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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   3317 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 17, 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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Can someone summarize right-wing contempt for Israel for me? Is it something like

  • Jews, believing they were oppressed minorities, were woke or woke adjacent
  • Israel famously refuses Palestinian settlement in their country but urges others to take refugees including Arab refugees, some of whom end up being terrorists
  • Israel gets attacked by Arab terrorists
  • Jews discover that the woke consider them oppressor colonialists
  • Israel apologists make “might = right” and “actually, multiculturalism bad” arguments
  • conservatives now point and Nelson laugh “ha! ha!” at the irony and hypocrisy?

Do I have this right?

If you are woke or woke-sympathizer, is there some pieces for propaganda of wokes that makes you feel cringe? I am a Red Tribe sympathizer, and Ben Harrison arts more often than not, makes me feel cringe.

I want to stop relying on 4chan for the latest AI news, currently searching for some better sources. I’m a long-time reader of Zvi and followed him to substack, and his summaries on AI are still excellent and information-dense, but (hedging) either his and my own points of view on AI drifted too far apart which colors my perception, or (honest opinion) the latest kerfuffle with Altman’s firing, reinstatement and everything in between finally broke his mind, and he is no longer able to keep back his obvious doomer bias, which is infecting his every post since. I still appreciate his writing, but disentangling the actual news from the incessant doom attached to them is quickly becoming tedious. Are there any other substacks or blogs which post on anything AI/LLM related in a similar manner? I’m mostly looking for technical insights and distillations of the current zeitgeist, I dropped out around the Altman incident due to RL things and am trying to get back in the saddle. Sources unaffiliated with the Yud cathedral are preferable but not necessary, I’m more or less a brainlet but I can read when I put my mind to it.

Twitter is the place to be - you won't get news and links quicker than that, and can fine-tune your timeline by picking who you follow. In your case, that would means filtering out the grifters and the people interested in the drama. I also often browse /r/LocalLLama, which is almost only about technical open-source stuffs.

I never was a 4chan user, but I've seen a few people saying they use it to get their AI news. How do you use it? Which board do you browse? Is there a way to filter AI-related content? How do you get used to the weird dated UI?

Forgot to mention Twitter, my bad. I'm aware (and mildly bewildered) that a lot of cutting-edge discussion happens on there, but I'm not keen on using it, and my great country provides a trivial inconvenience to not use it. My main reason for continuing to read Zvi is exactly because he gives Twitter links where needed so I don't have to actually use Twitter myself. Thanks for the subreddit pointer, I'll look for some more subs in this vein, they're bound to exist.

As for 4chan, most AI posting happens on /g/. Given it's a general technology board, there's no easy way to filter AI content - a lot of anons are clamoring for an /ai/ board, and e.g 2ch does have one - but there are almost always some scattered AI-related threads, as well as dedicated, continuously posted generals like /lmg/ for local models. You can search specific terms (OpenAI, Gemini, etc) from the search box in the catalog to find the OPs of threads containing them. Threads come and go, but general threads usually have a separate "tag" in the name which is always reposted, so you can search e.g /lmg/ to quickly find the current one. Their OPs also tend to link back to previous threads which get pushed off the board once they hit the bump limit. For deeper search, you can use desuarchive to trawl through archived threads.

Since this is still 4chan, you're not usually going to get cut and dry stuff and may have to sift through shitposting and NSFW, especially considering the posters' main use case for LLMs (spoiler: ERP). You also can't really use it as a content delivery pipeline like Twitter, you'll have to manually pick and read threads. Still, crowd-sourced autism is a helluva thing and the median poster has a lot of practical experience with wrangling LLMs, /lmg/ in particular is IMO unironically at the cutting edge of local model development. The format is also entertaining in general, though your mileage may vary.

I'm a dinosaur and use imageboards for a long time so dated UI was never an issue for me personally. 4chanX exists and reportedly improves the experience but I never tried it.

Also really interested in this? Have you found a good resource?

One Useful Thing seems to post on AI every now and then, from cursory reading posts seem to be much less exhaustive than Zvi's but still have a decent level of detail.

Other than that, I got nothin'. Reposted once in the new thread for good measure.

See my reply above.

Thank you!

Can someone understand anti-vaxx perspective on this? Why vaccine lobby does not promote vaccines against HIV? Mainstream science position [is that] existing HIV vaccines are experimental and not effective, but if anti-vaxx believe vaccine lobby promotes ineffecient or harmful vaccines, why would it be an obstacle?

The influence of the vaccine lobby and big pharma is massive, but still far from total. With COVID vaccines, the vaccine companies were protected from any legal liabilty, so they didn't have to worry about little things like mrna vaccines leading to the unplanned production of random proteins that create risk of autoimmunity issues, as reported recently in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06800-3). However, pushing other unsafe vaccines without these liability protections is still risky for these companies.

Overall, these data increase our understanding of how modified ribonucleotides affect the fidelity of mRNA translation, and although there are no adverse outcomes reported from mistranslation of mRNA-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in humans, these data highlight potential off-target effects for future mRNA-based therapeutics and demonstrate the requirement for sequence optimization.

That risk doesn't seem to have borne out.

No adverse events have been reported from mistranslation because the mistranslation has just now been discovered. But there's plenty to indicate mrna vaccines are not safe.

According to VAERS, the official US vaccine monitoring program, there have been more reported vaccine-related deaths since the introduction of COVID vaccines than from all the other vaccines in the 30 previous years of monitoring, combined. And while VAERS reports are not 100% accurate, they provide a clear picture of relative safety, and VAERS data clearly shows that COVID vaccines have led to more deaths than all other vaccines combined in the last 30 years (check total vaccine-related deaths by year for all vaccines at https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html EDIT: Select "Search CDC Wonder", "VAERS Data Search", under 1., group search results by "Year reported", under 5., select Event category "Death", press "Send" under 5. - the resulting table shows that 70.49% of all reported vaccine-related deaths since 1990 are in the years 2021 and 2021).

Based on clinical trial data, overall mortality in the vaccine group and the unvaccinated control group was statistically equal for mrna vaccines, as opposed to adenovirus vaccines where mortality among the vaccinated was lower, indicating a vaccine risk outweighing the protective effect for mrna vaccines (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/). Put more simply, more people died among the vaccinated than among the unvaccinated in the clinical trials used to approve the mrna vaccines.

Clinical trial data also shows increased risk of serious adverse events for mrna vaccines, outweighing risk of severe COVID in younger population groups: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283.

And that's just a few of the data points we now have that indicate that the mrna vaccines are dangerous, so I'd say the risk has definitely borne out.

Regardless, a medical product that leads to the unplanned production of random proteins within the body would put the company producing it at extreme risk of legal action without the immunities granted to COVID vaccine manufacturers.

VAERS doesn't report vaccine-related deaths. It reports post-vaccine deaths. The easiest way for those to skyrocket is to suddenly administer a lot more vaccines to a much older population.

I understand what you are saying, although I don't think it's completely true: the VAERS form asks you to report a vaccine-related adverse event, not simply that someone died post-vaccination. Also, old people were regularly given at least flu vaccines prior to COVID, so the effect you describe of old people coincidentally dying after vaccine administration was at least partially present before COVID, so I don't think that this is a sufficient explanation for the massive increase.

