Hey I’m gonna start a new ask meme: Come into my inbox and tell me what you think my “Type” is

Think not that it has escaped the attention of your author that in the two or so years since she left the Bay Area and cast off the mantle of “Bay Area trad girl,” it has been taken up, and in no small way–on the contrary, there seems to be a growing base of support for a sort of trad worldview among the Silicon Valley set.
The chief difference, I think, from the way that I was trad in my youth is that the thing I was reacting to was “hookup culture.” For whatever reason, that was big in the magazines and such at the time in a way that it isn’t today, accompanied by lots of hand-wringing. But more than that I actually experienced it some: not firsthand, but many friends were participants, and seeing its effects on friends and acquaintances was part of what pushed me toward trad at the time.
I think it’s not even quite that I came to think I was wrong about that part of trad (other parts, maybe) as much as it just became less salient to me as I got older and hookup culture became a less common feature of life.
The people involved are older, so it makes sense that the new Silicon Valley brand of trad would be older, too: the depredations it’s reacting to aren’t those of hookup culture but those of serial monogamy. Its tenets:
contemporary dating culture encourages:
serial, monogamous, multi-year relationships with no strong expectation of or timeline for marriage
high expectations and a search for “the one”
this is dumb
you don’t need several years of dating someone to know if you’re compatible: if you’re optimizing for finding that out you can do so relatively quickly
an excess of choices leaves people unsatisfied/always holding out for something better
serial monogamy norms waste a lot of time and emotional energy
people are better off, more secure, and more able to build stable connections in a relationship they know is intended for the long term
therefore people should
date with marriage in mind
optimize for determining compatibility quickly and then either get married or break up
plausibly use a matchmaker, or have arranged marriages
What do I think about all this? I don’t know; honestly it just feels a bit boring to me these days now that I’m out of my trad phase. But it seems probably at least kinda right.

@kaumnyakte:

in the same sense that BAP is feminism for men, default friend is the incel movement for women
“we need to bring back arranged marriages because i can’t get a man to commit to me” rhymes with “govt-issued gfs”

hmmmmm fair I think that’s part of what was giving me a weird vibe about this

otoh Moldbug has been endorsing it lately

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 661502704485597184

Date: 2021-09-05 16:08:59 GMT

Body: Think not that it has escaped the attention of your author that in the two or so years since she left the Bay Area and cast off the mantle of “Bay Area trad girl,” it has been taken up, and in no small way–on the contrary, there seems to be a growing base of support for a sort of trad worldview among the Silicon Valley set.

The chief difference, I think, from the way that I was trad in my youth is that the thing I was reacting to was “hookup culture.” For whatever reason, that was big in the magazines and such at the time in a way that it isn’t today, accompanied by lots of hand-wringing. But more than that I actually experienced it some: not firsthand, but many friends were participants, and seeing its effects on friends and acquaintances was part of what pushed me toward trad at the time.

I think it’s not even quite that I came to think I was wrong about that part of trad (other parts, maybe) as much as it just became less salient to me as I got older and hookup culture became a less common feature of life.

The people involved are older, so it makes sense that the new Silicon Valley brand of trad would be older, too: the depredations it’s reacting to aren’t those of hookup culture but those of serial monogamy. Its tenets:

contemporary dating culture encourages:

serial, monogamous, multi-year relationships with no strong expectation of or timeline for marriage
high expectations and a search for “the one”

this is dumb

you don’t need several years of dating someone to know if you’re compatible: if you’re optimizing for finding that out you can do so relatively quickly
an excess of choices leaves people unsatisfied/always holding out for something better
serial monogamy norms waste a lot of time and emotional energy
people are better off, more secure, and more able to build stable connections in a relationship they know is intended for the long term

therefore people should

date with marriage in mind
optimize for determining compatibility quickly and then either get married or break up
plausibly use a matchmaker, or have arranged marriages

What do I think about all this? I don’t know; honestly it just feels a bit boring to me these days now that I’m out of my trad phase. But it seems probably at least kinda right.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 659495171463036928

Date: 2021-08-14 12:20:06 GMT

Body: sure Hamilton was cool but did you know Thomas Cromwell was both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Principal Secretary to the King

so, in modern parlance, treasury and state

Tags: #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 659482408833417216

Date: 2021-08-14 08:57:15 GMT

Question: why did you leave JS?

Answer: I loved it but I thought doing this would be higher EV

Tags: #personal, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 659482321842487296

Date: 2021-08-14 08:55:52 GMT

Body: honestly this is so uncool but I love it when fiction has representation of literal girlbosses. like women managing people and running stuff. I’m like omg it me

Tags: #women less likely, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 659021536970326016

Date: 2021-08-09 06:51:53 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

there’s this interesting property of some gender role stuff where like
take Valentine’s Day. there’s a cultural expectation that women want to celebrate it and men don’t. so whether a couple celebrates Valentine’s Day, and how extravagantly, is a signal of who has more power in the relationship, and thus social status and attractiveness more broadly
and thus the expectation is self perpetuating, because both men and women are rationally incentivized to have these preferences regardless of whether they did in the first place

I’ve been obsessing over Liz Bruenig lately partly because I enjoy watching her navigate these dynamics. There’s an elegant mix of signaling (“weddings are stupid, just get married at City Hall Iike I did”) and countersignaling (“I make Matt’s favorite food for him every day :) :)”) but ultimately I guess most people just think she’s a self-hating misogynist tradwife anyway

Post ID: 659021028499111936

Date: 2021-08-09 06:43:48 GMT

Body: there’s this interesting property of some gender role stuff where like

take Valentine’s Day. there’s a cultural expectation that women want to celebrate it and men don’t. so whether a couple celebrates Valentine’s Day, and how extravagantly, is a signal of who has more power in the relationship, and thus social status and attractiveness more broadly

and thus the expectation is self perpetuating, because both men and women are rationally incentivized to have these preferences regardless of whether they did in the first place

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 658422895644639232

Date: 2021-08-02 16:16:44 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been enjoying Matt Yglesias’s substack for a while, but didn’t get around to reading this until now, because the premise sounded kind of boring at first or something.

But reading it I was basically like “okay, I’ve never fully thought through this before but now that I do it all just seems clearly right and it’s crazy that More People Aren’t Talking About This.”

The basic argument:
- it is better for the US to be the most powerful country in the world than for China or India to be
- there’s various second-order factors that go into this but the biggest thing is: how big is your economy
- at current trends China will overtake the US soon (or maybe has already done so depending on how you define things)
- growing the economy faster is hard and growing faster than China is near impossible given that the difficulty of growing increases as GDP per capita gets higher
- trying to make China poorer would be very bad from a humanitarian perspective
- otoh growing the US economy by increasing the number of people would not be that hard and we’re not really trying to do it

Not that any of this is the most important thing, but as opposed to other important things which are often weird and unpopular this seems like it should be popular, because most people in both parties want America to be great and don’t want China to become more powerful than us.

I guess people just intuitively have some weird Malthusian zero-sum mentality where more people -> less for us. You see it on the right when people worry about immigrants taking jobs, and on the left when people say that having kids is bad for the environment. When like, having more people also creates all kinds of positive externalities for other people that I guess are less intuitive.

Maybe the most striking illustration of this was a quote from a Trump official on immigration: “Why do we need more people? For the extra traffic congestion? More crowded classrooms? Longer emergency room and TSA lines?”

It’s interesting that the founding fathers didn’t fall into this trap even though their pre-Industrial Revolution world was in reality way more Malthusian than ours. Thomas Jefferson said, “the present desire of America is to produce rapid population by as great importations of foreigners as possible”; it seems like they mostly thought that increasing our population was important to the long-term security and prosperity of America.

View all my reviews

some numbers, because I was kinda unsatisfied with the lack of numbers here:

the US population is currently growing at a rate of 50 bps/year or so

this breaks down into: +1.2% from children
-1% from deaths
+30 bps from net immigration

China’s population is also growing at a similar rate but their population growth rate is plummeting and if current trends continue they are expected to start shrinking soon
seems like China’s GDP is likely to get at least close to ours in the net 10 years but looks neck and neck after that: they’d prob still be growing faster per person than us but maybe outweighed by shrinking population
if Americans started having the number of kids they say they want rather than the number of kids they actually have, we could more than double our population growth rate to 1.1%
this would mean a ~20% bigger population by 2050: 450m vs current projected 380m
but obviously would take at least 20 years before these kids start becoming economically productive
we could get the same level of growth with people who are immediately economically productive by letting in 3x as many immigrants as we do currently: from 1m/year to 3m/year
this would make our rate similar to Canada’s
the majority of our immigrants are people with family in the US: we have roughly the same rate of those as Canada relative to population
refugees are a pretty small group of both: the main difference is in economic immigrants. we accept fewer than Canada despite having 9x the population
we could potentially increase immigration way more than that: apparently 150m people worldwide say they would immigrate to the US if they could
but doing a lot more than 3m/year seems kinda risky/experimental

so Not an Economist but some toy graphs I made with numbers I googled:

current projections:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/8be458c5df3c2f575b0c4f96fba7203e/cf3ed747594dfa3b-ec/s540x810/a088e41fa9de71d81d337a01cdf018721b69dd69.png

with 3x current immigration levels:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/6bb7dacc846ab91bedab98c4f75058d3/cf3ed747594dfa3b-e4/s540x810/907cc0d82c62a083ce53ed73bc1b377018b80983.png

Tags: #goodreads, #immigration cw

Post ID: 658417593743523840

Date: 2021-08-02 14:52:28 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/855fcb317a22054f2203b6dfdea79f55/ec244447a2f81579-f4/s540x810/bfea13d568c4bd598c51161f5f028e90f21ee737.jpg

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been enjoying Matt Yglesias’s substack for a while, but didn’t get around to reading this until now, because the premise sounded kind of boring at first or something.

But reading it I was basically like “okay, I’ve never fully thought through this before but now that I do it all just seems clearly right and it’s crazy that More People Aren’t Talking About This.”

The basic argument:
- it is better for the US to be the most powerful country in the world than for China or India to be
- there’s various second-order factors that go into this but the biggest thing is: how big is your economy
- at current trends China will overtake the US soon (or maybe has already done so depending on how you define things)
- growing the economy faster is hard and growing faster than China is near impossible given that the difficulty of growing increases as GDP per capita gets higher
- trying to make China poorer would be very bad from a humanitarian perspective
- otoh growing the US economy by increasing the number of people would not be that hard and we’re not really trying to do it

Not that any of this is the most important thing, but as opposed to other important things which are often weird and unpopular this seems like it should be popular, because most people in both parties want America to be great and don’t want China to become more powerful than us.

I guess people just intuitively have some weird Malthusian zero-sum mentality where more people -> less for us. You see it on the right when people worry about immigrants taking jobs, and on the left when people say that having kids is bad for the environment. When like, having more people also creates all kinds of positive externalities for other people that I guess are less intuitive.

Maybe the most striking illustration of this was a quote from a Trump official on immigration: “Why do we need more people? For the extra traffic congestion? More crowded classrooms? Longer emergency room and TSA lines?”

It’s interesting that the founding fathers didn’t fall into this trap even though their pre-Industrial Revolution world was in reality way more Malthusian than ours. Thomas Jefferson said, “the present desire of America is to produce rapid population by as great importations of foreigners as possible”; it seems like they mostly thought that increasing our population was important to the long-term security and prosperity of America.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #immigration cw

Post ID: 658106115976019968

Date: 2021-07-30 04:21:40 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

baconmancr:
worldoptimization:
I feel like I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the relative importance of things, you know?

I wanna start doing something like: whenever I hear someone mention a problem, or read about it on twitter, or think about it and get annoyed, try and calculate how bad it is and place it on a list.

I started this today and here’s what I have so far: numbers are really bullshit but I feel like it can be nice to just try to get the relative senses of things?

Keep reading
May I ask why you picked wild fish suffering? Was it just easier to calculate than all wild animal suffering, or would it somehow be easier to address? Who is talking about wild fish suffering that prompted you to add it to your list?
yeah it seemed easier to calculate just for fish :P
my vague impression is that there aren’t actually that many wild mammals and birds, so to the extent wild animal suffering is a big problem it’s prob coming from fish, insects, and other dumber animals.
I don’t think anyone was talking about it, I just added it on as a natural comparison to factory farming. I was trying to just do proportional to number of neurons as a dumb baseline prior (idk if that’s the right way to think about it or if I got the numbers right)

argumate
how big is human suffering in general given that there are eight billion of us?

the total human QALYs/day is 21m: that’s 120x my farmed chickens number and 20x my wild fish number.

if you think that moral weight is sublinear in number of neurons, then you can get that chickens are higher relative to humans, but also of course that wild animal suffering is way higher relative to farmed animal suffering. (looks like if you do square root you get that humans are 6x as important as chickens and wild fish are 5x as important as humans)

idk, seems not obvious to me how the total of present-day human experience compares in importance to present-day wild animal experience. farmed animals seem less important either way, but also seem way more tractable than either humans or wild animals

there are some old Carl Shulman blog posts about this

is this using those trillion dark fish they discovered down in the deep?

yeah idk I just took the first result I got from google …

now that I look more closely it is unclear to me if anyone has any idea how many fish there are and if so who

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 658103335625392128

Date: 2021-07-30 03:37:28 GMT

Reblogging: baconmancr

Body:

baconmancr:

worldoptimization:
I feel like I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the relative importance of things, you know?

I wanna start doing something like: whenever I hear someone mention a problem, or read about it on twitter, or think about it and get annoyed, try and calculate how bad it is and place it on a list.

I started this today and here’s what I have so far: numbers are really bullshit but I feel like it can be nice to just try to get the relative senses of things?

Keep reading
May I ask why you picked wild fish suffering? Was it just easier to calculate than all wild animal suffering, or would it somehow be easier to address? Who is talking about wild fish suffering that prompted you to add it to your list?

yeah it seemed easier to calculate just for fish :P

my vague impression is that there aren’t actually that many wild mammals and birds, so to the extent wild animal suffering is a big problem it’s prob coming from fish, insects, and other dumber animals.

I don’t think anyone was talking about it, I just added it on as a natural comparison to factory farming. I was trying to just do proportional to number of neurons as a dumb baseline prior (idk if that’s the right way to think about it or if I got the numbers right)

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 658078464052772864

Date: 2021-07-29 21:02:09 GMT

Body: haven’t been to the AMNH in ages so went while in NY and my review is: it sucks

was mostly in the American Indian and Pacific peoples halls and they mostly did the thing I hate of portraying indigenous history/culture as:

this indigenous people did X (during what time period did they do X? unclear)
then Europeans came and disrupted their traditional ways of life

with little acknowledgment that:

these cultures were not static before Europeans came: there was history and dramatic change, technology evolved, empires rose and fell
there was lots of migration and displacement before Europeans arrived, with later-arriving groups often coming into conflict with groups that were already there
pre-European settlement had significant impacts on nature/the environment

sample explanations, paraphrased:

“the Rapa Nui lived on Easter Island and built giant stone heads. in 1722, the arrival of Europeans disrupted their traditional way of life” (wait I think there was some other stuff in there)
“the introduction of European horses allowed the Plains Indians to hunt bison much more effectively … [a few sentences later] unfortunately the overhunting of buffalo by the European settlers who moved west led to the diminishing of bison populations, threatening the Indian way of life” (I don’t even know what the breakdown of bison hunting was but like, it feels like there’s an inability to conceive that the increased capacity of the Indians to hunt bison might have contributed to the decrease in bison populations?)

Post ID: 658076058841694209

Date: 2021-07-29 20:23:55 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/28770b28d28bae1a3767821a2405495d/bf5d24068aff8fe6-63/s540x810/5125d3fc33e7a7c04368fbe12ed54ac78d6cd99e.jpg

Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, The Sleep You’re Missing, The Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy by Julie Holland
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I picked this up in a bookstore despite low expectations because I was interested in the topic, and I think it managed to somewhat exceed them.

The thesis is roughly: women tend to be different from men as a result of our differing hormone balances (and other factors both biological and cultural, but we’re focusing on the hormones here).

We tend to be:
- better at communication
- more empathetic
- more sensitive, with stronger emotions, more frequent mood changes, and lower tolerance for physical pain
- more conflict-averse, making us better at conflict resolution

These things are natural and fine, but they get stigmatized and medicalized by our patriarchal society, leading to the higher rates of depression and anxiety diagnoses in women. Medications, particularly hormonal birth control and SSRIs, can basically smooth women’s hormonal fluctuations and blunt our sensitivity, at the cost of the upsides.

She offers anecdotes such as a patient who called her crying from work asking to up her SSRI dose. When she dug into the reason why, she found out that the patient’s boss had yelled at her in front of a group of people and she had been embarrassed to break down crying. Instead of increasing the dose the patient agreed to talk to her boss and ask him to bring up issues more respectfully and privately.

My takes on all of this:
- I’m not sure how much I trust any of the science. I was expecting Cosmo-level and I think it was decently better than that: there was plenty of “well some studies on this show X, but others find no effect,” and despite the initial impression of anti-SSRI, anti-HBC polemic her actual view seems to be “these medications are super useful for lots of patients and I prescribe them often, but the effects vary by patient, many have negative reactions, and on the margin I think they’re overused.” nonetheless I’d take all the studies cited with a grain of salt
- a lot of the conclusions ended up being pretty boring “exercise and sunlight are good for you and have fewer side effects than SSRIs” type stuff
- the more interesting conclusions were stuff like “stress is a natural response to high pressure situations and isn’t in itself bad: it only becomes bad if you believe that it’s bad” (supposedly there were some studies showing this idk)
- I am kinda intrigued/convinced by the main thesis: I think to some extent I perceive a male-typical emotional range as “normal” and worry that deviations from that make me “crazy” or “too emotional” when it’s actually fine
- I felt unsatisfied by the conclusions though and ended up wanting more: like what does accepting that anxiety or mood swings are natural and okay look like, exactly?

Other random notes:
- It portrays estrogen as feel-good and progestin as depressing. Is this right? If so should we be more wary of progestin-only birth control?
- I liked the paean to crying: “Crying allows us to deeply feel what we’re feeling and then move on. It is a crescendo that naturally leads to a denouement of intensity. For most women, this depth of feeling is a birthright … have you ever noticed how often women apologize for crying? In part it’s because men are uncomfortable with expressed emotion, and so they, and we, have been socialized to shut it down.” It also points out that since men are a lot worse at identifying emotion than women, crying is practically useful since it’s the clearest signal men have that a woman is upset.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 657897512708046848

Date: 2021-07-27 21:06:00 GMT

Body: I feel like I don’t spend nearly enough time thinking about the relative importance of things, you know?

I wanna start doing something like: whenever I hear someone mention a problem, or read about it on twitter, or think about it and get annoyed, try and calculate how bad it is and place it on a list.

I started this today and here’s what I have so far: numbers are really bullshit but I feel like it can be nice to just try to get the relative senses of things?

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/a3656324fb5d01bdd886084639e4674c/08fdfad365ee8ea6-29/s540x810/c83a3111b253bf08f2f2acd835d657faf643f1c3.png

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren, #cw: prob generally offensive I guess

Post ID: 657810053117755392

Date: 2021-07-26 21:55:52 GMT

Body: dumb question what are the best sources on like effects or lack thereof of childhood environment on later life outcomes? I know there’s like The Nurture Assumption but idk what else

Post ID: 657805954637791232

Date: 2021-07-26 20:50:44 GMT

Body: if Ravenclaw is gonna have riddles to get in I think the other houses all having passwords is kinda lame

how about:

Slytherin having a finger prick blood test
Gryffindor requiring you to face one of your fears
Hufflepuff has nothing, they just let everyone in

Tags: #HP

Post ID: 656691139620044800

Date: 2021-07-14 13:31:13 GMT

Body: honestly the best fictional moralities are like

bad guy = fuck I hope I wouldn’t do that, but I’d be really tempted

good guy = fuck I hope I would do that, but it’d be really hard

Tags: #worth the candle

Post ID: 656690746644185088

Date: 2021-07-14 13:24:58 GMT

Body: ok at first I was kinda ehh on the Bethel rape plotline, because it felt so after-school-special. Rape Is Not Okay, Men Can Be Raped Too, everyone reacting in 100% appropriate ways and Believing the Victim and being maximally considerate and understanding.

then over time I became more sympathetic to it. well yeah, it wasn’t okay! Bethel is a shitty person! and yeah people should be considerate and Joon shouldn’t have to keep interacting and working with his rapist no matter how valuable her talents are, and you don’t need a reason beyond “because fuck that.”

so anyway I’m now fully on board with the plotline because the initial treatment just made the ultimate Bethel forgiveness arc hit harder

“being a good person means forgiving your rapist, and fighting for them when someone tries to hurt them because they’re a person with feelings and that’s all that really matters” is such a classic fucked up Worth the Candle moral but like it’s true

Tags: #worth the candle spoilers, #rape cw, #strong warning for both

Post ID: 655954860241502208

Date: 2021-07-06 10:28:22 GMT

Question: What happened with BTC-HASH-2021Q2? No volume?

Answer: ya

Post ID: 653704891049623552

Date: 2021-06-11 14:26:05 GMT

Body: success is when people no longer attribute your social inadequacy to your deep-seated personal flaws but rather to “oh she’s a quant”

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 653027663146024960

Date: 2021-06-04 03:01:50 GMT

Body: I wanna be annoyed about Valencia having a baby and thereby becoming lame because it feels like some Problem of Susan bullshit

but I guess Amaryllis also had a baby and it was not at all lame

owned by Alexander Wales and his diverse cast of female characters with different experiences etc :/

Tags: #worth the candle spoilers

Post ID: 652076974806876161

Date: 2021-05-24 15:11:03 GMT

Body: if Hermione Granger can be a general in one of Quirrell’s armies I can send a message asking some guys if there’s been any progress on the thing

Tags: #personal, #r a t i o n a l i t y, #I started rereading HPMOR for some reason

Post ID: 652076638435262464

Date: 2021-05-24 15:05:42 GMT

Question: Oh no does Mom know Miss Manners is pro-air conditioning?

Answer: why are you, my sister, choosing to communicate with me through tumblr anon ask

Post ID: 651993731183116288

Date: 2021-05-23 17:07:55 GMT

Body: I was browsing a bookstore the other day and came across a Miss Manners book, from the 90s, about the culture wars. So of course I had to get it and mine it for insights to help us during our current time of strife.

There are a some things that were hot-button issues in the 90s that just feel totally resolved today.

smoking. this seemed really big, like there was a time when everyone was either upset about people smoking or upset about people not wanting them to smoke. I guess the anti-smoking side just won that one
first names. lots of drama about when it was appropriate to call people by their first names, is it sexist/racist to call a woman/black person by their first name (because would you do that to a white man??) feel like the first names have won this.
swearing. again, I think this has just been resolved in favor of swearing.

And then there are some issues that are obviously still hot-button issues today:

The way race is talked about is interesting. It was clearly an issue on people’s minds back then too. But the way people were thinking and talking about it was really different: it feels like somehow people were actually talking about it in a way they don’t today? Like today there are two sides that don’t talk to each other, and one of them isn’t even talking about race, it’s talking about how you can’t talk about race. But back then there were people on both sides writing to Miss Manners not about how they were angry or exhausted but just trying to figure stuff out: black people asking how to respond to racist remarks, or white people asking how to respond to the black men who are always catcalling them (Miss Manners gently points out that race is irrelevant to this question before going on to answer it).

Workplace sexual harassment was big too. Miss Manners’ take is roughly

some guys are just dicks, and that’s bad
other problems result from misunderstanding and miscommunication around changing workplace norms, and see, this is why we never should have gone down the road of workplace informality and casual Fridays in the first place

And yeah I guess people are finally starting to come around and agree with her on that one huh.

She also takes the opportunity to lay out a clear definition of etiquette and explanation of her role:

“manners” = the principles underlying systems of etiquette. these are universal (eg “show respect in a house of worship,” “guests should respect a host’s home”)
“etiquette” = culture-specific systems of rules to express these principles (eg “take your hat off in a church”/”put a hat on in a synagogue”, “take your shoes off in a Japanese house”/”leave your shoes on in an American house”)
etiquette does and should change over time to keep up with other technological and social changes, but gradually (due to its culturally foundational nature)
Miss Manners’ role is to chronicle and explain etiquette, as well as arbitrating when changes are necessary
etiquette can be divided into three categories: regulative, symbolic, and ritual
regulative = how to resolve conflicts or adjudicate differing preferences: similar role to the law, but for situations below the level of legal involvement (who pays the check at dinner, what do you do when someone cuts you in the grocery store checkout line)
symbolic = rules that seem arbitrary: their purpose is to allow signaling respect/conformity or defiance by following or breaking them (what do you wear to a formal dinner or a business meeting; do you greet people with handshakes, cheek kisses, bowing, etc)
ritual = purpose is to “provide an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally reassuring sense of social belonging” (protocol for weddings, funerals, etc)

Examples of etiquette rules changing:

non-smoking becoming the default for gatherings unless all guests are comfortable with it
precedence for eg giving up a seat on the bus going from gender-based to purely based on age and disability

She pushes back against people who criticize her as being anti-freedom by arguing that etiquette is actually conducive to freedom. She thinks the declining respect for etiquette is in part responsible for regulatory creep and the increasing impulse to make everything bad illegal; she instead argues for keeping more minor infractions in the realm of etiquette, and enforcing etiquette by:

practicing it oneself
teaching it to one’s children
making admission to voluntary associations dependent on following a system of etiquette (everything from marriage and friendship to parties one hosts to clubs or professional organizations)
for the worst infractions, public disapproval and shaming

On political correctness:

PC = condemning things for being racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted
this can be done appropriately or inappropriately: Good PC or Bad PC
her principles of good PC:
responses must be proportionate and consider intent, so people are not severely condemned for minor mistakes
a rule must first be argued for and widely accepted before you can start the public condemnation phase
rudeness does not justify rudeness
prefacing a statement with “I know this isn’t politically correct, but” does not justify rudeness
appropriate responses to bigotry can range from “surely I must have misunderstood” to “I beg your pardon!” to “how dare you!” to “you will be hearing from my lawyer,” depending on the severity of the situation.

Ok I also just want to quote Miss Manners in response to someone who criticized her for idealizing the past:

“Have you been paying such close attention to Miss Manners’ hairdo that you missed what she was saying? Wild horses could not drag her back to live in the past. For one thing, she has too clear a memory of what perfectly agreeable tame horses, who kindly provided public transportation in a previous era, left in the streets. There are too many things she could not live without, such as air conditioning and feminism.”

Tags: #this is a Miss Manners fanblog, #crypto social conservative blogging, #culture war cw, #racism cw

Post ID: 649241296087728128

Date: 2021-04-23 07:59:08 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4e092a9f68ee9a895ff772b2d11d7e5c/7ed6b8304d6f4da2-88/s540x810/a1d3cee4108494e91f9653370457556de2addd5c.jpg

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’m not sure how much to trust this book. My evaluation of the actual claims ranged from “state of the art then but science has progressed now” to “totally reasonable (but don’t have independent verification)” to “… come on.”

That said, I thought it was great and would totally recommend it.

For one, I found it very readable with lots of fun anecdotes that are great for cocktail parties.

For another, I really liked his approach and just felt like he was asking the right questions, you know? with each new section and chapter I kept finding myself going “oh yeah, that’s exactly what I was wondering about.” He has maps and tables cataloguing the various independent inventions of agriculture and writing, which I just happened to be curious about and had been trying to haphazardly piece together in a google doc before I picked up this book. And reading his epilogue I felt sort of gleeful imagining how pissed off any historian reading it must be but also just kinda endorsed it.

I used to think of history and anthropology as sort of fundamentally non-scientific fields: just collecting anecdotes trying to tell you what happened, or what something is like. But I’ve gotten way more into them as I’ve realized their potential to actually explain things in a way that allows you to make falsifiable predictions. I don’t think that’s what most of those fields actually do, and it seems really hard compared to doing the same thing in science, but it totally seems like what they should be going for.

(Not that I think Diamond is a perfect practitioner of this or anything. The length at which he managed to discuss the domestication of plants and animals while totally refusing to consider the role that different environments and selective pressures might have played in the evolution of different human groups was honestly impressive.)

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 648542446560673792

Date: 2021-04-15 14:51:14 GMT

Body: There’s a strain of thinking about jobs that I see in online leftish spaces, etc that’s very adversarial. That’s where it seems strongest but it also pops up in more mainstream boilerplate “negotiate your salary” type stuff.

And like, I’m really not a fan,

(Tbc this is a privileged perspective; all of that stuff might totally apply if you have a low-paid job and aren’t looking for upside from it and just want to put food on the table, etc. But I feel like part of the trend I see is people taking this framing and applying it to higher-status/more aspirational jobs in tech or media or whatever, and that’s more what I’m talking about.)

And like I very much do think that employment should be a mutually beneficial relationship and there should be some fair allocation of the surplus produced. But it’s less like a simple transaction, and more like an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and you only end up in the high upside cases if you’re both cooperating.

So I used to think a bit more that the motivations of employees didn’t matter; there are lots of mutually beneficial transactions we could make with lots of people, let’s try to make them. And now I think something a bit closer to: a lot of the synergies of employment can only be achieved in an environment of high trust and cooperation, and so a lot of the most successful people in an organization will simply be the most loyal ones.

So yeah my (completely unqualified, fully anecdotal) advice if you are going for high upside in your career: don’t negotiate your salary! Instead of arguing over scraps of the surplus you can make the surplus orders of magnitude bigger by finding or creating the sort of organization that makes you want to be loyal and doing that.

Post ID: 648540197712281600

Date: 2021-04-15 14:15:29 GMT

Body: Catherine Morland is autistic tbh

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 647364737626243072

Date: 2021-04-02 14:52:03 GMT

Body: the great thing about tumblr is the contrast between how dead it feels and how ultimately public it is

when you’re posting it really feels like you’re sending your words out into the void, for your five friends who are still on tumblr to perhaps read and comment on if they so choose

and then sometimes you’re getting drinks with a coworker and she casually mentions that “everyone in the company” reads your tumblr

coworkers if you’re reading this: why?? what could you possibly be getting out of this?? get a life!

Tags: #this blue website

Post ID: 647259418617085952

Date: 2021-04-01 10:58:03 GMT

Reblogging: etirabys

Body:

etirabys:

After a maintenance lull I did whole lot of meditation in the past week – my go-to is Sam Harris’s Waking Up app and the same 3 Tara Brach meditations on Insight Timer that work for me. The former is more cerebral and dissolving-the-illusion-of-the-self-y, the latter is more Mindfulness Classic – pause before you get het up and react to shit, introspect on what you’re trying to get by shooting people with the emotions you’re currently loading into your rifle and figure out if there’s some non-rifle way you can get it. I’ve had a stressful week and ingested a whole lot of the latter.
I read Jessica Fern’s Polysecure last month, which is “attachment theory + polyamory skills”. I commented to some friends that
this and other books are very macho unfriendly? I think it’s possible to write a book about feelings for people who are allergic to ‘feelings talk’ without dropping a lot of what’s valuable, but this author is not trying.
I have the same feeling about Tara Brach.
This seems like a shame. I would have bounced off hard Tara Brach or Polysecure in my teens when I was more allergic to ‘feelings talk’, but I sure would have benefitted from it! And I think that a lot of what makes ‘feelings talk’ the thing it is isn’t necessary to communicate about feelings – it’s stylistic.
(I really wanted to write this post with examples but am too tired to put myself through Polysecure again to find good ones. I might add on later.)
I’m not saying the stylistic stuff – ‘sacred core of your being’, ‘connecting to your own heart’ – is bad and should be stripped out. I’m saying that currently a lot of emotional regulation wisdom seems to be in a kind of cultural silo that’s hard for many people to get into, because a distaste reaction to the style is common. I hate gendered products but find myself googling ‘yoga for men’ whenever I want to try yoga again because I personally can’t stand the thing instructors do where my stretches are supposed to affirm my existence or spiritually put me in touch with the planet. Again, there is nothing wrong with that style. Rock on, every yoga instructor on youtube. But having to effectively learn to codeswitch if you want to read about how to have better relationships seems suboptimal.

I was totally just thinking about this same thing earlier today. I think I’m by nature kind of macho in this way, and averse to feelings talk (though these have been getting less true over time).

What I am really into is contrarianism and being an edgelord, and what’s been most successful in getting me into feelings talk is framing it through that lens: basically “I’m so cool and edgy, I’m willing to talk about my feelings and be vulnerable even if it’s socially weird or whatever.”

But I don’t know of many resources on this. (I guess Mark Manson is sorta feelings talk but macho?)

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 646878821332746240

Date: 2021-03-28 06:08:37 GMT

Body: my brain refuses to believe that the Ever Given getting stuck in the Suez Canal is not some elaborate setup from Unsong and is still waiting for the punchline

Tags: #like what kind of name is ever given, #why would you name a ship that unless you were working under strict constraints for a pun, #unsong

Post ID: 646231770921107456

Date: 2021-03-21 02:44:02 GMT

Question: I'd like to apologize for the ask I sent about contraceptives in Africa a while ago - I was in a weird state of mind at the time and didn't recognize how bad-faith the question sounded, I hope it wasn't upsetting

Answer: no apology necessary, I was not at all offended! just couldn’t think of any particularly intelligent thoughts to share on the topic :P

Post ID: 646231567864365056

Date: 2021-03-21 02:40:48 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

https://twitter.com/carolinecapital

kaumnyakte:
memecucker:
such-justice-wow:
memecucker:
noted homogenous country China
Is it not? I was taught that China is 99% han Chinese
It’s about 91% officially but “Han” is a term that has a lot of history and baggage associated with it especially since it’s a label that’s used for people from vastly different areas speaking entirely different mutually unintelligible languages and with different cultural practices. The history of the development of “Han” as a term for people is complicated but it’s does definitely derive from the Han dynasty and a funfact is that in languages like Cantonese the equivalent term is actually “Tang” after the later Tang dynasty and the role of dynastic names in all of this is a major clue for what “Han” means
Anyway a good example of cultural diversity of China is simply looking at the wide linguistic diversity even in places where the population is considered “Han” . In Shanghai which is the most populated in China and people traditionally speak what’s called “Shanghaiese”, a dialect of the Wu language which is mutually unintelligible with Mandarin and which is still fluently understood by about 81% of the population of the city (there’s been worry in recent years about a possible steep decline but that’s another topic). Hakka people In Guangdong province most people speak varieties of Yue most notably Cantonese but tens of millions also speak languages such as Hokkien and Hakka which are all quite different languages with their own histories
yeah the idea of a “chinese language” of which mandarin, cantonese, etc are “dialects” would be like if we decided french, spanish, etc. are dialects of latin
actually even worse than that, didn’t the min “dialects” split from chinese a few centuries before vulgar latin started to diverge into the romance languages
mm I mean, it’s plausible that bc of Eurocentrism, etc Westerners think of China as less diverse than it really is, but also I think it’s true that it’s unusually non-diverse given its population size
like if you measure genetic and linguistic diversity I’d guess a reasonable analogy for China is something like northern China = France, southern China = Spain, Guangdong = Romania or something idk. which might be more diversity than people often give it credit for, but also it has a similar amount of diversity to that set of countries with 10x the population
(see eg PCA of Indian vs Chinese genetic variation: India otoh is very diverse)

(I am all about acknowledging the diversity of human populations as long as that extends to the diversity in their levels of diversity :P)

Tags: #hbd cw

Post ID: 646231282378063872

Date: 2021-03-21 02:36:16 GMT

Reblogging: kaumnyakte

Body:

kaumnyakte:

memecucker:
such-justice-wow:
memecucker:
noted homogenous country China
Is it not? I was taught that China is 99% han Chinese
It’s about 91% officially but “Han” is a term that has a lot of history and baggage associated with it especially since it’s a label that’s used for people from vastly different areas speaking entirely different mutually unintelligible languages and with different cultural practices. The history of the development of “Han” as a term for people is complicated but it’s does definitely derive from the Han dynasty and a funfact is that in languages like Cantonese the equivalent term is actually “Tang” after the later Tang dynasty and the role of dynastic names in all of this is a major clue for what “Han” means
Anyway a good example of cultural diversity of China is simply looking at the wide linguistic diversity even in places where the population is considered “Han” . In Shanghai which is the most populated in China and people traditionally speak what’s called “Shanghaiese”, a dialect of the Wu language which is mutually unintelligible with Mandarin and which is still fluently understood by about 81% of the population of the city (there’s been worry in recent years about a possible steep decline but that’s another topic). Hakka people In Guangdong province most people speak varieties of Yue most notably Cantonese but tens of millions also speak languages such as Hokkien and Hakka which are all quite different languages with their own histories
yeah the idea of a “chinese language” of which mandarin, cantonese, etc are “dialects” would be like if we decided french, spanish, etc. are dialects of latin
actually even worse than that, didn’t the min “dialects” split from chinese a few centuries before vulgar latin started to diverge into the romance languages

mm I mean, it’s plausible that bc of Eurocentrism, etc Westerners think of China as less diverse than it really is, but also I think it’s true that it’s unusually non-diverse given its population size

like if you measure genetic and linguistic diversity I’d guess a reasonable analogy for China is something like northern China = France, southern China = Spain, Guangdong = Romania or something idk. which might be more diversity than people often give it credit for, but also it has a similar amount of diversity to that set of countries with 10x the population

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/f2685eb505190ad1642ffcd07e69b12f/a3f7fb5f9b343ebe-7b/s640x960/52eab51117c303591d9aa1c3436bed037f56cc2b.png

(see eg PCA of Indian vs Chinese genetic variation: India otoh is very diverse)

Tags: #hbd cw

Post ID: 644998903536746496

Date: 2021-03-07 12:08:08 GMT

Body: I made a twitter! See below the cut if you want to read future content from me in tweet form.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 644028869914116096

Date: 2021-02-24 19:09:52 GMT

Body: when I first heard about NVC the idea that no one is responsible for anyone else’s feelings seemed unfair to me–letting off the aggriever at the expense of the aggrieved.

but something I’m realizing now is how it helps the aggrieved too: if someone feels responsible for your feelings then you can’t share your feelings without burdening them. but if you can get to the point where they really don’t feel responsible, then regardless of what the feelings are, sharing them can be a light, joyful experience, both of you simply deriving value from the connection it brings.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 644028125016211456

Date: 2021-02-24 18:58:01 GMT

Body: small brain: prioritizing personal relationships over work because they’re more fun

big brain: prioritizing work over personal relationships because it’s more important

galaxy brain: having personal relationships that are as ambitious and world-changing as your work

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 642667563692818432

Date: 2021-02-09 18:32:29 GMT

Body: A shitty thing about being human and trying to form relationships with other humans is that you have to try to read from their signals how excited they are about interacting with you. And you really can err in both directions, and they’re both bad.

One thing that at least helps is having somewhat well-defined relationships and levels of commitment. If I ignore my sister’s text, well long-term it might add a tiny amount to the erosion or our relationship, but short term her assumption will never be “oh, she doesn’t like me” but “oh, she is busy and flaky and sucks at texting people back, but I’ll try again tomorrow.” Because she’s my sister, it’s not true that I can’t end our relationship, but the threshold is a lot higher; there’s a strong prior that we’re good, so I’d have to be very proactive and explicit if I wanted to cut her off.

Most people are probably biased in one direction or another. I think for most of my life I’ve been too insecure; because I had a negative self-image I was biased toward assuming that people didn’t want to interact with me.

And I think I’ve been getting better at that, which is cool. But disappointingly, getting better at that doesn’t really make the original problem go away.

There is a real problem there, that isn’t just 100% cognitive biases; sometimes people just don’t really like you that much, and you do need to be aware enough to notice that.

But the main problem isn’t of prediction, it’s of coordination. If you’re unsure of how much someone likes you, it makes perfect sense to be more reserved in your interactions, to hold yourself back. And it’s so easy to get into that feedback loop, and so hard to get out

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 642664297644916736

Date: 2021-02-09 17:40:34 GMT

Reblogging: slatestarscratchpad

Body:

All right, more really stupid finance questions for Tumblr.
Suppose you buy $1000 of oil futures leveraged 100x. If I understand this right, if oil goes up $10, you make $1000. If oil goes down $10, you lose $1000 (all your money). Fair.
But if oil goes up $50, you make $5000, and if oil goes down $50, you already lost all your money at the moment it went down $10 so you can’t lose any more.
So it seems like as you increase the amount you’re leveraged, the potential profits go up a lot, but the potential losses stay fixed at “all your investment”. That seems…unfairly good? Like, if there’s a 50-50 chance oil will go up vs. down today, and I’m leveraged an infinite amount, then if it goes up I make infinity money, and if it goes down I lose some finite amount like $1000. If you have $2000 and are willing to wait two-ish days, it sounds like you have a strong expectation of making infinite money.
I’m obviously misunderstanding this egregiously, so what am I getting wrong?

I think your example is sort of right to first order. But there are reasons this doesn’t quite work in practice.

Whoever is providing you leverage is aware that you can do this and will still want the trade to be positive EV for them. So generally they will liquidate your account once you’ve lost some money but while it’s still worth more than zero; in your example, maybe once oil goes down $5 the exchange takes over your account and keeps the remaining $500 for themselves, so for a $5 move you make $500 on the upside but lose all $1000 on the downside.

A tricky part of running a crypto exchange is setting all the parameters so that you don’t lose on net from this. The biggest question is what the max leverage and liquidation thresholds are by coin (100x is basically the max anyone offers, and that’s generally just on the most liquid coins), but there are also other parameters you can try to tune (eg my exchange charges extra trading fees if you use 50-100x leverage, to make up for potential losses from this).

Exchanges definitely fuck this up sometimes; OKEx a couple years ago was notorious for this. Their risk parameters basically meant that under a lot of circumstances it was just positive EV to do what you suggested. They lost a bunch of money to this and “socialized” the losses (passed them on to other users) which was understandably unpopular.

(I’m not an expert on traditional finance but my impression is that it’s a lot more boring; largely brokers will just try and have margin requirements conservative enough that it’s very unlikely for you to actually lose all your money.)

If you abstract away the financial details there’s also a question of like, what your utility function is. Is it infinitely good to do double-or-nothing coin flips forever? Well, sort of, because your upside is unbounded and your downside is bounded at your entire net worth. But most people don’t do this, because their utility is more like a function of their log wealth or something and they really don’t want to lose all of their money. (Of course those people are lame and not EAs; this blog endorses double-or-nothing coin flips and high leverage.)

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 642249589154545664

Date: 2021-02-05 03:48:57 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

a maybe interesting question to ask is, “what’s your biggest constraint?”
three common ones I know of are time, energy, and money. idk what the other big ones are
I think people often have a hard time understanding each other when they’re constrained on different things
also moving from one to another is weird. I switched from “energy” to “time” a couple years ago and it took a long time to actually internalize that time was expensive

I think I’ve identified a fourth one: someone I know calls it “brainspace.” (these days I feel sometimes more time-constrained and sometimes more brainspace-constrained I think)

it feels a bit hard to describe, but some symptoms:

- feeling like you have so many things on your to-do list that half of your time is just spent remembering what all the things on your to-do list are
- feeling like you’ve hit a limit of “decisions per day” that takes time to reset
- feeling like time sleeping or away from work has a cost > 1, because of the additional time it takes to reset and load everything back into working memory when you start working again

I sort of feel like I don’t have that much responsibility, in the grand scheme of things, and am curious how other people handle it. Like what do CEOs of real companies do? Or presidents?

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 641897907929415680

Date: 2021-02-01 06:39:08 GMT

Question: What's your take on *gestures broadly at GameStop*?

Answer: I don’t always like Eliezer’s takes on finance but I did like his take here

I think WSB is nobly trying to solve a crazy hard coordination problem and I think it’s beautiful

Post ID: 641813296215916544

Date: 2021-01-31 08:14:16 GMT

Reblogging: discoursedrome

Body:

discoursedrome:

transgenderer:
does bridgerton like, do novel unique things or does it play it totally straight? it seems more popular than i would expect if its latter
I have no idea but god I’ve seen so much discourse about “is this historically incorrect thing in bridgerton due to carelessness or are they doing a bit” discourse

ok honestly I think what they did with Bridgerton is kind of brilliant:

> want to make a high-production-value Netflix miniseries based on a pure guilty pleasure romance novel, the kind whose appeal is ultimately premised on sexism, classism, etc
> remember that it’s 2021 and that might be a problem
> so you make some of the main characters black
> and have one throwaway line in like episode 3 about how by the way King George declared racism over so that’s not a thing anymore
> this is kind of absurd but doesn’t actually detract from the story
> and meanwhile you can still offer pure soap while getting glowing reviews for being progressive

but yeah aside from that conceit there’s really nothing novel. imo it’s just quite well-executed fluff; reminds me of Gossip Girl.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 640437190798786560

Date: 2021-01-16 03:41:40 GMT

Question: do you use discord?

Answer: Nah why?

Post ID: 638739724083904512

Date: 2020-12-28 10:01:09 GMT

Reblogging: etirabys

Body:

etirabys:

(Loose bundle of thoughts on a theme)
Literature about drug addiction is weird. There’s this real experience in the world people have that’s psychologically gripping, sometimes life-and-death. It’s something that bends the rest of your life around it.
But if you try to write about it, it can come out boring, because the gist is that “there are ways your utility function can be hacked that make you devote resources away from the activities that bring you ‘real’ life satisfaction, and towards a god that takes and never gives”. That’s just not compelling as a story if you’re not predisposed to finding it interesting. “And then this person’s life went to shit – not over gold, or a blood feud they couldn’t let go of, or a religion, or another person – but because they found a magic lever that made them want to press it to their own detriment.”
(Exception: I think Gollum is a compelling character – I wonder if ‘magic made him like that’ is much easier to digest than ‘your neurochemistry is going to go nuts over this pill’.)
Refining what I’m saying above – drug addiction poses a peculiar challenge to write about because it defies narrative logic, or character logic – normally if a character’s driving motivation changes, you need some ‘human-readable’ explanation for it (otherwise it’s bad writing), and ‘uhh, they got hacked’ doesn’t cut it. Character actions usually boil down to a desire for some traditional psychological thing like curiosity, or social recognition, or revenge – but a desire to ingest drugs sort of seems to appear out of nowhere, not tied to the greater world of other people and the mysteries of the universe.
Sex fits that description, but humans tend to grok sexual desire very well, whereas you need to be ‘culturally inducted into understanding drugs’ to grok drugs.
The fact that different drugs are common to varying extents in different countries makes drug addiction a culturally particular thing to write about – when I was growing up in Korea (alcohol and tobacco use very common, everything else that’s a problem in the US was, afaik, not a social problem) I just didn’t understand English language lit where drugs were a thing. Characters would take something, or be revealed to be addicted to something, and their lives would have weird features where it was hard to tell what the connection was between the pills they took and the problems they had. Not only was I ignorant of the immediate effects drugs had on people (I was unaware through my entire teens that drugs could fuck you up physically), but I was unfamiliar with ‘the cultural conversation about drugs’ – the horror someone might experience upon knowing that a loved one was an addict, or the expectation that someone would go to rehab.
Drug addiction is a tempting metaphor for decadence or decay, more than any other single thing I can think of, precisely because it’s a condition that destroys value without giving anything recognizable to an outsider in return, but using it in such a way tends to trade off against realistically portraying addiction.

I was having weirdly similar thoughts to this yesterday

I watched the beginning of the first episode of The Queen’s Gambit, a show in which the main character is addicted to benzos. And as soon as that was revealed I was like … ugh. And that seems kind of weird a priori; I’ve never been addicted to benzos but it seems like a potentially interesting and rich experience I’d like to learn more about. But in practice I feel like all TV storylines about this are going to be the exact same: person gets addicted to benzos, person’s life gets increasingly fucked up, person tries to give them up and either succeeds or doesn’t.

I do think songs tend to do better at portraying drugs somehow. And some other media does okay (I recently watched the Big Mouth episode on adderall and found it pretty good; I think they managed to make the appeal feel visceral enough that you got why the kids were taking it).

Tags: #drugs cw

Post ID: 637535985919508480

Date: 2020-12-15 03:08:15 GMT

Body: it took a couple listens of gold rush to realize that “at dinner parties I call you out on your contrarian shit” is Taylor’s daydream about her unattainable crush

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 637306030359035904

Date: 2020-12-12 14:13:12 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

the Eliza vibes in tolerate it
-
I greet you with a battle hero’s welcome
//
Thank you for all your service
-
While you were out building other worlds, where was I?
//
I don’t pretend to know the challenges you’re facing, the worlds you keep erasing and creating
-
Now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life
//
Let me be a part of the narrative in the story they will write someday

also love the way it echoes a lot of her songs with the obsessive watching/memorizing of a love interest, but here it’s less sweet and more just fucked up

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 637305456618061824

Date: 2020-12-12 14:04:05 GMT

Body: the Eliza vibes in tolerate it

I greet you with a battle hero’s welcome

Thank you for all your service

While you were out building other worlds, where was I?

I don’t pretend to know the challenges you’re facing, the worlds you keep erasing and creating

Now I’m begging for footnotes in the story of your life

Let me be a part of the narrative in the story they will write someday

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time, #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 636881704161837056

Date: 2020-12-07 21:48:43 GMT

Body: // cw: offensive, sorry

I feel like part of me that is interested in HBD is the same part of me that loves personality types and “which character are you” quizzes: my brain just has a strong impulse to put people into categories

there’s a stereotype of racist people that they will like, assume any East Asian person speaks Chinese or something. I appreciate that HBD people are the exact opposite of that, and will like make fun of you for saying something about “Indians” without specifying province and caste because come on, the genetic differences there are massive

Tags: #racism cw

Post ID: 636735441144578048

Date: 2020-12-06 07:03:56 GMT

Body: me: feminist criticism of Disney/Twilight/romance novels or whatever is dumb: the causality mostly goes in the other direction, in that women watch/read these because that’s what they’re interested in, and trying to force art to have “strong female role models” or whatever is just denying the agency of women as well as a great way to have shitty art

also me: Amaryllis Penndraig is my greatest inspiration and primary role model

Tags: #worth the candle

Post ID: 635031274440081408

Date: 2020-11-17 11:36:56 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

worldoptimization:
are there any good advice columns these days?
Emily Yoffe retired, Dan Savage has gotten old and soft, Miss Manners is like 100 by now
also I started reading about Miss Manners and I had no idea that she’s Jewish and the daughter of a PhD economist but in retrospect, of course

many good Miss Manners facts in here:

Growing up, Jacob once asked his sassy child Judith “How come you’re so upper class and we’re so lower class, and you’re our daughter?”

from her early days as a reporter, before she became Miss Manners:

When the White House decreed that reporters covering Julie Nixon’s wedding reception had to stay outside and rely on briefings, Martin sneaked in by masquerading as a friend of a bridesmaid. She subsequently found herself banned from Tricia Nixon’s wedding, but perhaps that was because she had written that Tricia dressed “like an ice-cream cone.” The White House announcement explained that “the First Family does not feel comfortable with Judith Martin.” Remarked Martin’s husband: “I’m scared to live in a country that’s run by a man who’s scared by the likes of you.”

on her dinner parties:

The seating is limited to ten people, since “I have ten forks of all kinds.”

Post ID: 635030181775605760

Date: 2020-11-17 11:19:34 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

are there any good advice columns these days?
Emily Yoffe retired, Dan Savage has gotten old and soft, Miss Manners is like 100 by now

also I started reading about Miss Manners and I had no idea that she’s Jewish and the daughter of a PhD economist but in retrospect, of course

Post ID: 635029827747037185

Date: 2020-11-17 11:13:56 GMT

Body: are there any good advice columns these days?

Emily Yoffe retired, Dan Savage has gotten old and soft, Miss Manners is like 100 by now

Post ID: 634678451688931328

Date: 2020-11-13 14:08:58 GMT

Body: Prioritization is so hard!

It makes sense, that thinking about and figuring out priorities would be hard. I think the thing I find surprising is just how hard it is to communicate about them.

Like, I have dozens if not hundreds of interactions a day where I’m on either side of this dynamic:

A asks B to do something
A has more information than B about the thing, why it’s important, the broader context
B has more information than A about how hard it is, what the various constraints are on it, what other things B is doing and how important they are
often B then delegates to C which adds extra noise and room for miscommunication: if B can misinterpret A and C can misinterpret B that’s twice as much room for error

In some ideal world, whenever this happens, A and B (and C if they’re involved) would just get together and talk through all the information they both know, and put it all together to come to a conclusion. In the real world, this happens to me 50 times a day and there’s not close to enough time to do that except for the biggest and most important things.

Instead what happens is more like:

everyone learns a series of heuristics. the most important is a function from (person, how important do they seem to think it is) -> actual importance
besides that, there are heuristics based on topic
in the simplest form these are are just rules that people try to formulate and pass down to their reports: “if a customer complains about X that’s important, if they complain about Y it’s not”
you start by learning the rules, then you learn the meta-rules that generated them (which makes the rules easier to remember/deduce as well as making you feel more motivated to execute them). and so on and so forth
as you move up levels, your job increases in complexity on a spectrum from “execute memorized rules” to “think hard about what the most important things are and then prioritize them”

A corollary to all of this is that it’s actually really valuable to have people who understand a wide variety of stuff beyond their specialization, enough to prioritize a lot of it well. If you want to assign things to someone you can’t trust to prioritize well, you have to:

check in with them whenever you assign them something to make sure they’re correctly valuing it compared to their other tasks
check in a lot in general to make sure they’re not sidetracked by something unimportant
make sure they’re valuing tasks correctly relative to things like sleep, fun, sanity which can be super awkward and touchy (but important to get right! and people often err on both sides)

Whereas being able to assign something to someone and trust that it will get done if and only if it’s correct for it to get done is just magical.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 634675635821953024

Date: 2020-11-13 13:24:13 GMT

Body: also, here are some really good country songs:

When It Rains It Pours, Luke Combs: I don’t know of any song that does a better job of “take sadness and transmute it into pure joy.” like there are a lot of songs that are like “I was sad about this breakup, but now I’m doing better.” harder to pull off “I was sad about this breakup and that was dumb because it was awesome and life is just so good.”
I Want Crazy, Hunter Hayes: “I don’t want good and I don’t want good enough, I want can’t sleep can’t breathe without your love.” it’s just a beautifully distilled defense of Red-era TS in her battle against Lover-era TS.
Somewhere in My Car, Keith Urban: just how can you not have feelings when you hear the transition to the first chorus. “but in my mind, we’re somewhere in my car”
Mama’s Broken Heart, Miranda Lambert: just love the sentiment of I could choose to be elegant and composed like Jackie Kennedy, but instead I’m going to be as dramatic as I can because why the fuck not

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 634674571182817280

Date: 2020-11-13 13:07:17 GMT

Body: I feel like I post a lot about Taylor Swift on here, but not much about other music that is good. So have some takes on non-TSwift albums I like:

Golden Hour, Kacey Musgraves

I really like her earlier country stuff too
but man on this album she just has it all figured out, like musically and emotionally??
Slow Burn is one of the most perfect songs ever and the only reason I don’t listen to it more is because I’m afraid it will lose its power to chill me out
it also has a special resonance with my life due to the line “in Tennessee, the sun’s going down, but in Beijing they’re headed out to work”
Butterflies is just so … lovely
“now you’re lifting me up instead of holding me down, stealing my heart instead of stealing my crown, untangled all the strings round my wings that were tied”
Space Cowboy and Lonely Weekend are like … straightforward but still Too Real
Wonder Woman is just … I love the exact thing it’s expressing and don’t know any other songs that express that exact thing
of like “of course I want us to support each other in our personal growth, and I want to be as strong as I possibly can for you … but also, I need our relationship not to depend on that and I want us to just be there for each other despite all the flaws”

Emotion, Carly Rae Jepsen

ok I was going to pick my favorite lyrics to gush about but then I realized they’re all pretty dumb
but I guess the music is good enough that I don’t notice which is pretty impressive

Norman Fucking Rockwell, Lana Del Rey

I feel conflicted about professing my love for this album because I feel like it’s related to my identification with some sort of Sad Girl persona that I’ve been trying to avoid identifying with but
it’s good
Happiness is a butterfly… I feel like if I had to pick one song that perfectly embodied “sadness” this would be up there
“I said don’t be a jerk, don’t call me a taxi, sitting in your sweatshirt, crying in the backseat”
it reminds me of Last Kiss actually: the imagery of wearing his clothing accompanied by utterly pathetic desperation
hope is a dangerous thing: I just love the drama of “writing in blood on the walls cause the ink in my pen don’t work in my notepad”
also, video calling your dad and feeling weird about your far away and glamorous life
love all the California references
Norman Fucking Rockwell … oof
Mariners Apartment Complex just takes all the sad girl energy and turns it into power and it’s beautiful

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 634671891349733377

Date: 2020-11-13 12:24:42 GMT

Body: No matter what changes the coming years bring,
As the leaves of our youth fade from green,
I am sure we will always remember the spring
When we fought about COVID-19.

We all became experts on MERS and on SARS,
Debated the hammer and dance.
Quoted from studies that found CFRs,
Weighing sample size, bias, and chance.

For others the year has brought lockdowns in vain,
Or loved ones in hospital beds.
We happened to live somewhere it was contained
So we argued on Twitter instead.

And they’ll bury the dead when it’s over at last,
As the streets fill with laughter and song.
Over time our disputes will fade into the past,
But we’ll never admit we were wrong.

Tags: #coronavirus cw, #really need a stronger cw; sorry this is offensive, #poetry

Post ID: 633914027419058176

Date: 2020-11-05 03:38:46 GMT

Body: I wonder when I’ll get over the instinctive reaction whenever I finish a call with a CEO of another company or something of “oh thank god, I think I fooled them into thinking I’m a real adult”

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 633501748835811328

Date: 2020-10-31 14:25:47 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

because I’m thinking about it now, some heuristics on market efficiency:
1) volume
the single best indicator for how efficient a market is is how much volume trades on it. the higher the volume, the higher the rewards are to trading against any mispricing, so the stronger your priors should be against there being easy-to-find mispricings. your uncle’s football betting pool can easily be inefficient because it’s not worth any professional’s time to trade on it, whereas anyone who can predict short-term price movements of the S&P 500 will be very heavily rewarded for doing so.
2) costs and barriers to entry
these can come in many forms:
literal trading fees
rules like low position limits or restrictions on short selling
operational and technological barriers
regulatory and other risks
costs of capital (markets that require more collateral to trade or are harder to get capital in and out of will be less efficient)
if you are already a trading firm trading on the Nasdaq, the additional cost to trading another Nasdaq stock is very low, so even though a stock might be much lower volume than AAPL it might not be much less efficient. (at least in terms of things like incorporating information from overall market moves or sector news. it might be much less efficient in incorporating information from earnings or other fundamental news, since the costs there scale more linearly with the number of stocks you’re analyzing.)
on the other hand, a crypto exchange in Indonesia that only allows Indonesians and doesn’t have an API will probably be way less efficient than the most efficient crypto markets.
in an extreme example of regulatory risks, US stock markets (while generally fairly efficient) are very much not efficient in incorporating information about upcoming mergers, because the regulatory costs to trading on much of that information are very high.

upon looking at this I guess I’m positing a sort of meta-EMH: “markets are efficient to the extent that the rewards for correcting inefficiencies are greater than the costs to doing so”

which I think is a reasonable prior. but of course my whole job is trying to find cases where this doesn’t quite hold

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 633501361449943040

Date: 2020-10-31 14:19:37 GMT

Body: because I’m thinking about it now, some heuristics on market efficiency:

1) volume

the single best indicator for how efficient a market is is how much volume trades on it. the higher the volume, the higher the rewards are to trading against any mispricing, so the stronger your priors should be against there being easy-to-find mispricings. your uncle’s football betting pool can easily be inefficient because it’s not worth any professional’s time to trade on it, whereas anyone who can predict short-term price movements of the S&P 500 will be very heavily rewarded for doing so.

2) costs and barriers to entry

these can come in many forms:

literal trading fees
rules like low position limits or restrictions on short selling
operational and technological barriers
regulatory and other risks
costs of capital (markets that require more collateral to trade or are harder to get capital in and out of will be less efficient)

if you are already a trading firm trading on the Nasdaq, the additional cost to trading another Nasdaq stock is very low, so even though a stock might be much lower volume than AAPL it might not be much less efficient. (at least in terms of things like incorporating information from overall market moves or sector news. it might be much less efficient in incorporating information from earnings or other fundamental news, since the costs there scale more linearly with the number of stocks you’re analyzing.)

on the other hand, a crypto exchange in Indonesia that only allows Indonesians and doesn’t have an API will probably be way less efficient than the most efficient crypto markets.

in an extreme example of regulatory risks, US stock markets (while generally fairly efficient) are very much not efficient in incorporating information about upcoming mergers, because the regulatory costs to trading on much of that information are very high.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 633462580788264960

Date: 2020-10-31 04:03:13 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

tbh I think the feeling I get as a trader listening to non-traders engage in discourse about whether Markets are Efficient is roughly how a physicist would feel if people got into lots of arguments online about Do Particles Attract Each Other

“well, some are and some aren’t and there’s a huge spectrum in between, and it depends on the time and the context and what scale you’re talking about and …. look, figuring out the details of this is my entire job okay”

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 633462463284822017

Date: 2020-10-31 04:01:21 GMT

Body: tbh I think the feeling I get as a trader listening to non-traders engage in discourse about whether Markets are Efficient is roughly how a physicist would feel if people got into lots of arguments online about Do Particles Attract Each Other

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 632994495556943872

Date: 2020-10-26 00:03:12 GMT

Reblogging: etiragram

Body:

etiragram:

worldoptimization:
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a sort of broad and ambitious book. The author is an anthropologist and one of the people who coined the term WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) to describe the populations most psychological studies are done on. The book covers:
- a review of the literature on cross-cultural psychological differences
- a review of the anthropological research on how cultural norms evolve and how they interact with people’s psychology
- the author’s theory of how WEIRD societies ended up being so unusual and successful, tracing back to the marriage- and family-related policies of the Catholic Church in the medieval era.

I found it super interesting and compelling. My favorite things:

For one, I’d heard the term WEIRD, and I knew about some studies showing cross-cultural psychological variation. But actually system-1 understanding that not everyone thinks like me seems really hard, and really important. Tbh I already have enough trouble with the fact that other people in my very specific subcultures sometimes think in different ways from me. But did you know non-WEIRD people:
- don’t experience the endowment effect
- give very little to the other person in the ultimatum game (and are totally fine with being given very little)
- don’t show much correlation between happiness and self-esteem
- have less differentiated personalities? (ie the Big 5 doesn’t apply, there are fewer than 5 factors)

For another, his picture of history through the lens of cultural evolution made a lot of things click: it felt like trad done right. What drew me to trad thinking was that it seemed to get a lot of things right that most people around me would frustratingly miss; I’d hear lots of people criticizing organized religion, or monogamy, or something, without ever seeming to reflect on how long it had existed, or how successful and prevalent it was throughout different human societies, and wonder why.

This book asks why, and comes up with answers: organized religion and monogamy were both hugely important to the success of earlier human societies, and those that had them outcompeted those that didn’t. But it also doesn’t stop there: modern WEIRD culture, which promotes lots of things like “individualism” and “innovation” and “questioning tradition” is the most successful culture in history. I ended up with a feeling of smug superiority to parochial traditionalists; as an unmarried, childless woman residing halfway across the world from my family, with an individualist psychology, a high level of market integration, and strongly universalist, utilitarian beliefs, I’m actually at the apex of Western civilization: the true successor to a thousand years of Western tradition from Charlemagne through the Enlightenment to today.

View all my reviews
Queued. Also, enjoyed reading this review, wanted to let you know I always perk up when I get a Goodreads email saying you reviewed something.

Eee thanks! I think your blog is excellent and am quite flattered.

Post ID: 632418692942135296

Date: 2020-10-19 15:31:04 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/efdaedbb1a6df069e13217ec7b64a876/927d8e304cb6ed02-e7/s640x960/7fa1eee0b20de397acb340b636dcb1659b8f836d.jpg

was walking through Hong Kong Park today and came across the SARS memorial and … yeah, I guess they will build memorials for COVID, I hadn’t thought about that

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 632382911231000576

Date: 2020-10-19 06:02:20 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/f30fed6a80d534f1b599c2220a593e67/c39ca401b7a8eff2-61/s540x810/671203224080c2e3c75d146b878df630b33c23f1.jpg

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a sort of broad and ambitious book. The author is an anthropologist and one of the people who coined the term WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) to describe the populations most psychological studies are done on. The book covers:
- a review of the literature on cross-cultural psychological differences
- a review of the anthropological research on how cultural norms evolve and how they interact with people’s psychology
- the author’s theory of how WEIRD societies ended up being so unusual and successful, tracing back to the marriage- and family-related policies of the Catholic Church in the medieval era.

I found it super interesting and compelling. My favorite things:

For one, I’d heard the term WEIRD, and I knew about some studies showing cross-cultural psychological variation. But actually system-1 understanding that not everyone thinks like me seems really hard, and really important. Tbh I already have enough trouble with the fact that other people in my very specific subcultures sometimes think in different ways from me. But did you know non-WEIRD people:
- don’t experience the endowment effect
- give very little to the other person in the ultimatum game (and are totally fine with being given very little)
- don’t show much correlation between happiness and self-esteem
- have less differentiated personalities? (ie the Big 5 doesn’t apply, there are fewer than 5 factors)

For another, his picture of history through the lens of cultural evolution made a lot of things click: it felt like trad done right. What drew me to trad thinking was that it seemed to get a lot of things right that most people around me would frustratingly miss; I’d hear lots of people criticizing organized religion, or monogamy, or something, without ever seeming to reflect on how long it had existed, or how successful and prevalent it was throughout different human societies, and wonder why.

This book asks why, and comes up with answers: organized religion and monogamy were both hugely important to the success of earlier human societies, and those that had them outcompeted those that didn’t. But it also doesn’t stop there: modern WEIRD culture, which promotes lots of things like “individualism” and “innovation” and “questioning tradition” is the most successful culture in history. I ended up with a feeling of smug superiority to parochial traditionalists; as an unmarried, childless woman residing halfway across the world from my family, with an individualist psychology, a high level of market integration, and strongly universalist, utilitarian beliefs, I’m actually at the apex of Western civilization: the true successor to a thousand years of Western tradition from Charlemagne through the Enlightenment to today.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 632375082483875840

Date: 2020-10-19 03:57:54 GMT

Body: some thoughts on leadership:

I used to think something like “it’s bad to be overconfident, and people who say things about how leaders should be confident are just promoting bad epistemic norms.”

now I think something more like–there are lots of situations where no one really knows what to do, and you need to make a decision. lots of people’s instinct in those situations is to ask the person in charge; but it turns out, the person in charge often doesn’t really know what to do either!

and leadership, in these cases, means not panicking or doing nothing or trying to find a person even more in charge, but instead coming up with your best guess–even if you’re super uncertain–and stating confidently and decisively “let’s do X.”

and if someone says “no actually, wouldn’t it be better to do Y instead because of Z” then great! none of this means you shouldn’t update on evidence or listen to other people’s opinions. just that there are a lot of situations that come down to “no one really knows, and someone needs to make a call and accept the responsibility if it turns out to be totally wrong” and being willing to do that is really valuable.

Post ID: 632165773157203968

Date: 2020-10-16 20:31:01 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

worldoptimization:
ok dumb question what is the best current research on long-term effects of COVID?

I haven’t really been following COVID discourse much for several months but like … we have enough data by now to know like what percentage of people by age group, etc are experiencing various symptoms six months later, right?
googling has so far failed to turn up anything concrete
ok, reading through this article:
a study of people who were hospitalized in Italy showed that 87% had at least one symptom 2 months later. this is just people who were hospitalized though, which accounts for 15% of diagnosed cases, and a lot lower in younger people
another study in Ireland found half of people having fatigue 10 weeks after being infected, but I think this has similar selection effects (it looks like participants were recruited from people who were attending a post-COVID follow-up appointment?)
the COVID Symptom Tracker app in the UK found that 2% of people were still experiencing any symptoms after 90 days. that seems pretty different from the above two numbers! I’m not sure how representative of a sample their userbase is, but they do have 4m users which is a lot. I can imagine it being biased toward young people, but at least that tells us that the rate of long COVID is pretty low in young people.
looking back at a spreadsheet I made back in March, my guess was that DALY costs from long-term effects of COVID would be 2x DALY costs from deaths. if the 2% number is real, then I feel like 2x is a reasonable upper bound, and probably significantly too high; either way, seems like much lower than would justify the costs of lockdown.

@correct-conflagration:

But see: https://mobile.twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1313973286364229638. tl;dr the app may be significantly underreporting because it’s clunky & people get tired of reporting symptoms

hm ok, I’m having a hard time confirming this but it sounds like the 2% number isn’t “98% reported that they were symptom free after 3 months” but “2% were still bothering to put their symptoms in an app every day after 3 months,” which seems pretty different :/

this spreadsheet (from the twitter you linked) has what seems like a reasonable compilation of studies on long-term COVID symptoms and the studies seem … mostly not that helpful?

out of the 21 studies listed, only 6 seem to be on potentially representative samples (the rest are on hospitalized patients, or recruited from support groups, etc). out of those, two are < 1 month, and one was a sample of fifteen people. looking at the remaining ones:

one was a news article in French citing a researcher in Switzerland who said that one in three patients was still having symptoms two months later. didn’t get any more details than that
one was a study from Wuhan of 153 patients, finding that 11% still had symptoms after 3 months. seems ok though not very big, not really controlled, and they warn there might be bias in who responded to their survey
the most promising one looks like a preprint posted a few days ago (!) it looks at 233 people in the US who tested positive for COVID, comparing to a large group of the general population. it finds that 24% of COVID patients have at least one symptom after 90 days, compared to 6% of the control group reporting one of the same symptoms lasting for 90 days. there were only a few symptoms that were significantly more prevalent in the COVID group than the control group (loss of smell and taste, headache, and rapid heartbeat) though probably the sample size isn’t big enough to say that much about individual symptoms

so yeah, idk. this definitely updates me higher on the number of people who still have symptoms after 3 months: seems like 20% is a better estimate than 2%. mostly though, the state of the evidence seems surprisingly bad given that COVID’s been around for a while.

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 631490403907059712

Date: 2020-10-09 09:36:19 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

ok dumb question what is the best current research on long-term effects of COVID?

I haven’t really been following COVID discourse much for several months but like … we have enough data by now to know like what percentage of people by age group, etc are experiencing various symptoms six months later, right?
googling has so far failed to turn up anything concrete

ok, reading through this article:

a study of people who were hospitalized in Italy showed that 87% had at least one symptom 2 months later. this is just people who were hospitalized though, which accounts for 15% of diagnosed cases, and a lot lower in younger people
another study in Ireland found half of people having fatigue 10 weeks after being infected, but I think this has similar selection effects (it looks like participants were recruited from people who were attending a post-COVID follow-up appointment?)
the COVID Symptom Tracker app in the UK found that 2% of people were still experiencing any symptoms after 90 days. that seems pretty different from the above two numbers! I’m not sure how representative of a sample their userbase is, but they do have 4m users which is a lot. I can imagine it being biased toward young people, but at least that tells us that the rate of long COVID is pretty low in young people.

looking back at a spreadsheet I made back in March, my guess was that DALY costs from long-term effects of COVID would be 2x DALY costs from deaths. if the 2% number is real, then I feel like 2x is a reasonable upper bound, and probably significantly too high; either way, seems like much lower than would justify the costs of lockdown.

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 630989920378421248

Date: 2020-10-03 21:01:20 GMT

Body: ok dumb question what is the best current research on long-term effects of COVID?

I haven’t really been following COVID discourse much for several months but like … we have enough data by now to know like what percentage of people by age group, etc are experiencing various symptoms six months later, right?

googling has so far failed to turn up anything concrete

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 630067895267983360

Date: 2020-09-23 16:46:09 GMT

Body: my contribution to Supreme Court discourse will be to share my most interesting celebrity encounter story, which is that I used to live in a house Antonin Scalia used to live in

we found this out when someone rang our doorbell one day and my mom opened the door to a guy who announced, “hi, I’m Antonin Scalia! I used to live here!”

and then he proceeded to invite us to visit him at the Supreme Court and reserve seats for us to watch a session if we were ever in DC, which we actually took him up on

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 629686861091258368

Date: 2020-09-19 11:49:46 GMT

Body: asset price bubbles are weird

you might think that knowing you’re in one would allow you to feel smart but … it really doesn’t … shit’s still anti-inductive

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 627754374185320448

Date: 2020-08-29 03:53:43 GMT

Body: the difference between IP culture in trad finance vs crypto is wild

when I worked in trad finance I would never have dreamt of telling anyone outside of work what I was working on, even though in retrospect a lot of it was just like, dumb intern projects or whatever

in crypto the top trading firms are on twitter and actually just tweet their trades and strategies. the hashtag is #freealpha

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 627753401873219584

Date: 2020-08-29 03:38:16 GMT

Body: does anyone have a good estimate of modafinil effects on birth control effectiveness?

I’ve seen lots of vague warnings that there might be problems but the closest I’ve seen to numbers is this study which seems to say something like:

there were 220 women of childbearing age in the study
100 were on a “recommended contraceptive plan,” so that left 120 without
3 women got pregnant despite being on hormonal contraceptives

which doesn’t sound particularly different from normal birth control effectiveness rates?

but there’s some missing data there and I might be misinterpreting because it wasn’t super clear/wasn’t actually trying to come up with an estimate

Post ID: 627399064224415744

Date: 2020-08-25 05:46:13 GMT

Reblogging: slatestarscratchpad

Body:

Somebody poke holes in this argument for me:
Suppose US lockdown will last one year before a vaccine or something else solves coronavirus.
And suppose US lockdown will save 1,000,000 Americans who would have died without lockdown. And each death costs 10 DALYs, because they’re mostly old people with only 10 years left to live. And there’s an equal amount of non-death disability, so total 20 million DALYs lost. I’m not 100% sure of any of these numbers but I think they’re the right order of magnitude and if anything skewed towards being overestimates.
Lockdown affects 300 million Americans. So it’s net negative if it costs them more than 1/15th DALY each, ie if one year of lockdown is less than ~94% as good as a year not on lockdown.
But it seems like a year on lockdown is less than 94% as good as a year not on lockdown. Therefore lockdown is net negative.

yeah I think this is basically right

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 626365324539887616

Date: 2020-08-13 19:55:22 GMT

Body: I think when I started working here I complained a lot about the “crypto community” but right now I’m just so glad I’m working in this industry and not any other

we’re having sort of a mini-2017-2018 redux, and I honestly recommend it; certainly not as trading advice, but just because the contrast is so stark these days between talking to anyone outside crypto (depressing as shit) and inside where people are having fun and building things and starting weird and ambitious projects

of course it’s 99% bullshit, but in a surprisingly wholesome way: like a giant collaborative art project. and then there’s the 1% of trying to do something real too

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 626303450027851776

Date: 2020-08-13 03:31:54 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

Say your partner cheated on you, years ago. It was only one time, and they felt really bad about it, and it has no implications for how they’ll behave toward you going forward; but if you knew, it would really hurt you.
Is it better to know or not?
One school of thought says, obviously, yes. (I think this is probably most people’s first intuition?)
Another school of thought says, wait, no. If you don’t know, you can continue to live your life happy; if you do know, you’ll experience a lot of pain. From a basic hedonic utilitarian standpoint, knowing seems bad.
I think I’m in favor of knowing; or at least, being the sort of person who wants to know. It’s not that I don’t buy the utilitarian argument: I’m all for experience machines. But real life isn’t a perfect experience machine, and I think if you’re committed to flinching away from truths that might hurt you, you’ll end up living in fear that they’ll pop up anyway. Seeking out the worst and most painful truths, and finding that you’re able to deal with them, lets you be free.

Not to mention, being in the habit of flinching away from the truth on things that don’t matter probably sets you up to flinch away from the truth on the things that really do matter.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 626299898416021504

Date: 2020-08-13 02:35:27 GMT

Body: Say your partner cheated on you, years ago. It was only one time, and they felt really bad about it, and it has no implications for how they’ll behave toward you going forward; but if you knew, it would really hurt you.

Is it better to know or not?

One school of thought says, obviously, yes. (I think this is probably most people’s first intuition?)

Another school of thought says, wait, no. If you don’t know, you can continue to live your life happy; if you do know, you’ll experience a lot of pain. From a basic hedonic utilitarian standpoint, knowing seems bad.

I think I’m in favor of knowing; or at least, being the sort of person who wants to know. It’s not that I don’t buy the utilitarian argument: I’m all for experience machines. But real life isn’t a perfect experience machine, and I think if you’re committed to flinching away from truths that might hurt you, you’ll end up living in fear that they’ll pop up anyway. Seeking out the worst and most painful truths, and finding that you’re able to deal with them, lets you be free.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 626268095672172544

Date: 2020-08-12 18:09:58 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

So, what do I think of folklore?
Mostly, not as much as her previous albums; it feels a bit more forgettable; there weren’t any songs that I listened to once and knew I would be obsessed with, like Blank Space on 1989 or Dress on Reputation or Cruel Summer on Lover.
But the more I listen to it, the more I feel like Taylor and I have quietly ended up on the same wavelength, you know?
I’ve talked before about the conflict I’ve felt whenever I feel like we’re in different emotional places; when she’s being immature and petty when I want to grow, or when she’s happy and chilled out and I need to work through my angst.
But this album, to the extent that it’s about Taylor, feels like it presents a … Therapy Taylor? Trying to work through her problems, and deal with her megasuccess, and yeah, okay.
Therapy Taylor:
I never had the courage of my convictions, as long as danger is near
I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit
pouring out my heart to a stranger, but I didn’t pour the whiskey
My favorite song right now is peace which everyone compares to The Archer but I keep thinking of Miss Americana?
I guess it’s the vision of “love doesn’t have to be boring: love is about having an ally in your quest for world domination; someone who will be on your side against your enemies, haters on twitter, own worst self, etc, etc”

Lines I keep thinking about:

they told me all of my cages were mental, so I got wasted like all my potential
stood on the cliffside screaming “give me a reason”; your faithless love’s the only hoax I believe in
I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try
you showed me colors you know I can’t see with anyone else
all these people think love’s for show, but I would die for you in secret
I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace, cause when I’d fight you used to tell me I was brave

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 626267182425309184

Date: 2020-08-12 17:55:27 GMT

Body: So, what do I think of folklore?

Mostly, not as much as her previous albums; it feels a bit more forgettable; there weren’t any songs that I listened to once and knew I would be obsessed with, like Blank Space on 1989 or Dress on Reputation or Cruel Summer on Lover.

But the more I listen to it, the more I feel like Taylor and I have quietly ended up on the same wavelength, you know?

I’ve talked before about the conflict I’ve felt whenever I feel like we’re in different emotional places; when she’s being immature and petty when I want to grow, or when she’s happy and chilled out and I need to work through my angst.

But this album, to the extent that it’s about Taylor, feels like it presents a … Therapy Taylor? Trying to work through her problems, and deal with her megasuccess, and yeah, okay.

Therapy Taylor:

I never had the courage of my convictions, as long as danger is near
I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit
pouring out my heart to a stranger, but I didn’t pour the whiskey

My favorite song right now is peace which everyone compares to The Archer but I keep thinking of Miss Americana?

I guess it’s the vision of “love doesn’t have to be boring: love is about having an ally in your quest for world domination; someone who will be on your side against your enemies, haters on twitter, own worst self, etc, etc”

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 625503231699795968

Date: 2020-08-04 07:32:46 GMT

Reblogging: swimmer963

Body:

swimmer963:

“We have so many gods / and none of them / can be trusted.”

—
Hafizah Geter, from “Fajr,” Un-American (via lifeinpoetry)
@swimmer963
(via darkersolstice)
…called out

when I first saw this I didn’t register who posted it and thus interpreted it as “someone on my dash is admitting that they are indeed a god who cannot be trusted”

Post ID: 624511097525993472

Date: 2020-07-24 08:43:14 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

very initial thoughts on folklore, I’ve only listened to the first half once:
wow the 1 hit me … right at the beginning of the album, “you know the greatest loves of all time are over now” … I teared up there
was that … another song about marrying into New England old money families ………
holy shit mirrorball
this album is so white
I don’t yet know what the theme/idea is besides “so white”

is mirrorball addressed to one of her love interests … or to you, the audience?? you decide

strong enneagram 3 energy tbh

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time, #enneagram 3 tips

Post ID: 624510481072308224

Date: 2020-07-24 08:33:26 GMT

Body: very initial thoughts on folklore, I’ve only listened to the first half once:

wow the 1 hit me … right at the beginning of the album, “you know the greatest loves of all time are over now” … I teared up there
was that … another song about marrying into New England old money families ………
holy shit mirrorball
this album is so white
I don’t yet know what the theme/idea is besides “so white”

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 624403260539830272

Date: 2020-07-23 04:09:12 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/fbf827b6219fb11c3afafa6915c69e23/d4f60290d0e28ea5-84/s540x810/1ab817a05d2b69e1da0c07aefb3da4c33c47a9ff.jpg

When I Say No, I Feel Guilty: How to Cope - Using the Skills of Systematic Assertive Therapy by Manuel J. Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I read this book after Anna Salamon recommended it, because it aligned nicely with my current interest in assertiveness (what is it? is it good? should I do it and if so how?)

Overall it was 1) kind of boring and repetitive and 2) painfully 70s, but maybe had some good points?

I’m often skeptical when people talk about being assertive: I think I feel like it might lead to lots of trouble/conflict, and I don’t feel sold on why it’s important or necessary. I’m the kind of person who, if I go to a restaurant and the waiter gets my drink order wrong, I never complain. People sometimes say I should, and I’m like … why? Idk, this drink is fine too?

The (I guess obvious now I think about it) answer this book gives is that it’s not about the drink, it’s about your self-respect. If you have a strong sense of self-worth, if you believe that you aren’t responsible for other people’s feelings and don’t need to justify your actions to anyone, then you can safely do things like compromise, or put others’ needs before your own because you want to. But it has to be done from a place of self-respect.

(Being unassertive doesn’t just mean always doing what other people want you to do: the book posits that the alternative to being assertive is often being “manipulative:” taking actions in an attempt to get others to meet your needs without being willing to openly and unapologetically express them.)

I guess this is just something like a meditation on boundaries, fully generalized. If you don’t want to have sex with someone, and you believe that your preferences are valid, and don’t require any justification or excuses, and you feel comfortable expressing them … well, then maybe you can reasonably decide to have sex with them anyway because their preference is stronger than yours and you want to make them happy. But in the absence of all that you just end up in that shitty place where you don’t feel that you have the right to enforce your own boundaries, and you have to constantly choose between ignoring your own needs and invalidating others’.

How do you tell the difference? I’m still confused about that part. I’ve been aware of this general concept for a long time (“a meditation on boundaries” is five years old), but I think I’ve still done plenty of the second thing while telling myself it was the first (“it’s not that I don’t have the right to do what I want here … but they do make some valid points … and it doesn’t really seem worth it to make a thing out of it just from a cost-benefit analysis perspective …”) So yeah, I still feel unsure about that.

(Reading this in an era where the Karen has obtained such cultural prominence is also … interesting … a lot of the content on women asserting themselves that was presumably kinda radical in the 70s feels positively problematic now. You want us to ask to speak to the manager??)

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 623746882272952320

Date: 2020-07-15 22:16:21 GMT

Body: a maybe interesting question to ask is, “what’s your biggest constraint?”

three common ones I know of are time, energy, and money. idk what the other big ones are

I think people often have a hard time understanding each other when they’re constrained on different things

also moving from one to another is weird. I switched from “energy” to “time” a couple years ago and it took a long time to actually internalize that time was expensive

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 623554142287396864

Date: 2020-07-13 19:12:50 GMT

Body: I watched a largely-black production of Tartuffe last night (over Zoom, obv) and they spent like five minutes at the beginning making it clear that Tartuffe = Trump, black trans lives matter, etc

and like yeah, I guess you have to really hammer in the Trump analogy if you want to avoid the obvious parallels

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 623070037213839361

Date: 2020-07-08 10:58:11 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/908caba08ef14ff22a9cef408b39cfe0/2cd67ec3fc2510fc-86/s540x810/3dd1b369f542af29eeea131b88be48a65ada711f.jpg

A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President by Jeffrey Toobin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I picked this up because I liked two of this other books; on the OJ Simpson trial and on Patty Hearst. This one made less of an impression on me, partly just because I knew more of the history already, but it still had many of the same things to recommend it.

I was thinking while reading it about what motivated me to, when eg I still have no idea what the Mueller Report is or what it says. My patience for learning about current events is selective, and for better or for worse I tend to be more driven by the meta level; not by the events, but by people’s reactions, and the narratives that spring up, and the way opinions form.

Looking at events from a historical perspective, even if it’s only with the benefit of a few years, often feels like a better way to do that. And this book works as a chronicle of that sort of metanarrative on multiple levels. On one, it’s a lot of what Toobin focuses on; the blurring lines of public and private life, the changing landscape of attitudes toward sexual behavior, the burgeoning role of the internet in disrupting traditional media. And on another, of course the book itself is a document of its time and often seems to be jarringly missing the point to a reader in the #MeToo era, and has been updated with an introduction apologizing for as much.

Yeah idk, I appreciated that approach to having written a book that is now sort of irredeemably problematic. I can only hope that in another 20 years there will be another introduction apologizing for the ways this introduction was terrible in ways we can’t even anticipate yet.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 622514729052733440

Date: 2020-07-02 07:51:48 GMT

Body: I tend to be intuitively skeptical of people saying negative things about “workaholism,” “perfectionism,” etc. To first order it seems like the best way to accomplish your goals is to work really hard, and you’d expect people to come up with a lot of self-serving reasons that isn’t true.

I do think there’s an adjacent concept that I undervalued for a while which is like, tying too much of your self-worth to your work productivity can make you end up doing kind of bad things, like:

cab driver’s fallacy
overweighting visible and measurable output
fear of branching out and doing things outside your normal scope

just sitting down and thinking for a while doesn’t “feel like work” but often it is Actually Good and you come up with new ideas that make the rest of your time much more effectively spent

Tags: #personal, #enneagram 3 tips, #maybe should be a category on this blog

Post ID: 622512744345878528

Date: 2020-07-02 07:20:15 GMT

Body: fact about me: I once broke up with someone after

he said that he didn’t love me
I was visibly upset and started crying
he said “see? this is why I don’t think any amount of chicken suffering is commensurable with human suffering”

Tags: #personal, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 622148561320230912

Date: 2020-06-28 06:51:43 GMT

Question: are you on twitter?

Answer: NO but by weird coincidence I was just talking to someone not five minutes ago about how I should possibly become twitter famous

if I decide to do so I’ll keep you updated

Post ID: 621724922155352064

Date: 2020-06-23 14:38:10 GMT

Body: reading through unpublished drafts from my angry antifeminist youth and felt like publishing this one

I think my first exposure to feminism came in middle school. I was a math team kid, and one of the things that quickly becomes self-evident when you’re a math team kid is that girls just aren’t as good at math as boys.

I mean, maybe they are on average. But I was spending my time around the upper tail of the distribution, and there just weren’t as many girls. I never saw any sexism, any girls being discouraged. There weren’t girls in my school or in the schools we competed against who would have been great if they had just joined but they were too busy painting their nails instead. The missing girls just weren’t there.

This never confused me, there wasn’t any mystery about it. Girls were different from boys in lots of ways, why shouldn’t this be one of them? Different chromosomes, different hormones … the idea that this sort of difference might arise due to biology was totally unremarkable.

But if I ever mentioned this self-evident fact, I got one of two responses. One from adults, who tended to look sort of uncomfortable and change the subject quickly. And one from my (non-math-team-kid) peers, who would look shocked. “I can’t believe you would say something like that! That’s so sexist! It’s the current year!”

(No one ever argued with me, or tried to explain gender socialization, or pointed me to studies that would show that I was mistaken. It was always one of those two.)

It was then that I got the idea that there were true things that, if you talked about them, made you a bad person. It was terrifying.

Now of course, it’s ten years later and that knowledge is second nature. I’m better acquainted with the nuances of social justice shibboleths than most actual feminists I know. I’m used enough to tiptoeing around friends and acquaintances and people I meet at parties that I don’t have to think about it. But I still breathe a sigh of relief whenever I’m in a group of people and someone makes an offhandedly sexist remark. This, I think, this is somewhere I can be safe.

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #not sj go away

Post ID: 621722475793874944

Date: 2020-06-23 13:59:17 GMT

Body: Try questioning whether your epistemic humility is just fear by another name.

Imagine no one else knew the answer, and it was your job to figure it out. How does that feel?

If it feels scary, that’s a good sign: stay with that, and keep imagining it, and start trying to figure it out as if it were your only option.

Because, actually, all the progress and decisions in the world are made by people not that much smarter than you, if at all, and either you can at least sorta try to figure it out or we’re really fucked.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 621720097024851968

Date: 2020-06-23 13:21:28 GMT

Body: One thing about having somewhat of an organization-level view of things is that I see taxes differently from the way I used to.

Back when I just got paid a salary, and some percentage went to taxes: it was annoying but it was like okay, some relatively fixed cut gets taken out of this to give back to society, that’s reasonable.

But when you are trying to do business things it goes more like:

you come up with a bunch of ideas for how to create value
then you remember that depending on what they are exactly something like 10-50% of the value will end up being paid in taxes
sometimes this makes them no longer worth it
then the ones that still seem worth it you end up deciding what to do based partly on taxes, or thinking of similar things you could do that might be slightly worse on net but are better for taxes

Idk, it mostly makes people talking about stuff like companies paying their “fair share” in taxes sound nonsensical because like … what is their fair share, or anyone’s? Who knows?

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 621061004250562560

Date: 2020-06-16 06:45:28 GMT

Reblogging: aneeshmulye

Body:

aneeshmulye:

worldoptimization:
Here’s some stuff I’m currently feeling interested in! Recommendations of relevant books/blogs/music/other media welcome.
Nonfiction:
genetics, population history, historical linguistics, anthropology
China: history, politics, what are they up to
biographies of impressive/inspiring people
how to run a business and stuff
wine
any good guides/advice on writing LARPs
Fiction:
smart/competent women who are nonetheless not the protagonist and feel Conflicted about that
managing; doing emotional labor; getting groups of people to get along and work together
women being really stoic and put-together
conversely, women being completely melodramatic and ridiculous
anything related to Hades and Persephone or Heloise and Abelard
is there a database of fictional romances by enneagram type somewhere? that feels like something that’s got to exist
The following list cleaves along the same divisions as your own:
Genetics, pop history, etc:
Razib Khan’s blog (dude also posts a lot about history, etc)
Eurogenes blog
China! (it’s a tragic and horrific tale, this one; like Hitler, but the baddies/leftists won, then kept bumbling around and moving from one group to another to violate humiliate torture murder and sometimes genocide; untold, unimaginable suffering for an entire century, with no signs it’ll end any time soon - the Uighurs in concentration camps right now, the slow grinding down of Hong Kong, etc):
Tanner Greer’s blog (not everything is about China)
Tanner’s reading list for making sense of China and Chinese history (highly recommend this); this will perhaps give you a sense of what China before it got repeatedly and variously ravaged was like.
The three part PBS documentary on China’s previous century - China: A Century of Revolution; post-dynastic history, essentially (spoiler: it’s just terrible - every time you think it can’t get worse, it gets much, much worse):
Part 1 - China in Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5cl0GjPjy4
Part 2 - The Mao Years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJyoX_vrlns
Part 3 - Born Under the Red Flag (couldn’t find the complete thing, here’s a playlist that has big chunks): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL29B2717C9EBC500B
Dikötter’s trilogy, starting with The Tragedy of Liberation (haven’t read this one myself, but comes recommended by Tanner)
This beautiful 3d topographic map of China, which makes it blindingly obvious how Tibet is different, what the actual Chinese core is and how their history makes sense, why the Sichuan valley and culture is a thing, and so on
Biographies of the heroic and the impressive:
Just finished reading a biography of Boyd, called ‘Boyd’, by Coram. Somewhat hagiographic, but very interesting nonetheless.
Sam Walton’s biography, Made in America (IDK how complete or honest this is, but again, it’s interesting anyway)
Running a business (nice coincidence, this is something I looked into recently; haven’t read all of them, but all the ones I list here have all passed a pretty high quality filter):
Disciplined Entrepreneurship (for startups) (highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend; also has EdX Edge classes that cover the earlier parts of it, if I’m not wrong, and and online toolkit that you can use as well - it’s pretty mature and very empirical, battle-tested)
The Science of Success, by Charles Koch (details the philosophy of what’s behind the Kochs’ consistent few precent edge over the market even in highly competitive sectors)
How to Measure Anything (plus workbook), for metrics and their use
How Brands Grow (two parts, first more foundational) - empirical work on branding and brand growth
The Personal MBA - a good overview of stuff you’ll need to know in general
Immunity to Change (not just for business - and it’s by Kegan - yes, that Kegan, the Kegan of the Stages) - useful for getting through the immunity to change that bedevils organisations and persons
For the bare-bones foundations, I’m going through Wharton’s Business Foundations on Coursera; again, since I’m at the beginning, it’s hard to say just how good it is, but it seemed like the resource I thought worth putting time into, so I’m putting it here.
Though you didn’t ask for this, I’m going to link it here anyway, since I have a sneaking suspicion it may be relevant to your interests: the Maneuver Warfare reading list. This is how something like this spectacular military debacle for the US military can happen.
Finally, how about a smart, competent woman who won the Nobel Prize for her work in getting groups of people to work together and defy Moloch and punch him in the face? Turns out that commons problems that occur most often in reality are just… solvable, actually; and people have solved them time and again. Her work details how, when, under what conditions, and what you need to do to do this. Book’s called Governing the Commons, by Elinor Ostrom. (Makes the usual rat attitude when encountering such problems - Oh no! Everything is forever terrible, we’re doomed! Despair despair despair! - seem pretty weird.)
(Possibly more later.)

ahh great list, ty! and thanks everyone else for the recs as well! (though @ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres I think you are overestimating my linguistics ability :P)

interestingly I actually thought about putting something with warfare/the military on the list but didn’t

Post ID: 620969651401375745

Date: 2020-06-15 06:33:27 GMT

Question: Fic rec: Assuming you are not already reading it perhaps "Lore Olympus" for fiction under Hadies and Persephone (cw for sexual assault played for drama and a realistic serious manner)

Answer: I am already reading it! But Lore Olympus is great and passing on the recommendation for anyone else who wants deeply satisfying Hades/Persephone fluff

Post ID: 620968370813255680

Date: 2020-06-15 06:13:06 GMT

Body: Here’s some stuff I’m currently feeling interested in! Recommendations of relevant books/blogs/music/other media welcome.

Nonfiction:

genetics, population history, historical linguistics, anthropology
China: history, politics, what are they up to
biographies of impressive/inspiring people
how to run a business and stuff
wine
any good guides/advice on writing LARPs

Fiction:

smart/competent women who are nonetheless not the protagonist and feel Conflicted about that
managing; doing emotional labor; getting groups of people to get along and work together
women being really stoic and put-together
conversely, women being completely melodramatic and ridiculous
anything related to Hades and Persephone or Heloise and Abelard
is there a database of fictional romances by enneagram type somewhere? that feels like something that’s got to exist

Post ID: 620930515581681664

Date: 2020-06-14 20:11:24 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/4bffbcb10c7f6c2af75163f1ad2a7fba/6ac373b03547e142-37/s540x810/7b023cc0a9a2498c568f9215deb8f9b54b7ace17.jpg

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was an excellent glimpse into a field I don’t know much about: sometimes I’ll see an article in some media about Neanderthal DNA or something, but I don’t have enough context to really get what’s going on. This book was an enjoyable way to get all that context; would recommend.

I didn’t really realize this before reading it, but it sounds like ancient DNA is a pretty exciting and fast-growing field; it’s just in the last decade that we’ve made enough technological advances to do whole-genome sequencing on ancient human remains, and we’ve gotten a way better understanding of human history from doing this. Tbh it made me kind of jealous: it feels like this is one of those moments where there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit and you don’t actually have to be that smart or lucky to significantly improve our understanding of early human history.

So yeah, read this to learn about:
- interbreeding with archaic humans
- agriculturalists and steppe pastoralists in Europe
- the Indus Valley civilization and its fall
- Indian caste division and endogamy
- the tribes in the Amazon who are related to Australian aborigines
- sex-asymmetric mixing between populations
etc. It’s cool.

I guess this also made me feel like I had a better overall picture of human population history, which is something like: there’s a family tree that splits and branches off, as you’d imagine. Sometimes those branches end up as hunter-gatherers on random islands and do their own thing for thousands of years. But a lot of the time the branches continue to intermingle, one of them develops some new technology or something and conquers another, then they interbreed and produce a new population, and so on.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 620626337045053440

Date: 2020-06-11 11:36:37 GMT

Question: sorry they cancelled gone with the wind. I haven't read or seen it but I know it was one of your problematic faves.

Answer: thanks <3

Post ID: 619646685397794816

Date: 2020-05-31 16:05:29 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

https://www.facebook.com/robert.wiblin/posts/884145899415

worldoptimization:
My company tries to hire the best person we can find for any given job. And it just so happens that a lot of the best people turn out to not be American. Add to that the fact that we’re running a global business marketing to customers all over the world where local expertise can be useful, and you end up with employees from all over: US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, etc.
And all we want is a place in the world where we can all stay for an extended period of time and work together, and it seems crazy that it’s so hard! Immigration laws are weird.
Like things that have happened in the four months since I moved to Hong Kong:
walking to work and passing smashed and burned-out storefronts from the previous night’s riots
my coworkers getting tear gassed
having to get my temperature checked every time I want to enter my apartment building
apparently there’s a toilet paper shortage now
and yet Hong Kong is still just clearly a better place for us to be running a business than the US, on many dimensions. I’m impressed how badly the US has fucked this up, and surprised by what proportion of world-changing startups are nonetheless headquartered there.

weird to think it was only a few short months ago when rioting and coronavirus were considered disadvantages of Hong Kong relative to the US

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 618905135348875264

Date: 2020-05-23 11:38:51 GMT

Body: a thing no one told me about being an adult:

I thought it would be like school, where the hard part is like, doing the things. the hardest part of having a job isn’t doing the things, it’s that you have to do the things and be in a good mood about it all the time.

being in a bad mood is actually just really bad: you snap at people or find ways to criticize them. you do things to increase your own status at the expense of others because you don’t feel sufficiently secure. you’re unexcited and pessimistic and that comes across and makes other people feel that way too.

(I guess it’s true when you’re a kid too, that bad moods are infectious. I think the differences are that for one, the more people are depending on you the more power your emotions have; and for another, the situations in which this is really relevant are when you’re working together with a group of people toward some common goal.)

all this means that it’s really valuable to find ways to be genuinely happy, if you can. but it also means that the times when you can’t–and there will always be times–taking a deep breath and putting on a brave face and smiling anyway is literally your job.

Post ID: 618880083796656128

Date: 2020-05-23 05:00:40 GMT

Body: The year is 2020. Your heroine is working for a digital currency exchange that allows citizens of repressive regimes to move money anywhere in the world. The authoritarian central government has just announced its plan to crack down on her scrappy, lovable city-state. She must choose between staying and facing a future of increasingly harsh and technologically sophisticated censorship and repression, or venturing into the outside world–which is currently in shambles due to a devastating pandemic.

like yes, I took my current job with the plan of becoming a sci-fi protagonist but even so this feels a little too on the nose

Post ID: 615915815449083904

Date: 2020-04-20 11:44:54 GMT

Question: Wait in what context do men demand u be more assertive + disagree with them more? I've found a lot of guys seem to respect me more when I disagree with them (even if its just like playful bickering) than if I go along with whatever they say. But I honestly respect assertive ppl more too. In no context has any guy ever told me to disagree with him more though if that makes sense.

Answer: I feel like it happens to me all the time: dating, work, really just whenever.

My brain is trying to come up with arguments for why this is completely unreasonable but more likely I just feel particularly insecure about these qualities in myself so get upset when they’re called attention to

Post ID: 615862315473043456

Date: 2020-04-19 21:34:32 GMT

Body: it’s actually sort of convenient how triggered I am by men demanding that I be more assertive, disagree with them more, and other things along those lines

“No, I absolutely will not. Also go fuck yourself”

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 615861863450820608

Date: 2020-04-19 21:27:21 GMT

Body: (just some bullshit intuitions I have, ymmv)

Obviously, optimizing for doing good isn’t the same thing as optimizing for personal happiness. And I think to whatever extent you can rewire your brain to value and seek out the first rather than the second, that’s good. I’ve been trying to do a lot of that especially the past couple years: training myself to get more pleasure and reward out of work, shaping my aesthetics and intuitions to be more utilitarian and more agentic.

But also, I think I probably won’t end up having much effect on the world either way, and I really should be going for the few cases where I have a lot of impact. And I suspect those scenarios just look, for lack of a better word, awesome: I’m awesome, my work is awesome, and my life is awesome. Maybe my life doesn’t look exactly like my or society’s preconceived notions of a good life, but it’s something I’m super excited about.

