we think of gribbly gods from Deep Time as residents of the undersea trenches because our sensory organs aren’t adapted to it and the limbs are different there but actually continental crust is generally much older than oceanic crust, So
above, there is a place where the water is very thin, so thin that it can’t be used to move through; your body has to pull itself along as it’s pulled by gravitational forces. the thinness of the water is very much like the spaces between the stars, and your body would push out against it until you burst. the ground, which everything hugs, is older there - aeons older
it is bathed in energy emitted from the decay of “fires” (do not ask) sent out from unimaginable distances - all that lives there lives off the putrescence of distant holocausts
Basically, microwaves operate at 2.45 GHz because that’s the most efficient wavelength for heating food. A small band from about 2.4 - 2.5 GHz was carved out and set aside for “idk, microwaves and shit,” and ended up being just about the only convenient spectrum left available for unlicensed devices to operate on by the time WiFi was invented.
TL;DR WiFi has an obnoxious noisy roommate because all the fancy licensed transmitters got the quiet rooms first.
Since this seems to be a thing, here’s how a promethea acquired a social life:
> Be born to the shittiest R-tribe shithole that ever R’d > feelsbadenbie.png
Depression +1 Self-esteem -1
> Be too good for school > In other words, have your childhood completely wasted on trivial bullshit because nothing is a worthy challenge > Not even being the best in [redacted] even though you thought you totally sucked in it; others simply sucked even more
Achievement unlocked: Less incompetent than everyone else Cynicism +1
> First experience with pornography: /d/ and /u/ on 4chan > sm0lethea gets extremely unrealistic expectations about future sexual parters, such as “they might be really pretty lesbians, some of whom have penises”
Lesbianity +1
> Finish school one year younger than most, thus being too young for some [redacted] awesome stuff. Finland: not even once.
Cynicism +1
> Go to university at 17 because you didn’t have the opportunity to finish school several years earlier than most > A surprise ADHD and anxiety disorder appears
Depression +1 Self-esteem -1
> Find LessWrong back when the sequences were still fresh > Be so jelly > Nonetheless manage to win free utility by realizing you’re not a man while still young, androgynous and neotenic > Can pinpoint the exact location of “The 12 Virtues of Rationality” which made you basically be like “okay I know where this is heading so I might as well go there straight away”
Lesbianity +1
> Doctors gonna doctor > In other words, bullshit gatekeepers > Get your own meds illegally
Cynicism +1 Depression -1 Will to Power +1
> Customs steals your meds
You have acquired the following item: Criminal Record Achievement unlocked: Fight da power Edginess +1
> Yell at doctors until they give you meds > It’s not very effective > Buy meds on the street
Edginess +1
> Get a private doctor who only cares about money to give you meds
Cynicism +1
> Find a person, who due to her lack of known tumblr presence shall be simply called E, on the internets > She’s in America, neither has money to fly across the pond > Agree to have cuddles when either has money and opportunity
Lesbianity +1
> Go change your name > The state be like “lol nope” > Forge some documents to change your name > The state be like “okay then”
Cynicism +1
> Go change your legal gender and have your gonads cut off > State-sanctioned monopoly clinic is like “lol nope, not ryal wymyn ynough” > (Previously on state-sanctioned monopoly clinic: “of course you can tell the truth, it won’t hurt you”)
Depression +1 Cynicism +1
> Yell at people online
Edginess +1 You have acquired the following item: Fan Club
> Wait, what’s that, how did this happen > Yell at some other people
Will to Power +1 You have acquired the following item: Political Following Depression -1 Self-esteem +1
> Wait, what’s that, how did this happen > Find yelling at people less interesting now, read from its downsides on SSC
Edginess -1 Achievement unlocked: update on evidence
> Go back to state-sanctioned monopoly clinic, yell at them and threaten to sue them, and the state, and everyone > Suddenly extremely cooperative > Get a lot of scaremongering about how nobody will let disgusting enbies change gender or be operated even if they have the mandatory doctors’ letters > Find out nobody outside the GIC gives a shit or even knows the difference between F64.0 and F64.8 and they were just bullshitting you as always
Cynicism +1
> Get random message on the internet > It’s E, she has money and opportunity and is coming for the cuddles now > No contact in over 2 years > No activity in my account in over 2 years > She’s nuts > Her coworkers think she’s nuts > She thinks she’s nuts > There’s a pretty strong consensus on that > She’s a quantum physicist, a rocket scientist and a silicon valley programmer > I’m a NEET > nopressure.png
use Fan Club use Political Following use Criminal Record
> Somehow she’s impressed by my stories > Wait, what’s that, how did this happen
Self-esteem +1
> Read stuff on SSC > “But as a proud black transgender triracial inverse bisexual anti-monogamite…” > There apparently is someone like that, lemme check them out this sounds entertaining > Wow
You have acquired the following items: GWWC Pledge; Basic Comprehension of Yiddish; Knowledge of Your Obvious Nemesis; No Regrets
> E comes to visit > Proves to be an actually existing person
Lesbianity +1
> On the second morning we’re discussing importing me to SF > Programmers make how much money over there
You have acquired the following item: Future Prospects
> SF is also the place where all the cool people live > They are actually existing persons > I am going to be where the cool people are > There is only one rational way to respond to this situation > nopressure.png > Stories are currency, right? I’ll just bargain for popularity because they seem to be worth something
use Knowledge of Your Obvious Nemesis use Political Following use GWWC Pledge You have acquired the following items: Tumblr Account; 2 Party Invitations You have gained the following superpower: Assertiveness and Confidence Self-esteem +1
> justasplanned.png > Go to SF > Meet the people > #it me everywhere
You have acquired the following items: Social Life; Place That Feels Like Home; Immigrant Status You have gained the following superpower: Programming Skills You have lost the following attributes: Depression Self-esteem +1
> Return to Finland > Illfare state bullshit everywhere > Desperate to get back to SF ASAP because everything is better there
Will to Power +1 You have leveled up the following superpower: Programming Skills
do you ever wonder what people say about you behind your back but like in a good way? like what are the #reviews
new ask meme: send me these #reviews 👀
Semi related but a nice habit I’ve been trying to get into is if I talk about someone with my friend in real space in a nice way is - right then, or immediately after - go send that person a message about what I said that I liked about them. Maximize #reviews
That question could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, anon. I assume this means something like “do you identify with Team Isreal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Last time I looked into the issue with any degree of effort I can to the conclusion that both sides had fucked up a lot, and that determining who has the more legitimate claim to a piece of land is often a hopeless quagmire.
If it’s something like “do you support the continued existence of Israel,” then yeah, I’d rather not force people to live through a change in regime.
If you mean “should the Jewish population get to have its own ethnic state,” I lean toward yes. “But then shouldn’t Europeans and Christians get that too?” I don’t think so.
I’ve been thinking recently about how atomic communitarianism works for majority and minority populations. Consider gay bars. Nearly everyone who doesn’t just oppose homosexual behavior outright seems to think they have at least some useful function. Whether or not they should get to exclude cishets is more controversial, but most progressives lean toward yes. Opponents will obviously point out that allowing this but not allowing cishet-only bars seems unfair. Supporters reply that “the whole world is a safe space for cishets!” This last reply is true for two reasons that I think we don’t distinguish between often enough.
Firstly, our society is still rather homophobic, even if this varies in degree, so gay and trans people have an interest in being protected from that sort of thing that cishets don’t. Secondly, unless there’s some very surprising and scientifically interesting demographic shift, gay and trans people will always be in a minority, and will never make the whole world a queer-only space in the way that cishets often can even without trying. This also happens to be true of Jews, since Judaism is by and large a non-evangelistic religion.
Thinking about this some more, I think I’d be okay with letting majority groups have their own dedicated spaces as long as there a limit to how much total space they take up. I am, for example, perfectly okay with the existence of Vatican City, and I wouldn’t have a problem with them declaring themselves to be a Catholics only zone. The problem is when exclusive spaces get big enough that you can’t avoid them or they take up all of a given category. So straights-only bars would be okay with me as long as they only made up a small minority of the bars that were out there, and as long as they didn’t end up being used for business meetings to keep out gay people or whatever. This is obviously a much harder standard to reach in a small town than in a big city. I’d be much more comfortable having bakery #3757 in New York City refusing to cater for gay weddings than Joe’s Baked Goods which serves the entirety of Podunk.