The current form specifically says "Please report all significant adverse events that occur after vaccination of adults and children, even if you are not sure whether the vaccine caused the adverse event." Healthcare providers are only "required by law to report to VAERS:

  • Any adverse event listed in the VAERS Table of Reportable Events Following Vaccination that occurs within the specified time period after vaccinations
  • An adverse event listed by the vaccine manufacturer as a contraindication to further doses of the vaccine"

(where that Table is basically "things we have a causal mechanism for, if seen within typically one week"), but are still "strongly encouraged to report to VAERS:

  • Any adverse event that occurs after the administration of a vaccine licensed in the United States, whether it is or is not clear that a vaccine caused the adverse event"

Also, old people were regularly given at least flu vaccines prior to COVID, so the effect you describe of old people coincidentally dying after vaccine administration was at least partially present before COVID, so I don't think that this is a sufficient explanation for the massive increase.

That's a very good point ... but the implicit assumption here is that healthcare providers were, for that vaccine, using VAERS that way. That's easy enough to check to back-of-napkin accuracy levels: in the US we administer flu shots to about 50% of the population each year, and we have around 60K deaths per week. Are we seeing the 30K "died within a week after a flu shot" base rate? Not only are we not within napkin-margin of that, we're a couple orders of magnitude too low. We're too low for the discrepancy to even be just "let's not give a flu shot to someone circling the drain" selection bias, which makes me suspect the alternative hypothesis: "nobody even thinks to blame the flu shot". But replace the flu shot with a brand-new politically-charged vaccine and it would be reasonable for the reporting rate to jump from negligible up to 30% - that'd be the responsible thing to do, even if you don't have any real suspicions, just to make it easier for researchers to possibly tease any signal out of the noise later.

the VAERS form asks you to report a vaccine-related adverse event, not simply that someone died post-vaccination.

There is no plausible way for an individual to distinguish between these two.

The VAERS UI and UX designers deserve to be shot.

I note a massive spike from 2021, which I don't particularly consider noteworthy since the total deaths from that period onwards sums up to about 15k. And:

VAERS accepts reports of adverse events and reactions that occur following vaccination. Healthcare providers, vaccine manufacturers, and the public can submit reports to VAERS. While very important in monitoring vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. Most reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these limitations in mind.

And the CDC makes no effort to verify every individual claim, let alone actually enforce the nominal legal penalty for false ones.

I expect that given the enormous increase in public awareness about VAERS, that this isn't particularly significant.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/

The RR for overall mortality of mRNA vaccines vs. placebo was 1.03 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.63-1.71). In the adenovirus-vector vaccine RCTs, the RR for overall mortality was 0.37 (0.19-0.70).

Those are some pretty wide 95% CIs to me, but I'm no statistician. All I can conclude from it is that mRNA vaccines do worse than adenoviral ones. Which is fine, a suboptimal choice of vaccine is bad enough by itself.

Clinical trial data also shows increased risk of serious adverse events for mrna vaccines, outweighing risk of severe COVID in younger population groups: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283.

I don't disagree that it's not worth vaccinating paediatric age groups.

I looked around for takes from those better equipped to evaluate such claims than I am:

https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/covid19-mrna-vaccines-saved-lives-reducing-risks-infection-severe-covid-19/

First, Benn et al. used RCTs with a small number of deaths, whether from COVID-19 or other causes. Together, the mRNA vaccine (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) RCTs reported 61 deaths out of 74,193 participants (0.0008%), while the AV vaccine (AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) trials reported 46 deaths out of 122,164 participants (0.0003%). When assessing the risk of death, a small number of events is problematic because it leaves the results highly vulnerable to statistical flukes.

Karina Top, a professor in the division of infectious diseases of Dalhousie University, explained that these small numbers of deaths “translated into wide confidence intervals around the point estimates indicating lack of precision in the results”.

Abram Wagner, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at Michigan University, reached the same conclusion. “Together, these studies included 74,193 participants in mRNA vaccine trials, and there were only 61 deaths across vaccinated and placebo groups. Essentially there is not enough statistical power to make any conclusions from these data”, he said.

Statistical power is the ability of an analysis to adequately detect an effect where there is indeed one. In this case, a lack of statistical power due to a small number of deaths means that there’s a high risk of failing to detect mRNA vaccines’ effect on overall mortality when such an effect actually exists. In other words, data on mortality in the mRNA clinical trials reported in Benn et al. are actually inconclusive.

Hmm, I guess my nose is worth something after all, I did consider those CIs sus before I read this.

And:

The fact that there aren’t enough deaths to properly assess the effect of vaccination on all-cause mortality isn’t surprising. As Benn et al. acknowledged, the initial clinical trials that led to vaccines’ authorizations primarily focused on preventing symptomatic COVID-19. For example, death from COVID-19 isn’t among the original primary outcomes monitored during the Pfizer, Moderna, or AstraZeneca clinical trials.

If you have better sources or can point out a reason my reasoning is incorrect, I'd be happy to hear it. My general enthusiasm for technological advances is, at least I'd hope, less overwhelming than my desire to get to the bottom of things.

Thank you for the thoughtful response! When we get to this level of analysis, I am of course willing to admit that there are many unknowns, and that the data is not sufficient for strong and clear conclusions on mRNA vaccine safety, although I would argue that there are clear indications that serious concerns exist. But it is the lack of willingness to investigate these worrying signals from the data and the blind repetition of the "safe and effective" mantra that is my main cause for concern. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

VAERS, the main monitoring system for vaccine safety, indicates a massive, and I mean MASSIVE, concern regarding the relative safety of COVID vaccines. I phrased my comment on VAERS carefully - it's definitely not 100% reliable, but it shows a massive relative difference in reported vaccine-related deaths since the introduction of COVID vaccines. Is this not cause for concern? Even if only 3% of the post-COVID VAERS reports are real and 97% are bogus, COVID vaccines still cause as much death as all other vaccines put together (per year instead of in 30 years combined). So even if 97% of post-COVID VAERS reports are trash (and the "increased awareness" argument is a huge stretch to support such a strong claim), the COVID vaccines are still more dangerous than all other vaccines put together, "just" causing more deaths that all other vaccines put together per year instead of more deaths than all other vaccines in 30 years. And if VAERS is complete and utter trash, as you say, isn't that even MORE cause for concern? In that case, we have NO population-level vaccine safety monitoring system of note at all. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

As for the second study I broguht up (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37163200/), I agree that the clinical trials used to approve the COVID vaccines, which are the only large clinical trials that have been run on them, were not designed to assess all-cause mortality risk from the vaccines, and the sample showing no effect on overall mortality is very small, yes. So where's the follow-up? VAERS is trash, and the trials were not designed to assess overall mortality risk. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

Your position on the severe adverse events risk study is not entirely clear to me based on your response. It's not about pediatric populations, it's that they found a greater increase in severe vaccine-related side-effects (that land you in the hospital) than the reduction in severe COVID events compared with the control group. The COVID vaccines cause more hospitalization-level adverse events than the hospitalizations they prevent from COVID, according to that study (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283). The authors call for a harm-benefit analysis for mRNA COVID vaccines, which has never been done. But if you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any, right?

Finally, we have the Nature article finding that the mRNA vaccines produce random proteins. Which ones? What are their effects? Surely Pfizer and Moderna tested whether their vaccines were actually producing what they were supposed to, at some point? Or was this a total surprise, and we "could not have known at the time"? Of course, if you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any.

You requested other sources, so here's the BMJ (top medical journal) desperately calling for follow-up studies on COVID vaccine safety: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2527?fbclid=IwAR3e8Rv7UdOUjx60Vf7CnrtZAcM7rCVxl5IRpT76ngyTokkALHVCbiO3Naw

And I wonder how long the spike protein produced by COVID vaccines keeps being produced? Here's a study finding that it's still being produced 60 days after vaccination: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8786601/ I thought the vaccine cleared out in a week or two, as I was told? Does it keep producing (these random) proteins longer than 60 days? How long are these vaccines active in the body? Who knows! If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any.