And like–I think there’s an extent to which talking about tradeoffs too much actually makes them real. I see this at work a lot. When someone says “what if we did X?” it feels like the correct and rational thing to do is to consider how valuable X is per unit time, rank it next to all existing projects, consider the other costs it might have beyond time and factor those in, and eventually slot it in on someone’s stack.

When the alternative is to say, “yeah, X sounds awesome, let’s just do it.”

Yeah, you’re always going to need at least some of the first thing; you can’t “just do” literally everything. But in practice it feels like a lot of the time the first thing just means not much gets done and the second one means a ton of shit getting done.

So anyway, I get that feeling a bit when listening to both sides of these debates. Whether it’s “people should make sacrifices” or “people shouldn’t make sacrifices,” my instinct is that maybe we shouldn’t give the sacrifices the benefit of believing in them. Maybe we should try harder to believe that we can do all the things, and then do them.

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 615487501106315264

Date: 2020-04-15 18:17:01 GMT

Body: I was having fun today with the insight that relationships can be momentumy or mean-reverty (or both, on different timescales), and classifying my relationships as such

mean-reverty:

they say something I find hurtful. I act hurt until they notice and start being extra nice to make up for it, at which point I go back to normal
they’re uncomfortable with intimacy so whenever we start to get too close they pull away. if I give them space they come back

momentumy:

they do something considerate for me. I’m touched and do something considerate back. the virtuous cycle continues
they do something I think is bad, ignoring my protests. I’m pissed so I do something I know they think is bad, etc. the vicious cycle continues

I haven’t decided which … is better … idk, mean reversion seems like it will always be a bit disappointing. Otoh, even if you’re in the good phase of a momentumy relationship it’s kinda terrifying because stuff can spiral into a shitshow real quick.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 615486458521862144

Date: 2020-04-15 18:00:27 GMT

Body: It’s sort of a weird shift in perspective to read the latest SSC post and see the list of people praised for getting things right: all Westerners, many of whom started tweeting about it in mid-February or so, all seemingly distinguished by their ability to do cost-benefit analyses and reasoning under uncertainty.

When like, you know who else got it right? The entire city of Hong Kong. Back in mid-January, before there was a single case in Hong Kong, my Hong Kong coworkers were already warning me to avoid crowds and wear a mask when I went outside. The city effectively went on lockdown as soon as the first cases were reported, and it wasn’t the actions of a few informed people in the government, either (the widely reviled chief executive was in Davos at the time, and it took a strike by hospital workers to get the government to take steps like “restrict travel from mainland China”).

Idk, it’s obviously not that everyone in Hong Kong has rationality superpowers. I guess they just have a cultural script of “potential deadly pandemic -> start taking precautionary measures” which … sounds pretty reasonable in retrospect but apparently most of the world just doesn’t have.

This is the most cliche takeaway ever from a white person living in Asia but I think it has pushed me a bit towards appreciating the ways in which we can learn from other cultures, etc. Like, sometimes I think that the internet has connected the whole world into one big unified cultural blob–and then I see things from Chinese social media, which has a fuckton of people and its own totally different (and incomprehensible, to me) set of memes and aesthetics and hot-button issues. Hong Kong social media overlaps with Western social media a bit–they’ll both comment on articles in the New York Times or whatever–but it also has its own set of issues and views, and it’s impressive how with all this information traveling at the speed of light it still manages to stay about a month ahead of the discourse on my facebook.

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 614125783519281152

Date: 2020-03-31 17:33:06 GMT

Body: (written by me in May 2010)

They say our lives are dreary and routine,
When suddenly, along comes a disaster
To break the peaceful, shatter the serene.

Perhaps that’s why life’s seemed a little faster,
A bit more thrilling, maybe, recently—
I’ve just now learned that man is not Earth’s master.

From Iceland came a cloud across the sea.
We had to close our airports, cancel flights.
We fell apart—that’s how it seemed to me.

In airports, weary travelers spent long nights.
We wondered if Earth had turned on her daughters
And sons, and humankind had seen its height.

It was like that when we couldn’t drink the water.
Was Earth a vengeful mother? Did she grow
Increasingly irate that we forgot her?

Whether she did or not, I was aglow
With ardor, and I begged to brush my teeth
With our San Pellegrino. Mom said no.

Tags: #poetry

Post ID: 614125237404106752

Date: 2020-03-31 17:24:25 GMT

Body: I wrote a LARP!

I successfully ran it a couple days ago; it definitely still has some flaws but I nonetheless feel pleased enough to want to share it with the world.

Here is a spoiler-free intro (feel free to DM for the rest of the materials)

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 613394847828705280

Date: 2020-03-23 15:55:12 GMT

Reblogging: kontextmaschine

Body:

kontextmaschine:

Hm, just remembered that with Lover released in fall, Cruel Summer was supposed to be the song of this summer.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 612947200913342464

Date: 2020-03-18 17:20:02 GMT

Body: if I were the sort of person who wrote such things I would definitely write Heloise and Abelard fanfic based on Cruel Summer

Tags: #nightblogging

Post ID: 612240319226003456

Date: 2020-03-10 22:04:27 GMT

Body: I keep hearing people equating the stock market being down 10% with the world economy losing 10% of its value, or stuff like that. But I don’t think that’s the right comparison.

I think the 2008 recession cost the economy something like 5-10% of its long-term value. There were one of two years of below average growth (depending on if you’re looking at the US or the world), then one year of negative growth (2009), then things mostly returned to baseline. But the S&P 500 was down 50% in 2008. Were people just bad at predicting how bad the recession would be?

No, I think what’s going on is that in a crisis:

volatility is higher
people’s risk tolerance is lower
people’s return on capital is higher

and these all mean that the premium you can get paid to hold risky assets goes up, ie stocks go down.

Does this mean there’s a trade to do? Well, yes, I think buying stocks in a crash is a positive EV trade on a year timescale or something. But it’s also risky; they’re much more likely than usual to go down a lot more, and cause you to get liquidated or lose a bunch of money, at a time when you’re much more likely than average to lose your job or experience other shocks that might create a need for capital. Matt Levine said something about this the other day:“Sure maybe a good time to buy stocks is when everyone is selling, but if people are pulling money from your fund and brokers are refusing to provide leverage, you’ll probably be selling too.“

But yeah, I don’t think the stock market being down 15% is nearly as bad as losing 15% of the future economic value in the world. If the average annual return of the S&P 500 is 8%, then a 3x in expected volatility should cause that alone, I don’t think volatility for the year is up that much (short term VIX is). But I think that and similar factors, rather than changes in expected future cash flows from the economy, accounts for the majority of the move in crashes.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 611759352238555136

Date: 2020-03-05 14:39:42 GMT

Body: honestly “Serena or Blair?” is just such a fundamental question to the point that like, I don’t think anyone who answers Serena and I are ever going to fully get each other

Tags: #gossip girl

Post ID: 611714835088031744

Date: 2020-03-05 02:52:07 GMT

Body: further updates in “worldoptimization is annoyed about Efficient Market discourse”:

this is like, the opposite of complaining about Predictit markets on Bloomberg being wrong.

the problem there is that there’s just not enough money to make it clearly worth worrying about. that’s not a problem if you think you can predict the S&P 500! if you can do that you can make arbitrary amounts of money, limited only by your capital and your risk tolerance. sure, maybe you, random internet user, don’t have immediate access to a ton of capital. but if you’re smart and motivated, you can find ways to get it.

not just to pick on this post, but I feel like a common reaction I’m seeing is “lol, guess markets aren’t so efficient after all.” when the right reaction is somewhere between being pissed that you missed out on this opportunity (if you did), and being excited because this is an update toward you and other smart people who share your values being able to make lots of money easily

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m, #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 611134395950268416

Date: 2020-02-27 17:06:17 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1228668492972462083

worldoptimization:
My company tries to hire the best person we can find for any given job. And it just so happens that a lot of the best people turn out to not be American. Add to that the fact that we’re running a global business marketing to customers all over the world where local expertise can be useful, and you end up with employees from all over: US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, etc.
And all we want is a place in the world where we can all stay for an extended period of time and work together, and it seems crazy that it’s so hard! Immigration laws are weird.
Like things that have happened in the four months since I moved to Hong Kong:
walking to work and passing smashed and burned-out storefronts from the previous night’s riots
my coworkers getting tear gassed
having to get my temperature checked every time I want to enter my apartment building
apparently there’s a toilet paper shortage now
and yet Hong Kong is still just clearly a better place for us to be running a business than the US, on many dimensions. I’m impressed how badly the US has fucked this up, and surprised by what proportion of world-changing startups are nonetheless headquartered there.

a-bell-to-rise-and-die

can you talk more about how hong kong is a better place to run a business? is this mostly a regulatory environment thing or something else?

Yeah, the US just has so many regulations.

Some of them, like caps on H1B visas, I really disagree with but at least I kind of understand. I think laws against what is essentially a transaction between two consenting people are a priori likely to be bad, and this issue feels like something there should even be bipartisan agreement on–but also immigration is a hot-button issue, and I guess people have a lot of feelings about it.

But then there’s other areas where no one in the public is even paying attention to them, and it’s clear the process of creating regulations is not anything like “find problems, try to fix them” or even “punish things that public opinion thinks are bad.” It’s “I am a regulator in the Department of Regulating X, and so I am going to write some regulations on X.”

And that’s if you’re lucky; the more likely case is that they haven’t written any regulations on X at all yet, because X has only been around for five years, but they are studying X closely and in another year they will emerge with a case against a bunch of people doing X because obviously X falls under some definition of wire fraud or something. So if you want to do anything remotely innovative you have to hire a bunch of expensive lawyers who will patiently repeat to you that no, there is actually no law here you can just follow and be good, there’s a bunch of competing overlapping heuristics and there’s industry standards and there’s vaguely related historical precedents and at the end of the day you make a guess and hope for the best.

And of course, in addition to the federal government there’s fifty different states that all want to be special so they all make their own different regulations.

Sure, the Hong Kong government isn’t perfect, they might resort to authoritarian measures to quell protests or whatever. But at least that keeps them busy, you know? The US government clearly just has so much time on their hands.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 190949723354

Date: 2020-02-21 17:42:44 GMT

Body: when I first started my foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past, but tbh I’ve come to decide the only acceptable style of poly is best characterized as something like “imperial Chinese harem”

none of this non-hierarchical bullshit; everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall on the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the higher ranks

Tags: #personal, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 190933093414

Date: 2020-02-20 18:55:38 GMT

Body: I only bought this personality so you could take it off

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 190913029694

Date: 2020-02-19 15:48:36 GMT

Body: I think an important fact, that I get wrong way too often, is that other people are never thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are.

other person: I wish someone had done X

me: what does that mean? Well, the only people who could have done it are me and A, and A definitely couldn’t have done it because of B, so they must mean me. But they know I didn’t do X because of Y, so that must mean they think I shouldn’t do Y … so they must think I should do Z instead of Y? But that implies such a low value on my time compared to C’s … oh god, am I really miscalibrated on that?

what they were actually thinking: it sucked for me personally that no one did X, and I’m sad about that

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 190896514914

Date: 2020-02-18 17:22:29 GMT

Body: I haven’t been following it that closely so I’m still kinda confused about how the coronavirus fits into the culture wars

my vague impression is that:

social justice-y people are being contrarian by saying that it’s not a big deal
tech/libertarian people are being metacontrarian by saying that it is a big deal and we should all be freaking out about it

I’m friends with more of the latter so seeing more of the latter discourse. And even though I think people think we should be freaking out, I’m not really sure what that means–is it jut that we should acknowledge that this is an important societal issue? Or do they think that it’s worth my time for me to take actions that decrease my personal risk of coronavirus?

Tags: #coronavirus cw

Post ID: 190896130184

Date: 2020-02-18 16:53:55 GMT

Body:

I find Robin Hanson’s reaction here … not wrong really (it’s true that markets are good sources of information! and it’s good to bet on your beliefs!) but sort of amusingly quaint

economist: are you saying … a Market … is Wrong

me, a Market Professional: yes yes I know! there are lots of markets that are wrong, and that market is on my list already, but it’s behind about a hundred others, and I’m trying to fix them all, but also I need to like sleep okay

Tags: #listen to economists they know things, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 190810458239

Date: 2020-02-13 19:33:24 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

BMJ Christmas issue | The BMJ

My company tries to hire the best person we can find for any given job. And it just so happens that a lot of the best people turn out to not be American. Add to that the fact that we’re running a global business marketing to customers all over the world where local expertise can be useful, and you end up with employees from all over: US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, etc.
And all we want is a place in the world where we can all stay for an extended period of time and work together, and it seems crazy that it’s so hard! Immigration laws are weird.

Like things that have happened in the four months since I moved to Hong Kong:

walking to work and passing smashed and burned-out storefronts from the previous night’s riots
my coworkers getting tear gassed
having to get my temperature checked every time I want to enter my apartment building
apparently there’s a toilet paper shortage now

and yet Hong Kong is still just clearly a better place for us to be running a business than the US, on many dimensions. I’m impressed how badly the US has fucked this up, and surprised by what proportion of world-changing startups are nonetheless headquartered there.

Post ID: 190810312894

Date: 2020-02-13 19:22:37 GMT

Body: My company tries to hire the best person we can find for any given job. And it just so happens that a lot of the best people turn out to not be American. Add to that the fact that we’re running a global business marketing to customers all over the world where local expertise can be useful, and you end up with employees from all over: US, Canada, Australia, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, mainland China, etc.

And all we want is a place in the world where we can all stay for an extended period of time and work together, and it seems crazy that it’s so hard! Immigration laws are weird.

Post ID: 190533057109

Date: 2020-01-29 14:47:58 GMT

Reblogging: kaumnyakte

Body:

yup-im-a-werewolf:

if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?
have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?
list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with.
do you like your name? is there another name you think would fit you better?
do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?
are you religious/spiritual?
do you care about your ethnicity?
what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime?
are you an artist?
do you have a creed?
describe your ideal day.
dog person or cat person?
inside or outdoors?
are you a musician?
five most influential books over your lifetime.
if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same?
would you say your tumblr is a fair representation of the “real you”?
what’s your patronus?
which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle?
would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else?
do you love easily?
list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.
how often would you want to see your family every year?
have you ever felt like you had a “mind-meld” with someone?
could you live as a hermit?
how would you describe your gender/sexuality?
do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”?
on a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is it for someone to get under your skin?
three songs that you connect with right now.
pick one of your favorite quotes.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 190455133064

Date: 2020-01-25 09:38:22 GMT

Body: I’ve been hiring and managing people for a year or so now, and it’s been pretty interesting to see what things turn out to be important in employees.

(obviously this is only from my experience; I wouldn’t be sharing it if I didn’t think it had some broader applicability but also my job is pretty weird)

Working more hours is really valuable. I think a reasonable prior is that a person’s output is linear in their number of hours worked. (This sounds like sort of an obvious point, but I think people can miss it because of the strong expectation of a job being something you do 9-5 or whatever; I definitely missed it for a while.) There’s a point at which it gets sublinear, but that’s often pretty far out. (I feel like there can be regions where it’s superlinear as well; if I’m working few enough hours I can get to a point where I have to spend all my time catching up on what happened when I wasn’t working.)

You can pay people more for working more, but the costs of hiring and training are really high, and scale with the number of people. It’s also just sort of better to have one person doing a job rather than two; it allows knowledge to be more concentrated and cuts down on communication and coordination costs.

Another thing that’s valuable: just being in the office. I used to think of “just showing up” as a bad thing and that companies should just care about how much work you get done, not how many hours you’re in the office. But actually, it’s really nice to have people in the office even if they’re not being productive; they can deal with things that come up, answer questions whenever you have them, join in conversations, etc. Being available 24/7 by phone/online is also great.

Willingness to just do whatever needs to be done is another good one. It turns out that a lot of things are annoying, and boring, and someone still has to do them. The difference between “ugh do I have to” and eagerly volunteering for the shittiest jobs is really big.

Being proactive is huge. I think this is the biggest thing I fucked up when I first started working. I was operating under some assumptions like:

my manager’s time and the time of the more senior people around me are really valuable
I should try not to waste it
therefore I:
shouldn’t talk unless I have something really worthwhile to say
shouldn’t ask questions unless I’ve exhausted all possibilities for answering them on my own
shouldn’t ask for more things to do unless I’ve done everything I’ve been given so far
etc.

Now I realize that this is the exact opposite of helpful, and actually makes management way more work. A lot of management comes down to stuff like having accurate models of what people do and don’t know, and what they’re good and bad at, and what they spend their time on. The less active effort I have to expend to build these models, the better. I love it when people:

ask lots of questions and talk a lot, especially when they’re saying something dumb. if they say lots of wrong things, it lets me know what they don’t understand, so I can help fill in the gaps.
give lots of updates on what they’re doing without being asked
ask for more stuff to work on
like my ideal interaction is something like “hey, here are the top 3 things on my stack. here are the stages they’re all at. if there’s something else you think I should do let me know, otherwise I’ll default to working on these”
suggest things and take initiative. I used to think stuff like “well, no one’s asked me to help with this project, even though it seems like a good fit for me, so they probably think I would be bad at it.” actually, it’s way more likely that it just didn’t occur to them, because constantly assessing and reassessing every combination of (person, project) is really hard, and they’ll be happy at you pointing things out and making their job easier.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 190454233009

Date: 2020-01-25 07:59:29 GMT

Body: I used to be the sort of person who never fought with people. I knew that getting into heated arguments with people, that might escalate to fights with yelling, was a thing that people did in movies and stuff, but I couldn’t imagine doing it myself. If I was annoyed at someone I might engage in passive aggression, but if it seemed like it might escalate to a fight I would always choose the side of backing down and being conciliatory. It just felt like getting into an openly acknowledged, common-knowledge fight with someone was devastating and to be avoided at all costs.

Lately I’ve gotten more into fighting and it seems … fine? I mean, I don’t strongly endorse it; it definitely seems better to resolve disagreements with honest but thoughtful communication. But if in the moment I’m too upset to do that, getting into a fight seems like a pretty good alternative to what I was doing before. It makes me feel better, it releases some tension, and it turns out it’s not devastating and you can generally make up and get along fine afterwards.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 189908403269

Date: 2019-12-28 00:12:37 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/72bcb8d91e45ab70b802ba947ec9102a/308767cbdaed2a95-3c/s540x810/78500f1f3f978c71a17a72530187b32eaa4b045c.jpg

The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Man, this was so good.

The first impression it left me with was: Daniel Ellsberg is so cool.

The second impression was: I guess a lot of my friends, and people who tend to share my political views, are pacifist-leaning and oppose the national security establishment and such. And I’ve never felt that confident that they’re right. “War is bad, killing people is bad” just seems like such an obvious, dumb take that the people who are against that must have good reasons. I can imagine what some of them might be: it does seem legitimately better to have a world under US influence than Russian or Chinese. And probably a lot of the good reasons people have for doing stuff are classified.

And The Doomsday Machine left me with the very strong impression that nope, there are no wise and thoughtful leaders behind the scenes making all the right decisions on national security. Actually, a lot of our plans and strategies and doctrines are not only based on disregard for non-American life and for future generations, but are just … dumb? They’re the product of incompetence and bureaucratic infighting and make no sense under any value system.

Anyway, it was all pretty scary, and I felt kind of amazed that we’re all still alive.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 189904536539

Date: 2019-12-27 20:00:12 GMT

Reblogging: millievfence

Body:

millievfence:

findingfeather:
kawuli:
hrovitnir:
lanibgoode:
so i’m confused. can someone explain how you can “control for socioeconomic factors”?
poverty affects every single part of your life.
it is why we eat the foods we eat (cheap and less nutritious), where we live (poorer neighborhoods have poorer air and water quality), which doctors you see (only certain doctors take certain insurances and the ones who take low-income insurance like medicaid are always overworked, overbooked, and burning out), it affects how much time you have to devote to things like exercise and recreation.
how do you erase how it touches you when it touches everything?
genatrius:
So basically what they’re saying is that enriching your life and discovering new things is good for your physical health. That’s actually cool as hell.
starstuffandalotofcoffee:
In addition to that very good point about controlling for socioeconomic factors, the article says a single museum or concert per year makes a difference. Most cities have free community concerts (some even have free opera performances!) and museums that are either free, pay-what-you-want, or at least have specific days/times during which they are free or at a significantly reduced cost. Many libraries (which are free) provide free museum passes to card holders. In fact, the article quotes a museum worker who works at a free art museum in Baltimore.
If you actually read the article you would also read that educators are excited about this study because it provides evidence that the arts should be made more accessible financially - by restoring arts programs in the public schools, for example.
cyborgfirelord:
They controlled for socioeconomic factors though! The people who conducted this study knew that people with lots of money to attend the opera were also more likely to be able to afford basic necessities, so they controlled for it in their analysis. The fun thing about statistics is that you can control for different confounding factors so you can look at the effects of one independent variable (opera or whatever) on the dependent variable (mortality). Part of being critical of potential biases is actually reading the article and knowing what to look for.
sapphichat:
this week in I Am Very Smart: having enough money to go to the opera, museums and concerts correlates with having enough money for food, shelter and basic health needs
It’s “controlled for” statistically. I haven’t actually read this properly, but in remotely decent research they take data about all factors and use tests designed to prevent making dubious correlations.
So rather than just comparing all people on just opera Y/N vs lifepan/health outcomes, it’s grouping people based on multiple factors at once. It’s not perfect, but it can tease out whether the only people experiencing the benefit also have higher income and your relationship will become weak.
My statistics game is weak, but basically you need to use multivariate analysis, and this requires specialised software.
From a website explaining multivariate analysis:
Multiple regression analysis, often referred to simply as regression analysis, examines the effects of multiple independent variables (predictors) on the value of a dependent variable, or outcome. Regression calculates a coefficient for each independent variable, as well as its statistical significance, to estimate the effect of each predictor on the dependent variable, with other predictors held constant. Researchers in economics and other social sciences often use regression analysis to study social and economic phenomena. An example of a regression study is to examine the effect of education, experience, gender, and ethnicity on income.
Ie: you are using statistical tests to look at the relationship between all your different variables at once, so if the relationship is actually between factors that are not what you’re interested in, that will show up.
@kawuli Does that explanation make sense? I hope this is actually something you were interested in hearing, @lanibgoode, my apologies if not!
It depends on the methods used but basically, they collect a bunch of socioeconomic data like income, where you live, education, etc.
Then they predict your lifespan based on those data. A good way to simplify is to think of an x - y plot with income on the x axis and years lived on the y axis. There’s going to be some line sloping up from left to right.
Then they separate people into two groups based on whether they went to the opera (or whatever) and they get two lines, where the one for opera goers is shifted up a little bit on the y axis.
Say for the no opera people life expectancy is 65 at $10k/year and 80 at $500k/year (these are completely made up numbers). Maybe for the with opera group it’s 68 at $10k/year and 80.5 at $500k/year.
The difference between those lines is the impact that opera going makes, controlled for income.
In reality this is a confusing Thing constructed in like 8-dimensional space (1 dimension per variable you want to control for) instead of a line, but the principle holds.
(disclaimer: you can do this badly and get nonsense, I have not evaluated the statistical methods used in this paper or making any judgment on the validity of the results)
Given it is quite literally a Holiday Joke about How You Can Use Statistics Weirdly by the BMJ which the NYT reported VERY BADLY ON … .
(Very seriously: THE BMJ WAS JOKING. THIS WAS A JOKE PAPER.)
I don’t see anything on the paper page that would let me detect it was a joke.

After googling a bit I don’t think this is a joke?

It’s from the BMJ Christmas issue.

According to the website, “While we welcome light-hearted fare and satire, we do not publish spoofs, hoaxes, or fabricated studies.”

And the Times interviewed one of the coauthors for their article and he seemed perfectly serious.

So basically I feel like everyone involved in this looks pretty bad:

The BMJ, for being very unclear about the epistemic status of their Christmas articles, which seems irresponsible for a medical journal.

The New York Times, for just generally sucking.

And the authors, for publishing a bad study. In fairness, they say “This study was observational and so causality cannot be assumed,” which is true. But in that case, why is there any value in the study?

It’s true that you can use statistics to control for things: in this case, it looks like they tried to control for socioeconomic status, health, etc. But once you’ve controlled for all the stuff you can think of, you’re still left with two hypotheses: that going to museums increases your lifespan, or that some unobserved variable Z causes both going to museums and increased lifespan. Z could be something else you haven’t thought of, or it could be something you tried to measure but did so imperfectly. Eg, you try to measure health by taking a bunch of vital statistics, but there’s some measurement error, and some natural variation in people’s blood pressure from day to day. So you end up with an imperfect measure of health, and it turns out that going to museums is somewhat correlated with people’s true level of health that you’ve failed to perfectly measure.

In this case, the latter hypothesis sounds more likely to me. It could be the former, it’s not crazy. But the study hasn’t really done much to distinguish between the two. This is why we have experiments, and instrumental variables, and other stuff that social scientists have come up with to actually measure causality.

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 189882398119

Date: 2019-12-26 16:04:05 GMT

Body: I did some anthropological research on Gen Z over the holidays. Here are my findings:

they like generally popular artists like Kanye and Drake. Taylor Swift is “very millennial”
they also like more Gen Z-specific artists like Lil Nas X and Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish is liked because she’s “weird” and “different from everyone else”
they communicate with friends via iMessage, Snapchat, and Instagram DM
Facebook Messenger is for “class president types”
but you have to be careful when snapchatting/sliding into the DMs of people you don’t know well, since it often comes across as flirting
the predominant internet celebrities are Youtubers
there are Youtubers who talk about specific topics, like makeup. but the most popular ones are those who talk about their lives and create a relatable persona
there are popular accounts on Twitter and Tiktok as well, but these are more anonymous meme accounts and don’t rise to the level of celebrities
there are a lot of scandals; one recent example was a gay male Youtuber who was accused of pressuring straight men into sex (I think, don’t know the exact details)
these scandals cause a lot of controversy but “everyone forgets about them within a week”
when asked what political issues their generation thinks are important, the one-word answer was “climate”

Post ID: 189857787479

Date: 2019-12-25 05:20:44 GMT

Body: Thoughts on 2019 donations:

Here are my current thoughts on 2019 donations. These aren’t final and I haven’t thought that much about it.

In general. this year I’ve been focused on generating value on a timescale of a few years. Almost all of my effort has gone into my job, with the goals of:

increasing the long-term expected value of my company
building my skills and getting career capital along the way

I haven’t been optimizing for short-term cash flow and haven’t spent any time looking for current donation opportunities, since I don’t think that whatever I can donate this year accounts for very much of my expected impact.

The first question: how much to donate?

Given that I’ve taken the Giving What We Can pledge, honoring that is a lower bound. My compensation is confusing, but 10% of the actual US dollars I got paid (plus taxes) seems reasonable for a lower bound.

The upper bound is my net worth, I guess.

Most of my wealth, as it were, is invested in an illiquid and volatile asset. I don’t think it makes sense to donate this now, as I don’t want to sell it. It’s also not any more tax efficient to donate this before year end.

I think it makes sense to have a decent amount of liquid savings. I’d like to have 2 years of runway; my job right now is pretty uncertain, I feel uncertain about my future career trajectory in general, and I want to make sure I can stay super flexible and unconstrained.

So the question is what to do with the money in between “GWWC pledge” and “2 years of runway.” I’m inclined to mostly donate it. It intuitively feels like just donating somewhere now compares favorably to the last dollar I’ll donate in the future, plus it just feels virtuous and stuff.

The second question: where to donate?

The obvious place given that I haven’t thought about this is a donor lottery. I’ll probably donate most of my 2019 donation to CEA’s donor lottery. I’m scared of committing time to things right now, but at $500k it doesn’t seem that bad to commit to spending a bit of time figuring out where to donate.

I’ll probably also give smaller donations to groups I like and/or have donated to in the past, just because it seems good:

THL
MIRI
CEA
political campaigns

Tags: #effective altruism, #scrupulosity cw

Post ID: 189852430064

Date: 2019-12-24 22:33:52 GMT

Reblogging: kaumnyakte

Post ID: 189850992059

Date: 2019-12-24 20:54:39 GMT

Reblogging: prestogagarine

Body:

prestogagarine:

worldoptimization:
btw a link from SSC sent me down a rabbit hole of reading hbd chick and related links lately and the whole intellectual edifice is pretty fascinating
I don’t have a great summary, and epistemic status tentative so you should just read the blog and follow the rabbit hole yourself. But basically:
most cultures throughout history have had norms of marrying cousins, often pretty specific (eg it is encouraged to marry your father’s sister’s daughter but forbidden to marry your father’s brother’s daughter)
Western Europe since the Middle Ages has been anomalously anti-cousin marriage
and more generally unusually focused on nuclear rather than extended family
this is related to things like late marriage (Hajnal line) and feudalism
all this makes the culture less “clannish” and more individualistic and prosocial/democratic (basically, because people’s ties to extended family are weak, they will act on behalf of broader society rather than extended family
all the stuff about kinship structures seems deeply embedded in societies; eg languages can be divided into categories according to the kinship classification systems they use, and this corresponds to social norms about kinship
Also fast, recent and local genetic evolution of the human brain.

Mm yeah that was the part I saw referenced but maybe missed the actual explanation; do you happen to have one/links?

Post ID: 189848451114

Date: 2019-12-24 17:51:32 GMT

Body: btw a link from SSC sent me down a rabbit hole of reading hbd chick and related links lately and the whole intellectual edifice is pretty fascinating

I don’t have a great summary, and epistemic status tentative so you should just read the blog and follow the rabbit hole yourself. But basically:

most cultures throughout history have had norms of marrying cousins, often pretty specific (eg it is encouraged to marry your father’s sister’s daughter but forbidden to marry your father’s brother’s daughter)
Western Europe since the Middle Ages has been anomalously anti-cousin marriage
and more generally unusually focused on nuclear rather than extended family
this is related to things like late marriage (Hajnal line) and feudalism
all this makes the culture less “clannish” and more individualistic and prosocial/democratic (basically, because people’s ties to extended family are weak, they will act on behalf of broader society rather than extended family
all the stuff about kinship structures seems deeply embedded in societies; eg languages can be divided into categories according to the kinship classification systems they use, and this corresponds to social norms about kinship

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 189847762429

Date: 2019-12-24 17:05:33 GMT

Reblogging: voxette-vk

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 189844058019

Date: 2019-12-24 12:17:52 GMT

Body: the two genders, inside view and outside view

Post ID: 189844014894

Date: 2019-12-24 12:12:28 GMT

Reblogging: rosetintedkaleidoscope

Body:

rosetintedkaleidoscope:

worldoptimization:
worldoptimization:
Persuasion by Jane Austen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I reread it because it’s one of Jane Austen’s novels that I remember least. It has some good classic Austen material: the characters are wryly observed, the resolution of the romance is dramatic. But mostly I was struck by how lame I found Anne. I really just wanted to shake her and start yelling. You don’t get any points for being quietly virtuous!!

View all my reviews
@rosetintedkaleidoscope
anne is wonderful! she’s literally one of austen’s best heroines morally
maybe not the most sparkling but definitely not the least, either (fanny price??)
haha sorry, obviously your opinion is valid too, I just really like this book…
oh yeah, definitely Fanny Price is worse, we can all agree on that.
I think my problem with Anne is not exactly that she’s not “sparkling” but that she doesn’t have any backbone. I was especially enraged by her speech at the end, where one might expect her to realize something like “maybe my elders are fallible and I shouldn’t listen to them 100% of the time,” and instead she comes up with “I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.”
Just like, being self-sacrificing isn’t inherently good; in fact, it’s inherently bad because it involves someone suffering, and is only worth it if you’re creating more value with your sacrifice than you’re destroying. But sacrificing yourself to please your family that sucks is just stupid, and it bugs me that she maintained up until the end of the book that it was the right thing to do.
i don’t actually see it as about self-sacrifice, but as about… idk, taking the outside view? learning from older people you trust?
like, she doesn’t listen to just any elders; she doesn’t trust her father’s opinion the way she does lady russell’s. but lady russell is someone whose judgement she agrees with on many other things. the ability to listen to people who think similarly to you & value similar things (which she clearly sees lady russell as) and learn from their opinions is good!
also like… she was very young! we (well, presumably, idk, maybe you’re super into youth rights) question it when anna gets engaged to a man she just met in frozen (i just saw that movie); is this that different? anne and wentworth had only known each other for a couple months iirc. which is plenty long enough to form an engagement at that time, but… they’re young, and young people do all sorts of stupid things when they think they’re in love, so why should anne be any different, if she tries to look at it objectively? for girls who get married at 19 to someone they passionately love, when their most trusted older friend is against it, and his profession is uncertain and her father threatens to cut them off, what would you guess is the ratio of happy marriages to bad marriages?
the book sets it up so as to give a kind of conflicted message about whether she should have listened or not: on the one hand, there’s the interlude with louisa, where louisa is too willful and gets hurt because of it. on the other hand, the narrative speaks for willfulness in anne’s love story, because lady russell’s fears turn out to be unfounded.
would your opinion on this change if the events in the book actually turned out differently? what if wentworth had died at sea? what if he’d returned alive but impoverished? (we see the epilogue of a similar story where it went badly in mansfield park, with fanny’s mom, and she doesn’t seem happy at all. but maybe anne is a different kind of person, or maybe wentworth is so inherently talented it was inevitable that he’d succeed)
this is not to say that i agree with lady russell, but that i can see why anne listened to her, and why she doesn’t regret it.
(wentworth is DEFINITELY at fault for not coming back as soon as he reasonably could, but i do understand that too)

hmmmm

I guess her speech sounded to me like it was more about some ideal of virtue than about the outside view: eg the mention of “duty,” the fact that her counterfactuals are not “he might have died at sea” or “he might have been poor” but “I should have suffered in my conscience” (if she’d ignored Lady Russell)

buuuuut I definitely like your reading better!

or I guess maybe the trad thing to say would be that separating these out doesn’t make any sense, and that the entire point of these social structures and rules is to draw on outside-view wisdom to keep young people from making mistakes

anyway, you’ve convinced me, I now feel somewhat more positively toward Anne and this book

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 189837320854

Date: 2019-12-24 02:03:45 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

Persuasion by Jane Austen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I reread it because it’s one of Jane Austen’s novels that I remember least. It has some good classic Austen material: the characters are wryly observed, the resolution of the romance is dramatic. But mostly I was struck by how lame I found Anne. I really just wanted to shake her and start yelling. You don’t get any points for being quietly virtuous!!

View all my reviews

@rosetintedkaleidoscope

anne is wonderful! she’s literally one of austen’s best heroines morally
maybe not the most sparkling but definitely not the least, either (fanny price??)
haha sorry, obviously your opinion is valid too, I just really like this book…

oh yeah, definitely Fanny Price is worse, we can all agree on that.

I think my problem with Anne is not exactly that she’s not “sparkling” but that she doesn’t have any backbone. I was especially enraged by her speech at the end, where one might expect her to realize something like “maybe my elders are fallible and I shouldn’t listen to them 100% of the time,” and instead she comes up with “I have now, as far as such a sentiment is allowable in human nature, nothing to reproach myself with; and if I mistake not, a strong sense of duty is no bad part of a woman’s portion.”

Just like, being self-sacrificing isn’t inherently good; in fact, it’s inherently bad because it involves someone suffering, and is only worth it if you’re creating more value with your sacrifice than you’re destroying. But sacrificing yourself to please your family that sucks is just stupid, and it bugs me that she maintained up until the end of the book that it was the right thing to do.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging, #but not though

Post ID: 189836948534

Date: 2019-12-24 01:35:26 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/61fc34abde365a92f6d4827a0bf25abc/bd944b84bb656741-d4/s540x810/19d2157c2f0e435f733f107724ced3d3cd1ae654.jpg

Educated by Tara Westover
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mostly it was a really interesting, couldn’t-put-it-down memoir by a person who had a really different life from me.

It also makes you think, per the title, about education, its purpose, etc. The author and two of her brothers ended up with PhDs after having received zero formal schooling before college, and obviously they seem pretty smart and impressive otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to do it, but also it does make you think about why exactly all that K-12 education was necessary. Sure, they had some catching up to do, but they basically managed. Tara self-studied enough trig to get into college, struggled through her college math requirements but passed them, and then never needed advanced math again in her life.

It makes it pretty clear that the real point of K-12 education is socializing kids. The stuff Tara was missing wasn’t stuff like “how to read and analyze a text” (she taught that to herself, as a kid, reading the Bible). It wasn’t anything you need for any job. It was basically all “how to be normal and fit in” in one guise or another, from how to dress to what the Holocaust was and what to say if it comes up in conversation.

And it ultimately made me feel some pretty strong pro-public-school feelings. Certainly most people are wrong about most stuff. But if whatever crazy ideas you’re trying to inculcate in your children can’t survive a little jostling in the marketplace of ideas, that really doesn’t seem like a good sign.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 189832615809

Date: 2019-12-23 20:34:04 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/f5d10c907d062383944545607f821ec3/3655ad8cc812a71e-8d/s540x810/f61a10cb1d1b158e0ab804d03990a65d26e2078e.jpg

Persuasion by Jane Austen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I reread it because it’s one of Jane Austen’s novels that I remember least. It has some good classic Austen material: the characters are wryly observed, the resolution of the romance is dramatic. But mostly I was struck by how lame I found Anne. I really just wanted to shake her and start yelling. You don’t get any points for being quietly virtuous!!

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 189799213219

Date: 2019-12-21 23:13:29 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

gender update: apparently these days, when I’m at a gathering of mixed genders and generations, the group I invariably have the most in common with is middle-aged men

on the plane ride from Hong Kong I bonded with the middle-aged man next to me about doing all our last-minute Christmas shopping at the Shanghai Tang in the airport

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 189797681044

Date: 2019-12-21 21:24:52 GMT

Body: I was wonderstruck from our first hello
Always faking smiles so you’d never know
Waiting by your back door, wanting so much more
Hoping you did too

I spent hours meditating on the color of your eyes
There’s not a fact about you that I didn’t memorize
I was up at half past two writing lyrics about you
And that was when I knew

That we were in a Taylor Swift song
My skirt was short and our glances were long
I knew without a doubt, I had it figured out
I just wish I knew which one

We looked for places we couldn’t be found
Elevators and storage rooms became holy ground
But whispers turn to talk, and people throw rocks
At things that shine

We knew our hands were tied, but that didn’t stop our dance
We were devils rolling dice in a twisted game of chance
And every winter night alone was a cut deep to the bone
Knowing you weren’t mine

But I knew we were in a Taylor Swift song
Riding shotgun on a road that was treacherous and long
I knew without a doubt, I had it figured out
I just wish I knew which one

Now we avoid meeting eyes in the middle of a crowd
And the silence between us is deafeningly loud
And it rains in your bedroom so I never get dry
I just wish I knew why

Maybe I was just dreaming before you let me down
And I’ll wake up lying on the cold hard ground
Realize that I was a mess living in your game of chess
Til I got away

Or is this the point where I’m braced for goodbye
But you meet me in the rain to say you want to really try?
Say that we can work it out, say you don’t want to be without me
So you’ll stay

Or maybe we just got to the end of the drive
Nothing lasts forever, but god were we alive
And I’ll be there in a dress, my head laid on your chest
In all your dreams

Just remember whispered words in the middle of the night
And how we were in color when the world was black and white
And when you hear a Taylor Swift song
Remember me

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 189759699779

Date: 2019-12-19 18:10:00 GMT

Body: mm okay so I love Amaryllis, to the point where a lot of my current personality is based on her, but also she’is frustratingly Mary-Sueish and perfect and I really wish she sucked just a bit more.

like I need more:

Amaryllis making really dumb mistakes, ones that are obviously mistakes if you think about it for a minute
Amaryllis knowing about problems and not doing anything to address them
Amaryllis breaking down and crying because she just. can’t.
Amaryllis thinking too hard about everything and everyone that’s depending on her, until she’s like “nope fuck this” and does something really selfish instead

Tags: #worth the candle

Post ID: 189723871709

Date: 2019-12-17 18:10:24 GMT

Body: thinking about the shared universe of Worth the Candle and Hamilton, where women exist as narrative devices; as NPCs; as sidekicks and love interests; as keepers of the narrative, all of these always in stories about men

“let me be a part of the narrative, in the story they will write someday”
“I was never going to be one of your knights of the Square Table. Even if I put my heart and soul into training, I was never going to be able to match the people you would pick up along the way. I’d at best be a wallet for you, or a love interest if I –”
Eliza spending fifty years continuing Hamilton’s work after he dies
twelve-year-old Raven devoting her life to Uther’s work
and searching for him when he’s gone, and becoming the Infinite Librarian to look for a story where he comes back
“I’m known for being Uther’s knight,” said Raven.
Amaryllis, stuck in a doomed timeline, growing old alone, writing a book for Juniper every year
“I’m burning the letters that might have redeemed you”
removing yourself from the narrative as the only and final option you have

Tags: #worth the candle spoilers, #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 188700866994

Date: 2019-10-30 15:43:37 GMT

Body: some thoughts on productivity and motivation:

Before anything else, the amount of energy you physically have is important, and if it’s too low you’re just kind of fucked.

I’ve gotten better at noticing my energy levels over time. One current barometer I use is the escalator in my office building. If I’m feeling really high energy, I’ll just naturally be impatient and want to walk up it; if I’m really tired I’ll go “thank god, a chance to stand still for 30 seconds;” otherwise I’m somewhere in between.

The only things I’ve gotten from this so far are really obvious:

sleep matters. I think I’m noticeably less good at doing things on 5 hours of sleep than on 8
being sick or hungover is really bad
prescription stimulants are really good

Once you’re all set on that, I think the most important thing is feeling like what you do matters. Like:

how motivated would you feel to do this task if it would save someone’s life?
is what you’re doing way more important than that?
if not, then uh, why are you doing it?

With a good enough framework for why everything matters I generally find it’s not too hard to motivate myself to do even boring or unpleasant things. If I don’t feel motivated to do something, I think it’s useful to introspect on why that is. Sometimes it’s just “this task is really triggering or aversive to me for no good reason” (in which case I might want to try to get someone else to do it if possible, or might decide that I just have to get over it). But often it’s “deep down I don’t really think that this is worth doing,” and then it’s useful to figure out if I’m right.

I used to think of “burnout” as a thing that happened if you worked too many hours and didn’t have enough time to relax. Now I feel like the two things aren’t that related. It can be easy to work a ton if you know why you’re doing it and feel like what you’re doing is important and appreciated and valued and you’re doing a good job, and it can be exhausting to work 40 hours a week if those things aren’t true.

It’s interesting to remember that “starting projects” used to be something that I found hard, because I don’t feel that way at all anymore. (It can still be hard just because it’s always hard to carve a chunk out of my day for anything, but it’s not hard psychologically.) I think I used to do a thing where I would put off starting something, then I would put it off for so long that it would loom in my mind and feel scary, and that would make it harder to start.

Getting past the looming cycle is maybe something you just have to do. I do feel like as a manager, you should never get things get to looming. If there’s a big thing your report should be starting, just ask them every hour if they’ve started it yet.

Post ID: 188505604074

Date: 2019-10-22 01:01:41 GMT

Body: When I was younger, I think a thing that bothered me about EA was that I felt like it required me to disregard which organizations just “seemed good” and instead give to whoever had the highest convincing back-of-the-envelope estimate of impact.

Now I feel like I was thinking about it wrong. Over time I’ve come to accept long-termism and “weird” ideas/causes much more than I did when I first heard about EA, but my impressions of the reasonableness and competence of organizations and people have remained surprisingly stable. (Not to say that they haven’t changed at all, but not a ton.)

I still believe in back-of-the-envelope EV estimates–maybe more than I did before; at least, I feel less internal tension about my belief in them. But also I think they’re really hard to get right, and maybe I was trying to do them at the wrong step.

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 187997366279

Date: 2019-09-28 07:28:06 GMT

Body: I think I’ve mentioned being raised by economists meant already growing up with a lot of rationalist/EA values–the biggest one that was missing was what I guess people call “taking ideas seriously.” I’m higher on this dimension than the rest of my family, which was enough to get me into EA in the first place, but I’m still lower than average for EA I think.

I was at a dinner party the other day with some (unrelated to me) academic economists. One brought up a recent study about CO2′s effects on cognition and said something about how in forty years atmospheric CO2 would be high enough that we’d start seeing noticeable effects. Another said “well, I guess by then maybe the robots will have taken over anyway.” The tone was like … kind of flippant but not really joking, and in response people like, nodded and shrugged.

It’s interesting to see ideas about AI risk getting more accepted among certain groups, and how they just don’t get taken seriously, but I guess taking ideas seriously is pretty rare.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 187891906510

Date: 2019-09-23 02:00:29 GMT

Body: just saw a production of SIX at the ART and it’s interesting how wokeness seems to have pushed American intellectual culture away from, uh, you could call it “nuance” or “sophistication” or you could call it pretension, in favor of accessibility

as a kid I associated the ART with productions of idk, Sophocles, or surrealist plays bordering on conceptual art

even the Diane Paulus revitalization took the form of eg a play that was just a guy reading the entire text of The Great Gatsby aloud for eight hours

whereas SIX would basically work as Schoolhouse Rock, minus the blowjob jokes

(I remember Cornel West releasing a rap album back in 2001; but you got the feeling that even if the denizens of Cambridge would take any chance to criticize Larry Summers they were quietly kinda skeptical of it)

Tags: #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 187888932675

Date: 2019-09-22 23:00:30 GMT

Body: When I was younger, I used to say things like “I only want to date guys who are smarter than me,” and people would grimace a bit and murmur something about my self-esteem.

Now that I’m older and have higher self-esteem, I still want to date really smart guys; that part hasn’t gone away. But I do think about it kinda differently; the idea of being an overqualified housewife to a genius mathematician no longer holds much appeal.

Instead, being in a relationship where I’m intellectually respected feels important. But so does dating the smartest guy I possibly can; it’s not the relative values that matter, it’s just the absolute.

Unfortunately, I guess having both of those things requires that I be really smart and impressive. Which already sounds good on its own merits, but it would be nice if all my eggs weren’t quite so in one basket.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 187885584950

Date: 2019-09-22 20:00:41 GMT

Body: At first I thought I Think He Knows was kind or boringly straightforward but I’ve come around a bit; I think it works in the context of the rest of her oeuvre (like much of Lover).

It presents her current relationship as akin to a teenage romance, with the “skipping down 16th Avenue” and the explicit “it’s like I’m 17.”

But in her teenage crushes, the guy never knew; her earlier songs are filled with tortured longing, and she’s always great at keeping her secret. See:

I fake a smile so he won’t see
I wonder if he knows he’s all I think about at night
I think he can see through everything but my heart
all this time how could you not know, baby?

etc. The idea that the guy in these songs could find out is terrifying.

And now it’s just … fine? “I think he knows,” shrug, good that saves me the trouble of telling him. She’s realized that she’s not a teenager anymore and people aren’t as oblivious as they used to be, and that’s okay, because now she’s secure enough not to be scared of displaying vulnerability, and mature enough to appreciate the joy of just getting each other, and wearing your heart on your sleeve, and not giving a fuck.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187882712289

Date: 2019-09-22 17:23:42 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/cd09fae978f1466609993afc7d4cb829/6a8176aa97b9b2fb-fa/s540x810/3ab7a2e8cce300a6a01015116bf525b9f0bd4f43.jpg

The Shipping Man by Matthew McCleery
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is described as a “thriller,” and I want to be clear that this is only accurate to the extent that you find high-yield bond offerings thrilling. At one point Somali pirates briefly enter the picture, but they are quickly dispatched with offscreen to make way for a plot thread about European regulators disputing the marking of some of a bank’s underwater loans.

Overall I really enjoyed it; the writing was awful, but it was a totally fun way to learn about the economics of the shipping industry. This genre should really be more of a thing.

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Tags: #goodreads, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 187882466179

Date: 2019-09-22 17:10:06 GMT

Body:

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Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was a pretty fun read, and there were lots of good anecdotes.

I thought it landed too far on the judgmental side, though; it didn’t editorialize a ton, but I basically got the sense that the author thinks obviously Uber shouldn’t have done all the stupid shit that it did.

As a result, I never really felt like it got into what I think is the most interesting part of all this: what should Uber have done in order to maximize its market cap?

Sure, they’ve done lots of horrible and embarrassing things. But they’ve also created a shitton of value, and genuinely made the lives of lots and lots of people better and more convenient, and probably a lot of that is thanks to aspects of their hard-charging bro culture or whatever. At the same time, a lot of the PR stuff has been expensive, and I’m sure they haven’t made the exact right decisions along the way.

Idk, it’s easy to point to individual dumb things, like they shouldn’t have gone to that KTV, and the whole leather jacket debacle. But to avoid all those little things, you need the sort of cautious HR-conscious culture that one imagines might have legitimately hindered their growth. And then there’s things like Greyball, which feels more like a conscious decision that could have been altered, but also it seems like it was pretty helpful and I don’t think the consequences have been that negative so far.

Anyway, I guess this is all hard to answer. This book provided some decent case studies, though.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 187324162224

Date: 2019-08-28 08:28:08 GMT

Body: Earlier I said that the outro of Death by a Thousand Cuts was “very Teardrops on my Guitar” and yeah let’s talk about that.

I think of making the outro a fragment of a verse as a signature Taylor thing, but in fact she’s done it less and less over time–until Lover. Let’s see, I count:

4 on Taylor Swift
3 on Fearless
3 on Speak Now
2 on Red
0 on 1989
1 on Reputation
and 4 on Lover, more than she’s had since her debut album.

So, why? I think there’s a sort of traditional verse-chorus-bridge song structure she’s working from. The verse introduces the song. The chorus provides the central theme. The bridge builds to an emotional climax–and then by returning to the chorus and the central message, the song can end on a note of resolution. If she’s violating that, it’s to subvert our narrative expectations.

Ending on a verse feels jarring. It disrupts the narrative progression and introduces a sense of stasis and circularity: instead of ending at the end, we’ve gone around in a circle and come back to the beginning.

It also feels ruminative in a way that calls attention to the (often highlighted, in Taylor’s case) metanarrative of her writing process. You get the feeling that she started writing this song to solve a problem, and now the song is written and nothing has actually changed, and all there is to do is go back and perfect the verses.

So I think you see this less when she’s changing or moving somehow, and more when she’s spinning her wheels, needing to process whatever she has to process through writing before she can move on. Over time she’s gotten increasingly self-assured, and you see Confident Taylor on Lover too; obviously on songs like Me! and IFTYE, but also on songs like Lover or Daylight, where she just knows what she wants to say.

But then there are the songs with verse as outro:

The Archer

“who could ever leave me, darling, but who could stay?”

Cornelia Street:

“I’m so terrified of if you ever walk away … that’s the kinda heartbreak time could never mend”

Miss Americana

“you and me, that’s my whole world”

Death by a Thousand Cuts

“I ask the traffic lights if it’ll be all right, they say I don’t know”

It feels like after years of trying to shed her vulnerability, she’s ended up in an immensely vulnerable place. She doesn’t know if she would be okay without Joe, and she doesn’t know what to do about that. And her just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks is how we ended up with this mess of an album, but at the end of the day she’s stuck.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187301247939

Date: 2019-08-27 08:21:44 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

Initial thoughts on Lover:
Maybe she’s an image-crafting, shapeshifting genius but it sure does feel like she writes what she knows, and her life right now is obsessively maintaining her valuable brand, living happily, with her bland British blue-eyed boyfriend, and sometimes getting triggered by people tweeting about politics.
I’m glad she’s happy but like
it feels like she’s not even 30, and already her life is what it’s going to be. She can’t be a bigger star than she is, the bigger she gets the more she just attracts haters, she’s slept with all the celebrities worth sleeping with and now her life is about deciding whether to bother taking down the Christmas lights, I mean, it’s only January.
I think her best songs are about longing. Usually for love, but not just that; “someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me”; “in your life you’ll do things greater than dating a boy on the football team.”
I know that there’s a time of your life for that longing, and a time of your life for settling down with someone and going to the pub to watch rugby with his school friends. There’s a part of me that thinks that it’s good and right that she’s completed this phase of her evolution, from all-American high school girl all the way to you know, 30-year-old white woman who’s into wine and real estate and engagement rings.
There’s another part of me that’s angry she’s chosen this pastel life over burning red. What happened to screaming, and fighting, and kissing in the rain?
Maybe if you’re still doing that when you’re 30, it’s just sad.

Update:

So once I got over the fact that Miss Americana is about Trump, I really liked it. (I decided it’s about my job; some parallels are kinda eerie, actually.)

And then I realized I’m totally okay with Taylor being in a happy, stable relationship as long as she’s longing for something, and if what she’s longing for is world domination then even better tbh. (see: my url)

And I don’t actually think this album is mostly about her desire for world domination; most of it feels pretty complacent. But that thought did make me feel better about the album and more hopeful about her future work (and honestly aging, and life in general).

(I never cared much for e.g. Change, maybe because I know that the revolution Taylor wants, if she even has a coherent idea of what it is, is different from the revolution I want. But if I abstract away from that, it’s a good song, and it (along with Miss Americana) sure does make it easy to project your own beliefs onto it.)

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187288274934

Date: 2019-08-26 20:00:52 GMT

Body: To get more concrete, current ranking of Lover songs based on how much I actually want to listen to them:

Cruel Summer

throwback to 1989 in the best possible way
that Out of the Woods-esque bridge tho
having the bridge in there twice almost feels like getting to eat two desserts but I’ll take it
“and if I bleed you’ll be the last to know”
the “it’s cool” reminds me of Delicate
“I don’t wanna keep secrets just to keep you”
“I love you, ain’t that the worst thing you ever heard?”

Paper Rings

kind of annoying but really catchy
“I’ve read all of the books beside your bed”
somehow the line “I want your complications too” is annoying me. What are Joe’s complications? Does he have a personality besides “British?”

Death by a Thousand Cuts

liking this one more and more
“my time, my wine, my spirit, my trust; tryna find a part of me you didn’t take up”
the outro is very Teardrops on my Guitar
the traffic lights thing reminds me of Somewhere in My Car

Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince

so not here for the political themes but there’s something that makes me wanna keep listening to it

Daylight

because I feel like it’s the thesis statement of the album in some sense?

Lover

complaints are similar to Paper Rings but it’s also catchy

London Boy

hate to admit it but it’s fun

Soon You’ll Get Better

not a song I need in my life but it’s good for what it is

False God

right now it’s boring but I feel like I might start liking it at some point

I Think He Knows

kinda forgettable so far

You Need to Calm Down

The Archer, Cornelia Street, It’s Nice to Have a Friend, Afterglow

boring

I Forgot That You Existed

I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I’m glad this exists as a breakup song option

I like how everyone has already collectively agreed to pretend this song never happened

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187285134792

Date: 2019-08-26 17:00:34 GMT

Body: There’s a clear religion motif that kinda feels like a callback to 1989? Specifically with the heaven/hell imagery. Let’s see, 1989 had:

magic, madness, heaven, sin
heaven can’t help me now … handsome as hell
could end in burning flames or paradise

I feel like Cruel Summer and False God are a continuation of this strand of 1989? Jaded Taylor, doing things she knows are bad because they feel so damn good.

Now I’m all about that, and Cruel Summer is absolutely my favorite song on Lover but it actually does feel like it could be on 1989 and that lack of progression is interesting

(oh man, also note “cut the headlights” vs “come and pick me up, no headlights”)

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 187277030214

Date: 2019-08-26 07:24:42 GMT

Body: Interesting that in addition to the explicit “I’ll drive” on this album, there are multiple other songs that imply she’s driving: Death by a Thousand Cuts (”I take the long way home, I ask the traffic lights if it’ll be all right, they say I don’t know”) and Cornelia Street (”I turned around before I hit the tunnel”) (okay going back to that one maybe she was just in a cab?)

It almost feels intentional, but sort of awkwardly thrown in there, since it’s clear that these days all her real experiences of transit involve sitting in backseats.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187276964209

Date: 2019-08-26 07:19:09 GMT

Body: The color imagery on Lover is interesting. (Obviously there’s the political angle, but let’s put that aside.)

Blue is obviously a sad color, and it’s been referenced as such in her past work (”losing him was blue like I’ve never known”).

On Reputation, we get “my love had been frozen; deep blue but you painted me golden” in a presumed reference to Joe.

Then Lover … really goes all out with relationship with Joe = blue? It’s in like every song:

“we paint the town blue”
“I’m with you even if it makes me blue”
“I blew things out of proportion, now you’re blue”
“it’s blue, the feeling I’ve got”
“my heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue”

not to even mention all the references we’ve gotten to his eye color.

Only on the last song, Daylight, does she resolve the tension here and complete the transition with “I once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden.”

But why does she take the whole album to do that when it was already spoiled on Reputation? And why do we keep coming back to blue even in otherwise happy, tension-free songs? It’s kinda weird.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187276548929

Date: 2019-08-26 06:47:05 GMT

Body: Initial thoughts on Lover:

Maybe she’s an image-crafting, shapeshifting genius but it sure does feel like she writes what she knows, and her life right now is obsessively maintaining her valuable brand, living happily, with her bland British blue-eyed boyfriend, and sometimes getting triggered by people tweeting about politics.

I’m glad she’s happy but like

it feels like she’s not even 30, and already her life is what it’s going to be. She can’t be a bigger star than she is, the bigger she gets the more she just attracts haters, she’s slept with all the celebrities worth sleeping with and now her life is about deciding whether to bother taking down the Christmas lights, I mean, it’s only January.

I think her best songs are about longing. Usually for love, but not just that; “someday I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me”; “in your life you’ll do things greater than dating a boy on the football team.”

I know that there’s a time of your life for that longing, and a time of your life for settling down with someone and going to the pub to watch rugby with his school friends. There’s a part of me that thinks that it’s good and right that she’s completed this phase of her evolution, from all-American high school girl all the way to you know, 30-year-old white woman who’s into wine and real estate and engagement rings.

There’s another part of me that’s angry she’s chosen this pastel life over burning red. What happened to screaming, and fighting, and kissing in the rain?

Maybe if you’re still doing that when you’re 30, it’s just sad.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187205532404

Date: 2019-08-23 05:24:19 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

When Taylor Swift sings about love (when she sings) cars inevitably enter the picture. On her first album cars are happiness, comfort, nostalgia. In Tim McGraw she reminisces about being in the passenger’s seat of an old Chevy truck; in Our Song she contentedly rides shotgun with her hair undone in the front seat of his car; in the similarly idyllic Mary’s Song she sings, “2 am riding in your truck, and all I need is you next to me.”

(On a tangential note, Taylor really likes the time 2 am, this is one of like five references in her work, more if you count 2:30 am and 1:58 am. Also note the trucks, this is the only album that mentions trucks afaik. In her most recent work, the model of the car is not usually specified, but you get the feeling it’s expensive.)

Keep reading

so it happened?

we can follow the sparks, I’ll drive

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187169234043

Date: 2019-08-21 18:00:35 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/793da13ce937c797afab38ddeddcc28c/302119d7f7fce186-fc/s540x810/f00294df01649751f7d1d1fd279e960dfbd21d25.jpg

The AI Does Not Hate You: Superintelligence, Rationality and the Race to Save the World by Tom Chivers
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Man, if you had told me a couple years ago that a Buzzfeed writer would write a popular book on AI risk and the rationalist movement, and my main complaint would be that it wasn’t sensationalist enough, I would have been very confused. But here we are.

The author seems like a really nice and reasonable person, who thinks AI risk might be important and wants to understand and explain it. But mostly it seems like most rationalists were reasonably pretty wary of talking to a journalist, so he didn’t get much unfiltered content from them. So the book ends up being largely a summary of the Sequences and some other rationalist ideas, with a few interviews thrown in. Which is cool, the ideas are the important part, but if you really want the ideas you can just read the Sequences. (Though this is a nicely digestible version of the highlights.) I think the book just needed him to go undercover to about three really crazy rationalist parties.

I did like the chapter at the end where he does internal double crux with Anna Salamon; it felt very true.

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Tags: #goodreads, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 187115127039

Date: 2019-08-19 08:44:12 GMT

Reblogging: femmenietzsche

Post ID: 187114648669

Date: 2019-08-19 07:58:05 GMT

Reblogging: kontextmaschine

Tags: #yep all fair, #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 187114306959

Date: 2019-08-19 07:26:27 GMT

Reblogging: kontextmaschine

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 186999472454

Date: 2019-08-14 07:53:04 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

I’ve gotten a lot of really interesting reactions to my post about how yes, people actually care that there are kids in detention camps, and it’s unhelpful to try to model them by imagining they’re just pretending to care so they look good.
A lot of people are still not quite grasping the thing I wanted to say, so I wanted to try another analogy that might resonate.
After 9/11, the US made a lot of horrible decisions that I think have approximately zero backers remaining today. We invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people died as a direct result of our stupidity. The war in Afghanistan was more justified, but it didn’t go any better, and we had plenty of historical knowledge that could’ve left us confident it wouldn’t go any better, and Afghanistan has more terrorists than when we started, and overall we’d be vastly safer today – not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people who’d still be with us today, and the $2.4trillion – if we’d just stayed home.
I wish that we’d taken our pain and our grief and our anger, and tried as hard as we could to underreact to them. I wish we’d remembered that good policy is not usually made from a place of pain and grief and anger, and made considered, deliberate decisions. I don’t just wish that; I think it was absolutely morally mandatory, and I think failing to live up to it, and making decisions based just off “I’m sad and scared”, was one of our biggest and most unforgivable mistakes.
So I have a lot of sympathy for anyone whose perspective on the camps is ‘I have an instinctive very strong aversion to taking literally any policy actions based on gut horror’. I think that this position can cause you to get right lots of things that other people get wrong. For example, asylum throttling - where we force applicants for asylum to wait in Mexico for months to get the chance to plead their case at the border - condemns families with young kids to homelessness in the summer heat, hunger, and substantial danger (there’s a lot of predatory gang activity targeting asylum-seekers in the northern Mexico towns where they’re forced to wait under asylum throttling, since ‘tons of desperate homeless people’ is a magnet for people who want to do harm).
But it’s less viscerally horrific than ripping kids out of their parents’ arms and keeping them in cages and arguing in court that they don’t need soap, so it bothers us less. It’s gotten much less attention. Kids still end up ripped from their parents if their parents get murdered waiting for asylum, but it’s happening across the border and it sure appears to make Americans less angry.
So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who go “anger makes bad policy”. Anger does make bad policy.
But imagine if, after 9/11, you’d gone around saying to people “ohhh, another person claiming to be sad about some buildings in New York getting destroyed. I bet you feel so virtuous. I bet as soon as there’s no audience to impress, you’re totally fine. More people die in car accidents every day, are you sad about those? No? Vir-tue signaling!”
Some things punch really close to the gut! They really do! You can firmly believe that anger is not the basis for policy, that what we do as a nation cannot be about how sad we are, and still understand that some things hit home and haunt you and hurt and hurt and hurt.
And once you can empathize with that, you actually have a better shot at talking people out of policies that don’t help.

Hm, I feel like it’s not as easy as that.

Having strong emotional reactions to political issues is often convenient. Social norms accord some amount of deference to people who are experiencing strong emotions–it’s probably kind of rude to interrupt someone who’s crying, or to argue against them very strongly. Having emotional reactions often gets you read as more genuine or more motivated by virtuous considerations. It can just make your argument stronger–”I feel so strongly about this I’m willing to publicly display emotion in a way that makes me look vulnerable” is a thing that works.

None of which is to accuse anyone of dishonesty. I’m sure there were some people who pretended to be sad about 9/11 for their own gain. But I bet there were lots more people who were just really genuinely upset. An emotion being convenient doesn’t make it any less real; I mean, most of our emotions are probably convenient in some since given that evolution selected our ancestors to have them.

But still, the more you respect people’s emotional reactions to political issues, the more convenient you make it to have those strong emotional reactions in the first place. I don’t really think there’s a big area of “being respectful and considerate and thoughtful about people’s feelings but never letting them gain any political advantage from them”; I mostly think it’s just a spectrum between being considerate and demanding high standards of epistemic rigor and the optimal point on the spectrum isn’t obvious.

Post ID: 186810470109

Date: 2019-08-06 07:16:39 GMT

Body:

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Heloise and Abelard by Étienne Gilson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Man, I’m just so into Heloise.

- She was really into Stoicism, and I think she actually just embodied the philosophy of the Stoics in a really cool way–she has this quality of self-awareness, and accepting things as they are, while still striving for demanding ideals.
- She doesn’t want to get married, because she thinks marriage would compromise Abelard’s work and integrity–instead, she argues for being his mistress.

“God knows I never wanted anything from you but yourself … No doubt the name of wife is stronger and more sacred, but I have always preferred that of mistress, or if you will pardon me for saying it, concubine and prostitute.”

- She combines an unconditional and irrevocable love for Abelard with a total willingness to argue with him, be disappointed in him, or call him out on his bullshit.

“Concupiscence rather than friendship bound you to me, the ardor of desire rather than love. This is no personal judgment, my beloved, this is the judgment of everyone … I wish I were alone in thinking so, because if anyone could justify you, it would relieve my sorrow.”

- She is totally frank about the fact that she spends Mass having sexual fantasies about Abelard instead of praying.

“The pleasures of lovers which we have tasted together have been so sweet that I cannot despise them nor even efface their memory without great difficulty … It is not until the time of Mass, when prayer should be purest, that the obscene imagining of these pleasures so completely overwhelms my poor soul that I yield to their shameful delectation rather than to prayer.”

- She doesn’t expect to go to heaven, despite leading what seems to be an admirable life as a nun, because she became a nun for Abelard rather than for God, and she will never forgive God for causing Abelard to be castrated.

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Tags: #goodreads, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 186809918909

Date: 2019-08-06 06:33:15 GMT

Body:

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Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America’s Wild Frontier by Stephen E. Ambrose
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One thing I really liked about this book was getting a sense of what America was like before white settlement: the natural (herds of bison roaming the Great Plains) and the anthropological. I somehow had a very binary idea that there was Native American civilization before vs after European contact, so it was interesting to see the ways the cultures interacted and coexisted over centuries. Some of the tribes Lewis and Clark came into contact with might never have seen white men, but their lives were still totally different because of things they did: the Spanish introduction of horses to the continent, trade routes involving British and French fur trappers, the spread of disease.

Reading it gave me some respect for cultural evolution-type stuff–like yep, Native American tribes really just figured out how to thrive in their environment in a way that’s pretty hard for a bunch of white guys figuring it out from first principles.

I picked this up because I wanted to read about people doing hard things, and it pretty much delivered. It sounds like the expedition was really hard and in most worlds wouldn’t have succeeded; they only made it through a combination of luck and actually being super prepared and making mostly quite good decisions. (I get weirdly anxious about packing for trips and have a lot of dreams about not having enough time to pack, forgetting to pack something, etc. so packing for a 2-year-long trip where you have to carry everything you pack but also you die if you run out of something is uh yikes.)

The weird thing about humans, though, is that they can be so good at doing hard things but they can also be so bad at doing easy things. Lewis commanded an expedition through unknown territory across America and did a really good job, but then when he got back he procrastinated horribly on publishing his journals, somehow totally failed to pick up any women despite being a national hero, became an alcoholic and opiate addict, and committed suicide.

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Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 186809224539

Date: 2019-08-06 05:44:57 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/49e2165b5d67ecf9e8d54a6564ea89a5/f183b440e41409ef-d1/s540x810/01bbf86628aa5369cdca557ab150a8b6ebd02dc7.jpg

Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

In general I found the second and third books kind of tedious and repetitive after the first one–just piling on more and more rich people and absurd ways to spend money.

What I did think was interesting was–I think Piketty says something about how Austen and Balzac mention specific sums of money, and clearly delineate their characters’ financial situations, in a way that literature never does today. That’s something I appreciate when reading older books: you can often get a sense of the economy, and how that works, and everyone’s roles in it, and a bunch of stuff that contemporary fiction seems more divorced from. So yeah, I do like something about how these books engage with material reality.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 186458881614

Date: 2019-07-22 02:17:28 GMT

Body: today I overheard a woman on the plane complaining about her boyfriend’s apartment

“he doesn’t have a coffee table, so if you’re sitting in his living room you have to put your drink on the floor.”

sure

“and he doesn’t have a lamp in his bedroom, so there’s no way to read at night.”

uh huh

“and you can’t open any of his windows, because all of his windowsills are totally covered”

okay

“with porcelain figures of Mao Zedong.”

uh wait what

Tags: #her companion did not seem to regard this part as worth comment, #bay area gothic

Post ID: 186453021199

Date: 2019-07-21 21:11:44 GMT

Body: gender update: apparently these days, when I’m at a gathering of mixed genders and generations, the group I invariably have the most in common with is middle-aged men

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 185822770884

Date: 2019-06-24 20:07:38 GMT

Body:

EA Global Gothic

People ask what your goals for the conference are. You feel something tugging in the back of your mind, but you can’t quite identify it. “Goals … yes …”

You ask people how their conference is. “Oh, I’m just spending the whole time in one-on-ones.” The one-on-ones are useful. The one-on-ones are always useful.

Someone has marked “interested” on the Bizzabo app. You don’t know what that means. Are you interested in them? Should you set up a one-on-one? Will they set up a one-on-one? In a panic, you close the app. For the rest of the weekend you studiously avoid eye contact.

You tell someone you went to a talk. The horror dawning on their face tells you that you have violated some dread taboo. “You know those are recorded, right?”

People ask if you’ve made progress on your goals for the conference. You think you wrote them down somewhere on Friday, but can’t remember where. You write everything down, hoping to keep your grip on reality, but it somehow gets lost anyway.

Luke Muehlhauser has not emerged from his room the entire conference. People go into the room, and people come out. When they come out they seem … different. No one will speak of what took place, but you observe a haunted look in their eyes.

Everyone is in a one-on-one. You don’t know where these are held, or what is discussed in them. You only know that they are always productive. You wander through an empty dome, looking for someone to talk to. You realize no one can break free of the sinister glamour of one-on-ones.

Amanda Askell is telling you that true propositions are easier to argue for than false ones, and thus reasoned philosophical debate tends toward the truth. It sounds plausible. You slowly nod.

People ask if you’ve achieved your goals for the conference. What is a goal? It sounds like one of those things you had, once. Like hopes, and dreams, and fears.

Tags: #bay area gothic, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 185787726504

Date: 2019-06-23 07:07:41 GMT

Question: An EAG play in three acts: Act 1: Is that worldoptimization!? Act 2: She mentioned Worth the Candle, it is! Act 3: Oh no, she left early. Well, at least I got another reminder to read that fic.

Answer: Hi! Sorry to leave early, I had Work Things but feel free to say hi if you see me tomorrow :)

Post ID: 185484058304

Date: 2019-06-10 00:22:57 GMT

Body: I started rereading the MsScribe story for some reason and the thing that struck me the most was the way politics just … wasn’t a thing the way it is on the internet of today?

Like, there was an election coming up, and so people started talking about their political views, and it came out that a bunch of people were Bush supporters, and sure the fandom was skewed left even then but people’s reaction was more or less “oh hmm … I hadn’t really thought about what to do if this came up … like what do we do? do we just ignore this or”

when reading it the first time, I either didn’t pick up on MsScribe’s race at all or it wasn’t salient enough for me to remember, which just seems unimaginable today

Tags: #culture war cw

Post ID: 185277873734

Date: 2019-05-31 21:01:20 GMT

Question: That story was beautiful

Answer: Aww thanks!

Post ID: 185182522114

Date: 2019-05-27 19:37:58 GMT

Body: At one time, people would tell of a treasure in an underground cave, guarded by a dragon. It was said that the dragon could see into the souls of men and women, and any who sought the treasure would be turned away if they were not pure of heart.

In a village not too distant, there was a widowed farmer who fell suddenly ill with a rare ailment. It was known that the cure could be bought in the capital city, but he lacked the funds. His three unmarried daughters, with little recourse, decided they would seek the treasure. They were good-natured girls, liked by all in the village; and what motive could be purer than the life of a father?

First to go was the eldest sister, known in the village for her cleverness.

She journeyed five days and five nights until she reached the mouth of the cave. Entering the cave, she descended further and further into darkness. She leapt across a freezing river, praying not to fall in. She crawled through narrow tunnels and was beset by bats and spiders. Finally she reached the lair of the dragon.

“Why do you seek this treasure, child?” asked the dragon.

“My father is dying, and I wish to save his life,” replied the eldest sister.

“Ah, but is that the only reason?” asked the dragon.

The eldest sister hesitated for a moment before replying, “Yes.”

The dragon looked into her eyes, and as it did she got the feeling that it was looking through her, deep into her soul. After a minute it spoke.

“You have always been called clever, but you have always been uneasy about it,” the dragon pronounced. “You think that people expect great achievements from you, but in truth you have no original ideas, and lack the drive to make your mark on the world. You fear you are capable of nothing more than being an average farmer’s wife. If you bring back this treasure, you will be remembered for your deed. You seek this treasure out of fear and need for the approval of others.”

As she listened, the eldest sister’s stomach dropped, for the dragon had indeed seen truly. It saw her as she was, fearful and self-doubting. She returned home empty-handed, and told no one of what had transpired, only that she had failed the test of the dragon.

Second to go was the middle sister, known for her beauty. She took the same journey as the eldest sister, and again was asked the same questions, and again looked into the eyes of the dragon.

“Though you catch the eye of nearly all the men in your village, there is only one you care for: the blacksmith. He broke your heart when last year he married the butcher’s daughter, a girl of far less beauty than you. Though you know he can never be yours, you still ask yourself daily what it is he saw in her but not you, ignoring the easy temper and liveliness that make her a perfect match for him. You hope by bringing back this treasure he will see that you are more than a pretty face, that you are strong and brave and good, and that he will regret his choice of wife. You seek this treasure out of jealousy, and a vindictive desire to prove him wrong.”

The middle sister knew that the dragon had judged her truly. As her elder sister did, she returned home without the treasure and told no one what had passed between her and the dragon.

Last was the youngest sister. She had neither the cleverness of the first sister nor the beauty of the second. What interested her was the ways of men and women.

As such, she spent much of her time listening to the gossip of the village, sitting with the old women as they spun wool, or bringing lunch out to the farmers and lingering to hear their talk. What interested her was not the gossip, but how people told it. And what she learned was that no two people ever agreed on how the gossip should be told.

There was a young man in the village who had broken many a heart. No one disagreed on the facts of the matter, but still they argued over him. Some said that he was a seducer, taking advantage of the naivety of young women. Others said that he was merely unlucky, and that though he told women clearly he was far from seeking a wife, they fell in love with him anyway.

The carpenter in the village had recently died. In his place his wife had taken over his shop, and caused a stir with her sharp tongue and tightfisted nature. Some said she was bad-tempered and bitter, and a stain on the village if they had no carpenter who would extend credit. Others said she had to be strict to make her voice heard at all as a woman in a man’s profession, and she was grieving her husband besides.

The tanner had just taken an apprentice, and was unhappy with his work and beat him. Some said the boy was lazy, and shirked his duties whenever he could. Others said he had a good heart and free spirit, and the tanner was cruel to beat him for being carefree and easily distracted.

With these tales, and many more in her head, the youngest sister set off for the cave. She had watched her two sisters come back, and seen the shame in their eyes as they refused to speak of what they had been through. She did not believe she was purer of heart than they. But she guessed she might know more of souls, and thus be more prepared to face the dragon.

She journeyed five days and five nights, and braved the dangers of the cave, until finally she reached the dragon’s lair.

“Why do you seek this treasure, child?” asked the dragon.

“My father is dying, and I wish to save his life,” replied the youngest sister.

“Ah, but is that the only reason?” asked the dragon.

The youngest sister felt a twinge of fear. But she looked into the dragon’s eyes, and knew what she had to do.

“I know you have a story about me in which I am weak, and selfish, and pathetic,” she said. “But I am not afraid, for a story is just a story. About everyone there are a thousand stories told, and a thousand thousand more that could be. All of them are true, and yet none of them are true.

What you call a soul is just a story, no more true than any other. If you look inside me you will find flesh, and blood, and bone, and memories, and fears, and desires. But nowhere will you find my soul.”

The dragon knew in an instant that its powers would not work on her. As it handed her a chest overflowing with treasure, the youngest sister felt a momentary pang of gratitude for this wise creature, pushing those it encountered to confront the darkness within themselves. She also felt a flash of contempt for a greedy old monster, hoarding its treasure and leaving people hurt and broken.

On her way home, she stopped at the capital city to buy the cure for her father, and within a fortnight he was as well as ever. The rest of the treasure she spent on farm equipment for all in the village, and it was a time of rejoicing and plenty. The dragon was never heard from again.

Tags: #fiction

Post ID: 185166263189

Date: 2019-05-27 02:15:53 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

http://worldoptimization.tumblr.com/post/181995783499/a-priori-cornel-mason-empirically-vivien

I used to think that there was a thing called “being a good partner” that was mostly like, doing things to make your partner better off.
Now I think something more like–there’s some amount of surplus created by a relationship, and creating surplus is good, but the allocation of that surplus is also important. And finding ways to capture more of the surplus, if you are getting relatively little of it, is an important relationship skill.

@actionsoflove:

Can you expand with some examples please? I think this is potentially a really interesting point, but I do not fully understand it. =)

Say you have a relationship with someone where you play tennis with them every day. Each of you likes tennis and gets 5 utils from playing.

Say they really like going to the zoo, whereas you kinda dislike it. So going to the zoo together gives them 10 utils and gives you -4.

Naively, it seems like you should go to the zoo with them every day. After all, the net benefit is +6 utils. And even if you do this, the relationship is still net positive for you.

But this makes it so that while the relationship is really good for them, it’s barely good for you. Small perturbations in your utility function might make the relationship net negative for you, and then you’ll want to break up, which is bad for the other person and ultimately leaves a lot of surplus on the table.

So I think in this case it’s good to go to the zoo less often, and to think about other ways to transfer the surplus from them to you. Maybe having them bake you cookies costs them 1 util and gets you 1 util–even though it’s zero-sum, it might still be good to do.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 185165020219

Date: 2019-05-27 01:10:27 GMT

Body: a weird thing about adulthood is going from “I want to hang out with my friends, but I have to work” to “I want to work, but I have all these social obligations to fulfill”

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 185164964144

Date: 2019-05-27 01:07:31 GMT

Body: I used to think that there was a thing called “being a good partner” that was mostly like, doing things to make your partner better off.

Now I think something more like–there’s some amount of surplus created by a relationship, and creating surplus is good, but the allocation of that surplus is also important. And finding ways to capture more of the surplus, if you are getting relatively little of it, is an important relationship skill.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 184938471399

Date: 2019-05-17 09:07:39 GMT

Question: You have been and continue to be my secret tumblr crush.

Answer: aww thanks <3

Post ID: 184881426136

Date: 2019-05-14 23:00:18 GMT

Body: Since reading Worth the Candle I’ve started thinking about my interactions with people in terms of loyalty points on occasion, which … I don’t think is endorsed by the text per se but is kind of cool.

My normal model of social interaction is something like: sometimes I have a spontaneous, genuine desire to be nice to people. I invite them to hang out because I enjoy spending time with them, or I ask them something because I’m really interested to hear what they have to say.

Sometimes I don’t feel this spontaneous desire: maybe someone said something that bothered me and now I’m feeling annoyed at them, or maybe I’m just tired or busy and don’t want to devote a bunch of time and energy to social interaction right now. In these cases, I feel like I should be nice anyway, because if I don’t I’ll be a bad person and feel guilty, and then I feel resentful toward them for forcing this obligation on me.

But if I instead think about this as an opportunity to score some loyalty points, it’s no longer an obligation; it’s more like a fun video game that will pay out in actually valuable real life rewards. I don’t have to be nice to anyone; it’s my choice. But if I am nice, then they’ll probably like me more, and say good things about me to other people, and be there for me when I need help in the future, and if we get to level 20 we can use 50% of each other’s skill levels which is pretty useful.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 184877899334

Date: 2019-05-14 20:00:29 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/62fc4cd6a3f328b1a068b2dd1aa1f237/tumblr_inline_prhjbbIvFa1sfizxi_540.jpg

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was a bit slow for the first 100 pages or so, but once it got into the actual story I couldn’t put it down. It was dramatic, and informative, and helped crystallize a lot of things I’m confused about, like:
- How do companies work? Like in basic economics, you think about market participants each trying to maximize their profits, and everyone acting in their own interest ends up maximizing total welfare, and that makes sense in a zoomed-out way, and as far as I can tell is not a crazy model of the behavior of companies. But how do companies end up behaving this way?

My very uninformed impression of how companies work is something like:
- there is a CEO, who is a guy
- there is a board, consisting of a bunch of guys who are friends with the CEO
- they all have fiduciary duties and if they fail to meet them they will get yelled at by a judge in Delaware
- ???
- shareholder value gets maximized

This book was simultaneously scary and reassuring on this topic, portraying people’s incentives as pretty far from aligned with economic efficiency. This is scary, for obvious reasons. But also reassuring, because it’s kind of relatable. Money is nice, but it’s so abstract; it’s some numbers on a piece of paper. I’m way more motivated by things like revenge, or the desire to prove that I was right, or making guys think I’m attractive, or getting nice articles written about me in the newspaper, or expensive perks. (You can buy perks with money, but it’s not really the same if you have to buy it yourself.)

And so is everyone in this book, and it is reassuring that the whole system seems to kinda work anyway.

- Finance: good or bad? And how do you tell?

The book doesn’t really explore this that much, and most of the anti-LBO voices have dumb moralistic objections. But it does kind of feel like whenever you package and reallocate some risk, there is some tradeoff in which you might be increasing systemic risk but it’s opaque and hard to measure.

Anyway, it was great, and if you are like me you will find a lot of intensely relatable moments, e.g.

“The initial projections they had obtained from RJR Nabisco was a heading ‘other uses of cash.’ Beside it was a row of figures stretching out ten years, each year ranging from 300 to 500 million dollars. Was it cash flowing in or out? Should he add it? Subtract it? Ignore it?”

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 184502196514

Date: 2019-04-28 12:22:08 GMT

Reblogging: etirabys

Body:

etirabys:

// very fiction-addled currently. post really geared at the small fraction of readers who’ve also read the work in question, because I’m in must-spew-excitement mode
I’ve been reading Worth the Candle for the past five days – I’m 80% through, which means I’ve been reading… ~150K words/day on average. It’s rationalist fantasy fiction, and also has amazing emotional arcs, a combination I don’t think I’ve encountered before. It’s got a core cast that goes from “fine, whatever, I guess you’re working together” to “wow, you’ve got rich, high-def group dynamics that I want another half-million words of” somewhere around the 30% mark.
Also, pacing and worldbuilding feels much less bloated than Worm’s, with comparable wordcount.
I’m sure I’m more interested in the player-thinking-about-hacking-their-narrative, player-trying-to-outguess-DM stuff because I haven’t read much like it before (and have no particular interest in seeking it out, I suspect I’ll find most of it poorly executed); I’m also sure I like the worldbuilding more than I would if I knew more about D&D.
Also, entertained to notice myself thinking, “okay, you’re trying to say stuff about this tired gendered trope by reproducing the gendered trope* within the story and then piling other stuff on it, and it’s not working for me” and when I look at myself having the thought, it’s usually right after the fic failed to deliver on a kink I have (related to the gendered trope) when I’d been hoping it would; author’s id and mine diverged on some crucial point.
* Mainly: the protag is living in a narrative that (initially) wants him to have a harem, he’s not on board with this but also has annoying romantically/sexually tinged interactions (to varying degrees) with three of his companions, none of which I enjoy except the ones with the ruthless, ace, control freak group member, which I’m pretty sure I’d hate the moment it became canon. I only like it because the UST loads more angst on her, which makes her hotter to me. Sorry.
Ahhh, the emotional arcs are so good. Imperfect people with baggage working with each other, sometimes failing to work with each other, sometimes hearing but not listening, listening but not understanding. All sketched out by a delicate, empathetic author. While maintaining a good sin(x) + x/3 shaped tension/stakes curve. And being enjoyable ratfic. Ahhh.

strongly agree with this, and amused by your outrage at discovering it in the cultural wasteland that is my goodreads :P

Post ID: 184112712032

Date: 2019-04-11 18:00:32 GMT

Body: I think I experience less romantic jealousy these days than I used to, and I was thinking about why that is.

I remember when I was younger, I would get really upset if, say, the person I was dating liked a selfie posted by some other girl. I would spiral into despair thinking about how he probably thought that other girl was more attractive than me and he’d rather be dating her. And … I don’t think I was being totally irrational? I was recalling one specific instance of this and, you know, I bet he would rather have been dating that girl. I think that she was more his type and they had more in common.

And I think what’s changed is that over time I’ve just gotten better at dating people for whom I’m–if not the optimal person, at least close to some kind of Pareto frontier. And then when this happens I can think, “actually, no, here are the reasons why he’d be better off dating me than her.”

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 184027940904

Date: 2019-04-08 05:04:01 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/18ea22697fa96b40af9dbae7ec56b9c2/tumblr_inline_ppmm2qB0Oq1sfizxi_540.png

Worth the Candle by cthulhuraejepsen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a really long time to get into this–like, 200,000 words. It starts out as not terribly interesting self-insert RPG fantasy; the magic was all pretty run-of-the-mill, I didn’t like the protagonist, and the other characters all seemed one-dimensional and tropey.

But like. It gets really good. I’m not sure how intentional the beginning was–like maybe on some level it was supposed to be kind of a boring level 1 D&D adventure? But as it goes on you get:
- excellent magic and worldbuilding (what would you do with the ability to edit souls? or a library that contains all books that will ever be written?)
- lots of fun meta-narrative deconstructiony stuff
- really good characters and interpersonal dynamics. Gradually the characters move from tropey to real and fully fleshed out and it just feels like, yes, these are exactly the dynamics you’d expect to come up when you have a small group of really different people trying to save the world together.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 183885652274

Date: 2019-04-02 06:42:28 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/5c0f83e4fc98ce2aca54b3b4a76972d2/tumblr_inline_ppbmmsdL7c1sfizxi_540.jpg

Middlemarch by George Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It’s been famously called “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” I’m not grown up yet, in that sense–I’m young enough that my life still stretches out before me with boundless possibility, having yet to reach the age where constraint after constraint, however gladly assumed at the time, imperceptibly narrows the space of our potential lives until we realize that the better part of our obituary is written and the remaining variations minor.

I’m not there, but George Eliot made me feel keenly how circumscribed the lives of men and women are, whether by wealth, sex, class, social standing, or their own failings; or by those more elusive barriers that go by names like “honor” and “duty.” I don’t want to make you think this is a sad book; on the contrary, one cannot but be struck by the morbid beauty in respecting these circumscriptions.

I think those who are skeptical of old books might find less to find fault with here; the values of the protagonists are hard to criticize, and Dorothea’s and Lydgate’s dilemmas seemed shockingly modern to me. Who hasn’t had a bunch of money and been frustrated to find that there isn’t a book that just tells you what the best way to donate it is–or fantasized about reforming the medical profession only to run into entrenched interests trying to maintain the status quo–or wanted to do important research but you know it’s just so hard to find the time–or thought that surely the best way to do good must be to marry a great man and aid him in his works? (read the book to find out how that one works out)

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 183871602538

Date: 2019-04-01 18:00:36 GMT

Body: Lately I’ve been noticing myself getting more extreme along some dimension, in a way that makes it harder to communicate with a lot of people. I would describe it as something like “wanting to see people as they are, and being comfortable with that including irrationality, contradictions, and other bad things.”

Some examples:

I noticed a way in which my thinking was biased against members of an oppressed group, and mentioned it to someone. She got upset, because she saw me as endorsing this by dispassionately mentioning it without disavowing it in some way. I was confused, because I was just reporting some things I noticed about my brain, not trying to endorse or disavow anything, and isn’t social justice supposed to be all about unpacking your biases anyway?

I’ll talk to someone about a book or TV show and they won’t like it because a character does stupid things, or has unhealthy relationships, or acts in self-destructive ways. I am confused that that’s a thing and think the more fucked up the better.

I was shopping with a friend on a warm day and commented that it felt like the weather was too nice to try on sweaters. She replied, “well, I don’t want to try on sweaters … but now is the best time of year to buy them since they’re on sale.” I felt like my joyfully authentic expression of feeling was dismissed. She thought I was saying something dumb and impractical.

I watched the first couple episodes of the Bachelor with a friend who was really confused about my enthusiasm for Hannah B. (I know everyone likes her now after they gave her a good edit later in the season. I liked her from the very beginning.) For the uninformed, in the first few episodes she comes off as neurotic, awkward, petty, jealous, super insecure, and the only actual person on the show.

I was talking to a friend about a story I thought it would be fun to write. I started describing the relationship between two of the characters and she asked “well, do they end up together?” I felt like she was implicitly asking me whether I thought their relationship was good or bad, which seemed like missing the point.

A was mad because B wasn’t doing a thing they were supposed to do. I gave my guesses as to why; they replied “but that’s not okay! B needs to just do the thing!” A was upset that I wasn’t mad at B, suggesting that I didn’t think the thing was serious or important. I was sort of upset that A was mad at B when it just seemed like a fact about the situation and who B is as a person that of course they weren’t going to do it.

Someone I’m dating will tell me something–say, “if you slept with [redacted] I’d like you less.” My instinctive response is probably something like “oh interesting, why do you think that’s the case?” Later I’m telling someone about our relationship and I realize that if I accurately report stuff like this they will just think the person is a dick.

I’ll tell someone about a bad interaction I had with someone. They’ll either:

blame the other person
blame me, but not explicitly say it, and it’s kind of awkward
try to justify it and come up with reasons it was actually fine

and I get frustrated with all these and find them counterproductive.

I’ve thought about talking to one of my friends about this, but fittingly, I don’t know how to express it in a way that she won’t interpret as me claiming that my way of thinking is better than her way of thinking.

To be clear, I don’t think it is–I think they’re both helpful and probably there are plenty of people who should move in each direction. I think my way of thinking is useful for forming more accurate beliefs about yourself and others. It might also make me happier, or at least have lower intensity and frequency of negative emotions–I think it promotes a state of lowkey contentment.

But there are also obvious failure modes, e.g. spending the rest of my life doing stupid shit while thinking “hm, I notice that I am doing stupid shit, interesting.” Judging is pretty useful, because sometimes you have to decide what action to take, and it’s good to be able to judge which action is best and do that one. Basically, if I ever become one of those people who does nothing but meditate and drop acid, please slap me and remind me of this post.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 183666793069

Date: 2019-03-24 06:09:58 GMT

Body: I know there’s this stereotype that doctors are good and lawyers are bad, but I feel the exact opposite?

(not that I actually think doctors are bad, medicine is good and many doctors are lovely people, I just have an instinctive aversion to them)

my experience with lawyers is generally that they are trying to help me figure out the best way to do what I want while also following the law. this is pretty helpful

my experience with doctors is generally that they know less about a topic than I do after I’ve researched it for an hour, and they are collaborating with the government to prevent me from getting whatever treatment I need

Tags: #nightblogging

Post ID: 183666511879

Date: 2019-03-24 05:48:25 GMT

Reblogging: confusedbyinterface

Question: Where do you identify on the political spectrum?

Answer:

confusedbyinterface:

worldoptimization:
Uh, idk. Do people still “identify on the political spectrum” these days?
I might not officially be a politician but I’m pretty sure I’m somewhere on the political spectrum.

Tags: #same

Post ID: 183664229519

Date: 2019-03-24 03:30:08 GMT

Question: Where do you identify on the political spectrum?

Answer: Uh, idk. Do people still “identify on the political spectrum” these days?

Post ID: 183657050714

Date: 2019-03-23 21:05:46 GMT

Reblogging: arbane235

Body:

arbane235:

worldoptimization:
I’ve had a yfip: meritocracy tag since, well, yfip was a thing that people said. And these days I feel like hating meritocracy is getting increasingly trendy and I am increasingly like “nope actually it’s just good.”
Sure, the current system of college admissions creates an elite that is segregated from the rest of the country, as well as incentivizing lots of zero-sum arms-race behavior among high school students and their parents.
But I just think the basic function that elite colleges serve of just putting all the smart kids in the same place and making them interact is so valuable that nothing else matters.
(The kids that I want to meet each other aren’t exactly the kids with the highest SAT scores–it’s some combination of that and intellectual curiosity and creativity and ambition. But SAT scores get pretty close.)
It’s kind of terrifying to think about what my life would look like if I had gone to a different school. I probably wouldn’t have had the same jobs. I probably wouldn’t be an EA. I probably wouldn’t live here or have befriended or dated any of the same people. And I think in most cases, the outcome would have been worse. (And I didn’t even go to the optimal school.)
‘Smart kids’ like George W. Bush?

Legacy admissions is anti-meritocratic–that’s the thing I want less of. (As opposed to e.g. Ross Douthat who wants top colleges to be for a hereditary aristocratic elite.)

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 183656988484

Date: 2019-03-23 21:02:51 GMT

Body: As of last week, I’ve lived in the Bay Area for a year. This feels like an intrinsically significant milestone, much more so than recent birthdays or New Years, so I feel motivated to reflect on the past year.

(self-indulgent personal reflections below the cut)

I think I’ve changed a lot this year, more so than in the years before it. That’s not surprising–in part, moving here was a conscious choice, because I felt like I was stagnating as a person and didn’t like who I was crystallizing into. I didn’t quite know how I wanted to change, nor did I feel capable of taking actions to make it happen, but I thought if I threw myself on the mercy of whatever supernatural entities govern San Francisco Bay, that something would come of it, and I was right.

I think I’ve become more agenty in a general way. Describing how I felt about my job a year ago sounds sort of silly to me now; I thought of it as like, part of my role in life or something? It was a thing that I went to for some number of hours a day because that was the normal number of hours a day to work; people gave me tasks; I tried to do the tasks at a pace that seemed reasonable.

The way I think about work now is so different: my “job” is to maximize the expected value of the money that my company makes, and to the extent that I have a defined set of roles I try to do well at it’s purely for instrumental reasons, because companies work best when you give people defined roles. But ultimately, if I waste my time on projects that aren’t valuable I’m not doing a good job. The more productive I am, the better (this seems obvious, but I think before I implicitly thought something like “as long as I’m an average level of productive or something it’s fine.”) If I work more hours, I can do more, and that’s better. If something needs to be done and no one else is doing it, I should just do it, even if it’s not my “job.”

This can definitely be more stressful, and sometimes you need to decide to care less or not take responsibility for something, but I think it’s overall the right way to think about things.

I think I’ve also become more self-aware, partly as a result of trying to be more productive. I started thinking about things like “why am I not doing work right now?” or “why have I made so little progress on this thing?” and realized that most of the time it really seems to come down to “I’m having feelings about something.” I have so many feelings! It’s crazy! They really fuck a lot of shit up.

I’ve become more secure, I think. Partly through becoming aware of and confronting my feelings, partly through failing at things and getting really honest and brutal criticism and realizing that … it’s okay, I can confront the fact that I have flaws and not run away from it because it’s not the worst possible thing and doesn’t mean that I’m fundamentally Bad. I’ve gotten way better at receiving feedback. I think my attachment style has gotten significantly more secure (though still in the anxious bucket), and I’ve gotten more into honesty and openness in romantic relationships.

A lot of things that felt important to my identity a year ago feel less so now. I’m less into femininity, and domesticity, and aesthetics, and being trad. More of my identity is centered around my work. I think I went a little too far with this; I think some recentering of my identity was helpful, but I also think that I genuinely like things to be nice, and beautiful, and I don’t want to destroy my aesthetic sense in the name of utilitarianism. I’ve been working on cultivating that side of myself more again.

I feel more motivated towards EA, but I don’t feel any more altruistic particularly. I think this feeling comes from being more ambitious, and I’ve started to feel like EA is just an inevitable consequence of ambition. If I want to do something with my life, what is there to do? Money is too easy. I could try to become famous or something, but that seems kind of lame. Making the future look the way I want it to really seems like the only worthy goal.

Maybe the most negative change is that I worry I’ve become a worse person to interact with in some ways. I’m more flaky, less likely to respond to messages, and less good at reliably keeping in touch with people. I’m more impatient and easily annoyed by people. I notice others’ flaws more easily. I’m glad about this in some ways–not everyone needs to like me, and I’m glad I went from desperately wanting everyone to want to be friends with me to thinking about who I actually want to be friends with. But I don’t like feeling negatively about others or fixating on their flaws. I think practicing more of an authentic relating-y mindset will be relevant here.

For the past week, I’ve had a strong feeling of things coming full circle. Things are so different from a year ago, and yet the same in some ways. The sun came out, and spring is starting to feel real, and it feels the exact same as last March did, when I moved here from cold and gloomy New York and it felt like anything was possible. I feel different in many ways, but I’ve also had the same job for a year now, lived in the same apartment, hung out with many of the same people. And yet things feel just just as uncertain, and I’m really interested to know what the next year will look like.

Tags: #personal, #bay area gothic

Post ID: 183655611654

Date: 2019-03-23 19:55:33 GMT

Body: I’ve had a yfip: meritocracy tag since, well, yfip was a thing that people said. And these days I feel like hating meritocracy is getting increasingly trendy and I am increasingly like “nope actually it’s just good.”

Sure, the current system of college admissions creates an elite that is segregated from the rest of the country, as well as incentivizing lots of zero-sum arms-race behavior among high school students and their parents.

But I just think the basic function that elite colleges serve of just putting all the smart kids in the same place and making them interact is so valuable that nothing else matters.

(The kids that I want to meet each other aren’t exactly the kids with the highest SAT scores–it’s some combination of that and intellectual curiosity and creativity and ambition. But SAT scores get pretty close.)

It’s kind of terrifying to think about what my life would look like if I had gone to a different school. I probably wouldn’t have had the same jobs. I probably wouldn’t be an EA. I probably wouldn’t live here or have befriended or dated any of the same people. And I think in most cases, the outcome would have been worse. (And I didn’t even go to the optimal school.)

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 183466832669

Date: 2019-03-15 06:09:19 GMT

Reblogging: aneeshmulye

Question: What's the appeal of the type of man who only cares about his wife being pretty and submissive? Is it just less pressure to try to attract such a man, instead of men who care about compatibility/intelligence/ethics etc?

Answer:

aneeshmulye:

worldoptimization:
yeah basically, or more like the idea of trying to attract such a man doesn’t activate weird insecurities, because I don’t feel insecure about qualities I don’t actually care about
unfortunately I think trying to date people who are interested in you for the qualities you value most in yourself is probably the right move on many levels
(As I understand it) To be liked ‘for’ anything is always, in the end, unsatisfactory; and in the interim, a source of insecurity. All such external characteristics - the body, the heart-mind, the fortuitous circumstances of finding you agree on important things - are transitory, and perhaps more treacherously fleeting than one imagines.
Yes, there is a ‘transactional’ or ‘self-interested’ component in all relating; that is a part of the human condition. Part of this is the use of external characteristics as indicators and filters; part is deciding what boundaries and engagement is actually beneficial in any given situation. This is what I’d call the practicalities.
And yes, there’s also the entire range of zero-sum control strategies, including ones that operate one level higher by arranging circumstances and choreographing interactions to lead the feeling-state of the other person in a carefully controlled direction, etc. Now, the non-zero-sum individual components of ‘game’ are actually very useful (and woefully neglected by lots of people because of where they come from, is my guess). But most people have no idea that taking on the basic framing that ‘game’ advice is presented in causes you to lose the game before you even begun playing. Or that there are other frames than the default (and miserable) one, which don’t involve neurotically juggling plates and knives while standing one-legged atop a house of cards. Becoming aware of the tradeoffs here, and picking a path through them that expresses your own values, is indispensable to your integrity - and also a part of the practicalities. Perhaps it’s the hardest one.
And yes, if you find that being appreciated for something (as distinct from being sought out for it) raises up a storm… great! Mmmmmm, that’s the juice of life, right there. I’ve developed a taste for it now, and grown to love it (uhh, in manageable quantities, to be clear).
But at the end of the day, the movement and opening of the heart towards another is a gift, and a precious one at that. And it can be terrifying - after all, in spite of all our attempts, when this movement is deep and genuine, there is nothing in there to hold on to, nothing we can draw security from, nothing we can control so as to make sure the love (or approval/intimacy/sex/whatever) keeps flowing.
All the lover can do in good faith is create the best conditions for this gift to do what it will, to give it fertile ground and sun and water and care and protection. This is a skill all its own, and much rarer and more precious than the strategising of those who think themselves the Machiavellis of the heart.
“How or why did it happen?”, you ask, perhaps because you want to further know, “How can I make sure she stays? Can I ensure I find another like her again, if I have to?” This kind of control is not given you. How could it be, after all, without reducing her to something over whom you can have affordances? Without reducing her agency? Without crimping the free and joyous expression of the dance of her being - the same dance that drew you to her in the first place?
And to be OK with that, while still skillfully managing the practicalities - that is the razor’s edge on which the heart of the lover walks.

Questions:

Don’t you like some people better than others? Aren’t there some characteristics that are correlated with that? Doesn’t that mean that to some extent you like people for those characteristics?

Isn’t reducing your agency kind of a key part of relationships? Why is that bad? Is it bad for countries to make treaties with each other?

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 183397756084

Date: 2019-03-12 06:02:09 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/07c2fe2ca0eec13811ae54f66c554b3e/tumblr_inline_po8orlHx7P1sfizxi_540.jpg

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love by Amir Levine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book, sort of in spite of myself. I’m sure none of the studies will ever replicate, but as far as Hogwarts house systems/bullshit models for thinking about relationships go I think it’s pretty good.