I think this works as a meta-level rule, but I’m not sure how confident I can be endorsing it yet. I’d love to hear critique on it.
as a twitchy ambiguously-badbrains Silicon Valley nerd, I don’t really know what to make of the whole radical-belief-that-people-are-women thing we’re all apparently doing this week
It’s the transgenderence explosion. A chain reaction. The right was right. The growth curves are exponential. I wanna be in the FOOM where it happens. People are solving the gender gap in a very Silicon Valley transhumanist way. “Be the change you want to see in the world” and all that. Besides, being enbie is always an option, no need to stay within the binary.
Seriously, although I doubt that EY’s estimate of 20% holds for the general population, the clustering effects and “trans contagion” make me pretty convinced that the frequently quoted “0.3% of the population is trans” is way, way too low, at least if by “trans” we mean “would come out as trans under the right circumstances, and not regret it”.
At my rural Midwestern public high school, my graduating class of 70 people contained 3 who have since come out as trans, that I’m aware of. This doesn’t have the same kind of selection effects that Yudkowsky’s social circle does; a priori, I think there’s no reason to expect my graduating class to have more trans people than any other population in the country. And none of the three of us were related, so genetic explanations for clustering can be discounted.
If we take my graduating class as an experiment testing the null hypothesis "at most 0.3% of people are trans" we can reject the null hypothesis with p < 0.002. I know, I know that’s not how real science works, but… still.
0.3% has already been shown to be excessively low; the current lower bound is roughly 0.7% and predictaby increasing over time:
“based on two population-based surveys, one of 1,832 Flemish persons and one of 2,472 sexual minority individuals in Flanders. In the general population, gender ambivalence was present in 2.2 % of [AMAB]* and 1.9 % of [AFAB]** participants, whereas gender incongruence was found in 0.7 % of [AMAB] and 0.6 % of [AFAB participants]. In sexual minority individuals, the prevalence of gender ambivalence and gender incongruence was 1.8 and 0.9 % in [AMAB] and 4.1 and 2.1 % in [AFAB participants], respectively. With a current Flemish population of about 6 million, our results indicate a total of between 17,150 and 17,665 gender incongruent [AMAB people] and between 14,473 and 15,221 gender incongruent [AFAB people] in Flanders.”
In Rationalist Diaspora pretty much everyone is familiar with the concepts of “Red Tribe” and “Blue Tribe”, and probably at least some of the counterarguments as well, such as “there are more than two kinds of people”. Such criticisms are obviously true, but what’s interesting is the way there seems to kind of actually be two kinds of people, or more accurately, a spectrum which replicates surprisingly consistently in various places and on which most people are positioned somewhere in between but a certain polarization with its archetypes nonetheless appears.
For example, I’m a very Blue person, with moderately Blue parents, born into a thoroughly Red shithole in the Bible Belt of Finland. I was immediately able to recognize this meta-level pattern despite the object-level manifestations differing quite a lot. Around here they are called “Red-Green” and “Blue-White”; I’ll just use “U” and “R” from now on.
Tribe R is relatively uniform, so much that it makes sense to call it a tribe. They yearn for the mythical “yhtenäiskulttuuri” (homogeneity culture) of before-tribe-U-ruined-it. They are white; working class, lower middle class, or petty bourgeois; and more likely men. They vote for the Fascist Party, the Redneck Party, or the Christian Theocrats. They love national symbolism.
Tribe U is better described as a vague coalition of everything that isn’t tribe R. They range from communists to civilized conservatives; precariat to bankers. Disproportionately women. The Green Party is the central example but the Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party, the Swedish Party, the Social Bureaucratic Party, and the Crony Capitalist Party are tribe U as well; support for gay marriage is pretty much exactly the dividing line. They tend to be vaguely embarrassed by national symbolism.
R treats the military as a matter of identity, and enthusiastically supports conscription. They are either militaristic neutral or pro-Russia. U treats the military pacifistically or pragmatically; they support disarmament or NATO.
R opposes the EU on principle; sovereign countries’ rights is a big deal, borders should’ve been closed to foreigners and immigrants even before the arrival of a few thousand brown people made it widely popular, and getting back the old national currency is important. U is pro-EU, or “pro-the-ideas-of-EU-but-not-the-implementation”. Borders should be more open, and immigration easier. Refugees shouldn’t be turned away even if they aren’t eligible for protection.
R is mercantilist; U believes in either free trade, or fair trade which is effectively an extension of foreign aid.
R believes in authority, discipline, obedience, conformity, and tradition. R thinks the problem with today’s kids is their relative inexperience of physical abuse. R wants criminals to be punished severely. U is against all that. U errs on the side of giving people a second chance, and their control of the criminal justice system has so far kept it absurdly lenient in Finland (the one thing I can actually be proud of in this country!). R wants to legislate conformity; U wants to legislate tolerance.
R is xenophobic, U is neophilic. R is fundamental attribution error, U is typical mind fallacy. R thinks people are inherently what they are, while U is prone to blank-slatism.
R is nazism, U is stalinism. R is genocide, U is eugenics. R calls you slurs, U is extremely politically correct while buying a house as far away from you as possible because of “property values”. When an islamist terrorist attack happens, R is very eager to deport all Muslims while U apologizes for causing it (if you’ve seen the “bad Monty Python sketch” post about a European liberal frustrating an islamist by being like “no no no it’s all our fault" it’s exactly how U operates and I’m U enough to be like “yes, I can see why it would appear funny when presented this way but I can’t see why one should not do it").
U correlates with wealth, and U wants to share the wealth. R thinks U’s wealth should be used locally within the country because people should take care of their own kind first. U thinks refugees are more of its own kind than R-tribers. R complains of poor people living on the taxpayer’s money while themselves subsisting on massive regional and agricultural subsidies, paid by U cities.
R feels threatened by their enemy U which wants to destroy their way of life. U treats tribe R as a public memetic health problem to be solved, and wants to eradicate it like hookworm infections. U thinks the only reason people are R is a bad environment, lack of education, poverty, etc. and R should be cured by removing the cause.
R is characterized by a frightened hostility, while U is characterized by a smug superiority. U thinks U is obviously the right way of being, and can whip out a lot of ~science~ and ~statistics~ to support ideas like “children should not be physically abused”. R can only say “fuck you” because it knows it can’t beat U in its own game. U is higher-IQ but also often reluctant to concede that IQ means anything.
False consciousness is a very U idea. When U leftists are sympathetic towards poor Rs, they still show a fundamental disrespect towards R values by explaining that R is only racist because they are downtrodden by global capitalism, and without global capitalism they would turn into the proper multiculturalist U-leftists they should be, and that’s the most U thing ever. An informed adult willingly not being U is simply impossible.
Something seems to be going on, and it’s far deeper than soy latte vs. NASCAR. Some of it is obviously class, but there is still quite a lot that isn’t. It’s definitely not left vs. right because both tribes have their own internal left-right distinctions. “Openness to experience”, aka liberalism, is a big factor; but why would liberalism cause a “we know better than you” attitude. I’m slightly actually confused.
That question could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, anon. I assume this means something like “do you identify with Team Isreal in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?” Last time I looked into the issue with any degree of effort I can to the conclusion that both sides had fucked up a lot, and that determining who has the more legitimate claim to a piece of land is often a hopeless quagmire.
If it’s something like “do you support the continued existence of Israel,” then yeah, I’d rather not force people to live through a change in regime.
If you mean “should the Jewish population get to have its own ethnic state,” I lean toward yes. “But then shouldn’t Europeans and Christians get that too?” I don’t think so.
I’ve been thinking recently about how atomic communitarianism works for majority and minority populations. Consider gay bars. Nearly everyone who doesn’t just oppose homosexual behavior outright seems to think they have at least some useful function. Whether or not they should get to exclude cishets is more controversial, but most progressives lean toward yes. Opponents will obviously point out that allowing this but not allowing cishet-only bars seems unfair. Supporters reply that “the whole world is a safe space for cishets!” This last reply is true for two reasons that I think we don’t distinguish between often enough.