Here's COVID vaccines causing myocarditis (perhaps because production of random proteins by the vax causes an autoimmune response in the heart in those unlucky to have the wrong random proteins produced by the vax?): https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/44/24/2234/7188747?login=false

Here's COVID vaccines causing vaginal bleeding: https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2023-074778 How? Why? Who knows! There's plenty more studies like this showing worrying signals. Modifying immune response in unknown ways for unclear reasons? Sure: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.29.23296354v1.full.pdf Causing seizures in children? Yup: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.13.23296903v1.full.pdf

Yes, you can pick apart any of these studies. They are all limited at least by being fairly small given the relative rarity of these events. None of them are proper clinical trials. But that's because these studies are the only ones that have been done. If you also dismiss population-level monitoring systems like VAERS, you can claim that there is no clear evidence, sure. If you refuse to look for problems, you won't find any. But we do now know that vaccines remain active for 60+ days and that they produce random proteins they are not supposed to (these are lab studies on how the vax works). And various data sources, flawed as they are, indicate strong safety concerns. Nevermind that this should have been investigated before giving these vaccines to billions (or coercing people into taking them). The companies are shielded from liability, and politicians will point to the medical community missing or ignoring these issues and say "we could not have known" (although scientists previously considered credible tried to raise concerns, but were sidelined or ostracized). But could we not at least look carefully at the potential issues NOW, before continuing to use this technology that was never deployed in humans before?

Anyway, I hope I've offered some insight on the anti-COVID vax position here. I'll shut up now unless there's something I really need to respond to, since this is the small-scale questions thread :)

The issue with VAERS is both that it doesn't vet data, had massive signal boosting, and more importantly, was signal boosted heavily in the vaccine-skeptical crowd. I expect a great deal more spurious claims, both because of intentional and disingenuous reporting, as well as people being on edge and willing to attribute a natural death or one from COVID itself to the vaccine that preceded it.

I mean, it's both possible for people to be irrationally averse to vaccination in general or the COVID one in particular and the vaccine to be dangerous (or at least worse than the disease), it's just unlikely.

Yes, you can pick apart any of these studies. They are all limited at least by being fairly small given the relative rarity of these events. None of them are proper clinical trials. But that's because these studies are the only ones that have been done.

I'm not against better studies, but until they happen, I reserve judgement, or at least hold the null hypothesis. There's publication bias both from the vaccine manufacturers and their pharma affiliates who would prefer not to demonstrate harm and hundreds or thousands of small-time researchers who would love to make a name by demonstrating clear and obvious harm. The latter aren't deplatformed, you did link to multiple weak/inconclusive studies after all.

But we do now know that vaccines remain active for 60+ days and that they produce random proteins they are not supposed to (these are lab studies on how the vax works)

"Random proteins" aren't really that big a deal. The human body handles probably quadrillions of misfolded proteins or even those produced by point/frameshift mutations every day. When the original study you cited makes no claim that it causes harm, I expect more evidence to back up that claim, including obvious increases in all cause mortality that can be retroactively attributed to mRNA vaccines.

In the specific case of children, my point is that the CFR for them is so minuscule that it wouldn't be worth vaccinating them even if the vaccine was perfectly safe. Certainly not when vaccine stocks were short of requirements in the early/middle pandemic.

Here's my attempt to parse VAERS data, so the next poor soul doesn't have to.

/images/17029894385891418.webp

A question for any readers located in France or familiar with French politics.

In 2019, Scott linked to this article, about a proposed piece of legislation in France which included "stigmatising agricultural activities" under the definition of "hate speech" i.e. an "ag-gag" law. According to this article, it appeared the bill passed (with major revisions) in May 2020, but the article doesn't mention if the ag-gag component was one of the components which survived the revision.

Answer me these questions three:

  1. Is "stigmatising agricultural activities" a form of hate speech under French law?
  2. Has anyone been arrested, charged, tried or convicted with so doing in France?
  3. Outside of France, has anyone been convicted of violating an ag-gag law, particularly if the law in question was framed as a prohibition on "hate speech" or similar?

Frenchman here - never heard of this, and googling for usages of the word "ag-gag" in French seem to mostly talk about them in the US or Canada, tho there's some talk of them coming to France.

Why do people buy name brand over generic groceries? They're often identical. Are people just stupid? But it's such a blatant case about which product is better. They'll be identical products, next to each other on the shelf, except one costs about 25% less. The only difference is that the other product has commercials advertising it. I have friends insist that name brand tastes better, but the contents are literally identical.

I would guess that many people don't really just think it through that much - if they want, say, cornflakes, they'll just stop at the cornflake shelf, extend their hand and take something, which is usually more expensive than if they just crouched down to take a cheaper product (usually stocked at a lower shelf).

I've noticed that once I started ordering regularly groceries online with home delivery it's led to me to select more store-brand stuff, since it's easier to just sort by unit price or something.

Some things are nearly identical (I couldn't identify the difference between store brand and Uncle Ben's rice, for example) but other things, particularly processed foods, do have a noticeable gap. Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.

Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.

Lots of people share this sentiment, but I'll admit I personally never understood this. Maybe I've been lucky enough to encounter just good off-brand cola, but I've overwhelmingly found that off-brand is more than good enough compared to Coca Cola or Pepsi. I'm also one of the weird people who significantly prefers Pepsi to Coca Cola (and Diet Pepsi to Diet Coke) and also likes to flatten my colas first by shaking the bottle and letting it dissipate, so maybe I just have weird tastes in soft drinks.

If you like to flatten your soft drinks, there is no "maybe" about having weird tastes in soft drinks. They're not force carbonated because people just love the joy of bottles gushing if they're shaken up.

I just don't understand why people continue to put so much effort into making the experience of drinking something more painful and more likely to cause bloating and gas. With beer, I see the carbonation as an acceptable consequence of the brewing process that also serves as a helpful way of enforcing a speed limit in taking in the alcohol. But with soft drinks, neither excuse exists.

It's just a matter of personal preference. I find the carbonation increases the flavor experience and clearly a lot of other people do as well. Maybe you just have a more sensitive mouth/throat than other people which causes you to find carbonation more painful. I don't think most people would say carbonation is painful and it could just be your body not being suited for it. It's like how some people when eating Hershey's chocolate find it tastes like bile while others don't.

I find your point more understandable if you were talking about spicy food, some people love extremely spicy food. Spicy food causes pain/discomfort to a lot of people during and after eating. Do you find some people's preference for spicy food just as puzzling?

I find the carbonation increases the flavor experience

Yep. The carbonation produces carbonic acid in the water. That gives beer and soda the correct smell and taste. "Why does flat soda taste so bad?" Because the acid bite is missing.

Liking spicy food isn't nearly as ubiquitous as liking carbonated soft drinks. There's a pretty sizeable niche of people (a niche that includes myself) that really enjoys spicy food, but that niche is smaller than the pool of soft drink enjoyers, even that niche doesn't partake in spicy food all the time, at least not as often as soft drink enjoyers drink carbonated beverages. This is in a large part because even spicy food enthusiasts tend to acknowledge that the experience has a significant painful portion that needs to be managed, and that the pain is part of the point, unlike with soda.

