fang Yuan wasn't evil enough is new, never heard that before! He absolutely is evil, as you say, yet it's really more of a sigma male kind of complete shamelessness rather than edge. Ally with your enemies for situational reasons? Of course! Undermine and betray them? Yes! Kill enormous numbers of people? Absolutely! Do another backflip and claim to be the paragon of righteousness and benevolence? Yes!

I also like how it messes with the tropes of the xianxia/shonen. Later on, we're introduced to the power of love (which causes our ruthless MC some problems). The power of love is very great, but it's not enough to win decisively. There's an element of tragedy to its use. The power of friendship is not a get out of jail free card, it has its limits and can be overpowered.

The story also tries very hard to navigate between the need to have a main character be exceptional and advance quickly without unfair advantages, while retaining agency and a world full of intelligent, selfish actors. There's an inherent contradiction there. Why aren't the first-rate elites, nurtured by the richest sects, capable of beating some orphan from a hick town? Are they all holding the idiot ball? Later on, you can sense that the author's been wracked with pains over the plausibility of the whole thing, trying to make it more reasonable.

I was only complaining during the first 30 chapters or so, and only half-heartedly. I've been in this rodeo long enough to know most Cultivation novels only really start 50+ chapters in!

The story also tries very hard to navigate between the need to have a main character be exceptional and advance quickly without unfair advantages, while retaining agency and a world full of intelligent, selfish actors. There's an inherent contradiction there. Why aren't the first-rate elites, nurtured by the richest sexts, capable of beating some orphan from a hick town? Are they all holding the idiot ball? Later on, you can sense that the author's been wracked with pains over the plausibility of the whole thing, trying to make it more reasonable.

I found Fang Yuan to be quite believable, he was significantly less sociopathic for most of his previous life, it was only after ages of suffering and suppression that he really ended up an amoral motherfucker. In the very beginning of his new life, he had a massive headstart in terms of knowledge, experience, and where to find hidden loot crates with rare Poke drops. At the point I am now, he's certainly fighting fiercer opponents, and I think that as the story progressed, the difficulty and intelligence of his enemies rose too. He has to work for it, and few things he does seem like complete ass-pulls, at least to the extent those aren't mandatory in Xianxia.

I'd also expect having access to 500 years of technological advances to be a big help, as it is in the story, though obviously not as much as in a more grounded and realistic setting.

Yeah, he does make good use of his time-travel advantage, even later on when it depletes a lot.

I personally think the author does a great job of making it seem plausible, yet a few people were unhappy about the balance between character agency and plausibility. Of those who aren't filtered by the bear scene, that's the only thing I've ever heard complaints about.

I'm one chapter away from finishing Alexander Wales' Worth the Candle, and have been for a couple weeks. I wish I could say that I enjoyed it, but the last half of it was a slog to get through as a reader, and kinda seemed like a slog for the writer too. It had some really neat pieces scattered throughout, but mainly just made me want to write an effortpost psychoanalyzing rat fiction and what it says about the mindset.

Yeah the last third to half of it was a big step down in quality. First half was super fun though.

I greatly enjoyed WTC, and my primary gripe is that there wasn't more of it (200+ chapters didn't suffice).

I'm curious as to what flaws you found in it, and I'll be waiting for your post if you do.

Found a copy of McCullough's John Adams at the local used bookstore yesterday, excited to read it. My knowledge of Adams is exclusively from the show that I think was loosely based on it.

Read it a while ago. Recommend. I've been working my way through presidential biographies, and McCullough is one of the better ones.

Main takeaway was that Adams was a good man but a mediocre president, but he should have gotten more than a few off-handed disses in Hamilton.

Let me know how it is if you start it. There's a copy of it on my bookshelf that I've never cracked open.

Finished The Big Short today. Remarkable how much it all resembled a game of musical chairs - no one wanted to be the one left holding the bag at the end. Also a great example of "people won't understand something if their job depends on not understanding it." I didn't see much in there to make me think that something similar couldn't easily happen again.

That’s a great book and really kicked off an interest in financial non-fiction for me. If you’re looking for more stories, Liars Poker by Michael Lewis is good. I also really liked Billion Dollar Whale and The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management. And if you haven’t seen Enron:The Smartest Guys in the Room, might be my favorite financial documentary.