Firstly, our society is still rather homophobic, even if this varies in degree, so gay and trans people have an interest in being protected from that sort of thing that cishets don’t. Secondly, unless there’s some very surprising and scientifically interesting demographic shift, gay and trans people will always be in a minority, and will never make the whole world a queer-only space in the way that cishets often can even without trying. This also happens to be true of Jews, since Judaism is by and large a non-evangelistic religion.
Thinking about this some more, I think I’d be okay with letting majority groups have their own dedicated spaces as long as there a limit to how much total space they take up. I am, for example, perfectly okay with the existence of Vatican City, and I wouldn’t have a problem with them declaring themselves to be a Catholics only zone. The problem is when exclusive spaces get big enough that you can’t avoid them or they take up all of a given category. So straights-only bars would be okay with me as long as they only made up a small minority of the bars that were out there, and as long as they didn’t end up being used for business meetings to keep out gay people or whatever. This is obviously a much harder standard to reach in a small town than in a big city. I’d be much more comfortable having bakery #3757 in New York City refusing to cater for gay weddings than Joe’s Baked Goods which serves the entirety of Podunk.
I think this works as a meta-level rule, but I’m not sure how confident I can be endorsing it yet. I’d love to hear critique on it.
I am somewhat amused that my culture-war dichotomies post has taken off due to people treating it like a personality quiz where you categorize yourself along each axis…
I think it was @worldoptimization who said “Never underestimate the memetic fitness of an opportunity to categorize oneself”. I’m starting to wonder if there’s a carcinisation-like effect there, too.
Luckily I’m one of those people who doesn’t fall for such tricks. Us low-Barnum types should probably stick together to avoid memetic contagion.
It’s an opportunity to do very condensed self-signaling with low effort and an already existing context for interpreting them. Also the dichotomy idea was interpreted as sufficiently sarcastic/non-serious that turning it into shitposting was the Officially Mandatory™ response. Your memetic game was good, even if it was accidental.
The “20th Century” update to Outside did give people a lot of cool new gear, but the changes to the ideology system are totally fucked up. I know the USSR drama was really popular and even got some attention in the non-gamer media but the new simplified ideology mechanism (to make it more n00b-friendly, no doubt) sux0rz. Also, the abrupt plot derail from the promised impending boss fight against the State-Sanctioned Robber Barons into the “everyone splits to two sides, now PvP” filler was complete bullshit and a blatant money grab because the creative team was sitting on their asses unable to figure out meaningful content (”Post-Scarcity” has been vaporware for how long now?). Also, the promised exciting update to organizations was a real let-down because they just took down all the player-created content and replaced it with NPC shit the players can’t meaningfully influence or interact with.
Devs, fire those slackers and roll back to the ideology system of “19th Century” for this update so I can again PvE with libertarians, communists and feminists without needing to be really careful not to accidentally PvP my guildmates because the game engine arbitarily assigns us to different sides.
One of the few fun things about culture war, in my opinion, is how every available territory gets crammed into this absurd dualistic framework so that people can fight about it, resulting in a fascinating assortment of mystic correspondences.
From a sufficiently advanced perspective, all of the following distinctions collapse into a single bit:
Women vs. Men
Hunanities vs. Sciences
Democrats vs. Republicans
Easy video games vs. Difficult video games
Trans people vs. Cis people
Communists vs. Fascists
Black people vs. White people
Literary fiction vs. Genre fiction
Young people vs. Old people
Disabled people vs. Abled people
Tumblr vs. Reddit
Gay people vs. Straight people
American children’s cartoons vs. Anime
Slavenmoral vs. Herrenmoral
Censorship vs. Free speech
Spirituality vs. Hard atheism
Choice-based interactive fiction vs. Parser-based interactive fiction
Secularism vs. Christianity
Poor people vs. Rich people
Relativism vs. Positivism
Any seeming contradictions in these coalitions/basic ontological categories is purely your imagination.
I scored 9 on one side, 9 on the other and 2 I have no idea.
L Women vs. Men
R Hunanities vs. Sciences
C Democrats vs. Republicans
L Easy video games vs. Difficult video games
R Trans people vs. Cis people
C Communists vs. Fascists
R Black people vs. White people
R Literary fiction vs. Genre fiction
L Young people vs. Old people
L Disabled people vs. Abled people
L Tumblr vs. Reddit
L Gay people vs. Straight people
C American children’s cartoons vs. Anime
C Slavenmoral vs. Herrenmoral
L Censorship vs. Free speech
C Spirituality vs. Hard atheism
C Choice-based interactive fiction vs. Parser-based interactive fiction
L Secularism vs. Christianity
R Poor people vs. Rich people
R Relativism vs. Positivism
8 left, 6 right, 6 center/confusion.
L Women vs. Men R Hunanities vs. Sciences L Democrats vs. Republicans C Easy video games vs. Difficult video games L Trans people vs. Cis people L Communists vs. Fascists R Black people vs. White people C Literary fiction vs. Genre fiction L Young people vs. Old people L Disabled people vs. Abled people L Tumblr vs. Reddit L Gay people vs. Straight people C American children’s cartoons vs. Anime C Slavenmoral vs. Herrenmoral R Censorship vs. Free speech R Spirituality vs. Hard atheism C Choice-based interactive fiction vs. Parser-based interactive fiction L Secularism vs. Christianity C Poor people vs. Rich people R Relativism vs. Positivism
9 Lefts, 5 Rights, 6 Center/confusion
I’m gonna guess based on:
American children’s cartoons vs. Anime (?? Slavenmoral vs. Herrenmoral ??) Spirituality vs. Hard atheism Choice-based interactive fiction vs. Parser-based interactive fiction
that this is sarcastic. I’ve yet to see any sustained-for-any-reasonable-time complete cramming of “American children’s cartoons vs. Anime” (there was like that one month, maybe…) into anywhere near the same binary as, e.g., “Woman vs. Men”, and I’ve flat-out never seen either of the other two even argued as opposites (especially not moral opposites? Unless you mean something REALLY different for “spirituality”…).
(”Slavenmoral vs. Herrenmoral” I’ve just never heard of, but from a quick web search which only turned up “Herrenmoral” as “master+morality”, introduced by some philosopher, it looks like this is a classic, deliberately-basically-one-bit dichotomy and also not one discussed very much in the same fights as the others. But I really, really, don’t know, so I’m just leaving it in (??)s and not using it to back my thinking.)
So yeah. I could be totally wrong, but I’m gonna go with sarcastic, maybe trolling, for this.
Oh, it’s definitely not 100% sincere, we’re just taking the survey anyway.
Slavenmoral vs Herrenmoral didn’t get search results because the first term wants to be spelled Sklavenmoral. It’s Nietzsche stuff, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality. AFAIK, both of them are interesting summaries of phenomena but not actually systems you should use for decision-making. Or even identify with, probably. IIRC, Nietzche sounded like he favored the latter, but that might just be because he published a book about how the former sucked that was supposed to be part of a series but then he died? IDK, though.
L Women vs. Men R Hunanities vs. Sciences L Democrats vs. Republicans L Easy video games vs. Difficult video games L Trans people vs. Cis people L Communists vs. Fascists R Black people vs. White people R Literary fiction vs. Genre fiction L Young people vs. Old people L Disabled people vs. Abled people L Tumblr vs. Reddit L Gay people vs. Straight people R American children’s cartoons vs. Anime R Slavenmoral vs. Herrenmoral R Censorship vs. Free speech R Spirituality vs. Hard atheism L Choice-based interactive fiction vs. Parser-based interactive fiction L Secularism vs. Christianity R Poor people vs. Rich people R Relativism vs. Positivism
11 Left, 9 Right, opting out is for the weak. I shall take this ridiculous one-bit framework and bend it to my own will by actualizing myself even within its constraints and defying the very foundations of it.
There are the answers, survey-maker. You may ask them to do whatever you wish. I remain free.
[disclaimer- I’m in a really weird easily excitable mood right now, this is written really weirdly. Will probably be very embarrassed about this later.]
Kira finds link to Slate Star Codex that some person put in a list of their favorite blogs.
It might’ve been in the comment section of Wait But Why, might have been on reddit.
Kira goes, “hmm, sounds cool”.
Kira reads a few of Scott Alexander’s posts.
Kira goes “!!!!”.
Kira binges a good half of his archives.