I wouldn't be surprised if I do have more sensitive mouth/throat than most, though, since I tend to be more sensitive to texture in food than most people I've encountered. And I'll note that @DradisPing guessed correctly in that I absolutely have a sweet tooth.

There are dozens of us!

The carbonation makes the drink taste less sweet, Pepsi is sweeter than Coke, so I suspect you just have a sweet tooth.

I'm reminded of when someone did a big study of children's breakfast cereal. They compared generic and name brands.

After crunching the data they learned that kids preferred whichever one had more sugar.

Pepsi is slightly sweeter and has less acidity, which is why they can always be assured that in blind tests (where people have just a sip from a small paper sample cup) the majority prefer Pepsi.

Offbrand cola is disgusting, for example.

How do we know they are objectively worse than brand colas without using your prior exposure to brand colas?

Cola is flavored primarily with a mix of vanilla and cinnamon; off brand colas tend to overdo the vanilla at the expense of cinnamon, which to me has always been the primary flavor.

Pepsi’s 1893 which was discontinued a few years ago was made with actual kola nut and the original flavoring proportions was excellent. I wish I could find a real kola cola in the UK but sadly I haven’t yet.

The primary reason to buy name brands isn't quality per se, but predictability. The same name brands are available nationwide, and while they do sometimes change their formulations, they tend to do so infrequently and carefully. A given generic brand is often not available everywhere (many are store-specific), stores/chains may vary which generics they carry over time, and even within a single generic brand there tends to be less focus on consistency, because what's the point in prioritizing that if you haven't got a well-known brand people have very specific expectations of?

People don't want to roll the dice on every purchase. Will this ketchup be too acidic? Will these cornflakes be a little gritty? They're willing to pay a dollar or three more to reliably get the thing they expect.

I prefer name-brands over generics for several categories in which I've tried the generics and they are definitely worse quality for not much less money. I don't have particularly great taste, so it has to be pretty significantly worse for me to notice and care. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe you are. I don't see anybody trying to prove that the specific products I'm comparing here are actually identical.

In Britain there's a popular-ish show called 'Eat Well for Less', with Greg Wallace, in which for a week a family who thinks they need to reduce their food bill has all their groceries replaced with new ones with all the branding removed so they don't know what they're getting. Invariably none of them can tell the difference when their branded products are replaced with the cheapo own-brand 'value' range, despite them all usually insisting beforehand that they'll be able to tell. Most amusing though is when they insist they don't like the replacement, only to find out they've been double bluffed and it was in fact the same brand as they have always been eating/drinking, and they look like morons. The vast majority of people who genuinely think they can tell a difference have definitely just been sucked in by marketing, which I suspect applies to most of the people in this thread insisting 'no, Heinz ketchup really is different to all the others!'.

Do they actually go over what percentage of overall food spending these brand changes represent? It looks like just a trick to amuse viewers, and not a big part of the actual saving money part of things. When I looked up a show, one of the results was a recipe for a potato soup, which, sure.

Last night we were eating burgers, and first we decided to get the (store brand) ones with slightly higher quality meat, then we grilled them with charcoal (is charcoal branding a thing? I don't know), then we decided that since the coals were already warm, why not grill some (store brand) shrimp as well? And since there was shrimp, I got some (sure, way more expensive than generic supermarket corn) farmer's market blue corn grits ready for breakfast. We also consumed soda, then manhattans.

If we really wanted to save money, we would have made completely different choices along multiple axes unrelated to brands. The brands or lack thereof were not a major factor in how much the meal cost.

Yeah they'll usually be some sort of VO saying 'if the Smith family switch to Tesco value baked beans they can save £100 a year' or whatever. There are other sorts of changes which perhaps make more of difference; usually cooking more meals from scratch and avoiding silly 'conveniences' with a big markup like pre-grated cheese and pre-chopped vegetables, but there are definitely substantial savings to be had from avoiding big brand names.

Color me skeptical of just how honest the show is being with participants and viewers. I remember back a couple decades ago when I first started hearing these stories about how social science had proved that people can't tell the difference between cheap wine and fancy wine, and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test. Me, as an absolute moron, simply believed that these smug hacks were doing actual scientific work where they were engaged in truth-seeking adopted that stance as a smug hack and repeated this "fact" about how stupid these rich people were.

Fast forward a couple decades, and I am a whiskey enthusiast. With dozens of bottles on the shelf, I can correctly identify specific bourbons in blinded taste tests without any real problem. I'm not even talking about things that are dramatically different styles - I can consistently identify the difference between Old Forester single barrel picks and Four Roses single barrel picks. These are barely different products at all, both being (primarily) corn distillate aged in charred, new American oak barrels for a few years, then dumped and bottled at barrel-proof. And yet, they're easy for anyone that enjoys bourbon to tell apart. While I haven't replicated such a test with wine because I'm not much of a wine enthusiast, there is simply no goddamned way that anyone that has any experience is going to confuse a sauv blanc with a cabernet.

So, when I hear that there is a show that profits from making people look stupid when they fail to identify the difference between products that literally have different ingredients, I am skeptical. What are they doing to arrive at that presentation? I don't know, but I bet that if I can tell the difference a couple bourbons, many people can actually tell the difference between Frank's Red Hot, Tabasco, and store brands without any trouble.

many people can actually tell the difference between Frank's Red Hot, Tabasco, and store brands without any trouble.

Are there people who can't tell Frank's Red Hot and Tabasco apart? They use different peppers. Frank's has paprika and garlic powder in it. Frank's is much more about adding flavour.

Tabasco tastes like vinegar and fire. It's used when you want to add neutral heat.

Store brands vary wildly.

and sometimes can't even tell the difference between red and white wine in a blinded taste test

Scott himself wrote an article about that exact thing: Is Wine Fake?, and yes, the study where people were tricked with colored wine was as garbage as one might expect – they tested undergraduates and not experts, and the test consisted of affixing descriptors to two wines, which resulted in them affixing the red-wine associated ones to red-colored wines more often than chance. Going from this to "people can't tell red and white wines apart" is a Grand Canyon-sized leap.

they tested undergraduates and not experts

Why would they necessarily want experts? If all they setting out to prove is that ordinary people can't tell the difference between better and worse wines, then obviously they wouldn't test experts or enthusiasts.

a show that profits from making people look stupid when they fail to identify the difference between products that literally have different ingredients

FWIW it's BBC so they're actually not making a profit, though obviously yes the individual showrunners and the BBC at large want to see the programs get good ratings.

I think the general point though is that of course if you care to pay attention to these things you can tell the difference, but most people are not an 'enthusiast' about most of the things they eat and drink. A ketchup enthusiast may have genuine and consistent preferences, but I doubt that's true of the majority of the population. On the whole it's a pretty sedate show and if you watch it while there are sections of the show (not the swaps week bit) which are likely semi-staged (alongside ordinary consumer advice scripted bits in factories etc. which aren't pretending to not be so) I doubt anybody would care enough to fake it. Most of the time they aren't make to look total fools - in fact much of the time they will correctly identify that something has changed, but will say they don't mind it anyway and would happily change to save money. So often rather than not being able to tell the difference (though that does happen) it's more that own-brand stuff is not actually worse than brand-name even if 'different'.

between products that literally have different ingredients

Well they aren't usually as different as the example of hot sauces, it's more things like cheese, vegetables, soft drinks etc.

i THINK I can tell ketchup with and without HFCS apart, but have never done a blind test. They seem more tomatoey and less sweet spice flavored. Ketchups often have different ingredients, and, of course the term"spices" can have a lot of variation. My mom switched a store brand graham cracker crust and I could tell immediately.