Probably the best thing was just listing a bunch of common cognitive distortions regarding relationships, which I read and was like “oh yeah I totally have some of those, good call.” Would recommend if you’re interested in finding ways that your thinking about relationships is fucked and trying to fix it.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 183397363014

Date: 2019-03-12 05:35:02 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/66fb1bb3b7eb359841bf3ecbb147d73b/tumblr_inline_po8nie9xps1sfizxi_540.jpg

On Beauty by Zadie Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first read this in high school and loved it. I remember thinking that it really insightfully expressed a bunch of things about human nature. Rereading it was underwhelming; the observations on human nature seemed obvious and trite, and the characters’ concerns were petty enough to annoy me.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 183317618764

Date: 2019-03-08 19:20:23 GMT

Body: I sent Matt Levine this article from Scott’s linkpost yesterday and he linked it in Money Stuff today!

Tags: #follow worldoptimization for the intersection of finance and redpill thought, #matt levine is my internet boyfriend

Post ID: 183113232029

Date: 2019-02-28 08:13:09 GMT

Question: S n i p e r

Answer: you do you anon

Post ID: 183112700024

Date: 2019-02-28 07:26:33 GMT

Question: So are you trying to argue that Cornell MASON is sexier than Cato Weeksbooth? Because nobody is sexier than Cato Weeksbooth.

Answer: I am actually on record about which Terra Ignota characters I think are sexiest, and it is neither of those!

Anonymous asked: A priori: Cornel MASON. Empirically: Vivien Ancelet.
nah
a priori: Apollo Mojave, empirically: JEDD Mason

I respect your opinion though :D

Post ID: 183090434964

Date: 2019-02-27 08:56:19 GMT

Answer: yeah basically, or more like the idea of trying to attract such a man doesn’t activate weird insecurities, because I don’t feel insecure about qualities I don’t actually care about

unfortunately I think trying to date people who are interested in you for the qualities you value most in yourself is probably the right move on many levels

Post ID: 183090302029

Date: 2019-02-27 08:43:51 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Question: which bits of men (specifically the ones who aren't, like, 95th percentile for beauty) are for ogling and such? you seem like a person who might know

Answer:

bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190:

oh man there are so many good things
(as always this is just the opinions of one admittedly pretty horny person)
hair! I love long hair on men! I love curly hair! floofy hair! hair that is soft and nice to pet
smiles. the thing where some guys smile and it just lights up their WHOLE FACE? it is so good.
big noses!!!
hands??? don’t you just love guys with big hands with a bit of fuzz on the back and calluses! or soft hands with long fingers! gosh!
hipbones!! when they stick out and you want to lick them!
when his belly is soft and just a LITTLE bit pudgy. that is VERY GOOD. so soft so nice to pet
or ALTERNATIVELY when he is SKINNY and SMOL. oh no want to protect
or when he is SO BIG that he could PICK YOU UP and CARRY YOU AROUND (I am p small lots of people can carry me around) and he is USUALLY SOFT but he has SECRET ARMS MUSCLES that show up for example when he’s fucking you in missionary position
speaking of arms: arms. shoulders. gosh. it is a service to us all when men wear tank tops imo
when guys have body hair and then you can put your cheek on it and rub it and it is SOFT and FUZZY
some men move in a way that is SUPER GRACEFUL and then I cannot stop looking at them and it is PROBLEMATIC
voices??? men who can sing are very good. guys with deep voices! guys with dom voices!
jawlines! I have a Thing for jawlines
dicks. I love all dicks. they are all great. like we talk about size but! what about the softness of the skin! what about the way the skin slides against the spongey bit when you give a blowjob! what about when a guy is just casually naked and he has a dick RIGHT THERE and it is v compact and neat-looking and also you want to put your mouth on it! what about when you are making out with someone and then you adjust a bit and then you can feel that he’s hard! dicks are an EXTREMELY GOOD BODY PART

nothing against this post in particular, but it reminds me that I find it amusing how ~boy positivity~ posts on tumblr always end up taking this cute, infantilizing tone that elides what is actually attractive about men

here are what I think are some ~cute boy things~

controlling most major world governments
being responsible for many important inventions and scientific discoveries
spatial reasoning abilities
low risk aversion
sufficient strength to physically overpower you

if you are a boy who is driven to succeed at ambitious goals you are valid

if you are a boy who arrives at opinions through logical reasoning you are valid

if you are a boy with the confidence to advocate for unconventional ideas and take actions based on them you are valid

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 182833232459

Date: 2019-02-15 22:45:34 GMT

Reblogging: kaumnyakte

Body:

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

My followers are ¼ communists, ¼ fascists, ¼ Californians, and ¼ TERFs, so it’s absolutely guaranteed that, at some point, no matter what I say, some of them will band together and drone strike my bedroom, killing me instantly. The Tumblr Experience™

… want to object to this but yeah okay I am a Californian

Post ID: 182157016919

Date: 2019-01-20 07:42:41 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/8e051a0b7f3840b58fefb8e532918efe/tumblr_inline_plmdfiDRKT1sfizxi_540.jpg

Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager by Keith Gessen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a really entertaining and readable account of the financial crisis. But more than that, it’s a poem; an ode to the aesthetic beauty of modern financial capitalism, a subject sadly underexplored in literature.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 182156236614

Date: 2019-01-20 06:56:35 GMT

Question: You cuck, you can literally speed up the text scrolls by clicking!

Answer: you know I can’t recall anyone ever calling me a cuck before

Post ID: 182051705324

Date: 2019-01-16 06:33:49 GMT

Body:

purgatory–and–probiotics replied to your post: Play and post a review! Maybe you can put it on…

I haven’t played it myself but at this point I agree you should play and post a review because it seems to be really important to some anons and it’s making me curious

I actually started playing it and I realize it gets interesting at some point, but I just got too bored to keep going. The text scrolls so slowly.

Tags: #purgatory--and--probiotics

Post ID: 181998571594

Date: 2019-01-14 06:25:35 GMT

Question: Play and post a review! Maybe you can put it on goodreads cause it’s a ““““““““visual novel””””””””

Answer: why do people want me to play this in the first place

Post ID: 181995982284

Date: 2019-01-14 04:16:55 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Question: Instead of reading the manosphere to figure out what men like, you should play ddlc. Men love that game.

Answer:

… okay

Multiple people have now facebook messaged me to tell me that DDLC, while “cleverly constructed”/“does some cool things,” is probably not worth my time. I’m honestly tempted to play it now just to see what inspires such strong feelings of mild positivity

Post ID: 181995788464

Date: 2019-01-14 04:08:16 GMT

Question: What do you think the guys you date would say their type is?

Answer: idk, but I’ll take submissions

Post ID: 181995783499

Date: 2019-01-14 04:08:02 GMT

Question: A priori: Cornel MASON. Empirically: Vivien Ancelet.

Answer: nah

a priori: Apollo Mojave, empirically: JEDD Mason

Post ID: 181973374014

Date: 2019-01-13 09:44:44 GMT

Question: Instead of reading the manosphere to figure out what men like, you should play ddlc. Men love that game.

Answer: … okay

Post ID: 181945044389

Date: 2019-01-12 07:49:52 GMT

Question: Peter the Great

Answer: kind of yes. I think he’s become closer to my type over time

Post ID: 181944969609

Date: 2019-01-12 07:45:13 GMT

Question: finance bros who lift and are slightly on the spectrum

Answer: uhh define lift

“actually strong” not as much, “tries to lift but is adorably bad at it” is better

Post ID: 181944932104

Date: 2019-01-12 07:42:54 GMT

Question: metacontrarians

Answer: well obviously

Post ID: 181939197184

Date: 2019-01-12 02:28:56 GMT

Reblogging: purgatory--and--probiotics-deac

Body:

goldenfleeced:

Hey I’m gonna start a new ask meme: Come into my inbox and tell me what you think my “Type” is

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 181862403644

Date: 2019-01-09 07:59:05 GMT

Question: Have you played Doki Doki Literature Club?

Answer: Nope!

Post ID: 181832096464

Date: 2019-01-08 08:34:21 GMT

Reblogging: aneeshmulye

Body:

aneeshmulye:

worldoptimization:
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I honestly loved this book. I think I might have gained 10 emotional IQ points just from reading it–this week whenever I interact with people I keep thinking about what they must be feeling and what need they were trying to express when they said that thing. (I think I still have a way to go before actually putting all of this into practice.) I’m also finding it quite helpful in thinking about myself, my self-image, my decisions and mistakes, etc.

I’d recommend it if you’re interested in relating more authentically to people, resolving disagreements, making people feel loved and valued, practicing compassion for others and yourself … basically normal human things tbh.

I’m still unsure about some stuff. There were a lot of really impressive stories about NVC healing decades-old rifts, preventing murders, etc. Maybe they’re all true, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t literally a superpower and I would feel better if there were some stories about “one time I tried to use NVC to stop this gang war, and it totally failed, and they kept murdering people, and we had to just put them in jail or something.”

I’m also confused about people having needs that conflict with each other. He kind of casually implies that everyone’s needs can always be satisfied and that seems fake. Maybe I missed him justifying this more.

View all my reviews
I’ve taken an interest in NVC as a part of a larger processof virtue-cultivation, the first virtue of which is non-violence.I’ve wrestled with it and attempted to cultivate it as well -though not as systematically as I’d like, alas – and I may haveanswers to some of your questions, I’ve been engaging with it for awhile now (more than a year); so this post is much more of aclarification and noting down of what came up in response to yourpost, one that I didn’t realise until now I’d been wanting toexpress. I’ve peppered my response to what you wrote throughout.
My understanding is that the hard operational coreof NVC is a shift of salience and attention enabled by areconceptualisation of human behaviour. More simply - it meansredirecting your attention, at the moment of interaction, from theexplicit content of what someone said to your direct perception ofwhere it’s coming from. This ‘where it’s coming from’ isalways the needs/values, feelings, and strategies that theother person is employing.
Even in extreme cases of character disturbance(a term I’ll come to later), where the other person’s strategiesare extremely dysfunctional, immoral, antisocial, or harmful, that’sstill where it’s coming from (at least, if the speech orbehaviour in question is volitional and not involuntary or a reflex).I’ll deal with the problem of bad-faith interactions later; rightnow, to simplify the discussion, I’ll focus just on the case whereboth people are basically well-meaning though perhapsvariously imperfect.
One possible way this attempt can fail isredirecting your attention from what they’re saying to yourtheory about where they’re coming from instead of to what youdirectly perceive (however dimly or hazily); this is why feedback isimportant here; that’s why the template interactions have youspecify that you’re offering your best guess when you say thingslike “So if I hear you correctly, you said/did <foo> becauseyou felt <bar> because you needed <baz>, as mediated bycontext <qux>, right?”. If you’re not careful about this,then you can end up BETA-MEALRing others, and irritate them evenmore.
As this attentional shift proceeds to solidify andbecome more and more natural, and as your powers of perception growand become subtler, more sensitive, and more precise, you often findyourself responding directly to where you can see someone’s wordscoming from, instead of merely their content. When someone is reallygood at this, it can look to those whose attention is stuck at thelevel of the symbolic content of words like some combination ofmind-reading and arcane interpersonal wizardry. I have personally hadthe experience of perceiving so clearly in the aftermath of ameditation retreat (or occasionally, a meditation sit) that it feltlike mind-reading, compared to back when I naively responded muchmore to people’s words and what I thought they meant; this abilityhas also slowly grown as I continue to practice (both NVC andmeditative cultivation).
Without this, if you just attempt to use thetemplate as presented but without trying to shift your attentiondirectly and in the moment and be present with with other person, itcan come across as inauthentic, artificial, or formulaic (because,well, if you do it like that, it is…), and gets old reallyfast; such sterile attempts at application are where a lot ofpeople’s frustrating experiences with others behaving like‘NVC-bots’ come from. I’m not really worried about this being afailure mode for you specifically, though, insofar as I know you.
This shift in attention and salience comes aboutin daily life through practice, and this is made possible by aclearer understanding of the why people do what they do – thereconceptualisation I mentioned above. This model – that everythingpeople do and say (volitionally, anyway) is a result of themattempting to use some strategyto meet a particular needthat lies behind the feelingsthat they experience, and that feelings and their underlying needsare the drivers of human behaviour and thus also naturally the thingsto focus on – is the foundation of practice, and what guides it inthe right direction. The interaction templates the book gives areboth a gateway to and a scaffolding for this practice, which firsthelps you shift your attention day-by-dayand in-the-moment by theirvery structure, and thus seedirectly and for yourself what Marshall did, and so make his insighttruly your own. Once that’s done, you don’t need them any more,and your style of speaking reverts to being more natural andcolloquial, though what’s actually happening underneath isprofoundly different – andothers can tell, too.(Eventually, even the labeling of what you perceive as ‘feeling’and ‘need’ drops away, as you exist in direct, deep immediateintimacy with the totality ofthe other person’s being asit presents to you in all its coruscating beauty.)
Howdoes this model help you do this? Followingthe Tantrik theory of the ‘purification’ of beliefsand belief-structures, thegeneral pattern is that first, you replace a belief misaligned withthe nature of things with one that isaligned with the way things are; and then, when you encounter thereality that the words are pointing to, the well-aligned beliefdissolves into it falls away too, because you don’t need it anymore, and now inhabit realityas it is, raw and intimate (which is the point).For example, if you have a bunch of mistaken ideas about what a mangois – say, it’s cubical, slate coloured, and tastes like limestone– then the first thing to do is give you a correct description ofwhat a mango is, maybe show you a few pictures, anddescribe the taste as well as possible.Then, when you encounter one in the worldand touch it, smell it, bite into it andsavor its taste and texture and juiciness,you’ll be able to recognise it as a mango. But you’re stilltasting and experiencingthe mango, not the pictures or descriptions.
Here, the NVCmodel first refactors yourperception of humans and their behaviour to be much more closelyaligned with what’s actually happening. Then, the interactiontemplates and other exercises help you turn your attention towardswhat the model is talking about, and verify it for yourself, in yourown life; see clearly what Marshall saw. Finally, as you begin toperceive more clearly and directly, the explicit model and theinteraction templates fall away, since they’re not needed any more– because you have grokkedthe insight, the same way you savoured mangoes in the example above.
This refactoringhas two parts – first, pulverisingthe old patterns of thinking that hijacked your attention awayfrom what was in front of you,such as theories about people that actually obscure theimmediacy of what’s happening with them(say, the blue or red pills, just to name twothat perhaps have some juice for you); andsecond, equipping youwith a model that’s actually descriptive of what’s happening. Howdo you know that the latter is more correct than the former? Well, ifit is, then it should dissolve into the reality it’s trying topoint you to when you encounter it; and that’s what the interactiontemplates (and a variety of other practices people have developed forthis) are for. Both theoryand practice are a way of cutting throughwords and concepts and belief-structures and other mental filters tothe sparkling, vibrant aliveness of reality.
You said youthink you still have a way to go before putting all of this intoaction. I’ll freely borrowfrom two models of the progress of practice that I find useful fromthe Tantrik tradition.
First, it seemsthat you’ve probably had what I call a transmissionexperience when reading thebook; as you said, you felt in the aftermath of reading it that you’dgained 10 emotional IQ points just as a result of doing so. This isabsolutely wonderful, and you’re fortunate that you could get thatfrom the book (for some people, it simply does notclick). Traditionally, it’s said that in the vast majority ofcases, the transmission just opens up the possibility of certaintypes of practice to you, maybepoints out something that you would have missed without it, but doesnot actualise the shift that’s being pointed to permanently; onlypractice on your part can do that. In my personal experience, thebook, though powerful, is still not a complete transmission; and ifyou want to get what I can best describe as a direct ‘pointing out’instruction of NVC,I’d highly recommend thisworkshop by Marshall. I can testify to its potential – a friend ofmine was able to save herdeeply-valued marriage, andcome to a place of deeper and healthier relating than even before thedifficulties due to which she looked to NVC,after getting her NVC transmission through it,and I am grateful that I gotthe opportunity to share it with her.
Second, there isthe matter of practice. I don’t want to presume how committed youare, so I’m not going to suggest specifics, contenting myselfmerely with sharing resources you may use if you are so inclined. Themost basic practice is, of course, the interaction templates given inthe book, and the attentional shift they imply and conceptualrefactoring that undergirds them. The book also has specificquestions and possible jumping-off points for further inquiry inquite a few of its chapters. Additionally, there are a few otherbooks I can suggest: the NVC workbook, which contains an actionableplan and exercises, for both individualand group practice; ‘Being Genuine: Stop Being Nice, Start BeingReal’ by Thomas d’Ansembourg (yes, it’s an NVC-style book, nomatter the name), ‘Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach toNonviolent Communication’ by Oren Jay Sofer, which includespractices and exercises that integrate mindful awareness and NVC(which, to be entirely honest, I don’t consider actually separateexcept perhaps as a pedagogical convenience we sometimes employ –bringing mindful awareness to human relating is quite likely toresult in the insights behind NVC, if the model is pointing tosomething real), and ‘AHelping Hand: Mediation with Nonviolent Communication’ by LivLarsson, which is one of the few books on NVC-style mediation I havefound so far. I’ve startedto develop a taste for the juice of life, to be honest, after myexperiences this past year – instead of flinching away from chargedsituations, I am now much more capable of enjoying and navigatingthem, and even somewhat attracted to them due to their undeniablealiveness.
As you’ve alsofound, the shift happens internally as well, to the little fragmentsof internal monologue that constitute our mindstream. NVC is afantastic thing to internalise for internal inquiry (a big part of which is ‘interrogatingmy desires’, as you called it), because you come to notice thatbehind every self-judgement and desire for some external thing is theenergy of feelings and needs, and the attachments and aversions wehave developed around connected strategies and self-images. One ofthe more interesting things to notice is that there is often internalviolence that we often use as astrategy; the very words ‘I’ll make myselfdo X’ implies an internal division of you into little parts, wherethe one that’s currently broadcasting through the verbal loop istrying to find a way to ram through something in the face of internalopposition it has come to expect. Bringing the same attention shiftto your internal dialogue means that tons of self-judgementsfall away, as does the attendant shame andinhibitions, and it becomesclearer what strategies are misaligned with their goals, and perhapsmore importantly, what goals are misaligned with the needs andvalues and feelings drivingthem.
I will note that NVC, though it sounds very nice,is also an extraordinarily ruthless process. An honest application ofthe insight and practice usually leads to a profound cutting throughof falsehood, and that cutting through is absolutely ruthless. It’sgentle and profoundly loving, but lacks all mercy for untruth. I saythis as a fair warning, because getting in touch with the needs andvalues underlying your feelings, and seeing your strategies as theyare, is very often a profoundlydisillusioning process, and unless you’re some kind of spontaneoussaint already, is likely to involve the cutting through of a varietyof self-images as well, both positive and negative; I’m reminded ofthe skinning knives some Tantrik deities hold, symbolising that theirpractices free you from self-images (usually without bothering toomuch about how gentle the process is). I hasten to add that anNVC-style inquiryis generally much, muchgentler. It’s equallyruthless interpersonally, too. Which brings me to my next point.
Applying NVC often results in a clarificationfollowed by a catalysis of the process of expressing the potentialinherent in a situation. Though a much greater degree of choice isoffered to both participants in a situation where the kind of clarityNVC can bring is available, and so the range of possible positiveoutcomes and options expands, clear seeing can also include seeingthings that both parties were denying, such as that perhaps arelationship or mode of engagement is past its natural expiry date.In such a situation, there is no guarantee that NVC is going to leadto a culturally-conditioned idea of what the ‘happy ending’ is,because if may become abundantly clear to both participants that fortheir situation, it isn’t actually happy at all. The process cancut through denial as well as enemy images. And this answers anotherof your questions – no, it’s not a conventional superpower, inthat it can’t forcibly change people or force a happy outcome. Itis a minor superpower, inthat it can unravel the knotsof a tricky situations andfind a way around impasses hithertothought insurmountably difficult simply by shifting attention awayfrom the layer of strategies and blame(where such conceptual stalemates generally occur) and towards theactual roots of thesituation in question. Since these are non-specific (needs andvalues), the range of possible choices is tremendously widened, afterwhich finding a workable solution is usually something a reasonablybright 12-15 year old can do within 10-20 minutes, as Marshall says.
Yes,I want to acknowledge that sometimes (though exceedinglyrarely), people’s needs cannotbe satisfied even in themain; or, at least, notnecessarily by the other person in the conversation. For example, ifboth of us are very hungry and there’s just enough food to take theedge off the appetites of one of us, well, tough luck forone us. Normally, though,it’s very rare in the modern world, due both to the abundantprosperity of modernity inwhich most of us are drenchedand with which we overflow,and also because of the non-specific nature of actual baseline humanneeds and values. Sometimesit happens that the other person simply feels no spontaneous drive tomeet your needs (sexuality and human connection generally is a goodur-example of this, and one of the few that’s actually juicy evenin the modern world), and the situation is resolved by recalibratingyour strategies to get your needs met elsewhere, in a way notinvolving the specific other person you’re talking to. Andsometimes, it happens that some of your needs don’t get met,because they may require strategies completely out of human reach sofar. It’s unlikely, but definitely possible. Andin general, not all of your needs are going to get met anyway; Idoubt there is a human being allof whose needs have always been met. Theinsight behind NVC doesn’t deny the possibility of tragedy inherentto the human condition, much as some may want to use it to prop uptheir own such denial.
At this point, I want to note that one of thecultural trends that has become far, far more prevalent today than inthe time in which Marshall grew up is the almost religious insistenceof many that all those who commit acts of harm are motivated solelyby ‘wounding’ or traumas or experiences of abuse or pain in theirpast, and that these acts are never reallycoldly calculated or predatorily intentional. This is anunderstandable illusion to fall into – the vast majority of peopleengaging with each other on Tumblr are, after all, much more likelyto be on the higher neuroticism end of the spectrum – and for suchpeople, generally, most aggression is reactive aggression (a responseto a perception of threat or triggering of past painful feelings).The problem is, this model is woefully and dangerously incomplete;there do exist people who have fallen down an incentivegradient that rewardspredatory aggression, and whoroute all feedback (up to and including being imprisoned) into their‘strategy’ module, and don’t really ever actuallyturn back on themselves and ask, ‘What the hell, man?’, and arecomfortable with themselves as they are. The temptation for peopleunder this illusion is to try to use NVC as a way of propping uptheir denial of the existence of predatory aggression – they mayoften interpret the statement NVC makes about all speech andbehaviour arising as a result of needs and values to narrowly meanwhat they want it to mean – which is to say, that the people who dosuch things are doing it out of some pain or darkness in their past.As I said before, this is dangerously misguided; and perhaps moreimportantly for this post, is a total non sequitur.Nowhere in the model will you find a statement to the effect thateveryone’s strategiesare of the kind that do not harm others; hell, if they were, would weeven need the method to begin with? Though he doesn’t emphasise it,Marshall straightforwardly notes that in cases where it’snecessary, force hasto be used protectively. I am not in agreement with him on somepoints, though; I do think that there exist individuals whose harmfulstrategies are sufficiently ‘baked’ or fixed by the time weencounter them that they are unlikely to be able to be reached withinthe span of a single human life, at least with the tools available tous today. (For more on this, I’d highlyrecommend Dr. George Simon’s books, starting perhaps with “InSheep’s Clothing”; his oeuvre of work is, suggestively enough forsomeone who has probablynot worked with it, oddly compatible with the insights underlying NVCat the level of practical recommendations. I should probably do ashort summary of his work at some point, honestly.)
Whatthe NVC model doesinvite is to not get lost in analysing the other person (exceptperhaps instrumentally, which is something that requires quite a bitof skill, given our habitual patterns of doing it prettyunskillfully), and instead focus on our own needs and values, and tosee how to use force protectively (say, protecting civilians againstthe murderous gangs you mentioned) in circumstances that warrant itwithout necessarily condemning the other person. This can beexceptionally difficult, and indeed is NVC on hard mode – but notruth worth its salt should break down just because things got moreintense. My own take is that character disturbance is the result of acombination (in different proportions for different people) oftendencies inherent in a person’s blood, with gettingincreasing habituated to and shaped by incentivegradients, perhaps during aperson’s formative times,that allow for and even reward the person’s continued use ofharmful strategies. Indeed, I’d say that the study and recognitionof character disturbance is atroot a way of identifying aparticular set of situations where protective force orboundaries is called for, andhow to deploy itskillfully. Additionally, this study gives us the ability torecognise much better what strategies will actually be effective inthose situations where someone’s character is disturbed (ie, theirstrategies are both deep-rooted and harmful, and resistant to eventheir own attempts to changethem), and how to help them (if we so choose, of course).
I also want to note that the insight behind NVC isactually morally neutral, in that the model and attentional shift Idescribed do not actually require you to subscribe to some fixedmorality; and can, indeed, allow you to be an evenbigger and more effective jerk if you want to. I don’t want tosay much about this publicly, because Dark NVC (as I call it) issomething I’d rather not have floating around, since it’sactually effective, being rooted in truth,instead of being kind of pathetic, like most wannabe-’Dark’things.
I want to end bybringing attention back to the point of all this – which is theobservation that when we find ourselves in the stateof being fully present with that which is truly alive in ourselvesand another person, there is a natural flow of what is best describedas ‘love’ (only because we lack a better term – non-reactiveunconditional loving acceptance points to the thing better, butdoesn’t exactly roll off the tongue) and compassion, and the blazingvividness of being fully here and fully human.

I really appreciate the thorough response.

Though I didn’t quite get to the level of articulating it (either in my post or in my brain), I think one of my main concerns with NVC was how it deals with “bad people” (manipulators, abusers, etc.) and whether it requires people to be kind of basically good and acting in good faith (and whether it promotes engaging with “bad people” in unhealthy ways).

Thanks for helping me articulate that, and for helping answer it. And for the other thoughts and resources!

Post ID: 181752257909

Date: 2019-01-05 23:12:08 GMT

Question: Lily van see Woodsen is not calm in a crisis!

Answer: wait she reacts to everything so calmly

explain

Post ID: 181727315989

Date: 2019-01-05 03:31:53 GMT

Body: my brain decided a couple days ago to obsess over Lily van der Woodsen and a couple days before that to obsess over Caroline Lamb

I guess it can’t decide whether it likes the idea of reacting to any crisis with preternatural calmness and composure, or responding to Lord Byron ending your public affair by making him the villain in your Gothic novel

but somehow they both seem like manifestations of the true aesthetic?

Tags: #nightblogging

Post ID: 181726993694

Date: 2019-01-05 03:17:11 GMT

Body: the red pill lied to me

I thought that men were only supposed to care about physical attractiveness, having a sweet and submissive personality, and maybe a couple other things like chastity and cooking skill

but it turns out all the men who are interested in dating me only care about “intelligence” and “knowing stuff about trading” and “having good opinions on social justice” and things like that

… I guess there’s probably a selection effect they were missing, isn’t there

Tags: #pua cw, #personal, #not sj go away

Post ID: 181537702114

Date: 2018-12-30 03:24:26 GMT

Reblogging: youzicha

Body:

youzicha:

collapsedsquid:
argumate:
shieldfoss:
argumate:
worldoptimization:
most of the discourse on my dash rn seems to be not only assuming that investment banking is evil, but maybe assuming that everyone knows and agrees on this including investment bankers?
1) do people know what investment banking is? I sort of don’t but my impression is that most of it is like, helping companies issue securities and structure mergers and acquisitions. do you think that any existing publicly traded company is good for the world? guess how it raised money? with the help of investment bankers! (unless it’s Spotify or something idk)

2) honestly if a sector of the economy is large and profitable my prior is just that they’re providing value

3) I’m being kind of flippant but I do think most people are not operating from the premise that the basic functions of investment banking are crucial to the operation of an advanced economy
the cotton sector of the Southern economy was large and profitable
My issue was with #2 as well, though my pithy answer would have been “Well that or rent seeking.”
(Because it’s rent seeking.)
also it wasn’t the basic functions of investment banking that almost destroyed the global economy
Yeah, one of the ideas you get from people from Mark Blyth is that we need a return to “3 6 3 banking“ where bankers “payed 3 percent on deposits, lent money at 6 percent, and teed off at the golf course by 3 p.m.“
Well, I’m also not convinced that advanced derivatives are inherently evil. (Durr hburr technology is bad, fire is scary, Black–Scholes were a witch.) I think the same complaints could have been made about all financial instruments at some point.
Futures were invented in the 1630s—and then promptly caused the tulip mania.
Shares were invented in the late 1600s, to finance the India trading companies, and then promptly caused the South Sea Bubble. The government of England concluded that shares are more trouble than they’re worth, and outright banned them, until 1825.
In retrospect, both shares and futures are excellent ideas which greatly improved trading and investing, but it took several decades to figure out how to use them safely. Similarly, I think CDOs are quite clever, but as we learned lately, using a simplistic frequentist risk model clearly doesn’t work. My guess is that a more sophisticated version of the same idea can be made to work, and 100 years from now some kind of CDO-like instruments will be considered as basic and obviously useful as futures is today.

Following your link led me to this great Adam Smith takedown of companies:

The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.Like the stewards of a rich man, they are apt to consider attention to small matters as not for their master’s honour, and very easily give themselves a dispensation from having it. Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company. It is upon this account, that joint-stock companies for foreign trade have seldom been able to maintain the competition against private adventurers.

I gotta say I’m glad we ignored him and I think companies have worked out pretty well

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 181537442394

Date: 2018-12-30 03:12:45 GMT

Reblogging: argumate

Body:

argumate:

shieldfoss:
argumate:
worldoptimization:
most of the discourse on my dash rn seems to be not only assuming that investment banking is evil, but maybe assuming that everyone knows and agrees on this including investment bankers?
1) do people know what investment banking is? I sort of don’t but my impression is that most of it is like, helping companies issue securities and structure mergers and acquisitions. do you think that any existing publicly traded company is good for the world? guess how it raised money? with the help of investment bankers! (unless it’s Spotify or something idk)

2) honestly if a sector of the economy is large and profitable my prior is just that they’re providing value

3) I’m being kind of flippant but I do think most people are not operating from the premise that the basic functions of investment banking are crucial to the operation of an advanced economy
the cotton sector of the Southern economy was large and profitable
My issue was with #2 as well, though my pithy answer would have been “Well that or rent seeking.”
(Because it’s rent seeking.)
also it wasn’t the basic functions of investment banking that almost destroyed the global economy

Some points:

1) Goldman Sachs only comes up in the news when it does something bad. It does things all the time that I assume are pretty good, e.g. “underwrite the Microsoft IPO.” Sometimes it does bad things like “steal a ton of money from Malaysia.” Unsurprisingly, the evil and illegal thing gets a lot more press coverage.

But not only was stealing money from Malaysia illegal, it also seems like quite a bad business decision in retrospect! You have to think that they will train their next intern class to super extra please please don’t steal money from Malaysia. And this is the sort of thing you can avoid doing if you go to work in banking and are either non-evil or somewhat intelligent or both.

2) Okay, but wasn’t the global economy created by Goldman et al. in the first place?

I guess maybe you think something like:

finance, defined as the packaging up of time and risk and the intermediation between parties with different preferences w.r.t. these to facilitate trade, can be good; at its best, it enables mutually beneficial trades to allow investment and promote economic growth. however, packaging these up too cleverly leads to people taking on risks they don’t realize, making the financial system fragile and prone to blowups. individuals in the financial sector are incentivized to obfuscate their packaging and it’s hard to align these incentives correctly. therefore, the whole “finance” thing isn’t worth it.

(this is my guess/steelman, not an actual quote)

This argument makes sense to me, but seems pretty hard to evaluate. You weigh up all the good stuff finance has done over the past few decades against all the bad stuff?

(Not to say that this isn’t an important question. Just that I am super not an economist and I don’t feel qualified to evaluate it.

I scrolled through IGM to see if there was anything that seemed helpful. Not exactly; on whether we should break up the big banks, people seemed completely uncertain; on whether the general concept of finance is good people strongly agreed.)

3) I can see that the banking sector is problematic and has done some bad things! But it seems weird to think of working in banking as obviously evil and compare it to the SS and slavery when like, the economy is complicated and banking does a lot of good things as well.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 181521636049

Date: 2018-12-29 16:06:48 GMT

Reblogging: thathopeyetlives

Body:

thathopeyetlives:

worldoptimization:
most of the discourse on my dash rn seems to be not only assuming that investment banking is evil, but maybe assuming that everyone knows and agrees on this including investment bankers?
1) do people know what investment banking is? I sort of don’t but my impression is that most of it is like, helping companies issue securities and structure mergers and acquisitions. do you think that any existing publicly traded company is good for the world? guess how it raised money? with the help of investment bankers! (unless it’s Spotify or something idk)

2) honestly if a sector of the economy is large and profitable my prior is just that they’re providing value

3) I’m being kind of flippant but I do think most people are not operating from the premise that the basic functions of investment banking are crucial to the operation of an advanced economy
Publicly traded companies (as an alternative to, i.e. “patriarchal companies”) are part of why recent capitalism is so stupidly short-sighted.

Pardon my ignorance, but what’s a patriarchal company? Google is being kind of unhelpful.

But yeah if the people who think Goldman is evil think that the existence of publicly traded companies is evil then that is totally consistent! It’s also pretty radical and I’m guessing most anti-Goldman people don’t actually really want to destroy capitalism

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 181521294224

Date: 2018-12-29 15:52:02 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/b5abc094914ec4d2f736f8ee02019bdc/tumblr_inline_pki9fzXu7O1sfizxi_540.jpg

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I honestly loved this book. I think I might have gained 10 emotional IQ points just from reading it–this week whenever I interact with people I keep thinking about what they must be feeling and what need they were trying to express when they said that thing. (I think I still have a way to go before actually putting all of this into practice.) I’m also finding it quite helpful in thinking about myself, my self-image, my decisions and mistakes, etc.

I’d recommend it if you’re interested in relating more authentically to people, resolving disagreements, making people feel loved and valued, practicing compassion for others and yourself … basically normal human things tbh.

I’m still unsure about some stuff. There were a lot of really impressive stories about NVC healing decades-old rifts, preventing murders, etc. Maybe they’re all true, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t literally a superpower and I would feel better if there were some stories about “one time I tried to use NVC to stop this gang war, and it totally failed, and they kept murdering people, and we had to just put them in jail or something.”

I’m also confused about people having needs that conflict with each other. He kind of casually implies that everyone’s needs can always be satisfied and that seems fake. Maybe I missed him justifying this more.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 181520854134

Date: 2018-12-29 15:30:33 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/eeeac577ab04871477125b067a5febf2/tumblr_inline_pki8glfZ8K1sfizxi_540.jpg

The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

There was a thing I was hoping this would express and it basically didn’t.

I read it at the same time as rereading Middlemarch, thinking that there would be connections but imagining them to be more subtle. As it was, I read of Renee’s disappointing Roman honeymoon right after Dorothea’s, and thought that reading the newer book might have been superfluous.

I can see my best qualities in Dorothea; I can see my worst ones in Renee, and that’s what makes reading about her so excruciating–I hate her but kind of sympathize with her but want to distance myself from her as far as possible in a “not like other girls” sort of way.

Overall I found it predictable, tedious, very confused about philosophy, and totally missing out on the fact that there are beautiful and good things in the world in a disturbing way. Obviously I would say that, because of the above, so take it with a grain of salt.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 181477833599

Date: 2018-12-28 04:38:32 GMT

Body: most of the discourse on my dash rn seems to be not only assuming that investment banking is evil, but maybe assuming that everyone knows and agrees on this including investment bankers?

1) do people know what investment banking is? I sort of don’t but my impression is that most of it is like, helping companies issue securities and structure mergers and acquisitions. do you think that any existing publicly traded company is good for the world? guess how it raised money? with the help of investment bankers! (unless it’s Spotify or something idk)

2) honestly if a sector of the economy is large and profitable my prior is just that they’re providing value

3) I’m being kind of flippant but I do think most people are not operating from the premise that the basic functions of investment banking are crucial to the operation of an advanced economy

Post ID: 181353057674

Date: 2018-12-23 19:06:09 GMT

Body: I don’t know if I’ve gotten much better at doing important things right but I think I am getting a lot better at feeling bad about things in proportion to their badness so that’s good right

Post ID: 181310086504

Date: 2018-12-22 03:07:18 GMT

Question: Few times I been around that Chad / but I’m not just gonna submit like that / cause I ain’t no Houellebecq girl, ain’t no Houellebecq girl

Answer: hi

Post ID: 181291502264

Date: 2018-12-21 09:58:12 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

deusvulture:
(Disclaimer: Most likely this is all deliberate and I’m just too dumb to understand Houellebecq.)
Houellebecq’s Submission reads like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -style porn parody remix of a much better book. It’s full of really brilliant passages, and has a luminous core about the poverty of modern life and the transcendent power of spirituality; but then like 80% of the book is about the protagonist’s sexual conquests, and the positive power of spirituality and social order is heavily thematically linked to the idea of, like, “how cool would it be to live in a society where you can just force teenage girls to fuck you?”.
I guess you couldn’t get away with dodging the issue of patriarchal sexual control entirely; but the way Houellebecq presents it makes the whole concept of secular anomie and a return to traditionalism seem like a sex predator’s scam.
Which is a shame, because otherwise he had me pretty well convinced!
see I loved this because I felt like it was acknowledging that 90% of lofty arguments on social issues about the poverty of modern life or whatever are actually just elaborate rationalizations for fulfilling someone’s kinks
which doesn’t mean the arguments aren’t beautiful and convincing and they could even be right! but also, come on
I have no idea if this was intentional or not

apparently I wrote about this back when I read the book

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging, #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 181291352804

Date: 2018-12-21 09:46:30 GMT

Reblogging: desinvulture

Body:

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

(Disclaimer: Most likely this is all deliberate and I’m just too dumb to understand Houellebecq.)
Houellebecq’s Submission reads like a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies -style porn parody remix of a much better book. It’s full of really brilliant passages, and has a luminous core about the poverty of modern life and the transcendent power of spirituality; but then like 80% of the book is about the protagonist’s sexual conquests, and the positive power of spirituality and social order is heavily thematically linked to the idea of, like, “how cool would it be to live in a society where you can just force teenage girls to fuck you?”.
I guess you couldn’t get away with dodging the issue of patriarchal sexual control entirely; but the way Houellebecq presents it makes the whole concept of secular anomie and a return to traditionalism seem like a sex predator’s scam.
Which is a shame, because otherwise he had me pretty well convinced!

see I loved this because I felt like it was acknowledging that 90% of lofty arguments on social issues about the poverty of modern life or whatever are actually just elaborate rationalizations for fulfilling someone’s kinks

which doesn’t mean the arguments aren’t beautiful and convincing and they could even be right! but also, come on

I have no idea if this was intentional or not

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging, #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 181036112454

Date: 2018-12-12 03:53:55 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/9da9a97102e49ca3a2ac34d4b05cd7ab/tumblr_inline_pjluxlP1Y71sfizxi_540.jpg

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To not review this work in verse
Would feel impertinent, or worse.
Its rhyming couplets always charm
As do its warmth and depth disarm.
For now I live my life in prose,
Trapped in the cells of spreadsheet rows.
To read a novel of this hue
Can somehow make my soul feel new.
Humans exist, and they have minds
And hearts of countless different kinds.
And if you’re longing to explore,
This book has what you seek and more.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 181033313565

Date: 2018-12-12 02:00:45 GMT

Body: “Being a woman in blockchain,” she says, “is like riding a bicycle. Except the bicycle is on fire. And everything is on fire. And you are going to hell.”

Tags: #out of context quotes, #not sj go away

Post ID: 180852497699

Date: 2018-12-06 06:56:05 GMT

Body: To Her Ardent Lover

(original)

Had I but faith, not cause for doubt,
Your boldness, sir, would fain win out.
The fires of our lust would blaze
So hot and bright; your touch, your gaze
Would rend me apart and make me whole;
Would penetrate my willing soul.
The flames would burn ‘til save soft rain
And languid sweetness, naught remained.
And if mortality by chance
Should pass us by with but a glance
We could mine rubies in Lahore
Or stay in bed and fuck some more.
For untold centuries might transpire
And still not dull my keen desire.

But in my heart I always fear
That this must end in pain and tears.
While of two birds of prey you talk,
I feel the rabbit to your hawk.
For now you call my honor quaint
But if I loved without restraint
You’d bore and soon cast me aside.
My dignity and simple pride
May turn to dust when I am dead
But now they keep me warm in bed.

Now, therefore, though my body yearns
And still the earth, relentless, turns,
I shall forbear to bare my heart
Until I trust its counterpart.
Maggots in the grave may lack
Your serious eyes, your sturdy back,
Your care, your force, your intellect.
At least they won’t ignore my texts.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 180740199544

Date: 2018-12-03 03:11:42 GMT

Question: What’s your take on the Pirenne thesis?

Answer: I am flattered by the fact that anyone thinks I know enough history to have a take on the Pirenne thesis but I really don’t. What’s yours?

Post ID: 180648609484

Date: 2018-11-30 10:30:16 GMT

Question: i don't really suggest hatereading my blog, since it's 95% reblogs but i think i have some opinions that will really rile you up.

Answer: oh do share

Post ID: 179872252239

Date: 2018-11-07 22:20:04 GMT

Body: honestly I’m at a point in my life where I want to interrogate a lot of my desires. this doesn’t make all the people who were like “you have to interrogate your desires!!” any less annoying

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 179816955404

Date: 2018-11-06 07:11:03 GMT

Body: becoming increasingly annoyed that people associate me with Trad. I like hoop skirts. but also I want to do math and argue with people and talk like an Aaron Sorkin character. just feeling increasingly divorced from trad aesthetics

still figuring out what my Thing is going to be if it’s not trad but I think that’s okay

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging, #nightblogging

Post ID: 179816487829

Date: 2018-11-06 06:47:39 GMT

Body: For the record, during my CFAR workshop I was kind of unhappy about all the hippie bullshit and since then it’s just hung around in my mind and infiltrated more and more of my thoughts.

My speech patterns have become more NVC-like. I think about relationships in terms of attachment theory. I try to guess people’s enneagram types. I might be into crystal healing.

Not sure if any of this is right or if it’s all dumb but it feels like I’m having a lot of personal growth idk??

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 179410991009

Date: 2018-10-25 07:46:25 GMT

Body:

Utopian
Cousin
Humanist
European
Brillist
Whitelaw
Blacklaw
Mason
Graylaw

Tags: #sorta works?, #too like the lightning tag

Post ID: 179407854824

Date: 2018-10-25 05:06:40 GMT

Question: I have an encyclopedic knowledge of tumblrs to read in order to feel bad. I am like a sommelier of bad tumblrs. What kind of bad tumblr in particular are you looking for?

Answer: Oh man. Some stuff that really does it for me is

communism
being a rationalist-y person who nonetheless is really sarcastic all the time about how dumb rationalists are
being a woman in a happy relationship who writes a lot about how good her romantic life is

But honestly I think these have all gotten a bit old, and I even follow people in these categories who I like and don’t hate at all. So I await your ideas.

Post ID: 179375514299

Date: 2018-10-24 06:40:50 GMT

Body: tumblr has really gone downhill

I’m trying to come up with tumblrs to hateread right now to make myself feel bad and I’m drawing a blank on even a single currently active tumblr I feel worse than lukewarm about

Tags: #this blue website, #I'm accepting submissions (not gonna publish them though)

Post ID: 178990693799

Date: 2018-10-12 21:19:27 GMT

Body:

2357911131719 replied to your post “ugh Columbus Day came and went and I totally forgot I was planning to…”

Have the take anyway?

idk just that while Columbus was a dick and kind of caused a genocide, the existence of America in its current form has probably been good for the world and thus Columbus’s impact on the world seems positive

Tags: #2357911131719

Post ID: 178990533934

Date: 2018-10-12 21:13:13 GMT

Question: Why would you RUIN ours!\

Answer: I’m sorry but people don’t actually throw rocks at things that shine, that’s not a thing

Post ID: 178902498534

Date: 2018-10-10 00:45:21 GMT

Reblogging: discoursedrome

Body:

discoursedrome:

Reality show idea: it’s like the Bachelor except it’s about some big celebrity who’s going to convert to a new religion, and all the contestants are clerics

honored that @automatic-ally tagged me in this

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 178902316409

Date: 2018-10-10 00:38:13 GMT

Body: ugh Columbus Day came and went and I totally forgot I was planning to have a (meta ^ n)-contrarian take that actually Columbus was great

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 178902255254

Date: 2018-10-10 00:35:44 GMT

Body: it’s hard to enjoy Ours the same way when you realize it’s literally the prequel to Dear John

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time, #crypto social conservative blogging, #maybe?

Post ID: 178887543704

Date: 2018-10-09 14:50:40 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/1ef306ad7ee23bb978a61217181ad940/tumblr_inline_pgc6lgOHEe1sfizxi_540.jpg

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty by Mark Manson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn’t really find it to be anything groundbreaking, probably because I’ve spent a lot of time reading dating advice and already distilled the best parts for myself (esp. Andrew Aitken who cites Manson and whose shtick is basically “Mark Manson for women”)

I thought it was basically good though and would recommend it as a dating 101 guide for men. (It’s possible you should read PUA stuff first as this is basically a reaction to PUA. Also possible you shouldn’t, since being exposed to it at all might just be negative for a lot of men.)

(in case it’s confusing: my star ratings are kind of personal and based on my experience. I gave this three stars because I don’t think reading it significantly affected my life in any way, nor was it an intensely enjoyable experience. I’d give it five stars on the scale of “usefulness/correctness relative to other dating advice for men”)

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 178581164729

Date: 2018-09-29 20:50:57 GMT

Body:

Notes on normality and insanity

Before I started dating my first boyfriend, there were lots of outside-view, externally verifiable, socially sanctioned reasons not to date him. When we met, he was 21 and experienced while I was 17 and had never dated anyone; my friends all thought he was bad; he had anger issues; he had a history of stalking and physically abusing exes. I had inside-view reasons why this was okay (it was only once, and he felt reeeeeally bad about it …) and so I dated him anyway.

The actual relationship worked out much better than you’d expect. We dated for less than two months before he broke up with me, and it was basically just fine. (He said some hurtful things to me on occasion, and cheated on me, but I wouldn’t characterize the relationship as abusive.)

The bad part wasn’t the relationship. The bad part was, after it was all over, I had no idea why I had done it. March 2014!me couldn’t identify with November 2013!me at all, and I still can’t.

The feeling of meaning in my life comes from caring about my past and future experiences, and continuing to exist, and the shape of my life as a whole. To the extent that I value these things, it’s because I experience some amount of continuity of identity. So the idea of ever having been November 2013!me, or of being her again, is scary! It’s scary in the exact same way as being dead!

So like, I understand that society is wrong about a lot of things. We should be able to improve on it, and we almost have to improve on it if we want to do anything good ever.

What I don’t understand is, without externally verifiable confirmation that the things you’re doing are reasonable, how do you know that you’re not just insane?

I started this post by talking about relationships, but I think this actually applies to pretty much everything in my life. Everything I do, unless it’s something my family and all my friends and a panel of normal people would agree is reasonable, I worry that it’s fundamentally bad in some mind-altering way that makes it impossible for me to see its badness. I do this with guys I like, companies I work at, books I read, charities I donate to, events I attend, ideas I believe–you get it. Which isn’t to say I don’t do weird or socially disapproved-of things–I do, in literally all those categories!–but they are really, deeply, scary.

Having written this, part of me is thinking, “Okay, cool, you’ve identified the problem. Things don’t have some fundamental property of badness–ideas can be wrong, and charities can be ineffective, and relationships can be unhealthy, but that’s okay. Maximizing EV means risking that you’ll make mistakes and those things will happen sometimes. What you need to do is get your current self and November 2013 self in a room to talk. Have them feel their feelings and package them up and send them back and forth. Get them to empathize with each other and truly understand each other, and maybe you can forge an identity that’s strong enough to withstand mistakes and changing your mind about stuff.”

and another part of me is like “… dude that sounds insane”

Tags: #epistemic status: trying to understand my own psyche, #not necessarily endorsing this as a way of thinking, #relationship abuse cw, #personal

Post ID: 178524211139

Date: 2018-09-27 23:03:43 GMT

Body:

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’ve read Gone with the Wind before. I first read it in middle school, I think; I reread it a few times in high school but I would stop after “as God is my witness I’ll never be hungry again” because I got too upset at the second half. In college I went through a phase of watching the ending to the movie over and over to make myself cry, in a sort of weird cathartic urge.

I had a sudden impulse to reread it the other day and I’m not sure exactly what was going on in my subconscious but man it feels really relevant.

Some thoughts:

I. Maybe I should read more novels. There’s something so spiritually rewarding about seeing someone’s private thoughts laid completely bare–it makes one feel less alone, like the world is filled not with p-zombies but with other entire people.

Scarlett isn’t introspective. She’s like the least emotionally intelligent person on the planet. She avoids thinking about unpleasant things and doesn’t tell hardly anyone what she’s actually thinking, except sometimes Rhett. It feels incredibly lonely to be in her head, walling off huge parts of herself from the world and even from herself. Maybe she should have read more novels.

II. It’s interesting how the novel can treat the flaws of the main characters with such compassionate understanding and then the characters who are black or white trash or Yankees just … nope.

It’s interesting how strong the instinct is to sympathize with the downtrodden people under an occupying military government. I mean, it’s basically the Hunger Games, if you ignore slavery. (Scarlett is Katniss, Gale is Ashley? Think about it.)

III. Scarlett isn’t admirable; she’s shallow, self-absorbed, petty, and cruel. She likes ballgowns and barbecues and beaux. And then shit goes down and she realizes she has something to protect and she does whatever it takes to do that and ugh that is awesome and I have so many feelings about this.

The passage that struck me most on this reread was:

Oh some day! When there was security in her world again, then she would sit back and fold her hands and be a great lady as Ellen had been. She would be helpless and sheltered, as a lady should be, and then everyone would approve of her. Oh, how grand she would be when she had money again! Then she could permit herself to be kind and gentle, as Ellen had been, and thoughtful of other people and of the proprieties, to. She would not be driven by fears, day and night, and life would be a placid, unhurried affair. She would have time to play with her children and listen to their lessons. There would be long warm afternoons when ladies would call and, amid the rustlings of taffeta petticoats and the rhythmic harsh cracklings of palmetto fans, she would serve tea and delicious sandwiches and cakes and leisurely gossip the hours away. And she would be so kind to those who were suffering misfortune, take baskets to the poor and soup and jelly to the sick and “air” those less fortunate in her fine carriage. She would be a lady in the true Southern manner, as her mother had been. And then, everyone would love her as they had loved Ellen and they would say how unselfish she was and call her “Lady Bountiful.”

Her pleasure in these thoughts of the future was undimmed by any realization that she had no real desire to be unselfish or charitable or kind. All she wanted was the reputation for possessing these qualities. But the meshes of her brain were too wide, too coarse, to filter such small differences. It was enough that some day, when she had money, everyone would approve of her.

Some day! But not now. Not now, in spite of what anyone might say of her. Now, there was no time to be a great lady.

IV. When I was younger, I remember feeling much more frustrated at Scarlett. I was mad that she was a neglectful mother and now I’m like “well, she has lots of responsibilities, kids are a lot of work, idk.” I was upset at her for using convict labor; now I’m like “sure, tradeoffs, running a business is hard, it’s not any worse than slavery.” I couldn’t wait for her to get over Ashley already and now I’m like “sure why not have a ten-year-long emotional affair with Ashley Wilkes, seems fun.” I’m not sure if this says good or bad things about me.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 178522804989

Date: 2018-09-27 22:06:46 GMT

Body: Someone asked on the CFAR mailing list about how to choose where to send their child to school and it turned into a discussion on the effect sizes of different pedagogical interventions and like … I feel like all of this is just rounding error and the only things that actually matter are 1) how smart are the other students and 2) how smart are the teachers. Thinking about interventions might be helpful at a policy level but you should really really just send your smart kid to where the other smart kids are.

Tags: #luckily I happen to know where the smart kids go to preschool in his town in France, #so I just told him to send his kid there, #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 178390607529

Date: 2018-09-23 20:56:22 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Question: I wrote a public defense of Brent, please rot13 cnfgrova qbg pbz fynfu jjkSnUKf

Answer: I’m not taking the time to respond to all of this but basically think I disagree with these sentiments:

btw there’s a fine line between “pressuring” women into sex and “taking the lead” in the way that most women want

theunitofcaring:
I promised a previous anon I would publish public defenses of Brent which people wrote, so I’m going to do that. (The link is here.)
My opinions are beneath the cut.

Keep reading
I think I once went on a date with one of these warning writers and got rejected for making the opposite mistake Brent made (i.e. I was rejected for being insufficiently dominant instead of being too dominant). And honestly I’m still kinda sore about this. Being dominant is something that I’m into, but I’m perpetually terrified of being called out in the way Brent is being called out here and therefore try to err consistently to the other side; it’s quite frustrating to keep getting rejected (due to insufficient dominance) in a way that prevents me from gaining the relationship experience I need to learn to be dominant in an acceptable way!

I’ve seen many people express similar things (including Brent!) and basically I think that being “dominant in the way women want” or w/e is uh, not orthogonal, but also not a point on the spectrum between “nice guy” and “abusive asshole.” It is possible to be Alpha and also be extremely considerate of your partners’ desires and autonomy. Doing what Brent did (e.g. using emotional manipulation and threats of self-harm to guilt/coerce partners into doing things they didn’t want to do) is the exact opposite of that.

(though, I understand romance is confusing and it’s hard to understand things without practice. it’s not a crazy mistake for anon to make but I do think it’s wrong)

Tags: #rape cw, #sexual assault cw, #pua cw

Post ID: 178291041895

Date: 2018-09-20 21:00:46 GMT

Body: slowly updating toward “anything my mom would think is creepy is actually just bad”

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 178234223177

Date: 2018-09-19 03:00:28 GMT

Body: the great thing about Gone with the Wind is that it’s disguised as a romance novel but is actually post-apocalyptic scifi

Post ID: 178230894221

Date: 2018-09-19 01:00:36 GMT

Body: What’s the best way to be effectively selfish, if you don’t discount your future self?

I was talking to someone who’s not at all altruistic the other day and it seemed like the actual actions it’s reasonable for us to take aren’t that different. If there’s a 1 bp chance you could live a happy life that lasts for a billion years, that still dominates anything you do to increase your happiness during your natural lifespan. I’d guess there’s only so much you can do to increase your personal chances of living a very long time without affecting anyone else’s (exercise? cryonics? asking random AI researchers to simulate you?). Then it might be reasonable to devote the rest of your resources to reducing existential risk (though depending on your assumptions about the current rate of scientific progress in various fields maybe it’s better to work on life extension or just increasing the rate of progress in AI/brain uploading?)

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 178225860604

Date: 2018-09-18 21:50:28 GMT

Body: Because people keep misunderstanding my aesthetics: they’re not equivalent to “everything should be as fancy as possible, all the time.” That is not how you effectively class signal. If you are confused about class signaling, read (the now outdated but still informative) Stuff White People Like and note how many things don’t actually cost a lot of money (or even are cheap compared to similar options, like thrift stores and backpacking through Europe).

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 177917998339

Date: 2018-09-09 22:03:08 GMT

Question: I didn’t see you! Terrible!

Answer: Yeah I slept through it sorry :(

Post ID: 177818541904

Date: 2018-09-07 01:00:40 GMT

Body:

this forum post is so relevant to my interests though

Tags: #follow worldoptimization for the intersection of finance and redpill thought, #pua cw, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 177792951644

Date: 2018-09-06 06:19:45 GMT

Question: Are you going to be at the Berkeley ssc meetup?

Answer: I’ll probably stop by unless something comes up! Pls say hi (I look like my avatar, but usually facing forward)

Post ID: 177435934944

Date: 2018-08-27 04:25:52 GMT

Body: the instinct to try to automate or speed up menial tasks is like, a thing they don’t teach you in school (I only learned it when I joined the workforce and someone actually had an economic interest in me not wasting tons of time) and it is extremely useful

(I was just helping my friend who is a teacher enter things in a gradebook, which is a spreadsheet that she manually color codes by coloring every cell with a 3 green, every cell with a 2 yellow, etc. I taught her about conditional formatting and it was great and like, how many total human hours are wasted on things like this)

Post ID: 177435364519

Date: 2018-08-27 04:05:54 GMT

Reblogging: kaumnyakte

Body:

worldoptimization:
ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:
worldoptimization:
I kinda want my new tumblr aesthetic to be “obscure rationalist woo” but every time I try this I get nice people responding to my posts with “what does this mean? can you give an example?” and I feel bad. how do people deal with this
that just means you aren’t being obscure enough
true. once I achieve enlightenment I will delete my tumblr and make a new one where I blog in reconstructed proto-languages and have four followers
mélōys púHlōys me h₃néyds gʰí sokʷóys kʷetwŕ̥dḱomth₁oḱtōw mébʰi h₁sénti ḱunéh₁ h₃yébʰoyth₂e téḱnomkʷe ḱuh₁yéh₁s

sokʷóys kʷetwŕ̥dḱomth₁oḱtōw? meĝos

Tags: #I ... really don't speak PIE, #linguistics

Post ID: 177402612909

Date: 2018-08-26 07:02:25 GMT

Reblogging: kaumnyakte

Body:

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

worldoptimization:
I kinda want my new tumblr aesthetic to be “obscure rationalist woo” but every time I try this I get nice people responding to my posts with “what does this mean? can you give an example?” and I feel bad. how do people deal with this
that just means you aren’t being obscure enough

true. once I achieve enlightenment I will delete my tumblr and make a new one where I blog in reconstructed proto-languages and have four followers

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 177394588989

Date: 2018-08-26 01:42:06 GMT

Body: I kinda want my new tumblr aesthetic to be “obscure rationalist woo” but every time I try this I get nice people responding to my posts with “what does this mean? can you give an example?” and I feel bad. how do people deal with this

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 177183136781

Date: 2018-08-20 01:00:34 GMT

Body: my favorite thing about tumblr is the fine line between reactionary social thought and porn blogs

I’m tempted to make a porn blog that only reblogs St. Augustine quotes from wrathofgnon or something

Tags: #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 177094580914

Date: 2018-08-17 14:13:40 GMT

Body: I’ve noticed a lot of changes in myself/my desires/my aesthetics over the past month or so. Likely they’re just weird temporary/circumstantial things, but somehow they feel significant enough that it’s started to bother me when e.g. people make incorrect assumptions based on the “old me.” So here’s the update.

I’m less aesthetically attracted to femininity and more to masculinity.
I’m less hedonistic and more masochistic. I get a lot of pleasure from doing things that are hard, unpleasant, physically taxing, or emotionally painful.
I feel more strongly about being agenty. I’m averse to feelings of helplessness.

I’ve started watching competence porn and listening to a weird mixture of Hamilton, filk, and Catholic music. I spent some time the other day googling medieval nuns, just because.

Post ID: 176816111814

Date: 2018-08-09 20:12:32 GMT

Question: Lmao I spent my Sunday in room reading Aquinas. I guess I inadvertently avoided a riot!

Answer: shoutout to my followers for keeping it trad in the face of my descent into West Coast degeneracy

Post ID: 176762662489

Date: 2018-08-08 07:56:08 GMT

Question: I live in berkeley too, did the antifa thing happen recently? it seems I'm out of the loop

Answer: yeah this was on Sunday! you should go outside (she says hypocritically)

Post ID: 176730243844

Date: 2018-08-07 11:08:09 GMT

Reblogging: akkkkaall1ttyynnn

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 176711763354

Date: 2018-08-06 22:51:57 GMT

Reblogging: nuclearspaceheater

Body:

nuclearspaceheater:

worldoptimization:
I can’t remember any of the details, but #oathgate vaguely reminded me of some rat controversy a while ago about people not being reliable, i.e. if someone said they would do a thing there was less than 100% probability they would do it?
Anyway, I think promises of the form “I will absolutely 100% do X, no matter what” are not very useful, hence the general preference for normal contracts over smart contracts, the paucity of Unbreakable Vows in the wizarding world, etc. When I say “I will do X” I generally mean something like “I will try hard to do X in situations where a reasonable person would think that I should, conditional on my having promised to do X.”
As I recall, that was about people failing to meet a “reasonable person” level of reliability, and not considering it fair to hold them to that standard.

Oh okay, maybe you’re right. I am generally in favor of people meeting a “reasonable person” standard of reliability, for the record.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 176710410854

Date: 2018-08-06 22:08:35 GMT

Body: tbh when I decided to move to Berkeley I didn’t even consider “sometimes can’t leave my building because antifa are throwing explosives at cops right outside my door” as a factor

Tags: #bay area gothic

Post ID: 176710393869

Date: 2018-08-06 22:08:01 GMT

Body: I can’t remember any of the details, but #oathgate vaguely reminded me of some rat controversy a while ago about people not being reliable, i.e. if someone said they would do a thing there was less than 100% probability they would do it?

Anyway, I think promises of the form “I will absolutely 100% do X, no matter what” are not very useful, hence the general preference for normal contracts over smart contracts, the paucity of Unbreakable Vows in the wizarding world, etc. When I say “I will do X” I generally mean something like “I will try hard to do X in situations where a reasonable person would think that I should, conditional on my having promised to do X.”

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 176546460844

Date: 2018-08-02 07:40:34 GMT

Body:

molibdenita replied to your post “I feel like I get a lot of criticism for doing things that aren’t…”

Wait, isn’t that last point a *bad* thing? “Keeping up appearances” / signaling classiness as hard as you can might eat your entire life if you let it, while optimizing for efficiency leaves you with free time / energy / resources to do worthwhile things?

Uh, what do you mean by worthwhile things? I agree that it’s good for my job to be optimized for effectiveness and stuff. But I think a lot of my leisure time should be optimized for what I enjoy, and it so happens that signaling is one of my favorite leisure activities.

Tags: #molibdenita

Post ID: 176503078194

Date: 2018-08-01 02:43:17 GMT

Body: I feel like I get a lot of criticism for doing things that aren’t obviously fun/pleasurable but are considered more high-status by mainstream society or something. Maybe the criticism is fair but maybe these people just differ from me on how much utility they derive from the object level of their life, as opposed to various meta levels?

For most experiences I think I get more enjoyment out of anticipating and reflecting upon them, and using them to signal (even if just to myself) than I do out of the actual experience.

Of course, you could just have different aesthetics/signaling strategies than me, and that’s reasonable. I think a lot of people I know have a sort of contrarian hyper-utilitarian aesthetic. But I feel like there’s legitimately less room for interesting signaling there. If your aesthetic is “drink five bottles of Soylent a day” that’s basically … all you can do? Where do you go from there? Whereas the signaling hierarchies of being “cultured,” “classy,” etc. always have more levels to reach.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 176251316493

Date: 2018-07-25 03:00:39 GMT

Body: is anyone else bothered by Bryan Caplan’s attitude toward causal inference or is it just me

(or if you have justifications for why you think it’s true that’s cool too. what I’ve gotten from The Case Against Education is “quasi-experimental designs are too complex to be trusted and if you just control for everything you can think of that’s probably good enough”)

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 176247845747

Date: 2018-07-25 01:00:48 GMT

Body:

COWEN: Why are there bid-ask spreads at all, and is it possible to get rid of them … if we’re asking, “What could economics teach us that would help us more?” I would think a better theory of bid-ask spreads is one of the big gaps.
BUTERIN: Absolutely.
COWEN: Because even sunshine trading, where you would think the information asymmetry would be away, there’s still a bid-ask spread. It may be lower, but not as much lower as you might have thought.

Why is Tyler Cowen skeptical of bid-ask spreads? I feel like there are a bunch of good reasons they should exist.

For one, adverse selection–as Vitalik says, “if someone is willing to take my offer, then that by itself is evidence that my offer could be mispriced.”

For another, even if, as he mentions, you preannounce your trades and make it clear that you’re an uninformed trader, just the fact that someone wants to buy something makes it worth more, and the fact that someone wants to sell something makes it worth less, because of supply and demand.

For a third thing, if someone wants to sell a share of Apple stock, it doesn’t make sense for me to buy it at the exact fair price without charging anything. I didn’t want to buy a share of Apple when I woke up today, I don’t particularly want it now, and if I buy it I’ll have to hold onto it and eat up capital and the risk of Apple going down until I can get rid of it. (Does Tyler Cowen want to offer a pick’em market for all stocks at all times?)

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 176242643804

Date: 2018-07-24 21:48:40 GMT

Body: in the future robots will outperform us at every high-skilled job but at least they’ll always need humans to do captchas

Tags: #shitpost

Post ID: 175735131399

Date: 2018-07-10 05:31:46 GMT

Body: It has reached the ears of this blog that the material herein printed has caused some confusion over how “woke” the Author is. This is a matter of some concern, as obviously the purpose of this blog is to edify and clarify, rather than obfuscate or mislead readers as to the Author’s most cherished and sincerely held beliefs. The Author thus wishes to clear this up once and for all–having consulted with none but the most sought-after physicians, there can be no remaining doubt in the precise measurement of Twelve. Her dear readers’ pardon and thanks for their continued attention must be begged in equal measure.

Tags: #shitpost

Post ID: 175629864789

Date: 2018-07-07 04:16:25 GMT

Question: re: mental illness contagion--for the most part it seems like unhappy/confused teenagers and people going through temporarily stressful phases might frame this as mental illness more than they would've otherwise, but i doubt that it'd affect actual rates--it'll only fuck up their life enough to be worth Identifying As Mentally Ill for significant periods of time if they're already unstable enough to be susceptible to that, in which case it'd probably have happened anyway (tho mb framed diff)

Answer: I realize this ask is super old and I forgot to reply to it at the time, but see Scott’s recent post

(I don’t know anything about psychiatry, I just have feelings about this because I feel like I started having feelings kind of similar to symptoms of depression, anxiety, OCD, etc. only after going to college and getting on tumblr, and thus being immersed in cultures where those things were common. I’ve been trying to conceptualize my feelings as vague somatic complaints lately and would totally recommend it. (e.g. ”How are you feeling?” “Oh not that great–the idea of food makes me feel nauseous, and I’ve had this weird tightness in my chest all day that makes it hard to breathe.”))

Post ID: 175629422494

Date: 2018-07-07 03:59:37 GMT

Question: your post about social anxiety seems useful.

Answer: aw thanks anon!

Post ID: 175514898029

Date: 2018-07-03 19:21:05 GMT

Body: accomplishments in the past month:

my high school AP stats final project (on college admissions rates by high school) convinced a private school not only to institute an official grade inflation policy, but to retroactively inflate all grades for upperclassmen

I gave an interview for my high school’s student magazine in which I mentioned that colleges do actually care about how many AP classes you take, causing the reporter to freak out over the realization that her guidance counselor has been lying to her for the past three years

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 175450367629

Date: 2018-07-01 22:01:55 GMT

Reblogging: theopjones

Body:

theopjones:

worldoptimization:
hot take: if you think you are an introvert because you find social interaction draining, consider the hypothesis that it is the accompanying anxiety that is draining and if you can get rid of that social interaction is super fun and fulfilling
Maybe. But it’s hard to find social situations that are free-flowing and pressure free enough to not be anxiety-inducing.

Definitely true. But practice/repeated exposure decrease social anxiety over the long term, whereas if you’re just an introvert there’s not really any reason to do lots of social interaction you don’t enjoy.

Post ID: 175450092764

Date: 2018-07-01 21:52:51 GMT

Body: hot take: if you think you are an introvert because you find social interaction draining, consider the hypothesis that it is the accompanying anxiety that is draining and if you can get rid of that social interaction is super fun and fulfilling

Post ID: 175449287874

Date: 2018-07-01 21:25:48 GMT

Body: I have to say it is pretty charming how every time you get into an Uber in Boston the radio is playing NPR

Tags: #this doesn't happen anywhere else?? only boston

Post ID: 174958192109

Date: 2018-06-16 23:32:28 GMT

Reblogging: desinvulture

Body:

another-normal-anomaly:
evolution-is-just-a-theorem:
evolution-is-just-a-theorem:
Friendly reminder that the Barber Pole Model of Fashion is utterly wrong. It makes sense, and I can understand why people might imagine that fashion works this way. However clothing is expensive and the lower classes can’t actually emulate the upper classes.
(Quick poll: do you own $800 shoes? Because that’s how a lower bound on how expensive your shoes need to be to pass as upper class).
Actually this is kind of a black mark on the community’s epistemic record. AFAICT everyone just assumed the model was correct and never bothered to check that fashion actually works that way?
Non-price elements of fashion can be emulated by lower classes. Knockoff handbags that have all the properties of expensive designer handbags except price and being made by a particular company are a thing. More abstractly, cuts, colors, degrees of ornateness, things like a tendency to carry a purse vs. a backpack, etc. can all be emulated. Remember that the goal isn’t to pass My Fair Lady-style, but to look slightly more sophisticated to the members of your actual class.
OP, nobody thinks the barber pole model means that working-class people wear $800 designer shoes; as @another-normal-anomaly said, it’s about “looks”, styles, etc (in particular any factors that don’t depend on expensive materials or trademarked brand names); not about exact passing.
You don’t have to use individual products as your unit of analysis, and in fact in this case you shouldn’t, because doing so would lead to extremely stupid conclusions, as you note. The black mark is on the one who would jump to condemning the whole community without first considering whether maybe the thing people believe isn’t actually the single most slavishly literal interpretation of the model.

Examples that I can think of of things following the barber pole model:

The upper classes wore silk stockings. People invented nylon stockings for the lower classes to wear that looked similar. Stockings fell out of fashion.

The upper classes had bags with designer logos. The lower classes realized that you can make knockoff bags with designer logos. Logos fell out of fashion among the upper classes and came to be seen as tacky. According to this article they are now trendy again, idk.

(I am not a fashion historian and don’t know if these stories are exactly accurate, but I’m pretty sure just the existence of nylon stockings/knockoff bags shows that it is possible for lower classes to emulate upper-class fashion? As long as not everyone can tell the difference between cheap and expensive clothes with perfect accuracy this still works.)

Post ID: 174867926739

Date: 2018-06-14 00:38:28 GMT

Question: That is super interesting because I find that performative enthusiasm to be one of the most exhausting things about social interaction, and I feel most comfortable about friends where performative enthusiasm is not required. (I think this is actually a reason that I mostly have guy friends, despite being a girl.) Anyway it's really fascinating to hear what it's like for people with the opposite preference! Your explanation makes sense and helps me understand the phenomenon.

Answer: Interesting! I agree with the genderedness–I think this is a reason I prefer hanging out with girls to guys.

Post ID: 174839547454

Date: 2018-06-13 02:47:30 GMT

Body: There are some friends for whom, when I’m with them, we talk a lot about what a good time we’re having.

The day before we see each other, we’ll text “can’t wait to see you tomorrow!! :D :D <3″ We greet each other with “omg, it’s so good to see you!” We get somewhere and it’s “wow, this cafe is so charming!” “I can’t believe how beautiful the weather is today!” When there’s a lull in the conversation, one of us will end it with “I’m so happy I have you to talk about things like this with.”

When I think about this too hard, it seems kind of weird and fake. If we’re really having a good time, why do we need to keep reassuring ourselves/each other of that?

But actually, I think I do honestly have more fun with friends when we do this.

Interactions tend to get into positive feedback loops; if the person I’m talking to is having a good time, and expressing that, I will be more engaged in the interaction, and have a better time, and feel inspired to express my enjoyment, and so on. Being somewhat artificially effusive at times can actually just get you into the good equilibrium.

I have other friends whose communication style is much more “so, did you have a good evening?” “well, it wasn’t clearly better than the counterfactual thing I would have been doing.” and I appreciate the commitment to truth-seeking but it really just does not work as well for me

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 174824309914

Date: 2018-06-12 17:00:28 GMT

Body: I’m used to thinking of opposition to smoking in media as kind of dumb, but a month ago I started listening obsessively to all of Kacey Musgraves’ oeuvre, and last week I told someone I was thinking maybe I should start doing nicotine, and it took until today when I was listening to Blowin’ Smoke to make the connection.

(I might be unusually susceptible to this, since I really like the rituals/aesthetics surrounding drug use. I also particularly enjoy songs about alcohol.)

Tags: #alcohol cw, #drugs cw, #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 174701035401

Date: 2018-06-08 20:00:40 GMT

Body: vaguely related to the UBI discourse: “funemployment” seems to be a(n increasingly?) popular thing (i.e. 20something programmers taking several months off between jobs to travel/relax/whatever)

so, maybe people are happy to take more free time and less money when it doesn’t trade off against career capital/status

Post ID: 174422733010

Date: 2018-05-31 03:00:37 GMT

Body: I made a sideblog at @worldoptimization-lifeadvice.

It’s experimental and I may or may not continue to update it, I just thought it might be nice to have somewhere to put more low-effort thoughts about super mundane/non-intellectual topics. It’s framed as life advice to my younger self, sort of (and thus obviously may be counterproductive advice for other people to hear).

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 174419573821

Date: 2018-05-31 01:00:45 GMT

Body: I used to think that I was One of Those Girls Who is Never Catcalled. I accepted it as my lot in life and sort of made it part of my identity.

And then I moved to Berkeley and … now I get attention/compliments from strangers all the time?

Like, I wouldn’t have predicted a geographical difference in that direction, and even if there is a geographical difference I can’t imagine it could be this stark?

I’m almost tempted to throw up my hands and attribute it to some kind of voodoo magic analogous to “radiant happiness” (FW), “producing serotonin” (JBP), etc.

Tags: #catcalling cw, #bay area gothic

Post ID: 174390295820

Date: 2018-05-30 03:00:23 GMT

Body: I used to think that the main choice you made was between good and evil, and choosing evil was tempting but–it was signposted. It was evil. There were skulls.

Now I think maybe the real choice, the hard choice, is between madness and reason. Red pill and blue pill. Faerie kingdoms and the realms of men.

And every kernel of understanding you gain is a point closer to

Hiiiii, future mes! So I decided I’d be the me who found out what would happen if she just raised ERO as high as she could. And, oh my god, I can’t tell you anything because you are so not ready to hear it, but take it from me, you were all worried about nothing. This is great. I don’t have a name any more though.

and the understanding and the madness aren’t just related they’re two sides of the same coin

Magic shall be written upon the sky by the rain but they shall not be able to read it;
Magic shall be written on the faces of the stony hills but their minds shall not be able to contain it;
In winter the barren trees shall be a black writing but they shall not understand it.

Tags: #epistemic status: not serious; meant to convey a feeling, #r a t i o n a l i t y, #bay area gothic

Post ID: 174387125448

Date: 2018-05-30 01:00:32 GMT

Body: I moved to New York expecting my life to be a cross between Gossip Girl and Sex and the City and that basically didn’t pan out

I moved to California expecting my life to be a cross between Silicon Valley and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and let me tell you that has actually been quite accurate

Tags: #bay area gothic

Post ID: 173788196334

Date: 2018-05-11 04:38:44 GMT

Reblogging: slatestarscratchpad

Body:

Has there been a lot of research or speculation about if transgenderism shares the same roots as normal gendered behavior?
Consider your typical cisgender man. He’s going to do some typically masculine things, and if somebody calls him a girl, he’s going to take that as an insult and maybe punch them. If you force him to behave in girlish ways, he’s going to complain about being emasculated, and if you force him to be really girlish, like wear a dress and put ribbons in his hair or something, he’s going to freak out.
Now consider your typical transgender man. He’s also going to do some typically masculine things, and if somebody calls him a girl, he’s going to take that as an insult and maybe punch them. If you force him to behave in girlish ways, he’s going to complain about transphobia or something, and if you force him to be really girlish - again, he’s going to freak out.
Most people I hear talk about this act like these are two totally different things, where the first guy has sexist fragile toxic masculinity, and the second guy has some sort of deep commitment to having their identity respected. But the other possibility is just that the brain has some set point about how your gender must be perceived, and tries really hard to maintain that set point, and transgender people just have a set point not matching their birth gender - and so a much harder time maintaining the set point than everyone else.
Plausibly some people might have really extreme set points. Like if the normal range is from 100% masculine to 100% feminine, some (cis) men might be fixed at 200% masculine, and get really upset if anyone perceives them as less than maximally super manly. I’ve been thinking about this in the context of things like muscle dysmorphia, an anorexia-like condition where very muscular men constantly freak out that their muscles are too small, and keep weightlifting until they’re freakishly huge.
Is this a standard way of thinking about these things, or does someone have a consideration for why it might not be true?

I was thinking the other day about how I experience something that feels a lot like what trans people talk about when they talk about social dysphoria.

(obviously the big difference here is that my gender is respected way more than trans people’s, so this is not unpleasant for me and in fact barely rises to the level of consciously noticing it)

It mostly comes up when I’m in groups of all or mostly men, and I feel like I’m being treated the same as everyone else, and I feel this need to like, remind people of my gender? I might respond by wearing dresses and makeup, or baking cookies for everyone, or talking about what guys I think are hot, or suggesting we all compare digit ratios.

It’s quite responsive to what seems like too-simple solutions, like how half the time I mention something that’s a statistical correlate of my gender around @profhedonium he responds with “well, you’re a woman. so.”

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 173760139874

Date: 2018-05-10 07:30:29 GMT

Reblogging: street-peddler

Body:

street-peddler:

worldoptimization:
I don’t actually read Overcoming Bias regularly so I don’t think I’m great at interpreting Robin Hanson/discerning what level of trolling he means any particular thing at …
but is the “everything is about signaling” guy really arguing that good writing should be free of signals and just state facts/make logical arguments? I’m confused
I also am not a dedicated reader of Robin Hanson, but my basic understanding is that he thinks everything is about signalling, and that this is bad and that everything should instead be about actually important, non-signalling things.
So him arguing that good writing should be free of signals and just state facts + make logical arguments is exactly what I would expect.

@high-priestess-of-elua

Isn’t it just the difference between descriptive and prescriptive claims? Hanson thinks that everything is full of signalling, but it (or at least good writing) *shouldn’t* be.

Makes sense. I guess “everything is about signaling, therefore try to be really good at it” just seemed like the obvious conclusion to me.

(I guess the blog is called Overcoming Bias, not Pointing Out Bias and Throwing Up Our Hands)

But okay, if this is a sincere argument, then

you can’t just avoid signaling by refusing to pad your statements with explicit value affirmations and presenting logical arguments! everything you say is signaling something!
to conclude from “people say in a twitter poll that they don’t need a writer to affirm their shared values in order to engage with them” anything besides “people [who read Robin Hanson’s twitter] want to signal that they are rational” seems like giving a bit too much credit to people’s honesty and self-awareness here
engagement is a limited resource. developing memetic immune reactions to things is not inherently bad. developing signaling mechanisms to subvert these reactions is the rational response.
~~occasionally mentioning that you think rape is bad is really not that costly~~

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #dark arts cw, #rape cw

Post ID: 173757538244

Date: 2018-05-10 05:10:45 GMT

Body: I don’t actually read Overcoming Bias regularly so I don’t think I’m great at interpreting Robin Hanson/discerning what level of trolling he means any particular thing at …

but is the “everything is about signaling” guy really arguing that good writing should be free of signals and just state facts/make logical arguments? I’m confused

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 173692675124

Date: 2018-05-08 04:06:25 GMT

Body:

[This character] is doomed to be eternally tortured by an artificial intelligence, but she’s also kind of like Marie Antoinette

me irl

Tags: #out of context quotes, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 173692549564

Date: 2018-05-08 04:01:40 GMT

Reblogging: desinvulture

Body:

@thesublemon @cptsdcarlosdevil @nostalgebraist @veronicastraszh @davidsevera @birdblogwhichisforbirds

Really not happy with how much information I could now provide you with about this “Met Gala”. Social media is dangerously close to losing its last redeeming quality – “not being bad in the specific way that the New York Times style section is bad”.

Sunday Styles coverage of the Met Gala is literally the only reason to read the New York Times. fight me

(source: spent Sunday eating gougeres, reading the Times’ coverage of the leadup to the Met Gala, and texting my friend in New York to remind her the exhibition opens this week)

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 173658392868

Date: 2018-05-07 03:00:21 GMT

Body: People keep asking you to have dinner. You never know if you’re on a job interview, or a career advice session, or a date, or just hanging out as friends. Only rarely do you ever find out.

People keep asking you to Skype. You forgot your Skype password years ago and have never bothered to recover it. You ask if you can meet in person instead. One day in a moment of desperation you borrow a work laptop and find your coworker still logged into Skype. You hope he doesn’t notice. You wonder how long you can keep this up.

You are applying to Open Phil. Your roommate is applying to Open Phil. Your boss’s ex-wife’s second cousin is applying to Open Phil. At least 60% of your metamours are applying to Open Phil. You feel like you have always been applying to Open Phil. You feel like you will always be applying to Open Phil.

People are always in the places you least expect them. When asked they give eerily similar reasons. “Why are you in Berkeley?” “My house was too crowded.” “Why are you in Santa Cruz?” “My house was too loud.” “Why are you in my office? You don’t even work here.” “My house has too many naked people.” You wonder what mysterious hold these houses have over their inhabitants.

Everyone around you thinks that the end of the world is imminent. “Unless Paul’s right, of course.” You wonder who this Paul is. You pray he’s right.

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 173655151187

Date: 2018-05-07 01:00:28 GMT

Body: dating tip: signal your chastity to prospective suitors by making awkward jokes about being a volcel

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 173649429144

Date: 2018-05-06 21:28:11 GMT

Question: You can't say "dark pools" and then not explain it.

Answer: They’re not actually as exciting/creepy as they sound, sorry. Exchanges are “lit”, meaning that they display quotes–if you are thinking of buying Apple stock on Nasdaq, they will tell you that you can buy 100 shares at $200.01, 200 more shares at $200.02, etc. Dark pools are like exchanges but not lit–you can send an order to buy AAPL for $200.01, but you won’t know ahead of time if anyone wants to sell to you there or not.

Theoretically, they’re a place where large institutional traders can trade with each other without tipping off high-frequency traders to their orders. In reality, they’re just like a normal exchange where large institutional traders trade with high-frequency traders, except quotes are hidden.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 173646805834

Date: 2018-05-06 19:59:32 GMT

Reblogging: femmenietzsche

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 173369897768

Date: 2018-04-28 01:00:26 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/a1966092010b621026cfb2644a16f2eb/tumblr_inline_p7rn1g6OZk1sfizxi_540.jpg

Golden Hill by Francis Spufford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gosh, this book was just delightful to read. Every sentence was just [gesticulates excitedly].

This was not at all intentional but I ended up reading it at the same time as Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money and I highly recommend the synergies if you have ever wanted to walk around all day with your head filled with money and trust and distributed ledgers.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 173342721098

Date: 2018-04-27 03:00:44 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/62270c09bfb3dbe32b100e06838a1008/tumblr_inline_p7rn1g4qT21sfizxi_540.jpg

Beyond the Breakup: Understanding Your Ex-Boyfriend from The Male Perspective by Andrew Aitken
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Here are some reasons not to read this book:
* It makes a lot of broad generalizations about gender. If you are allergic to that this is not the book for you. If you are relatively gender nonconforming, said generalizations will likely not apply and so this is probably not the book for you. In particular, if you are not a straight, monogamous woman looking for a committed relationship this is probably not the book for you.
* It contains very little in the way of scientific evidence. If you don’t want to read one random guy’s thoughts on relationships and absorb them through the epistemic filter that that implies, this is probably not the book for you.

All that said, I found myself nodding furiously and highlighting lots of passages, so you know, take from that what you will.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 173339753521

Date: 2018-04-27 01:00:51 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/f38478db33ccbe48044e397af7905418/tumblr_inline_p7rn1grE9I1sfizxi_540.jpg

Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck by Eliezer Yudkowsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I ended up liking this book a lot, and more than I was expecting at first.

The first three chapters didn’t really say anything I don’t already believe and hadn’t already thought about a reasonable amount, but they were a clear and entertaining presentation of the material. The last four chapters were basically a thoughtful examination of why people hate Eliezer and why he thinks that those people are wrong. I’m not sure if I agree with everything in them–I think that I think it’s harder to choose between disagreeing experts in fields in which you are not expert than he thinks it is. (I agree that if you can just try, and make bets, and see if you’re right, and update, that’s good. I think there are a lot of cases where it’s just hard to do this.) But I think being skeptical of reasoning motivated by status-regulating emotions is an important and good thing (for me personally, at least) to do.

If you like Eliezer, you’ve probably read this book already. If you hate Eliezer, I think you should read this book, and if you still hate him at the end then you can give up. If you don’t know who Eliezer is, probably don’t read this book and read Slate Star Codex instead.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 173311666257

Date: 2018-04-26 03:00:37 GMT

Body:

Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure by Amy Kaufman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I learned plenty of interesting tidbits that I promptly regurgitated to a friend later that day. Like did you know that Des was living paycheck-to-paycheck while on the Bachelor and had to ask producers to pay her rent? Or that Sean, having last-minute doubts, barged into Catherine’s room while she was wearing teeth whitening strips the night before the proposal to ask her if she would accept a life centered around Christ?

But I think it ultimately failed to deliver on its implicit promise–explaining just, why? Why do we all watch it and why can’t we stop? Why does such an ordinary and, honestly, boring show seem to encapsulate everything that matters in 2018 America?

If you know of a book that answers that, let me know.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads

Post ID: 173308529365

Date: 2018-04-26 01:00:45 GMT

Body:

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/d5043f0195256b34df0a30ac249432f4/tumblr_inline_p7rn1ghzFm1sfizxi_540.jpg

Fascinating Womanhood by Helen B. Andelin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Not many positive things to say about this book.

For one, I picked it up kind of expecting it to be about femininity in general. It turned out to be more of a marriage advice book, which is fine, but not really relevant to me. I was more interested in femininity in relation to family, friends, etc.

For another, I felt like the tone of the book just made the ideas seem unappealing, and in some cases, had the opposite of the intended effect. Like, being a housewife sounds pretty fun in a lot of ways. I enjoy cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. I find domestic and caring tasks pretty fulfilling. If you wrote a book that was like “hey here’s a cool hip subversive idea … have you ever thought about … being a housewife?” I would be all over it. “You should feel bad for having a job” … not so much. Maybe this is just a fact about my psychology.

But I think my main objection is really that … okay, this is a marriage advice book that is anti-divorce and doesn’t really say anything about the kind of crucial step of picking a husband. So it ends up coming off as a collection of cheat codes, accompanied by testimonials from women along the lines of “my husband was unemployed/alcoholic/abusive/just kind of a dick, and I tried these cheat codes, and now he is super nice and randomly buys me jewelry!” And like I guess it’s interesting to know that if I find some random loser on the street and promise to never question his judgment and obey him in all things, he will be really nice to me and always remember my birthday. But I don’t actually feel any motivation to do that.

Here are some anecdotes from this book, just because they’re fun.

- A woman wanted her husband to join her religion, so she invited some missionaries over for dinner. This caused her husband to become so upset that he went to the bathroom, climbed out the window, and disappeared for three days (??). She promised to never mention religion again. This led him to secretly convert to said religion and surprise his wife by showing up to church one day (?).

- A woman was married to a man who smoked, which she insisted she do outside to avoid exposing her to secondhand smoke. After learning from FW that she should accept him as he is, she apologized and asked forgiveness. Her husband told her that he loved her for the first time in two years (??).

- A woman was married to a man who spent all the money he earned on himself and always said he wanted nothing left over for her when he died (??). After she started following the principles of FW, he paid off their mortgage and started saving money for her.

- A woman’s husband continually made comments to his bachelor friends about how marriage was a trap and they should avoid it. This made her upset, so she invoked the FW principle of “childlike anger,” stomping her foot and yelling at him. He apologized to her (his first apology in eight years of marriage(?)) and remembered her birthday for the first time a couple months later (?), even getting her a card. He is now a model husband, including staying by her side during an emergency C-section despite not being able to stand sickness.

Anyway, you get the point. There is a steelman version of this book about, like, sexual dimorphism and the role that power differentials play in many people’s psychology and the ways that social changes over the past several decades have fucked with that and the value of introspecting about one’s preferences w.r.t. all this. But I think to most smart women in 2018, the idea that you should reset the power balance in your relationship by unilaterally giving up your power is not going to seem that appealing.

View all my reviews

Tags: #goodreads, #gonna try crossposting my goodreads reviews here maybe?, #expect potential differences given the different audiences I guess, #i.e. normies can and do read my goodreads, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 173272615864

Date: 2018-04-24 22:34:14 GMT

Reblogging: samueldays

Body:

samueldays:

rendakuenthusiast:
worldoptimization:
I feel like there are a bunch of people from whom, given their views on immigration, I’d expect to see more hand-wringing about how the slave trade was the worst mistake in American history
I’ve seen exactly this take from right-wing anti-immigrationists. Also “Canada is what the US would’ve been without slavery” in the context of implying that Canada is superior to the US.
A phrase you can search for to find a lot of this is “should have picked our own cotton”, optionally with a ‘fucking’ or ‘damn’ or other intensifier in there.

TIL

Tags: #racism cw

Post ID: 173266751699

Date: 2018-04-24 18:57:32 GMT

Question: I've held that slavery position for years, but for obvious reasons don't advertise it. I think the trouble is that the hardcore racists identify too much with the South to want to undermine the hill it died on.

Answer: datapoint!

Post ID: 173246847340

Date: 2018-04-24 03:00:15 GMT

Body: I feel like there are a bunch of people from whom, given their views on immigration, I’d expect to see more hand-wringing about how the slave trade was the worst mistake in American history

Tags: #I don't mean this as a gotcha, #it just occurred to me that I can't recall instances of this Take, #racism cw

Post ID: 173243474287

Date: 2018-04-24 01:00:24 GMT

Body: When I was younger I used to think that not having enough friends was pretty much the most embarrassing thing in the world and meant that you were an irredeemable loser.

These days I feel like half the time I have a long conversation with someone we end up talking about how we both wish we had more friends. (And I’m not even the one to bring it up most of the time.)

So like

feeling like the number and quality of your friendships is in part due to circumstance and luck and is in part due to skills you can improve on, rather than feeling like it’s a measure of your inherent worth as a person, is great
the fact that so many post-college young adults have few friends seems like … a problem idk

Tags: #personal, #I'm actually feeling pretty good about the number/quality of my friendships rn, #which is probably why I wasn't too embarrassed to make this post

Post ID: 173213338604

Date: 2018-04-23 03:15:41 GMT

Reblogging: athrelon

Body:

athrelon:

When applying to residencies, there’s a thing called the “couples match,” where you and your spouse/paramour/best buddy can set it up so as to guarantee that you’ll end up in the same city, at the risk of getting into a slightly less prestigious program in their chosen specialties. As it turned out, about half of the couples in my senior year of medical school broke up rather than enter into this match, an especially mind-boggling fact because the gain from breaking up was so small. After all, people graduating from a residency at no-name hospitals can get private practice jobs like anyone else. Going to a prestigious program only makes a difference to the small minority of people looking to practice in academic institutions.
Sidestepping the moral question on abortion for the moment, I think it’s a reasonable inference that the sexual marketplace among young professionals, too, would collapse without easy abortion available as a backstop. Careerism is too brittle and risk averse, and birth control in practice is too fallible, for the kind of risk aversion that young professionals maintain. To embrace the risk of having a kid and getting your zero-slack professional life derailed is a radically countercultural move - as countercultural as eating vegan, observing the Sabbath, or, apparently, keeping your girlfriend when a slightly more prestigious residency is on the line.
If there was no recourse for accidentally “catching parenthood,” the white collar mating marketplace would be fundamentally upended. In the best case, replaced by something else, in the worst case, replaced by nothing. This is probably not irrelevant to the current stalemate on the Abortion Question.

1) I would generally interpret people breaking up in senior year of medical school not to mean that they value the small gain in career prestige over their relationship, but that “doing the match together” is a signal of commitment that one or both parties were not willing to make. Maybe I’m wrong.

2) If you have a contraceptive implant, your probability of pregnancy is 5 basis points per year. (According to the CDC, I haven’t dug into the literature or anything.) That’s like, pretty unlikely. (That makes an implant more effective than abstinence alone given that rape is a thing, according to the extremely back-of-the-envelope calculation I just did.) If I were listing the top 100 most likely things that might derail my career, I doubt that would make the list. I literally had a discussion with my coworkers about the probability of an earthquake destroying our office two days ago–I spend a lot of time thinking about tail risks–and even I don’t think that’s worth worrying about. (And not to get into sex ed, but if 5 bps does worry you there are lots of great methods you can combine with hormonal birth control.)

Obviously, most women don’t use the maximally effective contraception. But if we’re positing that these ambitious professional women are low-time-preference enough to be driven to celibacy for the sake of their careers, you’d think they’d at least consider some other options first.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging, #rape cw, #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 173172448399

Date: 2018-04-21 23:04:10 GMT

Body: tfw you get locked out of your office and try to nonsuspiciously follow the next guy who walks into the building, only to realize

he is Nate Soares and
you need your key card to get off on the correct floor

so you awkwardly ride the elevator all the way to his floor while resisting the urge to reassure him that you are not in fact the agent of a UFAI trying very incompetently to break into MIRI

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #personal

Post ID: 173120293374

Date: 2018-04-20 06:52:23 GMT

Body:

spiralingintocontrol replied to your post: ahhhhhh great point –Matt Levine, to me

WHAT

ime Matt Levine is very gracious if you email him with random funny links, incredibly pedantic criticisms of his column, etc! I would recommend it to everyone

Tags: #spiralingintocontrol, #matt levine is my internet boyfriend

Post ID: 173114837442

Date: 2018-04-20 03:00:34 GMT

Body: there is this thing I keep encountering where like … rationalists value being Well Calibrated which is great, but it turns out even in a group that values appropriate levels of confidence sounding confident is the best way to be listened to and get status

me, yesterday: [in an assertive tone] oh that definitely might not be true

guy: … that is such a rationalist thing to say

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 173111703361

Date: 2018-04-20 01:00:42 GMT

Question: yes, MPC = My Posting Career = one of presumably many right-aligned spinoffs of Something Awful. they seemed like they were developing a competing political framework from the one I wanted to advance at the time, so I kept an eye on them, but they didn't write much up and devolved into shrieking about da jooz, which seems to be where weird rightist factions go to undergo brain death but keep shambling around comatose for decades

Answer:

(the search term for MPCism is “SCALE”, which doesn’t actually stand for “jeffersonian, but also ethnonationalist with primitivist sympathies” but, you know,)

Post ID: 173085210404

Date: 2018-04-19 04:37:17 GMT

Body:

ahhhhhh great point

–Matt Levine, to me

Tags: #matt levine is my internet boyfriend

Post ID: 172647604274

Date: 2018-04-06 05:35:59 GMT

Body: I’m not going to answer my latest anon ask, but PSA: if you want to post nasty things about my mutuals, feel free to do so on your own tumblr with your username attached, because I’m not really interested in seeing it in my askbox.

Tags: #it's not that hard to just, #not send people anon hate!!!, #I do it every day, #this blue website

Post ID: 172610501119

Date: 2018-04-05 03:17:21 GMT

Question: Why is monogamy so important to you, even when you're surrounded by people who aren't monogamous?

Answer: I’m not as good at this as @lambdaphagy, so let’s just imagine I replied with something cryptic hinting at references to history and evolutionary psychology and ultimately implying a profound connection between the problems facing our civilization and your asking this question in the first place.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 172546244894

Date: 2018-04-03 06:20:00 GMT

Question: Beyond the poly thing how do you find the bay vs. NYC?

Answer: I have been really happy in the Bay Area so far! Probably part of it is just the novelty of being somewhere new/experiencing many life changes, but also:

several close friends
wider circle of acquaintances
sun and green things
biking to work
rationalist parties
reading at outdoor cafe tables
wine tasting in Napa

etc.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 172544318074

Date: 2018-04-03 05:00:14 GMT

Question: I, bay area anon, am asking you out

Answer: *Bryar Kosala voice* oh Comte

Tags: #sorry that I unlike the Chairwoman prefer people with faces, #too like the lightning tag

Post ID: 172501215945

Date: 2018-04-02 01:00:25 GMT

Question: does this mean you're single now? Hope springs eternal...

Answer: I am! Uh, feel free to ask me out if you want?

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 172493262819

Date: 2018-04-01 20:40:31 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Question: fwiw, I don't recall the sex/bowling discourse and probably picked up "beep boop" by osmosis from reading MPC. earliest attestation there is 2010. -sev

Answer:

@thefutureoneandall:

worldoptimization:
Thanks for the clarification! And apologies everyone for my spurious etymological inferences :(
MPC? I’m curious about the history on this one

Nydwracu can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe MPC refers to My Posting Career, which is an internet forum related to Something Awful, which is an internet forum that’s important in the history of the internet somehow. (Can’t vouch for the accuracy of the linked article.

Post ID: 172493061599

Date: 2018-04-01 20:34:01 GMT

Question: What's a plate, and why do you want to be one?

Answer: Wow, I got a lot of asks about this. “Spinning plates” is a term used in redpill writing to refer to the practice of sleeping with several women at the same time.

(I don’t actually want to be a plate, which is the problem.)

Post ID: 172467414052

Date: 2018-04-01 03:00:22 GMT

Body: me after living in New York for years: remember when I used to be super triggered by the existence of polyamory? what a weird phase in my life

me after living in the Bay Area for a week: monogamy is hopeless and dying. might as well be a plate for alpha guys while I’m still young/hot enough and freeze my eggs for later

Tags: #polyamory cw, #degeneracy cw, #sexism cw, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 172464351641

Date: 2018-04-01 01:00:31 GMT

Quote: System.Linq.Enumerable+WhereSelectListIterator`2[TumblThree.Applications.DataModels.TumblrSvcJson.Dialogue,<>f__AnonymousType1`2[System.String,System.String]]

Body: me: how do I signal my genuinely sweet and feminine nature on my dating profile? should it go before or after the section on wire fraud

Tags: #follow worldoptimization for the intersection of finance and redpill thought, #pua cw

Post ID: 172401685819

Date: 2018-03-30 04:56:24 GMT

Reblogging: millievfence

Tags: #racism cw, #culture war cw, #do I have a tag for hating on Vox

Post ID: 172364473358

Date: 2018-03-29 03:00:41 GMT

Body: You are walking through Berkeley as the sun is setting, with a high school friend you haven’t seen in years. In the distance, a man calls out, asking if you’ve heard of the Book of Revelation. You ask her how she likes living in Oakland.

“Oh I love it. I don’t think I’ll be here forever, though–if nothing else, California will burn at some point.”

“You mean like–the state of California will burn to the ground? Like in a wildfire?”

“Or break off into the ocean. I don’t know, I just don’t think it’ll be around in ten years.”

You nod, not thinking to question the assertion further.