What I find interesting about the financial crisis, is it seems that the federal government learned their lesson from the extreme backlash in non bailing out the general public. The banks were all bailed out in 2009, but millions of people lost their houses and jobs and were not given much additional money. When COVID shut down the world economy, the federal government was much more generous in cash handouts, unemployment, and loans. The federal government didn’t want another Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movement on their hands, so they actually sent money straight to peoples pockets.

But they sent way more money to businesses and the donor class. The theme of COVID money was: we're going to let the little guys steal a little (stim checks, unemployment, small PPP loans) so they won't notice the big guys stealing a lot (big PPP loans, asset bubbles, ARP money to municipal governments pissed away on corrupt contracts, corrupt contracts). By making the public complicit in looting the Treasury they protected themselves from criticism.

Is this actually true? Seems like at least 40% of all COVID payments went to individuals, and a much higher percentage to small businesses, healthcare, and state funds.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/11/us/how-covid-stimulus-money-was-spent.html

"Small businesses" included 9-figure net worth private companies receiving multi million dollar PPP loans, which were not just forgiven in almost every case, the resulting income wasn't treated as taxable.

So where the $1200 check individuals got was taxed back for anyone with above median income, reducing the actual cost, the loans to businesses paying employee's wages weren't taxed even if the business made a profit that year.

State and municipal governments mostly pissed the money away on boondoggles, many of them likely either related to bribing key constituents (public sector union stuff) or blatantly corrupt (hiring the Manager's brother to upgrade the town hall). I saw very little ARP money spent on things that made sense as COVID relief.

Right, but in the chart above from the NYT, individuals received approximately 40% of COVID relief. Even if the money was wasted by municipal governments, even if the business loans weren’t taxed, even if corporations were bailed out, at the end of the day, the little guy did get a large piece of the pie.

Finally got around to reading Battleground, the latest Dresden Files entry. It's not high-falutin' literature but it is a damn fine adventure yarn. More wizards with reckless disregard for property damage, please.

I checked out of Dresden Files after...Skin Game, I think. Couldn't get through the next book, and not even sure why. Is Battleground a big turnaround?

Without knowing what you didn't like about Skin Game, couldn't tell you.

Fuego.

The building was on fire and it wasn't my fault.

I've been rereading the Cradle series now that the last book in the series, Waybound, has been released. I didn't time my reread quite right because I was distracted by some other books so I'll be a few weeks behind everyone else once I actually finish Waybound, but they're still good books

End Times by Peter Turchin. I'm about 30% of the way through, and so far it's just laying out the culture war of the past 50 years or so, with some theorizing and drawing parallels to other times and places. It has less statistics and graphs than his previous books, apparently. Not bad, but nothing much that's new yet, either.

I agree with @DaseindustriesLtd that UFOs are a (possibly semi-unintentional) psy-op. It’s not hugely malicious but it broadly serves the US government for both Americans and geopolitical competitors to believe that there are all kinds of unexplained possibly alien craft floating around the place, and for American institutions to be able to manufacture associated public interest. I actually question whether there even is somebody who ‘knows’ it’s all fake; I don’t think it’s like that. Instead, think of a compounding mythos, built on a combination of intelligence strategy, defense’s desire (both in private sector and the military itself) for more funding, and the impact of science fiction (especially on the male nerds who occupy most senior positions in UFO-related fields, in NASA, in defense etc) in general.

One problem with long-running psyops (a topic far less studied and funded than astrobiology, which should inform our priors about dragons lurking in each domain) that I hypothesize is pervasive is they come equipped with mechanisms for manufacturing plausible deniability of the deliberate effort/plausibility of the core hypothesis; and signaling cascades for maintaining epistemic culture that produces the conclusion of enduring plausibility; and social contagion patterns that replace conspirators with useful idiots predisposed to trust that kind of psyop; and become a robust alternative truth. At that stage, it's all but impossible for a critical number of people invested in the psyop to snap out of it and say «this is all some bullshit» upon realizing how little object-level plausibility remains in the system.

After that, the mature psyop's decay is probably governed by equations for very slow dissipative or evaporative processes. It can fade away like a fad if it had never reached certain scale of membership and recruiting and insulating infrastructure to keep up peer pressure; or last near-indefinitely, like a religion. But it will never be deboonked. Not even the High Mega-Pope of the True Church, adorned with every esoteric and exoteric and secular regalia, will be able to come out and convince the faithful they've been led on; they will simply conclude he's been replaced by a skin-suited lizard.