Depends on the store. French retailer Auchan has famously bad generic groceries in Russia under their "Every day" brand, but its other store brands are fine.

Whole Foods cola. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a worse no label product in my life.

Some no name products are better and some are worse.

I generally limit name brand stuff because most of those brands seem overloaded with sugar.

This varies a lot. Sometimes the generic brands are the same material rebadged. Sometimes they are better! But they're seldom going through the same production plants and distribution processes. Even when the materials are the same -- milk is milk! -- this can lead to dramatically different spoilage times. For stuff with widely varying recipes, like bread, the differences can be visible from a distance.

Store brands are definitely worth a shot, but it's worth being aware of their limitations.

Some things can be close, others are pretty far. Jif peanut butter and Heinz ketchup are not equalled by any other brand of either. Some things can be pretty close, my local store's hot dogs are better than national brand's but their similar in price to more expensive (when the national brand is on sale).

The listed ingredients of Alton Brown's variations on the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe would have very similar ingredients, if listed in the commercial format, but the small differences and different preparations make a noticable difference in the final product.

How do you know that the contents are literally identical? Can you give me an example of the products you're talking about?

Many generic products are subtly worse, or at least different in ways that one might rationally prefer the name brand. And figuring out which is which takes time and energy, for every Kirkland Signature albacore tuna which is superior there's JoeJoes trader Joe's knockoff Oreos which are in-fucking-edible. Trying those has costs involved, so people just buy name brand.

I assume someone must like the shitty generics enough to make it worth selling them, so tastes as always differ. Consider that you might have a less discerning taste regarding, idk, pasta sauce or whatever.

You're just wrong, joe joes are delicious.

Exactly my point, you could get me cross faded and have me hike ten miles and I'd still leave a box of Joe Joe's alone on the table.

Counterexample from the FTC:

(¶ 16) Respondents [JM Smucker (Crisco) and Conagra (Wesson)] do not sell their products directly to end consumers. Instead, both Respondents sell their branded canola and vegetable oils to retailers, including grocery stores (such as Giant), mass merchants (such as Target), club stores (such as BJ’s Wholesale Club), and convenience stores. Retailers purchase canola and vegetable oils at wholesale from suppliers such as Smucker and Conagra and sell them at retail to their in-store customers, the end consumers.

(¶ 19) In addition to buying canola and vegetable oils from the national brands, retailers also frequently sell canola and vegetable oils under their own label. Most retailers that have “private label” canola and vegetable oils typically price it at a lower retail price than the national brands, usually 10–20% below the brand price. Retailers generally contract with a third-party oil producer, such as Cargill or Stratas, to manufacture their private label oils. The process by which retailers supply themselves with private label canola and vegetable oils is separate, and different, from the way retailers buy and sell branded canola and vegetable oils.

(¶ 21) Smucker and Conagra do not participate in or bid to supply private label to retailers. While one of the rationales for the Acquisition is to fill excess capacity at Smucker’s Cincinnati plant by buying the Wesson brand and its corresponding volume, Smucker has elected not to increase its capacity utilization through a less anticompetitive alternative. For example, Smucker could supply private label oils to retailers or produce private label oils for a private label supplier that lacks sufficient capacity itself, which Smucker recently did for Cargill.

So, you typically will not find Crisco or Wesson vegetable oil repackaged under the grocery store's generic brand (though it does sometimes happen, as shown in the second item bolded above). Rather, generic vegetable oil is made by other manufacturers (at least as of year 2018).

The point isn't that it's literally exactly the same company/plant producing it, it's that the differences really don't make any difference; certainly not enough to warrant paying a premium. If you did put generic vegetable oil in a fancy bottle, I doubt anybody who wasn't some kind of expert/chef would actually notice any difference. Indeed, they presumably use generic bulk stuff in actual kitchens, even in nice restaurants, so it should be good enough for you or I at home.

The point isn't that it's literally exactly the same company/plant producing it, it's that the differences really don't make any difference

I did intend both points tbh. Sometimes it is literally the exact same plant producing it, and that's even more egregious. But even in the lesser cases, I don't expect there's a meaningful difference between Smucker/Conagra and no name brands like you say.

Example? Even something like milk is usually better with a name brand.

I have a sweet tooth and most notable to me is how there are dollar store brand chocolates that are a third of the price of name brand like Snickers or KitKat, but are identical. If you want actually high quality chocolate you have to pay more, but I'm talking about paying 33 cents instead of a dollar. And the two chocolates will be side by side on the shelf.

Chocolates are one of the items where I almost never see a store brand equivalent, though I don't shop at Dollar General or Dollar Tree or whatever, so maybe I'm missing out.

Costco has excellent store brand baked goods and alcohol, so I would certainly give a KitKat knockoff a try there, but have never seen anything like that. Or Sam's Club, either. I don't live near an Aldi's anymore, but I think their chocolates were German brands.

Trader Joes has good chocolate covered peanut butter and chocolate covered creamy mints, but they are a quite distinct products from Yorkshire peppermint patties or Reeses. Also, I consider Trader Joes a strong enough brand not to classify their products generic.

Trader Joes has excellent store branded chocolate. Or do you mean a knock off version of say a Kit Kat or Neslte Crunch bar?

Yeah, I meant the Dollar Store knock offs.

I haven't looked into whether TJ's chocolate is a better price than other brands, but I just buy it because it's good in general, not necessarily to save money.

So, what are you reading?

I'm starting a reread of The Count of Monte Cristo after recent mentions here. I don't remember a lot of the details and perhaps it will seem more profound this time around. The political aspect of Danglars' accusation wouldn't have drawn my interest in the past.

Still on Hurewitz' The Struggle for Palestine.

What do you think Count's most morally questionable doings were?

So, what are you reading?

Medical textbooks. I can't remember the last time I had time to read anything else.

The worst of it is the GMC's Good Medical Practise, which expects a kind of simpering obsequiousness and self-sacrifice from doctors that would be uncalled for in a nun working under Mother Teresa. Then again, we're both about as exposed to TB or leprosy, so maybe I can learn from them.

I'm in the middle of From Third World to First on my tablet, still plugging away at The Dawn of Everything on my bedside table, and listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Overall, I guess it cashes out to a 3 credit college course on authoritarianism. All three are fantastic, well written, insightful works.

I enjoyed Rise and Fall, but also found it a bit…un-journalistic. If you have the chance, I really recommend Ian Kershaws one-volume Hitler Biography. I still maintain that is the best biography I’ve ever read. It focuses not just on Hitlers life, but the world context that allowed him to gain power. The parts on 1920s Germany and the power, influence, and independence of the German generals is particularly interesting.

I'm about 1/3 of the way through Ezra Klein's Why We're Polarized. So far, it's been a bit better than I expected (not that those expectations were all that high).

I finished Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution over the weekend.

I was broadly in agreement with her arguments. Anyone familiar with conservative(ish) complaints about the current sex/dating/marriage situation will find them familiar. But I agree with what Kvetch wrote in his review. The inescapable conclusion of her book is that women shouldn't or can't have full agency around their love lives, but she never actually says it explicitly.

Think it's similar to an argument against alcohol. It's obvious that some people simply can not make good decisions about alcohol and would be vastly better off if it were not available. But everyone knows prohibition was a "failure", so its inherently discrediting to advocate legal remedies. I don't that that means it is pointless to make an argument that society should voluntarily lower the status of alcohol consumption.

The inescapable conclusion of her book is that women shouldn't or can't have full agency around their love lives, but she never actually says it explicitly.