Tags: #bay area gothic, #conversations with friends

Post ID: 172361143466

Date: 2018-03-29 01:00:51 GMT

Body: reblog if the only way you manage to post anything on your tumblr is by living in complete denial of which and how many people read it

Tags: #this blue website

Post ID: 172334370999

Date: 2018-03-28 05:32:29 GMT

Question: fwiw, I don't recall the sex/bowling discourse and probably picked up "beep boop" by osmosis from reading MPC. earliest attestation there is 2010. -sev

Answer: Thanks for the clarification! And apologies everyone for my spurious etymological inferences :(

Tags: #this blue website, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 172264763069

Date: 2018-03-26 05:44:31 GMT

Reblogging: cromulentenough

Body:

cromulentenough:

worldoptimization:
I.
To understand “beep-boopism” as I will describe it here you first must understand rationalist tumblr. To describe rationalist tumblr, otherwise known as the Tumblr Academic Freedom Club, would be far outside the scope of this account. If you are unfamiliar with it, I would encourage you to investigate the literature for yourself.
As people have pointed out, the practice of criticizing the overly analytical by comparing them to robots certainly has a long history, and in fact the term “beep boop” has likely been used many times before in this context. Here my aim is merely to give an account of the history of the term as it intersects with rationalist tumblr. The entire controversy certainly has relevance within a wider cultural context, but it is also worth noting that rationalist tumblr is quite idiosyncratic.
II.
As far as I know, the first time “beep boop” entered The Discourse was in a post by perversesheaf, a member of the hallowed tradition of rationalist-critical denizens of rationalist tumblr. (It is a much commented-upon phenomenon that the surest way to be accepted into rationalist tumblr’s ranks is to get a tumblr and begin criticizing it, a mark of the high value placed on contrarianism.) Unfortunately perversesheaf has since deactivated their blog, making it more difficult to investigate the origins of the beep-boopism debate. However, if I recall correctly it began with a post claiming that jealousy is weird by comparing it to bowling. It would be odd to be jealous that your partner had gone bowling with someone else, the logic went, and it is similarly odd to be jealous if your partner has sex with other people.
The discussion continued when thesublemon posted an essay by former tumblr user moteinthedark titled “Aesthetics are moral judgments.” This drew criticism from perversesheaf, who wrote “The author is very intelligent, writes well, yet fundamentally misconceives a basic aspect of the human experience. It sets off the exact same alarm bells the “How is sex different from bowling?” conversation did.” Tumblr user ogingat, an ally of perversesheaf, agreed with the criticism and added to it by criticizing moteinthedark’s use of mathematical metaphors.
This prompted a reaction from ozymandias271, who replied in an evenhanded tone defending the use of metaphor. However, their next post on the subject was less evenhanded: they wrote “beep boop rationalists are robots! It’s funny because a quarter of rationalists are autistic” and tagged it #vagueblogging. This post was criticized by tumblr users such as prophecyformula, who responded “beep boop highly autistic communities might have some systematic epistemological problems related to the high prevalence of autism.” Most notably, it began an argument with perversesheaf.
In this case, “beep boop” is used to mean something adjacent to “autistic.” Or maybe “people who have a hard time understanding things that normal people grasp intuitively.” The specialness of sex is certainly something that most people believe in intuitively, but many rationalists find odd. Aesthetic judgments are another example of this, as most people have an intuitive sense of aesthetics that is different from what is described in moteinthedark’s post.
(Not long after the argument began, ozymandias271 posted that their strongly negative reaction was due in part to their “~~tragic backstory”, in part to defensiveness of their friend moteinthedark, and in part to a depressive episode. For their part, perversesheaf and ogingat both deactivated the next day, finding tumblr an suboptimal place to conduct The Discourse.)
III.
Two months later, on September 24, “beep boop” made its return, in a response severnayazemlya wrote to an ask. An anon asked him for empirical evidence of his claims of the harms likely to result from immigration. He responded that the visible effects of immigration, particularly the societal decay it causes, are hard to quantify. He wrote in a clear criticism of tendencies in the rationalist community, “Number fetishism won’t get you very far here … There’s plenty of empirical evidence … but it’s not the sort of thing a beep boop can process, which means beep-boopism is epistemically harmful.”
The meaning of “beep boop” here seems slightly different than in the previous case. It refers less to a lack of understanding of neurotypical experiences and social norms, and more to an overreliance on statistics, the quantifiable, and the scientific establishment in forming opinions.
On September 26, nostalgebraist wrote “So excited for “beep-boopism” to become the next hot undefined-except-by-extension-and-connotation mystery term on my dash”. It received a smattering of likes and proved to be quite prescient, as nostalgebraist acknowledged two days later with his reblog, “the prophecy … has been fulfilled …”.
The discourse on beep-boopism took off around 9 am PST on September 28, when veronicastraszh made a post with the title “Beepy Boopy Veronica Style.” What she wrote seems to have little connection to the severnayazemlya post and is instead more reminiscent of the original argument between perversesheaf and ozymandias271. She describes beep-boopism as “hyper logic and hyper detachment … refusing to get caught up in the cult of social stigma.” Her main criticism of beep-boopism is that it is important not to dismiss social subtleties, as this can lead to things like people refusing to acknowledge sexism.
Tumblr user davidsevera, best known for his frequent jokes but increasingly considered a valuable contributor to the political Discourse as well, wrote another popular post on the issue three hours later, around 12 pm PST. His post focused on the issue brought up by severnayazemlya. He criticized opponents of beep-boopism as engaging in their own error, “Plausible Narrativism.”
Tumblr user queenshulamit, known romantic associate of nostalgebraist and fellow advocate for “nicencess” and “reasonableness,” wrote around 4 pm PST that “having a srs opinion on beepboopgate is compulsory now,” in an indication of how quickly and how far the controversy had spread. (The appelation #beepboopgate references previous controversies in the group known as rationalist tumblr or the Tumblr Academic Freedom Club. Most notable among these controversies are #prettygate, #speckgate, and the perhaps most notorious (and certainly most similar to #beepboopgate) #neotenygate. Unfortunately there is no space in this treatment to do them justice.) Her opinion was the the word “beepboop” was conflating several things, which was certainly correct: she named “basing opinions on numbers, being sutistic[sic]/autistic cousin, and disregard for social norms.” (One might call these the severnayazemlya, ozymandias271, and veronicastraszh definitions respectively.)
IV.
An interesting aspect of #beepboopgate as opposed to similar previous scandals is how much of the discourse occurred at the meta level. The original flare-up in July was entirely on the object-level, and the discussion on severnayazemlya’s September 24 post was object-level as well. However, people began discussing it as a controversy before it was a controversy (i.e. nostalgebraist) and as soon as the real controversy began, much of the discourse consisted of pattern-matching it to previous incidents and making jokes.
This is an unfortunately incomplete tumblr historical document here reproduced in its entirety.
It seems polite to tag those mentioned, sorry if I’m missing someone but people change usernames a lot:
@thesublemon @cptsdcarlosdevil @nostalgebraist @veronicastraszh @davidsevera @birdblogwhichisforbirds
“Most notable among these controversies are #prettygate, #speckgate, and the perhaps most notorious (and certainly most similar to #beepboopgate) #neotenygate.“
aww no #necrobestialitygate mention?

Maybe this was written pre-#necrobestialitygate? I have no idea when that was in the timeline of controversies, though it certainly deserves its own history

Tags: #this blue website

Post ID: 172260158705

Date: 2018-03-26 03:00:43 GMT

Body: to the tune of Jezebel (which is much better than this)

Next morning at work

My heart stops when you come say hello

But then you don’t laugh

At my joke about the BATS IPO

And with every word you’re piercing through

My flaws and insecurities

And hoping that the things

I’ve learned from all the Michael Lewis books I’ve read

Will convince you to take me back to your bed

And I know I might be wrong, but tonight

I wish I could be right

Don’t you ever get the feeling, oh you understand

You’re an absurdly wealthy finance bro who needs a hot girlfriend

The feeling you’d rather kiss a girl who’d say

That she checks Bloomberg every day

And I read Matt Levine every day

And I read Matt Levine every day …

And when the lights go out you’ll say

How you wish you had a girl who says that she reads Matt Levine every day

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 172256667529

Date: 2018-03-26 01:00:52 GMT

Body: I.

To understand “beep-boopism” as I will describe it here you first must understand rationalist tumblr. To describe rationalist tumblr, otherwise known as the Tumblr Academic Freedom Club, would be far outside the scope of this account. If you are unfamiliar with it, I would encourage you to investigate the literature for yourself.

As people have pointed out, the practice of criticizing the overly analytical by comparing them to robots certainly has a long history, and in fact the term “beep boop” has likely been used many times before in this context. Here my aim is merely to give an account of the history of the term as it intersects with rationalist tumblr. The entire controversy certainly has relevance within a wider cultural context, but it is also worth noting that rationalist tumblr is quite idiosyncratic.

II.

As far as I know, the first time “beep boop” entered The Discourse was in a post by perversesheaf, a member of the hallowed tradition of rationalist-critical denizens of rationalist tumblr. (It is a much commented-upon phenomenon that the surest way to be accepted into rationalist tumblr’s ranks is to get a tumblr and begin criticizing it, a mark of the high value placed on contrarianism.) Unfortunately perversesheaf has since deactivated their blog, making it more difficult to investigate the origins of the beep-boopism debate. However, if I recall correctly it began with a post claiming that jealousy is weird by comparing it to bowling. It would be odd to be jealous that your partner had gone bowling with someone else, the logic went, and it is similarly odd to be jealous if your partner has sex with other people.

The discussion continued when thesublemon posted an essay by former tumblr user moteinthedark titled “Aesthetics are moral judgments.” This drew criticism from perversesheaf, who wrote “The author is very intelligent, writes well, yet fundamentally misconceives a basic aspect of the human experience. It sets off the exact same alarm bells the “How is sex different from bowling?” conversation did.” Tumblr user ogingat, an ally of perversesheaf, agreed with the criticism and added to it by criticizing moteinthedark’s use of mathematical metaphors.

This prompted a reaction from ozymandias271, who replied in an evenhanded tone defending the use of metaphor. However, their next post on the subject was less evenhanded: they wrote “beep boop rationalists are robots! It’s funny because a quarter of rationalists are autistic” and tagged it #vagueblogging. This post was criticized by tumblr users such as prophecyformula, who responded “beep boop highly autistic communities might have some systematic epistemological problems related to the high prevalence of autism.” Most notably, it began an argument with perversesheaf.

In this case, “beep boop” is used to mean something adjacent to “autistic.” Or maybe “people who have a hard time understanding things that normal people grasp intuitively.” The specialness of sex is certainly something that most people believe in intuitively, but many rationalists find odd. Aesthetic judgments are another example of this, as most people have an intuitive sense of aesthetics that is different from what is described in moteinthedark’s post.

(Not long after the argument began, ozymandias271 posted that their strongly negative reaction was due in part to their “~~tragic backstory”, in part to defensiveness of their friend moteinthedark, and in part to a depressive episode. For their part, perversesheaf and ogingat both deactivated the next day, finding tumblr an suboptimal place to conduct The Discourse.)

III.

Two months later, on September 24, “beep boop” made its return, in a response severnayazemlya wrote to an ask. An anon asked him for empirical evidence of his claims of the harms likely to result from immigration. He responded that the visible effects of immigration, particularly the societal decay it causes, are hard to quantify. He wrote in a clear criticism of tendencies in the rationalist community, “Number fetishism won’t get you very far here … There’s plenty of empirical evidence … but it’s not the sort of thing a beep boop can process, which means beep-boopism is epistemically harmful.”

The meaning of “beep boop” here seems slightly different than in the previous case. It refers less to a lack of understanding of neurotypical experiences and social norms, and more to an overreliance on statistics, the quantifiable, and the scientific establishment in forming opinions.

On September 26, nostalgebraist wrote “So excited for “beep-boopism” to become the next hot undefined-except-by-extension-and-connotation mystery term on my dash”. It received a smattering of likes and proved to be quite prescient, as nostalgebraist acknowledged two days later with his reblog, “the prophecy … has been fulfilled …”.

The discourse on beep-boopism took off around 9 am PST on September 28, when veronicastraszh made a post with the title “Beepy Boopy Veronica Style.” What she wrote seems to have little connection to the severnayazemlya post and is instead more reminiscent of the original argument between perversesheaf and ozymandias271. She describes beep-boopism as “hyper logic and hyper detachment … refusing to get caught up in the cult of social stigma.” Her main criticism of beep-boopism is that it is important not to dismiss social subtleties, as this can lead to things like people refusing to acknowledge sexism.

Tumblr user davidsevera, best known for his frequent jokes but increasingly considered a valuable contributor to the political Discourse as well, wrote another popular post on the issue three hours later, around 12 pm PST. His post focused on the issue brought up by severnayazemlya. He criticized opponents of beep-boopism as engaging in their own error, “Plausible Narrativism.”

Tumblr user queenshulamit, known romantic associate of nostalgebraist and fellow advocate for “nicencess” and “reasonableness,” wrote around 4 pm PST that “having a srs opinion on beepboopgate is compulsory now,” in an indication of how quickly and how far the controversy had spread. (The appelation #beepboopgate references previous controversies in the group known as rationalist tumblr or the Tumblr Academic Freedom Club. Most notable among these controversies are #prettygate, #speckgate, and the perhaps most notorious (and certainly most similar to #beepboopgate) #neotenygate. Unfortunately there is no space in this treatment to do them justice.) Her opinion was the the word “beepboop” was conflating several things, which was certainly correct: she named “basing opinions on numbers, being sutistic[sic]/autistic cousin, and disregard for social norms.” (One might call these the severnayazemlya, ozymandias271, and veronicastraszh definitions respectively.)

IV.

An interesting aspect of #beepboopgate as opposed to similar previous scandals is how much of the discourse occurred at the meta level. The original flare-up in July was entirely on the object-level, and the discussion on severnayazemlya’s September 24 post was object-level as well. However, people began discussing it as a controversy before it was a controversy (i.e. nostalgebraist) and as soon as the real controversy began, much of the discourse consisted of pattern-matching it to previous incidents and making jokes.

This is an unfortunately incomplete tumblr historical document here reproduced in its entirety.

It seems polite to tag those mentioned, sorry if I’m missing someone but people change usernames a lot:

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #r a t i o n a l i t y, #this blue website

Post ID: 172223510071

Date: 2018-03-25 03:00:15 GMT

Body: O Abigail, dear friend without compare,

You gave away your heart and soon you found

His courtship left you soaring through the air;

His kisses made your glist’ning world spin round.

When his undying love your swain professed

You trusted him, youth rendering you blind.

Too innocent, you gave all you possessed

To someone who abruptly changed his mind.

One of the many trials that youth brings

Is wanting nothing more than to be wanted.

Just know that you are meant for greater things

Than faithless men by whom your dreams are haunted.

In time your heart’s contusions shall be healed,

And through misfortune your true self revealed.

Your reputation ought to keep me far

Away, but there seems little I can do.

With all the world I’m ever on my guard,

But I cannot but let it down with you.

I wish you could forget your every care—

Drop everything, and meet me in the rain.

I’d run my fingers gently through your hair;

Your lips on mine would soon assuage my pain.

You’d keep your eyes on me; though it be wrong,

Still there are sins that feel less wrong than right.

You’d lead me up the stairs. I’d go along,

And whisper softly that we’ll make tonight

A memory for when you’re gone awhile,

For I see sparks fly every time you smile.

My mother warned me I had lost my senses;

In my blind optimism I said no.

My friends recited all of your offenses;

I scorned their call to run and would not go.

But now you’re gone I see it all so clearly—

At nineteen I was too young, don’t you agree?

In my stupidity I loved you dearly,

So I played your twisted games till I was free.

For every girl who’s given you her heart,

There is a pair of lifeless, burnt-out eyes,

But I stole your tinder ere the flames could start—

Like fireworks I’ll shine in empty skies,

Those skies that once were gray and now are blue.

To start afresh, I’ve written this for you.

[unfinished]

So let our love eternal be, or let

It die in flames, for only at its end

Can we weigh joy and pain, compute regret,

see if the high was worth the scars to tend.

I cannot tell how many men I’ve kissed,

But there’s still room to add you to the list.

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 172220261068

Date: 2018-03-25 01:00:23 GMT

Body: To the left, to the left

Cthulhu swims slow but he always swims left

Don’t you ever for a second get to thinking

You’re not a Calvinist

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 172195364464

Date: 2018-03-24 07:06:52 GMT

Body: In case it wasn’t obvious, this is the first chapter of a never-finished genderbent OJ Simpson!AU Hamilton fanfic.

Alex Hamilton was standing in the kitchen of her cramped East Village apartment, looking at her reflection in the microwave, trying to comb her unruly hair, and snapping at her sons to stop bickering when the phone rang.

“I need your opinion on a homicide. On the Upper East Side.”

“What? No one gets killed on the Upper East Side.”

“One of the victims is the girlfriend of Levi Weeks.”

“Who?”

“Levi Weeks? You know. Plays for the Giants? Best running back in the NFL?”

“I have no idea who that is. Look, can you get to the point?” Alex continued to hold the phone in one hand while she grabbed Philip and William’s backpacks, handed them to the boys, and pushed them in the direction of the door.”

“Well, we’re at Levi’s apartment, and there’s a trail of blood leading in. There are also two matching bloody gloves, one at the crime scene and one outside his apartment. We want to get a search warrant, and we just wanted to get a prosecutor’s opinion.”

“That sounds like you have enough to arrest him. Go for it.”

***

Alex sat down in her lawyer’s office, her head spinning with all the facts about the Weeks case, coming in too fast for her to process. She so didn’t have time for this shit.

“Eli is challenging the terms of your divorce.”

“Goddammit. I can’t deal with this right now.”

“You filed for divorce on Thursday. You knew what you were getting into.”

“I didn’t know Levi Weeks was going to kill his girlfriend on Sunday!”

***

She and Eli had met at a party … what was it now? Eighteen years ago? She was in law school at Columbia, and he was interning at The New Yorker, having graduated college a few years before and spent the intervening time building houses in Tibet or Angola or wherever. He came from a rich New York family, and she was fascinated by his worldliness, charm, and the calm equanimity with which he seemed to view life. And he was intrigued by the small curly-haired girl from Washington Heights, who never stopped talking quickly and confidently and like she had something to prove. It wasn’t love at first sight, exactly, but she did feel something when she first caught his eye across the room, like she was drowning.

Well, it was all over now: they were getting divorced. After years of suggesting that maybe she could take their kids to the pool one day, or help Philip with his math homework, or at least just come home instead of working half the night and sleeping on the couch at her office, Eli put his foot down. He was right, she was a terrible mother. But how could she take time off when there was so much work to do? The district attorney’s office was perpetually understaffed, and there were always a million things she hadn’t done.

Well, the Weeks case would be a nice distraction from the whole divorce mess, that was for sure.

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 172194300099

Date: 2018-03-24 06:11:44 GMT

Body: I guess this was pretty topical in 2012?

This is the tale of Petraeus, whose exploits a nation encaptured.

High in position, he gave into hubris that made him lose all.

He was with his fair, sycophantic biographer deeply enraptured;

Carelessness led to discovery and a precipitous fall.

Under a CIA desk they conducted their ill-fated dalliance,

Borne amidst similar energy channeled in six-minute miles.

Her hagiography brimmed with adoring respect for his valiance,

While her computer contained an abundance of classified files.

Head of intelligence for our fair land, he should practice discretion.

Ominous as is his name, one might think he’d have read Sophocles.

Instead he made use of a Gmail dead drop to conceal his transgression,

Causing a peripeteia that brought the man down to his knees.

Secrecy might have been theirs had it not been for her hamartia:

Jealousy led her to write to a rival with friends in high places.

Her nemesis chose to retaliate, turning in unwise Medea,

Shirtless admirer soon making his total attention this case’s.

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 172194204284

Date: 2018-03-24 06:07:11 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

FYI: I’ve decided to put a bunch of stuff from my drafts folder into my queue.
Obviously, it’s all stuff I didn’t post, generally because I wasn’t really happy with it at the time. Now that it’s years old I’m even less likely to endorse it. So please don’t take it too seriously or consider it reflective of the general tone/content of my blog, if possible. I just thought it would be nice to get it out there.

I was looking through my Google Docs the other day and found lots of Content that wanted to be out in the world so I’m doing this again! Expect less vitriolic anti-sj and more bad/unfinished parody songs.

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 172185149761

Date: 2018-03-24 00:00:34 GMT

Body: is there a word for “the discomfort/anxiety felt by a member of a higher socioeconomic class upon learning that they will be forced to do something associated with the lower classes”

Tags: #extremely relatable problems, #me going over to someone's house: but what if they have the Wrong Kind of Food

Post ID: 172165524474

Date: 2018-03-23 10:02:56 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Question: Where do you think the appropriate line is between respecting people's gender identifications and the ability of others to make distinctions they find relevant? Is it ok to announce a'stereotypical girls night' and exclude (cis or trans) girls who act more like guys? Is it ok for guys who aren't attracted to trans-girls to just switch to saying cis-girls in their conversations if that's the category they care about or does this just cede trans ppl the words while keeping the bad distinctions?

Answer:

my attempt at an extensional definition

So, it is okay to have a party for whoever you want. This is important morally: freedom of association is a really important part of exercising your autonomy and pursuing your happiness as a person. It’s important practically: when people don’t feel entitled to have their parties for whoever they want, and hang out with whoever they want, then they behave a lot worse than when they have space to set those boundaries however they wish.
That said, I’d be surprised if ‘stereotypical girls night’ tended to attract the people you want and be uninteresting to the people you don’t want; it seems really hard to evaluate whether one is a ‘stereotypical girl.’, and I’d expect lots of people to be very stressed if their social environment frequently demanded they decide whether they’re a stereotypical girl. The best way to handle this is to invite, individually, the people who you’d like to have at the party to the party and tell them you’ll consider ‘can I bring my friend X’ requests on a case-by-case basis.
Same deal with the dating situation: I think that people should just date the people they find hot and not worry about the fact that in talking about dating they will use a word such as ‘girls’ which includes some people they don’t find hot.
I realize this doesn’t work as well for things like “who do we allow into this shelter” or “who is eligible for this scholarship”, and some of those get challenging, but for individual-level stuff, I really do think you can solve this entirely with “invite people to your party who you’d like to have at your party” and “date people who you find hot”, and that this is much preferable than trying to define the Kind of Person you want at your party/want to date and then trying to get widespread enough adoption of your word for that category that everyone will know what you mean and you can put it on party invites. (this is how things work in gender-conservative settings too; in practice people do not invite all the women and girls they knew of to their parties and in practice men are not attracted to the set of all cis women.)

There are people who don’t feel safe asserting “I will date people I find hot and I will decline a date if I don’t think you’re hot”. That’s a serious problem we should absolutely be addressing, and I do think sometimes it’s at the root of people behaving dickishly when dating comes up. But I don’t think it’s solvable with enough approved category-words.

I was thinking about the oft-expressed view of “date people you find hot and don’t worry about how precise the words you use to talk about it are” last night and just thinking how … kind of divorced from my life it seems. Like maybe there’s some sort of assumption that the answer to “who are you attracted to?” will stop at “guys”? I mean, “people” would be approximately as useful? Like how often am I getting drinks with a friend when the conversation turns to “what’s your type?”, or talking about the Bachelor when we veer into the relative attractiveness of all the different Bachelors, or gossiping about a guy we both know when we start discussing whether or not we would date him, or advising a friend who wants to set me up with someone, or drunk at a party playing Truth or Dare with a group of people, or …

This particular thought occurred to me because my friend was scrolling through my Tinder and demanding to know why I didn’t want to message a particular guy back, and I knew that the answer wasn’t politically correct and kept responding with vague generalities, making for a rather unproductive conversation.

(I mean, in this case it was sufficient that he had “feminist” in his Tinder bio. But still.)

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 172023914524

Date: 2018-03-19 05:26:56 GMT

Question: Fuck the patriarchy?

Answer: ??

Tags: #no idea what this is referring to, #not sj go away

Post ID: 171832673394

Date: 2018-03-13 15:46:48 GMT

Body: I’ve heard feminists approvingly cite Girl in a Country Song, but today I actually listened to the lyrics and apparently it’s actually just criticizing the way hip-hop-influenced and sexualized bro country objectifies women and calling for a return to the traditional days of chivalry in country music, so

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 171646415859

Date: 2018-03-08 03:43:15 GMT

Body: I feel like I see lots of people saying that we should destigmatize talking about about and being open about mental illness, but I don’t really see people making what seems like the obvious counterargument that mental illness is probably contagious/culturally influenced in some ways so talking about it causes more mental illness.

Do people make this counterargument? (Is it even right? I don’t actually know anything about psychology but it seems intuitively reasonable, and I know culture-bound syndromes are a thing.)

Tags: #scrupulosity cw, #ableism cw

Post ID: 171612270334

Date: 2018-03-07 03:45:19 GMT

Body: it’s kind of weird how differently people react to you saying that you broke up with someone vs. you saying that you quit your job when from the inside they feel … really similar?

with the job people will say “yay! congrats! good for you! so exciting :D” even if they know your job was amazing and a really good fit for you

with the breakup people will say “oh no I’m so sorry :( :( are you okay?” even if they know the relationship was really not good for you and needed to end like yesterday

anyway, I have done both of these things in the past few weeks and experienced approximately the same mix of emotions in both situations, and shoutout to the one guy who messaged me after I quit my job to ask if I was okay

(to be clear also thanks to everyone who has sent me congratulations or excited messages! those were great and made me very happy. it’s just that the “are you okay” was also helpful and much rarer)

(I got zero unsolicited congratulations after the breakup and kind of had to fish for them. “aren’t you proud of me? isn’t it exciting that I actually did it?”)

Tags: #follow worldoptimization for more thoughts on my personal life, #that are probably not of general interest, #or relatable to most people

Post ID: 171597322614

Date: 2018-03-06 18:49:00 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Question: What frustrates you about the Bay?

Answer:

theunitofcaring:
It makes it illegal for people to build themselves homes on land they own which is zoned for building homes. People poop on the streets. Public transit coverage is pretty lousy for a major city and public transit is more expensive than Uber. Our house has gotten robbed a couple times.
(To be clear, advantages that outweigh this include: there are good, flexible high-paying jobs that value employees and treat them like people. Many of these jobs will hire people without credentials, based just on what you can do. I am open at work about being gay and polyamorous and disabled, and no one even thinks this is remarkable or unusual. When I kiss my girlfriend in public people smile at us. Most of the people I hang out with are super excited about randomized controlled trials of universal basic income. My friend group holds ritualized retellings of the fight to eradicate smallpox. Our state legalized marijuana. Our city politicians are trying to handle the opioid epidemic with safe injection sites, support and compassion. I live with, work with, and am friends with great people who are working really hard to fix everything bad in their reach, and to extend their reach with every tool available to them.)
public transit is more expensive than Uber

see I cite this fact as one of the advantages of the Bay (Uber is cheaper than public transit!)

Tags: #I'm moving to the Bay Area!

Post ID: 171565653789

Date: 2018-03-05 20:34:27 GMT

Body: She was finished with the lands of men.

She was going to San Francisco.

Tags: #I'm moving to the Bay Area!, #personal

Post ID: 171559257994

Date: 2018-03-05 16:38:23 GMT

Body: Social norm that seems to have changed when I wasn’t paying attention: having roommates of the same gender.

I think that when I was growing up this was considered normal? Idk? And now my female friends seem just as likely to live (platonically) with men as with women, as many men have suggested roommate arrangements with me as women, and I was briefly excited when someone said she would put me in touch with potential roommates recently before seeing that all of them were men.

Idk, does saying “female roommates preferred” just make me sound like a homeschooled Christian girl at this point?

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging, #to be clear I'm not necessarily saying this is bad, #just observing it, #as a social change that I haven't heard talked about much

Post ID: 171538220094

Date: 2018-03-05 01:15:59 GMT

Body: honestly I still have no idea who Jordan Peterson is, what he thinks about anything, and whether I should like him or dislike him and I feel pretty good about it

Tags: #culture war cw, #uh, #not totally sure what else to tag this, #because I'm not sure what the Jordan Peterson thing is about, #but I assume it involves the culture war in some way

Post ID: 171364601909

Date: 2018-02-28 02:19:40 GMT

Body: I have a Goodreads!

I don’t remember if I’ve posted about this before but in any case, I am now trying to actually put the books I read on it and maybe even review them. Please friend me or whatever!

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 171185455869

Date: 2018-02-23 03:13:43 GMT

Body: I don’t know what happiness and life satisfaction are, or if they’re real things, or if they have anything to do with what people answer to survey questions, or which one (if either) actually matters.

I do know when I was dating him I was happy, I think? If you had pinged me at random times and asked how I was feeling, in that moment, I would have usually said “pretty good,” and I have the data to prove it.

I also know that if I started to cross the street without looking and a bus whooshed by me, I felt … nothing.

And last week on a night when I was sobbing so hard I was hyperventilating, I went to take some ibuprofen for my headache and looked at the pills sitting in my hand and felt panic. I had forgotten how scared I used to be of swallowing pills and now all I could think was what if I choke and die right now there’s still so much more I want to do

Maybe when I answer how happy I am, it’s relative to a recent average. Sometimes I wish I could remember better what I normally felt like during some period of my life. It’s a surprisingly hard thing to remember. Maybe I’m answering how happy my model of myself says I should be in that moment, or any one of a million other questions.

Maybe “life satisfaction” is partly a way to get information about my happiness that’s below my conscious awareness. What does happiness mean if it’s not something I’m consciously aware of?

I do know I wouldn’t go back for anything in the world.

Tags: #personal, #sorry this is really emo, #but idk I have been thinking about happiness and want to express my thoughts, #and don't know how to do it without getting personal

Post ID: 171184421884

Date: 2018-02-23 02:38:10 GMT

Reblogging: another-normal-anomaly

Body:

another-normal-anomaly:

worldoptimization:
little things that annoy me: articles about how a group of people should be put in jail that don’t actually name any specific people or any specific crimes committed by any of them
like. you can’t actually send someone to jail just because they are an asshole and you don’t like them. not even if they contributed to the devastation of the global economy.
(note: I know this is an unpublished draft and that you may no longer endorse it; I am trying to discourse with the post and with the linked article, not with present!you)
Charitably, I think they are saying that contributing to the devastation of the global economy should have been/should be made illegal. If it becomes illegal now, that might prevent people from doing it again, or at least from doing it the time after next once it’s been proved that that law has teeth. The really difficult things would be 1) getting the law to have teeth, and 2) proving mens rea, since the bankers in question would try to claim they had no idea what they were doing was dangerous.

Hmm, I think I disagree even with your charitable version. I don’t really remember what happened in the financial crisis that well but I can’t think of anyone involved who makes me go “yes what that person did should be illegal and result in going to prison for a long period of time.” I think people’s first instinct is to react to these things with “a bunch of bad stuff happened, we should make all of it illegal so it can’t happen again” when like, the problem is really a complicated mess of slightly misaligned incentives and human error rather than evil people doing clearly bad things.

And when it comes to financial regulation, I don’t even think you can assume the charitable version, because the way a lot of financial regulation actually works is “bank does something bad, we decide after the fact that it’s bad and should probably be illegal, we fine them for something or another.” Which does get around the problem that writing good financial regulation is really hard. But I’m still not a fan.

(and thanks! I totally expected people to completely ignore my #unpublished drafts tag and am pleased to see that people are reading them somewhat differently from my normal posts)

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 171147235486

Date: 2018-02-22 02:00:24 GMT

Body: little things that annoy me: articles about how a group of people should be put in jail that don’t actually name any specific people or any specific crimes committed by any of them

like. you can’t actually send someone to jail just because they are an asshole and you don’t like them. not even if they contributed to the devastation of the global economy.

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 171114556078

Date: 2018-02-21 04:00:38 GMT

Body: it being her experience that religious ecstasy made people callous

Miss Kilman would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians

but in private inflicted positive torture, so insensitive was she

dressed in a green mackintosh coat

They called her shallow, vapid, self-absorbed. Said she did nothing with her life but throw parties, and what good did that do? But I couldn’t criticize her, and what kept running through my head when I tried was we’re all sinners.

Am I Miss Kilman then? But Miss Kilman does hate her, a truly religious person couldn’t hate her because a truly religious person couldn’t hate.

So; enlightened martyr or apologist for selfishness? She does nothing with her life but throw parties–but most people do nothing with their lives, don’t they? And a good party–most people have no appreciation for the look of a room. But a good party is something.

“Yes, yes, but your parties–what’s the sense of your parties?”

all she could say was (and nobody could be expected to understand)

they’re an offering

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 171110919050

Date: 2018-02-21 02:00:44 GMT

Body: I really like the word “speciesism.”

Well, first of all, because it has this obnoxious hippie/SJW/Animal Liberation Front vibe which is very much the opposite of my typical signaling strategy, so it’s a fun word to use if I want to mix it up a bit.

But mainly, because it only means one thing. No one will call you a speciesist for thinking that chickens aren’t as smart as humans, or for not wanting to date a mosquito, or for privately thinking that cats are kind of creepy. Beliefs about empirical facts are never called out as speciesist. No one says that of course we’re all speciesist, because we all have implicit bias, and all benefit from human privilege or something, and then the next day calls someone evil for saying something speciesist. No one gets into interminable arguments about whether speciesism involves structural oppression, or if you can be reverse speciesist or is that just being speciesist or is that not even a thing at all.

Speciesism just means thinking that someone’s suffering doesn’t matter, that their pain and pleasure have no moral significance, that if someone is hurting we shouldn’t try to help them, that they’re worth less, just because that someone is different from us.

Because like, fuck that shit.

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 171077576765

Date: 2018-02-20 04:00:27 GMT

Body: Thinking about Ozy’s recent post.

I definitely remember when I first read the Sequences, getting a sort of “world is mad” feeling. But looking back, I’m having a hard time remembering what that feeling was about.

Because … my world was never that mad? I don’t know anyone who buys lottery tickets or homeopathic remedies. Pretty much everyone I know is atheist. My childhood was full of people making jokes about the efficient market hypothesis and the sunk cost fallacy. From an early age my parents taught me things like the difference between correlation and causation, and how to interpret observational vs. randomized studies.

(I mean, I know my world isn’t normal. But since before I can remember I’ve always known I and the people I knew were smarter than most people. The question is where rationality comes in.)

Idk. There are only two things that consistently make me feel alienated from non-rationalists.

One is politics. When normal people are talking about politics I always have the urge to yell, “Can’t you see this discussion is entirely signaling and tribal rock-throwing?” This is the least useful modification because it doesn’t really make me better at anything, it just makes me more annoyed when people talk about politics. 3/10 would not recommend asking the aliens for.

(I’m not even sure how rationality-related this is. Like, I’ve always felt sort of alienated by a lot of political discussions. Maybe because they often rely on emotional appeals to fairness and I’ve always been a degenerate unifoundationist? Maybe because I missed Political Indoctrination Day during Blue Tribe Socialization?)

Another is EA stuff. But I don’t think the main disconnect here is rationality. I think it’s more that most people don’t really care about helping people? Like, I explain GiveWell and people are like, “Cool. I guess I’ll check them out if I ever have any money I really don’t know what to do with.” Or I will explain the case for animal rights to people, and they will nod along and go “Yes, I see that factory farming is basically animal torture and we as a society could end it with little cost to ourselves, but I just don’t really care about animals.”

(This is non-rationalists I’m talking about. Rationalists go “Yes, I see, but I just don’t think animals are sentient.”)

I mean, I’m sure I got some insight from reading the Sequences and discovering the rationality community. I wish I could remember what it was.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 171073788208

Date: 2018-02-20 02:00:32 GMT

Body: This is maybe unreasonable but I’m sort of annoyed that my college’s career thing for women (which is mostly talks on negotiating and stuff) includes a panel on careers in social justice

like, where’s the representation for women who want careers in rent-seeking and exploiting the proletariat?

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 171039393573

Date: 2018-02-19 04:00:43 GMT

Body: I don’t remember when it happened, not really, at least I didn’t understand what was happening at the time. I remember chatter on the radio, whispers between adults, hearing the word “archdiocese” over and over. It was a while of hearing about Cardinal Law before I realized that he was a person, and not some special law that cardinals had to follow.

I do remember years later, when our beloved pastor was forced to leave the parish. They said it was for “financial improprieties,” but we all knew the real reason–he had criticized the church’s handling of sexual abuse one too many times. And to add insult to injury, they replaced him with a priest who had been Cardinal Law’s right-hand man. I remember being an altar server on the morning the story broke in the Globe. The girl who was supposed to serve with me saw me in my robes and asked what I was doing. “Haven’t you heard what happened?” she asked.

All the other altar servers left after that. There was little motivation to serve a church that so clearly didn’t care about us. But I kept coming, week after week, because someone still had to carry the cross and lay the cloths on the altar. Eventually those who were really angry left the parish, or the church, and those who were left moved on, forgave. Then I was able to train a new generation of altar servers, from kids whose families were new to the area or kids too young to remember our old pastor.

Our new pastor left after less than a year. Everyone was happy to see him go. I knew his leaving was inevitable, but I was a bit sad. I didn’t understand the scope of the unspeakable horrors he was a party to. I just knew he was a nice man, if a little quiet and sad. At his goodbye party he thanked me for my service, and said he had always thought that I laid out the cloths very well.

He’s a bishop now.

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 171035817576

Date: 2018-02-19 02:00:49 GMT

Body: So I have this high school friend who got SJ when she went to college. I try not to talk to her about my experiences as a Woman in STEM/Woman in Finance because whatever I’m saying doesn’t really get listened to so much as coopted into a narrative of “math geeks are all just misogynist dudebros” or whatever.

And I just remembered this time in high school when I idly mentioned that I wanted to learn computer programming and she got this horrified look on her face and was like “but that’s what people like Johnny do!”

(Johnny was a weird guy in our grade who had no friends or social skills to speak of and liked Star Wars beyond what was socially acceptable.)

plus ça change, man

Tags: #not sj go away, #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 171000768910

Date: 2018-02-18 04:00:32 GMT

Body: Things I’ve heard rationalists say they have no idea how anyone could do:

support Trump
be anti-GMO
think that open borders are bad
think that jobs are good
not like cuddle puddles
not want to fuck their clone
cheat on someone
feel jealousy
consider sexual compatibility in a relationship important
think that life is worth living

Tags: #unpublished drafts, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 170997410868

Date: 2018-02-18 02:00:40 GMT

Body:

Burr believed women to be intellectually equal to men, and hung a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft over his mantel.

malefeminists.jpg

Tags: #culture war cw, #the trash of the thing, #not sj go away, #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 170964484264

Date: 2018-02-17 04:00:18 GMT

Body: I.

In the Dear Future Husband music video, Meghan Trainor says she won’t cook for him or anything, and then she rejects him because he can’t do that strength thing at the fair! Isn’t she basically saying that she won’t conform to female gender expectations, but she expects to get a man who conforms to male gender expectations?

–my then-12-year-old sister

Based on a cursory examination of her song lyrics, I made a list of things Meghan Trainor is offering:

good at songwriting
sex
all the right junk in all the right places

things she won’t do:

bake pies
lose weight
waste all her time and money trying to look right

things she expects:

commitment
monogamy
dates
flowers every anniversary
dealing with her craziness
apologizing even when she was in the wrong
spending more time with her family than yours
giving her the left side of the bed
opening doors
not having a dirty mind
buying her a ring
treating her like a trophy

And yeah, flip the genders and this would all be received differently. But I don’t know, which reception is right?

II.

It’s a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, “Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn’t love me. He just couldn’t deal with love. He was too fucked up to know how to love me.” Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? … We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water.

–Zadie Smith, White Teeth

I mean, I’m a consequentialist, I don’t really think desert is real. I guess the criteria for whether everyone “deserves” something, or has a “right” to it, are: is everyone having the thing a good goal? and to what extent is getting the thing under people’s control?

So clean water obviously fulfills these. I mean, I don’t think there are many people who could have access to clean water if they’d just get off the couch and stop being lazy but instead drink parasite-infested water out of a sense of entitlement.

Love, though? I don’t know. “Everyone has a romantic partner they’re happy with” would be a great situation but I don’t think it’s an important goal: there’s not much we as a society can do to make that happen, at least not much that’s unambiguously good. And your romantic success is, yeah, something that’s under your control to a large extent.

III.

I hope you don’t think you’re not worthy of love or anything because you totally are

–unnamed friend

The more I think about this message the more I don’t understand it.

Is it some sort of empirical claim about my attractiveness? Is it a more moral claim–that I deserve love because of my moral worth? (Who would she say isn’t worthy of love?) Or is it not meant as a claim with a truth value but as a recommendation for what attitude I should take, along the lines of “love yourself?”

It’s not crazy to say “you deserve to make a million dollars a year” to someone even if they are not, in fact, making a million dollars a year. Maybe you think they are currently being underpaid due to their failure to negotiate and their employer would happily pay them more. But it’s also not something you would say to just anyone. If you spend enough time thinking about markets it is hard not to develop the prior that the market price is fair.

IV.

I don’t know if I’m worthy of love, or what the fuck that means. I think I’m worthy of existence. I think I’m worthy of clean water. Love gets more airtime in songs and novels, but have you tried clean water? Clean water’s pretty great.

Tags: #personal, #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 170961179263

Date: 2018-02-17 02:00:26 GMT

Body: There is no success in Elena Ferrante’s world; one can become a bestselling author only to be overcome by writer’s block, an designer who ends us slaving away in a sausage factory. There is no friendship; your tender feelings for someone, your confidences in her, will disappear as soon as your circumstances change. There is no love; you can hope for a successful professor, or a rich man, or a man who doesn’t beat you or rape you, or a man who supports your family and raises your children with dedication and kindness, but probably not all of the above. And all of that, plus a man who makes your heart race? Forget it.There are no happy endings in Elena Ferrante’s world. Time passes, things change. There are never endings at all. Things happen one after another until you are murdered or die of consumption or disappear one day, entirely without a trace.There are books you read when you are happy to play at sadness, books that tug at your emotions and leave you cathartically crying. There are books you read when you are sad to play at happiness, books that deposit you in worlds not our own, where the colors are more vibrant and the friendships are deeper and the characters are characters in stories, not fragile carbon-based life forms who evolved sentience in what is now widely regarded by the forces of nature as a mistake.And then there are the books that don’t tug, that just tell. That are terrifying yet comforting; terrifying, because looking at the way things are is terrifying, and comforting because you’re not crazy, because someone else sees it too. Books that leave you neither crying nor laughing, but staring dazed at a train window too dark to see anything but your own reflection, reaching for Facebook or tumblr or anything that will let you go back to the way it was before realizing you can’t.

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 170959606800

Date: 2018-02-17 01:00:32 GMT

Body: simulationist theodicy is the best thing to confuse people with at parties

person: [in response to a story about something bad happening] well, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that life isn’t fair.

me: WAIT actually you probably should–

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 170932612854

Date: 2018-02-16 06:04:46 GMT

Body: things I have learned from going through my drafts folder: apparently in 2015 I was really upset about the concepts “rolequeer” and “demisexual”

Tags: #??, #personal, #not sj go away

Post ID: 170932087969

Date: 2018-02-16 05:44:39 GMT

Body: FYI: I’ve decided to put a bunch of stuff from my drafts folder into my queue.

Obviously, it’s all stuff I didn’t post, generally because I wasn’t really happy with it at the time. Now that it’s years old I’m even less likely to endorse it. So please don’t take it too seriously or consider it reflective of the general tone/content of my blog, if possible. I just thought it would be nice to get it out there.

Tags: #unpublished drafts

Post ID: 170931413354

Date: 2018-02-16 05:19:27 GMT

Body:

Perhaps most telling was the question on pay: Only 14 percent of female economists said the gender wage gap is largely explained by differences in education and voluntary occupational choices while 54 percent of male economists agreed with that notion.

women are one fourth as likely as men to agree with true empirical facts, that’s why we should hire more of them

Tags: #not sj go away, #you won't believe how uncharitable local woman can be!, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 170931119264

Date: 2018-02-16 05:08:41 GMT

Body: … does anyone know Matt Levine’s secret tumblr?

Tags: #matt levine is my internet boyfriend

Post ID: 170556434374

Date: 2018-02-06 01:50:22 GMT

Question: This may be silly, but what exactly is meant in rattumb and adjacent spaces by "degeneracy"? I've seen it used to refer to orgies, acting affectionate, veganism, and pastry. Am confused.

Answer:

I’m sure that doesn’t actually help. Here are some random thoughts:

it’s basically the opposite of “trad”
I guess I use it to mean something like “in violation of traditional social norms.” Which ones? Good question. My instinctive reference point is probably the social norms I was raised with–I don’t really think of being gay as degenerate, since that was something I considered normal growing up, but polyamory, rationalist-level PDA, orgies, being openly kinky, etc. definitely fall into this. Other people on tumblr are more trad than me and probably have reference points closer to like the agricultural revolution.
it might just translate to “representative of things that annoy me personally about rationalist culture”
the cupcakes are because liking cute things as an adult is seen as a sign of immaturity, and modern culture is more encouraging of immaturity in adults?

My followers probably have better answers to this.

Tags: #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 170555590924

Date: 2018-02-06 01:22:42 GMT

Question: #problematic characters, say more?

Answer: I guess I like roleplaying characters with a … limited circle of concern? Think nationalist or speciesist or just straight up selfish. I find it really satisfying to openly engage in those modes of reasoning because I feel like they’re there in the back of my head all the time and it takes effort to ignore them and think about what the actual right thing is.

I can think of one character I’ve LARPed who was actually morally in the right–it was an Omelas-inspired setting and my character was the one who ran the machinery to convert torture into utopia. Though now that I think about it, the fun part wasn’t doing the right thing, it was roleplaying my callous indifference to (justified imo!) suffering. I guess it’s just fun to be a bad person for a few hours.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 170469023854

Date: 2018-02-03 21:48:55 GMT

Reblogging: pervocracy

Question: Is being a war reenactor bad because it’s getting fun out of a war? Your thoughts please.

Answer:

pervocracy:

No.
A lot of entertainment is based on suffering somehow. Including real historical suffering. Restructuring your entertainment to eliminate that would require extreme scrupulosity and severely limit your options, and in the end, I don’t think it would bring that much good into the world. If you’re the sort of person who worries about war re-enactment being unethical, I don’t think you’re on the knife-edge of slipping into cheering for real war.
There are a few things about war reenactment I could probably pick on as problematic – mostly people who are a little too happy to portray a Confederate or Nazi soldier – but I don’t think the activity in general is wrong.

As someone who enjoys roleplaying #problematic characters, I feel like if you’re really into Confederates or whatever it is better to get stuff like that out of your system in a fantasy setting where things are clearly marked as fantasy and everyone is consenting, then try to be as non-Confederate as possible in real life.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 170244618150

Date: 2018-01-29 00:00:37 GMT

Body: born too late to have ten kids, born too soon to have four-dimensional upload orgies

Tags: #purgatory--and--probiotics, #degeneracy cw, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 170209792224

Date: 2018-01-28 02:52:31 GMT

Body: I hate to wade into this discourse but I feel like lately I’ve seen a lot of conversations along the lines of

man: I’m sorry about what happened to so-and-so, but what I don’t understand is why she didn’t just say no! nonverbal signals are sometimes hard to interpret and just saying no would solve so many problems.

woman (or male ally): it’s because men are usually stronger than women and more likely to lash out in anger, and women live in constant fear of violence from men so saying no is often scary or dangerous.

and like. I don’t doubt that that is an experience many women have had. but I want to state for the record as a woman that out of the times I can recall that I’ve failed to say no to something that I didn’t want or that made me uncomfortable or upset, 0% have been because I was scared of the guy in question reacting with anger or violence and 100% have been due to a thought process like “well it seems really awkward to say no right now … I mean it’s not like a big deal … I don’t want to make things weird …”

which doesn’t mean I’m a bad person or deserve to have bad experiences!! but the remedies it suggests may be somewhat different and I hope we can be realistic about the relative frequencies of these things

Tags: #rape cw, #sexual assault cw, #degeneracy cw, #personal

Post ID: 170095652454

Date: 2018-01-25 01:16:48 GMT

Body: Honestly I feel like long skirts should be way more of a thing than they are.

more comfortable than pants
don’t have to worry about bending over, riding up, etc. like you do with short skirts
warm in the winter when worn with tights
cool in the summer
feel nice swishing around your legs when you walk
make you feel Subversively Trad

Tags: #do I have a fashion tag

Post ID: 170056478654

Date: 2018-01-24 00:28:34 GMT

Reblogging: athrelon

Question: 🔥 technological unemployment and ubi vs wage subsidies and/or abolishing the minimum wage

Answer:

athrelon:

serkentsi:
nuclearspaceheater:
mailadreapta:
argumate:
eightyonekilograms:
wirehead-wannabe:
thathopeyetlives:
mailadreapta:
UBI will be disastrous if implemented. Long-term idleness, which is what UBI enables, the explicit reason that UBI exists, is disastrous to the human spirit, and it will inevitable reduce a large fraction of the population to a near sub-human existence.
My preferred solution to the problem (if it is a problem) is a guaranteed jobs program.
I am somewhat inclined to agree with the second sentence, not quite as much with the first. I have a fair amount of hope for such a project, just not very much optimism.
(FALC and UBI-plus-heavy-automation combination worries me much more)
What about a guaranteed capital program? Jobs mitigate some of the long-term idleness issues but hardly attack the source.
Makework feels to me like it might not be that much better than idleness, in that it teaches you, at least on a system-1 level, that work isn’t something that’s *really necessary*, and that it’s just a pointless obligation imposed by authority figures.
Seconded, and maybe it doesn’t even go far enough. Make-work is awful. I can’t overemphasize how much resentment is generated when you’re forced to bust your ass for work that you know for a fact has no point. And to be honest, since a lot of labor in our current economy, even for the employed, is bullshit make-work and the malaise is already obvious, I’m confused as to how someone could think it’s the solution.
At least in idleness you could be playing video games. (I’ve seen the hypothesis floating around that, in utter seriousness, video games are the other half of the UBI puzzle. I don’t know if I believe it, but it’s a delightfully subversive take.)
“idleness” can also involve creating works of beauty that might not be financially sustainable in the current economic environment.
think of all the scientific discoveries and works of art and literature created by aristocrats who were technically “idle”, coasting on inherited wealth.
sure, some people may choose to spend their lives cock fighting or whatever instead, but so what.
“Idleness” can involve creating works of beauty, but honestly argumate, how many people would do that? “Somebody could paint the Mona Lisa in their UBI time” is not a serious argument, because only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population has the inclination and the skills to do that.
The people who already live entirely on gov’t support, what do they do? Does it look like “scientific discovery and works of art and literature”? Do you want to dramatically expand the number of people living under those conditions?
I appreciate this concern, tho I don’t myself care about it beyond practical considerations, but I’d expect that an analogy to the people on government support that you have in mind would be misleading because those are people who are economically useless in an environment where most of the population isn’t. There is a really strong selection effect at work there.
yeah, i think enough people are natural aristocrat types stuck plowing most of their waking hours into if not grunt shit then at least like, making pages load a few milliseconds faster, that the benefit of UBI from freeing up their time would dramatically outweigh the costs of subsidizing orcs
That would just result in an increased orc tax that makes natural aristocracy harder to attain though.
At any rate, periodic reminder that technological unemployment is fake news and UBI is a trap.

@mailadreapta: I’m guessing you’re not opposed to women staying at home to be housewives and mothers?

If so, then it seems like you already accept that a large fraction of the population can opt out of working within the capitalist system and still engage in fulfilling and productive labor, and we’re just haggling over the details.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 169951649794

Date: 2018-01-21 07:39:01 GMT

Body: in French, “California” means “the world is going to end and we will go hot tubbing in our underwear and braid LED lights into our hair” and I think that’s beautiful

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #nightblogging

Post ID: 169939804959

Date: 2018-01-21 00:29:53 GMT

Body: Political parties are so arbitrary. Who decided that a bunch of political positions on orthogonal issues had to be bundled with tribal signaling stuff into two clear groups with names and symbols. Why can’t I like killing people for the common good and 18th century larping

Tags: #too like the lightning tag, #the will to battle spoilers, #maybe?

Post ID: 168450509744

Date: 2017-12-12 02:35:51 GMT

Reblogging: lambdaphagy

Body:

lambdaphagy:

squareallworthy:
another-normal-anomaly:
anaisnein:
inferentialdistance:
argumate:
inferentialdistance:
argumate replied to your post: argumate: “I’m not saying we should criminalise…
WE USED TO MARRY OFF OUR DAUGHTERS AGAINST THEIR WILL AND THEY SELF-REPORTED HIGHER HAPPINESS LEVELS APPARENTLY
And in the least convenient world where women married off against their will are literally happier and healthier, what do you do? Are you only capable of living in a world that does not offend your sensibilities? Must you live in fantasy, forever denying every fact that opposes your dearly held views? For I cannot see how any humane being can look at the world as it stands and not be horrified to the point of despair. But neither despair nor outrage will make the world better.
First you must know the world as it is, in all its horror. Then you must decide how the world should be, fraught with every peril and self-serving trap such involves. And then you must build a bridge from the former to the latter. Your delusions don’t help the suffering. They may help you, to the degree that they’re politically useful and keep you from being ostracized. But that don’t help you figure out how to make the world a better place. So long as you deny the world as it is, your plans to fix it will keep failing to move the world to where you want it to be.
ah so I have agency and it’s cool if I act against other people’s expressly stated preferences if I know it’s for their own good, that’s reassuring and not terrifyingly exploitable at all.
It’s just a protocol that we’ve adopted to solve a problem forced upon us. I don’t see what the big deal is.
mmm okay I’m done actually.
If arranging marriages makes women happier, tell women, “you can marry as you choose and have freedom, or you can marry your parent’s choice and have happiness”. Some people prefer happiness and some people prefer freedom; let each have the value they prefer.
You know, I have been trying to follow this argument as best I can, and I have no idea what it’s about. Near as I can tell, @lambdaphagy posted a graph purporting to show that despite the victories of femminism since 1970, women in the US have become less happy while men have become more happy. Then @argumate said it was stupid to conclude that freedom is bad if it makes women unhappy. Then @inferentialdistance said hey, if we don’t judge freedom by its consequences, then what do we judge it by? And then everyone had a strong opinion on whether people should be thrown into volcanoes, which was a proxy for various policies about the role of women in society, even though no one expressed support for changing any policies regarding the role of women in society.
Maybe there’s some previous argument in which inferentialdistance staked out a position in favor of restricting freedoms on women, and maybe that’s in part what argumate is reacting to. But I don’t see any of that in this recent exchange.
So, inferentialdistance, are you taking a position against any of the freedoms women have gained since the mid-twentieth century?
And argumate, do you have any reason to believe that inferentialdistance wants to roll back any of the freedoms you’re in favor of?
Or should I just go ahead and throw myself into a volcano for even asking this?
I’d like to hop in briefly to clear my plate of this discourse. I posted that graphic as a pars pro toto for the various ways in which the much-sought “After The Revolution” has failed to materialize. In doing so I tied this point to the field of happiness research in general, and to one study in particular. This was a weak move, and I regret it. It is apparently disputed whether self-reported subjective well being (SRSWB) is even decreasing (per @somnilikes), and it seems that the most methodologically conservative conclusion to draw would be that feminism has not budged SRSWB much one way or the other. (I’m confident that this compromise that will please everyone.)
I don’t think that studying SRSWB is completely worthless, but I do agree with detractors in this thread that it is a rather low-fi (and unfortunately bike-sheddy) construct for the thing we’re trying to get at, so consider the point withdrawn.
Since then the thread has spun off into remarkably ahistorical territory, and I admit I have not much kept up with it. As for what I actually favor, I endorse this post by @samueldays and, even more so, this one by Sarah.

I’m intrigued that both of your links are about the changes in marriage, while when I think about declining female happiness the first thing I think of is the expectation that women be successful both inside and outside the domestic sphere and the extent to which women end up being both full-time workers and full-time homemakers/mothers.

Obviously my perspective is biased by living in an upper-middle-class trad bubble of low divorce rates and high fertility rates.

But like, I reeeeeeally don’t see the case for marital rape being a good thing.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging, #rape cw, #sexual assault cw

Post ID: 168340686194

Date: 2017-12-09 01:12:08 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

cptsdcarlosdevil:

I read the comments on the slatestarcodex article about men being harassed and honestly I am disgusted by the number of anti-SJ people in that thread rationalizing why men being harassed is ~*~less bad~*~
guys, you get to score a point against feminism AND be a decent person? I don’t understand why this is difficult for you?
honestly scott should just close comments on that sort of thread preemptively

sure, you could score a point against shitty oppositional-sexist feminism-as-it-actually-exists

or you could save your energy for Platonic gender abolitionist feminism, which is certainly less dumb but ultimately the greater threat

Tags: #uh, #not necessarily endorsed, #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 168166622204

Date: 2017-12-04 00:55:03 GMT

Reblogging: thenonesenseofladypole

Body:

tea-and-honour:

dataandphilosophy:
worldoptimization:
TIL John Rawls’s son is a right-wing conspiracy theorist?
#why in God’s name is Rawls the most respected political theorist of the 20th century
The ability to, starting from pure logic, derive as inherently correct the exact moral inclinations of an intellectual of one’s time, place, and social class is the most critical skill any ethicist can possess.
like, pretty much every rawlsian i know is a razian these days, and the ones that aren’t rawlsian are relational autonomy theorists
rawls might be respected, but no one thinks he’s right.

Oh interesting. What do Razians and relational autonomy theorists think/how do they disagree with Rawls? (If you feel like explaining.)

Tags: #why in God's name is Rawls the most respected political theorist of the 20th century

Post ID: 168030569894

Date: 2017-11-30 02:42:34 GMT

Body: TIL John Rawls’s son is a right-wing conspiracy theorist?

Tags: #why in God's name is Rawls the most respected political theorist of the 20th century, #(oh good I thought I had a Rawls tag)

Post ID: 167650533919

Date: 2017-11-19 06:38:02 GMT

Body: my gender is mansplaining facts about the history of feminine-coded labor to female historians at parties while drunk

Tags: #nightblogging, #not sj go away

Post ID: 167607661259

Date: 2017-11-18 01:39:26 GMT

Body: PSA: the term “housework” is problematic as it is rooted in capitalism & the concomitant alienation of labor. Pls use the term “huswiferie” instead.

Tags: #crypto social conservative blogging

Post ID: 167429998044

Date: 2017-11-13 00:22:40 GMT

Reblogging: digging-holes-in-the-river

Body:

digging-holes-in-the-river:

Yesterday I posted the outfit I was wearing, and described it as “how to dress femininely while still looking like a computer scientist”. And I fully expected to receive several angry asks or notes being like “there is no dress code for being a computer scientist! normal-looking girls with normal-looking clothes and makeup can be computer scientists too!” And I had a whole response prepared in my head (it was about semiotics).
But nobody sent me angry asks or notes. I received some likes and compliments, and that was it.
In general, this happens to me all the time. I’ll post something potentially controversial (such as this post), and I’ll sit there at my computer cringing, waiting for the anon hate to come pouring in.
But that never happens. I pretty much never receive negative responses to any of my posts.
So where does this intuition come from, that I need to be careful what I post or I’m going to get flooded with anon hate? Is it just anxiety and paranoia? I don’t think so, because when I look at other people’s blogs, they do receive anon hate. Often for expressing the “wrong” moral opinion, but sometimes just directed at their general personality / character.
It’s not all blogs, though. Most people I follow don’t receive any anon hate (at least not that they reply to publicly). But a few people do.
So now I’m really curious: what sorts of blogs attract anon hate? Why is mine not one of them?
Is it a number-of-followers thing? I’m guessing that, if you have more followers, you’ll be more likely to receive anon hate. (This blog has about 100 followers.)
Are there topics of discussion that are more likely to attract haters? Presumably, the closer you get to The Discourse, the more hate you’ll receive. (But I post discourse-y things sometimes and I don’t get any hate for it.)
People who blog about moral issues, and who express firm, absolute moral convictions, seems to receive more hate than people who don’t.
Maybe it’s a gendered thing? When I mentally list blogs which get anon hate, it’s mostly women and trans people. (But I’m a woman and I don’t get anon hate.)
I’d be curious to hear whether other people receive anon hate, and whether anyone has any insight into this topic

I don’t have much insight into what causes variance in amount of hate received (and I basically never get anon hate), but I do have the same intuition (“that I need to be careful what I post or I’m going to get flooded with anon hate”) despite the fact that most of the responses to my posts are positive, and the negative ones are usually nice and reasonable.

I don’t think it’s totally irrational though, because dogpiling is a thing–most of my posts have never gotten any hate, but two have ended up reblogged by someone who made a scathing reply, and then l got lots of negative replies from all their followers and followers’ followers and it was a very unpleasant experience. Even a problematic post might have only like a 5% probability of being dogpiled, but the cost/benefit calculation works out such that I’d still rather avoid making them at all.

Tags: #this blue website

Post ID: 167248213059

Date: 2017-11-07 23:36:23 GMT

Body: be the depressed voter turnout when it’s raining that you wish to see in the world

Tags: #shitpost

Post ID: 166486512519

Date: 2017-10-17 02:37:36 GMT

Body: I wonder how college!me would react if I told her how much time I spend exercising and reading books and how little time I spend staring aimlessly at a computer screen

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 166486346574

Date: 2017-10-17 02:32:16 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

the idea that Teen Vogue is more “serious” now that it has more articles about politics is a product of the devaluation of women’s aesthetic labor tbh

in retrospect given how many notes this got I’m astonished that zero of them were angry responses containing the word “intersectionality”

Tags: #seriously tempting fate here I know, #not sj go away

Post ID: 166486016214

Date: 2017-10-17 02:21:35 GMT

Body: I get really annoyed by the number of people I see who are like “Alice Wu’s study shows that the economics profession is sexist!”

like, that study is only surprising to someone who has literally never been on EJMR

saying “this study shows the economics profession is sexist” is equivalent to saying “the existence of this creepy internet forum shows the economics profession is sexist” but I guess the second one sounds less authoritative so people say the first?

(”study finds elevated use of homophobic slurs on 4chan”)

not to mention that afaik there are no equivalent sites for e.g. math or physics, so using the discourse on this site to explain the underrepresentation of women in economics (where they are much better represented than in math) lacks a certain parsimony

Tags: #listen to economists they know things, #seen on yankee facebook, #not sj go away

Post ID: 166276983534

Date: 2017-10-11 03:54:04 GMT

Question: What in particular did Caplan say about poverty?

Answer: Basically that poor people are partly responsible for their poverty, and that if they spend money on alcohol or cigarettes or lavish weddings that it’s their own fault they’re poor.
I disagree with this on a lot of levels.
One, I’m a utilitarian and I don’t really think desert and blame are very useful concepts. I think poverty is bad and we should alleviate it.
Two, to the extent that they are useful concepts, it’s because invoking them causes good things to happen. And talking about how it’s poor people’s fault that they’re poor just seems less likely to be effective than say, suggesting policy solutions to address poverty.
Three, there’s like an element of … I want to use the word privilege here? Tbh I don’t really know what Bryan Caplan’s background is like (though I’m going to guess he did not grow up as part of the global poor). So I’ll speak for myself and say that I’ve never been poor or faced anxiety over money and I don’t know what it’s like. I wish I could say that I would never choose beer or a lavish wedding over feeding my kids if that were the choice, but who knows? I think life on dollars or less a day isn’t easy, and I feel really lucky to never have been faced with that choice.

Post ID: 166276239044

Date: 2017-10-11 03:28:40 GMT

Reblogging: nuclearspaceheater

Body:

nuclearspaceheater:

Don’t let anyone tell you that they’re more entitled to your land than you are just because the last genocides and conquests that their ancestors won happened earlier than the ones that your ancestors won.

This, but also: don’t let anyone tell you that just because winning land through genocide and conquest has been the norm throughout human history, it is good or okay.

I don’t think you should feel guilty because your ancestors committed genocide while being advanced enough to write down good records of it. I think you should remember the victims, and look forward to the day when genocide is just a thing that happens in history books.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 166275641784

Date: 2017-10-11 03:08:22 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Question: How can you stand Bryan Caplan? (quote: Starving because you're born blind is morally problematic. Starving because you drink yourself into a stupor every day is far less so. Indeed, you might call it just deserts. ) How is he different than the neo nazi wanting jews to die? Bryan Caplan wants people like me to die, and calls it just desserts, and you enjoy reading his work and praising it in public?

Answer:

When I link an article and praise it, I am linking and praising the article, not everything that the author has ever said. And yes, he said that. He’s in good company: 70% of Americans say we should cut off welfare to people who test positive for illegal drugs. This is not quite Caplan’s exact position but it’s pretty close - it’s the position that welfare should not go to ‘undeserving’ people and that addicts are an example of undeserving people.
Do I disagree with this 70% of Americans? Profoundly. Do I think they are the equivalent of neo-nazis? No. Do I think that it is healthy, productive, or even possible to try to advance political discourse and share different perspectives while avoiding praising anything written by anyone who holds this position? No.
It is basically impossible to have any kind of interaction with anyone outside your bubble if you are opposed to ever reading anything written by anyone who has elsewhere supported a very harmful policy. I want the world to be better, and it will not get better if I refuse to interact with anyone who isn’t already perfect, and so I’m not going to refuse to do that.
But there’s a limit, right? Even if Hitler wrote a brilliant denunciation of Stalin I would consider myself morally obliged to find someone else’s brilliant denunciation of Stalin. Even if the KKK had a really great point about leftist classism I would want to find someone who talked about leftist classism without thinking the solution was ‘murder black people’. The way I personally draw this line is “has this person directly participated in violence, or channelled their resources and support to people directly participating in violence, or deliberately taken up a mantle with a violent history for the purpose of terrorizing political enemies into silence”?
I don't know if that’s the perfect way to draw the line but I do think the right place to draw the line is definitely not somewhere that puts 70% of the country on the ‘too evil for anything they say to merit praise or enjoyment’ side.
People who disagree with me about whether addicts deserve food stamps are wrong. I want them to lose the argument and I want society to operate on my principles rather than theirs. But I think it is outrageously inappropriate to compare people who want to deny food stamps to addicts and who argue for this position by writing a blog post about it to neo-nazis.
(The thing that makes Nazis bad is not just that they have evil opinions about who is worthy of welfare! The thing that makes Nazis bad is that they are willing to enforce this with violence and that they want to overthrow democratic states and replace them with authoritarian genocidal expansionist militaristic ethnostates! If you miss this thing about Nazis you are missing something incredibly unspeakably important!)

I saw Bryan Caplan talk about poverty and walked away being like seriously FUCK that guy so much

If he had talked about anything else I probably would have walked away thinking “what a chill dude”

I don’t really have a point, I just wanted to express my views on Bryan Caplan and his abhorrent opinions on poverty

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 165098749969

Date: 2017-09-08 01:04:51 GMT

Reblogging: truffledmadness

Body:

truffledmadness:

So after seeing @cptsdcarlosdevil ‘s writing on the subject, I checked out r/marriedredpill, thinking it would be a cesspit that would make me angry and I’d indulge in some good old-fashioned Feminist Rage.
Only…like…yes, there was some truly horrible stuff (one guy comparing women to household pets, gross sexual stereotyping here and there, a fair amount of racism and a heap of classism, etc.), but… there was also a surprising amount of advice that was, like, good and normal.
Like, they couched it all in goofy “alpha/beta dread kino” language, but strip that away, and you got advice like “if you want to have more sex with your wife, making sure you’re pulling your weight in terms of the household/kids, and then flirting with her, is more effective than slugging around whining that you don’t have enough sex” and “being cheerful and enthusiastic about your family life will lead to a happier family life” and “be supportive of your wife’s ambitions and hobbies” and “it’s not babysitting when they’re your kids–that’s just parenting.”
That’s good advice! That’s *egalitarian* advice, even! There were guys on there saying “do not be mean or sexually coercive…because that’s what betas do,” and it was honestly kind of hilarious. They even started saying cheating was “beta”, because an “alpha” would work on their marriage, get a divorce, or request non-monogamy if that’s what they wanted. Seriously, you flush out the creepers (which existed, in amounts that were not small, but not overwhelming either), and it’s like a Dan Savage column in there!
And, like, it got me thinking that maybe this is another side to the debate about if feminist-flavored environments are unwelcoming to men in general/ cishet men in particular: many of these guys *want* and *benefit from* what is essentially egalitarian relationship advice, but need to hear it from a goofy hat of “the mystical sekrits of het relationship advice, brought to you from Man Cave Radio” for them to believe it. I wonder if this isn’t a competing access needs thing, but it’s certainly worth thinking about.
(also, @worldoptimization , is this the sort of thing you had in mind when you said you admired the redpill stuff? because I never understood your affinity for it, but I can sort of see what you mean about the internal locus of control they promote)

Yeah this is pretty much what I think, that if you strip out the “alpha/beta dread kino” language a lot of it could basically be Dear Prudie. And yeah, “promoting an internal locus of control” is a good way to put it–I think that’s one of the ways in which, language aside, redpill relationship advice still differs from standard or more left-wing advice, and that’s an attitude I find helpful.

Tags: #pua cw, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 165098472864

Date: 2017-09-08 00:54:51 GMT

Reblogging: serkentsi-deactivated20180207

Body:

esoteric-hoxhaism:

colleges have the same rate of rape as prisons – about 20%. what kind of horrible, abusive parent would put their daughter through a place where she has a 20% chance of being raped? anyone who tries to send their daughter to college should have all their children taken away.
and that’s assuming there’s no gay rape. i’m sure it’s just that the new york times isn’t woke enough to tell us about it yet.

College-age women who don’t attend college are 30% more likely to be sexually assaulted than women who are in college.

(I know, the link is to the New York Times. I tried to read the actual journal article but it was paywalled. But like, all they did was run the numbers on NCVS data, plus it fits with my priors anyway.)

Obviously this is as far as possible from evidence of causality. I don’t know of any good studies attempting to do causal inference here; I wouldn’t be surprised if an economist could come up with a clever instrumental variable.

(though that study would by necessity tell us about the effects on people who were marginal to go to college, and I’m not sure how much that would tell me about the effects on e.g. my children)

Anyway I think refusing to pay for your children to go to college is a questionably effective and quite costly intervention–if I were into non-evidence-based ways to reduce my children’s risk of getting raped I would probably go with teaching them to drink responsibly, teaching them about buddy systems, teaching them about consent, etc.

(also I’ll note that college students are adults? if my parents had refused to pay for me to go to college, I would have gone to college anyway. this is dependent on class privilege in many ways but still)

Tags: #rape cw, #sexual assault cw, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 165028259289

Date: 2017-09-06 00:55:08 GMT

Body: me: oh hey, Petrov Day is coming up, maybe I should have a party

also me: oh, but if I plan it now North Korea might bomb us before it happens and then what would I do? cancel it? have a really depressing party? turn it into some kind of weird mourning ritual? either way this sounds super awkward–

me: … yes, I agree that in the event of nuclear war the potential awkwardness of any parties I am planning to host should be my first concern

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #I really don't want to end up like a certain unnamed economist though, #who planned a Hillary victory party before the election, #and it ended up being super awkward, #tbh whoever the economist you are thinking of who would be most likely to do that:, #it's him

Post ID: 165027974049

Date: 2017-09-06 00:45:19 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

I’ve had the chance to observe a lot of engineering hiring lately and it’s given me a lot of thoughts about diversity hiring.
Much of the screening process to hire for software jobs happens before you actually see an engineer write any code; you look at their resume and decide if they’re worth calling back, you talk to them on the phone and decide if they’re worth sending an at-home screen of some kind, you look at that and decide whether to bring them in for an interview.
Now, obviously you can change around your standards for who you talk to and who you bring on for an on-site interview. There’s always a chance that a candidate will really impress you at the interview, even if they have a mediocre resume and aren’t impressive on a phone screen, but it’s not as likely. Maybe candidates who have pretty limited resumes and aren’t impressive on the phone have only a 5% chance of turning out, once you do an on-site, to be someone you want to hire. While candidates with a great resume who sound amazing on the phone have a 30% chance of turning out to be someone you want to hire.
Your engineering team does not want to interview twenty people to find someone hireable. They like writing software, not interviewing. If they sit through fifteen days of interviews with people who suck and aren’t hireable, they will be miserable. You will end up setting your bar higher, so that you don’t bother bringing people on for an onsite which they have only a 15% chance of passing, and you’ll inevitably pass up some great engineers you would have hired but you’ll also waste a lot less time.
So your engineering team wants more women/people of color/veterans/disabled people/etc. I feel like the narrative I’ve heard around affirmative action has been ‘either you can use it as a tiebreaker (i.e., when you have two equally qualified candidates you pick the candidate with the background you want) or you can pass up qualified candidates to pick less qualified ones or you can give up on diversity hiring altogether’.
And obviously there’s another option: you can be likelier to talk to them in the first place. You can let someone through to have an interview even if you think, based on the phone screen, there’s only a 15% chance that after the interview you’ll want to make them an offer. This does not involve hiring less qualified candidates, just talking to more people in order to miss fewer qualified ones. I think this is the most common actual diversity tradeoff involved in actual hiring, and it’s weird to me that it’s not even mentioned as a form diversity hiring can take when people are talking about the challenges of doing hiring appropriately.
(Incidentally the ‘tiebreaker’ thing is very very rarely what is going on, and pretty much never at a company like Google or Facebook. If Google interviews two great engineers they want, they’ll hire both of them, they don’t have to choose. They’re not trying to fill specific openings, they’re trying to get good engineers and place them on a team that has an opening.)

This is a good point, and (as someone involved in hiring for tech-ish jobs) I think this is a real tradeoff that exists–we can actually get more minority candidates without lowering the bar by investing (a lot) more time.

I’d be reluctant to say it’s obligatory for companies to do this, because that is valuable time your engineers could be engineering. But it’s a thing you can do.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy, #not feminism go away

Post ID: 164923240144

Date: 2017-09-03 06:27:21 GMT

Body: the idea that Teen Vogue is more “serious” now that it has more articles about politics is a product of the devaluation of women’s aesthetic labor tbh

Tags: #nightblogging

Post ID: 164768971289

Date: 2017-08-30 00:39:30 GMT

Body: one of the more annoying anti-SJ voices on my facebook newsfeed:

In fact, that trial showed that the University of Texas system is not racist in their affirmative action. They use residential segregation as a basis rather than race. It’s an example of a great affirmative action system to reduce residential segregation

like, just the fact that people who are opposed to affirmative action because it’s racial discrimination are fine with discriminating on other things whose sole purpose is to serve as a noisy proxy for race

I mean no one is pretending this is not the case. The Economist:

For nearly two decades, UT has filled some 75% of its seats with Texas public-high-school students who finished in the top 10% of their graduating classes. This rule, adopted by the Texas legislature in 1997, was intended to increase black and Hispanic enrolment in the UT system.

the idea that anything that has disparate impact on different groups is discriminatory is dumb but at least it’s less dumb than this

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy, #racism cw

Post ID: 164767982344

Date: 2017-08-30 00:06:12 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

cptsdcarlosdevil:

2357911131719
Wait, how are those at all equivalent? Holding a purse costs nothing, buying a drink costs money; the latter seems clearly worse
apparently you might be stuck holding some lady’s purse for like fifteen or twenty minutes if there’s a line at the bar or the bathroom, and it means you can’t decide to go to a different bar or start dancing or go home with someone else or even move to a different part of the bar where she might not find you
it is different from, like, watching someone’s bag at the airport (which is just the nice person thing to do) because at an airport you are probably going to be in the same place for the next hour
or so topher, A Person Who Has Ever Gone To A Bar, reports to me

I’m just confused why a woman would ever need to ask a man to hold her purse ~~except as a shit test~~

I bring my purse with me to the bathroom? they generally have hooks for it? maybe occasionally it might be helpful if I’m trying to hold a lot of things at once but that’s why purses go over your shoulders, so they don’t occupy your hands while you’re trying to do things with them

but apparently it is enough of a thing to warrant a New York Times trendpiece

Tags: #pua cw

Post ID: 164354325209

Date: 2017-08-19 03:59:28 GMT

Question: what triggered your new about page?

Answer: I decided having actual information on my about page was Aesthetically Incorrect, while Unsong is Aesthetically Correct

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 164315062814

Date: 2017-08-18 03:02:29 GMT

Body: You see, friends, we’re asleep … we’re children of dust … but read the Sequences–and you’re God, you’re pure as on the first day of creation!

Tags: #improve books with careful insertions of 'read the Sequences', #shitpost, #idk, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 164160298939

Date: 2017-08-14 03:04:06 GMT

Body: @anon: I don’t want to talk about that publicly but happy to chat privately! (also I think the second half of your ask got lost)

Post ID: 163924558159

Date: 2017-08-07 23:59:17 GMT

Body:

@mens-et

actually I think you go overboard with the cws

I think the reason I put a reasonable (and increasing) number of cws on my posts is because I think for any given one of my posts there are like three people who would benefit from reading it and everyone else will either ignore it or get upset/triggered/annoyed/update in the exact opposite direction they should

I have a dream that someday everyone on tumblr will use enough tags that no one will ever read anyone else’s posts and we will all just monologue happily into the void

Tags: #this blue website, #tumblr cw, #what I should really do is go through all of my followers one by one, #and for anyone I don't think would benefit from a post tag it [firstname] don't look

Post ID: 163869342059

Date: 2017-08-06 15:39:16 GMT

Reblogging: lovecrafts-iranon

Body:

bpd-anon:

worldoptimization:
There are currently hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens in cages in the US alone. Most consumers of eggs–grocery stores, restaurant chains, food service providers–have pledged to go entirely cage-free within the next decade.
Hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed every year in the US. American egg producers have pledged to stop this practice by 2020.
source? If they actually stop doing this I will start buying eggs cheap from the grocery store and not expensive from an acquaintance with pet chickens

source on 70% of egg demand pledging to go cage free within the next decade

source on 95% of egg production pledging to stop male chick culling

But definitely note that even though these are exciting successes,

1) These pledges kick in at various times over the course of the next decade, but they have not kicked in yet. Currently only like 10% of US eggs are cage free. Hopefully that changes, but right now you can’t go to a grocery store or restaurant and expect to get cage free eggs unless they explicitly say so.

2) Just because they plan to eliminate a few particularly bad abuses doesn’t mean factory farmed laying hens will lead idyllic or even net positive lives. I think they will still be much worse off than your acquaintance’s pet chickens.

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 163868926949

Date: 2017-08-06 15:25:05 GMT

Question: I think monogamy is a standard expectation, aside from young upper-class urban circles.

Answer: You’re probably right, good point.

Post ID: 163813703629

Date: 2017-08-05 02:34:54 GMT

Body: There are currently hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens in cages in the US alone. Most consumers of eggs–grocery stores, restaurant chains, food service providers–have pledged to go entirely cage-free within the next decade.

Hundreds of millions of male chicks are killed every year in the US. American egg producers have pledged to stop this practice by 2020.

Tags: #good things, #effective altruism

Post ID: 163812599504

Date: 2017-08-05 01:56:37 GMT

Body: There’s this idea I have, I’m not sure where exactly it comes from, about the way relationships work. It says that everyone has different needs and preferences, and so to be in a relationship you have to figure out what your needs are, and express them to your partner; they do the same, and if you’re both willing to accommodate each other’s needs then congratulations.

I try to live by this, mostly. There have been many times when a boyfriend said or did something that upset me, I responded with the classic “when you do x I feel y,” and he responded with “oh okay, I won’t do x.” But somehow that exchange always left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.

You know what feels great? Telling one of my friends that ugh, my boyfriend did x, and hearing her respond with “seriously? that’s so fucked up!”

I think there are a couple things going on here.

One is that no matter how relationship anarchist you want to be about things, there will always be some things that fall outside the realm of needs and boundaries and preferences and end up in the category of “normal things people are or aren’t supposed to do.” You’re not supposed to nonconsensually beat up your partner, or express discomfort at them having friends outside the relationship, or tell your partner’s mother to go fuck herself upon first meeting her. (I think “don’t sleep with other people” used to be on this list, but no longer is.) No one thinks these are boundaries that need to be expressed. And if you can get your preferences into this list, that’s a huge win. So it makes sense that, even if in my small ineffectual way, I push for my preferences to be codified into local social norms.

Another thing is–negotiating an entire relationship from first principles is exhausting. If you are a naturally mono-inclined person trying to date someone who’s never heard of the concept of monogamy, you will spend half your time trying to legislate edge cases. It makes sense to look for someone who shares your basic intuitions about interpersonal relationships.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say here–certainly not that modifying traditional relationship structures is impossible or even undesirable. Maybe that I think it’s too easy to see the modifications and miss the social technology underpinning them.

Tags: #personal, #crypto-social conservative blogging, #neurotypical cw, #relationship abuse cw, #monogamy cw

Post ID: 163808646874

Date: 2017-08-04 23:37:26 GMT

Question: I think you are relatable and your blog is good.

Answer: Thanks anon! You’re very kind ^_^

Post ID: 163390017444

Date: 2017-07-25 02:07:36 GMT

Reblogging: earnest-peer

Body:

earnest-peer:

worldoptimization:
Yesterday I downloaded Track Your Happiness, an app that sends you notifications at random times throughout the day, asking you what you’re doing and how happy you are at that moment. While I’ll be interested to see what the data shows after a while, I’ve already noticed something cool.
I think there’s sort of a positive feedback loop to noticing my happiness level. It goes something like (notice current happiness level) -> (update towards average happiness being closer to that level) -> (life satisfaction updates in the same direction) -> (happiness updates in the same direction because either “wow my life is so great, I’m happy all the time” or “oh god despite all my success and privilege I’m still unhappy what even is the point”).
And since I’m more likely to be unhappy when alone/idle/introspecting about my emotions, and more likely to be happy when in a flow state, I notice my unhappiness more than my happiness. Track Your Happiness corrects for that bias.
So yeah. It’s never occurred to me to wonder whether I’m happy while immersed in a conversation at work, because immersion, and because I don’t actually have a choice about whether or not to have most of these conversations. But today I got a notification and realized that you know, I was really enjoying the experience.
This post is three weeks old now, so may I ask how it’s going? Would you recommend the app?

Oh yeah, it’s been fascinating so far. Some notes:

My day-to-day happiness is definitely outperforming my predictions. I spend about half my waking time working, and at work I’m generally pretty content. I’m really happy when interacting with people I like. The majority of my unhappy moments so far have been connected with kind of unavoidable minor frustrations; I found some inconsistencies in my data and have to parse it again, the grocery store was out of the thing I really wanted, the train is delayed and the subway station is really hot.
I’ve been generally happy when watching movies/TV/plays, reading, cooking, and doing housework. Not as happy when walking, running errands, or using my computer/phone. (These are all very small n so far.)
Interacting with people is really good. I don’t really know how people have their own offices ~~or live alone~~. Idleness is bad, having too much time for reflection is bad. I’m not sure why my brain is so biased to avoid the exhausted feeling that comes from too much activity/social interaction rather than the negative effects of being too often alone with my own thoughts but I think this is an important and bad bias.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d started to rely on this app for emotional support but it hasn’t pinged me since 3 pm yesterday and I don’t know what’s going on, I’m worried it’s broken, hasn’t it considered that maybe I need someone to vent to right now

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 163271491309

Date: 2017-07-22 01:29:22 GMT

Body: People’s worries about demographic decline among the educated are really hard to square with my personal experience of everyone I know having three or more kids.

To be fair, the people I know are either academic economists or Finance Professionals and I realize this is not a representative sample of the intellectual elite, and in particular both groups are known for being kind of conservative/reactionary, at least compared to the rest of said elite.

(And for the record this totally doesn’t hold among the people I know who are not members of one of those groups.)

(Not sure how much this is economists vs. all academics–a French person once mentioned to me that “it’s the trend for all French intellectuals to have three children nowadays.”)

But it still makes me wonder if there’s some sort of countersignaling backlash to the demographic transition coming?

Like, there’s a level of education/achievement where the wife is working and wants to succeed in her career and thus doesn’t have time to have lots of kids. And then there’s a level where the wife works in a sufficiently creative/self-directed profession that she has plenty of job flexibility, plus they have enough money for the best full-time nannies and private schools anyway.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging, #tokophobia cw, #children cw

Post ID: 162768214959

Date: 2017-07-09 02:57:16 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

Yesterday I downloaded Track Your Happiness, an app that sends you notifications at random times throughout the day, asking you what you’re doing and how happy you are at that moment. While I’ll be interested to see what the data shows after a while, I’ve already noticed something cool.
I think there’s sort of a positive feedback loop to noticing my happiness level. It goes something like (notice current happiness level) -> (update towards average happiness being closer to that level) -> (life satisfaction updates in the same direction) -> (happiness updates in the same direction because either “wow my life is so great, I’m happy all the time” or “oh god despite all my success and privilege I’m still unhappy what even is the point”).
And since I’m more likely to be unhappy when alone/idle/introspecting about my emotions, and more likely to be happy when in a flow state, I notice my unhappiness more than my happiness. Track Your Happiness corrects for that bias.
So yeah. It’s never occurred to me to wonder whether I’m happy while immersed in a conversation at work, because immersion, and because I don’t actually have a choice about whether or not to have most of these conversations. But today I got a notification and realized that you know, I was really enjoying the experience.

@oliwhail replied to your post: Can I ask about any experiences you’ve had with e.g. gratitude journalling / noticing things to give yourself credit for / taking special note of times when things are less bad?

I’m an intermittent gratitude journaler; I think it’s good for me, but like a gamified app is so much more fun.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 162767979014

Date: 2017-07-09 02:49:25 GMT

Reblogging: warpedellipsis

Body:

warpedellipsis:

worldoptimization:

Keep reading
It was done because of religion, under the direction of religious fanatics. Nazis we Catholic and I’m pretty sure operated with the blessing of the Vatican. Same with all the Christian holy wars. That’s why it’s relevant. The good in the world would still exist without religion, but all kinds of evil is carried out because of it, it’s used to convince people they’re the chosen ones and thst anything they do is correct, no questions allowed. Sure evil would still exist without religion, but you wouldn’t have this “Divine right” to justify things that people would otherwise question or not go along with otherwise.

It is certainly true that people have done innumerable horrible things in the name of religion, but this seems false? I’m not an expert or anything but two minutes on Wikipedia is getting me stuff like

To many Nazis, Catholics were suspected of insufficient patriotism, or even of disloyalty to the Fatherland, and of serving the interests of “sinister alien forces”.

Biographer Alan Bullock wrote that, though Hitler was raised as a Catholic, and retained some regard for the organisational power of Catholicism, he had utter contempt for its central teachings, which he said, if taken to their conclusion, “would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure”.

A pre-war critic of Nazism, Pius XII lobbied world leaders to avoid war and, as Pope at the outbreak of war, issued Summi Pontificatus, expressing dismay at the invasion of Poland, reiterating Church teaching against racial persecution and calling for love, compassion and charity to prevail over war.

Pius XII employed diplomacy to aid victims of the Holocaust and directed the Church to provide discreet aid to Jews.

Tags: #holocaust cw, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 162651747939

Date: 2017-07-06 02:17:55 GMT

Body: uhhhh okay so I agree that getting mad when anyone references the Holocaust in any way in an argument is unproductive but when you ask someone why they don’t think God exists and their response is “One word: Dachau.”

like idk it just seems kind of … insensitive? to use an atrocity in which people were persecuted and killed for their religious beliefs in your argument about how religion is the worst thing ever to befall mankind? couldn’t you at least pick some other genocide

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them, #holocaust cw, #genocide cw, #antisemitism cw, #vagueblogging, #not about anyone on tumblr

Post ID: 162651184149

Date: 2017-07-06 01:59:54 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

transgirlkyloren:

fostby
I can. Provide some relatable Mongolia content?
oh good because everything I know about Mongolia is the Genghis Khan thing and tfw yurts and so I was going to run out of material REALLY fast

#I don’t even know if they use yurts that often! #or just more than people’s zero usage

they totally do, literally half the population of Mongolia lives in a yurt

I assumed it was just a Cultural Tradition they did for tourists but nope it is a big deal

Tags: #relatable Mongolia content

Post ID: 162650706044

Date: 2017-07-06 01:44:11 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

transgirlkyloren:

justisdevan:
slatestarscratchpad:
transgirlkyloren:
my opinion is that breastfeeding and breastmilk pumping should be socially acceptable anywhere and at any time
if men get to take off their shirts because it’s hot out women get to take off their shirts to feed children
Everyone always says this, but is it really acceptable for men to be shirtless in public other than at the beach?
I feel like if a shirtless guy walked down Main Street where I live, people would get upset and maybe call the police.
As a Floridian, I’ve walked around shirtless plenty when it’s gotten hot, often with my removed shirt slung over my shoulder or something similarly unfashionable. I’m not particularly toned or muscular. Nobody’s ever complained or even given me a dirty look that I noticed for it.
Yeah, same.
But like California is not that different from Florida in climate and it’s true I rarely see shirtless men here, now that I think about it. How bizarre.
This is completely the WRONG direction for topless equality to go.

I feel strongly that this is the correct direction for topless equality

how can anyone who has read a historical romance novel not think it a societal failure that we have raised generations of people who will never experience the erotic frisson of seeing one’s beloved in his shirtsleeves for the first time

Tags: #not entirely serious, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 162297972229

Date: 2017-06-27 01:03:00 GMT

Body: Yesterday I downloaded Track Your Happiness, an app that sends you notifications at random times throughout the day, asking you what you’re doing and how happy you are at that moment. While I’ll be interested to see what the data shows after a while, I’ve already noticed something cool.

I think there’s sort of a positive feedback loop to noticing my happiness level. It goes something like (notice current happiness level) -> (update towards average happiness being closer to that level) -> (life satisfaction updates in the same direction) -> (happiness updates in the same direction because either “wow my life is so great, I’m happy all the time” or “oh god despite all my success and privilege I’m still unhappy what even is the point”).

And since I’m more likely to be unhappy when alone/idle/introspecting about my emotions, and more likely to be happy when in a flow state, I notice my unhappiness more than my happiness. Track Your Happiness corrects for that bias.

So yeah. It’s never occurred to me to wonder whether I’m happy while immersed in a conversation at work, because immersion, and because I don’t actually have a choice about whether or not to have most of these conversations. But today I got a notification and realized that you know, I was really enjoying the experience.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #personal

Post ID: 162211382914

Date: 2017-06-24 20:35:27 GMT

Question: Don't you ever get titred from that pseudo-rationalism? Your thought process strikes me as really lazy.

Answer: … if my thought process is really lazy why would it make me tired? wouldn’t you expect the opposite?

Post ID: 162068122824

Date: 2017-06-21 02:18:34 GMT

Body: The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches … In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist …

In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil …

Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 162064644629

Date: 2017-06-21 00:25:34 GMT

Question: Where do you go for relationship advice (for women) that presumes monogamous relationships and innate behavioral differences between women and men? All I have is Cosmo and I'm on the end of my rope.

Answer:

RedPillWomen

Hooking Up Smart

The Rules Revisited

I don’t necessarily wholeheartedly endorse any of these; e.g. The Rules Revisited is literally just one guy talking about what he finds attractive in women, and there is in fact some variation among men. But I think they’re a reasonable starting point for thinking through what the behavioral differences between men and women are and what the basic conclusions that follow should be.

I don’t think I have ever read anything that could be construed as useful advice in Cosmo.

Post ID: 161391713814

Date: 2017-06-03 15:41:17 GMT

Body: I feel like if we do live in a simulation, then praying is not a crazy response. If I were simulating a universe and its denizens started appealing to me to please lay off on the whole suffering thing, I hope I’d at least think twice about it.

I’m kind of tempted to start a simulationist cult, based on worshipping our simulators and thinking about the most effective ways of praying to get their attention. Has anyone done this yet?

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 160928174484

Date: 2017-05-22 00:22:05 GMT

Body: When I was younger, I assiduously avoided painkillers. I remember late one night, unable to sleep because of my period cramps, doing yoga and breathing exercises while my mom asked me why I wouldn’t just take an ibuprofen. I thought it was important to be in touch with your pain, that using painkillers to simply avoid it would be cheating somehow.

I also loved sad books and movies; I would reread Gone with the Wind until I started crying, reveling in the painful and beautiful feelings that filled me. My mom would refuse to watch movies that seemed as if they would be sad, or where she had heard that the mother died, or the father, or the dog. Her favorite movies were lighthearted comedies. She read no novels at all; her reading tastes tended toward histories of salt or the shipping container. I thought this was all very sad. Reading novels had been my main exposure to the spectrum of human emotion and experience so far. How could you go without that?

I don’t know exactly when this changed. At some point I tried an ibuprofen and found that hey, it worked pretty well. Somewhere along the line I became the girl who always has some on hand when her friends ask and is happy to tell you that things like maximum dosages and warnings against taking it with alcohol are really more like guidelines.

Yesterday I was reading a book–a good book, one of which teenage me would have approved–and the feelings, about love and humanity and the terrifying vastness of the universe, got stronger and stronger until I wondered, “why am I doing this again?” I flipped to a terrible YA novel instead.

After dinner, my sister asked me what I wanted to watch. “Something bad,” I replied. She found a British rom com on Netflix with a three star rating, and we happily made fun of the dialogue and characters and general implausibility of the scenario. I couldn’t have cared less about the fate of any of the characters. Watching it induced a pleasantly numb feeling, not unlike the sensation of the menthol cough drops I was taking for my sore throat.

The previous night, my cough had kept me awake, staring at the ceiling. So I took a dose of NyQuil before bed and slept soundly. I didn’t dream.

I don’t know what teenage me would think if she saw me now. I don’t know how I could explain my choices to her. I imagine staring at my shoes, guiltily, before offering a half-hearted justification.

“You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Post ID: 159995276544

Date: 2017-04-26 00:50:59 GMT

Body:

loki-zen replied to your post “An interesting thing about redpill thought–and something its adherents…”

I don’t know what kind of rp stuff you people are reading. Even the most reasonable stuff of theirs I’ve seen takes a sharp dive into dehumanising women before long. I genuinely find it difficult to understand how people in my tumblrsphere who do not seem to be terrible manage to not see this in everything they put out.

I guess I’m not sure what your disagreement with me is? To be clear, I absolutely think RP stuff tends to dehumanize women. I think women are people with feelings and desires and preferences that matter just as much as men’s and a lot of RP writings encourage men to ignore this, resulting in both harm to women and probably ultimately harm to those men as well (because that attitude seems like it would make it hard to form close and rewarding relationships with women). I guess I assume most of my followers already agree with this so tend not to post about it and instead post about other aspects I find interesting.

FWIW, I started replying to your reblog of my previous post to mostly agree with it but the post somehow veered into me being mad about PUA rape apologism, so I deleted it because I figured that was an invitation to discourse I didn’t need in my life.

But for the record: a lot of RP writings promote treating women badly/thoughtlessly/selfishly and I categorically disavow this. Some of them literally promote/encourage rape and even present as “success stories” detailed descriptions of times they have committed rape and that is fucking evil and those people should be condemned in the strongest possible terms (and like, arrested if it’s legally feasible though I’m sure it isn’t).

(I don’t think I’m come across anything on RPW that I would characterize as dehumanizing women, but I also haven’t read that much of it.)

Tags: #loki-zen, #crypto-social conservative blogging, #rape cw, #sexual assault cw

Post ID: 159959454244

Date: 2017-04-25 01:33:28 GMT

Body:

transgirlkyloren replied to your post: An interesting thing about redpill thought–and…

I think the idea that people self-select into rpw or feminism based on what best fulfills their needs is… very optimistic.

Oh yeah I definitely agree. But maybe it’s true of some people, me being sort of an example (not that I’m “in” RPW but that I’m more sympathetic toward their general mindset than feminism). And if not, it’s a cute idea, right?

Tags: #transgirlkyloren, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 159957863444

Date: 2017-04-25 00:41:26 GMT

Body: An interesting thing about redpill thought–and something its adherents would probably tell you distinguishes it from bluepill thought–is its focus on personal responsibility. Complaining about your husband on RPW is forbidden; your posts have to be about ways that you can improve as a partner. And I think if you commented on a PUA blog that the reason you can’t get laid is because women are bitches you’d get laughed at: regardless of whether women are bitches, the reason you can’t get laid is because you aren’t trying hard enough.

I think that mindset is part of what I find appealing about these communities. I’ve had several frustrating conversations with social justice-minded friends/acquaintances that go something like this:

me: *shares a problem I’ve been experiencing at school or work*

them: oh wow. clearly your classmates/boss/colleagues/industry is/are incredibly sexist. I’m so sorry you have to deal with that!

me: uh actually, I don’t really think that’s the issue here? I think that there are some ways I can grow as a person and I’m trying to figure out how to do that–

them: don’t blame yourself honey! this is structural oppression!!

And obviously, the “you are responsible for your own life” and “your problems are other people’s fault” narratives are both right sometimes. I think the response above would be correct if, say, I were experiencing workplace sexual harassment. Sometimes keeping a positive attitude toward your husband and becoming less demanding and more pleasant to be around is exactly what you need to make your marriage work, and sometimes he’s just an asshole and you need to dump him.

So what divides those attracted to the narrative of personal responsibility from those attracted to the blame-others narrative? Well uh, just speaking for myself, I’m an extremely privileged person. If it’s true of anyone, it’s probably true of me that most of my problems are kind of “my fault,” rather than the result of unavoidable external circumstances. And I’d guess based on any SJ-approved metric of privilege, the people in redpill communities are more privileged than those in SJ communities–in other words, the people for whom the personal responsibility narrative is most accurate/helpful.

(Of course, I’m sure both sides would object strongly to being characterized as coexisting communities for competing access needs. Either sexism isn’t real and those who claim to be held back by it are brainwashed, or all women are oppressed by sexism and those who claim otherwise are brainwashed.)

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging, #culture war cw, #pua cw, #slurs cw, #sorry I know the last sentence is uncharitable to both sides

Post ID: 159886628224

Date: 2017-04-23 04:06:29 GMT

Body: There are certainly a lot of criticisms I could make about this article.

But the one that stands out is that after reading it I went and read through a bunch of RPW threads and wow that subreddit is really … normal? The article characterizes it as

“Reddit’s most infamous MRA community” (… wait what about … r/MensRights?)
“chamber of bigoted secrets”
“violently misogynistic”
“hateful discussion”

but the stuff I read really just reminded me of, like, a million conversations I’ve had with other girls. “I just started a new job and guys keep hitting on me, how do I react?” “He says his best friend is a girl … is that weird?” “I got rejected by my crush and now no man will ever love me again!” It’s … well, not exactly Sex and the City, but Sex and the City if all the characters were Charlotte. Yet somehow, this is a subversive and reactionary fringe political group.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging, #culture war cw

Post ID: 159285896134

Date: 2017-04-07 02:05:57 GMT

Body: I don’t enjoy aspartame,
A mere Diet Coke’s
Little more than a joke
So tell me, why should it be true,
That I’ve found a superstimulus in you.

Some like to play video games,
I’m sure that if I
Were to give them a try
They would bore me terrifically, too,
Yet I’ve found a superstimulus in you.

I thought my reward system hard to hack
Until the day I met you.
I guess the environment of evolutionary adaptedness failed to prepare me for this since
I can’t seem to forget you.

Some find porn a secret shame,
A vacuous scene
On a thirteen-inch screen
Is my idea of nothing to do,
But I’ve found a superstimulus in you.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 159284426284

Date: 2017-04-07 01:15:49 GMT

Body:

A young girl undergoes a shocking and grotesque transformation from principled vegetarian to bloodthirsty cannibal in this flesh-focused (and some say surprisingly feminist) new film.

Tags: #out of context quotes

Post ID: 158725551744

Date: 2017-03-23 02:27:06 GMT

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 158534312109

Date: 2017-03-18 03:21:34 GMT

Reblogging: dot-garden-deactivated20181212

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 158376272344

Date: 2017-03-14 02:03:37 GMT

Body:

whatthefuckisramseytheory replied to your post: tip: confuse your nonrationalist friends by being…

given up on that whole maximal altruism thing eh. good on you. the world needs more abject callousness.

Sorry, I haven’t actually given up on altruism. I don’t think occasionally annoying your friends by playing the devil’s advocate for Trump is incompatible with altruistic goals?

uhhhh if I were @theunitofcaring I would write a long and stirring essay here about how compassion and helping others is good but instead I will just say that I disagree vehemently with the claim that “the world needs more abject callousness”

Tags: #whatthefuckisramseytheory, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren, #scrupulosity cw

Post ID: 158374662434

Date: 2017-03-14 01:15:33 GMT

Body: what she says: i’m fine

what she means: taylor swift traditionally releases new albums in the fall (specifically october for every album except fearless) every other year. fall 2016 came and went and nothing. do you think ed sheeran’s comment implying she would release an album this year had any basis in fact. what about when gigi hadid said that she was in the studio in september. is it going to be a surprise album release. she’s been through so much this year with calvin harris and tom hiddleston i hope she’s okay what if she has writer’s block

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 158374205434

Date: 2017-03-14 01:01:31 GMT

Body: Some considerations on boycotting Uber.

1. We already have a couple ways to ensure that companies treat their workers well. Probably the most important one is the job market: if companies treat their workers badly, the workers will find different jobs. (Like, on the one hand it’s horrifying that the percentage of women in SRE apparently went from over 25% to 3% while Susan Fowler was there … but also like, that is how it’s supposed to work? If a company is a bad environment for women, women will leave and find somewhere better.) And in addition to the market, we have laws: things like minimum wage and discrimination/sexual harassment laws.

Whereas we really only have one mechanism for ensuring that companies provide services efficiently and thus create consumer surplus, and that’s consumer decisions. If consumers are mostly making decisions based on things other than consumer surplus that seems bad.

2. The process of boycotting companies because posts about them went viral among your facebook friends is … fraught. It would be one thing to boycott companies systematically if they have labor practices that are worse than some threshold, but of course that’s impossibly hard and no one’s going to do that.

And there are reasons that you read Susan Fowler’s post in particular.

For one, Uber hires women. If they simply hired very few women and had never hired Susan Fowler, some people would look at the statistics and be annoyed, but a statistic can’t go viral in the same way.

For another, Uber wasn’t trying to screen out women for how outspoken they were or how willing they were to stand up to injustice. Or if they were, they were doing a pretty shitty job.

And of course, the person who was hurt could have easily been your friend. She’s a white woman who went to Stanford and works at Stripe and likes Ted Chiang and hiking and the philosophy of physics. Stories from people like that are always going to have more influence on you than they should.

3. If you think about it, you probably have some opinion on the effects of Uber’s success or failure on the future of the world. Maybe you think that a rideshare monopoly would be really bad, so you hope Lyft and other rivals start doing better in comparison. Or maybe you think the network effects of a single universal rideshare company would be really valuable. Maybe you think that the future of self-driving cars will look better if Google gets there before Uber, or the other way around.

There are … apparently five women in Uber SRE? Maybe there are 100 female engineers in the company? Even if your opinion on the above questions is really weak, it’s still going to outweigh whatever effect Uber’s work environment has on its female employees. If you want your patronage of the company to depend on the good it does for people besides you, think about all of the people.

(I feel kind of apologetic about writing on this topic–it’s somehow not want I want the aesthetic of my blog to be. But I ended up in a dinner party conversation about this with @mens-et and some other people last night. So here you go.)

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 157995677354

Date: 2017-03-04 21:08:25 GMT

Body: Cathy O’Neil is worried about insurers using data to predict patients’ health outcomes. She writes in Bloomberg View that “if we’re not careful, pretty soon it’ll be almost like there’s no insurance at all.”