Or alternatively, as Michael Vassar (was surprised to learn he's still around) puts it: «Once you know that taboos prevent the dominant narrative from converging on truth, logical inferences from the dominant narrative to very surprising conclusions should be seen as being of limited relevance». This is his hobby horse (understandable as the «mainstream consensus» with its taboos is so hugely consequential), but in realistically diverse societies it applies to recessive narratives just as well.

I’m 95% on UFOs not being real.

We have thousands of telescopes and radio telescopes trained on deep space, including the JWST and Hubble. We’ve never found anything that’s unambiguously life, and certainly no evidence of technology, no ships, no stations, no artificial signals, no Dyson spheres, nothing of the sort. As such there’s no reason to think that there’s anything out there with the capacity to come here.

Most experts on the topic say that FTL travel isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. And without it, interstellar travel isn’t feasible. The speed and distance are simply too great for beings with lifespans like ours to do much more than conquer their solar system.

Most experts on the topic say that FTL travel isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. And without it, interstellar travel isn’t feasible. The speed and distance are simply too great for beings with lifespans like ours to do much more than conquer their solar system.

Why would we assume that alien beings have lifespans like ours? Anti-aging technology, digital minds, or some form of hibernation do not seem to violate any known laws of physics, and even merely increasing human lifespans by a factor of five or so would make voyages between nearby stars at appreciable but not unattainable fractions of c the equivalent of 18th century transatlantic ship crossings. Automated probes could travel across the galaxy within a hundred thousand years, setting up infrastructure for colonization.

The fact that we don't see any evidence for such a civilization seems to indicate to me that either we've already passed the Great Filter, that living in some sort of VR or simulation is considered preferable by everyone to taking over the physical universe, or that we're missing some key piece of the puzzle (e.g. the technologies I listed above are actually impossible for some reason, or some version of the Katechon hypothesis perhaps, where civilizations that become too complex are deleted).

We know that FTL contradicts our contemporary understanding of physics. So let's assume that another species were knowledgeable enough that they could use FTL craft to surveil distant star systems. Would this species really be dull enough to let the inhabitants of those systems see their craft, let alone the things piloting them? This species would not only need to have an entirely different grasp of physics than we do, but they would also need to have an efficient organizational structure that would enable them to manufacture FTL craft en masse - because if they're good enough to send us a single covert craft, then I'd argue it's more than likely that they have several stationed in other systems and that we aren't necessarily unique. For reference, we're nowhere near FTL but we've compulsively sent several probes to every planet in our own star system; and surely, wouldn't this hypothetical species have evolved gradually to arrive at their current state? To an extent, I really think that them being here in the first place implies they're a lot more like us than we realize.

But this is special pleading. Or at least until some new discovery makes these things possible. If you want to argue that FTL travel is being done by aliens, then first it must be established that the laws of physics allows this to happen. And so far every proposed system runs into violations of known physics. If we later discover something that works, fine, but until then waving your hand and saying they’re more advanced is simply a more scientific sounding way of saying “Magic”. And the same is true of the idea of cloaking. There’s no physics that would do this. And furthermore, it still doesn’t explain the lack of artificial structures in general. Even if it were plausible to hide a ship, then where are the space stations, planets with artificial structures, artificial signals, or even signs of life on other planets. And this is the rub of why I think aliens are a poor explanation of anything. Everything in the argument is being used to explain away the lack of evidence, or explain away why physics doesn’t restrain them. And this is a red flag on the theory. Any theory that has to explain away a lack of evidence or excuse violations of known scientific theory is more than likely crap. Aliens are the least likely by far, of any plausible explanation for what people are seeing and what the “whistleblower” is telling people.

Yes, no physics according to our current level understanding. If you were to travel back in time to the Paleolithic Period and show a cave person a smartphone they'd believe the very same thing. And I'd bet you'd get the same reaction if you traveled back in time to around the Industrial Revolution and showed an engineer your smartphone - they'd say that there's no physics that would make this work, and they'd probably think you're a magician. Sure, this is essentially handwaving, but it'd be myopic to say FTL will never be possible just because that's what we think based on everything we currently know in the year 2023. And whether you realize it or not, you saying that another advanced civilization couldn't possibly exist because you can't see artificial structures/ signals we presume a sufficiently capable species is bound to make based on our current understanding is also handwaving.

I think there’s a difference here in that the argument that a being a million years ahead of us can do Y because it’s more advanced is a pretty poor argument, again, unless we, using current science and mathematics have some reason to suspect that Y is at least a possibility. In suggesting that physics says Y is impossible and therefore unless given a solid reason for doubting Y being impossible is wrong. And unfortunately E=mc^2 is a pretty well established tested and tried law of physics.