Most of these anti-"liberal consensus" books seem to have a lot of criticisms but stop short of proposing anything too alien to the normies or that can then be picked apart by the proponents of the beliefs they're criticizing. Lots of problems highlighted but you're often left wondering where you're expected to go from there.

I noticed the crazy woman in the comments. I can't imagine she convinced anyone of her position.

I think this is a great example of the fact that most of what you read on the internet is written by crazy people.

Four chapters into Moby-Dick (this is probably my fourth or fifth attempt at reading it, the last time when I was in my teens). The last chapter I read consists of "I woke up, my roommate woke up, I watched my roommate get dressed and shave". Aspiring novelists are rightfully advised to avoid morning routine scenes, as they do nothing to advance the plot or convey characterisation and are hence boring. Perhaps the only thing that's more boring and irrelevant is a chapter depicting the protagonist's roommate's morning routine.

Super late reply but I remember really loving a depiction of Watson getting ready in the morning in some Sherlock story I was listening to in audiobook form while working years ago. It has oddly stuck in my mind which is why I mentioned it here.

What struck me the hardest about MD is how modern the writing felt.

I found it funny in chapter 3 when Ishmael describes a set of wainscots as "old-fashioned".

Reminded me of this gag about Assassin's Creed Origins (a video game set in Egypt between 49-43 BC): "I remember feeling profoundly disappointed at the scene when Bayek's missus gives him a hidden blade and says, 'This is a weapon from ancient times.' Bitch, we're in ancient times!"

I really liked the setting of Origins, both because it correctly portrayed Bayek as religious (he's outraged that someone's making crocodile mummies by killing crocodiles not because it's animal cruelty, but because they are Sobek's sacred animals) and because we tend to forget that Ancient Egypt is so fucking ancient it was ancient history back in Cleopatra's times.

When someone told me that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landings than to the construction of the Great Pyramid, I felt like a trapdoor had just opened underneath me.

And yet, Moby Dick is rightfully seen as one of the best novels ever written.

Btw, there's also a pretty famous morning routine near the start of Ulysses.

Les Miserables is also considered one of the best novels ever written, but I don’t think the book would be materially harmed by removing the lengthy digressions on the Parisian sewer system and the Battle of Waterloo.

And yet, Moby Dick is rightfully seen as one of the best novels ever written.

I'm sure with good reason, I'll report back once I've finished it. I'll be immensely surprised if, upon completion, I come away thinking "yeah, the novel couldn't have done without the Queequeg shaving scene", but I'm open to the possibility.

The scene is pretty much unimportant to the story, but the point of the scene (and many others like it) is that instead of the story being linear from start to end, much like life it meanders this way and that, giving the reader a better sense of what it was like to actually be the characters in the text.

On its own the scene is meaningless, but together with other scenes like it it forms a part of the soul of what Moby Dick is, and the novel as a whole would be poorer without these scenes.

I just finished the Kyoshi novels which are official media in the Avatar: The Last Airbender universe. They're more at the 14-18yo maturity level, with sexual tension but not actually sex and people getting stabbed to death, compared to the show which was a more standard children's cartoon violence. I really enjoyed the first half of the first book, but after that it became a bit of a slog. I think I had two major issues with it. First, it felt like it was pretending to be a morally grey serious book akin to Game of Thrones where lots of the villains make good points and the heroes are forced to do bad deeds for the greater good. But the protagonist never really does anything that bad- she just kills a few extremely dangerous criminals/war lords in self-defense that she wouldn't have been able to bring in peacefully, and those criminals more than deserved death anyways. And the antagonists try to justify their actions claiming that they're just killing even worse bandits and are the only things upholding order, but they're far too needlessly cruel and violent for them to really have much moral justification.

The second issue I have with it is related and is that Kyoshi always felt incredibly guilty about having killed some of the antagonists and she'd always be beating herself up over it in the narration. But again, she really didn't do anything wrong, so the guilt just annoyed me instead of making me care more about her. I had a very similar issue with the web novel The Practical Guide to Evil as well. This stands opposed to the show Bojack Horseman, where the protagonist also is constantly feeling guilty over his past actions, but is also an actually shitty person, so it makes me sympathize with him instead of just rolling my eyes.

A third more more minor issue I had was that the spirit world never felt as mystical and otherworldly as it did in the original show. Instead it was more like a place that just contained some evil monsters and was travelled to with extreme adversity. It was similar to Legend of Korra in that way. As opposed to the original show, where spirits cared about their narrow interests like a forest, or the balance between moon and ocean, or protecting knowledge, or trying to steal people's faces, and didn't care about the rest of humanity beyond what they were the spirit of.

The original show was superb but I feel like that magic's never been recaptured in any media since, although I haven't read many of the comics.

Finished Brothers Karamazov.

After reading both that and Crime And Punishment this year I think I'm due for something much lighter. Does anyone have any recommendations for above average short story compilations?

Controversy around the inspiration for its most well-known story aside, I received Kristen Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This a few Christmases ago and enjoyed it quite a lot. Every story is short enough to be read in one sitting, her spare, terse style means that the stories never drag, and there were several stories I enjoyed quite a lot and none that I actively disliked. The stories are "dark" in the sense that they deal frankly with BDSM and weird sexual fetishes, but they're more like campfire stories or high-class /r/nosleep posts (made explicit in one story which veers into outright supernatural horror) - there's nothing here that's grounded or realistic enough to be truly disturbing or unsettling. As an understated slice-of-life examination of modern dating culture which is never really trying to shock or scare the reader, "Cat Person" is actually the outlier here.

Both Ted Chiang and Greg Egan have above-average short stories if you're into sci-fi. Try Chekhov and Turgenev as well, if you want to stick to Russians.

Not sure if this is up your alley, but Stephen Kings short stories are some of his finest work. His stuff from the 70s and 80s is great; he had a bite to his writing that sort of dissipated over time. Check out Skeleton Crew it has a few of Stephen Kings best short stories, The Raft and The Jaunt.

Murray's Human Diversity.

Was reading Albert Ellis' How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything again but couldn't actually do self-help at this point in the year. Hopefully I'll close it off after a palate cleanser.

If I wanted to see memes of aichads owning artcels, where would I go? It’s really important for my mental health.

Isn't this one of those "I don't think about you at all" situations? There are many communities producing and sharing AI art without a care in the world for the people who are angry about it.

The incest is, believe it or not, optional. But while I've heard it's a decent game on its own merit, most of the players are in it for the titillation.

The incest is, believe it or not, optional.

There is no incest. None of the companions the player can romance are related.

I'm talking about the meme cannibal game.

Which one is that?

Coffin of Andy and Leyley

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley

I am agnostic on your preferences, sadly I'm not the target demographic, so I only know what I've heard or seen on Twitter. I believe there are some visual elements involved, and probably text.

Personally I found Baldur's Gate 3 boring but I think that's just because I find the genre a boring.

Interesting. What genres of games do you find more engaging?

Card games, MOBAs, action RPGs have been the main games I've been playing lately. I also enjoy grand strategy like Stellaris. It's just something about the way the team is controlled makes me feel like I should be optimizing every little decision but it's tedious.

I couldn’t get an answer if I should buy Baldur’s Gate 3 last week.

It's easily Larians best modern game so far and probably their best game (although a small amount of people might prefer divine divinity) and I'd say a good game in general. It is still a Larian game though and if you don't enjoy those then it might not be a slam dunk for you even if it is a big improvement from their previous efforts.