I feel like this reflects kind of a weird view about the purpose of insurance.

Why do I have, say, flood insurance on my house? Let’s say there’s a 1% chance that my house gets destroyed in a flood, and my house is worth a million dollars. In a world without insurance, I have to save all the money I possibly can in order to be prepared for this potential cost, and even if I do I still probably won’t have saved enough and I’ll end up bankrupt or something. With insurance, I can just pay the $10,000 and not worry about it again.

The insurance is necessary because of our uncertainty: no one can predict exactly when and where floods will happen. It’s not about making everyone share the risks of floods. It would be ridiculous to suggest that it’s only fair that someone in Iowa pay the same for flood insurance as someone in Florida. The person in Florida should internalize the costs of the extra risks they’re taking.

And like, if we somehow got better at predicting floods, that would be great, right? Sure, it would make some people’s insurance more expensive. But it would make others’ cheaper. And it would allow everyone to better account for the cost of floods when thinking about the tradeoffs of different houses.

Substitute cancer or heart disease for floods. What makes that situation different?

I guess one thing people would say is that where you live is your choice, while your health outcomes aren’t. But I don’t think that’s super clear. You can do lots of things (exercise, diet, sleep) to influence your health outcomes. And there are lots of reasons people might be constrained in their choice of where to live–job opportunities, family members who need caregiving, whatever.

I think that what Cathy O'Neil really wants is socialized medicine. She thinks it’s unfair that people with worse health have to pay more for healthcare, and the government should just pay for everyone’s health care out of progressive taxes or whatever. And sure, it is unfair.

But what we have is a healthcare system based on private insurance. And I’m not sure how I feel about trying to make that more like socialized medicine by actively trying as a society to be as bad at making predictions about people’s health as possible.

Tags: #exercise cw

Post ID: 157461098364

Date: 2017-02-20 00:21:16 GMT

Body: tip: confuse your nonrationalist friends by being unusually frank about your motivations

“I mean, I do actually think Trump is bad, I just like annoying people by espousing contrarian political views.”

“I … uh … well, yeah, I had noticed that about you …”

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 157161709024

Date: 2017-02-12 21:36:04 GMT

Body: apparently my mom told my sister that I’m a “Trump apologist apologist”

Tags: #not wrong, #trump cw

Post ID: 156816184534

Date: 2017-02-04 22:26:25 GMT

Body: So I started reading More Money Than God and this is what I have learned about Alfred Jones, the first hedge fund manager:

While working as a diplomat in Weimar Germany, he fell in love with a twice-divorced communist and anti-Nazi activist and married her. He was fired as a result of this, but stayed in Germany to work secretly with the Leninist Organization. After a few months, they divorced, and Jones returned to America.
Back in America, he married again and spent his honeymoon on the front lines in Spain, where they drank scotch with Dorothy Parker and Hemingway.
After getting a PhD in sociology, he moved away from communism and became a journalist writing from a sort of centrist/liberal perspective. He described his views as “as conservative as possible in protecting the free market and as radical as necessary in securing the welfare of the people.”
He started a hedge fund because he needed money and had already failed twice to start a magazine. A lot of his capital came from a friend of his who was a biographer of Lenin.
He would keep his fund market-neutral by looking at the beta of stocks to the market when determining how much to buy or short. This was before the development of modern portfolio theory–also before computers, so he had to calculate all the betas by hand.
His tax lawyer came up with the 2-and-20 compensations scheme because he realized that if Jones took a share of the profits rather than a flat fee, that would be taxed at the capital gains rate. Instead of revealing his actual motivation, Jones told investors he took 20% of the profits in an homage to Phoenician merchants, who kept a fifth of the profits from successful voyages.
He was obsessed with the theory that Edward de Vere was the actual author of Shakespeare’s plays and named his poodle Edward.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 156742309829

Date: 2017-02-03 03:37:18 GMT

Body: so I started reading this historical romance novel I picked up off the 25-cent shelf at a thrift store without so much as reading the description

and at one point the hero is handed a crying baby and his first instinct is to start telling her about the history of the NYSE

like, this is creepily relevant to my interests

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 156609967544

Date: 2017-01-31 03:39:17 GMT

Body: I was thinking about something measuringshadows said the other day about cleaning. Basically he was complaining that people assign moral valence to things like cleaning and cooking for yourself, even though there’s not really any good reason to do so.

And yeah, it’s certainly true that if you are a person who does not like cooking and cleaning but has other valuable skills, you can pay people to clean and cook for you, and this is a positive-sum trade and exchange and specialization are what make the economy work and stuff.

And yet. I do the thing. I think that I am a person who gets fulfillment from keeping my apartment clean and cooking good things for myself, and the economist/rationalist/whatever way of looking at this bothers me, because obviously in an objective market-value sense, these things don’t compare to the work I do at my job. So I have to assign this extra intangible moral value to them, to hold on to that sense of fulfillment.

(I hold these sorts of intuitions in a totally inconsistent and self-serving way.

“You hired someone to come to your apartment and replace your lightbulb?”

“Just think about how valuable my time is! Exchange and specialization!”)

Tags: #cleaning cw, #(I feel like this is a Competing Access Needs post but idk how to content warn it), #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 156543583399

Date: 2017-01-29 19:10:14 GMT

Body:

Until this past week, the order was led by the conservative and elaborately titled His Most Eminent Highness the Prince and Grand Master of the Order of Malta, Matthew Festing of Britain, a former Sotheby’s representative who had taken a monastic oath.
Long-building tensions between Mr. Festing and the order’s Grand Chancellor Albrecht von Boeselager of Germany, whose father participated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, escalated in recent months amid accusations that Mr. Boeselager had knowingly overseen the distribution of condoms as head of the order’s charitable arm.

this whole article is great

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 156543244189

Date: 2017-01-29 19:01:41 GMT

Body: sure, Rodrigo Duterte is problematic, but did you know: he recently signed an executive order calling for free contraception for everyone in the Philippines, as well as mandating access to reproductive health services and requiring schools to teach sex ed

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 156380578389

Date: 2017-01-26 02:33:42 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Question: Do you think it's justified to try and keep trans men out of women's spaces? Like not letting them enroll at women's colleges or join sororieties?

Answer:

Confession: I don’t actually understand the appeal of women’s spaces. I personally feel extremely uncomfortable in them and have avoided them as often as I can; when I am unable to avoid them I have still not had any experiences that clarified what people got out of them. I know that people are different, and I can guess from how much fighting over access to women’s spaces is going on all the time that they clearly do fill a need for lots of people, but I am a bad person to figure out how that need can be met because I don’t have it.
That said, transition is very hard even without immediately losing your whole social circle. Lots of people don’t figure out they’re trans until college, and lots of those people have unsafe home environments where it would suck to be stuck if they were disenrolled from college. I think at this least it is harmful to force people to transfer colleges when transitioning. (Not accepting trans men in the first place makes perfect sense to me and I am also confused about why trans men would want to go to an all-women’s college.)
But really the answer here is, like with the endless debates over who counts as LGBT enough for LGBT spaces, what the space is supposed to achieve. If you go with ‘women’s spaces’ as ‘spaces for people who are or have been mistreated because of misogyny’, they best fulfill their purpose by letting some nonwomen in; if you think ‘women’s spaces’ are ‘spaces for people who want to be doing womanhood as a social role in a way that makes them happy, and need communities dedicated to that project’ then obviously trans men and nonbinary people don’t belong; if you think ‘women’s spaces’ are mostly for ‘spaces in which people can expect to experience a lower rate of gender-related behavior that is unpleasant for them or contextually inappropriate to the work happening in the group and more common among men’ then you probably want to boot people for the specific unpleasant behavior.

Oh man, the last paragraph really gets at all my feelings about women’s spaces.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a push by women’s spaces to rebrand themselves as “women and nonbinary” spaces or even “women and trans people” spaces. In the women’s spaces that I was in, no one seemed to question this at all, even though it seemed totally nonobvious to me that women’s spaces should include nonbinaries (and especially trans men). I realized that other people were conceiving of them as thing 1 (spaces for people who are or have been mistreated by misogyny), while I wanted them to be thing 2 (spaces for people who want to be doing womanhood as a social role in a way that makes them happy, and need communities dedicated to that project).

My theory is that all spaces that are explicitly “women’s spaces” eventually converge to thing 1, unless they are literally /r/RedPillWomen or something. You’d think that if you were a woman who liked a thing that was mostly liked by men, you could find a group of women who also liked Thing, and all hang out and chat about Thing together, maybe while getting your nails done, and without interrupting each other or getting into really combative arguments or making sports references or … but no, the laws of the universe apparently make this impossible.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 156015690929

Date: 2017-01-18 01:31:51 GMT

Reblogging: adzolotl

Body:

epistemic-horror:
ozymandias271:
Internet! If you have not already done so you must immediately pick up a copy of The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis!
You may have been PREVIOUSLY AWARE of the excellent psychological work of Mr. Kahneman and Mr. Tversky! What you were no doubt unaware of, because you have not read The Undoing Project, is that they are INCREDIBLY SLASHY.
seriously
I have yet to read ANY rpf pairing that was THIS incredibly, ridiculously, purely gay
the ending is just like… it is nicholas sparks shit. the canonical life of daniel kahneman and amos tversky was, in fact, a nicholas sparks novel. I am not gonna spoil it for y’all but I literally said OH COME ON to my computer screen
@worldoptimization you were right about michael lewis writing straight up slashfic
wait has he written OTHER straightup slashfic
or is this his one excusion into the field

no, that was just my characterization of The Undoing Project after reading an excerpt a few months ago

there are depressingly few good pairings in other Michael Lewis books, now that I think about it. if there were actually any high-frequency traders in Flash Boys I would probably ship them with Brad Katsuyama but uh

Tags: #behavioral economics is reactionary propaganda, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 155923706354

Date: 2017-01-16 02:00:14 GMT

Question: Actually, wait: I know *two* people who are closeted on Tumblr.

Answer: Yeah, fair. I can certainly imagine reasons people might be closeted on tumblr; I do think that, if you know me, it is kind of implausible that I would claim to be straight on tumblr but happily reveal the truth when casually asked irl.

Post ID: 155914335139

Date: 2017-01-15 22:05:52 GMT

Body: question I was asked yesterday: “it says you’re straight on your tumblr, is that true?”

“are you asking … if I’m lying … about the fact that I’m not straight … on tumblr?”

Tags: #apologies to all the people who are closeted on tumblr, #and want to angrily reblog this but can't because they're closeted on tumblr, #personal

Post ID: 155313606249

Date: 2017-01-02 22:11:25 GMT

Reblogging: slatestarscratchpad

Question: How do I make my eyes stop watering in public from anxiety? I've tried Zoloft and Wellbutrin, but they don't work.

Answer:

I hadn’t heard of eyes watering in particular, but if you have some kind of agoraphobia or social anxiety or something, look into exposure-based therapies.

My eyes water in public from social anxiety! I don’t have anything to help the eye watering in particular, but helping the anxiety helps the watering, so yeah, exposure therapy.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 155134355044

Date: 2016-12-29 22:19:26 GMT

Question: Do you have updated donation thoughts? I'm curious to read them

Answer: Yep! This year, I decided to give most of my donations ($15,000) to the Good Food Institute (reviews here, here).

I mostly thought about animal charities. My reasoning for this was

Even if you value animals only a tiny fraction as much as humans, animal charities still look way more cost-effective than Givewell top charities.
It’s true the effects of animal charities are pretty uncertain. But I think there are a lot of reasons to be uncertain about Givewell top charities too. Decreasing poverty is great in the short term, but it also causes people to eat more meat, contribute more to climate change, etc.
I find it really hard to evaluate existential risk charities: when I think about them it involves a lot of speculative arguments and generally comes down to “do I trust this guy or this guy more?”

Within the space of animal charities, I think the most effective interventions are corporate campaigns and supporting ethical meat alternatives. Between these two, it seems like the latter maybe has more room for funding given how much money Open Phil has given to cage-free advocacy in the past year. (They’ve also given a grant to GFI, but have given much more to cage-free advocacy stuff.)

Something that I found helpful while thinking about all of this was playing around with this app. The numbers certainly shouldn’t be taken too literally, but it can give you a good sense of how your opinion on different questions can change the EV of donations to different charities.

I also made a small donation ($1000) to SCI. I wanted to have a donation this year that’s easier to talk about with non-EAs who might be freaked out if I start talking about animal charities. And I do think Givewell does really good work with their top charity research and SCI is doing valuable things.

Post ID: 154788396749

Date: 2016-12-22 03:07:42 GMT

Body: Yesterday I was praised for being woke? Which is if nothing else, I feel like kind of concerning from a social justice perspective?

Like. Being a rich white girl with a high verbal IQ who is good at knowing what words to use and when to use them should not be enough to make you woke. And in particular, if you think I am more woke than the entire population of Sacramento, I think that your conception of wokeness is probably rooted in ableism and/or classism.

I could have said this at the time, but I realized that saying it would only make me sound more woke, which would undermine the point that I was trying to make, so

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 154649629379

Date: 2016-12-18 22:39:57 GMT

Body: Some notes I made about donations this year: I’ll flesh these out more later but just posting basic thoughts now.

Options:

donate to Givewell top charities

probably AMF and/or SCI, since those are the ones Givewell recommends based on effectiveness of current funding gaps
SCI is nice because it doesn’t depend on the value of saving children’s lives
cons: Givewell top charities are obviously not nearly as cost-effective as other things could potentially be
also unsure about flow-through effects and far future

donate to Open Phil

not actually an option this year
just putting it down because I suspect I’ll be excited about it when it actually becomes possible

donate to animal welfare stuff

ACE recommended charities are MFA, THL, GFI

not sure about MFA and THL
seems like Open Phil is putting a ton of funding into corporate campaigns
and I’m not that excited about leafleting and stuff
GFI seems promising, review here

donate to xrisk stuff

not sure if there are any xrisk charities whose effectiveness I feel good about

donate to metacharities

potentially good area because Open Phil might be less likely to fund these
should think about ACE and REG
other good metacharities?

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 154400795534

Date: 2016-12-13 01:48:19 GMT

Reblogging: type12error

Body:

type12error:

worldoptimization:
Rideshare apps benefit hugely from network effects. All the drivers want to be on the app with the most passengers, and all the passengers want to be on the app with the most drivers. If Uber is the most popular, everyone will want to use Uber, and this will naturally lead to a monopoly. This is pretty bad–once Uber is a monopoly, it can take huge cuts of drivers’ revenue, let its app get slower and slower, fail to introduce new innovations, but the network effects will make it really hard for a new, better rideshare app to succeed. So this seems like a case in which government intervention in the rideshare market might be justified.
For instance, we could make a list of Official Government-Sponsored Rideshare Services, and pass a law saying that for any ride you want to take, you are required to use the rideshare service that gives you the lowest price for that ride. This kind of makes sense, right? It helps the smaller rideshare services and keeps any of them from becoming a monopoly. And price is really the main thing you care about when getting a ride. No one really cares if your car has a pink mustache on it. (Does Lyft even still do that?)
Imagine if that’s what we did.
Rideshare services would proliferate, and in the name of fairness, the government would sanction them all. Let’s say there are 13. You’d need 13 apps on your phone, and you’d need to look at them all every time you wanted to go somewhere. Oh, of course you could use the official consolidated rideshare app, which shows you prices from all 13 companies. But unsurprisingly, it’s kind of slow and shitty, and none of the serious rideshare customers use it.
All the services start charging monthly subscription fees for their apps, and you pay the fees grudgingly, because hey, if you need a car right now you need to know what the prices on all 13 apps are. In some sense each of them is now its own monopoly: Uber is the only one (besides I guess the official consolidated app) you can get Uber prices from.
All the apps have different speeds: a lot of the time you’ll try to get a ride on whichever one looks like it has the best price, and after loading for a few seconds it will inform you that nope, that driver has already accepted a ride with someone else.
To further incentivize competition, the government decides to pay rideshare services based on the percentage of time they have the best price for any given ride. Midwest, generally considered the sketchiest rideshare service and known for their dedication to making money without ever actually giving anyone a ride, loves this rule. They propose a change to their matching algorithm that allows drivers who offer rides on Midwest a last chance to decide, once someone accepts their ride, whether they actually want to give that person a ride or not. They say this rule will be good for drivers and protect them from unscrupulous customers. You suspect they just want drivers to offer prices that are too good to be true and cancel whenever anyone actually accepts a ride, in order to increase the amount of money they get from the government for having the best prices.
All I’m saying is, US equity market structure is weird.
Is this an allegory for something?

Yeah, it’s an analogy for the US stock market. The apps correspond to stock exchanges, the “law saying that for any ride you want to take, you are required to use the rideshare service that gives you the lowest price” corresponds to the Reg NMS Order Protection Rule, the official consolidated rideshare app corresponds to the SIP, etc.

(Normally I would try to provide helpful links in this sort of post, but everything I know about this stuff was passed down to me through oral tradition. You can try googling things if you want to know more, I guess.)

Tags: #explaining the joke cw, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 154341007689

Date: 2016-12-11 19:34:23 GMT

Question: Are you going to the NYC rationalist solstice?

Answer: Yep! Please say hi to me if you want; if you haven’t met me before, the top of my head looks like my avatar I guess.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 154311292999

Date: 2016-12-11 01:59:47 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

Random political opinion of the day, arrived at after five minutes of consideration: I think Common Core is stupid.
There seems to be this assumption behind it that it is bad if public schools in Alabama have less demanding standards than those in Massachusetts? But this seems obviously good. Schools in Massachusetts should teach more than schools in Alabama: since students in Massachusetts are on average smarter, the optimal curricula for the two states are different.
My friend is an elementary school teacher in an underprivileged area and she has this absurdly detailed list of things she has no choice but to teach, even if the students are still struggling with one-digit subtraction and have no business learning about the distributive property. But she can’t just go back and spend two weeks reviewing subtraction, because … we have to demand a lot of students? And this will somehow resolve the problems that different students (and, on average, different groups of students) learn at different paces?

@light-rook

Isn’t the point that the reason MS schools are smarter on average is because the curriculum is more rigorous?

I agree that people think that, but I disagree with the claim itself: I think Massachusetts just has a very different population of students from Alabama.

@epistemic-horror

My understanding is that Common Core was supposed to solve two problems: make sure that students who move states will have roughly the same knowledge base as their peers, and increase the value of a high school diploma by ensuring that it represents mastery of a set of rigorous standards.
So there are real reasons to be concerned about different standards in different places; it’s not just a basic assumption. If schools in Massachusetts teach the distributive property in second grade and schools in Rhode Island teach it in third grade, then a kid moving from Providence to Quincy could fall through the cracks. And if you can graduate from high school in Alabama without ever learning long division, someone with an Alabama high school diploma is gonna suffer on the job market.
I can think of a few ways to negate the second problem (like overturning Griggs). But I’m not sure what you can do to solve the first problem other than a set of common standards.
Also, in terms of ludicrously unrealistic expectations for education policy, this has nothing on No Child Left Behind’s stipulation that every student in the country should achieve a “proficient” level on statewide standardized tests by 2014.

Those both seem like reasonable justifications to me, just not very important ones? In the course of going to four different elementary schools in six years, I managed to learn about Native Americans in social studies for three years in a row, while never learning long division. But like, I was fine. (I learned long division on my own.) And what percentage of students ever move states? It seems like not a compelling enough reason to make every school in the country teach the exact same curriculum.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 154294344719

Date: 2016-12-10 18:04:35 GMT

Body: Rideshare apps benefit hugely from network effects. All the drivers want to be on the app with the most passengers, and all the passengers want to be on the app with the most drivers. If Uber is the most popular, everyone will want to use Uber, and this will naturally lead to a monopoly. This is pretty bad–once Uber is a monopoly, it can take huge cuts of drivers’ revenue, let its app get slower and slower, fail to introduce new innovations, but the network effects will make it really hard for a new, better rideshare app to succeed. So this seems like a case in which government intervention in the rideshare market might be justified.

For instance, we could make a list of Official Government-Sponsored Rideshare Services, and pass a law saying that for any ride you want to take, you are required to use the rideshare service that gives you the lowest price for that ride. This kind of makes sense, right? It helps the smaller rideshare services and keeps any of them from becoming a monopoly. And price is really the main thing you care about when getting a ride. No one really cares if your car has a pink mustache on it. (Does Lyft even still do that?)

Imagine if that’s what we did.

Rideshare services would proliferate, and in the name of fairness, the government would sanction them all. Let’s say there are 13. You’d need 13 apps on your phone, and you’d need to look at them all every time you wanted to go somewhere. Oh, of course you could use the official consolidated rideshare app, which shows you prices from all 13 companies. But unsurprisingly, it’s kind of slow and shitty, and none of the serious rideshare customers use it.

All the services start charging monthly subscription fees for their apps, and you pay the fees grudgingly, because hey, if you need a car right now you need to know what the prices on all 13 apps are. In some sense each of them is now its own monopoly: Uber is the only one (besides I guess the official consolidated app) you can get Uber prices from.

All the apps have different speeds: a lot of the time you’ll try to get a ride on whichever one looks like it has the best price, and after loading for a few seconds it will inform you that nope, that driver has already accepted a ride with someone else.

To further incentivize competition, the government decides to pay rideshare services based on the percentage of time they have the best price for any given ride. Midwest, generally considered the sketchiest rideshare service and known for their dedication to making money without ever actually giving anyone a ride, loves this rule. They propose a change to their matching algorithm that allows drivers who offer rides on Midwest a last chance to decide, once someone accepts their ride, whether they actually want to give that person a ride or not. They say this rule will be good for drivers and protect them from unscrupulous customers. You suspect they just want drivers to offer prices that are too good to be true and cancel whenever anyone actually accepts a ride, in order to increase the amount of money they get from the government for having the best prices.

All I’m saying is, US equity market structure is weird.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 154290576659

Date: 2016-12-10 16:11:23 GMT

Body: Random political opinion of the day, arrived at after five minutes of consideration: I think Common Core is stupid.

There seems to be this assumption behind it that it is bad if public schools in Alabama have less demanding standards than those in Massachusetts? But this seems obviously good. Schools in Massachusetts should teach more than schools in Alabama: since students in Massachusetts are on average smarter, the optimal curricula for the two states are different.

My friend is an elementary school teacher in an underprivileged area and she has this absurdly detailed list of things she has no choice but to teach, even if the students are still struggling with one-digit subtraction and have no business learning about the distributive property. But she can’t just go back and spend two weeks reviewing subtraction, because … we have to demand a lot of students? And this will somehow resolve the problems that different students (and, on average, different groups of students) learn at different paces?

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 154269214854

Date: 2016-12-10 02:10:37 GMT

Body: I feel like this is kind of a weird post for me to make but I just want to say that I think appreciating women is good.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately being one of a few women in a group of mostly guys, and I’ve noticed that like, a really large amount of the stuff that gets done in order for people to hang out and have fun is done by the women. Women are more likely to plan social events, make reservations, get groceries, cook food, clean up afterwards, et cetera.

And I don’t necessarily think the fact that this work is disproportionately done by women is a bad thing. But I do think it’s good and important work, and you should appreciate the women who do it. Thank them. Compliment their cooking. Do anything that makes it clear that you noticed.

And I’m hanging out with 22-year-olds, but I think this dynamic gets even stronger once women start to have kids and drop out of the workforce. When you have a job, you get the unmistakable signal that you are appreciated in the form of a paycheck. When you are doing housework and taking care of kids, all you have is your husband and children’s gratitude. Husbands and children can be kind of oblivious to this. And I don’t think the thing over the last fifty years where society decided to value traditionally feminine work less has helped.

So yeah, there’s my feminist praxis of the day. I have actively been trying to do this, and while I have no idea if it helps the women I thank/compliment, it makes me feel better.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 154060289749

Date: 2016-12-05 03:44:23 GMT

Body: tfw the only political position you’ve expressed to someone is that you think women should be relegated to the domestic sphere and they tell you “you seem pretty liberal”

Tags: #I mean, #not wrong, #I just think it's funny how strong that default assumption is, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 153387794189

Date: 2016-11-19 16:26:34 GMT

Body: I have mixed feelings about this article.

On the one hand, I think it is true that “companies have higher expected future profits” is not the same thing as “the economy is better” (whatever that means exactly) and that is good to remember post-election.

But I think the example of Wells Fargo opening fake accounts is a bad one to illustrate this. Wells Fargo made like two million dollars from fake accounts. It was fined 185 million, plus had to fire and replace all the employees who opened fake accounts, plus had to replace its CEO, plus took a huge reputational hit causing new account openings to be down 44%. The fake account thing was not good for Wells Fargo’s profits but bad for consumers, it was terrible for Wells Fargo’s profits.

And actually thinking about this example makes me kind of doubt what I said in the first paragraph, and wonder to what extent “good for companies’ profits” and “good for consumers” converge to the same thing in the long term. If Trump slashes corporate taxes and as a result needs to make huge cuts to social services, in the short term that seems good for companies’ profits and bad for consumers. But in the longer term, you could imagine companies having more money to spend and thus hiring people and stimulating the economy, or consumers having less money to spend and so companies’ profits decrease.

(The epistemic status of the previous paragraph is very uncertain. It just disturbs me that he couldn’t come up with a better example than Wells Fargo.)

Anyway, then the article goes into behavioral finance and gives two examples of people buying the wrong ticker right after news. But like. “People buy the wrong ticker sometimes” is very different from “the entire market is systematically wrong about the fundamentals of the US economy.”

I kind of think if you want to claim the markets are being irrational in some specific case, you have to give an explanation why, and you have to be willing to bet against them. The article doesn’t give any specific bias, it just says that like, people can be biased. Which is true. But isn’t really a reason to assume that the market is wrong in any specific case.

The wrong ticker going up on news is a thing that happens sometimes, because markets aren’t perfectly efficient. And when it does, I am so happy to sell it. And I have! (Well not literally me. The guy sitting next to me was the one entering the orders.) I agree that the markets’ reaction to Trump’s victory was … weird. But I haven’t sold any of my S&P 500 index fund shares.

Tags: #trump cw, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 153019051884

Date: 2016-11-11 02:02:42 GMT

Reblogging: kelsey-likes

Body:

pistachi0n:

Last week, all of us grad students had to go see a presentation by the university’s Title IX officer on “appropriate interactions with the undergrads.” Okay, whatever.
She posed a number of ostensibly open-ended scenarios to us. The one she asked me: “suppose an undergrad in your lab is crying. You ask her what’s wrong, and she says she doesn’t want to talk about it.” I said I’d respect that she doesn’t want to talk about it and leave her alone. Oops. Wrong answer.
My second guess, “uh…I tell her she can come to me if she decides she wants to talk about it?” was also incorrect.
I am supposed to report the distressed person to the proper authorities. The presentation was centered on reporting sexual assault, but the Title IX officer said that whatever might be wrong–bad grades, interpersonal drama–there are “resources to deal with that.” I (and a few other people) argued that it’s a violation of boundaries to pry and meddle into someone’s personal life, but the Title IX officer said that no, we were incorrect, someone might not be capable of making rational decisions and really, if we alerted the authorities, it would be better for everyone in the end.
I wanted to ask “so we agree that no means no when we’re talking about sex–why doesn’t no mean no when we’re talking about sharing feelings?”
This was under the guise of “creating a safe environment,” but how can anyone feel “safe” in an environment where any visible display of negative emotion must be reported to the Distressed Person Police? What does “safe” even mean?

wow this is kind of horrifying

I mean if crying in public sometimes is a sign of being incapable of making rational decisions … then I guess I have spent my entire life being incapable of making rational decisions?

(trying to imagine how the conversation would go if I were actually Reported to the Relevant Authorities for this … “sorry, I just remembered this really sad line from a Jennifer Egan story I read the other day”? “sorry, I just started thinking about assembling IKEA furniture”?)

(also this entire thing is totally discriminatory against people with estrogen dominant hormone systems)

Tags: #not sj go away, #... I guess

Post ID: 152578649194

Date: 2016-11-01 01:34:59 GMT

Reblogging: moral-autism

Tags: #not sj go away, #culture war cw

Post ID: 152576639579

Date: 2016-11-01 00:36:15 GMT

Body:

If he cared about free speech more than he cared about being outed (hint: not a surprise) as a faggot, I might start admitting that he might be some percentage human.

let’s play “Red Tribe Conservative or SJW”

Tags: #I'm pretty sure this person is an SJW?, #looking at their facebook profile, #but like, #I feel like in any context besides Peter Thiel there would be no chance of that, #culture war cw

Post ID: 151634869999

Date: 2016-10-11 00:22:54 GMT

Body: man I loved Too Like the Lightning but I also had this weird feeling throughout like it was somehow … too good to be true?

like, obviously the ideal novel would consist mainly of worldbuilding and meetings of extremely important people

and be set in a future society where world politics is controlled by an eighteenth-century larping society that rebels against the mainstream gender abolitionist culture by practicing extreme traditional gender roles

but I kept feeling like novels shouldn’t actually be like that, because that would be just too self-indulgent? and this nagging feeling was strong enough to actually detract a bit from my enjoyment in reading the book

Tags: #too like the lightning spoilers

Post ID: 151314957004

Date: 2016-10-04 01:37:04 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

The other day I learned about the nominal share price puzzle. Like, since the Great Depression the price of pretty much everything has changed dramatically. Except stocks! Stocks cost exactly the same. The average share of stock cost $35 then and it costs $35 now.
And like, the stock market has gone up so much since then! If you bought a share of GE for $38 in 1935 it would be worth like $10,000 now. Except it wouldn’t, because GE has split their stock a ton of times so you would actually just own a whole lot of shares that are worth $30 each.
Why do they do this? It costs GE money in administrative costs. It costs shareholders money in trading costs. And it doesn’t have to be this way: Japan and the UK both have totally non-constant nominal share prices.
The authors of this paper suggest one reason could be to market to individual investors. But if that were the case why wouldn’t share prices at least keep up with inflation? And this hypothesis would also predict that as stocks have become mostly held by institutions rather than individuals, the effect would diminish, but it hasn’t.
Another fun theory is that when stock prices are low relative tick sizes are high, so companies keep their prices low to compensate market makers for providing liquidity in their stock. But that would predict that stock prices would change when tick size changed in 1997, and they didn’t. And do executives at GE really lie awake at night worrying that if their share price goes above $100 no one will provide liquidity in their stock anymore?
The authors end up concluding that there’s no good economic explanation and everyone does it because, uh, it’s what everyone does. It was kind of unsatisfying.

Update to this post: there is in fact a reasonable economic explanation!

Matt Levine:

If you bid $10 per share for 100 shares of a stock on a national stock exchange, then your bid is “protected”: Under the rules of the national market system, no one is supposed to sell shares to someone else at a lower price without selling to you at $10 first. But “odd lots” of fewer than 100 shares are not protected: If you bid $10 per share for 99 shares, and the highest bid for 100 shares is $9.99, then people can sell 100 shares – or 99 shares – at $9.99 and ignore your bid. (It seems like it would be irrational for them to do that, but in practice this means that a wholesaler can buy from a retail customer off the exchange at $9.99 instead of at your best-in-the-market $10 price.) Lower stock prices, the theory went, encourage more round lots, which means that more trades will take place at the “real” best bid or offer, and fewer will take place at worse prices that bypass odd-lot best bids or offers.

And this recent paper (link) shows that there are plenty of cases where people trade through odd lots. It doesn’t really explain the whole since-the-Great-Depression thing, since Reg NMS has only been around since 2005, but it does give a good reason you might consider splitting your stock today.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 150009301824

Date: 2016-09-06 01:59:42 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

serkentsi-deactivated20180207:

Against The Drowning Child Argument
There is an argument commonly known as the Drowning Child Argument, which goes something as follows: Imagine that you’re walking across a shallow pond and you notice that a small child has fallen in, and is in danger of drowning…Of course, you think you must rush in to save the child. Then you remember that you’re wearing your favorite, quite expensive, pair of shoes and they’ll get ruined if you…
View On WordPress

It is kind of annoying for the drowning child thought experiment that most people don’t have $3500 shoes. (I sometimes ask people to imagine they’re going to ruin their most expensive suit, or dress–for a lot of people this is pretty expensive.) But I feel like the important function of the thought experiment is

establish that people have an intuition that it is obligatory to save the life of a person dying in front of you, even at nontrivial cost to yourself
ask why that intuition doesn’t extend to cases where the person is somewhere else and you can’t actually see them

Why do most people who say “yes you should save the child” not donate at least 10% of their income to effective charities? If it turns out most people don’t actually think it’s obligatory to save the drowning child when you specify that it is a person of their income, wearing $3500 shoes for some reason, then that seems like an important flaw in the thought experiment. But I would guess the reason for most people is that kids saved by AMF are far away and don’t really seem real compared to the kid right in front of you.

Weirdly, “spend a month of every year going on quests to save children” sounds way more demanding and daunting to me than “give 10% of your income.”

Tags: #ursae don't look, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 150007315484

Date: 2016-09-06 01:10:52 GMT

Body: so I have these family friends who have kids, a fifteen-year-old and a seven-year-old, and they are both completely obsessed with Hamilton

and the fifteen-year-old was telling me that he posted a video of the seven-year-old doing one of the Cabinet Battle raps on Instagram and tagged Daveed

and Daveed liked the video! and even commented “looking great, sounding great”

and I was like that’s amazing!!

and he sheepishly told me that actually, he had deleted the video from Instagram. because there is a clique in his high school called, literally, the Hamilton Hate Squad. and they wield enough social power that he had to erase all evidence of his liking Hamilton from any social media

Tags: #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 149059391234

Date: 2016-08-17 02:42:57 GMT

Reblogging: serkentsi-deactivated20180207

Question: aesthetic?

Answer:

the moment when dylan matthews stops stamping awkwardly on a human face as the intrusive thought flits into his brain that maybe he ought to at least remind himself of the existence of such things as trees and the sun

Tags: #personal, #testimonials

Post ID: 149016671944

Date: 2016-08-16 04:56:10 GMT

Body: I always feel guilty about things like this fb thread I saw today, which was a bunch of men arguing about feminism (basically whether you should still identify as a feminist given the number of people who say bad stuff in the name of feminism) and then a woman commented with a bunch of criticism of all the comments and added “I also think it’s ironic that not a single woman has voiced her opinion on this post yet, and it’s a bunch of males shitting on feminism as a cause.”

and her comment got a bunch of likes and supportive comments

like I’m here … I’m a woman … I agree that Everyday Feminism is cancer … but I have absolutely zero interest in having angry fb friends-of-friends ask me why I hate women so much so you’re on your own, sorry dudes

Tags: #not sj go away, #culture war cw

Post ID: 148745283589

Date: 2016-08-10 16:42:22 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

I realized recently that at some point I associated “reading books” with “work/productive,” to the point where I will now only read books that I feel like I “should” read, either novels that are generally considered to have literary value or nonfiction books that seem like they will have useful/interesting information. The result of this is that I don’t read that many books, like on the order of 20 a year.
My reading habits in childhood were totally different from this. As a kid, I read constantly and paid no attention to the “value” of the books I was reading. I didn’t watch much TV, just because I preferred reading.
I was thinking about this when I was reading Cursed Child, realizing
even though it was pretty bad, I still felt very engaged/in a flow state, much more so than when watching pretty much any TV or reading tumblr/twitter/other internet stuff
I felt this way all the time when I was a kid
I should read bad books more often and make this more of a default leisure activity
My first experiment in this was reading Amy Snow, which I picked up in an airport bookstore because it had a picture of a girl in a Victorian dress on the cover.
Good points:
set in 19th century England
various secrets slowly uncovered throughout the book
easy to read and kept me turning pages–I definitely got that flow state I was looking for
Bad points:
bad prose
this distracted me enough that I had trouble enjoying it until I stopped reading every individual word and just tried to get the gist of every sentence
boring, one-dimensional characters
annoying projection of 21st century morality onto 19th century setting
I think one problem is that I’ve developed more taste in books since I was young. But it seems like it should be possible to find books that are easy to read and optimized for reading pleasure rather than literary value, but are still good. I feel like a large fraction of the books I read as a kid fell into this category, but I’m not sure what the equivalent books for adults are.

@princess-stargirl said: Neil Gaiman maybe?Amusingly I think his best written work is actually “The Graveyard Book” which is theoretically for children.

@dataandphilosophy said: You might like Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

@wirehead-wannabe said: Romance novels? Airport thrillers?

Thanks for the suggestions! It’s interesting that only one person actually suggested books intended for adults–maybe I should just read more kids’ and YA books.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 148716569404

Date: 2016-08-10 01:27:24 GMT

Body: I don’t really feel like I have an intrinsic “taste in art,” so today while at SFMOMA I tried to pay close attention to the art my system 1 liked.

Things I learned:

I like things where art is all around you. I saw a Sol LeWitt wall drawing in isolation and was like “eh.” Then I walked into a room where all the walls were Sol LeWitt drawings and I was delighted.
I like things that involve weird visual distortions. There was one thing involving strobe lights that made something look like molten metal. Also a poem written on a canvas with weird lines, which made it it physically hard to read the poem (my eyes started hurting) and made the poem look like it was shimmering before your eyes.
I like gold leaf. I already knew that I like medieval paintings with gold leaf, and 19th century paintings that have gold leaf because they’re playing off medieval painting styles. Then today

System 1: “look! I like that painting!”
System 2: “huh, I wonder why. it seems like typical abstract art, some primary colors, some shapes …”
“… it’s the gold leaf, isn’t it.”
System 2: “… yeah.”

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 148716029714

Date: 2016-08-10 01:14:01 GMT

Body: I realized recently that at some point I associated “reading books” with “work/productive,” to the point where I will now only read books that I feel like I “should” read, either novels that are generally considered to have literary value or nonfiction books that seem like they will have useful/interesting information. The result of this is that I don’t read that many books, like on the order of 20 a year.

My reading habits in childhood were totally different from this. As a kid, I read constantly and paid no attention to the “value” of the books I was reading. I didn’t watch much TV, just because I preferred reading.

I was thinking about this when I was reading Cursed Child, realizing

even though it was pretty bad, I still felt very engaged/in a flow state, much more so than when watching pretty much any TV or reading tumblr/twitter/other internet stuff
I felt this way all the time when I was a kid
I should read bad books more often and make this more of a default leisure activity

My first experiment in this was reading Amy Snow, which I picked up in an airport bookstore because it had a picture of a girl in a Victorian dress on the cover.

Good points:

set in 19th century England
various secrets slowly uncovered throughout the book
easy to read and kept me turning pages–I definitely got that flow state I was looking for

Bad points:

bad prose

this distracted me enough that I had trouble enjoying it until I stopped reading every individual word and just tried to get the gist of every sentence

boring, one-dimensional characters
annoying projection of 21st century morality onto 19th century setting

I think one problem is that I’ve developed more taste in books since I was young. But it seems like it should be possible to find books that are easy to read and optimized for reading pleasure rather than literary value, but are still good. I feel like a large fraction of the books I read as a kid fell into this category, but I’m not sure what the equivalent books for adults are.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 148452340274

Date: 2016-08-04 16:18:05 GMT

Body: I am reading The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street and wow the mid-19th century was a fun time.

In 1864, Cornelius Vanderbilt was the main stockholder in the Harlem Railroad. He wanted to build a streetcar line, for which he needed the permission of the New York state legislature. Everyone thought the bill would pass, so the stock rose in anticipation.

But Daniel Drew, another member of the board, secretly met with a bunch of legislators and suggested that if they were to short the stock and then vote no on the bill, they could make a lot of money. They were like “yeah, great idea,” and all got short the stock along with Drew. The committee on the bill failed to recommend it, and the stock fell from 140 to 101.

Vanderbilt’s response was to get a couple of friends and buy every outstanding share of Harlem stock, pushing it up to 224. When the legislators found that they needed to make delivery, Vanderbilt and his friends were the only source of the stock. They were left with the option to buy it from him at inflated prices or borrow it at the rate of 5% per day.

Vanderbilt was pretty annoyed at them and declared that he would push the price up to 1000. But one of his friends, Leonard Jerome (Winston Churchill’s grandfather) pointed out that this would probably cause lots of bank failures and a huge financial panic. So he let them out at 285.

The weird thing about this is that the previous year, pretty much the exact same thing had happened–also with Vanderbilt and the Harlem Railroad, though that time it was the New York City Council who needed to approve something. I guess people just entirely failed to learn from it?

Tags: #corruption's such an old song that we can sing along in harmony, #and nowhere is it stronger than in Albany, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 148321509549

Date: 2016-08-02 00:02:37 GMT

Body: I was talking to @profhedonium about donations and I decided I should say publicly on tumblr that this year I plan to write a post about my donation decision and publish it here.

For the first time this year I’ll have quite a bit of money to donate, and I think it’s important to think a lot about where I donate it. Hopefully writing up my decision and the reasons behind it will

force me to think through it carefully so I have something to write up
give other people a chance to point out mistakes in my reasoning and convince me to change my mind

I’m posting this now so that, come December, if I haven’t written a post about this everyone can shame me until I do. (Not that I think you will actually do that. But my irrational fear that you will will be a good motivator.)

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 148320960159

Date: 2016-08-01 23:49:05 GMT

Body: Being in New York, I pass a lot of homeless people. Typically the signs say something sad about their lives: “Laid off and hungry. Please help.”

Sometimes people will get more creative and you’ll see things like “Need money for weed.” I saw this a few weeks ago and thought it was clever. Sure, some people won’t want to give them money. But it’ll appeal to lots of people’s tribal sympathies, especially in a liberal place like New York, where people are pretty likely to be pro-marijuana legalization and anti-paternalism about how poor people spend their money. But it seemed like the convention where the sign has to refer to the homeless person’s life was kind of unnecessary. I decided that if I were panhandling, I’d just go all out on the tribal sympathies thing and have a sign saying “FUCK TRUMP” in really big letters.

Guess what I saw walking up Third Avenue today.

Tags: #and he seemed to be making a decent amount of money, #trump cw

Post ID: 148274325344

Date: 2016-08-01 01:43:25 GMT

Body: People talk about EA being this all-consuming thing sometimes, but for me it doesn’t really feel that way. Right now I’m earning to give, and so the main thing I need to do for EA is go to work every day and work hard, which is what I would want to do anyway. For the most part I don’t get paid any more money for working more hours. I guess there are things I maybe should be spending time on, like EA community-building and thinking about cause prioritization, but for the most part I think the official EA take on what I should be doing in my free time is “idk, maximize your personal happiness?”

And like, there’s something scary about that? Sometimes on a weekend afternoon I’ll find myself switching from activity to activity, opening and closing a book, starting and stopping a TV show, because the only point of anything right now is to maximize my happiness, and if I’m not really enjoying myself then why am I doing this? I find myself imposing structures, deciding “I will go to Mass every Sunday,” even though I don’t quite know what the point of that is either. And then I go, even though I’m tired and I want to sleep in and I don’t exactly enjoy it, because that seems better somehow than sleeping in and drinking tea in bed and watching Outlander.

I’ve been fantasizing more about having kids lately, and probably part of that is normal biological clock stuff, but I think part of it is that once I have kids, I won’t be trying to be happy anymore, I’ll be trying to make my kids happy. And that seems like a more fulfilling thing to live by.

When I was a kid, I always thought my mom’s life seemed kind of terrible. After a week of school, all I wanted was to do was play with Barbies and read books and dress up in costumes and generally have fun. Whereas my mom didn’t seem to have fun on weekends, really: when she wasn’t taking us to lessons and activities and playdates, she was cleaning the house or gardening or dropping off the dry cleaning. Even her fun was work: she’d invite friends over for dinner, but that meant hours of grocery shopping and cooking and cleaning up. Now I see it differently; she has a very firm conception of what a good life looks like for her family, and she works to achieve it. And that seems really appealing.

Tags: #ursae don't look, #scrupulosity cw, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 148099256829

Date: 2016-07-28 13:58:28 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

I like country music.
That first sentence was going to be ‘I have an anthropological interest in country music’ but actually fuck that thing where it’s only okay to like the things low-status poor people like if you explain how you’re appreciating it on a different level than them.
I like country music! I like Kacey Musgraves and Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley and Lee Brice and I have practically nothing in common with the lives they sing about but I don’t think there’s anything particularly academic or respectably distant about my appreciation.
And then you hear a song on the radio that’s just kind of impossible not to take an anthropological interest in, and the one that’s been in the radio lately is “Different For Girls.”
She don’t throw any t-shirt on and walk to a bar
She don’t text her friends and say, I gotta get laid tonight
She don’t say, it’s okay, I never loved him anyway
She don’t scroll through her phone just looking for a Band-Aid
It’s different for girls when their hearts get broke
They can’t tape it back together with a whiskey and Coke
They don’t take someone home and act like it’s nothing
They can’t just switch it off every time they feel something
I have a lot of feelings about this song. The first one is confusion, because the girls I know are exactly as likely as the boys I know to handle a breakup by having casual sex, if admittedly less likely to wear a t-shirt to the bar if they’re trying to do that.
The rest makes more sense. The guy has to say ‘it’s okay, I never loved her anyway’ because it’s pathetic for men to be heartbroken; contempt and indifference are Certified Male Emotions and heartbreak is definitely not. Men work through their feelings with casual sex, because casual sex is manly.
And the second stanza makes me want to give Dierks Bentley a hug even though he probably doesn’t want a hug because hugs, unless they lead to casual sex as a coping mechanism for heartbreak, are not manly. Because the angle of the song here is that breakups are harder on girls, because they can’t ‘switch it off’, because they can’t drink and sleep their way back to normal, and yet Dierks Bentley clearly also cannot do those things! he’s saying ‘it’s okay, I never loved her anyway’, but we are not supposed to believe him! he can take someone home and act like it’s nothing, but it’s not in fact nothing! he is scrolling through his phone looking for a bandaid! bandaids don’t fix things!
And then he is telling us that girls can’t just switch it off every time they feel something.
Okay, man, but neither can you, and it is really really awful that you have to pretend you can!
It’s different for girls
Nobody said it was fair
When love disappears, they can’t pretend it was never there
They supposedly can’t pretend, and you experience immense social pressure to so pretend! Who wins? Nobody! Oppositional sexism: sucking for everybody since the invention of, dunno, probably sexual reproduction.
I think this is supposed to be a song that says ‘girls, unlike boys, can’t tough their way through heartbreak’ but it’s literally impossible not to listen to as ‘boys experience horrible unrelenting pressure to muscle their way through heartbreak and to believe that this is itself manly specifically because women are not capable of it’
some songs make you cry because they’re so true and this song makes me cry because there are people to whom it will feel so true and all of them are probably hurting even more than they need to be.

I only listen to country music when I’m at my parents’ house, because for some reason I only listen to country music when I’m driving and I only drive when I’m at my parents’ house. But man I really should start listening to country radio on the subway to work or something because it’s so good.

This song reminded me of what I like about country music, which is I think its emotional honesty or straightforwardness or something? Coupled with its focus on the really basic emotions of human existence? I feel like music from other genres always has this level of detachment that country music doesn’t.

Anyway, you could be right but it’s hard for me not to see the “boys experience horrible unrelenting pressure to muscle their way through heartbreak” reading as intentional. Lines like “tape it back together with a whiskey and Coke” and “just switch it off every time they feel something”–I feel like no one actually thinks those are Great Heartbreak Cures, they think they are Bad Coping Strategies. Dierks Bentley, the character, is singing this song about how it’s super easy to be a guy because feelings don’t real–and he’s singing it because of the societal pressure for men to bottle up their feelings and act like cool tough guys. Meanwhile Dierks Bentley the singer is self-aware about the whole thing.

It reminded me of Ain’t Worth the Whiskey, in which the narrator is acting similarly blase about a breakup (and is also going out to a bar and drinking), but is clearly in a lot of pain. That pain is what the song is about, without the narrator ever admitting that he’s not okay or that he might be drinking for reasons other than the end of the week or his desire to salute those serving our country overseas.

There’s also the fact that, as you pointed out, the claims made about girls just aren’t true, even in country music land.

She don’t throw any t-shirt on and walk to a bar
She don’t text her friends and say, I gotta get laid tonight

I’m gonna dress up, in my low-cut
My tight blue jeans, I’m gonna stir somethin’ up
I’m gonna kiss all the boys ‘til I kiss your memory goodbye

–Sunny Sweeney

She don’t sleep all day and leave the house a wreck
She don’t have the luxury to let herself go

I cut my bangs with some rusty kitchen scissors
I screamed his name ‘til the neighbors called the cops

–Miranda Lambert

They can’t tape it back together with a whiskey and Coke
They can’t just switch it off every time they feel something

What I’m really needing now
Is a double shot of Crown
Chase that disco ball around
‘Til I don’t remember
Go until they cut me off
Wanna get a little lost

–Lady Antebellum

I feel like this just adds to the unreliable narrator vibe I’m getting.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 147830699264

Date: 2016-07-23 04:43:46 GMT

Reblogging: sinesalvatorem

Body:

#i forget how fucked up swallows and amazons is

jenndoesnotcare:
I just left my husband alone with our two children for sixteen days. I was not worried about anything regarding the house, their food, or their wellbeing. I put all the appointments in the family calendar and my husband checked it and kept them. I literally did not worry about them. I missed them, and I was sad that they missed me, but I didn’t worry about them AT ALL. I need to impress upon you all that I missed their company, but was not worried for their welfare.
I also did no meal prep. I don’t even think I went shopping right before I left.
This is not about apples and oranges. This isn’t even about my husband. This is about the fact that this is apparently WEIRD.
Another mum at my daughter’s school is leaving for ten days. She’s taking her youngest (who is a very small baby) and leaving her husband with their two girls. She has been cooking for days preparing freezer meals. She’s panicking and deputizing her six year old to remind him how to make school lunches. AND I AM APPALLED.
A) He is definitely not helpless. (He’s a doctor or something.) What gendered bullshit. B) THAT LITTLE GIRL IS NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR HER AND HER SISTER’S WELLBEING. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. C) Why is she married to this person and creating children with him if he’s this big of an idiot?
While she was laughingly recounting this, the other mums were nodding and smiling sympathetically, like oh yes, I too have my caveman at home!! Such managing required! I was the only one who was like “Dude, he’ll be fine. Literally. He will be fine.” I said it a lot. She was not convinced. She kept bringing up her older daughter. She’ll be like a little mum!
NO.
NO NO NO NO.
NO.
Straight women, don’t do this shit. It’s gross. Don’t infantilize your husbands and then expect your daughters to pick up the slack. So fucking gross. So. So. GROSS.
I am not actually sure what the big deal is? The only thing that looks like a real problem is that the six year old is being deputised to deal with shit, and the overtly gendered nature of how that’s being done.
But, ignoring gender for a moment - what’s wrong with division of labour? It’s efficient. It leads to brief periods of stress when the pair has to separate for a while, but that’s made up for by increased efficiency 90% of the time.
My mother cooks and deals with computers. My father does the shopping and fixing things around the house. That’s because those are what each party is better at - their comparative advantage - and everyone is better off when they play to their strengths.
For a lot of people, one of the benefits of having a partner is the fact that you don’t have to be good at everything. Sometimes someone more skilled than you can step in for what you can’t handle, and you can do the same for them.

I feel like whenever I see posts like this they are criticizing men for being bad at Traditional Woman Things, but I still feel implicitly attacked as a woman who is bad at a lot of Traditional Man Things. I can’t carry heavy boxes, my response to seeing a spider is to yell for whoever is around to kill it, and I call my dad when I’m having problems with my computer or it’s April and I realize I haven’t done my taxes yet and want someone to do them for me.

And yes, I could become better at any of these things with effort. But I have a limited amount of time and effort and none of these things are my top priority. Is that problematic of me?

(I also kind of object to the OP because from a pretty young age, I was in charge of food for my family when my mom was away and my dad was home with us, and I loved it: the responsibility made me feel really cool and grown-up.)

(I agree wholeheartedly with the efficiency argument for division of labor, and would go even further: since most people are straight, the traditional division of labor between the two genders allows people to learn only half the skills needed for adult life from a young age before they know who they are going to marry, saving a lot of redundant investment in human capital.)

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 147468687329

Date: 2016-07-16 00:03:00 GMT

Body: I had a weird deja vu experience the other day when I somehow ended up in an argument about the existence of God, which hasn’t happened to me since like … 2012?

interestingly my response was to immediately revert to 2012!me and start like quoting the Sequences

“Don’t you think that beliefs should … pay rent … in anticipated experiences? I mean, say you claim there’s an invisible dragon in your garage,

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 147466271229

Date: 2016-07-15 22:57:24 GMT

Reblogging: ursaeinsilviscacant-blog

Body:

ursaeinsilviscacant:

worldoptimization:
shellcollector:
I quite often get phrases stuck in my head, like songs, looping around themselves. At the moment it’s “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown”, which if you don’t know it is a truly stellar bit of Awful Parenting Presented As Fine in classic British literature.
#i forget how fucked up swallows and amazons is
wait what’s wrong with Swallows and Amazons
as a general proponent of laissez-faire parenting (which I think I have in common with this area of tumblr?) I always thought Swallows and Amazons was an example of awesome parenting
like if your kids want to go live on an island by themselves for the summer, why not tbh
There’s “if your kids want to go and live on an island for the summer, let them, because some risks are worth taking.” Which I agree with. Letting the kids on the island is not the problem.
But this isn’t that. This is “if your kids make any mistakes doing something dangerous, they deserve to die and you should celebrate their deaths.” That’s horrifying.
Like, you’ve just made it impossible to ever ask for help for anything. Because asking for help proves you deserve to die.

fair, I wasn’t really thinking through the literal meaning of “better drowned than duffers” and I of course strongly disagree with that sentiment

Post ID: 147419268219

Date: 2016-07-15 00:16:10 GMT

Reblogging: ursaeinsilviscacant-blog

Body:

shellcollector:

I quite often get phrases stuck in my head, like songs, looping around themselves. At the moment it’s “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won’t drown”, which if you don’t know it is a truly stellar bit of Awful Parenting Presented As Fine in classic British literature.

wait what’s wrong with Swallows and Amazons

as a general proponent of laissez-faire parenting (which I think I have in common with this area of tumblr?) I always thought Swallows and Amazons was an example of awesome parenting

like if your kids want to go live on an island by themselves for the summer, why not tbh

Post ID: 146910249899

Date: 2016-07-04 20:11:14 GMT

Body:

At a chimpanzee sanctuary in Zambia, scientists followed the spread of yet another meme. One female was the first to stick a straw of grass into her ear, letting it hang out while walking around and grooming others. Over the years, other chimps followed her example, with several of them adopting the new “look.”

petition for this to be the cool new meme

Post ID: 146468507149

Date: 2016-06-25 20:50:31 GMT

Body:

I don’t want a future in which politics is primarily a battle between cosmopolitan finance capitalism and ethno-nationalist backlash.
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 24, 2016

is it weird that this tweet makes me want to go up to couples and ask “So, which one of you is the cosmopolitan finance capitalism and which one is the ethno-nationalist backlash?”

Tags: #the answer is p obvious for prophecyformula and me, #personal, #<3

Post ID: 146235173939

Date: 2016-06-21 01:57:05 GMT

Body: man I get really annoyed when people are like “look at how we allow people to say insufficiently feminist things without ostracizing them! this is why we don’t have any women”

but this is probably unreasonable, right?

I want to be like This is Erasing Antifeminist Women but I’m sure statistically women are more feminist and more likely to be turned off by people saying insufficiently feminist stuff

I mean when I think about how groups can be more welcoming to women my first thought is “well you can start by not talking about basketball all the time” and I think if a woman got mad at me because she was a huge basketball fan that would be kind of silly

(I mean there could be other differences between the two cases, like maybe the freedom to be honest about your political beliefs is more important to group belonging than the freedom to talk about LeBron whenever he comes to mind, but the general principle is the same)

Tags: #vagueblogging, #not sj go away, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 145992502459

Date: 2016-06-16 03:11:56 GMT

Body: I was at my graduation last weekend, and the commencement address was basically about twenty minutes of vitriolic insults directed at Trump. And in between burying my head in my friend’s shoulder in discomfort and laughing nervously, I was thinking about the family of this guy in my class.

He’s the first person in his family to go to college. He drove an hour every day to go to a somewhat better high school because there was an epidemic of gang violence at his local school. Against the odds, he did well, and got into college, where he has continued to get good grades and play sports and generally do things that make parents proud.

His family is not well off. They’re Mexican-American. And they’re Trump supporters.

Yeah, I’m kind of confused too. But they honestly are. (Not even reluctant Republicans supporting Trump–they voted for him in the primary. His aunt owns a Make America Great Again cap.) And all I could think about was how happy they must have been to be attending their son’s graduation from one of the best universities in the world [citation needed], only to have that happiness turn to bewilderment and anger as everyone around them cheered a series of caustic attacks against them and their values. The message couldn’t have been clearer: “You don’t belong here.”

My mom thought this speech was So Courageous. When I suggested that it might have been more courageous to say something that not everyone there agreed with, she replied, “the students maybe, but a lot of the parents looked unhappy.”

Seventy percent of the parents there had family incomes over six figures. (More, probably, since low-income parents are less likely to attend graduation.) A lot of them are members of the self-perpetuating intellectual/economic elite. This probably isn’t true of the few Trump supporters among them.

So if we are going to single them out for judgment, force them to account for their support for an “infantile,” “bullying,” “proto-fascist” “charlatan” … can it not be on the day of their kids’ graduation?

Tags: #trump cw, #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 145805052689

Date: 2016-06-12 14:37:08 GMT

Reblogging: adzolotl

Tags: #I like how this is the first thing you thought of and the first thing I thought of, #but it didn't occur to the administration until students pointed it out to them, #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 145756413094

Date: 2016-06-11 14:44:54 GMT

Body:

The online outposts of most investment firms are awash in images of men in suits talking to one another, financial jargon, and rows of stats and pie charts. Choices are framed around returns and investment products that somehow seem detached from real life: Large- or small-cap companies? Global or domestic? Is it time to switch your IRA?
Compare that with Ellevest’s sleek home page, with its motto Investing, Redefined for Women. In their research, the Ellevest team found that women like to think of investing in terms of reaching life goals–starting a business, having a baby, sending kids to college–not in terms of beating the market.

man sometimes I am disappointed by the entertainment value of New Feminist Cosmo but then there’s stuff like this

Tags: #tbf the article does actually make an interesting point, #which is that women have less money in risky assets than men, #and this actually costs them more than the gender pay gap, #(not that I checked the math on that), #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 145403686814

Date: 2016-06-04 14:07:14 GMT

Reblogging: jiskblr

Body:

plain-dealing-villain:

spiralingintocontrol:
prophecyformula:
worldoptimization:
So I was talking to someone about livestock futures yesterday and I was like “I know you can get cattle futures and pork futures, but what about chicken? why shouldn’t I be able to buy some chicken futures if I want to invest in chicken?”
And I looked it up and it turns out people have tried to start a chicken futures market three different times! This was in the 60s, 80s, and 90s, and every time it failed.
Apparently this is largely because in the cattle industry beef processors buy cattle from farmers, so there’s demand for futures from people who want to hedge against price volatility. But the chicken industry is more vertically integrated, so no one actually needs to hedge with futures.
Also I learned that in 1958 Congress passed a bill banning the sale of onion futures? It is still a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5000, so be careful about that I guess.
(Of course there’s also the question of whether a vegetarian can even buy chicken futures. But my vegan friend bought cattle futures the other day so I think it’s generally considered acceptable.)
(Though now I am imagining animal rights groups campaigning for universities to be short livestock futures and it feels totally plausible. If you personally would like to be short livestock, there is a short livestock ETF that trades on the London Stock Exchange, but it does not seem very liquid and it might be hard to trade it if you are not British, idk. If you would like to be short chickens specifically, I recommend shorting the stock of poultry producers.)
oh man do you not know the onion futures story
okay, so, it’s the 1950s. there’s an onion farmer named Vincent Kosuga. he’s a pretty successful onion farmer, so he starts speculating in the commodities markets. after an initial disastrous flirtation with wheat futures, he finds a niche betting on onion prices – he is, after all, an onion farmer – and does pretty well for himself.
in 1955, Kosuga gets an idea. an awful idea. Kosuga gets a wonderful, awful idea. he starts building warehouses around the country, and places orders for all the onions he can get his hands on. in addition, he starts buying onion futures, guaranteeing him delivery of the onions that are still in the ground.
by that fall, he’s done what he’s set out to do. he owns 98% of the onions in the united states. he’s cornered the market, and he gets to control onion prices. of course, since he has all the onions, he jacks prices up really high and makes a ton of money.
but Kosuga isn’t done yet. he’s quietly been establishing a big short position in onion futures. then, all of a sudden, Kosuga starts flooding the market with all the onions he owns. onion prices go through the floor – literally selling for less than the cost of the bag they’re delivered in. since Kosuga is short onions, he makes another ton of money.
but everyone is super pissed at him. especially other onion farmers – when the price of onions got driven down to almost nothing, their crops, their hard work, became worthless. some of them went bankrupt, or even committed suicide. so of course they lobby congress. and congress, as always, legislates to prevent the previous crisis rather than the next one – and bans trading in onion futures.
of course, this is probably unnecessary and in fact harmful. it’s really rare for anyone to come close to cornering the market in a commodity, and it’s even harder today (you can’t really buy up all the onions in secret, without other traders noticing) than it was 60 years ago. nevertheless, trading in onion futures remains illegal in the US today.
this is an amazing story. but wait, wasn’t insider trading illegal by that time? why didn’t he get prosecuted on those grounds?
Probably insider trading didn’t apply to commodities markets (yet). I could see how making laws for that that wouldn’t hit normal farmers might be hard.

Yeah insider trading in commodities wasn’t illegal until 2011.

The concept of material nonpublic information is sketchier in commodities markets than in equities markets. Like, every farmer knows how his corn crop is doing this year. Is that material? What if you go on the Crop Tour and see a bunch of people’s corn? And the CFTC doesn’t have disclosure requirements like the SEC does, so I would imagine the markets are kind of how nonpublic information gets disseminated.

I could only find one guy who’s gotten in trouble for commodities insider trading so far, and he was already breaking a bunch of other CFTC rules anyway.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 144959366055

Date: 2016-05-26 15:30:42 GMT

Body: Man I read this Vox article today and there’s just so much going on I feel like I have to say something about it.

It claims “white women benefit most from affirmative action.” Its evidence for this is:

Kimberle Crenshaw said “the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been Euro-American women”
“A 1995 report by the California Senate Government Organization Committee found that white women held a majority of managerial jobs (57,250) compared with African Americans (10,500), Latinos (19,000), and Asian Americans (24,600) after the first two decades of affirmative action in the private sector.”

The wording of this sentence is somewhere between misleading and wrong: in fact what the report said is that there were 57,250 more women employed in managerial jobs in 1993 than in 1975, and similarly for the other groups. So this is actually slightly better evidence than I originally thought.
But still, there is no attempt to look at percentages? Like, 40% of California residents are white women, while 7% are black. Maybe this has something to do with the fact that white women gained five times as many jobs as African-Americans?
Also of course there is a lot that happened between 1975 and 1993 and we can’t really say with any confidence that affirmative action caused anything here.

The percentage of women physicians has gone from 8% to 25% since 1970. The article does not mention what has happened to the percentage of black physicians over time. It also does not give any evidence that this is due to affirmative action rather than medical schools and jobs just not actively discriminating against women. I mean, maybe it is, but the article gives no evidence for that.

It then proposes this “paradox”: that white women benefit the most from affirmative action, but still oppose it. It then gives the examples of several white women who have been plaintiffs in affirmative action cases over admission to college and law school.

Like. Maybe this is because white women don’t generally receive affirmative action in college and law school admissions?
I understand that white women do benefit from affirmative action in contexts like tech hiring! But undergrad admissions is really not one of those contexts.

It dismisses the mismatch hypothesis in a sentence with “Study after study shows there’s simply no evidence for the claim.”

Linking to two sociology studies.
The studies don’t look particularly bad (though admittedly my prior for sociology papers being good is lower than that for economics), and I’d like to read them when I don’t have finals. But I could just as easily link you two studies that do find evidence of mismatch. This is the problem with saying things are debunked based on two studies.

It admits that the percentage of black students enrolled at UC Berkeley has gone down from 8% to 4% since admissions went race-blind. But it says this is not because of “underqualified students of color” but rather because 58% of black students reject Berkeley’s offer of admission.

Okay, the 58% number is for black students from 2006-2010, and I only found Berkeley’s yield rate for 2012. But in 2012 it was 37%!
That means if the yield rate for 2006-2010 was similar, black students were more likely to accept Berkeley’s offer of admission than students of other races.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy, #racism cw

Post ID: 144959012201

Date: 2016-05-26 15:20:41 GMT

Question: Post on what futures are please. Otherwise is there a digestible FAQ on stock market stuff somewhere?

Answer: Sure! So a future is a contract to exchange an asset at a specific future date. So if I sell you a June gold future, I am agreeing to deliver 100 troy ounces of gold to you in June. And by buying a June gold future from me, you are paying for the right to have that gold delivered to you in June.

Of course, if you are an average trader who just wants to invest in gold, you probably don’t want to deal with having actual gold delivered to you in June and figuring out how to store it and stuff. So you will want to “roll” your futures: when the delivery date gets close, you can sell your futures and buy futures for a few months later, so you never actually get gold delivered to you.

A big reason people use futures is to hedge. If you’re a wheat farmer, you might be worried that if the price of wheat drops a lot this year, you won’t make enough money to plant next year’s crop. So you sell some wheat futures to insulate yourself from risk.

I’ve talked about commodity futures so far, but futures don’t have to involve delivery of physical objects. You can also buy things like S&P 500 futures. These are cash settled, meaning that instead of the person who sold you the future physically delivering something to you, they will just pay you cash. In the case of S&P 500 futures, they will pay you the value of the S&P 500 index at the time of settlement: if the index is at 2090, they will pay you $2090.

I don’t know of a good stock market FAQ or similar; usually if there’s something I don’t understand I’ll look it up on Investopedia or something.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 144914397559

Date: 2016-05-25 17:33:54 GMT

Reblogging: hunterstheorem

Body:

hunterstheorem:

worldoptimization:
So I was talking to someone about livestock futures yesterday and I was like “I know you can get cattle futures and pork futures, but what about chicken? why shouldn’t I be able to buy some chicken futures if I want to invest in chicken?”
And I looked it up and it turns out people have tried to start a chicken futures market three different times! This was in the 60s, 80s, and 90s, and every time it failed.
Apparently this is largely because in the cattle industry beef processors buy cattle from farmers, so there’s demand for futures from people who want to hedge against price volatility. But the chicken industry is more vertically integrated, so no one actually needs to hedge with futures.
Also I learned that in 1958 Congress passed a bill banning the sale of onion futures? It is still a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5000, so be careful about that I guess.
(Of course there’s also the question of whether a vegetarian can even buy chicken futures. But my vegan friend bought cattle futures the other day so I think it’s generally considered acceptable.)
(Though now I am imagining animal rights groups campaigning for universities to be short livestock futures and it feels totally plausible. If you personally would like to be short livestock, there is a short livestock ETF that trades on the London Stock Exchange, but it does not seem very liquid and it might be hard to trade it if you are not British, idk. If you would like to be short chickens specifically, I recommend shorting the stock of poultry producers.)
More to the point, there is no good reason for a normal human to be short any stock, because the market will eat you alive with probability approaching one. Do not short poultry producer stock unless you are Warren Buffett (in which case you ain’t listening to me anyway, so…)

agreed, please don’t actually short the stock of poultry producers!

the last paragraph of the previous post was a joke it was not investment advice

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 144914100469

Date: 2016-05-25 17:25:49 GMT

Reblogging: just-evo-now

Body:

lisp-case-is-why-it-failed:

worldoptimization:
So I was talking to someone about livestock futures yesterday and I was like “I know you can get cattle futures and pork futures, but what about chicken? why shouldn’t I be able to buy some chicken futures if I want to invest in chicken?”
And I looked it up and it turns out people have tried to start a chicken futures market three different times! This was in the 60s, 80s, and 90s, and every time it failed.
Apparently this is largely because in the cattle industry beef processors buy cattle from farmers, so there’s demand for futures from people who want to hedge against price volatility. But the chicken industry is more vertically integrated, so no one actually needs to hedge with futures.
Also I learned that in 1958 Congress passed a bill banning the sale of onion futures? It is still a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5000, so be careful about that I guess.
(Of course there’s also the question of whether a vegetarian can even buy chicken futures. But my vegan friend bought cattle futures the other day so I think it’s generally considered acceptable.)
(Though now I am imagining animal rights groups campaigning for universities to be short livestock futures and it feels totally plausible. If you personally would like to be short livestock, there is a short livestock ETF that trades on the London Stock Exchange, but it does not seem very liquid and it might be hard to trade it if you are not British, idk. If you would like to be short chickens specifically, I recommend shorting the stock of poultry producers.)
Why would you short poultry stock? All you’re really doing is giving money to whatever traders are lucky enough to notice.
Will Macaskill has an article on this here. Holden Karnofsky has also written about it here.

Yeah it was a joke ^_^ I agree with Holden and Will that divestment is kind of silly, so I am making fun of the logic of divestment by taking it even further: if it is virtuous to avoid being long the stock of companies in harmful industries, it must be even more virtuous to be as short as possible.

(Not to strawman divestment advocates–I think the okay argument for divestment is that it’s not about changing the share price or taking capital away from the bad companies, it’s about getting media attention and signaling disapproval of bad stuff. I still think it’s better to get media attention by doing things that actually have some effect–if you’re an environmentalist, you could campaign for your university to go carbon neutral or fund more geoengineering research; if you’re an animal rights activist, you could campaign for your university to buy only cage-free eggs or go meatless on Mondays. In any case, the media attention argument is obviously not relevant to your personal investment decisions.)

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 144911646219

Date: 2016-05-25 16:17:59 GMT

Body: So I was talking to someone about livestock futures yesterday and I was like “I know you can get cattle futures and pork futures, but what about chicken? why shouldn’t I be able to buy some chicken futures if I want to invest in chicken?”

And I looked it up and it turns out people have tried to start a chicken futures market three different times! This was in the 60s, 80s, and 90s, and every time it failed.

Apparently this is largely because in the cattle industry beef processors buy cattle from farmers, so there’s demand for futures from people who want to hedge against price volatility. But the chicken industry is more vertically integrated, so no one actually needs to hedge with futures.

Also I learned that in 1958 Congress passed a bill banning the sale of onion futures? It is still a misdemeanor that carries a fine of up to $5000, so be careful about that I guess.

(Of course there’s also the question of whether a vegetarian can even buy chicken futures. But my vegan friend bought cattle futures the other day so I think it’s generally considered acceptable.)

(Though now I am imagining animal rights groups campaigning for universities to be short livestock futures and it feels totally plausible. If you personally would like to be short livestock, there is a short livestock ETF that trades on the London Stock Exchange, but it does not seem very liquid and it might be hard to trade it if you are not British, idk. If you would like to be short chickens specifically, I recommend shorting the stock of poultry producers.)

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 144847284654

Date: 2016-05-24 07:04:19 GMT

Reblogging: a-bell-to-rise-and-die

Body:

nniihilsupernum:

everyone writing abt the early august 2007 quant crisis is like “weeeellll, there were just too many shitty knockoffs of good quant funds, and the good ones didnt realize, so too many people did the same thing, and that was bad”
like
a) no shit
b) that is like, no information
c) that is not the interesting part holy shit the interesting part is the everything became magically fine on the tenth after the like sixth to ninth being terrible and What

is it that weird that everything became magically fine on the tenth?

like, given that the price movements in assets held by the quant funds were driven by a liquidity crisis rather than anything to do with fundamental value, you’d expect them to rebound right

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 144759485534

Date: 2016-05-22 16:55:00 GMT

Reblogging: epistemic-horror

Body:

bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190:

shkreli-for-president:
jenlog:
voximperatoris:
fatpinocchio:
voximperatoris:
@eccentric-opinion / @amakthel / others:
Anyone know any good, fun personality, political, ethical, and/or other self-reporting tests?
I’ve done the ones at OKCupid years ago (an example of pretty low-quality tests).
Of course I’ve done the Myers-Briggs test and the Big 5 test.
The ones at YourMorals are really interesting. But I finished all the best ones a while ago.
The coolest ones I’ve run across recently are the ones at Philosophy Experiments. They’re fun because they try to test you on the internal consistency of your positions, e.g. on religion and philosophy of mind. I highly recommend them.
Any other recommendations?
iSideWith, World’s Smallest Political Quiz, 5-Dimensional Compass, Ideology Selector
iSideWith is pretty good, the second and last one are kind of…bad.
The 5-Dimensional Compass was a little bit interesting. My score:
You are a: Conservative Anarchist Interventionist Cosmopolitan Libertine
Collectivism score: -67%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: 33%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 100%
Kind of bizarre they they apparently use “conservative” to mean “individualist”. And I’m not actually that much of a “libertine”.
Objectivist Anarchist Total-Isolationist Cosmopolitan Progressive
Collectivism score: -83%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: -100%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 67%
There were some weird ones like “Our nation should eliminate all foreign aid and spend that money on other things.” Ideally they wouldn’t pay the foreign aid and also not spend it on something else.
You are a: Left-Leaning Anti-Government Non-Interventionist Nativist Fundamentalist
Collectivism score: 33%
Authoritarianism score: -33%
Internationalism score: -17%
Tribalism score: 67%
Liberalism score: -83%
ＣＯＭＢＡＴ　ＬＩＢＥＲＡＬＩＳＭ
You are a: Right-Leaning Non-Interventionist Traditionalist
Collectivism score: -33%
Authoritarianism score: 0%
Internationalism score: -17%
Tribalism score: 0%
Liberalism score: -33%

pat buchanan 4 god-emperor

You are a: Socialist Pro-Government Cosmopolitan Liberal

Collectivism score: 50%
Authoritarianism score: 17%
Internationalism score: 0%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 17%

Tags: #fight me irl, #though like, #I feel two people with exactly the same views on any given policy, #could get really different answers if they had different affective responses to things

Post ID: 144686996934

Date: 2016-05-21 05:13:21 GMT

Body: there was a post going around about Social Matter Forum, so I was reading some of it and it occurred to me that both the bonobo left-libertarian whatevers and neoreactionaries I encounter seem to have converged on “public school is child abuse”

where are my fellow proponents of “public school is an effective way to socialize children into mainstream society and teach them compliance with authority”

Tags: #epistemic status: only kind of serious, #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 144579930819

Date: 2016-05-19 01:22:44 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Question: Agree or disagree: Assume the pro-life view is basically correct, and abortion is murder. From that perspective, it makes perfect sense to be a single-issue voter, since abortion kills a million babies a year. Even if Republicans cut social services and hurt poor people, the fact that they're against killing a million babies a year makes them better than the Democrats. (Or in other words, the "pro-lifers should branch out and care about other issues" criticism is misguided). Agree or disagree?

Answer:

I’m actually unsure what the effect of the marginal Republican on abortion rates is. Republicans tend to make abortion harder to get, but they also tend to reduce access to birth control, which increases the rate of abortion. As someone who has mild pro-life sympathies, I’d much rather everyone have access to long-acting and effective birth control. (I’ve put this in practice myself– I have the implant.)

I think if I were a single-issue voter on abortion, I’d vote for Republicans. When I was writing this post on preventing abortions I didn’t find evidence that the Democratic abortion prevention strategy of “better sex ed and contraception availability” is really … doing anything? (Not that I’m sure it isn’t, just that I haven’t seen convincing evidence that it is.) Whereas the Republican strategy of “shut down all the abortion clinics in the state” or whatever they do does seem kind of effective.

But even if abortion is morally equivalent to murder, I don’t think it dominates everything else to the extent that you should be a single-issue voter. PEPFAR is estimated to have saved 400,000 lives a year, for only like 5% of the US foreign aid budget. (Compared to 700,000 abortions a year in the US.) If we devoted a bit more money to effective foreign aid, or if some of our foreign aid spending were redirected to more effective things, that could way outweigh abortion. PEPFAR was started by a Republican, but Democrats are generally more in favor of increased foreign aid.

You could argue abortion is the most important state-level issue, so you should vote Republicans for statewide office. Though of course animal agriculture is another issue that’s mainly decided at the state level, and there are 9 billion chickens killed for food in the US every year so

Tags: #tbh I am totally fine with abortions

Post ID: 144420953064

Date: 2016-05-15 22:36:40 GMT

Question: Do you have a before you follow?

Answer: Nope! Anyone is totally welcome to follow me regardless of beliefs or whatever.

Be aware that I am not super consistent about tagging–I vaguely try to tag things that seem like standard triggers and things that mutuals have posted about wanting tagged but probably forget sometimes. If there’s something you’d like me to tag for, please send an ask and I will do my best to tag for it.

I’d appreciate it if you didn’t reblog my posts to say really mean things about me, but luckily none of my followers have ever done this–afaict they are all lovely people. I’d also appreciate it if you didn’t reblog my posts if it seems likely your followers will reblog them to say really mean things, but this is kind of hard to predict and I would consider it a supererogatory kindness to me.

Post ID: 144315578724

Date: 2016-05-13 22:03:18 GMT

Body: Last night I had a dream that tumblr existed as a building in real life? Like, instead of blogs we each had our own room where we would “post” by reading aloud what we wanted to say, and instead of having a dash we had criers who would run around the building telling us whose room to go to next.

At the behest of the criers, I went to the room of someone with the username vulvakitten, where @ozymandias271 was already listening to her read a post aloud. I whispered to Ozy, “do you think she’s a TERF?” Ozy was like “I mean … her username is vulvakitten …”

They then proceeded to get into an argument with vulvakitten about whether it is bad to misgender people, while I slipped out of the room quietly.

Tags: #this blue website, #not sj go away

Post ID: 144102886519

Date: 2016-05-09 16:54:03 GMT

Reblogging: epistemic-horror

Body:

ozymandias271:
people who want to vote for a third party to express their disgust with the system:
can I suggest the Prohibition Party? It got 500 votes last time! Help save America’s oldest third party!
also, Prohibition was a legitimately effective public health policy, and would still be one were it reinstituted
the rest of their platform is p mixed, though, and i’m not sure most of rat tumb would find much to like in it
mostly i just like reminding people that prohibition worked

Was Prohibition an effective public health policy though?

good effects:

prevented deaths from cirrhosis

about 2000/year
my original estimate was about 20,000/year based on the naive (cirrhosis deaths in 1911) - (cirrhosis deaths in 1929)
and it is true that cirrhosis was a lot lower in the 20s than the decades before or after
but this claims that the drop in cirrhosis deaths was due to WWI and Prohibition actually increased the number of deaths, based on timing of the drop and comparison to Western Europe (where cirrhosis also dropped but didn’t rise again like in the US). the citation points to a book I can’t read so I can’t look at the statistics
however, it was also written by the Cato Institute who clearly has a dog in this fight
BUT this paper seems pretty legit and more or less backs them up, claiming Prohibition only decreased the deaths from cirrhosis about 10-20%

prevented admissions to mental hospitals for alcoholism

about 5000/year

bad effects:

caused deaths from adulterated liquor

about 10,000/year

caused deaths from homicide

about 2000/year
not sure if this is causal? but homicide rate definitely increased during Prohibition and decreased afterwards
this paper thinks it’s causal but I didn’t actually read beyond the abstract

caused deaths from the federal government poisoning people

about 1000/year
apparently this is a thing that happened??

blindness and paralysis from adulterated liquor

unknown, at least in the thousands per year

drunk driving

arrests for drunk driving went up 81% during Prohibition? that seems weird, idk if there was actually more drunk driving or what

lost tax revenue

about $1 billion/year ($13 billion in 2016 dollars)

cost of enforcement

about $25 million/year ($300 million in 2016 dollars)

Of course there’s also the lost utils from drinking alcohol. And the inconvenience and annoyance of not being able to drink at restaurants, not being able to get wine or beer (most alcohol sold during Prohibition was hard liquor), having to go to speakeasies … like all of the other bad effects aside I would pay a lot of money to prevent another prohibition for its negative effects on my day-to-day life alone.

In conclusion, if the decline in cirrhosis deaths was indeed mostly not caused by Prohibition, it really has nothing going for it. If it turns out it was mostly caused by Prohibition, then yeah, it saved some lives. I’m still inclined to say it overall wasn’t worth it.

(more sources: x, x, x)

Tags: #listen to economists they know things, #uh that's a category tag, #all the economists of the time were in favor of Prohibition so, #alcohol cw

Post ID: 143856267194

Date: 2016-05-04 20:18:26 GMT

Body:

Cf. the “effective altruism” loonies who think that 100% of philanthropy should be devoted to staving off the AI singularity.
— Matt Levine (@matt_levine) May 4, 2016

how could my Internet Boyfriend do this to me :(

Tags: #I do not actually think that 100% of philanthropy, #should be devoted to staving off the AI singularity, #in fact 0% of my personal donations have gone to staving off the AI singularity, #I am definitely an effective altruism loony though

Post ID: 143817073589

Date: 2016-05-04 00:48:30 GMT

Reblogging: lovestwell

Body:

lovestwell:

thepenforests:
worldoptimization:
a while ago I was having a conversation with my sister in which I was like “you know that thing nerds do when they talk? how they release the t’s at the end of words?” and she was like “… no”
so I feel vindicated to learn that this is a known fact in the literature (and in addition to it being a nerd thing it is also a Jewish thing apparently)
(also whenever I spend too much time around rationalists/EAs I start doing the /t/ release thing too)
Wait, so what exactly does “release” mean here? I hang around with enough nerds/am nerdy enough myself that I suspect I’d know this thing if I heard it, but I’m drawing a blank. Anyone have an example of a word where the t is often “released” (or better yet, a link to a video where someone does it)?
“Plato” has a “release” in most everybody’s speech.
In most American dialects, the letter “t” between vowels is pronounced very differently from the letter “t” at the beginning of a word. Between vowels, “t” merges with “d” into an identical-sounding consonant that’s called an alveolar flap. So “writing” and “riding” are pronounced almost the same (the consonants actually are the same but the preceding vowels may be slightly different in length; this is more advanced stuff). Often people don’t consciously notice that they pronounce “writing” and “riding” the same way, but if they listen carefully to themselves they’re forced to admit that.
Fun fact: the word “Plato” is apparently unique in resisting this evolution. It is not pronounced like “play-dough”.
So if you’re like most speakers of North American dialects, you pronounce “writing” and “riding” virtually the same, but “Plato” and “play-dough” differently; you might say your /t/ has a “release” in “Plato”. Now suppose that you consciously start pronouncing everyday words like “writing” the same way as “Plato”. That would be an example of the affectation discussed in the article linked by the OP. It may or may not sound “British” to you.
The OP actually talks about “the end of words”, which may be a related-but-different thing to what the article they link talks about. At the end of a word, /t/ is never an alveolar flap to begin with, but the usual explosion of air that follows it may be lessened or omitted in many contexts. I’m guessing the OP refers to an affectation where /t/ is especially carefully articulated at the end of a word, and that’s the “hyperarticulation” the linked article talks about.

Thanks for the explanation! After we talked about that paper in class I was googling to find more about /t/ release but most of what I could find was sociolinguistics papers that did not really explain the phonetics stuff?

So yeah, I guess what I was referring to was nerds aspirating /t/ at the end of words, though I think I also hear nerds releasing /t/ in the middle of words–both give the person’s speech the same hyperarticulation vibe.

(Weirdly, I’m pretty sure I do actually pronounce “Plato” the same as “play-dough”?)

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 143809856144

Date: 2016-05-03 21:56:30 GMT

Body: a while ago I was having a conversation with my sister in which I was like “you know that thing nerds do when they talk? how they release the t’s at the end of words?” and she was like “… no”

so I feel vindicated to learn that this is a known fact in the literature (and in addition to it being a nerd thing it is also a Jewish thing apparently)

(also whenever I spend too much time around rationalists/EAs I start doing the /t/ release thing too)

Tags: #linguistics, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 143124192834

Date: 2016-04-20 18:54:50 GMT

Reblogging: condensed-theorem-shop

Body:

shedoesnotcomprehend:

woodswordsquire:
worldoptimization:
apparently people think math competitions for girls are sexist because they “stigmatize girls as being less talented”
like, if you take away international girls’ math competitions, what will happen is that girls will mostly not qualify for international math competitions. but I’m sure they will feel very encouraged sitting at home, watching their male peers win medals, and knowing that we as a society have taken a firm stance on gender equality
What about girls who don’t qualify for the girls competition either? And children in general who love math but aren’t at the international level?
I was heavily involved in math competitions throughout my school years, and always deeply resented the special “for girls” sections. Because, yes, they do treat girls as lesser. I would go to a middle-school competition, and there would be the real first through tenth places, and then a “top sixth grader” prize, and a “top girl” prize. Even a middle-schooler can tell what that means: sixth graders aren’t as good at math because they’re younger, so they need a consolation prize, and girls aren’t as good at math so they need one too.
I am offended that people think I need to be pandered to. I resented, even as a child, that people thought I couldn’t do as well as any boy. If I can’t earn a medal honestly, I’d rather sit at home and study for next year.
Because next year, I will win.

Interesting. The “top girl” prizes never bothered me–honestly, I would always hand them out in my head anyway if the competition didn’t have one. I’d watch all the winners as they went up, note their gender, and if everyone ahead of me was a boy I’d come home and tell my parents “I was the top girl!” and they’d congratulate me and take me somewhere nice for dinner. So having an actual prize was just official recognition of that to me. I can see how it would seem like pandering, though.

But I’m not really attached to those. What I am attached to is all-girl math circles and math competitions, for partly I guess safe space reasons? Teenage boy math nerds are uh, great in their way, and I definitely had lots of fun over the years doing math stuff with them, but they can also be pretty arrogant and obnoxious and immature and also just different from me, like they were always talking about video games or whatever and had no interest in fashion or Jane Austen (my obsessions at the time). Not to mention being the only girl on a team full of guys is just kind of awkward. All-girl math spaces had no one throwing frisbees at each other, no one talking over each other or making fun of someone for not knowing a theorem, t-shirts that actually fit.

And I was one of the lucky ones–in freshman year I was the only girl on the math team, but by senior year the math team was actually like half girls and my school had articles written about how we were one of the best environments for girls in math in the country. I think one of the possible takeaways from Ellison and Swanson is that for girls to succeed in math it’s important for them to be surrounded by other girls who are into math, which is why I think arguing for the elimination of EGMO, CGMO, Math Prize for Girls, etc. in the name of feminism is counterproductive.

Tags: #not sj go away, #culture war cw

Post ID: 143100879594

Date: 2016-04-20 06:01:54 GMT

Body: apparently people think math competitions for girls are sexist because they “stigmatize girls as being less talented”

like, if you take away international girls’ math competitions, what will happen is that girls will mostly not qualify for international math competitions. but I’m sure they will feel very encouraged sitting at home, watching their male peers win medals, and knowing that we as a society have taken a firm stance on gender equality

Tags: #not sj go away, #math, #culture war cw

Post ID: 142595362559

Date: 2016-04-10 22:18:56 GMT

Reblogging: starlightvero

Body:

veronicastraszh:

worldoptimization:
theunitofcaring:
official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women:
women in Ubers are not at an elevated risk of sexual assault. most people who are sexually assaulted know their attackers. our societal obsession with the scary stranger as the prototypical case of sexual assault to protect ourselves from is deeply unhelpful.
women also commit sexual assault. saying “we’ll only hire female drivers, to keep our women safe” is buying into a narrative about female harmlessness and male predatoriness that helps female abusers and rapists get away with it.
In general, the fact that women are scared to be out at night and scared to call a cab is a problem. That fear is not remotely warranted by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect and limit peoples’ lives. it is part of the same patriarchal “women can’t go out alone; they need protection” mindset that motivates some countries to require women have male chaperones. It is not feminist and feeding the unwarranted flames of this fear in the name of feminism is disgusting.
There’s this thing that keeps happening where people say “let’s unquestioningly accept the patriarchal narrative that women are pure, virtuous, and need protection. Let’s also unquestioningly accept the narrative that women are safe around other women, and that danger comes from men. Then, let’s come up with a plan for ‘empowering women’ that buys into both of those assumptions completely and in fact reinforces them! Why aren’t women empowered yet?”
On the bright side good on them for having an unequivocal “duh we take trans women, they’re women” policy. I guess if we’re going to all be subject to stupid empowerment-flavored pedestalization it may as well serve a population with a legit non-negligible risk of random strangers assaulting them.
Also this just seems like a bad idea economically. Women are probably like 50% of Uber passengers but only 14% of drivers: it’s hard to imagine demand won’t be way higher than supply. Add in the fact that there’s no surge pricing (*eyeroll*), and it’s hard to imagine cars won’t be really expensive, have really long wait times, or both.
The enthusiasm for an all-female service ranged from “I would be all over it” to “HELL YES” [caps hers].
I have to wonder how this enthusiasm will hold up when they see the prices or have to wait half an hour for a car.
Also the fact that articles about this keep talking about the number of sexual assaults in Ubers and linking to “Who’s Driving You?” as a source which is literally a scare campaign funded by the taxi industry.
I’m always surprised at how scared other women seem to be of being assaulted by strangers. When I was talking about this to one of my friends she was like, “well yeah, I wouldn’t take an Uber alone with a male driver.” And I was like “??? I’ve probably done that like 30 times? How do you even get places?” (The worst thing that has ever happened to me while alone in an Uber was my driver telling me that I “look like a nerd.” This was not actually a bad thing and was in fact a great source of amusement.)
The 14% of drivers thing probably has much to do with how much women drivers are harassed by male customers. Plus don’t assume your experience matches what other women experience.

Sorry, definitely didn’t mean to imply all women have the same experiences or that women are never harassed or assaulted in Ubers! Just because I think it’s weird how scared other women are of strangers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re wrong or irrational. (Also to be clear the correct response to someone who is irrationally scared of something is sympathy, not “haha you’re being silly.” Irrational fear is still unpleasant.)

And I kind of doubt women being harassed by passengers is the main thing driving that 14%? I mean, truck drivers don’t pick up passengers, and only 5% of truck drivers are women. Men drive more than women in general: they’re like 60% of drivers on the road. Maybe men just like driving because operating a steering wheel while looking around for other cars is similar to hunting on the savannah, which requires using weapons with one’s hands while looking for an animal to kill.

Tags: #not sj go away, #uh the last line is a joke in case that wasn't clear, #the point is, #women less likely, #rape cw, #sexual assault cw

Post ID: 142588559989

Date: 2016-04-10 20:07:27 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

official opinion on “Chariot for Women”, the new Uber competitor that only hires women drivers and only picks up women:
women in Ubers are not at an elevated risk of sexual assault. most people who are sexually assaulted know their attackers. our societal obsession with the scary stranger as the prototypical case of sexual assault to protect ourselves from is deeply unhelpful.
women also commit sexual assault. saying “we’ll only hire female drivers, to keep our women safe” is buying into a narrative about female harmlessness and male predatoriness that helps female abusers and rapists get away with it.
In general, the fact that women are scared to be out at night and scared to call a cab is a problem. That fear is not remotely warranted by the evidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect and limit peoples’ lives. it is part of the same patriarchal “women can’t go out alone; they need protection” mindset that motivates some countries to require women have male chaperones. It is not feminist and feeding the unwarranted flames of this fear in the name of feminism is disgusting.
There’s this thing that keeps happening where people say “let’s unquestioningly accept the patriarchal narrative that women are pure, virtuous, and need protection. Let’s also unquestioningly accept the narrative that women are safe around other women, and that danger comes from men. Then, let’s come up with a plan for ‘empowering women’ that buys into both of those assumptions completely and in fact reinforces them! Why aren’t women empowered yet?”
On the bright side good on them for having an unequivocal “duh we take trans women, they’re women” policy. I guess if we’re going to all be subject to stupid empowerment-flavored pedestalization it may as well serve a population with a legit non-negligible risk of random strangers assaulting them.

Also this just seems like a bad idea economically. Women are probably like 50% of Uber passengers but only 14% of drivers: it’s hard to imagine demand won’t be way higher than supply. Add in the fact that there’s no surge pricing (*eyeroll*), and it’s hard to imagine cars won’t be really expensive, have really long wait times, or both.

The enthusiasm for an all-female service ranged from “I would be all over it” to “HELL YES” [caps hers].

I have to wonder how this enthusiasm will hold up when they see the prices or have to wait half an hour for a car.

Also the fact that articles about this keep talking about the number of sexual assaults in Ubers and linking to “Who’s Driving You?” as a source which is literally a scare campaign funded by the taxi industry.

I’m always surprised at how scared other women seem to be of being assaulted by strangers. When I was talking about this to one of my friends she was like, “well yeah, I wouldn’t take an Uber alone with a male driver.” And I was like “??? I’ve probably done that like 30 times? How do you even get places?” (The worst thing that has ever happened to me while alone in an Uber was my driver telling me that I “look like a nerd.” This was not actually a bad thing and was in fact a great source of amusement.)

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 142579346804

Date: 2016-04-10 17:07:19 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

I think my perspective on Hamilton is really fundamentally affected by the fact that I think factory farming is an atrocity on equal scale to slavery
I know lots of kind people, ethical people, people I admire for other reasons, who eat meat
and… that means I relate, really hard, to “Washington is my boss and I will FIGHT anyone who insults him” and “Washington owns slaves”

#sejm

my little sister was really confused how Hercules Mulligan could be good friends with Hamilton and be one of the founding members of the New York Manumission Society and also own slaves and I was like … this seems perfectly normal to me?

Tags: #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 141967528144

Date: 2016-03-30 18:44:33 GMT

Body:

But how oddly are all things arranged in this sublunary scene.

–Alexander Hamilton to Angelica Schuyler Church

Tags: #???, #this is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence, #the trash of the thing, #don't go into the caves

Post ID: 141904494004

Date: 2016-03-29 16:36:43 GMT

Reblogging: desinvulture

Body:

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.

full disclosure I stole that line from prophecyformula

Tags: #<3, #personal

Post ID: 141888705399

Date: 2016-03-29 08:20:06 GMT

Body: okay I knew that people want colleges to divest from private prisons but now people want colleges to divest from financial institutions … that manage index funds … that hold shares in companies … that run private prisons

like how many levels of recursion does this extend to

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m, #not sj go away

Post ID: 141491920689

Date: 2016-03-22 15:49:06 GMT

Body: I know people have raised various good objections to the kind of signaling games that involve constantly shifting shibboleths, like the way they assign moral value to adherence to a confusing set of language norms rather than like, doing morally good things.

As someone with finite amounts of time and energy for actually being an ally to oppressed groups but high verbal intelligence and a high tolerance for following the Discourse closely I think they’re great.

But apparently my sister’s middle school teacher has told them that they’re not allowed to use the word “black” to describe people? They have to use “person of color.” Except … “person of color” is an umbrella term for all nonwhite people … so there is literally no way they can specifically refer to black people? They just end up with a lot of sentences in their essays like “After they were freed from slavery, many people of color made a living as sharecroppers” which … isn’t untrue I guess?

(The teacher is white and most of the students are white or Asian. I wonder how the black students feel about this policy.)

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 141210184800

Date: 2016-03-17 18:01:18 GMT

Body: The other day I learned about the nominal share price puzzle. Like, since the Great Depression the price of pretty much everything has changed dramatically. Except stocks! Stocks cost exactly the same. The average share of stock cost $35 then and it costs $35 now.

And like, the stock market has gone up so much since then! If you bought a share of GE for $38 in 1935 it would be worth like $10,000 now. Except it wouldn’t, because GE has split their stock a ton of times so you would actually just own a whole lot of shares that are worth $30 each.

Why do they do this? It costs GE money in administrative costs. It costs shareholders money in trading costs. And it doesn’t have to be this way: Japan and the UK both have totally non-constant nominal share prices.

The authors of this paper suggest one reason could be to market to individual investors. But if that were the case why wouldn’t share prices at least keep up with inflation? And this hypothesis would also predict that as stocks have become mostly held by institutions rather than individuals, the effect would diminish, but it hasn’t.

Another fun theory is that when stock prices are low relative tick sizes are high, so companies keep their prices low to compensate market makers for providing liquidity in their stock. But that would predict that stock prices would change when tick size changed in 1997, and they didn’t. And do executives at GE really lie awake at night worrying that if their share price goes above $100 no one will provide liquidity in their stock anymore?

The authors end up concluding that there’s no good economic explanation and everyone does it because, uh, it’s what everyone does. It was kind of unsatisfying.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 141047695164

Date: 2016-03-14 20:30:25 GMT

Body: (redpilly thoughts on dating)

I was reading Ozy’s latest post and they mention that a great way for women to improve their dating prospects is to ask guys out. My first reaction to this was “nonono” because there’s this failure mode I see in a lot of my non-rationalist (i.e. “cool”) acquaintances that goes something like this.

girl asks guy out/pursues him because Hey It’s the Current Year
guy seems (to me, an outside observer) to not show any strong signals of interest
they hook up
after a few times guy loses interest and stops returning texts
girl is sad

And this can all be avoided by waiting for guys to ask you out, making them take you out to dinner and pay, basically just insisting on some credible signals of interest in a relationship with you.

Then I realized everyone who reads Ozy’s blog is a nerd, and the women who read it are probably disproportionately poly or high-sociosexuality, so it is actually good advice for people who read it. (When you’re dealing with nerdy guys, “too scared to ask you out” is way more likely than “player who considers you below his league but would sleep with you if the opportunity arose.”)

I still kinda object to the advice when given to a wider audience though.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 140953399784

Date: 2016-03-13 05:50:53 GMT

Reblogging: epistemic-horror

Body:

“i really like how you’re sentient” – @worldoptimization

hey Eliezer approves of my preferences

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 140725691259

Date: 2016-03-09 04:22:18 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

theunitofcaring:
ozymandias271:
You can tell that fatphobes are full of shit because I have never not once been criticized for my unhealthy weight even though my weight probably poses a lot more of a health risk than the average overweight person’s
This hasn’t been my experience, for what it’s worth. Every time I go home a significant fraction of the people I interact with confront me because they’re concerned about my unhealthy weight, and a larger fraction ask my parents if they are doing anything about my unhealthy weight. Strangers at parties will frequently insist I eat more food because I am unhealthily thin in their opinion. I can expect a concerned comment about my unhealthy weight with near certainty if I go to a dinner party with strangers.
And of course if I lose more weight it will be legal to forcefeed me to return me to an appropriate weight, and as far as I can tell there is nothing I can do, short of ‘don’t lose that much weight’, that will stop this from happening.
Obviously the solution to this is “stop accosting anyone with concerns that their weight is unhealthy; mind your own business; never talk about anyone’s weight ever.” But it’s not true at all that people are currently that respectful if you’re underweight. They aren’t.
You are significantly smaller than I am, and people who are forcefed are even smaller.
It seems plausible to me both that invasive douchebags feel entitled to offer their opinions on the health of very thin people and that invasive douchebags have an inaccurate idea, influenced by cultural fatphobia, of what level of skinniness is correlated with health problems.

Data point: when I had the same BMI as you (based on your self-reported height and weight in the Anti-Heartiste FAQ) I got comments to the effect of “You’re so skinny! Are you okay? Are you eating enough?” (Now that I’m five pounds heavier I no longer get these comments.)

And like, is having a BMI around 18 actually unhealthy? I think the CDC guidelines were chosen pretty arbitrarily. I am definitely not well-versed in the nutrition literature, but I know Walter Willett (who I read based on the recommendation of an economist who was like “a nutritionist who understands, like, controlling for stuff in studies!”) says if you take into account things like smoking and undiagnosed diseases causing you to lose weight, there’s a linear relationship between BMI and mortality starting at BMIs as low as 17.

Tags: #weight cw

Post ID: 140697491124

Date: 2016-03-08 18:36:53 GMT

Question: what is your biggest character flaw (or skill deficit)

Answer: hmm good question

The first thing that comes to mind that I’d like to change about myself is ~social anxiety~ because it makes p much everything harder–school, jobs, having a social life.

In terms of like doing good in the world, my biggest character flaw might be that I’m not altruistic enough. (~Social anxiety~ makes me less effective but not that much less effective.) But I don’t, like, system-1-want to change that, because then I would have to spend more money helping people and less buying nice things for myself. And I’m pretty sure only EAs would agree that this actually counts as a flaw.

(On the character flaw vs skill deficit thing, I want to defend Traditional Conceptions of Virtue or something here but truth is when I stopped thinking of my shyness as a character flaw it actually got a lot better and I got happier so)

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 140577436889

Date: 2016-03-06 18:20:08 GMT

Reblogging: hill-climber

Body:

hill-climber:

I was reading an article about students from a historically black college trying to find jobs in Silicon Valley, and noticed this quote:
When she finally visited [Silicon Valley] during college, it struck her as a startlingly homogeneous culture, made up of white and Asian people…
“There are not a lot of people of color in the Valley”
Are Asians not “people of color”? Now that I think about it, I’ve hardly ever heard it used that way. What comes to mind when you hear that phrase?

I think Asians are generally considered POC but people equivocate on this a bit when it’s convenient? Like Asians are underrepresented in Oscar nominations/wins, so they’re people of color when we’re talking about that, but overrepresented in Silicon Valley, so in that context they’re just kind of glossed over. (But I don’t think you’ll hear people outright say “Asians aren’t people of color” even in the latter case.)