What about Generation Ships?

Which run splat into the telescopes problem— we haven’t seen any anywhere. They’re certainly more feasible than the usual FTL because muh billions of years means that I can ignore known physics.

Seems to me that it may just be unlikely for us to spot any. Theoretically you only need to send one once to colonize a distant place, and they can presumably coast most of the way. Not exactly the stuff that highly visible traffic lanes are made of.

Technically UFO stands for Unidentified Flying Object, so anything that's airborne and you don't know what it is right now is one. So in that sense they're real.

I don't think any of them are actually any kind of craft built by non-human creatures. I think they're all either normal animals doing normal things, or human-built aircraft, possibly weird and experimental ones and/or viewed in strange circumstances. At least, the ones that aren't hallucinated or completely made up for whatever reason.

Here is a video I found with a detailed explanation confirming what I had figured to be the case for the recent Navy videos - it's raw video being shot in infrared through a sophisticated aircraft tracking camera system. Once you fully take into account the characteristics of infrared cameras (lens flare from very hot things like jet exhaust which is invisible in visual spectrum) and how the tracking system automatically maneuvers the camera to track a moving aircraft while mounted on an aircraft itself, and unwind those things, the targeted object acts an awful lot like a perfectly normal aircraft doing perfectly normal things.

My best guess is that UFOs are a combination of U.S. military or alphabet agency craft doing secret experimental flights, made up stories seeded by military and alphabet agencies to camoflage discredit the real ones, paranoid people with mental health issues making stuff up, and clickbait media agencies hopping on the bandwagon and having no journalism standards so that they can earn money from signal boosting said stories.

Maybe there are some foreign spy craft mixed in there too, but it's probably mostly domestic or imaginary.

I don't feel like these responses are "equal". I think a questionnaire with the goal or producing interesting data has to have each point be at least somewhat compelling, even if it isn't always going to be even. 1 and 2 sound so similar and are vague, while 4 is pretty radical.

For example I would say these would be better responses below (plus I would clean up the question phrasing so that the "pros and cons" are more explicit, or move some of the implications to the answer portion). Also, as an aside, the cost of the actual farm land itself is completely irrelevant from a macro perspective, as systemically the costs are aggregated -- unless the individual welfare of farmers themselves is intended to be part of the question? I feel like that's adding too many dimensions to the question however. Ideally, I think you only want to involve two primary "axes" at a time, otherwise it creates too many complications for your data modeling. There's a reason most political tests only try to isolate one at a time. Three is a lot and four is crazy. Right now, as far as I can tell from BOTH the question AND the answers, is you are trying to gauge if the responder thinks food insecurity is a national security issue (1), if they care or agree that developing farmland causes ecological damage (2), if they like or accept globalism as an ideal trade system (3), if they support forcible wealth or resource distribution (4), and how much they value the economic well-being of farmers (5).

Could be wrong about the above, but it seems to me that if you want qualitative analysis you may as well just make it a total free response, or maybe throw in a few "suggestions" as prompts. From a data perspective though, assuming you want to use all questions to generate a holistic assessment, I just don't agree with your current approach.

How I would phrase:

A small but densely populated island country doesn't produce enough food to feed its population. Food production continues declining as both farmland is developed for urban and industrial use. The country has many allies and participates in global trade and so has unfettered access to food imports. Still, government advisers have identified food insecurity as a key vulnerability for the country in the case of a conflict or severe economic shock.

  1. Do nothing because the country’s aggregate wealth and income is maximized by specializing in other products and importing food is cost-effective.

  2. Raise tariffs, use subsidies, or other measures to incentivize farmers to grow more food and protect farmland, even if it raises the price of food, land, or taxes, because it is a national security vulnerability and to be more self-sufficient.

And leave it at that. Narrow it down to an assessment of issues (1) and (3) of the five listed above from your original question. Aren't these realistically the only true options? Basically original options 1 and 3, because 2 brings ecological conservation and farmer's welfare into the mix for no reason, forces them to be coupled, and is the only place it's mentioned, while 4 doesn't even make sense. Farmland is by definition already used macro-wise to farm, and changing who exactly owns the farmland (it's implied that all farmers are exploited share-croppers in the question, but not stated) isn't going to magically change aggregate food production? And an important final detail: Is the population of the island increasing, increasing rapidly, or flat? (Plus, one wonders how big the deficit is -- implied is that all the solutions would be effective)

I might be missing your point about philosophical vs practical views entirely, but I've always thought that a lot of the compass quizzes I've taken are at least partially true to life?