The writing is still pretty poor (although a few segments are actually good this time), the world building is bad and the game is extremely easy beyond like level 3-5 on even the hardest difficulty. It has a fair bit of woke adjacent stuff as well but I didn't find it that obnoxious and it never felt preachy.

What it does exceptionally well is reactivity and crafting small set pieces with a ton of different viable solutions to them. This is legitimately a ton of fun and I don't know anyone that didn't appreciate it.

If you're considering to play it only because it's a continuation of baldur's gate then prepare to be disappointed. This is much more DoS 3 than it is BG3.

is there a mod to fix how the story makes the player enforce open borders in one of the chapters?

What do you mean by "enforce open borders?" Are you talking about a specific plot point?

There is a quest where the player gets in the middle of a dispute in which tieflings are seeking shelter among wood elves from hostile goblins. There are four options: you kick the tieflings out, you let the tieflings in, you kill everyone yourself, or you let the goblins kill everyone.

You are not obliged to help. The main criticism from people against open borders is the narrative portrays helping as the obviously good action and not helping as the obviously evil action (well, the player can actually go a fair bit beyond just "not helping"). But I cannot recall at any point being forced to help, though I'll admit it is a long game and I may have forgotten a scene.

I can't answer your question, but I think that's mainly because I literally cannot understand it.

"The meme cannibal game" is The Coffin of Andy and Leyley.

Thank you.

and to add to the above, the characters Any And Leyley are brother and sister, and the meme is that they're lovers. No clue whether this is actually in the game or just the community, and I can understand the desire to find out before dropping money on it.

This appears to be the folger's reference.

The last part is a request for memes representing the victory of generative AI art programs over human artists.

It's in the game, but optionally so.

Thanks

If I wanted to see memes of aichads owning artcels, where would I go? It’s really important for my mental health.

Generate some?

You've got eight comments in the mod queue and all of them are ban-worthy. Looking over your brief history here, this appears to be a troll account. Banned.

If the balance was natural, wouldn't you encounter it already?

Outlining the story as was passed on to me by a family member, there was a recent case here in Alaska where there was a proposal to create a paved road connecting one of the rural villages to the broader highway system (such as it is). Well, some of the opponents of the proposal looked at the plan for how the road would pass through the village, found the name of the person who owns the property at the proposed endpoint, and then started arguing about 'why is the state proposing to spend millions of dollars to build a road to [name]'s house?'

Is there a name for this sort of argument? I mean, setting aside the whole 'ignoring everyone else who would benefit from the road in favor of focusing on the endpoint,' there's the fact that any proposed road would wind up ending at some person's property*. If not this guy, it would be some other guy… but then they'd just ask 'why is the state proposing to spend millions of dollars to build a road to [other guy's name]'s house?' instead. It's a sort of fully-generalizable argument disguised as a specific criticism.

*Unless you spend money building a segment out past where anybody lives into empty wilderness; in which case the opponents would instead be (rightly) asking why you're wasting money on a stretch of pavement that nobody is likely to ever much use.

Isn't this just a case of straw-manning?

They're oversimplifying the proposal that it's a road to a person's house and then arguing over the straw man they set up.

Also, it's possible that the road doesn't end up at someone's house, it could end up at a publicly owned location, or a private factory, or a business. In the case it goes into empty wilderness, there would probably some justification such as developing something there in the future. I think it's a valid question to ask why something is being done, the issue with your example is that the question is straw-manning the proposal by framing it in an uncharitable manner which allows the opponents to ignore other benefits.

I feel like another example might be better to get to the heart of your question about the specific type of argument you're looking to identify.

Framing? Rhetoric?

Weakmanning?

Is there a term for the division of broad social/political views, going back to Plato vs. Aristotle, between “top-down” design and “bottom-up” evolution? Plato’s Politeía (“Republic”) tends to the prescriptive, focusing on designing a utopian ideal city-state from first principles, while Aristotle’s Politiká (“Politics”) is rather more descriptive, and views communities as growing out of humans’ social nature. The former view includes James C. Scott’s “high modernism” and his examples in Seeing Like a State. (It’s also the sort of thing that contributes to stuff like the Tanganyika groundnut scheme.)

It also seems to relate to a kind of view I like to describe as “creationist-adjacent”, in that it holds that unguided “evolutionary” processes are by nature so “crude,” “clumsy,” “random,” et cetera that their products are never anywhere near the trade-off frontier, and further, that a moderately competent intelligent designer is guaranteed to produce something far superior with only moderate effort. For one stark example, the idea that free-market competition and selection forces on firms, greed-driven and chaotic, can only give rise to an economy so inefficient that a few Marxist central planners would quite obviously be able to intelligently design a vastly superior and more productive economy from the top-down.

(Some of the people I’ve encountered with radically optimistic expectations of what human genetic engineering will achieve in the next few decades seem to me to derive those expectations from a similar view.)

In case you can’t tell, I’m with Aristotle on this one. Indeed, that’s one of the main reasons for asking: is there a good term for my position, opposing “high modernism” and “top-down” central planning (particularly of the “one-size-fits-all” variety), in favor of local, “bottom-up” evolved systems?

Isn't this just the authoritarian/libertarian axis in the (modern, memed-to-death version of the) political compass? Though I guess on the libertarian end of that there's perhaps only an alliance of convenience between the pragmatic "these are usually the best rules for evolving better systems" believers and the idealistic "these are the human rights we must never violate" believers.

What is wrong with reddit? I find that oftentimes I have a question, and I can't honestly think of any other place on the internet that I can ask that question and get an answer other than specific subreddits. But at the same time, I don't want to post on reddit because I hate it. You can't post anything there without at least half the comments being about how you're a fucking idiot for even asking the question to begin with. Every single time I'm like "I know I had bad experiences on reddit in the past, but this current post I'm about to do is so innocuous that no one could possibly take issue with it and ridicule me for it", and every time, without fail, I'm proven wrong.

Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world. Does reddit select for this? Is this some sort of toxoplasma in action? Does half of reddit just consider themselves to be better than other people?

I think that a large part of it has been downvotes affecting your participation. If you get downvoted too much, you're restricted from commenting, so you're always incentivized to say whatever gets you upvotes, which will always be what the majority consensus is. This is also where the judginess comes from, because if you have a differing opinion, people don't want to seem like they are the ones with a minority opinion, so they will attack you to keep the consensus afloat. Contrast that to TheMotte where downvotes don't affect your participation at all.

I find that posts that get popular and rise to the top tend to have a change in the majority opinion.

My thought is there is a small group of negative, constantly online individuals who just want to ruin someone's day. These people will be the first to comment because they're always online looking for new posts.

If the posts get popular enough then the normie Reddit opinion takes over and overshadows those initial negative comments.

Some examples can be found if you browse any old popular AITA posts. A lot of times the OP will post an edit addressing initial comments, but those comments are usually the opposite of the majority of highly upvoted opinions.

This should be obvious but which subreddit you are also impacts your experience. As biased as Reddit it is still diverse in its bias and the type of people on each subreddit, especially the smaller niche ones.

Recently, I think the default UI change is a factor. Comparing new.reddit.com to old.reddit.com, you get much less text, and many fewer visible comments per post on new reddit than old. By default, it seems to "... expand to continue" long messages. Some subs now also display gif replies, which seem to only be used for snark. In general, it seems to encourage low-effort participation, and discourage thoughtful answers.