(There’s an Asian woman who writes for my school newspaper (and refers to herself as a “woman of color.”) But in her column the other day she referred to “racism and white supremacy” as “those systems that empower and advantage white and light-skinned folks at the expense of Black, brown and Indigenous peoples.” So yeah I thought that was interesting.)

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 140511833314

Date: 2016-03-05 17:18:08 GMT

Question: Does it bother you that degenerates have managed to contaminate even the word "chastity" itself?

Answer: *sigh*

me writing that post: “will anyone … no, no one’s that degenerate”

Tags: #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 140461124614

Date: 2016-03-04 20:06:00 GMT

Body: I had a dream last night in which @sinesalvatorem was telling me about a sex club she was starting, and I was trying to convince her to make it a Christian chastity club instead.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 140258517659

Date: 2016-03-01 05:48:47 GMT

Body: reading an economics paper on high-frequency trading and looking through the citations

Einstein, Albert, ‘‘Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Ko¨rper (On the Electrodynamicsof Moving Bodies),’’ Annalen der Physik, 322 (1905), 891–921.

… what?

oh, they’re citing him for the claim that nothing can go faster than the speed of light

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 139931756834

Date: 2016-02-24 22:13:21 GMT

Reblogging: nuclearspaceheater

Question: the number of people who feel entitled to comment on your parenting is kind of horrifying. I'd heard that happens to pregnant people but I'm actually in a mild state of shock about how bad it is. you are handling it with extraordinary grace, but what the fuck.

Answer:

nuclearspaceheater:

luminousalicorn:
It’s okay, @andaisq just taught me to block anons so when I’m sick of it all will be well.
It’s weird, I didn’t really get mean anons before. Hypothesis is that I don’t usually seem vulnerable but now I’m impregnated and therefore probably hormonal and irrational and really easy to make cry, open season, whee?
It’s just the Public School Internet Defense Force, who are hired by teachers’ unions, textbook manufacturers, and “smart classroom” companies to harass home-schoolers online.

I actually get it? Like, I’m not even a parent but whenever I see someone making different parenting choices from the ones I would make I have a visceral reaction of WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE RUINED. Obviously,

1) this is irrational, parenting doesn’t actually matter that much and the children will probably be fine

2) actually expressing that reaction to the person in question is incredibly rude, mean, and unproductive.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 139747877459

Date: 2016-02-21 21:59:19 GMT

Body: about me: I am the worst at watching period TV shows because I always identify with the sensible adults rather than the young lovers defying society and end up yelling at the screen in frustration

“No you can’t marry the girl you love! Marrying an heiress is the only way to rescue your family from debt! Have you no sense of filial duty?”

“I don’t care how much you like this guy, you can’t cuckold the king of France! Think about the chaos your country will be thrown into if you get pregnant and there is any reason to doubt the child’s paternity!”

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 139619009224

Date: 2016-02-19 21:07:13 GMT

Question: That particular financial offer amuses me because I would gladly explain *anonymously* how tumblr talks about multiplicity for free but it would take *way* more than $5 to get me to say the same thing in a way that links back to real names -- like, say, Facebook and Venmo do.

Answer: lol

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 139590777194

Date: 2016-02-19 08:05:44 GMT

Body:

hey if anyone on my friends list feels like it and has sum good knowledge i will venmo u 5$ to explain to me the way that tumblr talks about DID/multiples systems n stuff? this seems important to a lot of younger queer n trans folks and i wanna understand it (and also pay u for yr labor lmao)

I keep seeing this “pay you for your labor” thing and like … what is the goal? replace all non-financial transactions with financial ones? like I get that people think women do more ~emotional labor~ in families/relationships and that’s unfair but this is just a person asking if any friends (not necessarily female or members of any oppressed group) want to volunteer to do them a favor? and not even an onerous favor, it’s “talk about something interesting with me for a little while”

idk how I feel about this. I do think money is really great and maybe people should use it more in friendships, but otoh something about nonfinancial transactions building trust and social cohesion? also a society in which you’re expected to pay for friends to do you a favor seems uh, unfortunate for those who lack class privilege

Tags: #seen on yankee facebook, #not sj go away

Post ID: 139196706029

Date: 2016-02-12 23:23:49 GMT

Reblogging: adzolotl

Body:

nonternary:

yxoque:
aquaberry-sweater:
I love how the clear pairing in The Force Awakens was meant to be Rey and Finn but everyone on Tumblr decided to fuck that and ship the adorable gays and the angsty hero/villain couple.
Wait, Finn/Rey was meant to be a romance?

Seems like nobody told the director. Or the actors.
“Do you have a boyfriend? A cute boyfriend?”

I was talking to a bunch of normal people the other day and I mentioned something about how of course everyone shipped Kylo/Rey and Finn/Poe and they all looked at me really weirdly and were like “… Finn and Rey were the main couple … what are you talking about … those couples don’t even make sense, Kylo is a bad guy and probably related to Rey and what makes you think Finn and Poe are gay”

I don’t even particularly like Star Wars or have any investment in said ships it was just weird

Tags: #also my twelve-year-old sister was literally sobbing as the credits were rolling, #because Kylo and Rey didn't get together, #I guess that was not the normal reaction?

Post ID: 138885390884

Date: 2016-02-07 22:44:02 GMT

Reblogging: wirehead-wannabe

Body:

wirehead-wannabe:

One of the many issues (or maybe not?) with our prediction market is the fact that I often find myself deciding whether or not to make a trade based on the person I’ll likely be trading with. If I see that I’m trading with someone I think of as incompetent, I’ll become more aggressive in my bets against the market. If I see that it’s with someone whose perceptions of reality I respect, I tend to take a step back and reevaluate my thinking, possibly trying to generate reasons why that person in particular might disagree with me. This isn’t the sort of thing you’d likely see in a larger market where everyone is probably anonymous, but it doesn’t matter anyway because there are so many traders that you’re unlikely to know your opponents and/or run up against them repeatedly.

This is totally a thing even in larger markets! Everyone is anonymous, but you can still make guesses about the sort of person you’re trading against (small investor? large institutional investor? HFT firm?) based on the size of the order, the timing of the order, what exchange/dark pool you’re trading on, stuff like that. And you always want to trade with uninformed participants as much as possible, because if you’re trading with an informed participant there’s a good chance they want to trade because they know more than you.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 138783015429

Date: 2016-02-06 09:54:20 GMT

Reblogging: sinesalvatorem

Body:

The players created the characters and the sheets. Now the characters were completely terrible, but in fascinating ways, and the humour of the players hovered over (and cursed) all of them.
And @theunitofcaring saw that the characters were complete fucking disasters, but let it pass because it looked like too much fun.
Last night, I started playing a Silmarillion based D&D campaign with the Stanford EA club. There were twelve of us. We ended up narrowing it down to eight of us playing, three abstaining, and Kelsey GMing.
Of the eight people playing, most of us ended up designing ridiculous characters for shits and giggles. Here are a few such characters:
The Halfling bards are literally two Hobbits who stand on top of each other to play a string bass. They play as basically a single character, because all Hobbits look the same. They are purposefully incompetent - and even have the rolls for it. Despite the ability of Halflings to reroll dice, they still managed to get a truly spectacular number of natural 1s. When something went wrong in the party, it was often because these guys were trying to “““help”””. That is, unless it was caused by…
The Half-Orc Rogue, who is a lawful evil genocidal asshole. Who does he want to commit genocide against? Orcs and descendants thereof. Yes, this is exactly as weird as it sounds. In his defense, he has a wisdom of 5 and is trying to roleplay it correctly. He does this brilliantly. His play-style is what you might expect if, every morning, he crushed twelve types of stimulants into a fine powder and snorted it.
Finally, there’s the one character who decided her particular brand of weird was going to be “maximise theological complexity”. You see, according to the rules of this campaign, all the Elves in Middle Earth are Doomed by the gods/Valar because they refused paradise. The High Elves in particular are double-Domed because they pissed on the gods’ doorstep while telling paradise to go fuck itself.
So, what does Ms. Theological Complexity decide to become? She’s The Fëanorian Cleric. She has so successfully gotten herself thrice-damned that @comparativelysuperlative (the current owner of my soul) would be proud. I’m kind of assuming that all her prayers go something like this:
Cleric: “Hey, can you help me out with-”
Her god: “Or I could kill most of your family and torment you for centuries. I like that idea better.”
That’s right: Our Elf is basically a Jew.
Of course, I decided to keep things simple. I’m just The Human Wizard who hates Elves because [reason redacted to spite @nonternary and everyone else actually playing], which may end up fucking things up for the party pretty badly. However, as bad as I might be, at least I’m (somehow) better than the others.
When our characters had all been created, Kelsey showed us where we were on the map of Beleriand. The maps all had a little strip at the top torn out. Apparently, they had all printed with the file name for the map image and Kelsey had ripped off the name because it might distract us.
After the game, someone found a discarded strip with the filename on it. Kelsey had named our map beleriandfuckers.jpg for reasons she doesn’t even remember any more.
I include this final detail as proof that I have the best taste in women. May all the Kelsey-less people of the world seethe with jealousy.

tag urself, I’m the Fëanorian cleric

Tags: #:^), #personal

Post ID: 138759814329

Date: 2016-02-06 00:44:54 GMT

Body: Fun auction theory fact of the day:

When Congress authorized the FCC to auction spectrum licenses, they required them to “ensure that … businesses owned by members of minority groups and women aregiven the opportunity to participate in the provision of spectrum-based services.” The FCC responded by giving bidding credits to women- and minority-owned firms. Unsurprisingly, critics of affirmative action criticized this as the government effectively giving away huge amounts of money to already wealthy minorities.

The fun part is, this actually increased the government’s revenue by over 12%, because subsidizing weaker bidders makes auctions more competitive and thus increases revenue for the seller. This can be tricky in practice because you don’t know a bidder’s true value until the auction, and bidders have no incentive to tell you the truth before that. But if you can find a good proxy for how weak a bidder is, subsidies work great.

(One might ask, is this sufficient constitutional justification for affirmative action? The authors of this paper say no, disparate treatment on the basis of race or gender is not justified if your only motive is to increase your profits. But if your motive is to increase diversity in the provision of spectrum-based services and it happens to increase your revenues as well, that’s fine.)

Tags: #listen to economists they know things, #not sj go away

Post ID: 138527838164

Date: 2016-02-02 05:50:38 GMT

Reblogging: slatestarscratchpad

Question: Do you think there is something about rationalism that attracts Jewish people? I have noticed that a lot of rationalists with large blog followings are Jewish.

Answer:

@worldoptimization, is this what it feels like not to be darkly hinting enough?

I tried to formulate a darkly hinting response to this but then remembered I’m really bad at darkly hinting which was why I made that post in the first place

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 138500756584

Date: 2016-02-01 21:39:13 GMT

Body: I was reading about real estate economics for one of my classes and I just had this vivid flashback to, it must have been, 2005 or 2006

I was playing with dolls or something with my sister when one of my parents’ friends walked by and whispered to me that I should ask another friend of my parents (who was a real estate economist) when the housing bubble was going to burst

so I walked into the other room and asked him innocently, “When is the housing bubble going to burst?” He groaned as everyone else laughed. I must have looked confused, because he explained to me that everyone was always asking him that, and it got annoying because he didn’t think we were in a housing bubble at all. I didn’t really understand what a housing bubble was but at the time I accepted the explanation

replaying it in my mind it takes on kind of an eerie quality, like the first scene of a movie right before everything goes horribly wrong

Tags: #listen to economists they know things, #though uh not in this case I guess

Post ID: 138459602329

Date: 2016-02-01 04:58:20 GMT

Body: today we were talking about the argument that talking about AI risk publicly was actually a really bad move, because various corporations and governments’ response to being told about AI risk was “hey superintelligent AI? that sounds cool we should try to build one!”

and now I’m wondering if AGCbtIitSH?! is actually part of Eliezer’s brilliant plan to discredit himself enough that everyone will stop taking the idea of superintelligent AI seriously

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 138430348069

Date: 2016-01-31 20:42:56 GMT

Reblogging: epistemic-horror

Question: your writing style is a lot like worldoptimization's, but with more shitposting and dark hinting

Answer:

epistemic-horror:

truuuuuuu

dammit I need to step up my darkly hinting game

Tags: #personal, #<3

Post ID: 138391825149

Date: 2016-01-31 06:07:58 GMT

Reblogging: tentativelyassembled

Question: What are your thoughts on the gender wage gap, the "motherhood penalty", etc., especially the extent to which they're caused by discrimination/social pressure versus differences in preferences, and what (if anything) should be done?

Answer:

tentativelyassembled:

worldoptimization:
Uh, I’m not really an expert on the empirical literature on the gender wage gap but based on my googling it seems like a lot of it is explained by hours worked, experience, and occupational segregation. Then there’s a residual that’s probably partly due to women not negotiating, and what’s due to straight-up discrimination probably comes out to a couple cents on the dollar at most.
I think the fact that you have to negotiate for your salary is kind of stupid. This is mostly motivated reasoning due to the fact that my response to every job offer I’ve ever gotten is “… you really want me to work for you? And you’re paying me that much? Don’t you realize how incompetent I am?” I guess negotiating probably exists for a reason, like a lot of norms, and won’t go away. My preferred solution to the “men negotiate more than women” thing is socializing men to be less confident. So far my strategy has mostly consisted of telling middle school boys they are stupid and making fun of them when they make mistakes. But keep an eye out for the release of my new book, Lean Out, in 2016.
Occupational segregation … I think women and men are pretty different and it is both unsurprising and totally fine that they self-select into different jobs.
Of course some of the occupational segregation might be coming not directly from different abilities/interests but from women going into less demanding/more flexible professions to leave more time for childrearing. And housework/children are presumably driving the differences due to women working fewer hours and taking time out of the labor force.
I think that if women are generally more interested in prioritizing children that is okay?
(A conversation with my friend I had a couple of days ago:
her: “I know this sounds bad, but I think once I have kids I want them to be my top priority and my job will be kind of secondary.”
me: “… that doesn’t sound bad, why would it sound bad?”
her: “you know, women … careers … feminism …”
me: “isn’t the point of feminism supposed to be that women have the freedom to do whatever they want, not that they should be forced to work demanding jobs?”
her: “well, I guess but …”)
But like, I do think a lot of women are unsatisfied because they would like to have successful careers and be involved mothers and it’s just hard to do both. I think men could stand to do more to help out, given that they have more leisure time than women right now. I don’t think “men do more” is all of the solution, especially given that women interested in demanding jobs tend to be interested in men with demanding jobs.
I guess ideally jobs would be more flexible about what hours their employees work, and women would not face as large a penalty for dropping out of the workforce for a few years? If I were czar looking into those further might be somewhere on my agenda.
Wait, was the Lean Out an intentional reference or just happenstance? Because you talk about women not negotiating in a way that makes me think that you’re not aware of research that indicates that women who negotiate are viewed more negatively then men who negotiate, but you seem to be referencing a book that talks about exactly that?

That was not an intentional reference to that, just a reference to Lean In! I had not seen that research–it’s interesting that failure to negotiate might be rational on the part of women.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 138379003724

Date: 2016-01-31 02:00:08 GMT

Answer: Uh, I’m not really an expert on the empirical literature on the gender wage gap but based on my googling it seems like a lot of it is explained by hours worked, experience, and occupational segregation. Then there’s a residual that’s probably partly due to women not negotiating, and what’s due to straight-up discrimination probably comes out to a couple cents on the dollar at most.

I think the fact that you have to negotiate for your salary is kind of stupid. This is mostly motivated reasoning due to the fact that my response to every job offer I’ve ever gotten is “… you really want me to work for you? And you’re paying me that much? Don’t you realize how incompetent I am?” I guess negotiating probably exists for a reason, like a lot of norms, and won’t go away. My preferred solution to the “men negotiate more than women” thing is socializing men to be less confident. So far my strategy has mostly consisted of telling middle school boys they are stupid and making fun of them when they make mistakes. But keep an eye out for the release of my new book, Lean Out, in 2016.

Occupational segregation … I think women and men are pretty different and it is both unsurprising and totally fine that they self-select into different jobs.

Of course some of the occupational segregation might be coming not directly from different abilities/interests but from women going into less demanding/more flexible professions to leave more time for childrearing. And housework/children are presumably driving the differences due to women working fewer hours and taking time out of the labor force.

I think that if women are generally more interested in prioritizing children that is okay?

(A conversation with my friend I had a couple of days ago:

her: “I know this sounds bad, but I think once I have kids I want them to be my top priority and my job will be kind of secondary.”

me: “… that doesn’t sound bad, why would it sound bad?”

her: “you know, women … careers … feminism …”

me: “isn’t the point of feminism supposed to be that women have the freedom to do whatever they want, not that they should be forced to work demanding jobs?”

her: “well, I guess but …”)

But like, I do think a lot of women are unsatisfied because they would like to have successful careers and be involved mothers and it’s just hard to do both. I think men could stand to do more to help out, given that they have more leisure time than women right now. I don’t think “men do more” is all of the solution, especially given that women interested in demanding jobs tend to be interested in men with demanding jobs.

I guess ideally jobs would be more flexible about what hours their employees work, and women would not face as large a penalty for dropping out of the workforce for a few years? If I were czar looking into those further might be somewhere on my agenda.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 137980558164

Date: 2016-01-24 23:22:00 GMT

Body:

The National BioethicsAdvisory Commission (2001), writes that paying subjects to participate in medicalexperiments may be coercive. They go on to say that, if an institutional review board is concerned that the subjects in an experiment may be economically disadvantaged, it mayrequire that the researchers reduce the payments they make to participants. The concernhere is … to protect low-income participants from being faced with such a highparticipation fee that they would feel coerced to participate.

Tags: #well then, #ethics, #lol bioethicists

Post ID: 137833760529

Date: 2016-01-22 21:17:12 GMT

Reblogging: queenshulamit-deactivated201602

Body:

queenshulamit:

transmemesatan:
grimmnir:
Public Service Announcement: If you are not a virgin do not presume to wear a white wedding dress. It is an honor that is earned from chastity and virtue. Not a tradition for you to soil if you lacked the same.
honor sucks and western traditions are for loser nerds ❤
So you wouldn’t have a problem with two virgin men marrying each other in white dresses, OP?

Miss Manners has always refrained from taking an unseemly interest in the symbolic interpretation of wedding clothes. The idea that white packaging advertises untouched goods has always struck her as being as vulgar as it is unlikely.

Tags: #this is a Miss Manners fanblog

Post ID: 137828455325

Date: 2016-01-22 19:40:49 GMT

Body: me: “I hate Congress–I hate the army–I hate the world–I hate myself. The whole is a mass of fools and knaves. I could almost except you”

–Hamilton to Laurens

@prophecyformula: “Fuck the world and everyone in it except for you, Laurens.”

“That’s not quite what I was hoping you’d do …”

Tags: #the trash of the thing, #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 137800473419

Date: 2016-01-22 07:01:37 GMT

Question: Are you single, and is so, are you interested in hearing about people who crush on you?

Answer: I am not single! I am dating @prophecyformula (<3)

sorry :( I appreciate you asking though!

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 137799568264

Date: 2016-01-22 06:39:27 GMT

Reblogging: moral-autism

Body:

ilzolende:

@worldoptimization is my 300th follower!
I think there’s a convention where you do some kind of prizes, but IDK how that works. People who do know should probably remind me.
Am I supposed to offer to draw worldoptimization’s face from a photo, or what?

Yay! I will happily give you a photo to draw me from if you decide on that as the prize.

Although I do feel like I cheated a bit to get this, since I’ve followed you in the past for a while. (I am incapable of not reading my entire dash so I unfollow and refollow people to regulate how much time I spend on tumblr.) Your prize system clearly creates an incentive for people to unfollow and refollow you as often as possible.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 137798010029

Date: 2016-01-22 06:03:56 GMT

Body: Today in my econ class we talked about this paper, which discusses Feeding America’s switch from a centralized resource allocation model to a market where local food banks use fake currency to bid on the food they want.

Which was a cool example of market design, but my favorite part was the reactions of the food bank directors. Initially they were really resistant; as one director told the economists:

I am a socialist. That’s why I run a food bank. I don’t believe in markets.

And now everyone is really happy with the system. Especially the aforementioned socialist, who wakes up at 6 am to submit his bids, buys food he thinks is underpriced even if he doesn’t need it hoping to resell it to other food banks, and is generally the most aggressive trader on the market.

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 137784141119

Date: 2016-01-22 01:46:39 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Question: "Most people who dress ‘sexy’ do so because they like feeling sexy, and spend no time at all thinking about how their classmates react." Can this really be true? I know my own attitude of only caring about my appearance to the extent that it affects how people view me as atypical, but surely anyone who literally doesn't care *at all* about people's reactions must be as much of an outlier in the other direction? (also can I not use line breaks in this? weird)

Answer:

Yeah, asks are terrible. this website is an embarrassing design nightmare.
And “classmates”, not “people”, is an important element there. People care a lot about how they’re perceived by their social circle, or (if they’re going to a bar or club) by the people they want to attract, but don’t tend to care much about what the other people in their lecture will think.
(it’s rare to be completely indifferent to how people will see you, but quite common to get dressed for the day without a single thought of “what will strangers think of this outfit”. Like, I’m sure if you asked people “would you prefer that strangers think you look good in that” they’d have an opinion - but that doesn’t mean they got dressed with even fleeting consideration for looking good to strangers. I guess concern about keeping up with trends is about the opinion of strangers, but even then, not random strangers, strangers who are also well-versed in fashion.)
I am very confident the thought process “I will wear this sexy outfit so my classmates are attracted to me” is unusual (though “I will wear this sexy outfit to catch the attention of specific classmate I have a crush on” is definitely a thing).

I suspect this is typical mind fallacy? I always care about whether random people think I’m attractive, including people in lecture or people I’ll pass on the street once and never see again, and dress with that in mind. (It’s not a strong preference, and it often gets overridden by “I’m in a hurry”/”I want to be comfortable”/”all my clothes are dirty,” but still.) When I’ve had conversations about this with friends the same seems to be true for them. And I’m pretty confident my friends and I are a lot less appearance-conscious than the average woman.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 137582817359

Date: 2016-01-18 23:36:34 GMT

Reblogging: michaelblume

Body:

michaelblume:

One of the centerpieces of Sanders’ campaign is a new tax on financial transactions, meant to curb high-speed/speculative trading. Have any economists actually analyzed the probable effects of this? Would it create incentives to take stupid/inefficient actions in order to evade the tax? Would it lessen the liquidity of the market? Would it do none of these things, provide a valuable source of revenue, and create an incentive for smart, mathematically inclined people to do productive work instead of playing zero-sum games of oneupmanship?

I don’t think a financial transactions tax is necessarily a terrible idea. This guy defends a tax of 3-5 basis points on financial transactions, phased in by one bp a year. This seems reasonable and I’m a big fan of the incrementalism.

Overall, the idea of an FTT has its good points and bad points. On the good side, it would be pretty progressive and raise a fair amount of revenue, like $50 billion a year.

But there are downsides too. Right now, if you want to invest in some gold for your retirement fund, you can buy a gold ETF with a bid-ask spread a cent wide. Like maybe the fair price is around $104.005 and you can buy it for $104.01 (or sell it for $104.00), basically paying half a cent per share to invest in it. With a 10 bp tax, say, the spread would widen out to $103.89-$104.12, meaning you have to pay more like 12 cents a share to invest in it. This clearly discourages investment and hurts middle-class investors as well as the rich. It would also reduce liquidity and make price discovery less efficient. (Some people, including Bernie Sanders presumably, think markets are too liquid right now and reducing liquidity would be a benefit to this tax. I think that’s something smart people disagree on.) I’m not clear on what the long-term effects on GDP would be, like I don’t think they would be good but I don’t know how big they’d be and that’s probably a hard question.

Bernie Sanders has proposed a tax of 50 basis points on every financial transaction. I think this is a terrible idea. (The Tax Policy Center says that would actually raise less revenue than a lower tax.) When I found out about the 50 basis points thing I was a little concerned that no one else seemed to be talking about how it was kind of crazy so I asked an Actual Prominent Economist (who is p progressive, voted for Obama, etc.) “wouldn’t a tax that high like, end our financial system as we know it?” He was like “oh yeah, probably.”

And on the subject of productive work vs zero-sum games of one-upmanship, I think it’s not clear that HFT is zero-sum. (Reasons it might not be so bad, from Matt Levine who has written a lot more about this in a thoughtful and nuanced and frequently entertaining way.) There are reasons to be concerned about it, but for the most part I think Democratic candidates have decided to go after HFT because it just sounds kinda evil.

Idk, I sorta want to hear more people complaining about how all the smart mathematically inclined kids these days get jobs at Uber for kittens instead of doing actually productive work. Maybe this is just going to school in California but I feel like that’s way more common.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 137577701884

Date: 2016-01-18 22:09:19 GMT

Reblogging: sinesalvatorem

Body:

The professor was giving us protocols for formal interaction. He said it was important to introduce people of higher rank first when introducing multiple people. As an intuitive Socialist, I was annoyed by all of these, since everyone is a comrade. However, some of these were worse than others:
The order, by rank and status, was as follows:
Bishops before priests
Prime ministers before cabinet ministers
Bosses before employees
Teachers before students
Parents before children
Men before women
…What the serious fuck

That’s weird–Miss Manners says pretty much the same thing about introductions, but says that women outrank men, and everything I found on Google just now agrees with her. I wonder if this is a [country of origin redacted] thing, or if your professor is just wrong.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 137206458599

Date: 2016-01-13 06:45:58 GMT

Reblogging: a-bell-to-rise-and-die

Body:

for totally unrelated reasons, ghengis khan was my role model for years as a child.

When I was 11 everyone in my class had to read a biography of someone and then make a presentation about why that person was a hero, and the class voted to determine the winner. So my mom thought it would be really funny to buy me a biography of Genghis Khan and suggest I choose him.

I was like “… okay he sounds cool, why not.” I made a presentation focusing on his anti-torture and pro-religious-toleration stances, left out all the brutal massacres and stuff, and won.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 137114934874

Date: 2016-01-11 22:51:22 GMT

Body: Many people’s investment strategies involve picking stocks to beat the market. As a believer in the efficient market hypothesis, I don’t think it’s worth my time to research individual securities and simply try to hold a diversified array of assets. And given my age, high expected future earnings, and intention to give a large percentage of my income to charity, I’m willing to accept a fairly high level of systemic risk in exchange for higher expected returns. So basically

other girls: seeking alpha

me: happy to settle for beta

Tags: #follow worldoptimization for the intersection of finance and redpill thought, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 137114089824

Date: 2016-01-11 22:37:06 GMT

Reblogging: argumate

Body:

argumate:

That men not to fuck post, it’s a thing that just keeps giving.
It follows the genre conventions of you go girl feminist takedowns, but the message is to only have sex with career men with stable incomes who know their place in society and relate to women as sensible adults.
If you dusted some quaint turns of phrase throughout you could drop it back to 1850 and it would be read approvingly by a matron to her nubile daughters.

I think this is why I felt sort of sympathetic toward it? It’s like, there are certain circles where if you find a guy attractive the expected response is to fuck him. And sometimes declaring someone Not to Fuck is the easiest way to be permitted not to fuck him (even if the only one you need permission from is yourself). I read that post and I saw a girl discovering the concept that like, it’s okay to have standards.

If read with the context of its intended audience it’s not actually bad advice. If you think finance guys are evil capitalist oppressors maybe don’t fuck them? If you think guys who go on Reddit or like Star Wars are losers maybe don’t fuck them? I mean, ymmv but I think a lot of women would benefit from not fucking men they hold in contempt.

(of course, the post isn’t merely feeding off existing contempt, it’s also giving people more things that they are now required to be contemptuous about)

(she also wrote a post on “dating resolutions for 2k16″ the first item of which is “expect guys to take me on actual dates that aren’t Netflix and chill” and like … oh honey)

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 137001564064

Date: 2016-01-10 07:22:33 GMT

Body: I wish I could say “I watch SU but identify with the diamonds,” but truth is the character I most identify with is Peridot

Tags: #well and Connie but that's not a deep political statement, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 136770740099

Date: 2016-01-06 22:24:24 GMT

Body: Yesterday I tried to drop a class, and the online course enrollment system gave me an error message.

So I went to the course advisor and explained my situation. “Oh, that’s because if you’re a dual-degree student, the system won’t let you drop down to zero classes for either one of your degrees. I remember so-and-so had the same problem last year.”

“But I thought that was allowed.”

“Oh, it’s totally allowed, no rules against it. It’s just a bug in the system. Go to the Student Services Center, they’ll help you.”

So today I went to the Student Services Center and explained what happened. “Oh yeah, that’s just because you’re a dual-degree student; we see this bug all the time. Fill out this form, give it back to us, and we’ll override the system and drop the course for you within five business days.”

I looked down at the form, titled Petition to Change Course Enrollment. The first section asked you to check off a box to specify the type of request. And the first option was “dual-degree student trying to drop down to zero classes for one degree.”

Like … I feel like if you are at the point of printing forms for students to fill out to request that administrators manually override the system every time they encounter this bug, it might be easier to just fix the bug?

Tags: #cs, #personal

Post ID: 136465413779

Date: 2016-01-02 16:37:12 GMT

Reblogging: epistemic-horror

Body:

This is a really interesting paper, which is not something I ever expected to say about medieval finance.
The basic thesis is this: usury was famously prohibited in medieval Catholic Europe. However, other financial contracts (that didn’t involve “barren money” bearing fruit) were not. In particular, in the northern Italian city-states, one could purchase equity by means of partnerships such as the “commenda” – this wasn’t usury, since it involved bearing some risk.
Another innovation, in 14th-century Genoa, was something like modern insurance, with “naked” policies unattached to loans or other contracts beginning to be written. This wasn’t usury, because no loans were made.
It didn’t take long for merchants to realize that they could offset equity risk by insuring themselves against losses. But the real innovation, sometime in the middle of the 15th century, was the ‘triple contract.” For a creditor, this consisted of a partnership; insurance of the principal against loss; and a third insurance-like contract selling an uncertain future profit for a small, certain profit. The genius of the triple contract is twofold: first, you can replicate the cash flows of a loan with interest, by combining non-usurious contracts. (This is, in all essential respects, just the statement of put-call parity: buying an asset, and buying a put option and selling a call option on the asset with the same strike price, gives you a constant payoff diagram. Hence the claim that parity was understood 500 years before it was officially recognized by academic finance.) Second, the creditor can make the individual contracts with different co-parties. A partner who did not want to borrow a loan could enter into a regular partnership, and the creditor could buy and sell insurance on the open market. This allowed triple contracts to become quite common – and made it difficult to argue that, since the payoffs replicated a loan, the triple contract was usury.
If that’s not enough for you, there’s also a brief (too-brief!) description of shady banking interests fighting to ensure that the triple contract was not declared usury by the Church. Plus ça change,

lifehack: if there’s a paper that looks interesting but you don’t feel like reading it, get prophecyformula to read it and give you the highlights

anyway, mostly reblogging this because inventing elaborate financial instruments to replicate loans with interest while avoiding breaking religious prohibitions on usury is so #the aesthetic

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 136231288829

Date: 2015-12-30 03:58:18 GMT

Reblogging: a-bell-to-rise-and-die

Body:

untiltheseashallfreethem:

severnayazemlya:
marcusseldon:
bartlebyshop:
funereal-disease:
jumpingjacktrash:
the-rain-monster:
littlepinkbeast:
rainbowbarnacle:
mercurialmalcontent:
mazarinedrake:
jezi-belle:
So I have a genuine curiosity:
What do people in the US outside the South drink with meals at home? Like, growing up every day, what got served as a drink with dinner? Obviously at a restaurant you order soda and stuff, but what was common at home? Do they keep sodas and such at home and serve it consistently, or what?
I know down here it’s sweet tea, and I know that’s foreign to the rest of the country, so I’m curious. Reblog if you can, I’m interested in as many responses as I can get.
When I was a kid I had a glass of milk with dinner every night, but these days I usually have soda. I grew up in Oregon.
From what little I can remember, tap water or Kool-aid (because Kool-aid is cheap and we were poor). I grew up in Eastern Oregon.
I grew up near Saint Louis. Usually we had tap water, sometimes coca-cola if we ordered a pizza or something. For barbecues and summery family gatherings and stuff, sometimes we’d make sun tea. (usually two batches, one sweetened and one unsweetened)
Michigan: milk or water, or lemonade in summer.
When I was growing up it was milk or Tang on military bases in various parts of the country. Now it’s tap water, sometimes wine or fruit juice.
minnesota: milk or fruit juice when i was a kid. pop, iced tea (not sweet tea, but earl grey or herbal brewed with a tea bag and then poured over ice), or iced coffee as i got older.
my parents would sometimes have a bottle of beer or a glass of wine instead, and now that i’m middle-aged i do that too. not every meal but when it was something that harmonized, you know? wine with pasta, beer with burgers or steak, lemon shandy with fried chicken, that sort of thing.
even though it’s cold as a republican’s heart half the year here, we almost never have hot drinks with dinner. i don’t know why. i have hot coffee with breakfast, hot tea with a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, but with a sit-down dinner i always want a big glass of something cold. i don’t even like red wine at dinner because it’s served room temperature – gotta be a nice cold white. or sake, i like sake cold during dinner and hot with dessert. no clue why. it’s just what i like. *shrug*
The idea of drinking with a meal is really weird to me. My family only ever did water. If I want a booze drink, I typically have it before or after dinner, not during.
I drank pretty much only water growing up. Other beverages were treated like snacks: nice for the taste, but not a thirst-quencher. To this day, water is the only thing that ever quenches my thirst. Any other liquid just makes me thirstier.
My parents insisted we have milk with every meal, even with things it really doesn’t make sense to pair milk with, like steak with red wine based sauce. Adults drank wine at the table, or very rarely beer. We had pop in the fridge but that was only to have with snacks, never with a meal.
As a little kid I always had milk or juice, occasionally soda. At some point in my early teens I started mostly drinking water with meals, and I’ll have alcohol with my meal on the rare occasions I drink it.
I grew up in the South, but nobody in my family likes sweet tea. We almost always drank water at meals, even at restaurants. When we didn’t drink water, we drank seltzer (or tonic water, in my dad’s case), but that was usually because the tap water tasted awful or wasn’t potable, which was not uncommon.
russian jewish, grew up in a lot of places but mostly new england and california; usually tap water or sparkling water, occasionally milk if it makes sense with the food, small amounts of wine on friday past age 13. everyone got their own beverage if it’s nonalcoholic.

New England

when I was a kid I had milk with every meal

at some point in high school I switched to hot tea with breakfast (because I needed it to stay awake in first period), unsweetened iced tea with lunch (what my mom did, my dad had Coke), and red wine and seltzer with dinner (what both my parents did)

I drank soda on occasion when I was a kid but don’t really anymore. I’ve never drunk much water

Tags: #personal, #food cw

Post ID: 136139544144

Date: 2015-12-28 22:36:02 GMT

Body: my 12-year-old sister just told me she got in an argument with a boy at her school because he said, and I quote, “malaria isn’t a big problem”

I’m so proud

Tags: #and then she proceeded, #to send him a bunch of facts, #about how many people die from malaria, #and how much it costs to buy a malaria net, #effective altruism

Post ID: 136020586034

Date: 2015-12-27 05:12:06 GMT

Question: In what contexts have you larped?

Answer: I’m a college student, so I’ve done a couple of LARPs with my school’s gaming society. I’m not like serious or good at it, I just like excuses to spend a few hours implementing evil schemes while wearing a corset.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 135685107509

Date: 2015-12-22 03:48:00 GMT

Body: (also on the subject of LARPing it occurs to me that my favorite character I’ve ever LARPed was a hyper-reactionary woman who thought that society was going downhill because no one respected the gods anymore but was pretty hypocritical about it–she thought that women should be submissive to their husbands but was scheming and ambitious in her own right, and believed in the virtue of chastity but was kind of a slut. so uh)

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 135661528009

Date: 2015-12-21 20:58:00 GMT

Body: re: neoreactionaries and political LARPing

(if this comes across as mean to neoreactionaries that was not my intention, it’s meant as more self-critical than anything else)

I don’t have like, a coherent thesis to share but I was thinking a lot about this when I read Submission. Submission is this beautifully embarrassing Mary Sue wish-fulfillment fantasy that clearly lampshades that it is such. (Quote from the main character Francois: “Story of O contained everything I didn’t like in a novel: other people’s fantasies disgusted me.”) Francois is … well I really sympathized with him but also he’s an upper-middle-class white man whose response to his pathetic life is “hey man … what if we like … brought back the patriarchy?” He’s a beta who buys into redpill/evo-psych and thinks he’s an alpha.

(I’m not saying neoreactionaries are weird beta losers who spend too much time on the internet but uh)

(<3)

It reminded me of this old post about confusing a kink for a political philosophy because there’s something similar about BDSM and neoreaction–maybe that they’re both about being transgressive by playacting an oppressive past. Ross Douthat’s commentary on Fifty Shades of Grey is relevant I think; “The hope … is that we can eventually have all the fun of Rome without the nasty bits,” he writes. Because like, I hate my left-liberal bubble but would never live anywhere but SF or NYC. Sometimes my friend from Texas shows me her Facebook newsfeed and it’s sort of horrifying. And Francois doesn’t really want to return to the past. What he wants is this absurd pseudo-Islamist fantasy where his life is kinda like it is now but also he gets three virginal teenage brides to serve his every whim.

Internal monologue I had the other day:

mmm my wedding is going to be so great. We’ll use traditional wedding vows of course … ooh, maybe we should leave the “obey” in the vows, that would be ~rly trad~

… wait, if I do that will people interpret it as like public BDSM or something? ew that is so not what I’m going for

… wait, is there really a difference?

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 135326691249

Date: 2015-12-16 17:43:13 GMT

Body: So I was reading the Times yesterday and one of the letters went something like “It’s troubling that Scalia would cite debunked social science such as the mismatch hypothesis–haven’t you seen this blog post?”

So of course I had to check out the post, which led to a rabbit hole of links, so I thought I’d summarize what I found.

The first thing Chingos cites in his post is this paper which uses a scholarship program in Massachusetts in which the top 25% scoring students in each school district on a standardized test were given free tuition at any state university. They compared the students just above and just below the threshold, and found that getting the scholarship made students significantly more likely to attend state universities and that this made them less likely to graduate. Which is interesting, but seems not totally the same thing as mismatch from affirmative action? This is basically saying that (for kids around the 75th percentile of their district) going to a school they’re overqualified for makes them less likely to graduate, while mismatch theory says going to a school you’re underqualified for makes you less likely to graduate. These things could both be true.

And actually, as I read the paper more closely (this factoid is buried on page 23) it says that non-white students do not see a drop in their persistence rates from attending state universities. So if I’m understanding this correctly this effect only holds for white students? Uh, this doesn’t exactly seem like evidence against mismatch.

The second thing is two studies supporting mismatch that he reanalyzes. The evidence supporting mismatch is mostly based on studies that control for what colleges students were accepted to. The problem with this is that, of course, we don’t know if it’s causal or if the students who choose to go to a less selective school are different in some way. Most students just go to the most selective college they’re accepted to or somewhere of approximately the same selectiveness, so we’re trying to trying to draw conclusions from this kinda small and weird group of students.

So what he does instead is look at the graduation rates for students who go to different schools, controlling not for what schools they were accepted to but for SAT score, GPA, parental education, and family income. And he found the opposite result–that students going to better schools had higher graduation rates. This method doesn’t have the issues of the previous one, but it clearly has its own issues–when controlling for SAT score and GPA, what colleges you’re accepted to probably has a lot to do with motivation and other stuff that clearly has an effect on whether you graduate college.

The second study was one that found that for URM students who stated an intention to major in science, going to a more selective school made them less likely to major in science. He agrees with this in his reanalysis, but says that this relationship got stronger after California instituted its affirmative action ban, which is the opposite of what you’d expect if affirmative action were the cause. I don’t know what’s up with that tbh.

(An issue that occurs to me with all the studies focusing on California is that, well, California college admissions aren’t really race-blind. We’re comparing a system that does a lot of explicit race-based affirmative action to a system that does a smaller amount of covert and very subjective race-based affirmative action. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if “applicants get +5 points if they’re black” is a way better system in terms of matching students correctly than “well, it would be illegal to ask you to consider race when reading these applications … but uh, we wouldn’t usually give that sort of student that sort of score …”)

What I haven’t seen, and what I’d like to see, is studies that survey URM students about happiness/feelings of belonging. Just thinking about my school, almost everyone graduates–we have a good support system and plenty of easy classes for you to take if you fail calculus. I think the issues go beyond not graduating. Although, I guess given the earnings boost from attending selective colleges, maybe four years of unhappiness is worth it if you get your degree at the end? I did find an interesting-looking paper arguing that our current level of affirmative action is higher than the level that would maximize interracial interaction across all college students, since social segregation is more likely on campuses where there is a marked difference in academic preparation between students of different races.

So yeah. In conclusion, Chingos says that “To truly put the mismatch theory to rest, rigorous quasi-experimental evidence that focuses on the beneficiaries of preferential admissions policies is needed.” I agree with this. But I’m not quite as confident as him about which way the evidence will point.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 135324524544

Date: 2015-12-16 16:58:55 GMT

Reblogging: untiltheseashallfreethem

Question: "I’m not sure how to be Catholic in an authentic way without believing." I'd be really curious to hear any further thoughts you might have on this?

Answer:

worldoptimization:
The backstory is that when I was a kid I was pretty Catholic. I liked going to Mass and everything, but I could never really wrap my head around the God thing. I knew about science, I knew that magic wasn’t real, and I knew not to believe everything you hear, that unbelievable stories people passed around often turned out to be just urban legends. But I still tried to be a good Catholic, and pray and fast and do all the things you were supposed to do.
At some point, I heard the story of the Incredulity of Thomas. It made me feel terrible–if Thomas was a bad person because he didn’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead without evidence, then I was a bad person too. I tried to believe, but I didn’t know how you were supposed to make yourself believe something that didn’t make any sense. I started praying every night before I went to sleep, asking God if He existed to please help me believe in him, to give me a sign, or maybe just come in the night and fix my brain because it was clearly missing the faith module.
Then one day when I was 16, something clicked. I realized God didn’t exist, and that was okay. I wasn’t a bad person for thinking He didn’t exist because, you know, the belief system that told me I was a bad person wasn’t true because he didn’t exist. I felt tremendously relieved and happy. I stopped praying. I still went to Mass, but it went from something I looked forward to to something I dreaded. All the priests saying these wonderful things about Jesus, all the people following along in the prayers and saying the Nicene Creed, did they really believe God existed, or were they just going along and pretending? Were they just silly and deluded, or evil men perpetuating this structure of lies that hurt people?
That phase lasted a couple of years. After I had time to get over all the negative feelings I had about Catholicism, I started to miss it more and more. The music, the weekly ritual of Mass, the fasting and giving things up for Lent, the comfort of praying every night before I went to sleep. I started getting into my hypercontrarian Social Conservative for the Signaling phase and thinking a lot about the value of ritual and community and tradition and hiding in a corner of the campus bookstore to read First Things when it came out every month and thinking people who get it. (Yeah yeah I know, thou shalt not steal.)
This thread is actually a fairly good summary of the argument in my head going on about religion these days? I was really excited when I came across the argument that the focus on belief and brain-states in religion is actually sort of modern and degenerate and Protestant-centric, and religion at its heart is about participation in rites and tradition. But on the other hand, I’m still unsure about the value of rites and tradition that are grounded in a belief system that ultimately I can’t get behind. I mean, a lot of Catholicism really is founded on the whole Jesus thing and on the concomitant system of moral beliefs that, well, I don’t agree with. A lot of Mass still feels hollow to me, knowing that it’s not true. The most meaningful ritual I’ve ever participated in was an effective altruist ritual, because I really believed in the value and truth of everything we were saying and doing. But, well, if EA is a religion it’s a religion that was founded in 2011 by some nerds who spent a lot of time arguing about utilitarianism on the internet. It’s not exactly a two-thousand-year-old tradition passed down by your ancestors for almost that long that you can baptize your children into.
This is silly, but this issue is actually the biggest thing one of my friends and I fight over. Whenever I say that I want to go to Mass or refer to Catholics as “we” or express an opinion on the direction the Church should take, she accuses me of appropriating religion. She thinks that participating in religion without believing in God is wrong, that if I don’t believe then I’m only being Catholic ironically, and that’s disrespectful of people who are actually religious. And maybe she’s right? I don’t know, I do a lot of things ironically I guess, not that I’m trying to it just happens, and even from the inside it’s hard to tell the difference between doing something ironically and just doing it. How do you do something really, truly sincerely?
And I just don’t get her attitude toward religion. She’s one of the people I mention in this post: she believes in God (or uh, believes that she believes in God), but this belief doesn’t really lead her to do anything except go to church twice a year or so to hear the pretty music. I mean, if the Christian god is real, doesn’t that change everything? Doesn’t that affect every thought you have, every action you take? Isn’t it better to try to do something, even if the faith module in your brain is broken and maybe you’re just doing it for the signaling or maybe you’re doing it because you want to but you’re telling yourself you’re doing it for the signaling so you can maintain some level of ironic detachment, than not to try at all?
So yeah idk if any of that was helpful anon. I don’t really have any settled thoughts, just a lot of feelings and questions.
I feel like I should respond to this, because it’s relevant to my interests, and you linked a thread that I was part of. So!
As far as I can tell, religion is, indeed, not about beliefs. Or at least, beliefs aren’t the point of the religion. The point has more to do with values, shared cultural traditions, and rituals that create a sense of group belongingness. (And if you’re a mystic like me, then religion is also about the experience of the divine, but I won’t get into that here.)
But that doesn’t mean beliefs are irrelevant to religion. If I remember correctly, Kevin Simler says that beliefs are basically just an ingroup shibboleth. You believe some crazy ideas for which there’s no evidence, and these beliefs imply you should practice laborious rituals and follow restrictive taboos, which provides a costly signal that you are, in fact, a member of the group. (I haven’t read the essay in a long time, so I hope this is actually what Kevin was saying.)
Anyway, I disagree with this! Or, at least, I don’t think it’s the complete story. If beliefs only existed to create an ingroup shibboleth, then it wouldn’t matter what a group believed, as long as it provided a costly enough signal. But in fact, you see different kinds of societies holding different religious beliefs, suggesting that the specifics of the beliefs are important. You have the different kinds of mythology that Joseph Campbell described, one for hunting cultures and another for planting cultures. You have the fact that monotheism tends to arise in conjunction with empires. All of this suggests that beliefs are doing something. Whether they actually drive the social technologies, or whether they merely reflect the underlying worldview of the people, it seems that a synergy is necessary between the society and its beliefs. (I should probably give an example. By “beliefs actually driving the social technology”, I mean, say, that people are more inspired to follow the emperor when they’re also worshiping a single, all-powerful god. By “beliefs may reflect the underlying worldview”, I mean that in an empire, people might say “hey, we have a bunch of separate city-states ruled over by a single empire; I wonder if all our separate gods are ruled over by a single emperor-god, too”.)
So anyway, I think that beliefs are important. And you actually have to believe them in order for them to work. (I’m using “belief” pretty broadly here – to include the doctrines of the Judeo-Christian religion, which are interpreted as historical fact, as well as myths that aren’t historically “true”, but which exist in a separate dreamtime as archetypes of the collective unconscious. I’m also including traditions. The point is, I mean “believe” in an emotional sense, not a factual one. Like, I, personally, believe in the myth of the dying-and-rising god. Let’s take a concrete example, like the song “Finnegan’s Wake”. I believe in Finnegan’s Wake. What does that even mean? I don’t believe it actually happened. But I believe that the story condenses and encapsulates some fundamental aspect of human experience. I believe that it relates to things that happen in my own life. I believe it emotionally, where I listen to the song, and in my heart I say “yes, this is true”. But it’s not a factual truth. It’s an emotional truth. (If someone pokes me hard enough, I’ll try to explain this in cogsci terms.) Anyway, I think maybe this is what your Christian friend means when she says she believes in God. Maybe she feels, in her heart, that he is real and the stories are “true” in this emotional sense.)
So anyway, I think beliefs are important, but they don’t have to be factual beliefs; they can be emotional beliefs. But in any case, these beliefs drive people’s actions and values. The beliefs inspire people to perform specific rituals. And if the beliefs were just ingroup shibboleths, and the rituals were just mechanisms for promoting group cohesion, then it wouldn’t matter which beliefs and rituals a culture chose. But no, the beliefs drive people’s values and influence people’s fundamental ways of life. Christianity comes with certain values (chastity, etc.), and people are inspired to follow those values because they believe in the stories (of the Virgin Mary, etc.). So if you don’t hold the beliefs, what’s to inspire you to keep holding the values? And indeed, a lot of ex-Christians have ceased to care about chastity.
Here’s the thing – it’s nice to participate in age-old traditions, and we shouldn’t just tear down social technologies willy-nilly (Chesterton’s fence and all). But times do change, and the social technologies will need to adapt. Scientific discoveries weaken Judeo-Christian religious beliefs, which weakens religious values and traditions, and the whole thing starts to collapse. Similarly, the circumstances of the culture change, and the values that used to be necessary cease to be important, and people start to think that the religion is pointless. (I’m sure there is still virtue in chastity, but not nearly as much as there used to be, back before birth control!)
I think it’s pretty much inevitable that over time, religions will weaken; their beliefs, values, and traditions will become outmoded. People’s experience of the religion will start to grow hollow, as yours did. And when the religion collapses (just like when an empire collapses), it will leave this void of chaos, where new conflicting belief systems can compete for power. I think this is maybe what happened during the Protestant Reformation, and it definitely seems to be happening now.
So anyway, I wouldn’t feel bad about abandoning an old tradition, if it’s no longer meaningful to you. I wouldn’t follow a religion just because “religion is a social technology, and social technologies are important”. You have to find something that resonates with you. If Catholicism is important enough to you that you want to keep attending, regardless of your lack of belief, then by all means, continue. If you think Catholicism has something new-fangled belief systems can’t provide you with, then that seems like enough reason to keep practicing Catholicism. But if you think you can take what you like about Catholicism, and use it to create a new EA-inspired “religion”, then… I don’t see any reason why not to. I don’t think you should resist that course of action just because it’s new. (I mean, creating a new religion / social technology is always a matter of trial and error, and it will likely take a while before it’s as effective as Catholicism is to its true believers. But new social technologies need to be created at some point. Participating in a venerable institution can be powerful, but creating a new institution is also a method of participating in the continuity.)

This was a really interesting response, thanks!

I really like the idea of beliefs being emotional as well as factual, of feeling “yes this is true” being a way to believe things. And I really like the idea that traditions need to change over time, and creating new social technologies is a way to participate in the continuity. That’s actually quite comforting to me–that yes, tradition is important, but the ending of old traditions and the starting of new ones as society changes is a constant, and it’s traditional in a way too.

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 135069991294

Date: 2015-12-12 21:45:10 GMT

Question: "I’m not sure how to be Catholic in an authentic way without believing." I'd be really curious to hear any further thoughts you might have on this?

Answer: The backstory is that when I was a kid I was pretty Catholic. I liked going to Mass and everything, but I could never really wrap my head around the God thing. I knew about science, I knew that magic wasn’t real, and I knew not to believe everything you hear, that unbelievable stories people passed around often turned out to be just urban legends. But I still tried to be a good Catholic, and pray and fast and do all the things you were supposed to do.

At some point, I heard the story of the Incredulity of Thomas. It made me feel terrible–if Thomas was a bad person because he didn’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead without evidence, then I was a bad person too. I tried to believe, but I didn’t know how you were supposed to make yourself believe something that didn’t make any sense. I started praying every night before I went to sleep, asking God if He existed to please help me believe in him, to give me a sign, or maybe just come in the night and fix my brain because it was clearly missing the faith module.

Then one day when I was 16, something clicked. I realized God didn’t exist, and that was okay. I wasn’t a bad person for thinking He didn’t exist because, you know, the belief system that told me I was a bad person wasn’t true because he didn’t exist. I felt tremendously relieved and happy. I stopped praying. I still went to Mass, but it went from something I looked forward to to something I dreaded. All the priests saying these wonderful things about Jesus, all the people following along in the prayers and saying the Nicene Creed, did they really believe God existed, or were they just going along and pretending? Were they just silly and deluded, or evil men perpetuating this structure of lies that hurt people?

That phase lasted a couple of years. After I had time to get over all the negative feelings I had about Catholicism, I started to miss it more and more. The music, the weekly ritual of Mass, the fasting and giving things up for Lent, the comfort of praying every night before I went to sleep. I started getting into my hypercontrarian Social Conservative for the Signaling phase and thinking a lot about the value of ritual and community and tradition and hiding in a corner of the campus bookstore to read First Things when it came out every month and thinking people who get it. (Yeah yeah I know, thou shalt not steal.)

This thread is actually a fairly good summary of the argument in my head going on about religion these days? I was really excited when I came across the argument that the focus on belief and brain-states in religion is actually sort of modern and degenerate and Protestant-centric, and religion at its heart is about participation in rites and tradition. But on the other hand, I’m still unsure about the value of rites and tradition that are grounded in a belief system that ultimately I can’t get behind. I mean, a lot of Catholicism really is founded on the whole Jesus thing and on the concomitant system of moral beliefs that, well, I don’t agree with. A lot of Mass still feels hollow to me, knowing that it’s not true. The most meaningful ritual I’ve ever participated in was an effective altruist ritual, because I really believed in the value and truth of everything we were saying and doing. But, well, if EA is a religion it’s a religion that was founded in 2011 by some nerds who spent a lot of time arguing about utilitarianism on the internet. It’s not exactly a two-thousand-year-old tradition passed down by your ancestors for almost that long that you can baptize your children into.

This is silly, but this issue is actually the biggest thing one of my friends and I fight over. Whenever I say that I want to go to Mass or refer to Catholics as “we” or express an opinion on the direction the Church should take, she accuses me of appropriating religion. She thinks that participating in religion without believing in God is wrong, that if I don’t believe then I’m only being Catholic ironically, and that’s disrespectful of people who are actually religious. And maybe she’s right? I don’t know, I do a lot of things ironically I guess, not that I’m trying to it just happens, and even from the inside it’s hard to tell the difference between doing something ironically and just doing it. How do you do something really, truly sincerely?

And I just don’t get her attitude toward religion. She’s one of the people I mention in this post: she believes in God (or uh, believes that she believes in God), but this belief doesn’t really lead her to do anything except go to church twice a year or so to hear the pretty music. I mean, if the Christian god is real, doesn’t that change everything? Doesn’t that affect every thought you have, every action you take? Isn’t it better to try to do something, even if the faith module in your brain is broken and maybe you’re just doing it for the signaling or maybe you’re doing it because you want to but you’re telling yourself you’re doing it for the signaling so you can maintain some level of ironic detachment, than not to try at all?

So yeah idk if any of that was helpful anon. I don’t really have any settled thoughts, just a lot of feelings and questions.

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 134824431844

Date: 2015-12-09 00:59:15 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 134814096639

Date: 2015-12-08 21:52:29 GMT

Reblogging: epistemic-horror

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 134808379189

Date: 2015-12-08 20:14:11 GMT

Body: after reading this I’m p ready for the glorious Houellebecqian future tbh

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 134605740464

Date: 2015-12-05 19:59:06 GMT

Body:

Consider that since puberty a modern woman may spend almost ¼ of her life under the threat of subtle disorder to their thinking processes due to hormones. It seems clear that for a self-aware woman, the rest of the time they may have an advantage in noting when they are biased.

only in the SSC comment section can you find people arguing that menstruation makes women more rational

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 134356803339

Date: 2015-12-01 22:27:57 GMT

Tags: #vagueblogging, #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 133942731524

Date: 2015-11-25 19:07:15 GMT

Body: lifehack: read all of Scott’s posts by imagining them being said aloud in his voice

(it takes longer to read them but it makes them like 10% better)

Post ID: 133771408659

Date: 2015-11-23 03:41:13 GMT

Reblogging: serkentsi-deactivated20180207

Body:

severnayazemlya:

I don’t know why anyone would be surprised that “it’s historically recent for homosexuality to be thought of as an identity rather than as an incidental act, and before that development, there were no homosexuals in the sense of identity, but only people who engaged in acts of sodomy” is a common argument in trad circles. I think I’ve even seen Catholic outlets explicitly cite Foucault on that point.

this First Things article is a v good example

Tags: #first things <3, #crypto-social conservative blogging, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 133157839514

Date: 2015-11-13 22:53:09 GMT

Reblogging: wirehead-wannabe

Body:

wirehead-wannabe:

floresapriles:
Somewhatrelevant confession time: Reading birth chart analyses on astrology forums is apretty reliable ASMR trigger for me
Iknow waaay more about ascendants, conjunctions, and houses than any respectableyoung skeptic/former “Anything not of God is of Satan!” Christian should
(Myverdict: astrology is much more than sun signs and horoscopes in Cosmo, butit’d need to take advantage of the Barnum effect more before any of it started sounding even sort of accurate)
btw, do any of my followers experience ASMR regularly/reliably? I have this effort post in my drafts about a theory of mine where ‘ASMR’ can actually be divided into at least two, possibly more, discrete sensations, and how the English language really lacks the vocabulary to distinguish between them
but I need at least a couple of people who get it regularly so that I can get feedback from the ‘community’, as it were, to ensure that I’m not just seriously typical-minding here
I experience ASMR from videos designed to induce them, but I’m put off by the roleplay stuff.
Also maybe one of the two sensations is frisson?

Someone else who gets ASMR from reading a really random category of stuff! My most reliable ASMR triggers are this blog and anything on Yahoo Answers, though astrology also sounds like the sort of thing that could work. (Also people with Chinese accents talking about boring things, for some reason. The videos I’ve seen didn’t do much for me.)

(I wouldn’t divide what I refer to as ASMR into two sensations, it seems like one well-defined thing to me. I’d be interested to hear what you think the sensations are.)

Post ID: 133097333449

Date: 2015-11-12 23:46:53 GMT

Body: for the record, I identify as the comparison shopper, it’s science!, the rationalist, the economist, the traditionalist,the good girl, and now I guess the cartoon critic, in roughly that order

Tags: #vagueblogging, #never underestimate the memetic fitness of invitations to categorize oneself, #not sj go away

Post ID: 133029758059

Date: 2015-11-11 23:05:10 GMT

Reblogging: serkentsi-deactivated20180207

Question: In your ideal Calvinist theocracy, do the people at the top know it's a sham? Do the people at the bottom? Do people know that their neighbors know?

Answer:

serkentsi-deactivated20180207:

Who said anything about shams?
The insistence on the primacy of belief over action isn’t necessary. Look at the Jews. How much does it matter whether a Jew is religious? A Jew who doesn’t believe in God can still go through the motions of Judaism. A Protestant who doesn’t believe in God, on the other hand… what motions are there to go through? Maybe he takes his children to church, but that’s about all there is, and that’s understandably rare. Who wants to sit in a hard bench for a few hours on Sunday morning and listen to some boring rand talk about God?
The big issue for Protestants is that people lose faith. They’ve been looking for solutions to that. Books don’t seem to work. Personal charisma… well, look at the Pentecostals. That didn’t turn out so well. And there’s plenty of room for scam artists, which you don’t want either.
Now, let’s say you have someone who was raised atheist, but whose absence of faith starts to crack. How do you get him? You don’t want there to be too high an inferential distance. Maybe he decides that God exists, or that there’s historical evidence for the Resurrection, it doesn’t really matter what it is, but if Christianity is alien to him, he’s going to be confused. Maybe he’d feel too awkward to go to church, maybe he’d worry about social pressure, whatever. You’re likely to lose him. But if he’s already going through the motions, it’s just a change in brain states.
And let’s say you have someone who was raised Christian, but ended up losing faith. What do you think happened there? There were some articles about this a while back, I think one was in the Atlantic, I’ve never been able to find it, but the point was: you might think people become atheists because of intellectual arguments and so on (if you haven’t accepted that intellectual arguments don’t mean all that much to most people), but what it usually comes down to is that they lose respect for their church. They think the people at the top of it don’t take it seriously or don’t care, they don’t get anything out of it, that sort of thing.
I’ve seen it happen. When I was about eleven, my mother got it into her head to start going to church – an awful ultra-liberal church for aging hippies, of course, because she’s an aging hippie. Used to be a commie, still basically is, went to the USSR even, darkly hints about having had friends who got up to some real darkside shit in the ‘70s, all that. Anyway. I was the only person in that building under 50. I slept through everything. I didn’t give a damn, and they weren’t trying to get me to. Then one day they brought in an old hunchbacked black woman with a lisp to lead everyone in a round of Kumbaya. Really. They lost half their people that day, including us. We didn’t switch churches. We stopped going entirely. I doubt we were the only ones. Now she gives me nü-atheist tracts every Christmas.
But what happened to get a commie to go to church? She decided I ought to be familiar with the music. In other words, she went to church – and made me go to church – because there was a secular component that she, even as an atheist, could respect. And then there wasn’t.
(But she’d been apologizing for the low quality of the music there for a while before the Kumbaya incident. Straw, camel.)
In the ideal Calvinist theocracy, your brain states are between you and God. What’s between you and society is your participation in the rites. The Jews seem to get this right. So does the American civil religion. You celebrate Independence Day and Thanksgiving and so on even if you don’t care about the government, and you familiarize yourself with the Constitution even if you’re a monarchist. You go through the motions regardless of your brain states, and you know what the motions are about. Thanksgiving is an annual celebration of a good harvest in Plymouth after Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to grow corn. Independence Day is about the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Everyone knows that. It’s taught in schools, it’s on TV, all that. So do the Japanese. Does religion even exist in Japan?
So you have general participation in the rites, and you make sure everyone knows what the rites are about – and the evangelicals get that part. They’ve been saying ever since the decisions came down that it’s a big fucking deal that the Court doesn’t want the public schools touching anything that smells like Christianity and doesn’t want the government putting up statues of the Ten Commandments, that Christmas and Easter are getting secularized, and so on – and they’re right. If the mechanisms by which the meaning behind the rites is explained to the general population are lost, the inferential distance is increased. But on the other hand, if you make it look like you want to affect people’s brain states, you run into problems. And if the thing can’t command respect – if the churches are ugly, if the music is shit, if the rites are tedious, if the general level of civilization is low, that sort of thing – you lose completely.
To answer your question in a sentence: in the ideal Calvinist theocracy, the concept of ‘sham’ doesn’t even apply.

(this sparked a lot of good discussion but it got really long so I’m just reblogging the original)

This was really interesting because the role of belief in religion is something I’ve thought about a lot. I was pretty Catholic until age 16. I really liked Catholicism but I couldn’t deal with the belief part–I remember hearing a reading in Mass about Thomas doubting that Jesus had risen from the dead, and feeling terrible because I found the whole resurrection thing a bit implausible and obviously that was Wrong.

When I told my mom that I didn’t want to go to Mass anymore because I was an atheist, she responded, “What you believe is your own business! That doesn’t mean it’s okay to stop going to Mass.” I found this very confusing at the time.

I had a mild nü-atheist phase that I got over by 19 or so, and now I daydream about getting married in a church and having my kids baptized and being a ~religious but not spiritual~ Catholic. But like … atheism is still a sin, at Mass you’re still supposed to stand up and profess publicly that you believe Jesus rose from the dead on the third day which feels pretty weird to me. I’m not sure how to be Catholic in an authentic way without believing.

(I’m jealous of people who were raised Jewish–it seems easier for them.)

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 133028954454

Date: 2015-11-11 22:51:37 GMT

Reblogging: chroniclesofrettek

Body:

chroniclesofrettek:

worldoptimization:
So today I was talking to someone who works in admissions for an economics PhD program. The way they do admissions is that they go through every folder and give it a numerical score that’s as objective as possible, based on grades, GRE scores, quality of recommendations, undergrad research, etc. Then they go through all the folders, looking at the scores, and decide who to admit.
In the second step they always practice explicit affirmative action in favor of women; the score required to get in as a woman is significantly lower than the score required to get in as a man. And yet, consistently their female students do better on average than their male students.
I thought that was really interesting.
I don’t suppose anyone took those scores and tried to figure out a system that would better predict how well people do? It seems likely that some of those criteria are anti-correlated with success.

Yeah, economics PhD admissions seems like kind of a hard problem. Of course one thing you want is people who will do well in classes, and that’s easy–just get smart people from top schools with good grades and stuff.

But the main thing you want is people who will be good at research, and that’s not as correlated with all the obvious things, and they haven’t found a really good predictor. It seems like success in research involves a lot of intangible factors–broad range of knowledge and interests? curiosity about the world around you? creativity? ability to work in a self-directed way?–that are hard to measure from reading a folder about a college senior.

The one thing they do know is that, conditional on having 99th percentile GRE scores or whatever, these intangible factors seem to be positively correlated with being female.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy, #not sj go away, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 133028047699

Date: 2015-11-11 22:36:01 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

worldoptimization:
So today I was talking to someone who works in admissions for an economics PhD program. The way they do admissions is that they go through every folder and give it a numerical score that’s as objective as possible, based on grades, GRE scores, quality of recommendations, undergrad research, etc. Then they go through all the folders, looking at the scores, and decide who to admit.
In the second step they always practice explicit affirmative action in favor of women; the score required to get in as a woman is significantly lower than the score required to get in as a man. And yet, consistently their female students do better on average than their male students.
I thought that was really interesting.
Why don’t they bias things even more in favor of women? This seems like the sensible response.

That’s what they have been doing recently–every year they lower the score cutoff for women a bit and every year it still happens. The guy I talked to was like “… yeah we’ll probably make it even lower this year.”

(They have the opposite problem with Asians: they currently have a higher score cutoff and still consistently do worse than the white students. In this case the obvious solution–discriminate against Asians even more–feels a bit ickier.)

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy, #not sj go away, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 133022860814

Date: 2015-11-11 21:10:15 GMT

Body: So today I was talking to someone who works in admissions for an economics PhD program. The way they do admissions is that they go through every folder and give it a numerical score that’s as objective as possible, based on grades, GRE scores, quality of recommendations, undergrad research, etc. Then they go through all the folders, looking at the scores, and decide who to admit.

In the second step they always practice explicit affirmative action in favor of women; the score required to get in as a woman is significantly lower than the score required to get in as a man. And yet, consistently their female students do better on average than their male students.

I thought that was really interesting.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy, #not sj go away, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 132832840794

Date: 2015-11-08 23:46:52 GMT

Question: Because you are my social graph's expert on both: What does NRx think about PUAs?

Answer: oh god what choices have I made in my life that have gotten me to this point

(epistemic status: I’m sure I have followers who know more about this than I do)

I think the answer is, it’s complicated? they are definitely in the same general idea-cluster. there’s a range of PUAs, with Roissy on one end (that end being smarter/more philosophical/more NRx-adjacent) and the guys selling e-books on how to get laid on the other. and it’s hard to answer “what does NRx think” when I don’t know that it’s really a coherent community now. I think a lot of the cool kids don’t really identify as #NRx these days and a lot of those who do identify as such are just like, obnoxious racist trolls on Twitter.

for an illustration of the latter group’s philosophical differences with PUAs see this twitter. main criticisms include “promote degeneracy and nihilistic hedonism rather than a Correct Trad Lifestyle of getting married and having white babies” (true) and “not racist enough” (debatable).

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 132821420549

Date: 2015-11-08 20:49:51 GMT

Reblogging: epistemic-horror

Body:

It scares me a little bit that this textbook on statistical modeling is 500 pages long and the word “overfitting” appears in it exactly zero times.

#yes yes I know studying

“”studying””

Tags: #sorry everyone, #I wouldn't have had to make this low quality post, #if tumblr hadn't taken away my reply feature, #so go complain to them pls

Post ID: 132820727784

Date: 2015-11-08 20:39:33 GMT

Reblogging: serkentsi-deactivated20180207

Body:

severnayazemlya:

get people to stop using emoji and start using chinese characters imo

囧

Tags: #endorsed, #linguistics

Post ID: 132809886239

Date: 2015-11-08 17:52:51 GMT

Body: today in personal insights: I realized that part of the reason I got really excited about PUA stuff when I first discovered it is that the Dominant Narrative is that Men Like Smart Women and hearing that makes my brain go “oh no but I’m not smart, clearly no one will ever love me”

and PUA is like “actually men don’t care how smart you are or what you’ve accomplished, all they care about is physical appearance!” to which my brain’s response was “oh good then I’ll be fine, I’m pretty hot”

which uh makes a lot of sense given where I actually am in the distributions of those two traits? idk

(and can I find a good reason to be annoyed at the people who promote the Men Like Smart Women narrative for ideological reasons? I mean obviously the real answer is some combination of the two, and maybe it’s best just to get as close as possible to the real answer and promote that. or maybe people are different enough from each other that promoting a single narrative is sort of hopeless. but I do have to grudgingly admit it seems good on the margin to encourage women to spend more time trying to be successful and less time on makeup?)

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 132527396894

Date: 2015-11-04 08:34:15 GMT

Reblogging: sinesalvatorem

Question: worldoptimization! she is awesome and pretty.

Answer:

She is! Anons continue to have Correct Opinions. I am pleased with the quality of my followers’ orientations.

thanks!

(just fyi, anyone with a crush on me is welcome to send me bizarre anon asks about chives or whatever the trendy way to express affection is on tumblr these days)

Tags: #personal, #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 132463443454

Date: 2015-11-03 09:11:26 GMT

Body: More and more, I find myself writing in lowercase, and specifically in that tumblr lowercase style that uses less punctuation and needlessly abbreviates words.

When I do it I’m definitely conveying a specific register. It’s less formal, less polite, more sarcastic and deadpan. Writing in it feels good, sort of like wearing a leather jacket. It conveys a jaded world-weariness; it says, “I don’t care what you think.”

It can be used to countersignal caring: when someone I barely know wishes me a happy birthday I reply, “Thanks!” When my friend whom I’ve known for half my life does, I reply “thx man.” (Without the period. Punctuation and quotes are a problematic combination.)

I’m more likely to use tumblr lowercase when posting something that’s not directed to anyone in particular. But unless it’s someone I know well and/or it’s a casual, joking context, I use capitals and normal punctuation/spelling standards when I’m talking to someone. It conveys politeness, it conveys “I am taking you seriously” and “we are allies, in this together to seek truth.”

There are people, not so much in this corner of tumblr, but stereotypical tumblr people who show up in my Facebook feed who never deviate from tumblr lowercase. They can be having a serious discussion with a random person on someone else’s Facebook status about the Israel/Palestine situation and there it is, with liberal use of “yr” for “your” and “sry” for “sorry” (spoiler: they’re not) and lots of Capital Letters with “…” and “~” and “???” randomly thrown in from time to time.

I don’t ever want to talk to those people. It’s hard to know exactly what the lowercase register conveys to other people. But to me, it conveys Not a Good Person to Talk To. It makes it seem like they’re always trying to score points or somehow assert their dominance by being the one who cares less. Like they’re never attempting a real discussion, just hiding behind layers of snark to avoid engaging with anyone.

I wonder if that is actually what they’re doing, or if they just really don’t feel like typing the extra e, o, and e in “people.”

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 132457486939

Date: 2015-11-03 06:04:47 GMT

Reblogging: arundelo

Body:

arundelo:

@worldoptimization’s About page:
sign: assigned Scorpio at birth but I identify as Virgo
Me too! (This is probably explained by my moon being in Virgo.)

Cool!

Apparently my moon is in Libra, though, and I’m definitely not a Libra.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 132416708964

Date: 2015-11-02 18:08:34 GMT

Body: just got an email from a Korean address that I first thought was spam

then I looked more closely and realized it was from a Korean high school student who wanted to learn more about EA … addressed to me along with Rob Wiblin, Dylan Matthews, and Peter Singer

well then

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 132323084479

Date: 2015-11-01 09:31:33 GMT

Question: Happy 'even more alcohol than normal' day!

Answer: I haven’t even drunk any alcohol this day and am not planning to, like, it’s a Sunday

Tags: #personal, #nightblogging

Post ID: 132188987229

Date: 2015-10-30 03:18:30 GMT

Question: is it too late for degeneracy meme?

Answer: (It is now! Degeneracy meme is closed, no more submissions will be accepted.)

respectable married adult who does important things at companies

on the other hand, reblogs degenerate gifs of Natalie Dormer, etc. and things like “reblog if you are cute and unstoppable”

degeneracy level: 7/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132188548149

Date: 2015-10-30 03:10:13 GMT

Question: degeneracy meme!

Answer: seems fairly respectable, CS grad student with mathy avatar

on the other hand, probably too old/respectable to be on tumblr

degeneracy level: 2/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132187699189

Date: 2015-10-30 02:54:32 GMT

Body:

@michaelblume

Ooh, am I degenerate?

one of the leaders of the Bay Area Bonobo Rationalist Cult

neotenously reblogs pictures of small humans and animals

only saved from complete degeneracy by recent posting of much Quality Hamilton Content

degeneracy level: 8/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132187481624

Date: 2015-10-30 02:50:37 GMT

Question: sup

Answer: doesn’t post on tumblr much which is good, it is hard to resist the influence of tumblr for too long

“primitivist-Falangist-Evolian-Bolshevik-Anarcho-Nouvelle-Droite-Sorelian-crypto-fasco-communist-something” which is obviously the most correct political affiliation

degeneracy: 2/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132187141214

Date: 2015-10-30 02:44:29 GMT

Question: Could you rate my Degeneracy?

Answer: uses lots of exclamation points

being nice and enthusiastic is degenerate

degeneracy level: 4/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132181763419

Date: 2015-10-30 01:07:14 GMT

Question: How degenerate are prairie voles?

Answer: small and neotenous which is degenerate. otoh they mate for life which is good, stable monogamous marriage is vital for the continued stability of society and the rearing of children

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132181637429

Date: 2015-10-30 01:04:48 GMT

Question: How degenerate is #iodised salt

Answer: the ship:

extremely, characterized by over-the-top compliments and expressions of neotenous affection, being cute is Incorrect

the salt:

not really. iodine is a vital nutrient. although weird colored sea salt from remote places is more the aesthetic

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132181308669

Date: 2015-10-30 00:58:45 GMT

Question: I already know I'm degenerate, but I wanna hear you say it

Answer: obviously unacceptable hair color, clothing choices hint at traditionalism but in an unacceptably tongue-in-cheek way

lives in a hippie state where (to judge from pictures online) she spends much of her time romping through forests

overly fixated on “”shipping”” characters from an animated movie

degeneracy level: 8/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132180493509

Date: 2015-10-30 00:43:27 GMT

Question: degenerate me! degenerate me!

Answer: v degenerate blog full of nsfw images, etc.

also the same theme as this girl in my high school, who we all thought was just a really strait-laced science team captain until the url of her tumblr, which described all of her debauched adventures in detail, got passed around the school. this makes you more degenerate by association

degeneracy level: 7/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132170946424

Date: 2015-10-29 21:50:16 GMT

Question: Looks like you don't follow me so don't do this if you don't feel like it but I would appreciate you degener-rating me.

Answer: … there are pictures of cupcakes on the first page of your blog

*starts clicking on random tags*

post from July: “I really feel the opposite of simpatico with people who use the adjective ‘degenerate’ non-ironically.”

degeneracy level: 8/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132170431579

Date: 2015-10-29 21:41:18 GMT

Question: Discuss my degeneracy, please.

Answer: pro-youth-rights which is degenerate, respect your elders

however, high schoolers devoting themselves to being cyberpunk protagonists rather than normal high school things is admirable

degeneracy level: 4/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132161312214

Date: 2015-10-29 18:58:31 GMT

Question: Am I a degenerate

Answer: goes to a Catholic university and is going to take theology next semester (which I’m jealous of tbh)

v Correct aesthetics and such

on the one hand, doesn’t have many feelings, but on the other hand, posts all of them on tumblr so that’s a minus

degeneracy level: 2/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132160449654

Date: 2015-10-29 18:41:22 GMT

Question: Degeneracy meme??

Answer: wow your tumblr about page has a link to your OKCupid profile (which has too many pictures, it seems like you’re overly satisfied with your appearance)

OKCupid also thinks you’re “more artsy,” “more drug-friendly,” “less pure,” and “less old-fashioned” than the average straight man your age

well who am I to argue, they know you better than I do

degeneracy level: 8/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132135023324

Date: 2015-10-29 06:55:11 GMT

Question: How degenerate am I?

Answer: writes good effortposts on economics/politics

unfortunately, has a degenerate anime avatar that makes it impossible to take them seriously

also from Canada which afaict is like the US but more degenerate

degeneracy level: 3/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132134521719

Date: 2015-10-29 06:39:20 GMT

Question: rate my degeneracy

Answer: on the one hand, long-haired gay Californian who will make out with pretty much anyone

on the other hand, good use of countersignaling, sufficiently vague political opinions, aura of mystery, and promotion of Traditional Masculinity through fighting

clearly aspires to be seen as degenerate but good aesthetics, etc. get in the way

degeneracy level: 4/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132134348254

Date: 2015-10-29 06:33:56 GMT

Question: i don't know if you know enough about me to do this, but - degeneracy meme?

Answer: dating far too many people

apparently you had a kink meme on your secret blog? which is maybe degenerate but honestly I’m just impressed that you put it on a secret blog, that’s classier than 99% of tumblr

was reluctant to post selfies on the internet but did so anyway. clearly you have inclinations against degeneracy but are being corrupted by the company you keep

degeneracy level: 5/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132133321169

Date: 2015-10-29 06:04:51 GMT

Body: announcement: degeneracy meme is now closed

all of you who have submitted, never fear, I will get to you

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132111086089

Date: 2015-10-28 23:09:37 GMT

Question: Am I degenerate enough?

Answer: pink-haired neotenous Satanist apostate whose hobbies include watching cartoons, advocating for a “”kinder world,”” and taking naked selfies while holding ukuleles

turns Serious Dialogues on Serious Issues into obscene fanfiction

encourages men to wear dresses

frequently shares impure thoughts about Zyrtec commercials with the entire internet

degeneracy level: 9/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132110202129

Date: 2015-10-28 22:54:07 GMT

Question: take me to church

Answer: wrote a thing that implied disapproval of such vital cultural traditions as calling women “hypergamous sluts”

self-proclaimedly “too old to be here”: tumblr is a cesspool of degeneracy but at least the rest of us have the excuse of being young and foolish

the sentence “romance is pretty much an ideological construct meant to create white women’s desire for marriage and the reproduction of the family, capital, and whiteness itself” appears on your blog

degeneracy level: 7/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132109321904

Date: 2015-10-28 22:38:56 GMT

Question: Can I have a degeneracy meme?

Answer: bonobo rationalist who lives in a bonobo rationalist house I think which is even worse

regularly expresses affection for people on tumblr including by use of tags (e.g. #this is a ___ fanblog)

degeneracy level: 5/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132105253789

Date: 2015-10-28 21:30:02 GMT

Question: how degenerate am i

Answer: likes sports, which is kind of a prole thing, but also a Traditionally Masculine thing and the Lord knows we need more Traditional Masculinity in this corner of tumblr

Correct Opinions, fairly Correct religious affiliation, admirable interest in ~bioreaction~

you do watch a children’s cartoon about lesbian space rocks though so there’s definitely room for improvement

degeneracy level: 2/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132101669709

Date: 2015-10-28 20:29:58 GMT

Question: RATE MY DEGENERACY

Answer: I … literally can’t think of anything about you that isn’t degenerate

went to hippie college in Florida, majored in gender studies or sociology or something, used to take off clothes on the internet for money, now an unemployed Bay Area Bonobo Rationalist and known progressive/gender abolitionist

degeneracy level: 10/10, it is unlikely at this point that your soul can be saved

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132100261739

Date: 2015-10-28 20:05:23 GMT

Question: Degeneracy rating: fucking a pig

Answer: rude, there is a child who reads this blog

(my little sister)

(she’s 18)

anyway, it’s fine if you do it in a secret society at university, as part of your initiation into the British aristocracy, and never speak of it thereafter

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132099986474

Date: 2015-10-28 20:01:11 GMT

Question: How degenerate is asking how degenerate I am without providing sufficient information ^-^

Answer: very

i’m pretty sure you’re a bonobo rationalist. also iirc you have strange facial hair, having facial hair in this day and age is usually Hipster and therefore degenerate

degeneracy level: 5/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132099597064

Date: 2015-10-28 19:54:13 GMT

Question: Degeneracy meme!

Answer: this was really hard because everything about you is so Correct

you live in rural Appalachia, you learn traditional crafts, you write folk music and like poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson

you did post a selfie on your blog once. but it seemed more “making your blog a reflection of you and your aesthetic” than “degenerate attention-seeking”

the only way you could be less degenerate is if you dropped out of grad school to housewife and make furniture by hand.

degeneracy level: 1/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132092040339

Date: 2015-10-28 17:25:13 GMT

Question: You probably don't know me well enough to do it, but this degeneracy rating thing sounds really fun.

Answer: like half your posts are defenses of loli, the rest are degenerate gifs and suchlike

you describe yourself as a “proud neckbeard” … get a razor lol

degeneracy level: 7/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132090912274

Date: 2015-10-28 17:00:49 GMT

Question: How degenerate am I?

Answer: well you take illegal drugs … without researching them … because you’re under the influence of other illegal drugs at the time … I mean really

the first time I met you, you started talking about your participation in the [redacted for degeneracy] community, which should properly be a shameful dark secret known only to those closest to you

sometimes you post about your ~stress~ and ~feelings of inadequacy~ on tumblr. be more alpha

degeneracy level: 8/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132071692604

Date: 2015-10-28 07:43:57 GMT

Question: are you using a decile system for degeneracy ratings? a normal distribution? over the population of people you have opinions about, or the population of the U.S.?

Answer: deciles, over the population of people I think are likely to submit to my ask meme

not sure if this is also you asking to be rated on degeneracy but I’ll do it anyway:

“””orthodox jew””” who touches boys and wears star trek costumes in which the outline of her legs is clearly visible, go to shul lol

encourages the assigning of status to weakness with writing about #real life incompetence

advocates for things like ~better social norms~ as if there was something wrong with the ones we had

degeneracy level: 6/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132071100564

Date: 2015-10-28 07:22:31 GMT

Question: I'm curious how degenerate I am.

Answer: well you go to a school where people do nothing but party, when you even go to school at all

insufficient level of respect for Miss Manners

you approve of things like public affection-signaling and writing one’s own wedding vows

you’re also UU which is the literal worst religion. go to a real church lol

degeneracy level: 7/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132069625294

Date: 2015-10-28 06:33:18 GMT

Question: Ha! How may one whose mind is shrouded in the darkness of radio silence be judged a "degenerate"!?! My purity ranking is surely 10,000!/10,000!! In other words: #1!

Answer: your avatar is a picture of people cuddling in a public place, but it is sepia and from a Correct Time Period so I guess that makes it better

you approvingly reblogged a picture of unnaturally colored hair the other day. women’s hair should never be blue, it would clash horribly with the wheat fields and so forth

degeneracy level: 3/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132067964834

Date: 2015-10-28 05:47:23 GMT

Question: I am the most wholesome person you will ever meet.

Answer: one of your tags is “descent into bisexual madness” which pretty much says it all, like I guess it’s unfashionable to be satisfied with your Gnon-given sexual orientation these days

in favor of “”wireheading”” i.e. immanentizing the eschaton, didn’t anyone ever tell you that suffering builds personal virtue

degeneracy level: 6/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132067473704

Date: 2015-10-28 05:35:06 GMT

Question: Testimonial me- err, I mean, degeneracy meme!

Answer: you said something negative about cultural appropriation the other day; stealing things from inferior cultures is Traditional and Correct and having scruples about it is a sign of weakness

mostly you don’t personally seem that degenerate, but given your attendance at a certain bacchanalia recently I fear you are headed down a dark path

degeneracy level: 4/10

Tags: #degeneracy meme

Post ID: 132065285969

Date: 2015-10-28 04:46:07 GMT

Body: send me an ask and I’ll tell you why you’re degenerate

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging, #disclaimer I have a strong intuitive sense of what is degenerate, #that may or may not correspond to Official Neoreactionary Definitions

Post ID: 131929971959

Date: 2015-10-26 04:08:14 GMT

Question: What are your thoughts on being referred to as ~demisexual~? Why?

Answer: Basically I don’t think it’s a great word or a great identity category.

I think having the concepts of gay, straight, and bi are pretty good. (I know some people disagree with me on this.) But like, which gender you’re attracted to is kind of important and has a big effect on your life. And it’s a pretty discrete thing; I think most people are pretty much totally straight, and a lot of those who aren’t are pretty much totally gay.

I don’t think the same is true for ~demisexuality~. I don’t think it’s very important; like, the only time it ever comes up is when my friends and I are talking about our sexualities or comparing our internal experiences of attraction or whatever.

And I don’t think that demisexual/non-demisexual divide the world into really natural discrete categories. It’s more spectrumy: the definition of demisexuality I usually see is something like “doesn’t feel physically attracted to people they don’t know well/aren’t emotionally close to” and when I hear that I’m just like “… how attracted? how well? how close?” (One time I fantasized about kissing someone after having only two conversations with him and spending a lot of time reading things online that he wrote ten years ago. Does that make me a Fake Demisexual? Who knows?)

And it just tends to conflate a lot of things like how often you’re attracted to people, whether your attraction is more based on looks or other factors, the role emotional comfort and reciprocation play in your attraction, whether you’re interested in having casual sex, etc.

It’s like calling yourself “brunettesexual” because you’re primarily attracted to people with brown hair. Like, this is clearly not a natural category, and you know creating the word will just lead to identity politics fighting somehow. Also, no one cares.

Also, the actual word sounds like it means what gray-ace actually means, which is just confusing. And apparently someone has decided demisexuality is on the asexual spectrum? which I totally don’t get, like, if your asexual spectrum includes me I think you’re doing something wrong.

But anyway, I’ve recently decided taking a stand against the word is futile and using it does seem to make people go “oh, okay” when we’re having a conversation about this stuff. So feel free to use it to refer to me.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 131909268949

Date: 2015-10-25 22:29:16 GMT

Body:

asocratesgonemad replied to your post:is there an accepted hand gesture or voice…

Splay your hands tensely in front of you, palms facing straight forward and out, and widen your eyes, while using the same tone of voice you would if you were doing finger quotes. I’m not sure if I’m conveying this, do you know the thing I mean?

I do know the thing you mean and I had totally forgotten about it, thanks! The closest I could come up with was air quotes but they’re not quite the same. I will definitely use this.

@untiltheseashallfreethem replied to your post:

At a recent IRC meetup, we developed “arm tildes” for exactly this purpose. They involve sticking your arms out to both sides, and then waving them to indicate tildes. =P

Ooh I really like this, because it sounds fun and because the first thing somehow seems like not exactly the same connotations as tildes, although maybe that’s just me. Sadly this is not a norm in any of my social groups (yet! Growth mindset!)

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 131907988999

Date: 2015-10-25 22:08:43 GMT

Body: is there an accepted hand gesture or voice equivalent of ~ as punctuation?

because people keep referring to me as ~demisexual~ and I should probably just give in because I don’t think the word is going away and I can’t really do anything about it but the thought of using it without tildes around it is kind of painful

Tags: #personal, #linguistics

Post ID: 131838407424

Date: 2015-10-24 22:14:29 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

worldoptimization:
I feel like the extent to which women’s magazines have embraced feminism is kind of bizarre. Like, I can’t decide if they’re being stupid and don’t realize they’re helping a force that wants to destroy them and everything they stand for, or being smart, and they realize they can ride the bourgeoisification of the left and ultimately make the current wave of feminism into just another set of impossible standards for women to live up to?
(always look hot, Lean In, and purge your problematic thoughts)
Like I was reading Glamour in a waiting room yesterday and they mentioned that if you’re wearing sexy underwear only because your boyfriend wants you to that is Not Feminist and Bad … in the middle of a magazine that is 90% advice on how to look hotter and attract men … I remember Cosmo had an article a while ago on why shaving your legs is giving in to the patriarchy and I just
Anyway whenever I read one of those magazines these days I just think of Reductress. Fun Weekend Getaways to Fill the 48-Hour Abortion Waiting Period!
To be fair, that was Cosmo’s shtick in the seventies too, so it’s returning to its roots
idk I sort of like it? I mean, it’s absurd but on the other hand bisexuals exist in Cosmoland now

Yeah it’s definitely a good thing that Cosmo realizes lesbian and bi women exist, but when Cosmo isn’t being hilariously terrible it can get kind of boring and I sort of miss all of the advice along the lines of “Q: I fantasize about kissing girls a lot, what should I do? A: Don’t worry, it’s a totally normal fantasy for a straight girl to have! It probably just means you want your boyfriend to be more sensual and spend more time on foreplay.”

I also feel like they’re devoting more time to Serious Issues like articles about sexism and constant exhortations to be more confident and speak up at work and … I know I should be more confident and speak up at work! Constant reminders are not going to help! If I wanted to spend this time improving my chances of professional success I would be doing work right now, I bought this magazine because I wanted to find out what the Seven Things He Might Be Thinking About When He Doesn’t Text You Back are

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 131803121304

Date: 2015-10-24 10:14:53 GMT

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 131803070689

Date: 2015-10-24 10:12:58 GMT

Body: I feel like the extent to which women’s magazines have embraced feminism is kind of bizarre. Like, I can’t decide if they’re being stupid and don’t realize they’re helping a force that wants to destroy them and everything they stand for, or being smart, and they realize they can ride the bourgeoisification of the left and ultimately make the current wave of feminism into just another set of impossible standards for women to live up to?

(always look hot, Lean In, and purge your problematic thoughts)

Like I was reading Glamour in a waiting room yesterday and they mentioned that if you’re wearing sexy underwear only because your boyfriend wants you to that is Not Feminist and Bad … in the middle of a magazine that is 90% advice on how to look hotter and attract men … I remember Cosmo had an article a while ago on why shaving your legs is giving in to the patriarchy and I just

Anyway whenever I read one of those magazines these days I just think of Reductress. Fun Weekend Getaways to Fill the 48-Hour Abortion Waiting Period!

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 131733639259

Date: 2015-10-23 06:06:36 GMT

Body:

towardsagentlerworld replied to your post:Do you have any resources quickly on hand to train…

anecdotally, i had terrible spatial reasoning for *years* and then got way better at it after learning how to solve a rubik’s cube

Cool, good to know! I’ve always meant to learn how to solve a Rubik’s cube but never gotten around to it.

Tags: #math

Post ID: 131727742244

Date: 2015-10-23 03:55:07 GMT

Question: Do you have any resources quickly on hand to train spatial skills/mental rotation?

Answer: I am probably not the person to ask as (despite my low 2D:4D ratio) my spatial skills are pretty bad.

That said, here have this website. I’ve never used it and don’t have any particular reason to trust it but video games to train spatial skills do seem to have good evidence behind them in general and these seem like fine video games. (If you can find better video games, do that I guess.)

Tags: #math

Post ID: 131546264944

Date: 2015-10-20 09:32:03 GMT

Question: I've been creeping your tumblr, and I wanted to tell you that I too am defensive of that Barbie. Math *is* hard! "A woman admitting something is difficult? That's anti-feminist and wrong" seems like, to borrow your words, peak white feminism. Or, rather, neurotypical feminism.

Answer: I’m glad someone else is defensive of that Barbie too! People getting upset over it seems similar to the thing where people get upset that female characters have flaws, especially flaws that are stereotypically feminine. Which (as a girl who cries a lot, gets lost if I ever don’t have my phone, etc.) I’m not a fan of.

Tags: #not sj go away, #math

Post ID: 131546086264

Date: 2015-10-20 09:23:54 GMT

Question: I think Hillary Clinton's peak feminism moment was earlier, with the "primary victims of war" thing.

Answer: sure

I mean it seems like the primary victims of war are probably the people who fight and die in wars, who are mostly men. I’m not about to get worked up about that comment, because like, let he who made it through the entire nineties without saying anything stupid cast the first stone.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 131506853724

Date: 2015-10-19 20:00:21 GMT

Question: Can you elaborate on your campus sexual assault post, i'm confused as to how its an issue of white feminism

Answer: Sure! Sexual assault is a really serious issue, but not just among college students; in fact, according to this survey, college-age women who are not in college are more likely to be assaulted than women of the same age who are in college. So I think focusing on campus sexual assault while ignoring sexual assault of nonstudents is pretty classist.

(It’s mainly an issue of classism, not racism, though black high school students are less likely to enroll in college than white students as well as less likely to graduate. I said “white feminism” because people seem to use that as shorthand for “non-intersectional feminism,” which doesn’t roll off the tongue in quite the same way.)

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 131478733114

Date: 2015-10-19 08:22:51 GMT

Body: the fact that Hillary Clinton, who as far as I know is running for president of not a university but the United States, has a page in the issues section of her website titled not “Sexual Assault” but “Campus Sexual Assault” is uh

I mean that’s like peak White Feminism

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 131312146249

Date: 2015-10-16 23:06:03 GMT

Reblogging: gruntledandhinged

Body:

gruntledandhinged:

hunterstheorem:
worldoptimization:
The average marriage lasts for 100,000 hours. If used well, you can use this time to improve the lives of hundreds of people.
A lot of people will tell you simply to “marry whoever you’re passionate about.” At 100,000 Hours, we think you can do a lot better. Research shows that passion before marriage is actually a poor predictor of how happy you’ll be in your marriage. Better ways to ensure happiness are dating lots of people before marriage to get an idea of your compatibility along different dimensions, marrying someone with whom you share similar interests and values, and taking an IAT to check if you have positive associations with your future spouse.
Everyone wants a happy marriage, but if you’re reading this it’s probably because you want more from your marriage than just happiness for your and your spouse–you want to help the world. Luckily, these two goals don’t have to conflict. For one thing, an unhappy marriage will make you less productive, helping no one. For another, making a marital decision that makes the world a better place is one of the best ways to find personal fulfillment in your marriage. Below is a quick introduction to our social impact marriage advice.
Question 1: EA or non?
This is probably the biggest issue. It really depends on how committed of an EA you are. If you’re very committed, the best course of action is to marry someone who is on the margin of being an EA, but is unlikely to stick with it without your influence. If you’re on the less committed end of the EA spectrum (do you sneak dairy products when no one’s looking? fantasize about owning a yacht?), try marrying someone particularly moral. Ideally just thinking about their reaction should be enough to stop you doing anything wrong.
Question 2: What should I consider before I marry a non?
If you’re a woman marrying a man, be careful–unfortunately men adopting the ideologies of their wives is frequently seen as low-status. In any case, make sure your spouse is someone who gets along with EAs socially and is not firmly anti-EA–these are good indicators of EA potential. And your spouse’s potential to contribute to the EA movement–by getting a high-paying job or doing valuable direct work–is an important consideration as well.
Question 3: What about children?
Whether or not to have children is an important and contentious issue we won’t get into at the moment. If you’ve decided not to reproduce, marry someone who is firmly in agreement with you. If you want to be really safe, we recommend marrying a man–men are less likely to decide later in life that they want children after all.
If you do want to have children, remember that shared environment never explains any variance in anything, so by far the biggest parenting decision you’ll make is whose genetic material you want to combine yours with. An EA spouse will make your kids more likely to be EA (obviously the most important thing) and beyond that look for high intelligence, conscientiousness, charisma, attractiveness, and anything else that’s a predictor of career success.
Question 4: What about MtG?
It’s a common misconception that we recommend all EAs “marry to give,” or marry a high-net-worth individual with the intent of redirecting much of their wealth to effective causes. In retrospect, we emphasized this idea too much in our early days, and as the most controversial of our suggestions it attracted a lot of press. In fact, we recommend that only a small fraction of EAs pursue MtG. MtG is probably best suited to attractive people, those with good social skills, those who fit in well in high-status and wealthy circles, and women looking to marry men–hardly a large percentage of the EA community. And if you do think that MtG is a good fit for you, we recommend that you still marry someone you like. Marrying someone you dislike is likely to lead to burnout and unhappiness, which will make you less effective in your other goals.
Question 5: Okay, I have a good idea of what I’m looking for in a spouse now. How I do find one?
If you’re looking for an EA spouse, try looking in EA communities, either online or IRL. Otherwise, try your school or workplace or asking around among friends. And of course, there’s EACupid, where you can fill out a short quiz and our recommendation engine will find the optimal spouse for you!
See, the funny thing about this parody is that people _are_ famously bad at thinking out their choices of spouse, and in terms of both happiness _and_ charitable success (not to mention pretty much anything else) a careful analysis of factors like 80,000 hours does would totally be useful.
But let’s just sneer at those weirdos, that sounds more fun.
I mean, I *really* don’t think this was sneering, especially given how many people who reblogged it are in this community (notably, on Facebook a bunch of the 80k staff were posting it happily).
(Though tbh, I would not be very comfortable with this community giving me any kind of relationship advice)

Can confirm I was not trying to sneer at weirdos, I am in fact an EA who is planning to earn to give and my only intention was to countersignal affection for the ingroup.

(the advice in my post was obviously a bit over the top but I do agree that people can be bad at choosing spouses and thinking about it carefully/systematically is a good idea)

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 131273250199

Date: 2015-10-16 07:59:06 GMT

Body: lots of boring finance stuff under the cut

(epistemic status: I Am Not A Finance)

I. Hillary

i. increase statute of limitations for financial crimes, increase funding for the SEC, hold executives responsible for misconduct by their employees

Sure, whatever.

ii. no bonuses for managers when banks have losses that threaten their health

This seems good.

iii. fee on risk

Ehhh idk about this one. I mean on the one hand people on Wall Street tend to not be adequately incentivized to avoid risk. On the other hand this fee is going to come out of banks’ capital, which means they have less capital so. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be better to just raise capital requirements.

iv. tax on canceled orders

This one … like market makers cancel orders all the time, for good reasons. Because prices change. (Canceling orders for bad reasons is already taxed at like, 380 years in jail if you get caught.) And if you make it costly for them to cancel orders then they will just widen out. Apparently it’s a tax on an “excessive level” of canceled orders, whatever that means. So like is the idea that it will solely target HFT? Because I’m still confused about what exactly the externalities of HFT are and I think other people are too.

I think the idea of this one is less “canceling orders is bad” and more “HFT means lots of canceled orders so this is an easy way to target them” but even if you do think HFT is bad I’m not totally sure you could implement this in a way that would just hurt them and not other market makers.

Overall I like her financial plan even if I don’t really agree with it, honestly just because it’s kind of interesting and shows some thought.

II. Bernie

i. reinstate Glass-Steagall

He seems really into this probably for the reason that Hillary is not into it, that being that Wall Street doesn’t like it. I mean the financial crisis had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall. Why are Democrats obsessed with this?

ii. audit the Fed

Ugh the last thing the Fed needs is more interference from politicians who know nothing about economics.

iii. financial transaction tax

This again seems motivated by “do things that annoy Wall Street.” Like does he think that financial transactions are bad? I guess it’s supposed to discourage HFT but it just seems like it’ll do horrible things to the economy.

It’s a little weird that presidential candidates are really into things that hurt HFT when like the financial crisis was all about really illiquid products whose prices no one knew because they didn’t really trade, and in our exciting new era of HFT markets are super liquid, spreads are really tight, and price discovery is really fast. I mean there are worries, like instability/flash crashes, and maybe making the markets too efficient in some sense and causing underinvestment in fundamental analysis. But I suspect a lot of this is motivated by “these guys just seem evil” tbh. (Hillary has also called for “greater scrutiny of shadow banking” which, yes, cracking down on something with “shadow” in its name is a good way to seem like the good guy.)

Overall I’m not a fan of his plan, because I not only disagree with it but feel like it’s just motivated by blind ideology rather than some attempt to make policies that do good things. And I can see bigger risks if this stuff gets implemented, while Hillary’s plan is a lot more cautious/incrementalist.

III. Republicans

There are a lot of them and I wasn’t able to find much detail on financial reform plans when I did a cursory search for a few of them. Pretty much the big thing is they all want to repeal Dodd-Frank.

i. repeal Dodd-Frank

Yeah this seems like kind of a bad idea. I didn’t actually know what Dodd-Frank did before today but apparently it

created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau which seems good
created the Volcker Rule which prevents proprietary trading by commercial banks using deposits? this seems fine, I mean it’s kind of Glass-Steagallesque
improves accuracy of ratings agencies? idk how it does this but that would be nice
let regulators set capital requirements which as I mentioned before are A Good Thing
has just a lot of oversight of banks and research into risks

I guess the criticism of it is that it places a high regulatory burden on small banks. It’s probably overly complicated. But apparently commercial lending by small banks has just been going up, a lot, since it passed, so I guess they’re dealing with the regulatory burden okay. The most credible criticism is I think that it’s 2300 pages of not really doing anything, but I don’t think the Republicans’ worry is that it’s not aggressive enough.

I’m not a fan of this plan, since I feel like this is just the least creative possible thing they could suggest. “My plan: repeal the thing Obama did.” Hopefully as the race goes on they come out with more detailed financial reform proposals.