Kira reads the comments.
Kira goes “Oh my god a comment section that doesn’t make me want to wipe humanity from the face of the earth”.
“who are these people and where have they been hiding for my whole life?”
Kira obsessively stalks SSC’s comment section for maybe a month.
Kira finds LW, the Sequences, and HPMOR.
Kira is useless for the next two weeks, can be seen reading her Kindle, ranting at her Kindle, and threatening to throw her Kindle at a wall.
Kira develops obsession/special interest in anything related to rationalists.
Kira finds Ozy’s blog, Scott’s twitter, figures out he has a tumblr, finds his tumblr, finds Ozy’s tumblr.
“form letters. She has form letters. I can do form letters.”
Kira sends form letter.
Kira freaks out because that’s embarrassing.
Alison responds.
“!!!!!!” thinks Kira.
a few days later:“oh my god she likes me?”
“is this flirting? I think this is flirting”
“how do I flirt back oh my god this stressful”
“wait. did that work. are we actually dating? For real? In real life? Wait, so this means I’m gay. And poly. OK, that’s a thing I can do.”
“!!!!!!!!!”
Kira proceeds to be extremely surprised by this for the next month or so.
Kira then realizes that she can talk to other people.
Kira also realizes that it’s probably a good idea to actually post original content, because people who do that are much more interesting and then people are more likely to talk to me.
I wouldn’t call it unreasonable to be excited by people talking to you. I used to think I was just an introvert and I spent an entire year having basically 0 friends/friend-like acquaintances, and all the social contact I get from the LW Diaspora has been really amazing for me too.
one of the posts i have decidedly not been meaning to write for ages because writing at all is probably unvirtuous is b. about that
it’s actually about “introversion doesn’t really real and if you think you’re an introvert it’s probably just that for whatever reason you find the people around you too cognitively taxing to be worth the effort of interacting with them, and the reason is probably either anxiety or thedish distance, except anxiety is fed by thedish distance.”
So I have no idea what thedish distance is, but as anecdata supporting the rest of your point: Since I’m currently on a terrible caffeine high (because I never learn, apparently), all my social filters and inhibitions are completely down, and I have been absurdly social. Talking to multiple people at once, completely invested in all the conversations, really excited about every single one, not frantically re-reading everything I write worried that it’ll make me look bad, etc. That’s the only reason I was even able to make the original post at all, because I wasn’t worrying about how people would see it. So yeah, conversation right now are unusually easy for me, and if it was like this all the time I would be the most extroverted person I know, assuming an abundance of interesting people. And my entire post up there was me being really really excited about finding so many interesting people, so I doubt that would be a problem.
“Anxiety has fallen asleep at the wheel, send all the messages RIGHT NOW”
My brain seems to split al human beings into “friends” and “not-friends”; with friends being the people I am super confident like me, and not-fiends being literally anyone else. They could definitely like me - it’s just that system 1 wouldn’t be sure they do.
Friends are easy to be around. Friends aren’t mentally taxing to interact with. I don’t need to script to interact with friends. I don’t need to convince myself I have an “excuse” in order to go anywhere near them.
This is not true of anyone else. Be they strangers or classmates; if I’m not completely sure they like me, I can’t initiate any sort of contact without convincing myself that I have a good reason to.
Which is to say that my useless traitor of a brain won’t let me leave my room when my flatmates are about. Ugh.
Anyone know of an epistemological theory besides Objectivism’s that treats context, both in the sense of “the sum of things you already know from which further knowledge can arise/be made intelligible” and in the sense of “the particular goals and scope of action of the knower”, as fundamentally/inextricably an aspect of all knowledge?
Intersectional feminism? Knowledge, aka. reality-based conceptualizations of things, is not independent of the systems within which the conceptualization is done, and the systems themselves lend themselves towards certain kinds of action, and there are knowledges and actions that are effectively impossible within carelessly constructed conceptualizations, and this is kind of a low-effort post so I haven’t bothered to think things through much more thoroughly than “this sounds really familiar” (possibly a little bit relevant link)
Muslims are already detained without cause(CMU’s, black sites,etc)….
Black people make up a significant amount of those in the prison system and our used as a source of cheap labor
Undocumented immigrants ranging from toddlers to the elderly are put into transient detention centers every day.
So for people to talk about Tump’s ideology leading to “camps” is not only insulting it also ignores the grim reality that in 2016 with Obama as president millions of people are incarcerated mostly for political reasons and are forced to work for little to no pay.
You don’t even have to go back to the 1930’s-40’s
Also Indigenous people who live on reservations go to federal court/prison cause the state still treats them like colonial subjects
The election of Trump will be a sudden reminder to the Democratic party that Guantanamo should be closed, drone strikes are a war crime, and there should be strict checks and balances on presidential power, lasting up until the next time they win an election.
I think in most fiction that I read, the hero is confronted with a crisis, and they end up saving everybody. Like in Die Hard John McClane starts as a hostage along with everybody else. In Star Wars, Luke may have joined the Rebellion eventually anyway but in the moment he’s responding to a call to transport the Death Star plans.
Less often do the heros sort of, start the fight. Attack on Titan is maybe one of these cases. Eren and Armin are not responding to a crisis but to the ongoing circumstance of the Titans imprisoning humanity. (Mikasa doesn’t seem to think much about this stuff.) Although even in this case the titans sort of started it by killing Eren’s parents.
In Alicornfic though this is the norm. In Luminosity, Bella basically starts planning a war against the Volturi the moment she hears about them. Whereas in the source material, Twilight, the action side of the plot was more like, “she’s playing baseball with her hot sparkly superpowers boyfriend, fairly content with the state of the world, when a wild serial killer appears.” Luminosity!Bella definitely starts the fight. Like Eren, she’s not responding to a crisis, but to the way things have been for hundreds of years, which she decides to change.
Rhysel too, shows up like “nice Elcenia you got here BUT OH MY GOD THE SHRENS I HAVE TO HELP THE SHRENS”, which you know has been a work in progress for a few hundred years, not some sudden crisis instigated by a villain like you usually see. Talyn has the more traditional story when he fights off the demon. But he responds to the ongoing problems of Ryganaav, and then for most of the rest of his story he’s dealing with problems that he created.
So, many Alicorn heros become heros by deciding to fight against an ongoing circumstance that people have gotten used to, just like Eren and Armin. Whereas I think in most fantasy fiction the heros become heros by responding to an emerging crisis that threatens to upset the status quo. (though in Star Wars, while Luke is responding to an emerging crisis, he is still fighting to change the status quo.)
The most alicornish thing I’ve read outside of Alicorn is I think the subplot in The Sorcerer Royal, where the main character visits a school for magical women, where they are mostly taught how to suppress their magic because magic isnt proper for a woman, and he’s immediately like, “well clearly I have to reform women’s magical education,” and immediately sets to work. The action of the story is mainly not about this, it’s about all the attempts to kill him and the crisis of magic beginning to fade from England. But taking up a cause like this against an ongoing usual circumstance is not something I usually see in fantasy fiction outside of alicornfic.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looked like it was going to be like this. Harry showed up to the wizarding world and wass like, “here’s my list of things wrong with this situation.” But then he didn’t really pursue them, and the story stuck to the source material of dealing with Voldemort invading the school for the Sorcerers Stone.
OH MY GOD THIS HAS BEEN BOTHERING ME SO MUCH THOUGH
Like you I haven’t read much Alicornfic yet, but reading stories that always end with the hero right where they started after a massive struggle is sort of mentally exhausting after a while.
Yes! I’m a villain because most people operate on the assumption that heroes defend the status quo which villains try to change. Fuck that.
Also, looks like I need to read Alicornfic when/if I have time for such things.
How many of these rationalist activities do you participate in more than three (3) times a week? Check all that apply.
* Cuddle puddle with rationalists
* CFAR orgy
* Swimming around in a giant pile of money like Scrooge McDuck
* Secret world government meeting with all-you-can-eat snack bar
How many of your current romantic partners did you meet through LessWrong?
* 6 or fewer
* 7-10
* 11-25
* 26-100
* More than 100
* Not sure/too many to count
Approximately how much do you donate each year to GiveWell’s recommended charities? Please state your answer in tens of millions of dollars.