My favorite form of this on my local subreddit is the contingent that always feels the need to say, "you could do it yourself" to any question about getting any service or good locally. What's a good mechanic? You could do it in your garage. Who has the best BBQ? Smoking meat isn't that hard. Bore sight a scope? You can learn to do that. Best burger? My house, har har har.

How the fuck is this remotely helpful? Everyone is aware that it's possible to do [service] yourself, but if they're asking where to get it done, they have already considered doing it and decided they would rather pay someone that does it all the time. More to the point, what the hell is it that triggers people to give these responses? Just a desire to show off their own skills? Very weird behavior.

I do think admin and moderator decisions (some of which were absolutely necessary) have resulted in its userbase becoming more selected for midwittery, conformity and smugness over time. In 2012, Reddit was so committed to its vision of a free speech-friendly website that there was a major controversy over whether or not to ban a subreddit for photos of attractive teenagers taken without their knowledge (a rare example of a subreddit ban I fully endorse, for what it's worth).

But successive bans of subreddits for weird porn, edgy humour or anything which contradicts woke orthodoxy (most notably The_Donald, but also numerous subreddits which tolerate even the mildest scepticism of gender ideology - I expect the days are numbered for /r/detrans) have resulted in most of the witches and weirdos fleeing the coop, leaving behind only the midwits whose tastes tend toward the anodyne and who can reliably be assumed to believe that we really have always been at war with Eastasia.

The_Donald

Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump. Hard to complain about being banned for 'contradicting woke orthodoxy' (which I don't think is a fair representation of what happened but nevertheless) when you don't allow any contradiction of Trumpian orthodoxy.

Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump.

That's the deal they were offered. Pity that Reddit couldn't hold up their end.

More broadly, subjects shouldn't be (and generally aren't) held to the same standards as their rulers. Does filing a FOIA request give the government permission to wiretap you? Does skipping your court date justify the prison skipping your release date? If you lock your apartment, is your landlord justified in banning you from (otherwise-)common areas? If a student skips some homework, can a teacher skip grading their exams?

The only place pure reciprocity works at all is among peers, and even that doesn't always go the greatest.

I hope you didn't interpret my comment as to imply that I support any and all subreddits which contradict woke orthodoxy. /r/itsafetish was banned, but so was /r/GasTheKikes. My point is that the common thread underpinning the banning of most political subreddits is that they were insufficiently woke, sometimes subtly, sometimes extravagantly. I have yet to hear of a subreddit which was banned by a conservative admin for being too woke.

I don't see anything intrinsically objectionable about a political community banning all criticism of a specific political figure. It's pretty weird to go into a subreddit for supporters of Donald Trump and start ranting about how much Donald Trump sucks, especially when there are thousands of other subreddits (most of which have nothing to do with politics) in which you can do that and get a warm reception. Which is more pluralistic: a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?

a website with numerous sub-communities each enforcing their own specific orthodoxy on their members, or a website in which the members of every community have to adhere to exactly one orthodoxy?

Well we can make this argument one stage removed no? Reddit is simply one of many websites enforcing certain values, if you don't like them you can go to another website - it is itself a 'sub-community' of all websites.

  • -10

Ah yes, the old "if you don't like it, start your own website" argument.

Then someone does start their own website, and woke people don't like that, and immediately start hitting said website with DDoS attacks and putting pressure on their hosting providers and payment processors to drop them as clients.

You seem to be operating from the assumption that woke people, as a group, actually respect people's rights to hold and express political opinions they disagree with. I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at such a manifestly preposterous idea, when the last 10-15 years of Western politics have largely consisted of woke people loudly and explicitly announcing that they do not.

"if you don't like it, start your own website"

They could and they did! Patriots.win is still up and running. Where do you think you are now?

So you're not even going to acknowledge my point then, cool.

I was responding to you, specifically your smug mockery of 'start your own website', which was silly because that's exactly what they were able to do.

Kiwifarms, though I don't necessarily agree with Cloudflare's decision, was clearly not just banned just for its ideological proclivities.

More comments

The singer in my band is emigrating, so I'm looking for a replacement. I posted an ad on Facebook and on a local forum. I've never had any luck finding band members on Reddit, but I figured there'd be no harm in trying, so I found the subreddit for my country and posted the ad. It read something like "Looking for a lead singer for a band in [city]. Powerful vocals and good stage presence are a must. Experience in a recording studio, rhythm guitar skills and own transport are a plus, but not essential."

The first reply was "Hi, I'd like to join your band! The only thing is, I have no experience in a recording studio, don't have a car, can't play the guitar, don't live in [city] and I can't sing."

Har de har har, hilarious. I immediately remembered why (and how much) I hate Reddit, and deleted the post.

Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world.

I guess StackOverflow really is dead.

It's full of 110 IQ misunderstood geniuses who are smart enough to signal how smart they think they are but not smart enough to actually say much that's novel or interesting, and the more a Redditor does it for free, either as a mod or as a groupthink enforcer, the larger his karma/e-peen. So it selects for midwits with nothing better to do than farm karma and play reputation games. Any subreddit about $THING with more than >100 users quickly gets swamped with these people and stops being primarily about $THING. The Iron Law strikes again.

Thanks for linking that post, it was very entertaining and perfectly encapsulates a particular type of extremely online Western male in his twenties or thirties. In the description of "second option bias" I was thinking of Scott's "intellectual hipsters and meta-contrarianism", and it's linked in one of the top comments.

There usually are other places that you can ask your questions but nowhere that offers such a broad range of topics to such a large userbase with such a low barrier to entry and all in one place. That was always a double-edged sword but it progressively swings further towards the low effort = low quality side.

In terms of content it used to be like HackerNews and now it's like Facebook. People don't go there to discuss questions, they go there to reassure each other they're in the right.

The scale of users means you get increasingly squeezed between the opposing forces of shitposters and overworked moderators. So they get a lot of idiots asking questions and a lot of replies that assume anyone asking questions is an idiot, and then the mods have to spend time cleaning it up instead of building out better tools that might help prevent those questions.

It doesn't help that Reddit's search has been shit forever. The sorting algorithm and karma system also incentivise repeating popular questions no matter how any times it's been asked before. And instead of fixing search to improve the UX for existing users Reddit prefers to chase new users by gamifying and appifying, while marginalising their smarter users (who might have contributed a lot of the better quality content but didn't represent much/any value to their revenue).

I've had the same experience many times. A lot of redditors are just itching to talk down to someone or try to prove they're smarter than you.

I don't know if reddit has changed or I have. I used to browse it daily on my commutes and I posted regularly. I had numerous comments gilded. I got in one of those mega karma subs. Then last year or so I deleted everything with a third-party app (or tried to. Reddit just wiped my name but resurrected some of my comments for some reason.) I don't know what happened but part of it I suspect is the userbase has seen a lot of old users getting quieter and new aging up users taking over. The mod nannying is uncanny--even benign comments are sometimes deleted for seemingly no reason. It's odd, I agree.

It is a microcosm of the world of man; it is a little voodoo doll of society.

As above, so bellow; and then you add in GIFT(https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies) and you get reddit.

It's not that reddit is bad, it's that social interaction is bad when you take down all the screens and rules and protections imposed by the other person being in front of you and having the ability to eg hit you with a big rock.

The karma system rewards conforming to the majority group think, so it's constantly selecting for the most banal least spicy take.

Further, the site depends on a zillion moderators to police content. This is a thankless, unpaid task, so the only people interested are Karens or proto-Karens who lust for petty power which let's them put their thumb on the scale of which lame takes win.

Reddit was braindead without Schwartz, IMHO it just took longer for everyone to notice the smell.

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