I'm not so sure that a multiple-choice framework can really work for something like this, there's such a huge variety of possible positions.

I'd start by doubting that food insecurity is a meaningful vulnerability in the modern era. It seems highly unlikely that anyone could maintain a shipping blockade against a first-world island nation for long enough for food supply to actually be an issue with a reasonable stockpile in place. Even if you had perfect food security, wouldn't shortages of something else start to hurt almost as much soon enough anyways?

If you had to, though, I'd say you should rejigger the property / tax laws in order to make it reasonably profitable to produce and sell local food at a price competitive to imports with modest tariffs.

I am thinking Option 1: even the threat of food insecurity through conflict allows other parties to have a stronger negotiating position. The rural poverty and ecological sustainability is a bonus.

[5] Tax the extremely wasteful top 10% of urbanites that exist in every country, who spend their money on lavish vacations and hedonic treadmilling, and instantiate a subsidy for healthy food stuffs so that that every family can buy cheap healthy food.

If it’s a small island nation, it probably does not need to protect the environment like a nation like Brazil. If it’s prosperous, it doesn’t need to grow its own food. The national security vulnerability can be dealt with by simply stockpiling non-perishables.

Option 3 for the most part. If they deem food security is a national security problem, then the department of defense should more directly buy out and employ some farms to produce food as government owned entities.

Option 3. Maximizing aggregate wealth and income puts you in the best position to afford food when you will need it the most.

There is also the aspect that (3) actually incentivizes you to not get into positions where 1,2,4 would have been a better choice (maintain peace/diplomacy and trade with other nations).

I mean, I don't think it's possible to create a test of political ideology that accurately predicts real-world behavior because those things are nearly orthogonal. In the same way knowing that a 12th century Templar knight and Mother Teresa were both Christians does not provide any practical guide to their actions, what a given liberal, conservative, or libertarian does in any situation is at best very loosely informed by their liberal/conservative/libertarian-ness. To the extent that those labels have meaning it is by providing the lens through which each individual interprets their own unique personal preferences. The number of people who have actually shopped around for an ideology whose principles they align with most strongly is so vanishingly small as to be meaningless, even though we are overrepresented by orders of magnitude in a forum like this one.

In other words, what you're looking for is a personality test and not a revised political compass test. For the record, my answer to your question is that it's entirely context-dependent but if you insist then I would have to go with option 1. I outlined my ideology here.

Option: 3

Ideology: Libright

Option 3 sounds a little strawmanny to me. A better version might be: "Repeal laws against 'gouging' the price of food in emergencies, because private speculators in food are better at preventing food insecurity than the government is."

More information needed. If the threats are significant and development is high (Taiwan, for example) I’d choose 1, whereas a safer, poorer country like Sri Lanka is probably better off with 3.

Ideology: anti-globohomo, I guess. Different places and peoples require different things from their governments.

Re #1, although tariffs on imported food will increase prices, subsidies will reduce prices. So I think you need to adjust your hypothetical.

What’s the proper etiquette for Juneteenth? I work with a black guy. Am I supposed to say “Happy Juneteenth!!!” going into the weekend?

Is it a happy holiday or a solome one?

Is there a political valence to wishing someone happy Juneteenth? We all avoid politics we’re possible.

I think lots of people have this question because I hear a hell of a lot of “enjoy the three day weekend” this week.

Is there a political valence to wishing someone happy Juneteenth?

Wishing someone happy Juneteenth would be the equivalent of putting up one of those "In this house we believe" signs. It means exactly what you think it means. Just like Pride is meant to replace the Fourth of July, Juneteenth is intended to replace Father's Day.

Maybe I'm really out of touch, but would one route be to not bring up Juneteenth at all?

Assuming your social skills are decent, and your relationship with the Black guy doesn't make this inappropriate, and he isn't too touchy about it, it might be a good idea to ask him what the etiquette is. Not only will you get your answer, but he will also likely appreciate that you cared to ask.

solome

Solemn?

It’s a gulf coast black holiday, it’s not somber.

There is unfortunately a political valence(I mean, it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to celebrate to me). I don’t think it’s inherently political though.

It commemorates the end of slavery, so I am pretty sure it is a happy holiday. Every Juneteenth event I have ever been to has been pretty festive.

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