My actual answers:
How many of these rationalist activities do you participate in more than three (3) times a week?
>Cuddle puddle with rationalists
How many of your current romantic partners did you meet through LessWrong?
>7-10
Approximately how much do you donate each year to GiveWell’s recommended charities? (Please state your answer in tens of millions of dollars.)
>Just you wait. Just you wait…
LessWrong surveys be like
Provides quick definitions and links to Wikipedia for terms like ‘Feminism’ or ‘Conservative’.
Does not provide a definition or a link for the term ‘epsilon’.
LessWrong surveys be like
Where are you from?
* Big Anglosphere * Old Anglosphere * Cold Anglosphere * Opposite Anglosphere * Finland * Somewhere else
What is your IQ?
* +4σ or more * between +3σ and +4σ * between +2σ and +3σ
Traditionally we have been perceived as being over 90% male, but recent evidence has forced us to reconsider whether there actually are any men at all among us. Please select which of the following matches you:
* I’m a trans woman * I’m nonbinary * I’m a man but I’d rather be a woman and I’m just scared of being trans * People think I’m a man but I don’t think I’m a man * I think I’m a man because everyone else thinks I’m a man and I think that’s what being a man means, right? * I think I’m a man because my biological features are commonly associated with men but nothing else matches and I just haven’t thought that deeply about the implications * I’m just a twitchy, ambitious, ambiguously badbrains Silicon Valley nerd * I’m AFAB
19. I don’t recall what I got when I read Coming Apart (and took the quiz there); I noticed that they updated the movies and the TV shows, as is appropriate.
9.
I guess I picked up a few points eating at Waffle House and Outback when I go visit my family. :) But I had to guess for that part because it’s not like I know the exact numbers.
13, which is funny because I work with and for a lot of people who do all these things, just not me or my family and friends.
4.
Unsettling.
20 when adjusted for immigration and nonetheless I’m feeling like my past is characterized by an uncomfortably extreme exposure to the not!bubble. Also this generalizes between countries astonishingly well; a cultural translation is needed to make it comparable but everything was obviously “yes, I know what they’re talking about”
Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles’ struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn’t induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.
When I worked at a game story, there were plenty of popular games by private companies that were impossible to get in stock (or get enough in stock to meet demand).
That’s why abandonware needs to be pushed into the public domain, or at least have mandatory licensing or something. Original maker not supplying the demand? Get out of the way and let someone else do it. The only reason a board game shouldn’t be manufactured is if nobody is willing to pay the printing costs, otherwise it’s just artificial scarcity.
(It would probably also help if scaling up production was more flexible, but at least private companies have a direct incentive to meet the demand. Aesthetically my brain thinks all games’ rules and basic data should be available on the internet for free and the price would be paid for the physical product, but that’s probably not enough to make it an imperative “should” even if it would be awesome and very post-scarcityish.)
I mean, I agree with you regarding copyright being an interference with the free market, and that being at least part of the problem.
I wasn’t talking about abandonware games, though; often enough popular games (especially if they’re new and unexpectedly popular, but not always even that) were unavailable even if when they’re nominally in print.
Also worth noting, Kolejka/Queue apparently does have the rules posted on online. This does happen for privately produced games sometimes, but I’d say it’s the exception rather than the rule.
I consider drastic inability to supply the demand to be “effectively abandonware”; I don’t really see a reason why such popular games shouldn’t be licensed for production by other manufacturers, at least temporarily while production is scaled up, to satisfy the customers. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sold somewhere, if it’s realistically unavailable for most.
As long as the forcibly licensed versions note clearly that they aren’t made by the original manufacturer and there is a reasonable time for the OM to react to surprise demand (for example something like 6 months to a year; short delays make sense but having something chronically unavailable is a market failure) I think it might be close to strictly superior, even if copyrights aren’t abolished altogether.
Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles’ struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn’t induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.
When I worked at a game story, there were plenty of popular games by private companies that were impossible to get in stock (or get enough in stock to meet demand).
That’s why abandonware needs to be pushed into the public domain, or at least have mandatory licensing or something. Original maker not supplying the demand? Get out of the way and let someone else do it. The only reason a board game shouldn’t be manufactured is if nobody is willing to pay the printing costs, otherwise it’s just artificial scarcity.
(It would probably also help if scaling up production was more flexible, but at least private companies have a direct incentive to meet the demand. Aesthetically my brain thinks all games’ rules and basic data should be available on the internet for free and the price would be paid for the physical product, but that’s probably not enough to make it an imperative “should” even if it would be awesome and very post-scarcityish.)
Freddie deBoer writes a white paper supporting standardized testing in colleges.
His position is that private colleges need to be held accountable and
we need proof that online courses don’t work, but American Interest points out
that it might break the power of education-industrial complex if people
who go to less prestigious institutions have an objective way to prove
they’re just as good as people who went to more prestigious ones. And I
will add that it might incentivize colleges to admit based on something
vaguely resembling merit if they want higher test scores. Overall this
would be amazing it it happened.
Um, but… We already have this in the Caribbean? Because we’re halfway civilised? Do you mean to tell me Americans are barbarians who let random colleges do whatever? If you don’t test your colleges, what are they even for? How can you know how a student at one college compares to one at another? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS???
I think I’ve determined the main trade-off between the Caribbean and the US: Sure, we’re poor; but when we design an institution, it isn’t fucking stupid.
I know I’m biased as someone who is, I think, reasonably smart and capable and does v poorly on standardized tests, but the idea that more standardized tests will force institutions to admit based on merit is ridiculous ime. Like with subject GREs, it will give schools an easy but inaccurate metric so they can avoid actually judging merit or potential.
As someone who does well on standardized tests, I also think that they are pointless as actual assessments. IMO the things that may make me successful in academics are exactly the things I had to learn to suppress to pass standardized exams. Logic, analytical skills, creativity. I think @quasitree is just not as good at suppressing her brilliance / perhaps her brilliance surpasses mine (the latter has always been my theory).
…Are your standardised tests really really different to mine? Like, as far as I can tell, logic, analytical skills, creativity, and depth of knowledge of the subject area are what I’ve been tested on?
Like, typical chem question would be something like: “You run a laboratory and have been given samples X, Y, and Z to identify. Their characteristics are [description]. Your budget is limited, so you can only devise one testing regimen to apply to all the samples. You can use some or all of [list of apparatus]. Design and justify an identification process with explanations of the principles behind each stage of chemical testing, cost effectiveness, the trade off between accuracy and efficiency, and the level of confidence you can expect for your identification.”
[cue me furiously writing four pages while cursing several deities]
I mean, if building and justifying your own experiments from scratch isn’t evidence of understanding chemistry, is their literally any observation you could make that would give you information about someone’s chemistry proficiency? If not, I still have to wonder what colleges are for because, for all we know, they aren’t teaching shit and no one can tell.
This response is based on one year of high-school chem with an above-average teacher in a 30-person classroom, and one semester of college-level intro chem in a 350-seat lecture hall (twice-weekly lectures, with a corresponding twice-weekly 30-seat ‘recitation’ period to explain the lecture and a once-weekly 30-seat lab period). This is also drawing on years of PSAT and SAT tests, and on the AP Calculus AB test.
In my experience, in the US, standardized tests are designed to make the jobs easy for the graders.
Your “typical chem question” would be the end-of-test essay question, and would be preceded by 25 to 50 multiple-choice questions requiring you to regurgitate facts about various compounds and their properties. Then, there would be around 25 multiple-choice questions where you would solve chemistry-related math or balance chemical equations. These two sections would all answered by filling in the bubbles on scantrons. If there is a short-form free response series of questions, (if!) then there will probably be no more than 5 of the free-form response questions, and your answer must fit within the designated area on the form. Your final answer (if it is a math problem) must have a box drawn around it: This is a standardized test. Priority is placed on the graders’ ability to grade your test.
Finally, there is the longer essay, which is again limited by space. When I took the SAT, the writing space available for the essay question on the writing section was about equal to one and a half single-sided pages of college-ruled paper. It was not a lot of space to write a 1-3-1 essay, and if your response wasn’t in the 1-3-1 format, if you were taking space to explain your arguments and to back them up with knowledge not included in the test form (this practice is encouraged), then you are more likely to run out of paper. If you write large, you’re more likely to run out of paper.