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 131237588979

Date: 2015-10-15 20:00:52 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

worldoptimization:
so I get emails from my college Women in CS organization
last week their event was “practice Dropbox interview questions while decorating cupcakes”
this week it’s “get networking tips from software engineers at Pinterest while making mason jar terrariums”
and I’m … not against these events they actually sound pretty fun … they just seem like things that would happen in Silicon Valley and not real life?
I really appreciate that you draw the distinction between SV and reality. Because over here, “while making mason jar terrariums” sounds … just … I don’t even … Ok.

actually when I said Silicon Valley I was thinking of the TV show and totally did not realize it would sound like I was referring to the geographical location, but I stand by the distinction nonetheless

Tags: #what it really reminded me of was the Larry Summers-inspired Simpsons episode, #where they segregate the girls and boys for math, #how do numbers make you feel? is the number 7 odd or just different?, #cs, #not sj go away

Post ID: 131179258679

Date: 2015-10-14 21:45:45 GMT

Reblogging: fierceawakening

Question: I'm completely with you on speciesism, and it's actually one of my biggest criticisms of EA. I simply do not think animal lives are worth as much as human ones, except in our attachment to specific animals. Reforming agribusiness is important to me inasmuch as its corruptions cause *human* suffering. The animals are an afterthought to me.

Answer:

fierceawakening:

I think animal suffering matters. (Though I am not a consequentialist and find the idea that suffering is the main moral concern bizarre.)
But I am baffled by the notion that when predators eat animals that is not “speciesism” and not morally culpable ACCORDING TO PEOPLE WHO APPEAL TO SUFFERING but when humans do, it is, and not just because agribusiness is horrible.
Whaaaaaa?

I think when predators painfully kill and eat other animals, they’re not “morally culpable” in the sense that they’re not morally culpable of anything because they’re not capable of moral reasoning. I do think it’s bad (because suffering is bad) and we should try to stop it. I mean, right now I don’t think we know how to do that without messing up ecosystems and causing even more suffering, but it’s something we should be doing more research into.

Most EAs I know agree with me. (This may not be a representative sample of EAs in general.)

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 131100538754

Date: 2015-10-13 18:09:54 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

Hmm. What’s the evidence on selection vs signalling vs added value for education? My recollection is that people who are accepted to Harvard do about as well regardless of where they go, unless they’re poor, in which case Harvard does help.

I don’t know … It’s possible the benefit of the degree could outweigh the suffering they experience in college. I don’t know how valuable a nice-sounding degree with a terrible GPA is. I also think they’re not usually looking for jobs at like McKinsey where the name of your school really matters; the people I’m thinking of want to be a park ranger and an elementary school teacher.

The lack of even the most basic math class is sad. Do you not have mandatory general education classes? I thought you got a liberal arts education at your school? Or at least a pretense of it.
Also, in their defense, some schools are taking baby steps towards supporting students who didn’t get in on academic or sports merit. Assuming everyone has a working knowledge of (I’m guessing Algebra 2? That seems like a plausible thing some schools might not teach.) is terrible.

If you want to major in a technical subject you need calculus, and we don’t offer precalculus. To fulfill their math requirement humanities students often take the lowest level stats class, which only requires algebra 2, or something like that.

Also, there’s the even darker theory that affirmative action is good because it increases intellectual diversity, and as such might be good even if the poor saps who are accepted lose out from it. I admit, I’d be willing to trade “future presidents have actually known non-white non-asian people” for “some college students suffer and don’t learn as much but still have a fantastic (bad) signal of value.” Thinking of minority humans at top schools as ritual sacrifices on the altar of future leaders having some instinctive understanding of diversity sounds bad, I grant you, but politics really matters.

… yeah that’s just evil.

In all seriousness, I’m skeptical of supporting policies that have a lot of tangible identifiable victims in the name of some wishy-washy benefits we have no evidence they actually have. I mean, it seems just as plausible that affirmative action causes future presidents to become more racist because they spend four years in an environment where the average minority student is so noticeably different from the average white student.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 131071264624

Date: 2015-10-13 04:59:43 GMT

Reblogging: lambdaphagy

Body:

lambdaphagy:

dataandphilosophy:
lambdaphagy:
worldoptimization:
I’ve always thought that the way we do affirmative action is stupid, that UC v Bakke was stupid, and that if colleges want to do affirmative action (which they always will for the forseeable future) they should have an explicit quota system and be transparent about it
I mean, the more transparent they are the easier it is to call them out for e.g. discriminating against Asians, and the less ~holistic~ their process for affirmative action is the less random noise gets introduced by admissions officers’ whims
but last night I talked to a girl who invoked her FERPA rights to read her admissions file and was so upset she almost didn’t come back to school this year, because the file made it clear that she was admitted on the basis of affirmative action
like, I always assumed she knew that already? she knows what her SAT scores are and what SAT scores are typically required to get in here, she knows that she’s a minority from a very disadvantaged background, she knows that our school practices affirmative action (and has always been vocally in favor of it)
but I guess she’s always genuinely believed, or at least told herself, that affirmative action played no role in her acceptance
polite fictions, man
From “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”:
I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
Like, ok, The Left, that one… that one’s kind of on you.
I had always taken your line, and generally am rather dubious of holistic admissions (though I admit a strict quota rather than a “within a 5% range of this value” is likely to cause pointless problems), but I don’t think that quotas would necessarily make it obvious which students from within a minority group wouldn’t have gotten in if they had competed with the general pool. There are going to be some 14 5s on their APs black students who ran nationally competitive track who get in on their own merit, and presumably people will be able to delude themselves perfectly well regardless of whether there is a quota or a “holistic process”. One downside I can imagine of this is that we’ll accelerate the problem of male under-education, as colleges will find it hard politically to openly discriminate in favor of male students and right now they are doing so anyways to try to keep gender remotely balanced (haven’t seen published research on this, just suggestive studies). Another issue might be how mixed-race students are treated under this system: if they count as multiple quotas they’ll be extremely heavily prized, which could cause issues down the line. Overall I agree with you that SCOTUS’ allergy to numbers is damaging, but my fence-senses are tingling.
The unavoidable problem with affirmative action policies seems to be that the more work you try to make them do, the more apparent it is that you are using them, which is self-undermining according to almost every theory of how affirmative action is supposed to work.
For example, if there are two applicants identical in every way except that one got dealt a bad hand, no one objects to favoring the disadvantaged candidate. In practice no two applicants are identical, so the policy will amount to some fudge factor, explicit or implicit, for the scheduled group. If the fudge factor is modest then its effects may go unnoticed (or at least ignored), but it also won’t shift the distribution very much.
On the other hand, a study using (somewhat dated) NSCE data calculated that being black was worth 230 [old-style!] SAT points relative to white candidates in elite university admissions. (Also being Asian cost you fifty points, but anyway moving on.) IIRC 230 points is more than two standard deviations. At that point I have to wonder, “how is that supposed to work out, even in theory?” Yes, every college has some variation in scores, but two sigmas is pretty unmistakable.
I’m not sure what either group of students is supposed to conclude under such conditions, but it’s probably not what the administrators had in mind.

And in addition to the issue of what either group of students is supposed to conclude, there’s the issue of what the two groups’ experiences are actually like.

I’ve never met a white person who doesn’t love my school and think coming here was the right decision. OTOH I have two good friends who are underrepresented minorities, both got composite SAT scores over 400 points below the school average, and both have struggled academically, dealt with mental health issues, and frequently expressed feelings that they don’t fit in and regrets that they came here.

Like … my school just admits these kids for the optics or some sense of fairness or whatever, and then is like “Welcome! We offer pretty much no classes you will be able to do well in! Also like it or not, you’ll be majoring in a humanities subject since you literally don’t have the background to take our most basic math class! Anyway have fun!”

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 130972857249

Date: 2015-10-11 21:02:23 GMT

Body: I’ve always thought that the way we do affirmative action is stupid, that UC v Bakke was stupid, and that if colleges want to do affirmative action (which they always will for the forseeable future) they should have an explicit quota system and be transparent about it

I mean, the more transparent they are the easier it is to call them out for e.g. discriminating against Asians, and the less ~holistic~ their process for affirmative action is the less random noise gets introduced by admissions officers’ whims

but last night I talked to a girl who invoked her FERPA rights to read her admissions file and was so upset she almost didn’t come back to school this year, because the file made it clear that she was admitted on the basis of affirmative action

like, I always assumed she knew that already? she knows what her SAT scores are and what SAT scores are typically required to get in here, she knows that she’s a minority from a very disadvantaged background, she knows that our school practices affirmative action (and has always been vocally in favor of it)

but I guess she’s always genuinely believed, or at least told herself, that affirmative action played no role in her acceptance

polite fictions, man

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 130727520914

Date: 2015-10-08 03:44:45 GMT

Body: Think of the alicorn as Uber, for not dying of poison.

Tags: #out of context quotes

Post ID: 130638937929

Date: 2015-10-06 21:07:53 GMT

Body: so I get emails from my college Women in CS organization

last week their event was “practice Dropbox interview questions while decorating cupcakes”

this week it’s “get networking tips from software engineers at Pinterest while making mason jar terrariums”

and I’m … not against these events they actually sound pretty fun … they just seem like things that would happen in Silicon Valley and not real life?

Tags: #cs, #not sj go away

Post ID: 130361641609

Date: 2015-10-02 22:23:58 GMT

Question: I have frozen in every classroom and/or office I've entered in the past month! OTOH, about I month ago I left the Caribbean for Northern Ontario. I'm sure that has nothing to do with it, of course...

Answer: Nothing I’m sure ^_^

I actually have no problem with buildings being too cold when it’s cold outside; I can always put on extra layers. It’s when it’s really hot outside and I have to choose between being too hot during my commute and freezing once I get there that I get annoyed.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 130324242824

Date: 2015-10-02 07:50:36 GMT

Body: (Background: this post)

1) Are the NCLB scores surprising?

I don’t think so; I think the difference between NCLB and SAT can be entirely explained by greater male variability and selection effects. The male:female ratio at the 99th percentile of NCLB data is 2.06. If around the top half of high schoolers take the SAT, that corresponds to 98th percentile on the SAT, which has a gender ratio of around 1.9. Similarly the 90th percentile of SAT scores has a gender ratio around 1.5, corresponding the 95th percentile of NCLB with a ratio of 1.45.

(based on this website)

(As I look back at the blog post I notice that these numbers are for whites. I have no idea what to make of the numbers on Asians. I guess I would say anecdotally that Asian girls are more overrepresented relative to white girls in math contests than Asian guys relative to white guys.)

I think that PhD programs in engineering probably require higher than 99th percentile math ability, so it shouldn’t seem that weird that they’re only 15% women. The gender ratio is like 4 for people scoring >100 on the AMC I think, and it only shoots up from there.

2) If it’s all variability, why don’t we see the same results on the verbal SAT as on the math?

I’m not really up on the intelligence research; I read a bunch of Wikipedia while writing this post and came away with the impression “people disagree with each other.” My model of the world is generally “men and women have the same average general intelligence, women have higher verbal intelligence, men higher mathematical, and men have higher variability” and this model rarely leads to my being too confused by the world around me. We know men are better than women at mental rotation, but I don’t know how well this correlates with what we think of as “being good at math.”

Why are the average scores on NCLB math tests the same if men are better at math? Idk. One thing is that NCLB tests, unlike the SAT, don’t actually count for anything and thus students have no incentive to try to do well on them. And in my experience they have a lot of stupid questions that ask you to, like, write a paragraph on the steps you took to add 12 and 15. I always tried to do a good job on those questions, I guess because I’m a girl. But anyway these tests aren’t just testing math ability, they’re also testing ability to explain your work and caring enough to do a good job, neither of which boys are that great at. (Source: interactions with teenage boys. Also, girls do better on the writing SAT than guys despite doing worse on the other two sections.)

Tags: #math, #not sj go away

Post ID: 130212590594

Date: 2015-09-30 18:05:27 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

still confused by Eliezer’s assertion that Bay Area rationalists will become less annoying when (and only when) more of us have VC funded startups tbh

antisquark said: Where was this assertion?

On Facebook. Someone posted that they found Bay Area rationalists unpleasant to hang out with because of their insularity and tendency to think outsiders not worth talking to. Eliezer responded “It’s a problem I suspect can only be solved in the long term by having more successful startups and VC money flowing through the community.” Everyone was confused and someone asked if he was trolling, but he continued to stand by his statement.

dataandphilosophy said: I think he thinks that people who have or want startup money only hang out with people who have or want startup money, forming a cohesive unit. And this group is supposed to be less obnoxious I guess? IDK.

Yeah that sounds close to right. Rereading what he wrote, the argument seems to be “Bay Area rationalists are insular because they feel marginalized. They are marginalized because in the Bay Area no one wants to talk to you unless talking to you will help them get VC funding.”

And like … I don’t really agree with any of the logical steps in that argument, and more than that I feel like there’s an easier solution and it’s “Bay Area rationalists should be nice to people even if they don’t know what a principal-agent problem is or whatever”

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 130210737264

Date: 2015-09-30 17:29:32 GMT

Question: Oh man, I am *also* a woman in STEM who has never faced any setbacks due to microaggressions, but who regularly freezes in an over-airconditioned (or, in the winter, underheated) office. Of the three girls in the room where I work, two of us wear blankets almost every day. (On the bright side, this is CS grad school, so nobody cares if we look unprofessional.)

Answer: Yay another one! I would totally wear a blanket to work if it weren’t weird/unprofessional, I love wrapping up in blankets.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 130190331349

Date: 2015-09-30 08:09:46 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

dearfeminists:
Who Social Justice Warriors used to be:
Luigi Taparelli who coined the term Social Justice in the 1840s trying to get the Catholic Church to help poor people instead of hording all their money.
Mary Harris Jones labeling herself a Social Justice Activist while protecting the working people by using her political power and organization skills to stop the striking Industrial Workers from being slaughtered by the Pinkertons.
Louis Brandeis calling for more Social Justice in his attempt to bring world peace while helping create the Treaty of Versailles ending WWI.
Martin Luther King leading the Civil Rights Movement and writing an essay about the need for Social Justice in society in relations to the War in Vietnam.
Who Social Justice Warriors are now:
White women in their 20s working at buzzfeed making news articles on that complain about how air conditioners are sexist. And people on tumblr who threaten to kill or Dox anyone that has a different opinion then them.
I am so confused that anti-SJ has decided the air conditioner article is Quintessential SJ. The article argues that most office buildings are over air-conditioned in the summer, and suggests approximately eight reasons: humidity control, badly placed thermostats, air conditioning units designed for full occupancy when buildings are usually at less than full occupancy, offices built in times when buildings were mostly lit with incandescent bulbs (which produce a ton of heat), systems with so much overcapacity that they don’t run well on low settings, better sealing and insulation that mean the AC has to run on full blast to get sufficient air circulation.
And ‘most managers are men who wear a suit and probably prefer the colder temperatures’.
Mentioning, as one of eight hypotheses about why office buildings are too cold, that most managers are men who wear suits, is apparently Where SJ Went Off The Ledge?
Guys, in the last week I have seen SJ blogs argue that Emmett Till had it coming because he catcalled a woman, that the Holocaust was justified because Hitler was trying to prevent the creation of colonial power Israel, that it was okay to use slurs about disabled people against abled people because if they weren’t disabled they couldn’t be oppressed by them, and that the only reason to like history is because you are racist.
You have better targets.

they might be referring to like this vox dot com article which pretty much does say explicitly that air conditioners are sexist

but yes, anti-SJ holding this up as an example of the terribleness of SJ is crazy! this is probably one of the best things SJ is doing! as a Woman in STEM I have never faced any setbacks due to microaggressions that I can recall but I have spent years in freezing cold workplaces and classrooms, shivering while wearing my warmest fleece sweatshirts. I actually told an HR person at my job this summer that I thought air conditioning was the #1 issue faced by women in the workforce today (she seemed skeptical).

also, the environment

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 130180257434

Date: 2015-09-30 04:04:05 GMT

Body: still confused by Eliezer’s assertion that Bay Area rationalists will become less annoying when (and only when) more of us have VC funded startups tbh

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 129887897496

Date: 2015-09-26 03:00:44 GMT

Body: I guess being a senior is making me nostalgic or something but lately I’ve been thinking about communities.

I think when I left high school, I was sad about losing my friends. But I didn’t lose my friends, not really. We still Facebook chat and Skype sometimes and hang out when we’re in the same city. What I did lose was the communities I had in high school.

I had two groups of friends, my main friend group and my math friends. Among my main friends there was this sort of conformity, but in a joyful way. We all liked the same music because the friends with the best taste in music would find bands and tell the rest of us about them. We all dressed the same because we borrowed each other’s clothes and went shopping together. In the same way we mostly liked the same movies and books and TV shows and had years and years built up of complicated inside jokes and memories. And when we went to college we all found new friends who changed us in different ways, and now we’re pretty different. There are friends who network obsessively and ones who respond to “what are your plans after college?” with “uh, travel?” There are friends who go to parties and hook up with guys and ones who’ve never touched a drop of alcohol or kissed anyone. And there’s never more than a few of us together at once, now, and it’s not the same.

With my math friends our community was partly based on the math we did together, and some of us don’t even do math anymore, and none of our lives revolve around it like they did in high school, we’re doing physics or programming or econ or pre-med. And it was partly based on the gossip of our small and incestuous world that doesn’t really exist anymore, and partly based on the inside jokes, so many inside jokes. And so that community is gone forever too, only existing in our memories and gchat logs and Google Docs full of the weird RPF we wrote about about each other.

So I’m not sad about losing my friends when I graduate. I know we’ll still talk. What I am sad about is the idea that a community can exist for only a brief, perfect moment in time and then be gone forever. I’m scared because who I am has been shaped so much by the communities I’ve ended up with through random accident. I’m scared because you can travel through time, but only in one direction.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 129814696088

Date: 2015-09-25 01:01:26 GMT

Tags: #degeneracy cw

Post ID: 129811597184

Date: 2015-09-25 00:06:55 GMT

Reblogging: automatic-ally

Tags: #the trash of the thing

Post ID: 128641923984

Date: 2015-09-08 15:51:21 GMT

Tags: #idk I thought this was interesting, #disclaimer I just skimmed the actual paper

Post ID: 128364570264

Date: 2015-09-04 23:27:38 GMT

Reblogging: a-bell-to-rise-and-die

Body:

let sexual ethics team = preference for (and argument for the moral necessity of, lol) norms about sexual ethics optimized for solving the problems of that team
my team is “hot people who are bad at saying no”, so i like things like nobody who can’t notice non-verbal signals of discomfort expressing interest in me in a way which expects reciprocation. i wrote a post about that a while ago. it’s intentionally uncharitable and i don’t literally fully endorse it, but it’s a thing
the general lw team is low-status men who get called creepy and whatever for daring to exist around high-status women while low-status. i think this really solidified after the scott aaronson thing, but it was a thing before too
this is a team which, of course, has many legitimate problems, which i sympathize with etc
the fascinating part is that, as far as ive seen, most of the people who care about being on this team a lot are, in fact, lw-affiliated high-status women and enbies, usually neurodivergent ones, who perhaps would have been called neckbeards if they were male but are personally in no danger of being called creeps, not being able to find sexual partners, etc.
this by itself was pretty interesting, but then i saw a post which seemed to imply that the poster considered themselves a low-status man talking about being on the team of high-status women (like stuff about how being creepy is in fact bad and this does mean that unattractive people can do less things than attractive people and that’s fine)
EVERYTHING IS BACKWARDS
i guess one hypothesis here would be that rationalists don’t personally really encounter problems with sexual ethics norms bc of lw diaspora norms actually working well for the entire lw diaspora (which generally thinks in a specific way, has a certain culture, is high-iq and mildly neurodivergent in a certain way, etc, so it’s plausible), so they assume that the other groups’ problems must be the ones that suck
(note here: i *have* seen self-identified low-status women and high-status men be on their own teams, so it might be just norms that are good at pairing off attractive women with less attractive men who write cool things or something)
another hypothesis is just that rationalists are really into charity and are defending the positions that are the opposite of what one would expect just because they like being charitable so much
idgi/don’t have a hypothesis im particularly sure about but it s u r e i s a t h i n g

I like this post because it made me go “what team am I?” (nerdy straight mono girls with social anxiety who like delayed gratification in case you were wondering) and then realized 100% of my views on sexual ethics can be explained by my team

I don’t think this is true for other political issues necessarily? But “what social norms surrounding relationships/sex will lead to the best utilitarian outcome” is kind of an impossible question so I just end up supporting the social norms that are best for me personally

(I’m not team low-status men, but I’m closely allied with them because guys like Scott Aaronson are the guys I want to date. And since my strategy for hitting on guys is “listen to Enchanted and Hey Stephen on a loop while hiding in my room avoiding them because if I talk to them I might say something stupid,” if they’re too scared to hit on me it’s kind of a problem. And I don’t mind being hit on by guys I’m not into, I just mumble something awkwardly and then run away)

Tags: #personal, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 127596152674

Date: 2015-08-26 00:28:46 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

worldoptimization:
eccentric-opinion:
wirehead-wannabe:
I know I spend a lot of time saying things like this, but I’m kinda creeped out by the notion of “reproductive rights.” Why should anyone have an unrestricted right to create other human beings?
This is why the “what if the government is run by the wrong people and makes bad criteria for licensing” counterargument to parental licensing doesn’t bother me that much - it’s not a rights-violation because there’s no right to have children in the first place. At worst, some people who should’ve been able to have children wouldn’t, but that’s minor compared to the benefit of some of the wrong people not being able to have children.
Am I the only one on Tumblr who intuitively understands Beauty of Parenthood/parental rights stuff?
(*mumbles something about cupcakes*)
Idk I feel like parenthood is really intrinsic to my conception of the good. Like people complain about a lot of different rights violations, but rarely does anyone actually leave the country because of stop-and-frisk or the NSA or high taxes. If I couldn’t legally have kids I would leave the country in a second and I’m sure a lot of other people would too.
(I know the OP was about moral not legal rights I’m just saying that parenthood is really important to lots of people)
I don’t think abusive parents should be allowed to have children, but for anything less I’m skeptical that the benefits of fewer children with somewhat unhappy childhoods or a gene pool that’s better in some way outweigh the unhappiness of people who want to have children and can’t.
Genuine question: are you serious? Not, “in two years, before which I am certainly not having kids.” In a second? You don’t want to get pregnant right now. How is a right you will do your best to avoid exercising valuable?
Particularly if the restriction was “you have to ask twice, at least six months but less than a year apart, without missing either appointment”? Because that seems like a very reasonable procedure to me, and one I’m confident you could pass.

Uh no, I was being hyperbolic. What I meant was more like “It would take me a second to decide to leave the country, and my actual emigration would be sometime over the next several years after I finished school, depending on things like my job situation, the plans of family and friends, taxes and cost of living in different countries, etc.”

Obviously I could pass that. It still squicks me out, though, I think because it falls under “making it harder to have wanted children” which is my least favorite category of influencing people’s reproductive choices. (My favorites are, unsurprisingly, “making it harder to have unwanted children” and “making it easier to have wanted children”–think starting more abortion clinics or giving tax credits allowing groups of people to afford to have more children.) Like I’m a utilitarian, I’m not going to say that no form of pregnancy licensing is ever justified, but it seems weird to even be thinking about it when like 40% of births in the US are unplanned right now. Preventing one of those pregnancies is a win-win-win situation! So much low-hanging fruit that doesn’t require interpersonal utility comparisons!

And said test seems trivial to me, but I’m wary of assuming things that seem easy to me are easy for others. There might be people for whom making appointments is hard who could still be good parents. (Actually now that I think about it I’ve slept through multiple dentist appointments.)

(Irrelevant note: I was wondering whether my strong intuitive feelings about this are a product of Tumblr–it would make sense, since prolonged exposure to Tumblr’s ~neoteny culture~ has definitely made me more aggressively pro-adulthood and maturity which to me includes parenthood. But then I remembered one time in my high school bio class when the teacher asked, “Should the US institute a one-child policy to combat overpopulation?” Most people were like “yeah that sounds like a good idea” while I was like “… what the actual fuck.” Hearing high school students debate a political issue when they haven’t already determined which side is Blue and which is Red is interesting. I was reduced to pleading, “But what about reproductive rights?! I thought you guys were like super into those!”)

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 127569896979

Date: 2015-08-25 17:47:30 GMT

Reblogging: eccentric-opinion

Body:

eccentric-opinion:

wirehead-wannabe:
I know I spend a lot of time saying things like this, but I’m kinda creeped out by the notion of “reproductive rights.” Why should anyone have an unrestricted right to create other human beings?
This is why the “what if the government is run by the wrong people and makes bad criteria for licensing” counterargument to parental licensing doesn’t bother me that much - it’s not a rights-violation because there’s no right to have children in the first place. At worst, some people who should’ve been able to have children wouldn’t, but that’s minor compared to the benefit of some of the wrong people not being able to have children.

Am I the only one on Tumblr who intuitively understands Beauty of Parenthood/parental rights stuff?

(*mumbles something about cupcakes*)

Idk I feel like parenthood is really intrinsic to my conception of the good. Like people complain about a lot of different rights violations, but rarely does anyone actually leave the country because of stop-and-frisk or the NSA or high taxes. If I couldn’t legally have kids I would leave the country in a second and I’m sure a lot of other people would too.

(I know the OP was about moral not legal rights I’m just saying that parenthood is really important to lots of people)

I don’t think abusive parents should be allowed to have children, but for anything less I’m skeptical that the benefits of fewer children with somewhat unhappy childhoods or a gene pool that’s better in some way outweigh the unhappiness of people who want to have children and can’t.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 126848111674

Date: 2015-08-16 19:26:50 GMT

Body: The average marriage lasts for 100,000 hours. If used well, you can use this time to improve the lives of hundreds of people.

A lot of people will tell you simply to “marry whoever you’re passionate about.” At 100,000 Hours, we think you can do a lot better. Research shows that passion before marriage is actually a poor predictor of how happy you’ll be in your marriage. Better ways to ensure happiness are dating lots of people before marriage to get an idea of your compatibility along different dimensions, marrying someone with whom you share similar interests and values, and taking an IAT to check if you have positive associations with your future spouse.

Everyone wants a happy marriage, but if you’re reading this it’s probably because you want more from your marriage than just happiness for your and your spouse–you want to help the world. Luckily, these two goals don’t have to conflict. For one thing, an unhappy marriage will make you less productive, helping no one. For another, making a marital decision that makes the world a better place is one of the best ways to find personal fulfillment in your marriage. Below is a quick introduction to our social impact marriage advice.

Question 1: EA or non?

This is probably the biggest issue. It really depends on how committed of an EA you are. If you’re very committed, the best course of action is to marry someone who is on the margin of being an EA, but is unlikely to stick with it without your influence. If you’re on the less committed end of the EA spectrum (do you sneak dairy products when no one’s looking? fantasize about owning a yacht?), try marrying someone particularly moral. Ideally just thinking about their reaction should be enough to stop you doing anything wrong.

Question 2: What should I consider before I marry a non?

If you’re a woman marrying a man, be careful–unfortunately men adopting the ideologies of their wives is frequently seen as low-status. In any case, make sure your spouse is someone who gets along with EAs socially and is not firmly anti-EA–these are good indicators of EA potential. And your spouse’s potential to contribute to the EA movement–by getting a high-paying job or doing valuable direct work–is an important consideration as well.

Question 3: What about children?

Whether or not to have children is an important and contentious issue we won’t get into at the moment. If you’ve decided not to reproduce, marry someone who is firmly in agreement with you. If you want to be really safe, we recommend marrying a man–men are less likely to decide later in life that they want children after all.

If you do want to have children, remember that shared environment never explains any variance in anything, so by far the biggest parenting decision you’ll make is whose genetic material you want to combine yours with. An EA spouse will make your kids more likely to be EA (obviously the most important thing) and beyond that look for high intelligence, conscientiousness, charisma, attractiveness, and anything else that’s a predictor of career success.

Question 4: What about MtG?

It’s a common misconception that we recommend all EAs “marry to give,” or marry a high-net-worth individual with the intent of redirecting much of their wealth to effective causes. In retrospect, we emphasized this idea too much in our early days, and as the most controversial of our suggestions it attracted a lot of press. In fact, we recommend that only a small fraction of EAs pursue MtG. MtG is probably best suited to attractive people, those with good social skills, those who fit in well in high-status and wealthy circles, and women looking to marry men–hardly a large percentage of the EA community. And if you do think that MtG is a good fit for you, we recommend that you still marry someone you like. Marrying someone you dislike is likely to lead to burnout and unhappiness, which will make you less effective in your other goals.

Question 5: Okay, I have a good idea of what I’m looking for in a spouse now. How I do find one?

If you’re looking for an EA spouse, try looking in EA communities, either online or IRL. Otherwise, try your school or workplace or asking around among friends. And of course, there’s EACupid, where you can fill out a short quiz and our recommendation engine will find the optimal spouse for you!

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren, #when I was googling predictors of successful marriage to write this, #I found an article saying that one of the best ways to make your marriage last, #was to get a graduate-level education, #wow that is some good correlation/causation confusion

Post ID: 126633233274

Date: 2015-08-14 01:50:41 GMT

Reblogging: chrysostmomhasmoved

Body:

chrysostmom:

littlehouseontheprisonfarm:
adryquietpeace:
worldoptimization:
So the other day I read Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle’s takes on the whole “conservatives should be pro-contraception if they really want to reduce abortion” thing, and I really liked them because the idea that providing better access to contraceptives reduces abortion rates was one of those little things I absorbed at some point during my socialization and have never since had occasion to question.

Keep reading
Am I wrong that there’s something a little off about the general concept of “unintended pregnancy?” (Link: Wikipedia) I’ll grant you the “we used reliable contraception” excuse, though the failure rates are far higher than almost-never. But in the main sense: a pregnancy is “unintended” if you had sex hoping it wouldn’t work?
(Also: can anybody identify when having kids became a bad, misery-causing thing? I’m assuming that the idea dates back at least to the sterilize-the-poors movement of the early 20th.)
Re: your parenthetical question - some interesting stuff out there on it. I was remembering harried mother types from old books, but not really any concrete examples, so here’s just a skimming of what I’m finding on the question.

This - “England and Wales experienced a demographic transition characterized by slow and steady change. From 1700, the death rate began a long gradual decline. The decline was initially due to three factors: the first was the trade revolution, which introduced new foods such as potato and maize (corn) from the Americas. The second was the agricultural revolution that brought about higher yields of food production locally through the use of new agricultural practices. Finally, the industrial revolution that made new goods available. All of these changes were gradual, and increased the general standard of living for the population, without major medical breakthroughs. While death rates fell, the birth rates remained high, as both cultural norms and expectations and need for productive labor at home made immediate downward adjustment in the birth rate difficult to attain. As life in an urban industrial society made large families neither necessary for labor nor desirable for cost reasons, the birth rate declined over one or two generations. The intervening period saw a dramatic rise in the annual rate of population growth, to about 1 percent per year.It is important to note that this same transition seen in England and Wales took place in every industrialized country in the world (all of Europe and Russia, North America, Australia and New Zealand and Japan). All went from high birth and death rates in traditional, rural-agrarian societies to low birth and death rates in modern urban-industrial societies, though the dates and rates of change vary considerably.”
This one is fun reading though irritatingly blanket-statement-y, and brings up the rather overwhelming variety you encounter when you look at “families in America” since the time when non-native civilizations here became a thing.
It is complicated and interesting to me, thinking through this, because childbearing was a leading cause of death in pre-menopausal women until the 20th century. (It still is, in some non-industrialized countries.) So the view of children being a good thing to have was even higher than we might think from our place along this timeline, because it came at the cost of the lives of millions of mothers…and millions of siblings, since so very many babies died in childbirth, too.
The Victorians, caught between the industrial revolution which reduced the economic need for large families and the medical advances that radically lowered maternal mortality, had a particularly poignant view of the high cost of childbearing. I remember reading that the sudden minor key tragic-sounding finale to Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty (after an act full of light-hearted wedding festivities) was meant to symbolize the reality and gravity of a married woman’s fate occurring to Princess Aurora as the curtain fell.
We have inherited a great many of our sentimental tics from the Victorians, and this heavy ambivalence may be one of them.
I really object to the OP’s advocacy of “aggressively promoting IUDs and implants.” Even if I had no religious objections to them, I object on the grounds of ethics and women’s rights and dignity. These are products, people, sold by corporations more interested in profit than anything else. They have hurt women by the thousands and they will continue to hurt more women. They should not be urged on anyone, pushed, promoted, or shilled–let alone “aggressively” so. I am not talking about Dalkon Shield ancient history either. The Mirena is currently subject to a class action lawsuit and investigation, for instance. That’s your “new improved state of the art next generation IUD” btw. IUDs carry substantial risks including uterine perforation and increased infection risk, which can cause infertility and worse. And let’s not even get into the horrors caused by the “next generation hormones” like Yaz.
If a woman wants to choose this for herself with no pressure or incentive, that’s one thing. But the whole point of aggressive public health campaigns is to convince and subtly coerce. This is like twisting women’s arms into doing Jaeger shots. Sure some can handle it, some will enjoy it and even swear by it, but some will suffer and even die. No one should be coerced or incentivized into behavior that carries such serious risks.
The other problem is this: who are they (”They”) interested in getting on board with “LARCs”? People who They think have too many kids. Hmm…now how could that ever go wrong?

Mmm okay, maybe “aggressively” wasn’t the word I wanted to use. I don’t agree that we shouldn’t promote things just because they hurt women by the thousands, though. IUDs definitely carry risks, but so does the pill, plus the health risks associated with that extra risk of pregnancy if you forget a couple days, plus all of the negative effects on your life an unintended pregnancy has. Like, no matter what you promote you’re going to promote something that has hurt women by the thousands in some way or another.

(I tried to look up some numbers on what the probability of various side effects is exactly and couldn’t find anything. Open to changing my mind if it seems that LARCs are actually dangerous enough to outweigh the benefits of not getting pregnant.)

And I don’t think we should convince anyone who wants children not to have them. I do think that finding women who don’t want children right now and aren’t going to use other methods consistently and telling them “hey, here’s something you don’t have to think about for the next five years” is better than anything else I can think of.

(I mean I’m also sort of pro-spreading abstinence memes, but I just don’t know if there’s any way to do that effectively.)

Tags: #I tried to snip this chain but . . . couldn't?, #wtf is this website

Post ID: 126559493454

Date: 2015-08-13 03:26:24 GMT

Body: So the other day I read Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle’s takes on the whole “conservatives should be pro-contraception if they really want to reduce abortion” thing, and I really liked them because the idea that providing better access to contraceptives reduces abortion rates was one of those little things I absorbed at some point during my socialization and have never since had occasion to question.

So, how do you prevent abortions?

There are pretty much two ways: lower the rate of unintended pregnancies and lower the probability of abortion conditional on unintended pregnancy.

I. Unintended Pregnancies

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/bbe8fd73d8568671f294c060c6bd6d3e/tumblr_inline_nswg2xxH261sfizxi_540.png

Here’s a map of unintended pregnancies by state. My first thought was “poverty rates?”

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/109de8f4c9a83ed3983431c8d3d0eee7/tumblr_inline_nt00aal88W1sfizxi_540.png

Not the worst idea, correlation .37. My second thought was “wait no, percentage nonwhite”

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/77b61b5255d6500fba46c4f1a0173487/tumblr_inline_nt00cpAlEd1sfizxi_540.png

Better idea, correlation .82. Neither of my thoughts was “oh, red states and blue states”

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/1632f011412f9d51737093f539b80d4b/tumblr_inline_nt00fiMgoh1sfizxi_540.png

Which is good because that is a bad idea, correlation .29 (in the direction of blue states having more). In other words, you’re not allowed to blame it all on abstinence-only sex ed.

I decided to search for some randomized controlled trials on interventions to prevent unintended pregnancy and found this cheerful meta-analysis which looks at 26 trials of interventions including abstinence-only, conventional, and other things based on stuff like “operant theory” and “empowerment theory” and concludes, “strategies evaluated to date do not delay the initiation of sexual intercourse, improve use of birth control among young men and women, or reduce the number of pregnancies in young women.” Apparently results were “remarkably consistent across studies” in showing that nothing made teenage boys more likely to use birth control. So that’s something.

Now that was in 2002. Since then we’ve had that Colorado study showing that if you give women IUDs, their rates of unintended pregnancy go down. Which seems obvious. Except as McArdle points out the study doesn’t actually show this, it just shows that they started a program in some counties of Colorado to give free IUDs to low-income women, and then the abortion rate fell in those counties. As it did in the rest of the US. And they didn’t really have a control group so yeah.

I’m actually all for aggressively promoting IUDs and implants. Even if this study didn’t really show anything it seems … physically impossible for it not to help … I mean I guess the main issue is “can you convince people to get them and how much does it cost.” But I don’t think the reason most people get pregnant without meaning to is that they don’t know birth control exists or can’t afford it/don’t have access to it, and while I’m still somewhat confused as to why unintended pregnancies happen it seems like a complicated social technology issue that is not amenable to government intervention.

II. Abortions

Gotta say, probably the best thing to do here is to outlaw abortions.

Source URL: https://64.media.tumblr.com/27c09d1358961e06a95af106c6c6c55f/tumblr_inline_nswgjdHHPW1sfizxi_540.png

McArdle gives this really pretty picture. Who is really great at preventing abortions? Ireland. How do they do it? Make it illegal. (Also Austria, but I honestly don’t know what’s up with Austria. According to Wikipedia there are very few abortion clinics in rural areas of Austria? Idk man.)

In terms of state-level data, I looked at abortions/unintended pregnancies in the US. The correlations with poverty and percent nonwhite were both lower (-.26 and .36 respectively) while correlation with percent voting for Obama was .77. The “make abortion socially stigmatized and really hard to get” plan is looking good.

Also, I liked McArdle calling this idea the “torture doesn’t work” of the feminist movement. I remember, when I was 15 or so, thinking that abortion and torture both seemed like hard moral problems. Then at some point someone told me that torture didn’t work, and someone else told me that actually making abortion illegal just drove it underground and really the best way to prevent abortion was to make contraception more widely available, and I didn’t really think about either one again for years.

Tags: #I feel like this deserves a much more thorough lit review, #but I don't really feel like doing one, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 126471010009

Date: 2015-08-12 01:49:29 GMT

Body: I feel like given the general interest of EAs in ending death we should be slightly annoyed about this Alphabet thing

more investor transparency seems like not what the immortality division of Google needs

Tags: #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 126394819614

Date: 2015-08-11 03:37:22 GMT

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren, #is my new tag for stupid ingroup drama, #to be clear the pro-meat people are different from the anti-anti-meat people, #I am somewhere between anti-meat and anti-anti-meat, #but mostly I just wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school, #EA Global 2016 should serve nothing but cakes filled with rainbows and smiles

Post ID: 126224598199

Date: 2015-08-09 03:33:46 GMT

Body:

untiltheseashallfreethem replied to your link:UV :…

Datapoint: I like when people hold doors for me, but I’m super territorial about my possessions, so I feel like my space has been very invaded when people try to carry bags for me. I also have a sort of self-reliance thing about carrying my bags.

But in general, I think I enjoy chivalrous behaviors? I like it when guys open the car door for me, but it seems like no one does that, other than old professors and neoreactionaries.

I like the rule where the guy walks on the outside of the sidewalk. Ostensibly it’s to protect the girl from being splashed with mud, which is not really a danger in this modern-paving age, and yet it still makes me feel protected for some reason.

Interesting! I also approve of the “guy walks on the outside of the sidewalk” rule, and think guys should perpetually strive to be more like old professors and neoreactionaries ^_^

And I think your first point is interesting, in that feminism is definitely #the aesthetic for me, but self-reliance and strength are also #the aesthetic and sometimes they seem sort of opposed.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 126218358274

Date: 2015-08-09 01:58:06 GMT

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 126207429909

Date: 2015-08-08 22:57:45 GMT

Reblogging: angrybisexual

Body:

ryrnun:

toddmonotony:
‘Is that a thing?’ for ‘does that exist?’
Deliberate omission of grammar to show e.g. defeatedness, bewilderment, fury. As seen in Tumblr’s ‘what is this I don’t even’.
‘Because [noun]’. As in ‘we couldn’t have our picnic in the meadow because wasps.’
Use of kerning to indicate strong bewilderment, i.e. double-spaced letters usually denoting ‘what is happening?’ This one is really interesting because it doesn’t really translate well to speech. It’s something people have come up with that uses the medium of text over the internet as a new way of communicating instead of just a transcript of speech or a quicker way to send postal letters.
Just the general playing around with sentence structure and still being able to be understood. One of my favourites of these is the ‘subject: *verbs* / object: *is verb*’ couplet, as in:
Beekeeper: *keeps bees*
Bees: *is keep*
or
Me: *holds puppy*
Puppy: *is hold*
I just love how this all develops organically with no deciding body, and how we all understand and adapt to it.
THIS IS SO COOL

I love all of these

although oddly I associate all of them with Tumblr/the internet/the last couple of years except the first? I’ve been using “is that a thing” for at least five years: it was in common use at my high school back before any of us spent much time on the internet

actually I have a great linguistics memory associated with it

someone made some reference to Jennifer Lawrence doing something in 2008 and I responded “did Jennifer Lawrence even exist then?” intending that in a sort of figurative way to mean something like “was she famous” or “did the phenomenon of Jennifer Lawrence exist,” since obviously she had been born at that point

and my 10-year-old sister looked at me in puzzlement and corrected, “you mean she existed, she just wasn’t a thing.”

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 125653542584

Date: 2015-08-02 05:54:42 GMT

Body: When Taylor Swift sings about love (when she sings) cars inevitably enter the picture. On her first album cars are happiness, comfort, nostalgia. In Tim McGraw she reminisces about being in the passenger’s seat of an old Chevy truck; in Our Song she contentedly rides shotgun with her hair undone in the front seat of his car; in the similarly idyllic Mary’s Song she sings, “2 am riding in your truck, and all I need is you next to me.”

(On a tangential note, Taylor really likes the time 2 am, this is one of like five references in her work, more if you count 2:30 am and 1:58 am. Also note the trucks, this is the only album that mentions trucks afaik. In her most recent work, the model of the car is not usually specified, but you get the feeling it’s expensive.)

The other cars on this album are in Teardrops on My Guitar (“I drive home alone,” symbolizing that she’s alone. Not much to say about that) and Picture to Burn. In the latter she sings, “I hate that stupid old pickup truck you never let me drive,” which is interesting because in all the happy car references she is clearly riding shotgun and doesn’t seem unhappy about that, while the one instance of her driving is clearly unhappy. Does this to some extent undermine the happy songs on this album? Is riding shotgun a sort of illusory happiness, one that doesn’t actually bring her fulfillment? Is this line expressing an intent to exercise more agency, in relationships and/or in life? We’ll come back to this.

The role of cars and driving doesn’t change much on Fearless and Speak Now. The former’s title song features more happy shotgun riding: she sings, “So baby drive slow … I wanna stay right here in this passenger’s seat.” Same in Back to December: “I think about summer, all the beautiful times I watched you laughing from the passenger’s side.” Fifteen twists this trope slightly with the self-awareness that she shows more of on every album; she feels like flying at the prospect of going on her very first date, with a ~senior boy~ who has a ~car~, and ends up getting her heart broken when he tells her he loves her and she believes him.

Now Red is where the role of cars really changes. There’s no awareness up to this point that 30,000 Americans die in cars every year, often from doing stupid shit like putting their hands on their girlfriends’ hearts instead of on the steering wheel where they’re supposed to be. On Red, cars are dangerous and love ends in heartbreak. In All Too Well, she and her love interest of the moment get lost driving, and he almost runs a red light because he’s looking at her. In Red, another devastated post-breakup song, she sings, “loving you was like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street.” She’s become aware of the dangers of love now, but she’s not doing the smart/cautious thing: she still has hope. This is most obvious in Treacherous, when she considers the danger, but decides that “nothing safe is worth the drive.”

On 1989 cars are still dangerous, but she’s not surprised or saddened by that fact anymore; she seeks out and embraces the danger. In Style her paramour drives without headlights and “can’t keep his wild eyes on the road”: she knows “exactly where it leads” but gets in the car with him anyway. In Wildest Dreams, driving, like her short-lived fling, is about adventure: she sings, “let’s get out of this town, drive out of the city, away from the crowds, heaven can’t help me now.” She can see the end (of the ride, of the relationship) as it begins, but doesn’t let that stop her. In Out of the Woods, a snowmobile accident (I’m counting it as a car ok) leads to “twenty stitches in a hospital room,” but the song isn’t about regret or mistakes. It’s about inevitability, the way they were “built to fall apart and fall back together.” In a world of black and white, how can you regret finding screaming color?

And getting back to the Picture to Burn issue I said I’d get back to … she still doesn’t drive on this album. It’s “you come and pick me up,” “remember when you hit the brakes too soon,” “you drove us off the road,” “in your car, windows down, you pass my street.” I’m conflicted about the fact that she never drives. On the one hand, yay traditional gender roles practiced between consenting adults, and (at least in my opinion) Taylor has always been about being true to herself rather than being a Strong Woman, and that’s part of why I like her. 2015 Feminist Taylor is a stronger, better person than 2006 Taylor, but I think she’s grown in an authentic way, while still being open about her vulnerabilities.

On the other hand, 2006 Taylor said she wanted to drive the truck! Why doesn’t she just drive the truck?

When I was researching this I came across this cover on Youtube which … idk how much relevance it has because she didn’t write it but I’m just really interested in her choice to cover it. It’s all about the excitement of driving! Which she never does! Also in this song her father is the one teaching her to drive, and she is able to drive only because her father “lets” her which is another whole thing.

Also, she’s always been into cars (clearly) but there are especially a lot of cars on her most recent album. Doesn’t she know real New Yorkers take the subway?

Tags: #I am so jet lagged right now I just, #if you were wondering why I thought it was a good idea to research and write this at 2 am, #that's why, #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 124999978399

Date: 2015-07-25 13:34:12 GMT

Reblogging: ogingat-deactivated20150801

Body:

ogingat:

shadowpeoplearejerks:
jadagul:
worldoptimization:
[snip]
[snip]
Is something wrong with my Tumblr?

Why are you both typing alieve?
marry me

“deep down they feel like they’re good at math”

… okay that does sound less stupid

Post ID: 124974357974

Date: 2015-07-25 04:10:56 GMT

Body: Sometimes I feel like I’m not really a “math person,” like I don’t fit in with math culture. But today there was this math discussion where I felt like I did fit in, and I think part of that is that there are really two math cultures, one of people who did math contests and one of people who didn’t, and they’re pretty different.

People who never did math contests talk a lot about how math is “fun” and “awesome” and “beautiful.” They think math is their friend, and deep down they alieve that they are good at math. People who did math contests don’t see math as our friend. It’s more like outer space: looks pretty in pictures but will kill you if you get too close. And deep down we alieve that we are bad at it. There’s this thing math contest people do where they all say, all the time, “I suck at math.” And what I love about it is that there’s no irony, no winking, no “see it’s funny because I’m not really bad at math, I was just talking about being in Blue MOP,” it’s said with utter sincerity in a way that seems … appropriately respectful of math.

Incidentally, this is why I’m sort of irrationally defensive of that Barbie. Math is hard.

Tags: #math

Post ID: 124715804674

Date: 2015-07-22 03:04:01 GMT

Reblogging: chroniclesofrettek

Body:

chroniclesofrettek:

I haven’t had my caffeine this morning, so I’m not being very charitable, “effective altruism is just asking how to best promote global welfare, that’s not controversial!” sounds a lot like some other claims about ideologies that you see around tumblr and other social media.

Yeah I never understood why people liked to make the definitional argument for feminism until I started reading critiques of EA and found that my first thought was “But you’re just disagreeing on what’s effective, not disagreeing with effective altruism! Effective altruism is literally just the idea that we should use evidence and reason to make the world a better place! What kind of terrible person could disagree with that?”

I think the situations are pretty similar; EA, like feminism, is not a one-sentence proposition but a diverse movement founded on a kind of weird, not at all obvious framework for thinking about the world. And the “but it’s obvious, look at the definition” is not only totally unhelpful for promoting productive engagement with critics, but at least when it’s done to me it really pisses me off so I’m gonna try not to do it to other people.

When people are like “EA is philosophically trivial” I wonder about the sort of bubble they’re living in … I guess the thinnest possible version of EA is trivial if you’re consequentialist (although you could still think that the EA movement is doing it wrong enough not to be worth anyone’s time) but most people aren’t consequentialist and can’t be convinced to become consequentialist.

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 121425462424

Date: 2015-06-13 13:44:14 GMT

Question: "if attraction to women is considered evil then only evil people will express attraction to women" You got it all mixed up. Women are attracted to evil so when disturbed women, e.g. many contemporary feminists, analyze relationships they shift the evil to the outside attraction rather than risk saddling their gender with an onus to keep their own dark, evolutionary impulses in check. Read Dworkin in this light. It's a thickly obfuscated infantilization of the gender. This remains suboptimal.

Answer: um

well I probably wouldn’t have put it quite like that but I was wondering who was benefiting from that meme anyway (and why it was being spread by mostly straight women) and that makes sense as an explanation

I will keep that reading in mind if I ever finish Intercourse

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 120801507284

Date: 2015-06-05 21:08:50 GMT

Reblogging: profhedonium

Body:

profhedonium:

worldoptimization:
I’m pretty much writing this for myself, but people who are in college and are similarly clueless about the real world might find it helpful.
Keep reading
Some thoughts in response:
1. In the early stages, you can get a lot of interviews by going to career fairs. I personally find this a lot easier than applying online and get a much higher response rate. This requires that you be able to talk to strangers for a long time, which I’ve had some trouble with but it was easier for me than I expected since the conversations are fairly formulaic (ask about their company, tell them what you’re looking for, talk about your resume, give them your resume and leave).
2. *Cracking the Coding Interview* is a popular book for practicing programming interview questions.
3. If a company asked me about specific features of Java, I would not work there. This tells me that they have no understanding of what makes someone a good programmer. I have never had a good software company ask me a question like this.

1. and 2. good advice, thanks.

3. I believe this: the company that asked me about specific features of Java was in finance, and one of the things that made me less inclined to work there is that their interview questions weren’t very interesting/their interview process seemed less selecting for the right things.

Post ID: 119789838129

Date: 2015-05-24 20:27:53 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

ogingat:
dataandphilosophy:
My working definition of creepy, most typical case: a man who interacts with a woman in a way she doesn’t want that doesn’t fit in another category. This seems a decent extensional map, though if you’re using a different one we’d be talking apst each other and I’m willing to switch.
The important thing to me is that being creepy is bad. You are causing an interaction someone doesn’t want, this is a priori bad. I believe that there are women who are unhappy because men who are unattractive interacted with them in a way that they would have appreciated had the man been attractive. That’s OK. People are allowed to have preferences. Just because I could be non-creepy doing X if I was attractive, doesn’t mean that I should feel it is acceptable for me to do X. Attractiveness is not morally different from generic social skills. It is objectionable for people to make others feel bad, regardless of where that comes from. Yes, this means that if you’re unattractive, you’re obligated to be more cautious in your social life.
[snip]
The other important thing to note about your definition is that it’s asymmetric. Unwanted interactions are taken to be morally weighty, but unwanted non-interactions are neglected, and in fact are more or less required. There is no moral reason for this. (There is, of course, a social or in some sense “political” reason, which is that attractive people make the rules.) I believe the SSC post “Radicalizing the Romanceless” addressed this.
[snip]
I never said that unwanted non-interactions don’t matter. I didn’t focus on them, because I was discussing unwanted interactions, but I agree that they matter. I liked Radicalizing the Romanceless.

The thing is, it’s good signaling for women to complain about unwanted interactions and bad signaling to complain about unwanted non-interactions, so we probably way overweight the badness of unwanted interactions just based on availability heuristic from complaints we’ve heard.

I’d prefer the marginal guy to hit on me and it’s hard to say that in a way that doesn’t sound low-status. Girls complain in private that guys never ask them out, and then in public join in the general whining about “Ugh, creepy guys hitting on on me, so exhausting.”

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 119291914794

Date: 2015-05-18 18:05:14 GMT

Reblogging: spiralingintocontrol

Body:

spiralingintocontrol:

worldoptimization:
The thing about making EA more welcoming though is that it seems hard to determine what discourse norms will actually get you more people on net.
I mean, I’m an EA because I think the philosophical arguments are correct. But I never would have even listened to the arguments if I hadn’t been drawn in by the community first. And what drew me in about the community?
full of programmers and philosophers
willing to argue about the methodology of studies or the details of population ethics at very little provocation
conversations about the Silmarillion (which I haven’t even read but still)
capable of discussing the pros and cons of murdering babies in a calm and rational manner
ridiculous thought experiments and in-group jargon
the kind of place where you can refer to the thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort and no one will storm out of the room
Like high-variance strategies are a thing, “make EA as non-weird as possible” seems unlikely to actually be the best way to do recruitment.
so… yes, high-variance strategies are a thing, but they make more sense in the context of dating, where you only want a limited number of partners and so only attracting the best one(s) is a good idea
but EA is something that could benefit from having as many people as possible contributing to it over time! so it’s different. although we still likely want to do some amount of selection for people whose beliefs are at all compatible with EA.
but for example, I think a lot of Christians who take charity really seriously could potentially be really into EA, except… well, this community likely isn’t as welcoming to that type of person (as far as I know, which is of course not very much, since I’m an atheist and don’t really know any religious people).

Yeah, I agree our strategy should be less high-variance here than in dating. And I’m on board with getting as many people into EA as possible. And I support the suggestions that are like “be friendly to people” and “listen to people about their experiences rather than just trying to convert them.”

I just think

if people criticize the way EAs talk to other EAs because they’re afraid it will turn people off it will make the movement a less fun place to be
there’s a possible future where we try to appeal to both devout Christian art history majors and utilitarian programmers and end up being bland enough that we appeal to neither

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 119275116424

Date: 2015-05-18 13:08:11 GMT

Body: The thing about making EA more welcoming though is that it seems hard to determine what discourse norms will actually get you more people on net.

I mean, I’m an EA because I think the philosophical arguments are correct. But I never would have even listened to the arguments if I hadn’t been drawn in by the community first. And what drew me in about the community?

full of programmers and philosophers
willing to argue about the methodology of studies or the details of population ethics at very little provocation
conversations about the Silmarillion (which I haven’t even read but still)
capable of discussing the pros and cons of murdering babies in a calm and rational manner
ridiculous thought experiments and in-group jargon
the kind of place where you can refer to the thin line between feminism and literally Voldemort and no one will storm out of the room

Like high-variance strategies are a thing, “make EA as non-weird as possible” seems unlikely to actually be the best way to do recruitment.

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 119037201324

Date: 2015-05-15 17:07:23 GMT

Reblogging: rageofthedogstar-blog

Body:

rageofthedogstar:

worldoptimization:
A friend (who’s studying to be an elementary school teacher) and I were talking about ability grouping for elementary school students, which they’re now apparently being told not to do. The evidence they’ve been given for this recommendation by textbooks and professors has been mostly anecdotal,…
You might be interested in this Boston Globe article from last year, which talks about the problem of dedicating resources to high ability kids.

Thanks for sharing, it’s nice that the Globe recognizes that this is a thing (although of course it has to be framed not as “smart people will make the world a better place” but as “smart people will help us compete against Asia”)

In one of the studies, the Vanderbilt researchers matched students who skipped a grade with a control group of similarly smart kids who didn’t. The grade-skippers, it turned out, were 60 percent more likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in science, math, or engineering.

Interesting. (Controlling for SAT scores makes me happy, though it seems likely there’s other stuff that would confound this–like grade-skipping children may be more confident or proactive.)

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 118692433964

Date: 2015-05-11 12:49:04 GMT

Reblogging: a-bell-to-rise-and-die

Body:

dataandphilosophy
who wins: you? probably
should you fight: do it, shove him in a locker he’s a fucking nerd

all true can confirm

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 118228038814

Date: 2015-05-05 21:18:18 GMT

Body: skwrk:

sex positive paradigm: “everyone wants to have sex, but society tells us it’s bad. uh, does it hurt anyone? no! so where’s the logic in that? if everyone just had more sex, everyone would be happier. there’s nothing wrong with casual sex, it’s fun! it’s not any different from any other activity.”

ozymandias271:

I also have… major issues with the description of the sex-positive paradigm, the point is NOT that everyone wants sex or that everyone should have lots of sex, it is that your sex life is none of anybody else’s business whether you are celibate or having orgies swinging from the chandelier

So sex-positive people tend to be adamant that the movement is not about “casual sex is great,” and other people seem to interpret it that way nonetheless. Because the thing is that these spokespeople for sex positivity (who are the central examples of sex-positive people? Ozy? Cliff Pervocracy? Dan Savage?) are always on the “orgies swinging from the chandelier” side of the spectrum.

This isn’t surprising given

people who have more sex and more interesting kinds of sex with more different people have a lot more interesting things to write about
they’re more qualified to give opinions and advice
they’re probably less likely to care about privacy/decorum

And I don’t know how other people’s brains process social norms, but mine very much focuses on what people do rather than what they say. If I’m surrounded by feminists who work outside the home saying “being a stay at home mom is a great personal choice!” I will interpret that as “being a stay at home mom is shameful and low-status.” If I’m surrounded by poly people saying “monogamy is a totally valid alternate lifestyle!” I will interpret that as “monogamy is weird and selfish and evil.” And I suspect the same sort of thing goes on with the sex-positive movement.

And having a norm of “sex is shameful and we don’t talk about it” has … problems but at least it avoids having the social defaults be too skewed solely by selection effects of who talks about things.

Tags: #not sj go away, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 118012095484

Date: 2015-05-03 10:01:34 GMT

Question: Can confirm seeing you both at HPMOR wrap.

Answer: noooo the theory falls apart

(hi spiralingintocontrol I do not know your irl identity and thus did not realize you were at HPMOR wrap)

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 117886039119

Date: 2015-05-01 21:55:50 GMT

Reblogging: spiralingintocontrol

Body:

spiralingintocontrol:

spiralingintocontrol:
now realizing that my friendship style is based almost entirely on a dislike of hanging out with people i don’t know well because I feel insecure around them
this results in me hanging out always with the people I know best in a group which pretty much always results in me latching on to like one or two people
except I also hang out more with people I perceive to be low status because i don’t feel as insecure => they’re easy to interact with
so… fun facts??
worldoptimization answered: wait this is exactly me, the best feeling is when I find someone I like who is low-status enough not to make me nervous
are we literally the same person

probably, has anyone ever seen us in the same room together

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 117347838804

Date: 2015-04-25 17:03:43 GMT

Body: if attraction to women is considered evil then only evil people will express attraction to women

this seems suboptimal

Tags: #I mean other people have already covered negative effects on lesbians, #and straight men and developmentally disabled men and black men, #and trans women and male abuse survivors, #I just wanted to throw straight women in too

Post ID: 117345307164

Date: 2015-04-25 16:29:29 GMT

Body:

morality matters because human beings matter

moral rules must be tested for their consequences on human well-being

the morally best act is the one which maximizes human welfare

I feel like this chapter on utilitarianism would be, if nothing else, a lot more philosophically elegant if you removed every instance of the word “human”

Tags: #liveblogging my tutorial, #ethics

Post ID: 117344631834

Date: 2015-04-25 16:20:15 GMT

Body:

taymonbeal said: Wait, utilitarianism as in the ethical theory? Where on earth did anybody get THAT idea?

idk man I must be hanging out with really different utilitarians than he is

he cites Morality: An Introduction to Ethics by Bernard Williams as saying that utilitarians are “surprisingly conservative” but I can’t access that book right now to check what else it says

his examples of issues on which utilitarians defend the status quo are land rights for indigenous peoples, accessibility rights for the disabled, and gay rights because they involve protecting the rights of historically oppressed minorities while potentially imposing costs on the majority (but no examples of utilitarians espousing those opinions)

Tags: #liveblogging my tutorial, #ethics

Post ID: 117342477604

Date: 2015-04-25 15:50:31 GMT

Body:

utilitarianism … tends if anything to defend the status quo

well if by “status quo” you mean “tiling the universe with kittens on heroin”

Tags: #liveblogging my tutorial, #ethics

Post ID: 115778195464

Date: 2015-04-07 18:25:57 GMT

Body: I saw Elie Hassenfeld speak yesterday and he was really cool, GiveWell is great and I’m excited to see where the Open Philanthropy Project goes.

Probably the thing that struck me most was how much he emphasized GiveWell’s capacity bottleneck. He said they’d rather have a good new researcher than a million dollars a year in money moved, so really everyone should just apply to work at GiveWell.

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 115776511014

Date: 2015-04-07 18:01:14 GMT

Question: Just found your blog so sorry if you've answered this a million times already. On your about page it says you like Heartiste--do you mind explaining why?

Answer: tbh I mostly put that in my about on a whim because I was like “will anyone ever actually read this? let’s mention Heartiste and find out” so now that it’s served its purpose maybe I’ll delete it ^_^ but yes, I do like him.

(long apologia for the manosphere below the cut)

To be clear I think he’s a terrible person, rape and abuse apologist, etc. and I don’t think people should read him unless they’re prepared to separate the wheat from the chaff. I read him not because I think it’s a Good Thing to Do but because he’s really entertaining and I can’t seem to stop.

(though I think he may have become more of a horrible person with time? read this and tell me it isn’t beautiful)

I think as an advice manual on picking up conventionally attractive, high-sociosexuality women if you don’t care about morality his work is probably pretty good. When he starts purporting to give a Grand Theory of Human Nature I think he’s automatically doomed to be wrong because people just vary a lot. But I still think he gives a helpful framework that I find myself referring to when trying to understand others’ relationships and my own brain.

(And I think the further you get from the rationalist community and the closer you get to the land of normal people, the more helpful said framework is. I know a girl who’s dating a super-nice guy with a good job and wants to break up with him and get back together with her ex who cheated on her and gave her herpes. Without the manosphere I would have just thought she was an idiot; now I get it and feel bad for her, because to some extent she can’t help how her attraction works. I might be more sympathetic to the manosphere than others because I think I’m closer to the “normal” end of rationalists and so more of it describes me. It’s useful, when you wonder things like “why do I suddenly feel more attracted to him” to have actual answers like “oh, dread game.” And some stuff is applicable even outside romantic relationships: I whispered “abundance mentality” to myself before every job interview I had.)

Also like, there’s this competing access needs thing going on where I managed to internalize the message “Relationships are this beautiful thing where two people meet on a spiritual plane and just because it didn’t work out doesn’t mean you should stop being friends or caring about each other as long as everyone is honest about their feelings and needs”

(unless he’s an abuser then he is the scum of the earth and deserves to die, it’s very binary)

Then at some point what I needed to hear was “Relationships are two people manipulating each other to get what they want, you should take whatever actions will get you what you want, why would you care about hurting other people, also if the guy in question is a beta loser why would you ever give him so much as the time of day to begin with, abundance mentality” so I am grateful to Heartiste and the rest of the manosphere for helping me, even if it was in a pretty idiosyncratic way and I don’t expect it to be relevant to most people.

(also this)

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 115598421899

Date: 2015-04-05 20:10:58 GMT

Reblogging: mathprofessorquotes

Quote: Hey, if this unsubstantiated claim in your proof were actually true it would warrant another whole paper! You could title it ‘The Riemann Hypothesis is Trivial.’

Tags: #I submitted this!, #math

Post ID: 115437966224

Date: 2015-04-04 01:21:19 GMT

Question: You're /u/GladOS on LW, correct? *sigh*

Answer: Nope! From a brief glance at her profile she seems significantly more into HBD than me, also unlike me she puts parentheses around her emoticons ^_^

(nah, you are a lot less awful than what I remember of her, hehe)

… thanks I guess!

Post ID: 115179785889

Date: 2015-04-01 03:26:04 GMT

Reblogging: chroniclesofrettek

Body:

chroniclesofrettek:

worldoptimization:
A friend (who’s studying to be an elementary school teacher) and I were talking about ability grouping for elementary school students, which they’re now apparently being told not to do. The evidence they’ve been given for this recommendation by textbooks and professors has been mostly anecdotal, with maybe a few mentions of studies thrown in, which is depressing but not surprising.
I looked at a few meta-analyses and it seems like flexible ability groups for one or two subjects in the context of a heterogeneous classroom have a positive effect on average achievement, although I say this with low confidence.
I could tell her that, but I don’t think she’d change her mind, since the effects seem to vary by ability level and are negative for the lowest-achieving kids. She’d say what matters is that we help the kids who need it the most, the high-achieving kids will be fine on their own.
Which made me wonder, if we can choose to either improve the achievement of low-ability or high-ability kids by a certain amount, which is a greater utilitarian good? My intuition says the high-ability kids, since they’re more likely to create lots of value with their education by e.g. curing cancer or inventing the computer. I’m not sure though. Would I be less successful now if my elementary school education had been 5% worse? I always had the resources and the motivation to learn stuff outside of school, which a lot of kids don’t.
Also I think we should put nonzero weight on what makes kids happiest while they’re in school. I know my happiest memories from elementary school are things like when I was in the highest spelling group and I got to pick words like “brachiosaurus” instead of “about” and research their Latin and Greek roots, when I got to do things that were actually interesting for a change. Maybe the lowest-achieving kids were made less happy by the ability grouping, I don’t know.
(I started elementary school in a very diverse school district. By third grade, the top ten kids in my grade had all left because it was clear the teachers didn’t care about teaching us, leaving our classmates without the benefits of heterogeneity. If you sacrifice the high-achieving kids on the altar of closing the achievement gap they will opt out of your educational system.)
If you’re talking about global utility then it’s likely best to boost the top kids. Utility generation by people functions along a power law, most of the value comes from the top performers (doing things like investing the computer). They’ll be “successful” in any system that doesn’t actively try and hurt them, but that means getting a decent engineering job instead of founding SpaceX.
On the other hand, if the goal of your system is to make all the kids have happy lives. Only a small percentage of kids really need help to be happy and have good life outcomes, and someone really needs to help them.
You likely want at least one system doing the first, just like you want one system doing the second.

Yeah I guess what I value is pretty different from what education people value: most of the utility is in the rest of the world/far future/whatever but people involved in the American educational system probably care about something more like “make current Americans happier.”

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 115176914709

Date: 2015-04-01 02:50:20 GMT

Body: A friend (who’s studying to be an elementary school teacher) and I were talking about ability grouping for elementary school students, which they’re now apparently being told not to do. The evidence they’ve been given for this recommendation by textbooks and professors has been mostly anecdotal, with maybe a few mentions of studies thrown in, which is depressing but not surprising.

I looked at a few meta-analyses and it seems like flexible ability groups for one or two subjects in the context of a heterogeneous classroom have a positive effect on average achievement, although I say this with low confidence.

I could tell her that, but I don’t think she’d change her mind, since the effects seem to vary by ability level and are negative for the lowest-achieving kids. She’d say what matters is that we help the kids who need it the most, the high-achieving kids will be fine on their own.

Which made me wonder, if we can choose to either improve the achievement of low-ability or high-ability kids by a certain amount, which is a greater utilitarian good? My intuition says the high-ability kids, since they’re more likely to create lots of value with their education by e.g. curing cancer or inventing the computer. I’m not sure though. Would I be less successful now if my elementary school education had been 5% worse? I always had the resources and the motivation to learn stuff outside of school, which a lot of kids don’t.

Also I think we should put nonzero weight on what makes kids happiest while they’re in school. I know my happiest memories from elementary school are things like when I was in the highest spelling group and I got to pick words like “brachiosaurus” instead of “about” and research their Latin and Greek roots, when I got to do things that were actually interesting for a change. Maybe the lowest-achieving kids were made less happy by the ability grouping, I don’t know.

(I started elementary school in a very diverse school district. By third grade, the top ten kids in my grade had all left because it was clear the teachers didn’t care about teaching us, leaving our classmates without the benefits of heterogeneity. If you sacrifice the high-achieving kids on the altar of closing the achievement gap they will opt out of your educational system.)

Tags: #lol I am so mind-killed on this issue, #I really should not argue about it with people, #you said helping disadvantaged children is good clearly that means you want to take away all safe spaces for people like me, #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 114902289649

Date: 2015-03-29 03:48:43 GMT

Reblogging: taymonbeal

Body:

taymonbeal:

In other news, I took the train into Cambridge and had lunch with theunitofcaring and worldoptimization, which was the best thing.
Hedonic Enhancement Tip: Have conversations with extremely awesome people about effective altruism, cultural politics, metaethics, Scott Aaronson, computer science pedagogy, what makes nerd communities work, and other Objectively Best Conversation Topics*.
* Objectively Best Conversation Topics may be subjective. Results may vary for persons who are not me.

Tags: #seconded, #affection signaling cw, #personal

Post ID: 114525618594

Date: 2015-03-24 21:50:12 GMT

Body: today I had a break between interviews and was chatting with another guy who was interviewing with the same company

him: oh you go to [school]? Do you know this girl … I think her name starts with K … I don’t actually know her, I just read her Tumblr.

me: wow theunitofcaring is Internet famous these days ^_^

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 114163911184

Date: 2015-03-20 22:14:56 GMT

Reblogging: wirehead-wannabe

Body:

wirehead-wannabe:

worldoptimization:
It seems like there are two purposes to marriage, and they are fundamentally opposed.
One is to accomplish things together: to make an income, to run a household, to rear children. For this purpose it’s best if the two people have complementary skill sets.
The other is the whole love thing, and on just about every dimension people seem more attracted to people who are more similar to them.
In the past the former purpose was considered the more important one, and you didn’t even have to worry about who would provide an income (or freshly killed animals or whatever) and who would vacuum the carpets, because gender roles took care of that for you.
But now that the second purpose is considered paramount, mating is becoming more and more assortative to the point where every smart, ambitious person I know is married to a more or less equally smart and ambitious person, probably in the same field. And then they both have demanding jobs and compared to 99% of the population their comparative advantage would not be housework and childrearing, but someone has to do it and so it defaults to the woman who now has to work a second shift after she comes home from running her hedge fund.
(Or they don’t have children, or they delegate childrearing to hired help. Anecdotal evidence suggests the latter leads to dissatisfied children.)
Like, optimizing for comparative advantage is great in theory! I’d like to advise smart and ambitious women to go forth and find housespouses! But my confidence in the efficacy of this is very low as a result of actually knowing many smart and ambitious women, who seem to agree that they would like to date and marry guys who at minimum are as smart as them and have pretty good career prospects, and ideally the higher-status the better.
And you’d expect optimizing for comparative advantage would work better in the other direction, but actually two professors of my acquaintance immediately come to mind who married attractive, unintelligent women, had unhappy marriages and divorced soon after, and are now happily married to women of similar intelligence and career status and have multiple kids together.
Clearly the solution to all of this is that women aren’t allowed to have jobs anymore. But this seems sort of economically inefficient as well as politically untenable.
I feel like the ideal solution here would be for group living to become more socially acceptable, and to designate one or two people to do the maintenance stuff. Unfortunately, this requires a group of people that all trust each other highly, and it’s difficult to make that happen in modern America. If anyone can come up with a social technology to make that work, we’d be able to solve a huge number of problems with social isolation as well. Additional challenges: has to work for introverts, should be accommodating to people who want to minimize time spent around children, have to decide how easily a person can escape a bad reputation, has to somehow maintain an ideal ratio of homemakers to breadwinners, has to come up with a system for arbitrating financial allocations to homemakers.
Colleges, incidentally, seem pretty good at making group living work among people who were previously strangers, but doesn’t include a system for having people’s individual living spaces get cleaned by someone else. They have the benefit of not normally needing to deal with people having young children, so I’m not sure how viable of a solution that is. The idea that keeps popping up in my mind is having (parents + people who want to help raise children) live separately from childfree people, but then you need a way to deal with accidental pregnancies in the childfree groups. Voluntary sterilization maybe? This still unfortunately leave people who want children later but don’t want to deal with them now in weird spot. We would want them to live with like individuals, but again, accidental pregnancies are a problem. Then there’s the question of how to keep pedophiles out of childrearing groups.
I can sorta see why society has been slow to adapt here.

Yes this is actually a great solution, I totally support more group living. Provides opportunities to exploit comparative advantage, gives people close-knit communities, counters the atomization of society.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 113815534969

Date: 2015-03-16 21:28:29 GMT

Question: One thing that helps psychologically is to remember that your interviewer is looking for reasons to hire you, not reasons to exclude you. The interviewer wants you to be hirable so they can stop the interview process right then and hire you. gl;hf!

Answer: This is a good way to think about it, thanks!

Post ID: 113814641884

Date: 2015-03-16 21:17:50 GMT

Body: I’m pretty much writing this for myself, but people who are in college and are similarly clueless about the real world might find it helpful.

The next time I have to look for jobs, there are a lot of things I’m going to do differently. First, I need to make a plan before the school year even starts of what companies I most want to work for, and then figure out when I’m supposed to apply for them. Jobs rarely have explicit deadlines, but they do seem to have implicit deadlines that you’re supposed to magically know through word-of-mouth and I need to figure out when those are. Missing out on jobs because you applied too late is stupid.

In general, I spent a lot of time procrastinating throughout the job application process. I think this was not actually because job applications are hard (they’re pretty mindless), but because I was scared of interviews and I knew subconsciously the more jobs I applied to the more interviews I was likely to have. After all the interviews I’ve done this year I’m much less scared now, so hopefully I won’t fall into this trap in the future. If I do at least I will recognize it.

I should also apply to whatever jobs I want most regardless of how likely I think I am to get them. Sending an application is very low-cost, and in any case whether I get interviews seems kind of random: I have a final-round interview for the one job I assumed it would be hardest to get so I didn’t even bother to apply for a while, and I’ve gotten form rejection letters from some random-ass startups.

I think both the application-to-interview and the interview-to-offer step are things I could work on. For application-to-interview:

1) Networking seems to be a much better way to get interviews than submitting applications online. I need to be more aggressive about using the networks I have at my disposal. Asking around among EA people would work. Asking around among my parents’ friends works. Cold-emailing [my school] alumni that I found on the internet and asking them to refer me apparently works, although the fact that it does seems to indicate flaws in our civilization.

2) My resume and cover letters could probably be improved. I should get a resume/cover letter critique session with my career center next year.

3) Some applications ask for projects you’ve done outside of school, or open-source contributions you’ve made. I should try doing some of those to stand out more. It would also be a good thing to talk about during interviews.

For interview-to-offer:

1) I seem to be pretty good at math questions, fine at “tell me about yourself”/”why do you want to work here”-type questions AFAICT.

2) Whatever kind of jobs I’m looking for next year I should probably get better at programming questions, since even the least CSy jobs I applied for wanted me to be good at programming. There are books on how to do coding interviews so I should start out by reading those. After that I should spend a bunch of time on Topcoder or whatever to get more familiar with all the algorithms/data structures and get used to solving problems quickly. I also need to learn more about the details of various programming languages so next time someone asks me about interfaces in Java I don’t stare blankly. Presumably they expect you to know the answers to these because you’ve just spent so much time coding in Java you know it like your own home. It might be easier to just get a book titled Top Java Interview Questions or something and memorize it.

3) It might help to know more statistics. I should either take some applied statistics classes next year or learn stuff on my own. Or at least review all the machine learning I’ve forgotten, people seem to get excited when you mention machine learning.

In conclusion, I think looking for jobs will already be a lot easier next year because I’ll be less scared of interviews and I’ll have an actual internship on my resume that I can talk about. If I follow everything I’ve put here it will be even easier.

Post ID: 113293509396

Date: 2015-03-10 23:30:59 GMT

Body: The road to virtue?—Well, it’s
plain and simple to express:
Sin
and sin
and sin again,
but less
and less
and less.

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 113234888879

Date: 2015-03-10 05:49:15 GMT

Body: I.

The other day I was asking someone why he didn’t identify as an EA. “I’m just not a very moral person,” he said. “Oh,” I hastened to reassure him, “I mean, me neither.”

II.

I was thinking about Scott’s recent post on his trouble with accepting that animals have moral value. Lots of people have trouble with this, and lots of other people will tell you it’s because it’s really hard to accept that you’re committing a horribly immoral act every time you eat a steak. But I realized I’ve always found that kind of odd, because for me it wasn’t hard at all.

I think I always implicitly believed that animals mattered. But my first contact with animal rights memes wasn’t until high school, when I learned that animals on factory farms lead really terrible lives. And my reaction was, “Okay. I guess eating meat is really terrible then.” And I kept on eating meat for the next three years, eating less and less and eventually realizing that I’d found enough vegetarian foods I liked that going vegetarian wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience.

When I heard the Peter Singer drowning child thought experiment, my reaction was, “Hmm, I guess spending money on myself beyond the basic requirements of living rather than donating it is morally equivalent to murder. Maybe I should start donating 10%.”

When I heard that animals farmed for eggs and milk suffer just as much as those farmed for meat (this somehow never occurred to high school me) my reaction was, “Okay, I guess eating eggs and milk is morally equivalent to torturing animals for fun.” This was two years ago and giving up dairy is still on my to-do list, somewhere between “read more books” and “learn to do makeup.” But it took me about a day to intellectually accept the idea, and right now I eat ice cream all the time and feel no guilt at all.

III.

I think if I were more scrupulous I would be more inclined to extreme acts of altruism. I’d be more likely to give, say, 50% of my income (once I get a job) if I had some guilt motivating me; as it is I don’t know if I’ll have enough willpower to give that much. But my lack of scrupulosity does make it easier to take moral ideas seriously, and I think as an EA that’s really important.

Tags: #effective altruism, #food cw

Post ID: 113079624169

Date: 2015-03-08 17:09:30 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

queenshulamit:

Things which are signs society devalues friendship:
1. It is considered normal to move a long distance for the sake of family or romantic partners. It is not considered normal to move a long distance for the sake of friends.
2. You can get compassionate leave from work to care for a sick partner or family member but not for a friend (even if the friend lives with you.) There is sometimes an exception if you are a Registered Carer.
3. People will commiserate you far more over a break up than over the end of a friendship.
4. The whole “men and women can’t be friends” nonsense.
But I don’t think slash fiction is a sign society devalues friendship. I think slash fiction is a sign that a small, not especially powerful section of society values Representation and/or Hot Boys Kissing (probably more of the latter tbh, otherwise there would be more femslash and more poc-centric fanfiction.) Nobody is saying “Steve has to kiss Bucky because nobody cares that much about measley old FRIENDS. They’re saying” “Steve has to kiss Bucky because Bisexual Steve Rogers is important for Social Justice” and/or “Steve has to kiss Bucky because fap fap fap”

Idk, I think slash might be part of a larger picture in which society devalues friendship. My roommate (also straight) and I have a pretty close relationship, and I’ve had people (both guys and girls, both straight and not) tell me that they ship the two of us. I think that’s pretty clearly motivated not by desire for Representation or Hot Girls Kissing but by this sense that platonic relationships are inherently less interesting/complex/high-stakes/intimate than sexual relationships.

Maybe that’s not exactly the same thing as slash but like, I do think a lot of people I know have this tendency to respond “I ship it” to any relationship between characters or real people they find interesting, even if I think it’s more interesting when viewed as a friendship.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 113077476399

Date: 2015-03-08 16:43:56 GMT

Body:

dataandphilosophy said:

To what extent do you think that this explains the rise in the number of startups promising to do housework for people?

Wellll people have been doing housework for other people since time immemorial. The more women work the more demand there will be, but I think said startups are just replacing “hire a cleaning lady your friend recommended” and their existence is due to advances in technology/the sharing economy being trendy.

Post ID: 112925844471

Date: 2015-03-07 01:01:30 GMT

Body: It seems like there are two purposes to marriage, and they are fundamentally opposed.

One is to accomplish things together: to make an income, to run a household, to rear children. For this purpose it’s best if the two people have complementary skill sets.

The other is the whole love thing, and on just about every dimension people seem more attracted to people who are more similar to them.

In the past the former purpose was considered the more important one, and you didn’t even have to worry about who would provide an income (or freshly killed animals or whatever) and who would vacuum the carpets, because gender roles took care of that for you.

But now that the second purpose is considered paramount, mating is becoming more and more assortative to the point where every smart, ambitious person I know is married to a more or less equally smart and ambitious person, probably in the same field. And then they both have demanding jobs and compared to 99% of the population their comparative advantage would not be housework and childrearing, but someone has to do it and so it defaults to the woman who now has to work a second shift after she comes home from running her hedge fund.

(Or they don’t have children, or they delegate childrearing to hired help. Anecdotal evidence suggests the latter leads to dissatisfied children.)

Like, optimizing for comparative advantage is great in theory! I’d like to advise smart and ambitious women to go forth and find housespouses! But my confidence in the efficacy of this is very low as a result of actually knowing many smart and ambitious women, who seem to agree that they would like to date and marry guys who at minimum are as smart as them and have pretty good career prospects, and ideally the higher-status the better.

And you’d expect optimizing for comparative advantage would work better in the other direction, but actually two professors of my acquaintance immediately come to mind who married attractive, unintelligent women, had unhappy marriages and divorced soon after, and are now happily married to women of similar intelligence and career status and have multiple kids together.

Clearly the solution to all of this is that women aren’t allowed to have jobs anymore. But this seems sort of economically inefficient as well as politically untenable.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 111924665639

Date: 2015-02-24 04:14:19 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

Long post is long. Contains references to fashion, Leah Libresco, Effulgence, “the aesthetic”, Maslow’s Hierarchy, and my life.
Basic structure:
1. Background on what I think aesthetic means in context.
2. Discussion of what it implies we should do, half-hearted references at the literature.
3. Discussion of the contrasting theory.
4. Conclusion.
Read More

Coincidentally I’m pretty sure we were talking about this exact same thing in my philosophy class today. (Only pretty sure because I didn’t actually do the reading so I couldn’t totally understand what was going on. I was preparing for an interview instead, for a job that pays a lot of money that I could donate, so not doing the reading was actually the virtuous thing to do.) But in any case we read Sartre and MacIntyre and talked about their conflicting views of self-fashioning, which pretty much map onto your divergent and convergent.

I find the Sartre/divergent view to be self-indulgent. Of course, I’m only saying that because self-indulgence runs counter to my current conception of the aesthetic soooooo

Tags: #the aesthetic, #my philosophy class is often silly but sometimes interesting, #I started typing in philosophy and that was the tag I got, #it refers to a class I took last year, #but it's still very relevant so I'm keeping it

Post ID: 111236286254

Date: 2015-02-17 02:14:14 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

worldoptimization:
theunitofcaring:
[snip]
dataandphilosophy:
Oh, I definitely think top students are disproportionately liberal. But I think there might also be anti-conservative (or more accurately anti-Red Tribe) discrimination going on; according to Espenshade and Radford (or at least some description of their work I read somewhere) a lower-class white student is much less likely to be admitted to any given college than an upper-class white student with the same academic qualifications, and Red Tribe extracurriculars like 4-H club and ROTC decrease your admissions chances.
I’d guess that top Red Tribe students are more spread out and a lot are at their state universities.
We’ve read the same study summary, and it matches the partyism data nicely. But partyism would still predict one school that is deliberately conservative having the opposite bias and harvesting all the good conservatives. Why doesn’t this school exist?

Well, the last top 10 university was founded in 1891. The current political landscape is much more recent than that.

Actually, if I were a conservative (non-EA) billionaire I would totally found a university.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 111163732564

Date: 2015-02-16 08:52:25 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

dataandphilosophy:
theunitofcaring:
[snip]

Yeah. I would also have liked ideological diversity, if I could find any.
However, if the reasoning is that college admissions at schools at the level of quality you would have been ok with (Ivys and equivalents), we should expect at least some right-wing schools that snatch those students up. Catholic colleges, perhaps: No, Boston College doesn’t count, and it’s a perfectly lovely school that couldn’t compete with Stanford. I’m going to guess that Georgetown is no poster-child for conservatism either, not to the extent that we would expect if student quality for admissions officers was distributed evenly across the political spectrum, Is anyone on my dash familiar with it?
Duke is southern by the standards of top schools: The Ivies have a history bias, obviously, but I can’t think of a school at that level in the South aside from Duke, while, starting from the steps of MIT, I can draw a straightish line that goes through University of Michigan, UChicago, the best writer’s program in the country at the University of Iowa, and wind up on the other side of the country coming towards San Francisco, home to your UC Berkeley and a junior university you may have heard of. One could make the case that UT Austin should be on the list, but one can make a stronger case that Austin is in the South in the same way that Japan isn’t Protestant.
This suggests that geography plays a role. Some students don’t want to go too far from home. While I obviously don’t understand this inclination, I am willing to accept that it is part of the equation.
I think it’s quite plausible that for a variety of reasons, possibilities ranging from (conservatism = survive/thrive = less focus on education and planning for future) to (perception of being unwelcome in academia leads to negative affect towards education) to (the Southern education system is terrible, & in modern American politics conservatism is increasingly southernized) to (younger people are more liberal), top students will be disproportionately liberal.

Oh, I definitely think top students are disproportionately liberal. But I think there might also be anti-conservative (or more accurately anti-Red Tribe) discrimination going on; according to Espenshade and Radford (or at least some description of their work I read somewhere) a lower-class white student is much less likely to be admitted to any given college than an upper-class white student with the same academic qualifications, and Red Tribe extracurriculars like 4-H club and ROTC decrease your admissions chances.

I’d guess that top Red Tribe students are more spread out and a lot are at their state universities.

But all that, I think, is completely beside the point. I think that the level of free speech is a sacred value, and student preferences will have very little impact (marginally, mass protests are different) on what mixture of free speech/silencing of liberal speech/silencing of conservative speech colleges, by which we mostly mean self interested administrators and to some extent professors, will choose.

Yeah, universities are not for-profit and I think the incentives of the administrators are pretty much “mold the university in accordance with my personal values as long as no one important gets too mad at me”

Tags: #politics is the mind-killer, #the spirit of the first amendment, #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 111149581104

Date: 2015-02-16 05:05:15 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

theunitofcaring:
response to Colleges Need Speech Codes Because Their Students Are Still Children
When I was fifteen my high school banned bake sales to fight obesity. I and my friends thought this was stupid and disrespectful of high school students, who were mature enough to make healthy decisions for themselves and who benefitted from the space to make those informed choices now rather than, once we were adults, be responsible for our own groceries while having been shielded our whole lives from the temptation of a cupcake. We did some reading and found that banning bake sales did not improve student health. It was also devastating to high school student groups, who depended on bake sales for revenue. We scraped together hundreds of petition signatures, we wrote up a clumsy summary supporting our claims that it wouldn’t improve health outcomes, and we spoke to the Board of Education, who listened but didn’t change anything.
So we started holding ‘napkin sales’, in which we’d sell napkins for $1 and give away free cupcakes and donuts with purchase of a napkin.
I learned more from our failed campaign to overturn the bake-sale ban than I learned from all of the rest of high school.
This is the first of my many objections to Eric Posner’s appalling new article defending bans on free speech on college campuses. Why? Because students, who are emotionally still children, don’t need open and free debate - they start out knowing nothing, and they really just need to be informed by people who know better. Lest you think I’m strawmanning:
They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right. But they have also not considered that the justification for these policies may lie hidden in plain sight: that students are children. Not in terms of age, but in terms of maturity. Even in college, they must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.
“Protected”, here, means “forbidden from voicing opinions that I deem to be hateful”. If you’re wondering how it protects anyone to face academic sanctions unless you hide or lie about your beliefs, don’t read on, the article never returns to that. It also takes a while to return to the ‘students are too immature to have rights’ argument, instead throwing out various other justifications for banning free speech and repeatedly, aggressively conflating ‘hearing opposing views’ and ‘being a victim of violence’.
Once again lest you think I’m strawmanning:
If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they?
BECAUSE THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT REMOTELY EQUIVALENT AND BASICALLY NONE OF THE SAME CONSIDERATIONS APPLY WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.
Read More
This is 60% contrarianism because you’er clever and I like debating with you, 20% “Richard Posner is brilliant and I suspect I have more respect for him than you because I like his other work,” and 20% actual disagreement. That said:
1. You completely fail to engage with his market argument: to be fair, I think his market argument is terrible, we probably have similar reasons for thinking it’s terrible, I could try to make it a competing access needs point (or how liberal do you think the University of Alabama, last in the news for all-white fraternities, is?) but that’s obviously not what actually happens, let’s move on.
2. You attack over reality what he defends in principle. Richard Posner is a judge (and, frankly, one who plenty on both sides of the aisle is more deserving than Thomas is or was, and the only reason he isn’t on the SCOTUS is that he’s too old)(OK, I”ll stop the fangirling now)( But comparativelysuperlative, you know where I’m coming from). He is writing to defend the position that schools should legally be allowed to act in loco parentis. So the argument that schools are censoring only one side, while true, seems somewhat orthogonal to what he is saying.
3. I would love to see a writeup of your high school misadventures and tangles with the bureaucracy some day. No, this has no relevance to anything else.
4.(This is running on raw contrarianism) There’s no age where we should protect children from saying what they believe. But it’s much more reasonable to say “given the number of students who need this and are harmed, on this campus you can’t make homophobic comments”. This relies on a belief that people can be harmed by speech, but I don’t think we disagree here. It seems that you think that the harm of enforcing the speech codes, and the bad lesson censorship teaches, outweighs the harm caused to students from the types of speech that are banned. I suspect typical mind might apply here: I suspect you have an unusually high desire to be able to find and understand truth. I wish to note that I acknowledge that this does in fact also argue against you being able to set up a GSA.

The article is actually by Eric Posner, Richard Posner’s son. I was disappointed because I read a good article by Richard Posner the other day but I guess his son did not turn out as well :(

On the market analogy, I think I actually considered ideological diversity at some point in my college decision. I came to the conclusion that at the level of academic quality I’d be okay with there was basically no difference. I’m not sure if I believe this but if I were being contrarian I’d say that there are no conservative students to put pressure on colleges to be more accomodating of conservative viewpoints because college admissions discriminates against conservative students.

You make defending this article hard, you know. :)

doing my best ^_^

Tags: #the spirit of the first amendment

Post ID: 111144633114

Date: 2015-02-16 04:06:49 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

untiltheseashallfreethem:

response to Colleges Need Speech Codes Because Their Students Are Still Children
When I was fifteen my high school banned bake sales to fight obesity. I and my friends thought this was stupid and disrespectful of high school students, who were mature enough to make healthy decisions for themselves and who benefitted from the space to make those informed choices now rather than, once we were adults, be responsible for our own groceries while having been shielded our whole lives from the temptation of a cupcake. We did some reading and found that banning bake sales did not improve student health. It was also devastating to high school student groups, who depended on bake sales for revenue. We scraped together hundreds of petition signatures, we wrote up a clumsy summary supporting our claims that it wouldn’t improve health outcomes, and we spoke to the Board of Education, who listened but didn’t change anything.
So we started holding ‘napkin sales’, in which we’d sell napkins for $1 and give away free cupcakes and donuts with purchase of a napkin.
I learned more from our failed campaign to overturn the bake-sale ban than I learned from all of the rest of high school.
This is the first of my many objections to Eric Posner’s appalling new article defending bans on free speech on college campuses. Why? Because students, who are emotionally still children, don’t need open and free debate - they start out knowing nothing, and they really just need to be informed by people who know better. Lest you think I’m strawmanning:
They think universities are treating students like children. And they are right. But they have also not considered that the justification for these policies may lie hidden in plain sight: that students are children. Not in terms of age, but in terms of maturity. Even in college, they must be protected like children while being prepared to be adults.
“Protected”, here, means “forbidden from voicing opinions that I deem to be hateful”. If you’re wondering how it protects anyone to face academic sanctions unless you hide or lie about your beliefs, don’t read on, the article never returns to that. It also takes a while to return to the ‘students are too immature to have rights’ argument, instead throwing out various other justifications for banning free speech and repeatedly, aggressively conflating ‘hearing opposing views’ and ‘being a victim of violence’.
Once again lest you think I’m strawmanning:
If students want to learn biology and art history in an environment where they needn’t worry about being offended or raped, why shouldn’t they?
BECAUSE THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT REMOTELY EQUIVALENT AND BASICALLY NONE OF THE SAME CONSIDERATIONS APPLY WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.
Read More

So gratified you wrote this because I read this article a couple days ago and was really annoyed especially by the charming “offended or raped” line ^_^

But Posner also doesn’t even mention the best part of the Marquette incident, which is that the reason anyone heard about the TA telling the student not to argue against same-sex marriage was that a professor wrote a blog post criticizing the TA’s actions, for which he was stripped of tenure.

Tags: #the spirit of the first amendment

Post ID: 110884939034

Date: 2015-02-13 08:49:48 GMT

Question: let's form a Girls Masculinity Club and lift weights and stuff while still maintaining generally feminine identities! (... I mean if that's something you want to do)

Answer: Yes! Although tbh what I liked most about Phalanx was not the weight-lifting but the whole passivist/“let’s retreat from modern society and cultivate our virtue” vibe. (Also the “we may or may not be preparing for the coming revolution” vibe.) If someone started a Phalanx for Girls where we, I don’t know, learned to sew and studied Han Feizi I would want to join that too.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 110605115584

Date: 2015-02-10 04:29:16 GMT

Quote: Yeah I’m a libertarian, but I’d support monarchy if it were the only way to have closed borders.

Tags: #um

Post ID: 110604976829

Date: 2015-02-10 04:27:34 GMT

Quote: System.Linq.Enumerable+WhereSelectListIterator`2[TumblThree.Applications.DataModels.TumblrSvcJson.Dialogue,<>f__AnonymousType1`2[System.String,System.String]]

Body: me three years ago: I should donate blood, that would be the virtuous thing to dome two years ago: I shouldn't donate blood, the marginal value of a donation isn't that high and I could be using my time more effectivelyme one year ago: I should maybe donate blood, the marginal value of an hour isn't that high either and if I make a habit of performing altruistic actions altruism will become a more deeply entrenched part of my identityme now: I should donate blood, that would be the virtuous thing to do

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 109861640424

Date: 2015-02-02 07:53:52 GMT

Reblogging: untiltheseashallfreethem

Body:

[snip]
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Until about three years ago, I never saw the purpose of privacy when interacting with my friends, and I was completely open with them about all the things in my life. And like you, I had a lot of friends. And I tended to make friends really intensely and really quickly, because the vulnerability led to building trust.
But then a few things happened that made me reconsider. One was that something like five people all became romantically fixated on me in the space of a single semester. Similar things had happened in the past, but never in such great volume. And I thought to myself, “ok, if this happens with five people in a single semester, I’m probably doing something wrong”, and I started to take a look at what that might be. Before this I was totally fine with cuddling, casual nudity, etc. with friends. In one case I got very sleep-deprived and ended up kissing a friend of mine, even though I wasn’t interested in him romantically. And I figured, that sort of thing was probably a major cause of the problem. So I started avoiding physical contact with platonic friends, and I started dressing more modestly, and I stopped talking nearly so openly about sex. Basically I became very reserved about sexual things, and I think that was the first step in increasing my privacy.
Shortly after that I met someone who was extremely private. He wouldn’t tell me what he did for work; he wouldn’t tell me who his friends were; he would only make vague allusions to his hobbies. He’s on the very extreme end of privacy, but after hanging out with him a lot, I came to appreciate it. (Also, over time, I ended up learning a lot more about his life. But there’s still a lot I don’t know, and I’m fine with that.) His privacy allowed for a certain mystery, something that always kept me intrigued and seeking to learn more. And I started wondering if masculine and feminine mysteries played a role in keeping romantic relationships alive. If the man and woman each have parts of themselves that they don’t share with the other, maybe it’s harder to fall into that “overly comfortable” stage of the where neither partner puts in the work anymore, and they both lose attraction for each other.
Later, I met other private people and learned a lot from them as well: that privacy creates a shared world of intimacy together; that privacy helps keep unrelated parts of one’s life from spilling into each other, and so on.
I also came to realize that when I shared everything, all the time, I was being sort of a burden on my friends. Like, in college, every time I had any kind of emotional problem, I’d gchat one of my friends to talk. And this helped me a lot, but it also created a lot of work for my friends. And as part of becoming a grownup, I realized how much most grownups hide their emotions in order to support others. So like, when I came to my friend for help, if he was having a shitty day, he might just… not talk about that, since right now he was busy helping me. And I know friends who maintain firm, calm outer surfaces, and make sure that none of their self-doubt shows through, because they want to be a pillar of support that people can rely on. A friend of mine says that this actually strengthens him; when he knows other people are relying on him, he has to be his best and strongest self.
And I realized that in all my interactions up until this point, I’d always been the one baring my soul to others, burdening them with my problems. I was never the one who sat there stoically and listened. (Actually I doubt this is true. I’ve always been very willing to listen to other people’s problems. But I’ve definitely become a more consistently supportive friend as I’ve grown older.)
There’s also a lot of social reasons to keep certain things private. Suppose I’m part of a big friend group, and person Z in that friend group was once a huge asshole to me. If I complain about this to other people in the friend group, it will cause social friction, like maybe people will be forced to pick sides between me and Z in the conflict. So that’s a reason to keep quiet about it.
But I’m not sure where the balance is, between openness and privacy. For the last while, I think I’ve been erring on the side of excessive privacy, being afraid to burden anyone with my problems. And this has led to a lot of loneliness, when in fact, I may have been overestimating the burdeniness. Anyway, in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had some really open conversations with new friends, and as a result, I’ve realized how much I missed that.
So I’m trying to figure out where to draw the line. Anyway, there’s probably a bunch of different things here. Being really open about my life experiences, with people who ask me questions about them, is different from gchatting people every time I’m sad and being like “I’m so sad”. But other than that, I don’t have any good intuitions, and I’m still trying to figure this out.
(Privacy on social media, incidentally, is a whole other story.)

This was interesting, hope it’s okay if I reblog. The whole lack-of-privacy thing is one of the things I find most odd about Tumblr culture. I like your way of putting it–“privacy creates a shared world of intimacy”–because that’s exactly what I use privacy for. When I think about moments I’ve really bonded with friends, they’re usually times when we shared things we wouldn’t talk about with most people.

If cuddling, casual nudity, talking about sex, talking about intense feelingsy stuff, etc. were all things that I did with casual acquaintances or anyone with an internet connection, I’m not sure how I would distinguish my close friends. Or at least I feel like the specialness of my close friendships would be diminished.

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 109344950242

Date: 2015-01-28 00:30:41 GMT

Body: I’m not a Catholic conservative I swear … *latest issue of First Things falls out of backpack* I-I’m an atheist materialist individualist secular liberal, I- *struggles to gather up old Ross Douthat columns* no I don’t commiserate with my Catholic friends over the possibility of allowing remarried Catholics to receive communion, I’m an apostate, I’m a utilitarian, I read Dan Savage, I … no I’ve never told someone to stop separating the procreative and unitive purposes of the conjugal act, what do you mean that’s my favorite phrase

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 109281236289

Date: 2015-01-27 06:54:10 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

moteinthedark:
If a “friend” is someone I’d feel totally comfortable asking “Hey, wanna hang out?” without a special occasion or agenda, then I have only a handful of local friends.
Basically, my goal for a community is to have at least 10 local “friend-units” living nearby. (Couples who live together only count for one friend-unit, because in practice hanging out with a couple is usually a package deal. Sorry, but if you usually make plans to spend time with Alice-and-Bob, then Alice-and-Bob are in practice one friend-unit.)
I have two friend-units in my current location (hopefully upgrading to three soon!) and it feels really fucking lonely. Two is not a good place to be. I have maybe four friend-units in the next closest city, and that still feels like too few.
I think ten is a good round number. I think with ten solid friend-units, you basically wouldn’t be lonely, even if you lived in a foreign country or a rural area; and I think with fewer than four or so friend-units, you’re basically going to feel like you’re in exile even if you’re living in a major city in your home country.
This is fascinating and let me know if it was personal/you didn’t want it reblogged, because -
if that’s what a friend is, I have no local friends. Asking ‘hey, wanna hang out?’ is scary and I’d have to be really really certain that 1) someone likes me and 2) my company is the most valuable use of their time. As a result, I tend not to ask it and so friendships that depend on it existing as an option tend to die. I can think of three or four people who I would feel comfortable doing this with, but none of them live near me.
I don’t feel sad about this at all. I have people who like me and I hang out with them in scheduled contexts where it’s very clear what I need to do in order to make my company the most valuable use of their time. It’d be cool if my friends-who-I-could-ask-to-hang-out lived near me, but actually I’d probably get stressed and overwhelmed and immediately start trying to create scheduled contexts in which we hang out regularly for a fixed amount of time. And once that was established I would take ‘randomly asking them to hang out’ off the table mentally and be much happier for it.
It seems like maybe people are very high variance in terms of how much non-scheduled social interaction they want to feel like is available to them? I would guess that you’re on the high end and I’m sure that I’m on the low end.

It was actually quite reassuring to see this and find out someone’s brain does the same thing as mine! I don’t even know how I can simultaneously alieve “it makes me happy when other people ask me to hang out” and “asking someone to hang out is absurdly presumptuous, why would you assume that out of all the infinite things they could be doing on Saturday afternoon spending time with you is somewhere close to the most valuable one.”

Unlike you I wish my brain would stop doing this, because it’s cool to have the option of being friends with people even if you’re not likely to run into them/have scheduled social interaction often enough to maintain a friendship through that alone. Currently my coping mechanisms include:

having a party (“hey there will be several people there so the odds are good that at least one will be interesting!”)
enticing them with a thing (“well I heard there’s this really good movie that’ll probably win like 10 Oscars so maybe we could sit next to each other while we both watch it”)
making sure they don’t lose any time (“you will probably go to the dining hall sometime this week independent of me so what if I just arranged to be there simultaneously”)

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 109094735584

Date: 2015-01-25 11:44:49 GMT

Body:

dataandphilosophy said: That fountain is lovely. :)

I know! I used to play in it as a child (it was like a block from my house) which is probably why I have unusually pleasant associations with it.