In the AP Calc AB exam, there was still a lot of bubble-filling. But there were more free-form responses, and at the end were six word problems, of which you were allowed to choose three. Each response was allowed to take up half a page of the printed workbook. You could use scrap paper to work, but all logic required for your response needed to be in the workbook.
The chem course I took in college was the not-remedial intro-to-chem course. You were expected to have memorized the speed of light, and you were expected to use 300,000,000 m/s as an acceptable substitute, because it would simplify your calculations and allow you to finish the test faster.
About half the class did not finish the average exam. The average exam grade was 75% correct, a ‘C’. ‘C’ is a grade in the middle of the scale from the top scores, marked ‘A’, to any failing grade, marked ‘F’. ('E’ is skipped for legacy reasons, except where 'E’ is used in place of 'F’ because 'F’ hurts children’s feelings. I’m not kidding.) (Letter grades are still tabulated from point scores in order to convert point scores to GPA scores, which are a 0-4 scale that is used in college admissions, in inter-school comparisons, and in entry-level job placement.
That chem course was explicitly designed as a weed-out course, to deflect people from the Chemistry department’s majors.
In comparison, my high school: with ~65 people taking the course in three sections, the (delightfully sadistic) teacher didn’t use scantrons. (It would not be cost-effective at this scale.) There might be 10 multiple-choice or true-false questions at the start of the text or exam, but the remainder of the test was all short-answer or essay questions, where you were expected to explain your reasoning. If there was an extra credit question, you were expected to be creative in your response.*
This teacher’s methods would not work in standardized testing, because this teacher’s methods required effort on the part of the grader. The grader would need to understand the question, the solution, the student’s answer and the student’s reasoning behind their answer.
Your “typical chem question” can’t be scaled up to deal with ~10 million students per year.
And thus, why standardized tests suck.
* One Intro to Engineering final exam was one question, whose prompt was as follows**: You awaken to find yourself in a locked room the size of this classroom (25 feet by 75 feet). There is a door in one corner. At the opposite end of the room is a weighty metal desk. On the desk is a cardboard file box containing one (1) fully-disassembled AK-47 and one round of ammunition. Next to the box is the AK-47 user manual, printed in Swahili. In 15 minutes, a hungry Bengal tiger will be introduced to the room through the door. Explain how you will survive the tiger and escape the room.
** If you recognize this teacher, go say hi! He likes hearing stories of our adventures.
For college-level standardised tests in the Caribbean, there would be two separate papers per subject area, plus a portfolio.
For the first paper, which receives lower weight in your grade, you would have to answer 60 multiple choice questions. If this is chem, they’ll be split between chem math and “what would you expect to happen if [chem thing] were done?” type of stuff. This is generally ~25% of your grade. It’s not thought too highly of and mostly exists as a check on the other bits. If you do really well on one type of assessment while flunking the others, someone calls your school and asks what’s going on.
Paper II would have 2-3 questions of the type I described, plus 20-30 (depending on subject) short-answer questions that would definitely require creativity to figure out. This would be ~35% of your grade.
Finally, there’s the School Based Assessment. This is a portfolio of projects that the Caribbean Examinations Council required you to do as part of your class during the year. In the hard sciences, this is mostly a write up of labs (some of which you design). In the social sciences, a research paper. In Computer Science, code. This was the final ~40%.
Then, at the end of the year, your school ships all this stuff to CXC head quarters. Additionally, since this is the summer vacation, some of your professors will also get shipped to CXC head quarters. There begins the super labour-intensive multi-week process of grading every exam paper and portfolio.
The papers are divided up and distributed among the graders. Physics professors get the physics papers; lit profs get lit; etc. Everything is broken up into pieces and assigned a serial code so you don’t know whose paper you’re grading.
If you are confused by an answer or find it ambiguous or think it doesn’t fit the rubric, you flag it as such and a panel of other professors in your field will look it over and come to a consensus grade. A couple of the grades you give will also be randomly submitted for review to make sure you aren’t grading too far out of line with the rubric.
After all this is done, the grades are distributed to the colleges. Then the colleges hand grade slips to the students. Then the professors are allowed to go home. I have been told that, if the review panels think you’ve been marking unfairly, they drown you in the caves in Barbados and you never see your family again. However, I’m sure that’s just a myth…
And this, of course, can only be done because the body that tests every college has been officially elevated as the Education Tsar by each Caricom government. This is one of those areas where I am kind of doubtful about a private corporation being able to do it. No one but the government is allowed to exile all the professors each year and drown them in the caves if they fail. The only rule of survival is don’t go into the caves academia.
Accred Inc. starts with a significant capital investment. It devises this kind of a testing regime, offers it for a four-digit price per student, and conducts a lot of studies on how the test scores predict things like “will this person actually know how to do their job”. The testing regime is optimized for predictive power. Accred pays good money for people from the academical precariat to get sufficient expertise for the review process.
Blind review is utilized, and a lot of ~statistics~ is run on the answers to see if people can eg. recognize the characteristic style of some institutions, or the race or gender of the person answering, or any other irrelevant characteristic, because it can introduce biases. The aim is to have the answers be completely statistically indistinguishable when controlled for quality, so that the reviewers can’t cause conscious or unconscious favoritism. Reviewers are scored on their adherence to the consensus and those who deviate are dropped like uber drivers; reviewer scores might also be automatically adjusted so that if #526 tends to give everyone half a point less than the consensus the system gives it back if doing so improves the predictive power of the standardized testing.
Now, everyone who cares about work performance has an incentive to use Accred. Employers can hire equally skilled workers from less prestigious institutions; a cheap college + Accred fees saves students money compared to an expensive college; and expensive colleges need to prove they are worth the money.
Accred can use the fuckload of money it starts with to prove the superiority of objective standards in the media, it hires some really smart people who figure out how to spin it into a social justice issue (protip: it should hire me) of evil rich people pushing down competent poor people while simultaneously presenting it as “hey businesses, here’s a way to get free money by hiring smarter than the competitors” in a clever left-right pincer movement.
It clashes with the established education-industrial complex but thanks to ~free market magic~ it inevitably comes out as the winner because ~incentives are aligned~ (read: the VCs funding it pull some strings behind the scenes with their buddies) and it can use data to discredit any cheaper competitors who try to use less stringent standards for easier grading, and becomes a precarious monopoly which is profitable but must keep up with the demonstrable objectivity so that someone else doesn’t figure out how to do better than it.
One issue I can immediately perceive is that if Accred is cartelled out by prestigious professors and institutions and gets a reputation as a second-rate service for second-rate students, but even then a brutal focus on predictive power could show that even less prestigious graders can do a good job, and prestigious students could be offered money to defect and get tested and show that their credentials are less important than their score.
The biggest problem might be if the ~cathedral~ declares Accred evil and racist (~completely unlike~ the big name schools with their legacy admissions for incompetent whites and affirmative action aka. asian quotas) because black people score worse on average, and it gets regulated away like IQ testing. To pre-empt this, Accred needs to play the SJ card in its opening salvo, “we didn’t cause black people to test worse, the System is failing them but we developed a method to measure it so that now we can find out what actually helps with the achievement gap”, and put the establishment on defense. (protip: hire me to help with it) Furthermore, sufficiently reliable blind testing could reduce biases in employment when test scores can be given more weight than subjective evaluations. Self-taught people could test against those with degrees, and credentials could lose their importance in favor of measurable competence.
I totally see how it could possibly be done as a private enterprise, as long as it starts with enough money to afford the initial investment in proving its effectiveness with data. Anyone got Peter Thiel’s phone number?
horrifying fun fact of the day: so greenwich village, which is the neighborhood in nyc where the stonewall riots took place and which was a v important gay center from like the 50s-80s, is now super swanky and full of touristy boutiques and expensive apartments and stuff. st vincent’s, the local hospital which had the first aids ward on the east coast, closed a couple years ago and is being replaced with luxury condos. all of this is sad enough, BUT i just found out that one of the reasons it’s so gentrified now is that the aids crisis was really awesome for real estate. ppl were dying in thousands and leaving empty apartments behind, which their landlords would then rent at higher prices until only rich ppl could afford to live there :)
elaphaia said: also during the aids crisis landlords would shut their heat off in the winter knowing it would kill ppl so they could then rent 4 higher :-)
Reminder that the cishet dominated government didn’t just ignore the effects of HIV/AIDS because of how concentrated the deaths were in other communities because they hate us, but also because they materially benefited from it - because they owned most of the buildings, because our partners and other kin had no legal right to our possessions, and because they commodified and monopolized antiretrovirals to bilk us.
In “rent control leads to weird results” …
(Obviously, if people are purposely messing with the heat system, that’s horrible, but “people pay lots of money to rent apartments in nice regions” doesn’t seem like a giant problem.)
Like, I don’t think areas magically become gentrified as soon as you get rid of rent control. There almost certainly isn’t rent control in, say, Alison’s hometown, and yet it has not been gentrified. All gentrification seems to mean in areas that used to have more rent control is that space goes to whoever has the most money instead of whoever showed up first and has the most bureaucracymancy?
This. Rent control doesn’t prevent gentrification, it just sucks. Stockholm has total rent control, meaning that pensioners who can wait 20 years to get an apartment can have 60 m² in the most prestigious areas for 700€/month, and businesses move out and economic growth fails to happen because high-skilled workers can’t live anywhere. Helsinki has market rate rents so the equivalent might cost 1500€/mo but at least it’s available.
My favorite solution would be to recognize that existing rent control has de facto created property for the tenants, and formalize it as a bostadsrätt entitlement lasting, say, 10 years. Bostadsrätt basically means “whoever owns this may rent the apartment for the below-market rate specified here” and most importantly, it can be bought and sold. Now evicting BMR tenants without compensation is theft, but they can be bought out for a fair price and don’t need to desperately stick to the one place they found for really cheap.
For example, if someone is renting an apartment for $1000 but the market would pay $2000, their 10-year bostadsrätt is worth roughly $100 000. The landlord could buy it from them, effectively destroying it, and rent the place to someone paying the market rate, resulting in a fair transaction for all, instead of trying to find a sneaky way to evict them. This would be a huge windfall from landlords to rent-controlled tenats but landlords can easily take it because they themselves have reaped huge windfalls from the rise in rents. Plus opening the markets for new development would benefit the property owners as well, so basically the only ones who would really lose are those who can’t do the sneaky eviction tricks any more (it’s one thing to fight a court case against a poor family, and completely another thing to fight a court case against a poor family you’ve obviously stolen six digits of currency from).
In a twisted logic, assuming basic economic rationality, this might be enough to break the political coalition of property owners and rent-controlled tenants, eliminating the latter’s incentives to be hostile towards new development, and aligning them with the market rate tenants and tech industry instead. Result: rent markets become healthy, new development becomes possible, and instead of suffering unfair sneaky evictions rent controlled tenants get a lot of money and can choose between living in pricey areas or moving to less expensive ones and using the difference for something else.
Today’s hottest news in Finland: White man burns down centuries-old church to protest “influx of barbarian hordes coming to destroy our priceless cultural traditions”
Freddie deBoer writes a white paper supporting standardized testing in colleges.
His position is that private colleges need to be held accountable and
we need proof that online courses don’t work, but American Interest points out
that it might break the power of education-industrial complex if people
who go to less prestigious institutions have an objective way to prove
they’re just as good as people who went to more prestigious ones. And I
will add that it might incentivize colleges to admit based on something
vaguely resembling merit if they want higher test scores. Overall this
would be amazing it it happened.
Um, but… We already have this in the Caribbean? Because we’re halfway civilised? Do you mean to tell me Americans are barbarians who let random colleges do whatever? If you don’t test your colleges, what are they even for? How can you know how a student at one college compares to one at another? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS???
I think I’ve determined the main trade-off between the Caribbean and the US: Sure, we’re poor; but when we design an institution, it isn’t fucking stupid.
I know I’m biased as someone who is, I think, reasonably smart and capable and does v poorly on standardized tests, but the idea that more standardized tests will force institutions to admit based on merit is ridiculous ime. Like with subject GREs, it will give schools an easy but inaccurate metric so they can avoid actually judging merit or potential.
As someone who does well on standardized tests, I also think that they are pointless as actual assessments. IMO the things that may make me successful in academics are exactly the things I had to learn to suppress to pass standardized exams. Logic, analytical skills, creativity. I think @quasitree is just not as good at suppressing her brilliance / perhaps her brilliance surpasses mine (the latter has always been my theory).
…Are your standardised tests really really different to mine? Like, as far as I can tell, logic, analytical skills, creativity, and depth of knowledge of the subject area are what I’ve been tested on?
Like, typical chem question would be something like: “You run a laboratory and have been given samples X, Y, and Z to identify. Their characteristics are [description]. Your budget is limited, so you can only devise one testing regimen to apply to all the samples. You can use some or all of [list of apparatus]. Design and justify an identification process with explanations of the principles behind each stage of chemical testing, cost effectiveness, the trade off between accuracy and efficiency, and the level of confidence you can expect for your identification.”
[cue me furiously writing four pages while cursing several deities]
I mean, if building and justifying your own experiments from scratch isn’t evidence of understanding chemistry, is their literally any observation you could make that would give you information about someone’s chemistry proficiency? If not, I still have to wonder what colleges are for because, for all we know, they aren’t teaching shit and no one can tell.
That’s way way way better than I’d have expected standardized tests to be. Finland is famous for faring well on international evaluations yet nonetheless our standardized tests are way shittier than that; and some countries allegedly even use the “guess the teacher’s password from options A to D, rinse repeat forever” type of standardized testing because it standardizes really well while not testing anything worthwhile at all. Caribbean testing is first-class, and the US really should import the geniuses who run that system and prevent it from crumbling to box-checking because wow.
OMG. This is like my dream job. Social interaction! Getting to know a new person! Making shy people happy! Getting paid for what has basically been the best part of being in the Bay! Where do I sign up?
I mean, sure, meeting the average socially awkward person is probably less fun than meting the average rationalist - but it seems so overwhelmingly well suited to my skill and interests that I would almost certainly like it as a job.
If only there was some way for me to contract with such a service. Any start up geeks want to build an Uber for friendship?
I would actually kinda like to make this idea work, but you are the only sufficiently extroverted person i know to do this job. I’m not sure how I would go about finding people to actually do the thing.
Clearly, we need to scout for more extroverted people in their natural habitats.
Like, at parties, or something.
We need someone who would be willing to go to a crowded place and speak to large numbers of people and sell them on a crazy idea.
Oh, whoever would be willing to do such a thing?
Startup geek reporting in. My current skills might best be described as YGM but I’ve got the entrepreneurial spirit and the drive to get. shit. done. and I’ve heard that even failing in a startup is universally considered good experience and a powerful way of learning things.
Also, Troll is so amused by the potential job description “Friendship Pimp”
I asked topher where the pretty noise came from; he said it was a wind chime
I asked topher how we make sure that the pretty noise keeps happening; he says the wind has to blow the right way; I am sad because I cannot make the wind blow right, and thus the wind chime will stop chiming
this has been a demonstration of the concept of dukkha
Fans exist, as do stores that sell wind chimes.
this has been a demonstration of the concept of transhumanism
“When I hear the phrase “workplace coercion,” the first thing I think of is employee theft, estimated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at over $50 billion a year.”—
Tyler Cowen, economics professor at the George Mason University
American libertarians scarcely need to be caricatured.
I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece. How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the context of a boss wishing to search an employee?
When I was seventeen, I had a job in the produce department of a grocery store. They made me wear a tie. They did not let me curse. Even if there was no work at the moment, I could not appear to be obviously slacking for fear of setting a bad example. They had the right to search me, including for illegal drugs. I suspect that “contract indeterminacies” gave them other rights too.
The company kept each and every one of its promises to me and they paid me on time every two weeks. The company also taught me a lot. I honor that company to this day. I also did my best to keep each and every promise to them.
What I did observe was massive employee shirking, rampant drug use including what appeared to be on the job, regular rule-breaking, and a significant level of employee theft, sometimes in cahoots with customers.
I understand full well that’s only one anecdote and only one side of the picture, and yes the company did fire vulnerable workers and quite possibly not always with just cause. Still I get uncomfortable when this other side of the story is ignored. When I hear the phrase “workplace coercion,” the first thing I think of is employee theft, estimated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce at over $50 billion a year.
Charming, huh? Those dirty fucking proles don’t need any fucking “workplace freedom”, and should in fact be just grateful to their betters, his point is.
I mean, very little fucking surprise here - It Is Known, and my outrage would look positively stupid… but this was in the context of someone asking why more social justice supporting people aren’t embracing a libertarian identity. Because non-left libertarianism looks, sounds and acts like cackling villainy, that’s why. Walmart employees: the real problem with society!
If these findings in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are generalizable to the rest of the U.S. low-wage workforce of 30 million, wage theft is costing workers more than $50 billion a year.
Libertarianism seriously needs to stop being rich white men’s identity politics club. They might be correct on many things, but they won’t get anywhere if they always feel the need to point out that “hey, we still hate the poor, or at least don’t care if a lot of people perfectly justifiably interpret us that way”.
1 and 6 are (partially) valid arguments, and the whole issue is caused by the lack of the workers’ bargaining power when the supply of employment is artificially constrained and they have only the theoretical, not the practical, freedom to switch to someone who doesn’t expose them to such indignities.
People are assholes, so it’s not a surprise that those controlling the capital other people’s livelihoods depend on use their power in assholish ways, and the linked article contains a massive number of things that can best be described as “egregious contract violations facilitated by inequal power and material deprivation”. A set of default contracts that can be deviated from with mutual informed consent might help with this, so the employer would have to specify “you’ll work for me, but you’ll also not have freedom of speech or bathroom breaks” explicitly and see how long they last against PR and unions-as-intended, but ultimately the solution needs to involve reducing people’s material dependency on the boss.
And even if not having workplace regulations is a desirable goal, setting priorities doing things in the right order is kind of relevant for the outcome. Abolishing oppressive policing, coercive requirements for welfare, harmful regulations and corporate subsidies are far more important concerns than whether or not people can “freely” contract away their bathroom breaks.
Unintentionally, the game is a living example of that world because it is produced by the Polish government. The Institute of National Remembrance, a state body created in 1998 to preserve memories of Poles’ struggles against Nazism and communism, gets money to produce Queue from the national budget. Overwhelming demand hasn’t induced bureaucrats to fund a production increase.
million-dollar idea: therapists specializing in anxiety who give an option to make appointments online
“Doctor, my leg hurts, I can barely walk”
Doctor: “okay but I will need you to run this 15k before I can see you”
This. It has been literally easier to get involved with awesome people from the Bay Area IRL, despite originating from the other side of an entire ocean and having practically no money, than to get a therapist. Judging from the results, probably way more useful too. Guess which one the government would’ve been willing to subsidize.
“The virtues of the poor may be readily admitted, and are much to be regretted. We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid. I can quite understand a man accepting laws that protect private property, and admit of its accumulation, as long as he himself is able under those conditions to realise some form of beautiful and intellectual life. But it is almost incredible to me how a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.”
21-year-old
Otto Warmbier,
another man from Ohio who last week was convicted of subversion for
stealing a propaganda banner in North Korea, and sentenced to 15 years
hard labor. […] my mother’s callous reaction to Micahel
Fay’s sentence is my reaction to another young white man who went to an
Asian country and violated their laws, and learned that the shield his
cis white male identity provides here in America is not teflon abroad.
It goes on to talk about how acting recklessly in North Korea is a side effect of having been raised in the US with white privilege and says that, effectively, he deserves whatever he gets.
No! Bad! WTF is wrong with you?Are we so stuck in a crab bucket mentality that, when oppressive power comes down on an arbitrary member of the out group, we have to celebrate it?
Coming from a country filled with citizens who lambaste black victims of
state sanctioned violence by telling us that if we obey the law, we
wouldn’t have to face the consequences, Warmbier should’ve listened. […] And if Eric Garner
is to be blamed for his own death for selling loose cigarettes or if
Sandra Bland is dead because she failed to signal when changing lanes,
then Otto Warmbier is now facing a decade and a half of hard labor
because he lacked both good judgment and respect for the national
autonomy of a country which has made its hatred for and vendetta against
America unequivocally clear.
Yep, nothing but crabs in a bucket. “A member of your tribe has to suffer the arbitrariness of state violence, because members of my tribe do, too!” Eric Garner shouldn’t have been killed. That was terrible. Nobody should be treated so despicably by a “justice” system.
But that fucking means ‘nobody’. The world isn’t made a better place by “balancing out” the suffering of one group of people with the suffering of another. It isn’t improved by an attitude that laughs gleefully whenever Those People come to harm.
And if your social justice sees oppression and says “Hooray! The hated out group is bleeding”, then there is no ‘justice’ in you.
And if your social justice sees oppression and says “Hooray! The hated out group is bleeding”, then there is no ‘justice’ in you.
I think this is the most #endorsed statement anybody has ever made to me about sj.
[Epistemic status: I do not endorse all the positions outlined in this post, and I stated several more strongly than I normally would.] [Unrelated donation request: Here is a GoFundMe for my friend Katie Cohen, a mentally ill rationalist single mother, and her daughter Andromeda. They are struggling and helping out would mean a lot. Come on, libertarians! Do that nonstate social support!] As far…
Getting really tired of political arguments that are just about how (un)virtuous a particular faction is.
I truly don’t care how you feel about Democrats or Republicans or
liberals or libertarians or conservatives or leftists or SJWs or MRAs or
rationalists or feminists. If there’s a belief or pattern of behavior
you want to discuss which is associated with a particular group, by all
means talk about that. But if your thesis is ultimately about praising
or condemning the group rather than saying something about the specific
beliefs or behaviors, I usually won’t have any idea how to evaluate your
claim or any good reason to try.
For example: If you say “There’s
a common belief among libertarians that the prices set by a free market
are the morally correct prices. I think that’s incorrect and harmful,
and here’s why,” then great! We can discuss that idea, its philosophical
basis, and its consequences. You might manage to convince someone who
previously believed in it to change their mind. Someone might accuse you
of attacking a strawman, but it should be easy enough to show that some
people actually hold the belief you’re talking about.
On the
other hand, if you say “Libertarianism is terrible because it claims
that the prices set by a free market are the morally correct prices,”
then you’re going to end up arguing about how many libertarians actually
believe that, who actually counts as a libertarian, what beliefs are
essential to “the libertarian worldview”, how someone’s actions might reveal
a belief in a particular principle even if they don’t state that it’s
true, etc. These discussions are difficult, contentious, and almost
completely pointless. At best, they can change how someone chooses to
label their beliefs. But how someone labels their beliefs is a lot less
important than what they actually believe, and you’re not going to make any headway on the latter as long as you’re arguing about what counts as libertarianism.
(This
was written with the assumption that when you debate, you’re attempting
to change someone else’s mind –either your interlocutor’s or a third
party’s– but it’s just as applicable if you’re trying to test and
clarify your own opinions. If you have no hope of changing anyone’s
view, even your own… I don’t want to tell you how to live your life,
maybe what you’re doing is enjoyable and/or healthy for you. But please
keep it away from me.)
like im trying to think who would NOT benefit if dresses and skirts were universally accepted as gender-neutral clothing? and i think the answer is: it would be good for all of us
This might make it harder for trans girls to pass as girls. They might get more “cool dress man” type statements.
Yes. This. This is a thing. This is a very important thing. Gender-coding is very important to people with strong genders.
what if systems of meaning are actually good
what if everyone had a gender symbol tattooed on their foreheads that took priority over whatever clothes they were wearing huh what then punk
assign a color to each gender and have its members use / wear that color preferentially
or we could have a complex system that combines color options with different clothing fashions and even hairstyles and accessory choices to indicate gender!
wait-
Or we could stop gender-coding to give the trans girls plausible deniability to experiment with, switch to universal pronouns and aim to diminish the importance of gendering, while letting people be what they say they are. Cherry-picking a single example of gender systems that benefits trans people is kind of like saying that drone bombings aren’t that bad because one target was actually planning to hurt people. The benefits of gender-coding to some people with strong genders don’t necessarily come anywhere near to outweighing the harms of gender-coding to other people with strong genders, and all people without strong genders. For example, I know quite a many trans guys who still want to wear dresses but are having a lot of trouble with it because it leads to misgendering.