Post ID: 109024933909

Date: 2015-01-24 18:52:56 GMT

Body: Tagged by funereal-disease :)

Name: worldoptimization

Nicknames: none really (those who share at least 50% of my genes have been known to call me Car or Scoog)

Birthday: November 1

Age: 20

Gender: woman

Sexual Orientation: straight

Significant Other: none

Work/School: junior studying math and CS

Favorite Color: gray

Time and Date: 10:49 am on January 24

Average Hours of Sleep: 8

Last thing I googled: “offer it up”

(this is what my mom tells me when I complain about something and I was wondering if it’s a common expression among non-Catholics but nope, purely a suggestion to offer up your suffering to the souls in purgatory)

Number of blankets I sleep under: two

Favorite Shows: Game of Thrones, Arrested Development, Silicon Valley, Downton Abbey, The West Wing, 30 Rock, Sherlock, Girls

Favorite Food: according to my roommate, “All you eat is scones and Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. And pasta. And chickpeas.”

Favorite Drunk Food: Pirate’s Booty

Favorite Place to Shop for Clothes: H&M

Last Movie I Saw in Theaters: The Imitation Game (with my 11-year-old sister who afterwards commented, “I think the movie would have been a lot better if it had a happy ending”)

Last Book I Read: Permutation City by Greg Egan (really good in case you were wondering)

A Place That Makes Me Happy: my grandparents’ farm, my kitchen at home, upscale malls, the ski trails in Jackson, NH, that fountain outside the Harvard Science Center

What are you doing today? going to see a play in San Francisco, then heading to a charity gala afterwards! my life is so glamorous

tagging nobody (I am less virtuous than theunitofcaring clearly) but consider yourself tagged if you feel like it

Tags: #food cw, #personal

Post ID: 108859238059

Date: 2015-01-22 22:25:27 GMT

Reblogging: a-bell-to-rise-and-die

Body:

ok so i don’t really understand the sj/feminist/whatever framework beyond what ive seen on tumblr and have no interest in doing so, so i might be using the words wrong
however
veganism/vegitarianism is not a privilege. it is associated with rich people, but it’s not actually expensive. grain is cheap, meat is $$$. veganism* can be human-capital-expensive; junk food is easier to procure and eat, etc., etc., but the concept of being “too poor to be vegan” is confused.
i am not a vegan because i am a moral nihilist and see no need to be. i would be willing to eat human flesh were it not socially unacceptable/psychologically a bad idea/likely to get me sent to jail
the idea of saving animals by being a vegan is basically homeopathy anyway if the counterfactual is buying meat from stores that buy it from larger suppliers that but it from… certainly if an animal is already dead and nobody will know you are of it no harm is done.
but anyway, if you think veganism is a moral imperative and aren’t a vegan, look into things like ordering grain in bulk online

I mostly agree on the privilege thing except it is true that being vegetarian has a social cost that varies depending on the community you’re in and that’s definitely correlated with wealth

as someone who’s tried to eat vegetarian at restaurants in rural Indiana and ended up eating salad and fries for dinner, I can see why someone from rural Indiana would get annoyed at someone from an urban Blue Tribe enclave being like “but it’s so easy to be vegetarian, every restaurant has at least five clearly marked vegetarian options!”

also being vegan doesn’t really save animals, I think the main reason to do it is if you think animals on factory farms have lives not worth living and you want to reduce demand for animal products thereby preventing some of them from being born in the first place

(main utilitarian reason that is, most vegans are probably so for non-utilitarian reasons)

Tags: #food cw, #scrupulosity cw, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 108592473304

Date: 2015-01-20 00:01:16 GMT

Reblogging: lambdaphagy

Body:

lambdaphagy:

I
One conceit in science fiction that always appealed to me is the idea of civilizations that have inherited technologies that they no longer quite fully understand. H.G. Wells was probably the first to explore this theme, but it runs through many different strands of speculative fiction. A Canticle for Leibowitz was maybe the last great novel to do it, but I’m happy to be corrected with a more recent example.
II
Folks in programs with names like “Science, Technology and Society” like to remind us that there are social technologies too. Democracy is a technology for conflict resolution in the context of a state. Markets are a technology for organizing production and allocation of scarce goods in super-Dunbar settings. In fact, I’d say that STS types tend not to take that point seriously enough.
III
If you buy (I) and (II), the obvious next step is to put them together and consider social technologies that have been inherited by cultures that no longer understand them. AFAIK the first to make this argument explicitly was Chesterton but, again, I would not be surprised if someone could locate a similar statement in the ancients.
The more I think about it, the stronger my suspicion that my tribe might be like a band of scavengers that survived some cataclysm ca. 1960, and now regard any enduring antediluvian social institutions with bewilderment and loathing. Not merely in the sense of considering and rejecting them on the merits (as often we should), but finding them literally incomprehensible. What is marriage for, except a contractual bundle to arrange health insurance and hospital visitation rights? What was the point of the prohibition of no-fault divorce? How on earth did people get by before ubiquitous contraception and the sexual revolution? What was up with everyone participating in religious life with apparent sincerity? How did anyone manage to survive without a modern welfare state?
When I listen in on conversations among my friends on the left about the bad old days, the consensus is not even that these institutions were bad and worth abolishing, so much as that they were inscrutably evil in their lust of oppression for its own sake. Which is weird because these are the same people who nod approvingly about the idea of “social technologies” and especially about the hidden wisdom of various cultural practices of indigenous groups.
To be clear, I’m not endorsing conservative answers to these questions. Chesterton’s fence proves too much, and sometimes we are right to tear it down. But I do think it strange that so much of past social life seems totally alien to us, just fifty years out.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 108277245064

Date: 2015-01-16 19:38:20 GMT

Quote: System.Linq.Enumerable+WhereSelectListIterator`2[TumblThree.Applications.DataModels.TumblrSvcJson.Dialogue,<>f__AnonymousType1`2[System.String,System.String]]

Body: friend: ugh I'm in this class on Enlightenment philosophy and I have to read Leibniz, he's so stupidme: but like, what if he was right all along? if you believe the simulation hypothesis, and then you assume our simulators are ethical, then we really are living in the best of all possible worlds!

Tags: #also he invented calculus so

Post ID: 107476945774

Date: 2015-01-08 05:07:52 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

untiltheseashallfreethem:

on the one hand, I hate posts that are like ‘women who aren’t feminists are just selfish people, since they don’t personally benefit from feminism then the suffering of others just doesn’t matter to them’
hate them
because the reason a lot of women don’t identify with feminism is because feminists have royally fucked up intersectionality along an axis they care about (other people have written about this far more eloquently than I could) - because they see the priorities of feminism as being for white women, or abled women, or wealthy women. in other words it’s the exact opposite of ‘just because I don’t personally benefit, I don’t care’. it’s ‘you aren’t addressing the very real suffering that I see in the world and want to change’.
on the other hand, a lot of the women I know who aren’t feminists, it is because we haven’t experienced any of the things that tend to be described as the universal experience of womanhood. I haven’t ever been catcalled. or talked over. or dismissed because of my gender. or told I can’t succeed in a STEM field. or been told not to enforce my boundaries. or been pressured to date a boy I wasn’t interested in. I’ve never felt in danger in the company of men. And that’s a result of class privilege and liberal-upbringing privilege and not-dating-men privilege (seriously! it reduces your rate of intimate partner violence by a lot!) and probably also a consequence of my neurology, since I seem to have totally failed to internalize basically all ‘female socialization’.
Read More

I actually became a lot more sympathetic toward feminism after reading and thinking about Generalizing from One Example (Scott Alexander: making people more sympathetic toward feminism since 2009!) because I realized that maybe all the women who said things like “it was hurtful to me when [guy] made [sexist joke]” or “when [guy] made [factual statement about biological gender differences] it made me feel really uncomfortable and excluded from [space]” weren’t just pretending to be offended for attention or something

which is sort of similar to the way feminists use “lived experience,” I think: when someone says they’ve experienced something it’s a good idea to take a stance of epistemic humility since they always know more about their experience than you do, and maybe they’re lying or mistaken but that shouldn’t be your first assumption

except in practice your lived experience often gets ignored if it doesn’t fit with the narrative and you end up with e.g. #yesallwomen

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 107039392459

Date: 2015-01-03 21:31:08 GMT

Reblogging: untiltheseashallfreethem

Body:

Since everyone is sharing their feminism-and-scrupulosity stories, I figured I’d add mine to the pile. My problems were comparatively mild, and I’m mostly over them now, so this is not a plea for sympathy, just another voice in the chorus speaking out against this stuff.
After reading feminist writings like “Schrodinger’s Rapist”, I too became afraid of talking to female strangers, for fear of hurting them. Let me be clear: I’m straight and female, so this had nothing to do with sexual attraction. I think it just had to do with being socially awkward, and believing that any social mistake I made might traumatize someone.
I mean, feminism isn’t the only thing responsible for my scrupulosity. The scrupulosity began back in sophomore year of college, when I first started to get a grasp on social skills. As I became more aware of nonverbal communication and social norms, I started to realize that a lot of what I said and did was making people uncomfortable. Often when I talked, I was interrupting people or going on long monologues. I was stepping on people’s voices the way an awkward dancer steps on people’s toes. So anyway, I stopped talking nearly as much, and deliberately tried to cultivate shyness as a virtue.
I also spent a lot of time on an IRC channel that explicitly encouraged scrupulosity with an oft-repeated motto “doing things is evil”. So that definitely has a lot to do with my problems.
But reading online feminism definitely didn’t help. Like, before I started reading this stuff, I used to get really worried that all my social mistakes were the worst thing ever. But without the influence of feminism/SJ, I could always calmly remind myself that no, in the grand scheme of things, my little social mistakes were no big deal. Usually, they’d just make people mildly uncomfortable for a few minutes, and then everyone would forget about it. And every social mistake was a learning experience for me, a necessary part of levelling up in social skills. So I shouldn’t stress too much about the error, and in fact, I should be happy that I had learned something. As I told myself, there’s no way to learn social skills except by repeatedly screwing up.
But then I read articles like “Schrodinger’s Rapist”, which say pretty much the opposite thing from what I just wrote. They say that if you make a social error, it could cause serious harm to someone. It won’t just make them feel mildly uncomfortable; it will make them feel like their lives are threatened. Or it could trigger a really painful episode of PTSD, which could put the person into a terrible state for weeks on end, and make their recovery that much more difficult. (I’m a straight female, so I really don’t understand how I internalized the whole Schrodinger’s Rapist thing. I have a lot in common with straight nerdy guys, so maybe I just assume that all messages directed to them apply to me too? Who knows.)
Anyway, as a socially awkward person, I became afraid of talking to people. Particularly strangers who were women, but I also just grew nervous about ever talking to anyone. What if I accidentally said something racist or ableist or offensive to some minority? That would cause serious harm and be the worst thing in the world!
The saner social justice people (e.g. Captain Awkward) will say that everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and if someone calls you “ableist”, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, just that you need to pay more attention to what you’re saying and try to fix it. But it’s hard to internalize that more forgiving perspective, when words like “ableist” are hurled like weapons by Tumblr activists, and everyone emphasizes how much damage improper behavior can cause. It’s much easier to start worrying that everything you say will be flawed, and the only way to avoid hurting people is to never speak at all.
Interestingly, though, social justice hasn’t made me kinder to oppressed minorities. It’s just made me hide in places where sensitive people don’t hang out. I breathe a sigh of relief every time someone makes a racist joke or mocks social justice, because it means I’m in a safe space, where no one is going to be deeply damaged just by me speaking my opinion.
I am mostly over these scrupulosity issues now. I still feel very nervous in SJ spaces, and nervous about speaking my true opinions publicly. But I’m not afraid of talking to strangers anymore. Why? Because a few months ago, I was walking outside my office, and I ran into someone I knew. I was feeling very introverted and didn’t feel like conversing right then, but this person was socially oblivious and ignored all my signals that I didn’t want to talk. Also, it seemed like he really wanted someone to talk to, and was getting a lot out of the conversation. So I just sighed internally and listened to him for another 15 minutes. It was mildly annoying, but no big deal. And then I realized: this was exactly the sort of thing that I’d been afraid of doing to people for so many months. But someone just did it to me, and it was really no big deal! So if I inflicted that same amount of discomfort on people occasionally, it would probably be no big deal either.
So if you’re also suffering from these scrupulosity issues, and are afraid of making people uncomfortable with your social awkwardness, I will tell you: it’s probably not a big deal. Go ahead and make social mistakes and learn from them. Your chances of traumatizing someone are exceedingly low. And being made to feel uncomfortable is far from the worst thing that can happen to someone. (I mean, still don’t approach women in dark alleyways. But if it’s broad daylight, and you’re in a public place, then seriously, don’t worry about it.)

“Interestingly, though, social justice hasn’t made me kinder to oppressed minorities. It’s just made me hide in places where sensitive people don’t hang out. I breathe a sigh of relief every time someone makes a racist joke or mocks social justice, because it means I’m in a safe space, where no one is going to be deeply damaged just by me speaking my opinion."

yep same

I think a lot of SJ messages are harmful to people with social anxiety/fear of offending people (even straight women–like wow I’m sure if I were a straight man this issue would be so many times worse). Yesterday a woman at a party congratulated me on being a woman in computer science, then asked if I’ve been following the articles on women in CS lately and said with an eyeroll that people were "bringing back Pinker, suggesting that women just don’t want to study CS or something.” I responded with a smile and a “Mhm, I know right?” Like really, brain? Not only would it be good to share my opinion on important issues I know a lot about, my anxiety about this stuff just makes it hard to converse with people about things that aren’t superficial.

So I’ve been realizing recently that it’s important to be able to talk about things even when they might offend people (“So, why did you decide to become vegetarian?”), and it’s something I want to work on this year.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 106757439644

Date: 2015-01-01 01:38:52 GMT

Body: thanks Amanda Marcotte for annoying me enough to motivate me to read Quantum Computing Since Democritus

Tags: #cs, #not sj go away, #I guess buying the book would be a better way to support Scott Aaronson, #but I think getting it at the library is acceptable too

Post ID: 106674119734

Date: 2014-12-31 03:46:43 GMT

Body: (the thing)

I do some social dance in the Bay Area. Basically what that means is that I go to a public space for a few hours with a few female friends, while a succession of nerdy math/science/engineering guys ask us to spend a few minutes touching them in a socially acceptable manner and perhaps making small talk. It’s a great microcosm of the STEM world, or the dating world or something.

What is interesting about this is that I can’t think of a single instance when I or someone I know has been harassed by someone while dancing. Which is not to say that female dancers don’t have complaints. It’s just that those complaints are invariably about guys who are bad dancers or who sweat too much, who smell weird or get out of breath easily, who make too much eye contact or not enough, who respond in monosyllables or who go on long soliloquies without provocation.

“That guy was weird.” “He creeped me out.” These are the phrases people use for stuff like that and if you say those things your feelings are assumed legitimate and to be trusted.

(There are guys who do hold you closer than is standard, whose hands move lower, who turn innocent dances into more suggestive ones without really obtaining your consent in any way and they’re invariably confident and conventionally attractive. And girls recount their dances with those guys while blushing slightly and end with a smiling “Not that I’m complaining …”)

And I don’t want to make this about criticizing something other girls do, I know I do this stuff too. In the first few moments I interact with someone new I form an impression of him, and if that impression is negative then my rationalizing mind will do anything to avoid admitting that that impression might have been tinged by racism or classism or ableism or fatphobia or any of the forms that my low-status-detecting software takes. If I can tell a story where he’s the bad guy, tell myself that he must have done something to make me uncomfortable otherwise why would I be uncomfortable around him, then I win and am allowed to continue feeling virtuous.

Anyway, in conclusion

I haven’t personally experienced any sexism as a woman in math and computer science
to the extent I have heard other women complain about barriers to achievement in said areas it is mostly about subconscious bias and structural issues (i.e. work-life balance)
if STEM culture is more sexist then other cultures I am pretty confident the causal arrow points in the other direction i.e. women aren’t interested in STEM so the culture is male-dominated
you can be as much of a sexist oppressor as you want if you are a high-status male
you can be as nice and feminist as possible if you are a low-status male and people will still think you are a sexist oppressor
the drive to improve your status by punching down is really strong and identifying obvious axes of oppression will probably just make you more likely to punch down on the less obvious axes

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 105418376234

Date: 2014-12-17 05:47:32 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

worldoptimization:
gruntledandhinged:
Internet, I met dataandphilosophy yesterday and he is delightful. Continue being awesome, tumblr!rationality
true fact
also the entire Boston EA community seems pretty delightful
Recent discoveries
1. worldoptimization is just as clever and fun in person as she is on the interblags.
2. gruntledandhinged is lovely, and her leaving a party early is a sad thing.
3. I am really looking forward to NY!solstice now. Last year did not go very well, because lonely outsider who left on the early side, but this time I am going with friends and I know people who are going.
3. I continue to be a machine that translates praise into concentrated joy.

#bonobo rationalist tumblr #actually the stereotype

I am jealous of NY!solstice, also wrt bonobo rationalist tumblr I usually countersignal affection, but I think my previous post was countercountersignaling? I’m not quite sure, that many levels make my brain start to hurt

Tags: #affection signaling cw

Post ID: 105415099944

Date: 2014-12-17 04:59:08 GMT

Reblogging: gruntledandhinged

Body:

gruntledandhinged:

Internet, I met dataandphilosophy yesterday and he is delightful. Continue being awesome, tumblr!rationality

true fact

also the entire Boston EA community seems pretty delightful

Tags: #affection signaling cw

Post ID: 104477881984

Date: 2014-12-06 08:52:59 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

nihilsupernum:
I register people to the left of me as misguided and stupid and people to the right of me as outright evil and crazy. However, every time I alieve that something is evil and crazy, my auto-steelman module pops up to yell “THEY PROBABLY MAKE SENSE TO THEMSELVES, THINK MORE”, so I end up being more charitable to people to the right of me. This is the exact opposite of how thinking that people are evil is supposed to work.
This. Also, people to the left of me tend to assume I’m On Their Side for miscellaneous demographic reasons and I sometimes am but not always so around them I feel like a traitor who will be cast out when discovered. The people I meet in the real world who are to the right of me are all really pleased to discover I’m not a leftist so I feel unique and interesting around them.

#i endorse none of the reasons for my beliefs

Tags: #yes all of this

Post ID: 103164046494

Date: 2014-11-21 01:12:15 GMT

Reblogging: uncrediblehallq

Body:

uncrediblehallq:

ozymandias271:
uncrediblehallq:
ozymandias271:
hey, people
when you’re reblogging something to disagree with it and there are, like, twenty notes
check that fifteen of them aren’t someone shouting about how OP is terrible
I like arguing too, but being dogpiled is really unpleasant and it silences dissent and new ideas within our communities; if there are already a lot of people disagreeing, the point has probably been made and you’re just giving someone a hard time
I’ve been bad about this in the past and I will be trying to get better
Agree with the conclusion but not the reasoning. If 15 people have already said why something is wrong, you’re probably wasting your breath responding, and may be contributing to giving a bad idea more exposure than it deserves.
But the meme that criticism can be silencing needs to die–even if a bunch of people are criticizing you. It provides a lazy justification for internet self-righteousness: notice a bunch of people are criticizing you, then conclude they’re trying to silence you and therefore you must be the good guy.
(Or at least, that’s how things used to go in the online atheism community. Things may play out differently in your community.
A bunch of people disagreeing with you doesn’t make you right. I’m using “silence” in its most literal sense: like, there are times I’ve thought “man, if I say this sixteen people will yell at me, and I don’t want to deal with that” when I probably would have said it if two or three people would yell at me. And I would prefer, on balance, that people with unpopular opinions say them.
Except I don’t think that is the most literal sense of “silence.” Being quiet because you don’t want a bunch of people criticizing you is not the same thing as being forced to be quiet. That’s something that the rhetoric of “if you criticize people under certain conditions you’re silencing them” tends to ignore.
It’s unfortunate if people with worthwhile things to say stay quiet for fear of criticism, but there’s a limit to how much we can do about that. Talking about controversial subjects on the internet requires a certain amount of thick skin, or at least the ability to have a minor freakout but then say, “wait, no, I’m being irrational about this, and I can’t insist everybody else alter their behavior to keep me from having irrational freakouts.” We should insist people not be jerks unnecessarily, but I don’t think we’re going to change the fundamental dynamic.
And yes, while I won’t name names, I can think of specific people who I don’t think are really cut out for the “well-known controversial blogger” gig, because they don’t handle criticism well, and it isn’t reasonable to expect other people to cater to their inability to handle criticism well. In an ideal world you’d never have to make that kind of judgement, but obvs. we don’t live in an ideal world.

“Being quiet because you don’t want a bunch of people criticizing you is not the same thing as being forced to be quiet.” no it’s definitely not, but at least when I say “silencing” I mean it as the opposite of “mind-changing,” which is what we should be aiming for. If the worst that happens when you post something is that a few people disagree with you nicely, you’ll go ahead and post it and if the people disagreeing with you are persuasive you might change your mind, or at least be a little less confident in your position. But if you’re afraid of hundreds of people reblogging your post with “wow this is so wrong I can’t even” you won’t say anything at all and then you’ll keep believing whatever it is you believe and quietly resenting the ~evil lynch mob who has decided your opinion is too politically incorrect to speak out loud~.

“I don’t think we’re going to change the fundamental dynamic.” yeah okay probably not. I’ll keep hoping though.

Tags: #the spirit of the first amendment

Post ID: 101982302849

Date: 2014-11-07 03:53:39 GMT

Reblogging: spiralingintocontrol

Body:

kylecassidy:

Guy on the train, yelling into his phone: “No, I do NOT like being with you. It’s like dating the Jezebel comments section.”

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 101899259754

Date: 2014-11-06 03:45:03 GMT

Reblogging: e8u

Body:

e8u:

worldoptimization:
badconlangingideas:
A conlang where which pronoun to use is determine not only by gender but by the first letter of someone’s name.
Actually this is a great idea minus the gender. Gendered pronouns are problematic but useful for disambiguation: compare
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? He said he’d had a crush on her for a long time” to
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? They said they’d had a crush on them for a long time” which is really ambiguous to the point where you just can’t use any pronouns and end up with
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? Dan said Dan had had a crush on Elizabeth for a long time” which is unwieldy.
But with this system you can say stuff like
“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? D said D’d had a crush on E for a long time” which is concise, clear, and politics-free!
That requires that the persons’ names be known. It also seems to be doing the exact opposite of the thing cryptographers do to aid in keeping track of multiple-agent interactions. Of course, that technique might not be necessary in a culture with name-based pronouns.
I contend, however, that gendered pronouns are a very good choice. They divide humans into groups of roughly equal size, so the variance in the amount of information given by a pronoun is small. Which pronoun applies can almost always be determined by seeing the person or hearing their voice. No interaction or detailed knowledge is necessary. And, gender can be useful information outside of the context of remembering which person is being discussed. First letters of names, not so much.

Yeah this is a good point. I do still like the idea of having 26 categories instead of 2, though.

I actually wonder if this system would lead to more people giving their kids names that start with Q, U, X so they would be more distinguishable.

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 101890193619

Date: 2014-11-06 01:50:10 GMT

Reblogging: badconlangingideas

Body:

badconlangingideas:

A conlang where which pronoun to use is determine not only by gender but by the first letter of someone’s name.

Actually this is a great idea minus the gender. Gendered pronouns are problematic but useful for disambiguation: compare

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? He said he’d had a crush on her for a long time” to

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? They said they’d had a crush on them for a long time” which is really ambiguous to the point where you just can’t use any pronouns and end up with

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? Dan said Dan had had a crush on Elizabeth for a long time” which is unwieldy.

But with this system you can say stuff like

“Did you hear Elizabeth and Dan are dating? D said D’d had a crush on E for a long time” which is concise, clear, and politics-free!

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 101738268399

Date: 2014-11-04 05:29:19 GMT

Tags: #neoreaction, #my dream job is member of the leisure class

Post ID: 101738063989

Date: 2014-11-04 05:26:07 GMT

Body:

dataandphilosophy said:Overcoming self-segregation based on different interests seems like a hard task.

I agree and was hoping no one would ask for my solutions!

I don’t really know how you can address stuff like this legally without unacceptable encroachment on personal freedom. Ron Unz suggests we admit people to Harvard by lottery, which just seems kind of crazy?

And I think my first reaction to Unz’s proposal was something along the lines of NO YOU CAN’T TAKE AWAY MY SAFE SPACE, which makes sense and it’s totally reasonable for people to want to hang out with people like them and marry people like them on the individual level. But then when those people hold all the positions of power in a country …

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 101449888324

Date: 2014-10-31 22:53:46 GMT

Body: Colleges, at least in their purest form, take all the intelligent high schoolers and sort them into little enclaves with the other intelligent high schoolers. And some of them go on to become lawyers, some investment bankers, and some get PhDs and end up back in the enclaves teaching the next generation of intelligent high schoolers.

And the thing about meritocracy is that the smart kids aren’t like the other kids, in so many ways, and this system puts them in bubbles where they never have to interact with the rest of America again. And colleges recognize this, and try to look like America in the most superficial ways, namely skin color and parental income. (Of course, they’re doing much better on the first than the second.) But that doesn’t really help, it just means instead of the smartest kids you’re getting the smartest white kids and black kids and Latino kids and Asian kids with a few first-generation college students thrown in and it’s not really that different.

Because I know the Red Tribe exists only intellectually. Because I don’t know any evangelical Christians, or people who smoke cigarettes or have been to Branson or even know where Branson is (thanks Charles Murray). Because I asked my friend to guess who there are more of in the US, Jews or Catholics, and she guessed Jews. And I can’t even blame her, because searching “catholicism” and “catholic” in my school’s course catalog gives 8 results total, and “judaism” and “jewish” give 187.

(my dad is Jewish and my mom is Catholic so I think I’m allowed to make this comparison)

And of course if you really want to look like America, you’re going to have to discriminate against oppressed minority groups and so they do. And I guess college admissions officers seem to sleep fine at night despite this but I’m not sure if I’d be able to.

So we get an intellectual elite that focuses on some questions, perspectives, and experiences to the exclusion of others. And they talk to the rest of the elite and breed with the rest of the elite and are just increasingly detached from anything resembling the real world.

Tags: #yfip: meritocracy

Post ID: 101293660789

Date: 2014-10-29 23:27:55 GMT

Body:

dataandphilosophy said: I’ve been to LW-affiliated group ceremonies that were more emotional and religious than some church services that I’ve been to. I was raised UU, but still. I’ve sat in worship on Sunday morning and felt less than while dripping a candle on Petrov day

I really want to go to some LW ceremonies sometime! I’m traveling during the solstice celebration in New York this year, but we might have a very small-scale one at my school.

Tags: #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 101141375674

Date: 2014-10-28 02:41:38 GMT

Body:

theunitofcaring said: down this path lies neoreaction. :)

I will undoubtedly get there at some point.

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 101128122940

Date: 2014-10-28 00:01:38 GMT

Body: I don’t know when religion got so consumerist, or if it always has been and I just wasn’t paying attention.

I have a friend who goes to church whenever she feels like it, usually twice a year, and prays when she wants something. Another friend who says she wants her kids to believe in God, not so they can act on their religion but just so they think there’s someone looking out for them, to make things easier. And I think that’s normal. Most people I know ask what God can do for them, not what they can do for God.

(Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace)

People tell me that the Catholic Church is okay but they really need to liberalize on same-sex marriage and contraception if they want to appeal to the younger generation, like they’re the Republican party or something, like divinely inspired truth obeys the median voter theorem.

(Grant that I may not so much seek to be understood as to understand)

I don’t believe that there is a god but I alieve that He is a demanding god. Jesus didn’t tell us to try to be pretty okay people: that’s what we try to do anyway. That’s the baseline. He told us go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and follow me.

(Where there is despair, let me sow hope)

That’s why I think effective altruism is a more real religion then most religions. We give you the sacred texts to read and tell you to come to services every week. We ask everything of you and in return we give your life a joyful purpose. We tell you to lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven and that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God and we mean it.

(For it is in giving that we receive)

Tags: #epistemic status: meant as ramblings rather than anything that will convince people of something, #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren, #crypto-social conservative blogging, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 101012941424

Date: 2014-10-26 18:25:53 GMT

Reblogging: formerandromedalogic

Body:

andromedalogic:

lol it’s possible that part of my frustration w/ this album is that i feel like tswift has finally moved beyond me developmentally, and that ALWAYS happens.

Tags: #gpoy, #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 100936087449

Date: 2014-10-25 20:43:00 GMT

Question: Wow, I got 26 (M) and 71 (F). I guess I am slightly more masculine than you and a lot more feminine, or at least a lot more willing to lie to myself and to the test.

Answer: I put 100% probability on you being more willing to lie to yourself

Post ID: 100844743074

Date: 2014-10-24 18:33:27 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190:

My BEM is 50(M), 31(F). At least, today it is - I have this problem where I don’t actually seem to have persistent personality traits (except low conscientiousness). My Myers-Briggs is all over the place.
I also feel like either the test is measuring something wrong or I’m misunderstanding categories here. All of the BEM femininity words amount to ’instinctively figuring out other peoples’ emotional needs and doing something about them, and also projecting that you’re the sort of person who will do that’: warm, tender, affectionate, eager to soothe hurt feelings, sensitive to needs of others…
…I care about other people in the aggregate but on a bad day (and this is one) it is damn near impossible to hold a functional model of them in my head. And I only have a comparative advantage in giving-of-emotional-support to rationalists and people who trust me personally so it’s not exactly a priority skillset.
It seems like properly performing masculinity should also require some capacity to model other people - like, people I know don’t talk about the femininity/masculinity distinction as if it’s ‘good theory-of-mind/bad theory-of-mind.’ But none of the masculinity-coded words seemed to require it: ‘willing to take a stand’, ‘defend my own beliefs’, ‘strong personality’, ‘aggressive’…. I guess maybe ‘leadership’ and ‘dominant’ imply social adeptness, but knowing what to say to get people to admire you is way easier and less draining than knowing what to say to do emotional support.
Also, none of the masculine traits seem bad at all, except ‘aggressive’. I am confused about whether toxic masculinity is just that one or whether some of the others are toxic in some way I’m not seeing.

We have the same femininity score! (Except I got 22(M), so apparently I’m inadequate at both gender roles.) I noticed the same thing when taking the test: that I ended up with a low score even though I think I fit femininity pretty well (and masculinity not at all) because I don’t do the ’instinctively figuring out other peoples’ emotional needs and doing something about them, and also projecting that you’re the sort of person who will do that’ thing.

Tags: #also I think the manosphere would consider me pretty good wife material tbh, #as long as I'm not expected to soothe men's hurt feelings or whatever, #but I thought men weren't supposed to have feelings anyway?

Post ID: 99600361084

Date: 2014-10-09 23:09:43 GMT

Reblogging: hot-queer-rationalist-deactivat

Body:

miraniel:

In all other cases except the Triwizard cup, portkeys only go one way at one specific time. Touching them again does not activate them to return to their place of origin. Also, when Harry grabs the cup a second time, it does not return him to the middle of the maze. It takes him to the entrance of the maze, in front of everyone.
Therefore, when Crouch Jr. (as Moody) bewitched the cup, he planned to have it take anyone who touched it first to the graveyard, then to the front of the maze.The cup was probably supposed to be a portkey to take the winner to the front of the maze anyway, so they wouldn’t have to try to fight their way out again.
Voldemort obviously planned to kill Harry. He had to. That was the whole point; to kill Harry in front of all his Death Eaters, all the ones who had deserted him and doubted his power to return.
There’s the possibility that he wanted to send Harry’s body back, either to divert suspicion somehow or to intentionally flout his victory in Dumbledore’s face. Except Voldemort had promised his precious Nagini several times she could eat Harry, and it seemed like a promise Voldemort was going to keep.
So who was meant to take that return trip?
Voldemort could use it as a ticket into Hogwarts for a surprise attack, but he’s freshly reborn, his Death Eaters are 13 years out of practice, and there’s a flock of powerful wizards there for the Triwizard. That would be an idiotic move.
Or what if Harry—or someone who looked like him—had returned to Hogwarts as if nothing had happened in that maze? As the victor of the Triwizard Tournament AND the Boy Who Lived, Harry would be able to go anywhere and do anything. Everyone trusts him.
Two words: POLYJUICE POTION.
There was one Death Eater already waiting at Hogwarts who had very carefully been spending a whole year getting to know Harry, watching his every movement: Barty Crouch Jr.
So here was Voldemort’s complete plan: Use Barty Crouch Jr. to infiltrate Hogwarts as Moody. He gets to know Harry and sets him up to be selected for and eventually to win the Triwizard Tournament. He makes sure Harry touches the cup first. Harry is then transported to the graveyard where Voldemort is waiting. Voldemort uses Harry to rise, calls his Death Eaters to him, and then humiliates and kills the Boy Who Lived in front of them.
Then Voldemort strips Harry’s body, takes his hair, and transforms into him (or else has one of his DE’s do this—but really, who would he pick? Lucius is an idiot, Bellatrix is still in jail, and he believes Snape has deserted him). He then takes the cup and goes to Hogwarts as Harry. Later that night, Moody disappears, and Crouch takes Voldemort’s place as Harry Potter. Then, when the moment is right, Voldemort-Harry or Crouch-Harry will assassinate Dumbledore (incidentally gaining the power of the Elder Wand, though he wouldn’t know it), stage a coup of Hogwarts, and take over the wizarding world.
Heck, he/they might not even drop their disguise as Harry. The wizarding world has faced Voldemort as an enemy before, but if their savior Harry Potter suddenly turned out to be just as powerful a Dark Lord as He Who Must Not Be Named? It would be a far scarier prospect than simply dealing with Voldemort’s return.
It solves the problem of why Voldemort went to such lengths to get Harry through the Triwizard, when there were far easier ways to capture him: Voldemort didn’t just need Harry’s blood; he needed Harry as the world’s hero.
And all that time in Hogwarts would give Voldemort time to search for a relic of Godric Gryffindor, the one founder he never made a horcrux from.
Of course, none of this could have worked because Voldemort could never in a million years fool Ron or Hermione or Dumbledore, not even for a minute. But there’s Voldemort’s greatest weakness again—he doesn’t understand love.
You’re welcome.

Tags: #HP, #headcanon accepted

Post ID: 98211425179

Date: 2014-09-23 06:33:05 GMT

Reblogging: serkentsi-deactivated20180207

Quote: To test for political prejudice, Shanto Iyengar and Sean Westwood, political scientists at Stanford University, conducted a large-scale implicit association test with 2,000 adults. They found people’s political bias to be much larger than their racial bias. When Democrats see “joy,” it’s much easier for them to click on a corner that says “Democratic” and “good” than on one that says “Republican” and “good.”
To find out whether such attitudes predict behavior, Iyengar and Westwood undertook a follow-up study. They asked more than 1,000 people to look at the resumes of several high-school seniors and say which ones should be awarded a scholarship. Some of these resumes contained racial cues (“president of the African American Student Association”) while others had political ones (“president of the Young Republicans”).
Race mattered. African-American participants preferred the African-American candidates 73 percent to 27 percent. Whites showed a modest preference for African-American candidates, as well, though by a significantly smaller margin. But partisanship made a much bigger difference. Both Democrats and Republicans selected their in-party candidate about 80 percent of the time.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 97759750774

Date: 2014-09-17 21:46:41 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Question: What do you mean by sj Feminism?

Answer:

This is the taxonomy I use for third-wave feminism. This is not any kind of like Official Statement from the Feminist Gods, but I do think I’ve identified natural kinds.
Liberal Feminism: “All women EVERYWHERE should become CEOs because FEMINISM! Jezebel! New York Times! Lean In! You’re not leaning in hard enough! What’s an intersectionality? All women are upper-middle-class and white and college-educated and work glamorous magazine internships in NYC, right? HOOKUP CULTURE HOOKUP CULTURE HOOKUP CULTURE”
Radical Feminism: “We really, really, really fucking hate trans people. Especially trans women. FUCK trans women. Trans women are basically singlehandedly upholding the patriarchy at this point. Why do kinky women keep letting themselves get abused, those stupid sluts? We need to save sex workers from having the ability to make decisions about their bodies, those poor dears, they just don’t know how oppressed they are. PROBLEMATIC BIHETS. Have we mentioned we hate trans women enough yet?”
SJ Feminism: “Trans women of color are DYING because you won’t invite me to the cool lesbian parties. Your favorite piece of media is Problematic. I have prepared a ten-thousand-item list of why. It is okay to enjoy it, just remember that you have to self-flagellate constantly while you do! I have stopped using d*mb, cr*zy, ps*cho, l*me, bl*nd, d*ft, de*f, id*ot, imb*cile, lun*tic, m*niac, m*ron, n*ts, and sp*z! I have solved ableism forever! Monosexual privilege! Allosexual privilege! Monogamous privilege! We must parse exactly which person is most oppressed in every interaction! The Most Important issue facing Native Americans today is Halloween costumes, closely followed by the Seminole Tribe of Florida not realizing how oppressed they are by the FSU Seminoles. Cishet abled white men! Antisemitism don’t real because Palestine. Trans women of color! Trans women of color! TRANS WOMEN OF COLOR! Kill yourself shrimpdick.”
I am, in case you’re curious, an SJ Feminist.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 97666872979

Date: 2014-09-16 19:14:12 GMT

Tags: #transhumanism

Post ID: 97176331079

Date: 2014-09-10 23:57:09 GMT

Reblogging: slatestarscratchpad

Body:

[So the old “Less Wrong and possibly Slate Star Codex are evil for associating with people to the right of me!” argument is making the rounds again. Last time it was doing that I wrote an angry blog post about it, but I decided on reflection not to post it because it would only make things worse. Luckily I saved it, and now the same argument is back, and now I’m on Tumblr, where making things worse is an accepted part of the culture. So (with the caveat that all uses of the word “recently” refer to “as of several months ago”) I guess I will throw it out there.]
Someone recently used the ask box on Ozy’s blog to say that:
The LessWrong community does more to make reactionaries feel at home than literally any other not explicitly reactionary community I’ve ever seen. Does this not bother you, or at least make you reluctant to feel community/fellowship with many of these people? I don’t doubt there are often good intentions about free intellectual inquiry, but functionally excluding anyone who doesn’t want to hang out with reactionaries is going to give a rather… demographically skewed view of ideal reasoning.
Ozy gave one response I thought was relatively tepid - there aren’t that many reactionaries - and then a somewhat stronger response:
And… for me, personally, I feel much safer around a community that is absurdly tolerant of intellectual diversity. I’m contrarian as fuck and I get depressive fits when people are mad at me, you know? Bad combination. So I really prioritize “ability to be contrarian without people yelling at me,” and unfortunately that means I have to put up with people also not yelling at the people whose views I think are stupid or evil.
As usual, Ozy speaks for me also.
There was recently a very similar debate in the reactionary community. Justine Tunney, a transwoman, has become interested in neoreactionary ideas and is hanging around the periphery of the community - whether just inside or just outside the periphery is not quite clear.
Mike Anissimov, who is possibly the closest thing to a leader neoreaction has got, has demanding everyone exclude her. It’s unclear whether because she’s a transwoman or because she’s associated with some leftist ideas or because of other things, but it quickly became interpreted as being about how transpeople aren’t allowed in the movement or people in the movement shouldn’t associate with transpeople.
And what was amazing was how nearly everyone in the entire movement - which, remember, is about how all existing conservatives aren’t conservative enough - told Mike to go fly a kite. From the relevant comments thread at Xenosystems:
I’d say the transsexualism issue is more complex than this discussion is allowing for. How does it rank in the hierarchy of social conservative abominations? It’s an attempt to re-order a disordered nature, isn’t it? Even if it’s a solution conservatives don’t naturally warm to, it’s not being driven by an attempt to perversely deepen chaos. Nature can be screwed up. There are hermaphrodites. I’m assuming the right is unwilling to embrace crude social constructivist accounts of same-sex preference. It’s not as if everything would be really simple, if only people would behave themselves. As a parent, I sympathize (strongly) with the desire to shield kids from profound bio-social deviations. On the other hand, being spitefully offensive to people who are trying to navigate intrinsically messed-up situations seems considerably less than fully civilized. Intersectionalism and pomo cis-critique are, of course, expressions of leftist vileness. There’s some distance between these cultural attitudes and a cautious tolerance for people in difficult places.
And:
Transsexualism is a problem insofar as it’s being (ab)used for political reasons. It’s a somewhat rare (1 in 10000) condition that may be caused the brain incorrectly thinking it’s suppose to have a female body. It seems that the brain structure has slight differences, and a new study has shown that TS people who feel to be in the wrong respond to pheromones in the way of their experienced sex, beginning in early puberty. Hopefully, someone is going to replicate that finding. [Others say it is caused by] the idea of having a female body being a turn-on. This might or might not be due to sexual fetishism, as straight women apparently are often turned on by their own bodies. Or so it’s claimed. IMO, allowing the odd unfortunate who genuinely has the condition to choose elective surgery doesn’t seem like much of a social ill. Also funny note: not all conservatives are anti-transsexual. Iranian Mullahs are okay with gender reassignment.
Meanwhile, Ozy helpfully informs me that one of the feminist blogs ze reads has taken to consistently calling female-to-male transexuals “shrimp-dicks” because all the previous insults they thought up for them weren’t misgendering enough.
So the first thing I would have said to the person in Ozy’s ask box is that there are good and bad people in every political movement, even by my own early-21st-century-liberal-weighted definition of “good people”.
But even more interesting to me was what happened when the debate backed up from being about transsexuals per se to being about how Tunney was a leftist with many counter-reactionary opinions. From the same source:
Anissimov maybe wants to drive us all insane, and soon enough it might actually happen. Apparently people who talk to leftists without explicitly trying to convert them or kill them (preferably) are leftists themselves. ALWAYS. I am not sure what this logical fallacy is called, but I am pretty sure it is one. (actually I am not sure there is even any logic in this one)
And:
Surface traits can be forced, and enforcing surface conformity will just send the deceptive to the top. It’s better to let each contribute as he can, so long as he contributes toward the goal/ideal and not some hypothetical or tangential goal. Tunney is intelligent and inquisitive. She contributes quite a bit to discussion and publicizing the neoreaction/dark enlightenment/new right/traditionalist (NDNT) sector. Let her play, let libertarians come by, be open to everyone but the instant they deviate from goals, make it clear that this is “something else.”
And from Xenosystems administrator and arch-neoreactionary philosopher extraordinaire Nick Land, what I consider the debate-winning point:
Neoreaction should engage in vigorous intellectual interchange with anything and anybody that can sharpen its thoughts. Any group that would have excluded Alan Turing, for instance, on grounds of social purity (or any other) is intrinsically stupid. That one Turing is worth many million social conservative ditto heads is not even seriously in question from my PoV. It’s not impossible that one could work with groups that proceed from different assumptions, but it would definitely be in the mode of tactical alliance than any kind of deeper communal solidarity. When the definitive split comes, if I end up confederated with the people [Mike Anissimov] has anathematized, I think I’ll be doing pretty well. The constituency would be based on post-libertarians, working their way ever further right, in a direction they are confident leads away from fascism, rather than towards it. This is what NRx is about.
Conservative Catholic reactionary blogger Nick Steves (more or less) concluded the issue by announcing an Official Neoreactionary Position, of which the three relevant points were:
1. Talking to, being friends with, showing normal human kindness to a disordered person is not tantamount to: a) approving all the free choices that person has made; or b) favoring social and/or legal norms that support the person’s disorder; or c) joining them in their organization (should it exist); or d) inviting them into your organization (should it exist)
2. If someone wants to purge someone else then show up with an Institution and your name at the top of it, and then there’ll be something to talk about. Until then, all future such attempts to purge are moot, null, damaging, extremely embarrassing, and in very poor taste. This shall be construed as the Official Neoreactionary Position.
3. I shall be the judge of who I can have a drink with. This should henceforth be construed as the Official Neoreactionary Position on this matter.
This was then officially endorsed by James Donald, whom as readers of this blog know is baaaaaaaasically the Antichrist and dislikes gays, transsexuals, socialists, liberals, and minorities more than anyone else you will ever meet.
So the second thing I would have said to the person in Ozy’s ask box is that if you think that people should be judged for interacting with intelligent, reasonable individuals who happen to hold a political position which you consider objectionable, you are less tolerant than James Donald.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 97106437369

Date: 2014-09-10 02:26:43 GMT

Quote: The orthography of French was already more or less fixed and, from a phonological point of view, outdated when its lexicography developed in the late 17th century and the Académie française was mandated to establish an “official” prescriptive norm.

Still, there was already much debate at the time opposing the tenets of a traditional, etymological orthography, and those of a reformed, phonological transcription of the language … the Académie chose to adhere firmly to the tradition “that distinguishes men of letters from ignoramuses and simple women” in the first edition of its dictionary.

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 97102819054

Date: 2014-09-10 01:42:30 GMT

Body: I’m reading Yes Means Yes for Feminism 101 purposes and I feel like feminism really needs to learn how to shut up and multiply.

Like there’s this essay that is repeatedly like “well of course women should have the choice to work at Hooters … but if they do they’re allowing themselves to be objectified and contributing to the commodification of female sexuality thus perpetuating rape culture.”

Like even if you think all of that is true, do you really believe that the actual effect of one (replaceable) woman choosing to work at Hooters can’t be outweighed by, say, that woman donating $1 a year of her salary to GiveDirectly? Generally if someone chooses a job it is probably because it’s the best option they have. Is resisting the commodification of female sexuality by this tiny tiny amount really worth pressuring this woman into taking a worse-paying or less-pleasant or more-hours job?

The nice thing about EA is that we acknowledge how far we all are from perfect. And if you’re not going to be perfect, the best course of action is to consider your impact on the world for a few decisions where the scale actually justifies it and make the rest of your decisions about you. Whereas feminists seem to want me to “face the reality of what you’re doing and make sure you’re self-aware enough to know why you’re doing it” (in this essay’s words), to “examine your complicity in this pervasive rape culture” (another essay) for every little choice and like … no. I have other stuff to worry about.

Tags: #not sj go away, #effective altruism

Post ID: 96763116774

Date: 2014-09-06 05:13:41 GMT

Quote: You and I both know there’s got to be some greater storyline for you than ‘girl gets heart broken, was sad forever’. I think a nice one would be ‘girl gets heart broken, was sad for a while but in her heartbreak she found freedom, friends, and the ability to look back and laugh at all she’d learned. She now lives her life on her own terms and still has fantastic hair.’

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 96761353664

Date: 2014-09-06 04:45:21 GMT

Reblogging: eccentric-opinion

Quote: A skilled professional I know had to turn down an important freelance assignment because of a recurring commitment to chauffeur her son to a resume-building ‘social action’ assignment required by his high school. This involved driving the boy for 45 minutes to a community center, cooling her heels while he sorted used clothing for charity, and driving him back - forgoing income which, judiciously donated, could have fed, clothed, and inoculated an African village. The dubious ‘lessons’ of this forced labor as an overqualified ragpicker are that children are entitled to treat their mothers’ time as worth nothing, that you can make the world a better place by destroying economic value, and that the moral worth of an action should be measured by the conspicuousness of the sacrifice rather than the gain to the beneficiary.

Tags: #effective altruism, #ahh steven pinker

Post ID: 96096521739

Date: 2014-08-29 16:59:38 GMT

Reblogging: worldoptimization

Body:

missespeon:
my brain: there is literaly a 0 percent chance the fictional shit from creepy games will show up irl in your kitchen
me: but its dark and scary
Huh your reversed the roles for ‘you’ and ‘your brain’ are the opposite of mine. I would have said
me: there is literaly a 0 percent chance the fictional shit from creepy games will show up irl in your kitchen
brain: but its dark and scary
In my culture (and here I mean some kind of lesswrong/jewish/other life influences/america mashup, my culture is not necessarily one which anyone else shares), the base assumption is that I am the rational part of my mind and any sort of akrasia and social anxiety and emotions and whatnot is not part of my identity. Treating my badbrains as not part of myself could be harmful for fixing them, but it is an accurate description of the way I currently function. I say ‘slytherin side’ and ‘humor module’, but it wouldn’t occur to me to say ‘logical side’. I am the logical side.

Based on “my mind forgets to remind me/that you’re a bad idea” I have determined that Taylor Swift does not identify with her logical side.

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 95969202809

Date: 2014-08-28 03:18:34 GMT

Reblogging: a-bell-to-rise-and-die

Body:

missespeon:
my brain: there is literaly a 0 percent chance the fictional shit from creepy games will show up irl in your kitchen
me: but its dark and scary
Huh your reversed the roles for ‘you’ and ‘your brain’ are the opposite of mine. I would have said
me: there is literaly a 0 percent chance the fictional shit from creepy games will show up irl in your kitchen
brain: but its dark and scary
In my culture (and here I mean some kind of lesswrong/jewish/other life influences/america mashup, my culture is not necessarily one which anyone else shares), the base assumption is that I am the rational part of my mind and any sort of akrasia and social anxiety and emotions and whatnot is not part of my identity. Treating my badbrains as not part of myself could be harmful for fixing them, but it is an accurate description of the way I currently function. I say ‘slytherin side’ and ‘humor module’, but it wouldn’t occur to me to say ‘logical side’. I am the logical side.

Tags: #gpoy, #i'd be interested to see how many people would say each one, #and what the demographics/correlated characteristics are

Post ID: 95890525729

Date: 2014-08-27 05:22:15 GMT

Body:

@theunitofcaring said: would you have expected mental rotation skills to not be trainable, or for training them not to improve the correlated trait (CS skills) because you’d have expected they were both just proxies for g or something?

More the second. I guess I just assume everything is a proxy for g.

Tags: #cs

Post ID: 95847927304

Date: 2014-08-26 20:17:44 GMT

Body: Interesting fact: today I heard a talk from a CS professor who was teaching high school girls to code. Knowing that mental rotation skills are correlated with CS performance, he gave half of them training in spatial skills. Not only did that half do better on mental rotation tests at the end, they did better on the final exam, which was entirely CS and unrelated to mental rotation. This surprises me.

Tags: #cs, #not sj go away

Post ID: 95769848734

Date: 2014-08-25 22:44:04 GMT

Reblogging: queenshulamit-deactivated201602

Quote: To fix the financial crisis, we have to revoke, or at least denounce and denigrate, Marie Curie’s Nobel prize.

When they gave a Nobel prize to Marie Curie for being female, that did not hurt anyone except more deserving potential Nobel prize winners. But handing out phony Nobels on the basis of sex, race, and nationality necessitated handing out phony degrees on the basis of race and sex, and handing out phony degrees on the basis of race and sex necessarily led to a crisis where these phony degrees were being ignored by employers, so employers necessarily had to be forced to give out well paid phony jobs on the basis of race and sex.

Tags: #this will probably work, #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 95491741269

Date: 2014-08-22 22:01:43 GMT

Reblogging: raginrayguns

Quote: … “You must have shown me real loyalty down in the Chamber. Nothing but that could’ve called Fawkes to you.” That’s the very first thing Dumbledore thanks and praises Harry for. Not for rescuing Ginny, or saving the school from the basilisk, or for keeping Voldemort from coming back, but for loyalty.

Dumbledore judges the people he works with based first and foremost on how loyal they are to him. Not because he thinks he’s all that, but because, as I said, he views people as game pieces, and you can’t have your game pieces acting up, can you? He values his pieces. He wants to advance and protect them. But he doesn’t want them running off beyond his sphere of influence and doing their own thing. I think there’s something very ambiguous about Dumbledore’s habit of seeking out desperate, socially outcast people and doing them one or two huge favors that leave them bound to him for life. Remus, Hagrid and Snape all fit that pattern, and Trelawney and Firenze appear to join the ranks in OOP. It kind of makes me wonder what Dumbledore has done for Fletcher, Moody and Shacklebolt.

…The problem with Sirius is, he’s not loyal to Dumbledore at all; he’s loyal to Harry. From Dumbledore’s point of view, it’s as if he’s playing wizard chess, and one of the knights suddenly decides that he doesn’t care what happens to the king, he’s just going to take care of that little pawn on the left. So Dumbledore does the only thing he thinks he can do — he sticks his recalcitrant knight into a safe, isolated corner of the board and keeps him from making any moves. Perfectly sensible and strategically sound, as long as you don’t expect your game pieces to have any pesky emotions or psychological issue that need to be taken into account.

…Dumbledore’s actions at Hogwarts are another symptom of his general approach. He doesn’t treat it just as a school, but also as an instrument in his strategy. People like Snape, Hagrid and Trelawny — all lousy teachers, in very different ways — are given their jobs as perks, because of their past of future usefulness to the Order, and because it strengthens their bonds of loyalty to Dumbledore.

OTOH, look at Lupin, who is a talented teacher. Why wasn’t he hired before Harry’s third year, especially given the difficulty of finding qualified DADA professors? My theory is that Dumbledore didn’t consider it necessary. As far as he knew, Lupin was already totally loyal simply because Dumbledore had allowed him to attend Hogwarts. There was no need to bribe him with a job. He was hired only when his familiarity with Sirius became an important factor. Once Sirius proved not to be a threat, Lupin was allowed to resign…

Tags: #this is interesting, #HP

Post ID: 95355277984

Date: 2014-08-21 07:35:45 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 95351875219

Date: 2014-08-21 06:23:52 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Tags: #crypto-social conservative blogging

Post ID: 95168378524

Date: 2014-08-19 05:54:42 GMT

Reblogging: gruntledandhinged

Body:

andromedalogic:

Do you ever just sort of die inside because if you were a fictional character, fandom would chalk up all your weaknesses and faults and blunders to misogyny on the authors’ part

Tags: #gpoy, #not sj go away

Post ID: 94567494744

Date: 2014-08-12 21:44:28 GMT

Reblogging: chamomilegeode

Body:

chamomilegeode:

worldoptimization:
chamomilegeode:
worldoptimization:
chamomilegeode:
[snip]
[snip]
ugh yes….you want exactly the same cultural shifts i want…
and i appreciate that you’re being epistemically humble about the value you give to humility—hella meta
but i don’t think that valuing overconfidence is a chesterton’s fence? maybe? i can come up with a believable reason we might overvalue overconfidence: we start out with a world where some people are overconfident in their beliefs, some people are underconfident, it all averages out to basically correct confidence. some people start taking into account the confidence that believers have in a belief, and it helps them determine the truth, it’s a good heuristic. but since being believed gives you social status, as the heuristic spreads, overconfident people do better than underconfident people in situations where social status has more effects than truth, or in situations where social status is easier to see than the truth. bam, the overconfidence fence is built.
also, like, at this point i’ve seen several studies saying that humility has better economic consequences than overconfidence even if it gives you less status (you can see the list of papers in this link, i thought they were good but i don’t know much about statistics), at least when it comes to investing.
idk how useful this is, this is basically just me being like “if there’s one thing i’m SURE of it’s EPISTEMiC HUMILITY!!!”
Haha I did not even intend the meta-ness.
And I like your story of the overconfidence fence. Your link to the papers is broken though :(
oops! here you go. there’s actually a list of papers at the bottom, the article itself is a summary

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y, #not sj go away

Post ID: 94500517459

Date: 2014-08-12 03:56:13 GMT

Reblogging: thededekindadafunction-deactiva

Body:

i remember when we broke up
the first time
saying, “this is it, i’ve had enough,”
‘cause like
we hadn’t seen each other in a month
when you
said you
needed
space
what

Tags: #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 94500123079

Date: 2014-08-12 03:51:44 GMT

Reblogging: chamomilegeode

Body:

chamomilegeode:

worldoptimization:
chamomilegeode:
[snip]
I think I’m pretty good at epistemic humility but according to my mom and Sheryl Sandberg I should probably stop being good at it so I can like succeed in the workforce.
I feel like my favorite way (okay this is like a giant cultural shift so it’s not exactly a solution) to get more women in high-status positions would be to value aggression less and humility more in hiring/promoting decisions. Except I’m not really sure if this valuing of overconfidence is actually rational for reasons I don’t understand?
ugh yes….you want exactly the same cultural shifts i want…
and i appreciate that you’re being epistemically humble about the value you give to humility—hella meta
but i don’t think that valuing overconfidence is a chesterton’s fence? maybe? i can come up with a believable reason we might overvalue overconfidence: we start out with a world where some people are overconfident in their beliefs, some people are underconfident, it all averages out to basically correct confidence. some people start taking into account the confidence that believers have in a belief, and it helps them determine the truth, it’s a good heuristic. but since being believed gives you social status, as the heuristic spreads, overconfident people do better than underconfident people in situations where social status has more effects than truth, or in situations where social status is easier to see than the truth. bam, the overconfidence fence is built.
also, like, at this point i’ve seen several studies saying that humility has better economic consequences than overconfidence even if it gives you less status (you can see the list of papers in this link, i thought they were good but i don’t know much about statistics), at least when it comes to investing.
idk how useful this is, this is basically just me being like “if there’s one thing i’m SURE of it’s EPISTEMiC HUMILITY!!!”

Haha I did not even intend the meta-ness.

And I like your story of the overconfidence fence. Your link to the papers is broken though :(

Tags: #not sj go away, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 94414459729

Date: 2014-08-11 06:45:13 GMT

Reblogging: chamomilegeode

Body:

chamomilegeode:

also, when i do that thing i was just talking about—think about what i said, realize that i’m not sure of it, and offer a qualification—
the motive is rationality/a respect for the truth
but i can tell it sometimes comes across as feminine signalling, like apologizing a lot (something i also do)—qualifying your sentences whether with uncertainty or apology, is super ladylike.
so. two things.
women are frequently told to stop qualifying themselves so much (remember that pantene commercial?). and honestly the apologies can probably go but saying out loud when you’re not sure of something is awesome and good, men should pick it up.*
also, people act like rationality and truth-seeking is something that men are just naturally more interested in…
but (i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again)
men (whether because of genetics or hormones or socialization or whatever) tend to be more into the argumentative, statistical, i’m-sure-i’m-right side of truth seeking, and that kind of fact-bravado is frequently interpreted as rationality
but women are socialized/gened/hormoned into being pretty damn good at epistemic humility and belief updating, which (except in the less wrong community) doesn’t get as much social respect, and isn’t seen as part of rationality
basically….femininity and rationality aren’t opposed, but their connections are lower status than connections between masculinity and rationality……why do you think that is…………………………………………………….
*for instance, see this article, which talks about how feminine-coded uncertainty can actually give better outcomes in male-coded fields, even though that feminine uncertainty is low-status

I think I’m pretty good at epistemic humility but according to my mom and Sheryl Sandberg I should probably stop being good at it so I can like succeed in the workforce.

I feel like my favorite way (okay this is like a giant cultural shift so it’s not exactly a solution) to get more women in high-status positions would be to value aggression less and humility more in hiring/promoting decisions. Except I’m not really sure if this valuing of overconfidence is actually rational for reasons I don’t understand?

Tags: #not sj go away, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 94217144119

Date: 2014-08-09 03:49:03 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

[snip]
yeah, that’s a very fair point. I think most criticism of art for being sexist is unhelpful, I’ve also seen the particular examples you point to and I feel mostly the same way about them, and it’s not really what I have in mind with ‘put pressure on content creators’.
Like, the reason Marvel hasn’t had a Black Widow movie is not that no one has a powerful and meaningful message that would center around her as a character. The reason they haven’t had a black protagonist isn’t because there aren’t any compelling stories to tell with that premise. It’s because those wouldn’t sell. And so if people are concerned with representation, I think it’s a productive exercise to make a lot of noise about how well those things would sell, because that puts the incentives in place for that story to get told in the first place.
Or, like, I know some authors who’ve wanted to include a trans character but they’re cis and have no idea how to write a trans person without accidentally writing a horrible misrepresentation of the trans experience. So trans people who write up tips and resources for cis people writing trans characters are contributing to representation without policing anyone’s art.
‘representation’ advocacy which takes the form of yelling at existing authors for the works they’ve created is the worst, and unfortunately also the easiest, variety.

Cool we’re in agreement then. I support offering authors productive suggestions and making noise about your willingness to watch things.

Although I also feel like people will write what they know, and people who aren’t members of marginalized groups are probably less qualified to represent the experiences of people who are, and so if people want representation for their groups their best bet is to make it themselves.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 94212718039

Date: 2014-08-09 02:51:39 GMT

Reblogging: lintamande

Body:

lintamande:

Something that inevitably comes up in conversations about female character representation is the fact, that, given two minor characters with only bit parts in a work, the male minor character is likelier to acquire an enthusiastic fanbase while the female character gets ignored.
Or if there are shallow, badly-written male and female characters, fans will often contentedly ret-con the male character to build someone more interesting, while saying ‘I don’t care about [female character], she’s shallow and badly-written’.
Both of these are things that happen; in the statistical aggregate, you can pick up a pronounced tendency to develop male characters more. Some of the reason is certainly internalized misogyny.
But lately I’ve seen people claim that the only conceivable reason this happens is internalized misogyny. Posts have circulated saying things like ‘okay, if you want you can go around adoring male characters while saying you just don’t find female characters interesting. But at least be honest that your reason is internalized misogyny.’
And, wow, no. “In the statistical aggregate, fandom focuses on male characters probably because of our sexist society” is completely true. ‘You, personally, random fan who happens to care a lot about a male character, need to admit that it’s because of internalized misogyny’ is not only way out of line but also false.
Read More

I love all of this except the very end, which I’m not sure about. I realize that “putting the pressure to do better where it belongs – on content creators and the media” is a Thing among feminists. But it’s always bothered me.

Maybe there are other ways to apply the aforementioned pressure, but when I hear that phrase I mostly think of people on the internet complaining about how [insert show/book/artist here] is sexist. Complaining that a political opinion piece or something like that is sexist is entirely reasonable: someone has an opinion, and you disagree with them. But political criticism of art bothers me because I feel like the implied message is “it is Morally Wrong for this art to exist in its current form.” It’s inherently not about adding to the marketplace of ideas, but about silencing.

I’ve heard a fair number of accusations of sexism or general problematicness about many things that I like, and not only that I like but that I identify with and that I think capture in some way the experience of being female for me (the HBO show Girls, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Taylor Swift, and terrible historical romance novels, to name four). And I worry about a future where people dilute the art that they want to make, or don’t make it at all, because they’re afraid of criticism.

I feel like art is one of the superpowers of the human race. Like, someone can have a complex internal experience and convey it to someone on the other side of the world. I think that’s really cool and it’s really improved my life in a lot of ways and I get scared when people start policing it.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 93839896449

Date: 2014-08-05 03:34:34 GMT

Body: best revenge idea: get an account with your enemy’s full name on fanfiction.net

then write super embarrassing fanfic and become popular enough to be the top hit on google

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 93461816189

Date: 2014-08-01 02:55:58 GMT

Reblogging: suwakoing-deactivated20141005

Body:

moriya-sama:

moriya-sama:
worldoptimization:
There’s this classic thought experiment that people use to argue against utilitarianism. You’re a doctor with five patients about to die for want of different organs, when you get one patient who’s in no danger of dying but is a match for all five of them. You can harvest his organs (which will kill him) and no one will ever know. Killing him seems correct under utilitarianism, but is it really the right thing to do?
I’ve heard two utilitarian responses to the thought experiment. One is that killing the guy is the right thing to do, and our moral intuitions, not designed for weird edge cases such as this, are leading us astray. The other is that killing the guy is wrong, because you’re contributing to a precedent of killing random people whenever they come to the hospital and that outweighs the four lives you’re saving.
But with this and this floating around my head recently I’ve settled on a third solution. I think that killing him does increase utility. But if everyone made the utility-increasing choice, then the world would be a worse place. It’s the altruistic version of the prisoner’s dilemma.
[snip]
The issue as I see it is that if you establish a precedent of nearly healthy people going to hospitals and being killed against their will as donations then you would discourage people with tolerable illnesses from ever seeking medical attention for fear of losing their lives.
The obvious solution to this is to keep an organ compatibility list of everyone in the country, and when you require organs to save a few lives with high probability of success you can quickly contact them for volunteers to see if any suicidal people close enough to help wish to volunteer - If nobody replies then you pick one at random and send a hit squad to collect them.
Best of both worlds :p
Or we could, y’know - Cease some of the crazy restrictions on biomedical research and advance plans for synthesizing human organs.

Haha yes, there are in fact many less drastic ways to get more organs. Like opt-out organ donation. Or organ markets. Or taking them from dead people. If none of those solve the problem fully I like your random hit squad idea, though ^_^

Tags: #ethics

Post ID: 93461484554

Date: 2014-08-01 02:51:54 GMT

Reblogging: fnord888

Body:

fnord888:

worldoptimization:
I’m curious, what’s your alternative to copyright?
The simplest, obvious alternative is copyright, only less terrible. The current term of copyright is an order of magnitude too long. As much distaste as I have for government granted monopolies, I could be convinced that the least bad option is copyright with a term in the 2-20 year range (patent duration is 20 years, for comparison).
Another alternative is compulsory, flat-rate licencing. There’s a set fee for the use of the work, which anyone can pay to use the work and the copyright owner is required to accept (they can also accept a lower fee if they choose). Content creators still get compensation, via the fee, but the monopoly rents they receive are capped by the fee. It also prevents problems like the issue of orphaned works: if the owner is unclear, users can acquire a licence at the compulsory rate from the copyright office (and the owner can collect the royalties from the office if ownership becomes clear again). Note that systems like this aren’t new. A number of compulsory licences already exist in the United States, applicable to certain types of works and situations. Balancing exactly what the licence fees should be in a broadly expanded system of compulsory licenses would be a challenge.
A somewhat more radical alternative is direct compensation. Essentially, content creators are paid directly, and the intellectual property is placed in the public domain. The advantage of this system is that bribing a would-be monopolist to release their monopoly using money from the people who would otherwise pay monopoly prices provides a Pareto improvement on a monopoly. Compared to a direct subsidy, using a government grant of monopoly like copyright to compensate creators creates a dead-weight loss, destroying value to the benefit of no one.
Of course, to do this, you need to determine a fair price. You might pay creators ahead of time to produce public domain content. That’s the classical state art subsidy. But it may also be possible to do it post-hoc. A variation on prediction markets provides one way to do this: have an auction (or a second price auction) for each new piece of content, or shares thereof, predicting what the intellectual property would be worth (optionally, let shares circulate for a while as well). In (say) 10% of cases, the high bidder (or bidders, if it’s being done by shares) pays the winning price(s) to the content owner, and acquires the IP; in the remaining 90%, the government pays the winning price and the content is released into the public domain.
And the final question is whether we really need government intervention to produce artistic works at all. It’s clearly the case that many great works of art were produced before copyright existed.
Copyright (or other state-based alternatives like those above) are not the only way creators can be compensated. Voluntary donations are an obvious one. Patronage is another: either centralized private patronage or distributed patronage like Kickstarter (see assurance contracts and dominant assurance contracts for more formal game theoretic versions of distributed patronage.
And, of course, amateurs have always and will continue to produce works without monetary compensation.
Copyright, or any alternative system, acts as a subsidy for the production of art (plus producing dead-weight costs). The existence of subsidies, even given that the non-government alternatives exist, likely leads to more art. But there’s at least an argument that doing so is not necessarily beneficial.

These are all super interesting, thank you! I definitely think if nothing else copyright terms should be drastically shortened (and penalties for violation made less harsh, and protections of fair use made more robust) but compulsory licensing and direct compensation sound potentially even better.

Tags: #free culture

Post ID: 93455049655

Date: 2014-08-01 01:30:42 GMT

Body: There’s this classic thought experiment that people use to argue against utilitarianism. You’re a doctor with five patients about to die for want of different organs, when you get one patient who’s in no danger of dying but is a match for all five of them. You can harvest his organs (which will kill him) and no one will ever know. Killing him seems correct under utilitarianism, but is it really the right thing to do?

I’ve heard two utilitarian responses to the thought experiment. One is that killing the guy is the right thing to do, and our moral intuitions, not designed for weird edge cases such as this, are leading us astray. The other is that killing the guy is wrong, because you’re contributing to a precedent of killing random people whenever they come to the hospital and that outweighs the four lives you’re saving.

But with this and this floating around my head recently I’ve settled on a third solution. I think that killing him does increase utility. But if everyone made the utility-increasing choice, then the world would be a worse place. It’s the altruistic version of the prisoner’s dilemma.

So how do we solve this? This is where moral rules like “keep your promises” or “don’t tell lies” or “don’t kill people even if you think it’s a really good idea” come in, to enforce coordination. Folk morality does a great job with this. The issue is that folk morality is a paperclip maximizer. It’s optimized for genetic and memetic fitness rather than any human values. And it still seems like utilitarians do better than most deontologists on the important questions. But this failure mode is kind of a problem.

Tags: #ethics

Post ID: 93378684789

Date: 2014-07-31 05:16:37 GMT

Body: So I had a dream last night in which I decided someone should write a paper on the relationship between value-added on standardized tests and students’ life outcomes. But then I was like wait, just because a teacher improves their students’ life outcomes doesn’t mean they’re doing net good. What if their students are just edging out other students for zero-sum things like getting into college?

Then I woke up and remembered that this was a paper that already exists. I still don’t feel like they addressed my issue, though.

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 93377084929

Date: 2014-07-31 04:56:08 GMT

Reblogging: fnord888

Body:

fnord888:

Amazon’s Latest Volley
Oh, cry me a river, you government-backed monopolist.
OK, that’s probably harsher than I really feel, at least about individual authors. And they do deserve to get compensated somehow, so I don’t actually begrudge them their copyright rents (even if I think copyright is a shitty way to do it).
But don’t commit the very crime you’re accusing everyone else of. Especially since you JUST FINISHED arguing that books aren’t substitutes for each other. You’re a monopoly. Not even just a de facto market-power possessing behemoth (like Amazon), but a genuine holder of a government-granted and guaranteed exclusive (and transferable) right to the production of a certain class of good. You collect monopoly rents. Don’t pretend you’re dealing with raw supply and demand arriving at a “fair market price”.
I think less of you when you do.

I’m curious, what’s your alternative to copyright?

Tags: #always defend amazon, #listen to economists they know things, #free culture

Post ID: 93375820509

Date: 2014-07-31 04:40:32 GMT

Reblogging: eccentric-opinion

Body:

eccentric-opinion:

House of Lords comes out against a “right to be forgotten”.
/r/technology starts praising aristocracy and criticizing democracy.

Tags: #aristocracy is underrated

Post ID: 92594634369

Date: 2014-07-23 03:10:14 GMT

Reblogging: slatestarscratchpad

Body:

http://www.xenosystems.net/aaa/
I like this because taken to its logical extreme, it means that all politics will turn into leftists advocating leftist ideas, and conservatives advocating much stronger exaggerations of those leftist ideas in order to make those ideas look silly.
Instead of normal political debates, we would get debates over whether a certain idea is a real proposal or a comically exaggerated version of a real proposal.
Eventually it goes too far. The Republican Party is replaced with the Comically Exaggerated Democratic Party. If you elect them, they raise the minimum wage to $5,000 an hour. Eventually everyone gets the message and decreases the minimum wage, above the Comically Exaggerated Democratic President’s theatrical objections and demands that we think of the children. It is an amazing political coup.
Outcompeted, the Democrats switch to being the Comically Exaggerated Republican Party. Their platform is feeding poor people to bears, then hunting the bears with automatic weapons. The Comically Exaggerated Democratic Party counters with a demand that the entire continental United States be turned into a national park and designated bear habitat, with humans restricted to a small sliver of territory on the southern half of Manhattan island.
Eventually the country is ruled by bears with machine guns. No one can remember exactly what principle they were trying to prove, but everyone is very confident that they proved it.

Post ID: 92459625809

Date: 2014-07-21 20:20:46 GMT

Reblogging: thededekindadafunction-deactiva

Quote: The great mathematician, Herman Minkowski, once told his students that the 4-Color Conjecture had not been settled because only third-rate mathematicians had concerned themselves with it. “I believe I can prove it,” he declared. After a long period, he admitted, “Heaven is angered by my arrogance; my proof is also defective.”

Tags: #math

Post ID: 91420005189

Date: 2014-07-11 03:54:55 GMT

Reblogging: spiralingintocontrol

Body:

into-the-weeds:

“You’d look cute in a toga and a dog collar.”
—actual thing Donna Moss actually says to Josh Lyman.

Tags: #west wing, #otp

Post ID: 91419566699

Date: 2014-07-11 03:49:51 GMT

Reblogging: creativepooping-deactivated2022

Tags: #always defend amazon, #listen to economists they know things, #q u a r t e r l y c a p i t a l i s m

Post ID: 91418327159

Date: 2014-07-11 03:35:48 GMT

Reblogging: michaelblume

Body:

anartisticanomaly:

phantomcat94:
meefling:
You Aren’t Boring I Just Suck At Conversations I’m Sorry: a novel by me
I’m Not Ignoring You I Just Don’t Know What To Say: a sequel by me
I Feel Like I have Nothing Interesting To Say So I Don’t Say Anything At All And I’m Really Sorry Don’t Stop Talking To Me: the trilogy.

Tags: #gpoy, #personal

Post ID: 91311020949

Date: 2014-07-10 02:15:11 GMT

Reblogging: michaelblume

Quote: Only a bioethicist could prefer a world in which we have 1,000 altruists per annum and over 6,500 excess deaths over one in which we have no altruists and no excess deaths.

Tags: #ethics, #lol bioethicists

Post ID: 91294693404

Date: 2014-07-09 22:57:00 GMT

Reblogging: eccentric-opinion

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 90202157904

Date: 2014-06-29 00:26:31 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Quote: It’s two thousand, one hundred and twenty-nine years since Ptolemy died. He was fourteen. Eight world empires have risen up and fallen away since that day, and I still carry his face. Who do you think’s the lucky one?

Tags: #transhumanism, #bartimaeus trilogy, #so many feelings

Post ID: 89683599164

Date: 2014-06-23 20:02:44 GMT

Body: reading Patrick Rothfuss is such a weird experience because I’m unable to put the book down but I also really want to throw it across the room

Tags: #the wise man's fear, #ugh the entire felurian subplot

Post ID: 89676514449

Date: 2014-06-23 18:41:39 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

how to decide who to cheer for in the World Cup:
look up the populations of all countries participating and the percentage of the population who watches or finds out about the World Cup outcome
develop an estimate for the number of people whose preferences would be fulfilled by the outcome of each possible match, weighted by the strength of that preference
determine which outcome maximizes utility for every single actual and potential World Cup pairing
remember that you cheering doesn’t actually affect the outcome
cheer for whoever the hell you want

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 88033010314

Date: 2014-06-07 00:37:33 GMT

Reblogging: formerandromedalogic

Body:

spicyshimmy:

3 keys to a successful relationship
trust
intimacy
do not go through the rite of kolinahr and purge all emotions

Tags: #star trek, #feelings

Post ID: 88020288329

Date: 2014-06-06 21:45:51 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

markusbones:
If you look at the world and say “Yes, there are enough homes for people, yes, there is enough food for people, but if we give it away for free they won’t have earned it and the economy will collapse.” Then you have chosen money (a constructed medium of exchange) over living beings who only want to continue living in peace and safety.
And I have no qualms telling you, that is the wrong choice, and you have been brainwashed by this destructive, exploitative system.
I support a basic income guarantee, but c’mon, this is embarrassingly simplistic.
‘If we give away food and homes for free, we’ll drive down the price of food and homes until producers of those things stop producing those things; the end result will be shortages of those things’ is an empirical claim, not a normative one. It’s not saying ‘money matters more than living beings’, it’s saying ‘I don’t expect this to have positive consequences for living beings’. We should be trying to figure out whether or not this is true, not condemning people who raise it as a possible objection.

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 87755807654

Date: 2014-06-04 02:23:23 GMT

Body: so my little sister sent me this email

I was inspired by your blog and especially the article on defective altruism to write a poem. Some people might say it’s a waste of time, but I think there’s nothing more important than converting people to the doctrine of effective altruism, so I wrote a poem to definitively prove that effective altruists are better than people who give to charity only in an attempt to look kind.

You warm, you soft, superior gods

who live in castles preaching your love

who pose beside the wretches you help

saying, shouting, “Look! I’m so kind!"

But kindness isn’t what you possess;

it’s wanting joy to fill every mind.

It’s looking past what keeps us apart

to find you want what’s best for us all.

It’s seeing how your efforts could help,

a want to do the most that you can.

And wanting, then, to do the most good

is never mean, it’s perfectly kind.

And all you guys just suck.

(disclaimer I do not actually endorse hostile messaging)

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 87754002254

Date: 2014-06-04 02:03:44 GMT

Reblogging: karmakaiser-deactivated20140613

Body:

karmakaiser:

political beliefs: taylor swift is a national treasure.
sexual orientation: taylor swift is a national treasure.

Tags: #gpoy, #happy free confused and lonely at the same time

Post ID: 87713266429

Date: 2014-06-03 18:14:39 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

worldoptimization:
Things I just realized: a lot of the philosophy we’ve been doing in my class this quarter is based on the assumption that people don’t want to maximize their expected utility, they want to maximize their minimum possible utility over all outcomes.
Like on the one hand, now Rawlsian philosophy makes sense. On the other hand, this just seems empirically false? Like, if that were true, wouldn’t that mean that no one would take any risk ever?
Thank you thank you thank you!
I am a big fan of prospect theory for this: the actual Rawlsian position is obviously false when you go to an extreme, but he is tapping into an intuition that we are more afraid of catastrophic events. Prospect theory integrates this in a sensible way.

Tags: #ethics, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 87711877479

Date: 2014-06-03 17:56:42 GMT

Reblogging: thededekindadafunction-deactiva

Quote: See? In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing. I can’t show you how deep it goes.

Tags: #math

Post ID: 87641328554

Date: 2014-06-02 23:35:53 GMT

Body: Things I just realized: a lot of the philosophy we’ve been doing in my class this quarter is based on the assumption that people don’t want to maximize their expected utility, they want to maximize their minimum possible utility over all outcomes.

Like on the one hand, now Rawlsian philosophy makes sense. On the other hand, this just seems empirically false? Like, if that were true, wouldn’t that mean that no one would take any risk ever?

Tags: #ethics, #why in God's name is Rawls the most respected political theorist of the 20th century

Post ID: 87534209599

Date: 2014-06-01 22:11:59 GMT

Reblogging: suwakoing-deactivated20141005

Body:

raginrayguns:

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Everybody is too irrational to understand why they need to give me money to save them from robots. I must make them rational
Eliezer Yudkwosky: *ends up creating evidence-based self-help community*

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 87450341589

Date: 2014-06-01 02:21:23 GMT

Reblogging: fourthroot

Question: would it be fair to say that linguist opposition to genderqueer pronouns is due to an 'us vs. _them_' mentality?

Answer:

worldoptimization:
fuzziesandutilons:
worldoptimization:
dataandphilosophy:
paradoxicalechoes:
ozymandias271:
fuzziesandutilons:
Yes I definitely support good and clear writing. The grammar mistakes that annoy me are ones that make writing unclear (misplaced modifiers, etc.), but some prescriptivist rules (don’t end sentences with prepositions or splice commas or use singular “they”) actually obfuscate language more than they help.
I am definitely down with pragmatic (pseudo)prescriptivism, by which I mean encouraging people to use grammar that adds clarity of meaning or encourages correctness. Sometimes this is in support of standard prescriptivist advice, sometimes it’s opposed, sometimes it’s neutral in which I revert to “do what you want, prescriptivism has classism issues.” E.g. I value the oxford comma for clarity of lists, I support splitting infinitives on the grounds that it doesn’t cause any problems, and I support the (re)introduction of the singular they for being able to talk about people without asserting a gender¹.
There’s also a bit of trickiness around appropriation here because there are some aspects of minority dialects that would be really nice to introduce in general. E.g. African American Vernacular English has some really awesome tense structures. Take a look at the Wikipedia article for it — isn’t the distinction between stressed/unstressed been in the sentence “She been running” really awesome? And it’s not something you can duplicate easily in General American.
And while I would really like to learn this grammatical structure and introduce some parts of the dialect into my speech, I really, really can’t. I would definitely just sound like I was making fun of black people. Especially as someone whose only dialect is General American² and who would likely only be able to replicate the grammar, not necessarily the accent or other dialectical³ differences.
As with many things with appropriation, it’s really sad that it works out this way, and it would be really nice if this could be adopted generally without it being a “fuck you” to black people, and honestly since so much of culture is building on previous bits of culture the fact that we have to not adopt things⁴ is part of what keeps black people segregated from white people and helps enable further discrimination. None of which means its ok to act in a way that will almost definitely look like making fun of black people! But it’s still all really really sad and frustrating and seriously why does the world have to suck.
We actually do lose a little bit in using “they” as a general singular no-gender-asserted pronoun. Specifically, singular they has a bit of a connotation of being of indeterminant gender rather than not being gendered (by which I mean I feel a bit of a connotation of “I am talking about a generic person and so don’t know their gender” or “I am talking about a person I don’t know well enough to know their gender”). But I don’t think losing this connotation is sufficient reason to not have a pronoun where you don’t have to include gender, and I definitely don’t think this is a sufficient reason to throw gender nonbinary people under the bus.
I could imagine someone supporting singular they as a gender indeterminant singular and something like zie as a gender nonbinary singular. That’s not me, but I can see why one might want that.
(As with all discussions of pronouns, for specific people the correct policy is “use the pronoun they want.” Well, unless they’re a dick about it and are like “my preferred pronoun is ‘fuck having preferred pronouns’”. Fuck those people. (Still don’t misgender them, that’s not a correct way to be an asshole at someone who’s being an asshole. If you can’t figure out which pronoun to use, ‘they’ is a good singular “I don’t know your gender” pronoun.)) ↩
Seriously, if you look at the Wikipedia map for the regional home of General American, it includes the area where I grew up. ↩
Not certain if this is the right word, but spell check thinks it’s ok. So surely it’s correct (</sarcasm>). ↩
Like this, although this particularly example is probably fairly idiosyncratic to me and is probably not a key example of appropriation problems being a factor in cultural segregation. ↩

I don’t really understand the AAVE tense system but it seems pretty awesome, and I think the fact that we don’t all use it (and can’t use it) makes the world a slightly sadder place.

And I agree that the connotation of “they” as gender indeterminate is a little awkward when it’s used for a specific person. But it seems likely that those connotations will start to go away.

Tags: #linguistics, #not sj go away

Post ID: 87438220044

Date: 2014-05-31 23:39:34 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Question: would it be fair to say that linguist opposition to genderqueer pronouns is due to an 'us vs. _them_' mentality?

Answer:

fuzziesandutilons:

worldoptimization:
dataandphilosophy:
paradoxicalechoes:
ozymandias271:
fuzziesandutilons:
Am I evil if I follow prescriptivist rules, and teach people to follow prescriptivist rules, not because they are right but because they are high-SES signals? I do my best to follow these sorts of rules, even though I wish that there were fewer of them, because that signals high-SES and that is just a really useful signal to project.
Is it problematic to optimize for, among many other things, giving an impression of high-SES? I think so. I also don’t think that it is actually bad. Problematic just means something that you need to think about and consider carefully.
For example, I negatively judge university students (an english-speaking university in an english-speaking country) who I hear speaking non-English living languages with each other (If I hear someone speaking classical latin I am more likely to just listen in). This is obviously problematic, especially as most of the students I overhear appear Asian and are speaking a language I can identify as Asian (I tend to suspect Chinese, but that is more from base rates than anything else). Yet I have a reason (Don’t go to another country and not immerse yourself), I am consistent (I judge even more heavily everbody who voluntarily resides in the ______ House, where all the students from ______ University live, whose students do all speak English fluently), and I don’t act on this negative judgement, so I think that I am not obviously wrong.
There is a way in which deliberately trying to project high-SES is classist: if I didn’t, then it would be harder to distinguish high-SES from low-SES, and so I perpetuate the system and all that jazz. But I am also responding, with the appearence of rationality, to the incentives in my environment. And I know that the Modern Orthodox SJ (used very broadly, if you have a better term or phrase to encompass this crowd I welcome it) Movement defines isms in such a way that a computer at your average financial institution is racist because it perpetuates inequality, but that is also the point where I start talking about the non-central fallacy, so it is less of an issue to me than it might otherwise be.
I don’t think optimizing your speech for high SES signaling is evil.
1) Signaling SES through speech has as far as I know been a thing forever in every language, so I don’t think your refusal to buy in is going to do much to change the system, and it is going to hurt your career prospects (and your career is probably the biggest way you’re likely to do good things for the world).
2) Following prescriptivist rules seems like it might be more of a signal of education than social status: if you learned silly grammar rules in school, you probably learned other things in school too. The bigger problem might not be prescriptivist signaling but rather that quality of education received is so highly correlated with SES.
I agree with worldoptimization. I also strongly believe there is still value in “proper” grammar, at least in writing, because each word communicates something.

Had I just chose to use communicate, you would read what I’d writ differently, and my message would not be not different.

Yes I definitely support good and clear writing. The grammar mistakes that annoy me are ones that make writing unclear (misplaced modifiers, etc.), but some prescriptivist rules (don’t end sentences with prepositions or splice commas or use singular “they”) actually obfuscate language more than they help.

Tags: #linguistics, #not sj go away

Post ID: 87437598159

Date: 2014-05-31 23:31:14 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Body:

fuzziesandutilons:

fuzziesandutilons:
antinegationism:
eccentric-nucleus replied to your post“Why would you not want to write really clever code?”
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by…
Okay, how did you get it working? We’ve been trying since 7pm yesterday. Tell me there’s a magical key which, once turned, reveals the light.

The trick is to walk through gdb a lot and fix every one of your 20 stupid bugs. At least that’s what we did.

Tags: #cs

Post ID: 87429583279

Date: 2014-05-31 21:50:00 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Question: would it be fair to say that linguist opposition to genderqueer pronouns is due to an 'us vs. _them_' mentality?

Answer:

paradoxicalechoes:
ozymandias271:
fuzziesandutilons:
It could also be grammar. “they” and “them” are grammatically incorrect when referring to one person, and yet many people, understandably, like them.
love, it’s a pun
Also, linguists couldn’t care less whether some books list it as a rule that singular they is grammatically incorrect. Prescriptivists - people who enforce made up language rules - are sworn enemies of linguists everywhere.
Am I evil if I follow prescriptivist rules, and teach people to follow prescriptivist rules, not because they are right but because they are high-SES signals? I do my best to follow these sorts of rules, even though I wish that there were fewer of them, because that signals high-SES and that is just a really useful signal to project.
Is it problematic to optimize for, among many other things, giving an impression of high-SES? I think so. I also don’t think that it is actually bad. Problematic just means something that you need to think about and consider carefully.
For example, I negatively judge university students (an english-speaking university in an english-speaking country) who I hear speaking non-English living languages with each other (If I hear someone speaking classical latin I am more likely to just listen in). This is obviously problematic, especially as most of the students I overhear appear Asian and are speaking a language I can identify as Asian (I tend to suspect Chinese, but that is more from base rates than anything else). Yet I have a reason (Don’t go to another country and not immerse yourself), I am consistent (I judge even more heavily everbody who voluntarily resides in the ______ House, where all the students from ______ University live, whose students do all speak English fluently), and I don’t act on this negative judgement, so I think that I am not obviously wrong.
There is a way in which deliberately trying to project high-SES is classist: if I didn’t, then it would be harder to distinguish high-SES from low-SES, and so I perpetuate the system and all that jazz. But I am also responding, with the appearence of rationality, to the incentives in my environment. And I know that the Modern Orthodox SJ (used very broadly, if you have a better term or phrase to encompass this crowd I welcome it) Movement defines isms in such a way that a computer at your average financial institution is racist because it perpetuates inequality, but that is also the point where I start talking about the non-central fallacy, so it is less of an issue to me than it might otherwise be.

I don’t think optimizing your speech for high SES signaling is evil.

1) Signaling SES through speech has as far as I know been a thing forever in every language, so I don’t think your refusal to buy in is going to do much to change the system, and it is going to hurt your career prospects (and your career is probably the biggest way you’re likely to do good things for the world).

2) Following prescriptivist rules seems like it might be more of a signal of education than social status: if you learned silly grammar rules in school, you probably learned other things in school too. The bigger problem might not be prescriptivist signaling but rather that quality of education received is so highly correlated with SES.

Tags: #linguistics, #not sj go away

Post ID: 87375677509

Date: 2014-05-31 07:51:06 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Body:

fuzziesandutilons:

antinegationism:
eccentric-nucleus replied to your post“Why would you not want to write really clever code?”
“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”
this.
Tell me about it. We thought implementing a segregated linked list into our heap allocator would be easy. False.

We successfully did this! Debugging it was in fact twice as hard as writing it, though.

Tags: #cs

Post ID: 87350772289

Date: 2014-05-31 01:44:33 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Quote: They say that “Confronting triggers, not avoiding them, is the best way to overcome PTSD”. They point out that “exposure therapy” is the best treatment for trauma survivors, including rape victims. And that this involves reliving the trauma and exposing yourself to traumatic stimuli, exactly what trigger warnings are intended to prevent. All this is true. But I feel like they are missing a very important point.

YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

Psychotherapists treat arachnophobia with exposure therapy, too. They expose people first to cute, little spiders behind a glass cage. Then bigger spiders. Then they take them out of the cage. Finally, in a carefully controlled environment with their very supportive therapist standing by, they make people experience their worst fear, like having a big tarantula crawl all over them. It usually works pretty well.

Finding an arachnophobic person, and throwing a bucket full of tarantulas at them while shouting “I’M HELPING! I’M HELPING!” works less well.

And this seems to be the arachnophobe’s equivalent of the PTSD “advice” in the Pacific Standard. There are two problems with its approach. The first is that it avoids the carefully controlled, anxiety-minimizing setup of psychotherapy.

The second is that YOU DO NOT GIVE PSYCHOTHERAPY TO PEOPLE WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT.

If a person with post-traumatic stress disorder or some other trigger-related problem doesn’t want psychotherapy, then even as a trained psychiatrist I am forbidden to override that decision unless they become an immediate danger to themselves or others.

[…]This is not your job to meddle. If you are very concerned about helping people with PTSD, please express that concern by donating to PTSD USA or one of the other organizations that will help those with the condition get proper, well-controlled therapy. Please do not try to increase the background level of triggers in the hopes that one of them will fortuitiously collide with a PTSD sufferer in a therapeutic way.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 87344995974

Date: 2014-05-31 00:28:41 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 87310300719

Date: 2014-05-30 17:03:48 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Tags: #effective altruism

Post ID: 87223562629

Date: 2014-05-29 19:22:58 GMT

Reblogging: karmakaiser-deactivated20140613

Body:

karmakaiser:

Me: “Valar Morghulis!”
Man: “#NotAllMen”

Tags: #transhumanism, #game of thrones, #not sj go away

Post ID: 87214410194

Date: 2014-05-29 17:19:58 GMT

Reblogging: dataandphilosophy

Body:

teajaylore:
luminousalicorn:
Alicorn’s post about identity theft, , being linguistically forced into someone else’s movement, and other things.
Read More

Yay I’m annoyed by #yesallwomen for the same reason, I’m glad I’m not the only one. I wish people wouldn’t use my supposed experiences of oppression to support their political arguments.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 87144005824

Date: 2014-05-28 23:06:23 GMT

Reblogging: karmakaiser-deactivated20140613

Body:

binghsien:

ok that onion headline going around really annoys me.
just because you don’t read the news from other countries doesn’t mean that they don’t have senseless, sensationalized mass murders. There was a mass stabbing on the taipei metro two weeks ago. There was a mass stabbing in Kunming the month before. The same day as the UCSB shootings there was a shooting in Brussels.
grouchy about this.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 87142519169

Date: 2014-05-28 22:49:27 GMT

Question: You didn't know who I was? Man, harsh.

Answer: ohhhhhhhh my bad hi!

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 86825771199

Date: 2014-05-25 20:35:44 GMT

Question: btw, I'm calling it defective altruism from now on.

Answer: hi I don’t know who you are but use of the phrase “defective altruism” is always a good choice

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 86823682294

Date: 2014-05-25 20:12:57 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

sadspockpanda:

“average starfleet officer breaks the prime directive twice a month” factoid actualy a statistical error. average starfleet officer breaks prime directive 0 times a month. jim kirk, who captains the enterprise & breaks the prime directive 10,000 times each month, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Tags: #star trek

Post ID: 86823504064

Date: 2014-05-25 20:11:00 GMT

Reblogging: michaelblume

Body:

friendly reminder that mass shootings are an extremely rare, extremely dramatic event and making any policy conclusions from them is pretty much just the availability heuristic

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 86558654949

Date: 2014-05-23 02:15:17 GMT

Reblogging: fourthroot

Body:

worldoptimization:
theunitofcaring:
worldoptimization:
fourthroot:
Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.
I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”¹. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it². We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.
But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning³. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.
That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs⁴. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.
I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new⁵.
A good principle in general, I’m not trying to say not to use it; I’m just trying to figure out limitations on its scope. And I think the fact that I didn’t have a handy example is that this isn’t a principle that’s applied too broadly very often; “consent” isn’t at the point of something like “freedom” where everyone claims they’re protecting it. ↩
Probably, anyway. I’m not sure we really are strengthening his argument, we mostly seem to be saying it’s not right, but I guess we’re debating against points that are not quite he said but rather something stronger (to us at least), and hence implicitly steelmanning his argument. ↩
I guess I shouldn’t speak for all of us on this point. I, at least, am learning (and having new and interesting thoughts, etc). ↩
Which, by the way, I like my beliefs and think they are right, and if you manage to interpret one my arguments so that it says that homosexuality is bad, it’s very very very likely that I’ve either said something really stupid or that you’re coming from a really messed up worldview. And in the latter case you should change your worldview to something that isn’t wrong. (In the former case you can just tell me that my arguments prove things they shouldn’t, and then I/we/you can try to sort out what the problem is.) ↩
But maybe someone else can? If you have thoughts, I’m interested. ↩
Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.
Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.
I wonder if the not being offended thing has more to do with Scott’s latest post about identifying with different ingroups? I used to think I was difficult to offend because attacking many of my identities (sexuality, religious, national, political) did not offend me. It turns out I’m average difficulty to offend, I just draw the lines of my tribe in strange places.
(I think the argument against cultural appropriation is, more or less, that lots of people are in fact offended by it, often not just because their national/cultural/racial identity is important to them but because there’s a history of the people who think it’s unimportant being people who do horrifically shitty things to them. So if people say that a particular behavior is appropriative and they are offended, continuing to do it signals not caring that you’ve hurt them.
I present this argument with the caveat that I see people who are not members of an affected group being indignant on behalf of those who are pretty often and I think obligations to stop doing things that make one group of people offended on behalf of another are not sustainable at all.)
Hmm, the first suggestion is interesting. Now that I think about it, I can think of times I’ve been slightly offended at people insulting nerds/math majors/whatever. Not offended enough to ask them to stop or write angry blog posts about it or anything, though.
And to add yet another Slate Star Codex reference to this thread, okay, I get cultural appropriation being bad in the way it’s bad to show pictures of salmon to British people. Even if I don’t understand why my actions are making people upset, I should stop unless I think the importance of what I’m doing outweighs their suffering.
Yeah, I’m certainly also on board with the don’t-show-british-people-salmon¹ idea of appropriation that goes something along the lines of: Value: Don’t harm people without reason; Observation: appropriation makes people unhappy; Conclusion: don’t appropriate. But I very much see this as a special case of my fallback “don’t be an asshole” moral value², and when that’s all I have I’m usually suspicious that I’m not understanding everything.
While I wouldn’t say that the above is the only thing I have in my understanding of appropriation, it probably is the only thing I have that I really understand³. I have heard additional arguments about the problems of appropriation, and I could probably regurgitate them and say some rote answers about how it’s bad, and it’s pretty clear it is bad under the above argument of “I see people end up hurt from it” … but I feel like I don’t really understand it yet. This example really felt like something that would provide some additional insight, but I haven’t found it⁴.
I needed to hunt down the reference, so for anyone else in the same position as me, here it is. ↩
Just because I’m calling this value a fallback doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. The value of having my morals fail gracefully is one of my values that I treasure most. Goodness knows I had plenty of terrible beliefs that I never inflicted on others only because of this value. ↩
Admittedly I have a moderately high standard for understand. If I couldn’t teach the thing to someone who is interested but uninformed off the top of my head, then I don’t consider myself to understand the thing ↩
Not yet, anyway. ↩

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 86557239344

Date: 2014-05-23 01:59:23 GMT

Reblogging: michaelblume

Quote: This is what frustrates me… People don’t like Sansa because she is feminine. It annoys me that people only like the feminine characters when they act like male characters. And they always go on about feminism. Like, you’re rooting for the people who look like boys, who act like boys, who fight like boys. Root for the girls who wear dresses and are intellectually very strong.

Tags: #game of thrones, #not sj go away

Post ID: 86536612824

Date: 2014-05-22 21:47:46 GMT

Reblogging: shlevy

Question: would it be fair to say that linguist opposition to genderqueer pronouns is due to an 'us vs. _them_' mentality?

Tags: #linguistics, #not sj go away

Post ID: 86536391934

Date: 2014-05-22 21:45:04 GMT

Reblogging: yxoque-deactivated20170920

Body:

yxoque:

fuzziesandutilons:
fuzziesandutilons:
In a world where people bet reputation and money on prediction markets, would people who lost a lot on a belief they were particularly passionate about (e.g. political, identity-ish) actually become more convinced of that belief due to the sunk costs fallacy? My co-blogger won’t let me make any science bets until I have some evidence or good arguments either way.
In response to some answers:
People would know and understand the sunk cost fallacy. However, this does not always stop people.
After spending two days studying it in my high school economics class, the teacher had the students enter a sunk cost auction (in which you have to pay whatever you bid, even if you don’t win).
Even after having done a homework assignment on sunk costs and discussed them at length, many students found themselves betting on sunk costs. In the end, one guy payed $20 for a can of coke.
I believe the point of prediction markets is primarily to create a more rational world, and to help people make informed decisions (e.g. politicians) rather than act blindly on irrational pet beliefs. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
What this story tells me, more than anything else, is that people fail to internalize sunk cost fallacies.
This seems to be common of people who learn about biases. Knowing about the planning fallacy doesn’t seem to make a real difference. In Thinking: Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman tells the story about students learning about the bystander effect, but failing to actually update their thinking.
This tells me that we need a new, better way of teaching people about biases so that the knowledge actually influences their mind and they internalize it.
What does this say about prediction markets? I have no idea.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 86536067379

Date: 2014-05-22 21:40:54 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Body:

worldoptimization:
fourthroot:
Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.
I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”¹. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it². We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.
But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning³. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.
That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs⁴. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.
I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new⁵.
A good principle in general, I’m not trying to say not to use it; I’m just trying to figure out limitations on its scope. And I think the fact that I didn’t have a handy example is that this isn’t a principle that’s applied too broadly very often; “consent” isn’t at the point of something like “freedom” where everyone claims they’re protecting it. ↩
Probably, anyway. I’m not sure we really are strengthening his argument, we mostly seem to be saying it’s not right, but I guess we’re debating against points that are not quite he said but rather something stronger (to us at least), and hence implicitly steelmanning his argument. ↩
I guess I shouldn’t speak for all of us on this point. I, at least, am learning (and having new and interesting thoughts, etc). ↩
Which, by the way, I like my beliefs and think they are right, and if you manage to interpret one my arguments so that it says that homosexuality is bad, it’s very very very likely that I’ve either said something really stupid or that you’re coming from a really messed up worldview. And in the latter case you should change your worldview to something that isn’t wrong. (In the former case you can just tell me that my arguments prove things they shouldn’t, and then I/we/you can try to sort out what the problem is.) ↩
But maybe someone else can? If you have thoughts, I’m interested. ↩
Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.
Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.
I wonder if the not being offended thing has more to do with Scott’s latest post about identifying with different ingroups? I used to think I was difficult to offend because attacking many of my identities (sexuality, religious, national, political) did not offend me. It turns out I’m average difficulty to offend, I just draw the lines of my tribe in strange places.
(I think the argument against cultural appropriation is, more or less, that lots of people are in fact offended by it, often not just because their national/cultural/racial identity is important to them but because there’s a history of the people who think it’s unimportant being people who do horrifically shitty things to them. So if people say that a particular behavior is appropriative and they are offended, continuing to do it signals not caring that you’ve hurt them.
I present this argument with the caveat that I see people who are not members of an affected group being indignant on behalf of those who are pretty often and I think obligations to stop doing things that make one group of people offended on behalf of another are not sustainable at all.)

Hmm, the first suggestion is interesting. Now that I think about it, I can think of times I’ve been slightly offended at people insulting nerds/math majors/whatever. Not offended enough to ask them to stop or write angry blog posts about it or anything, though.

And to add yet another Slate Star Codex reference to this thread, okay, I get cultural appropriation being bad in the way it’s bad to show pictures of salmon to British people. Even if I don’t understand why my actions are making people upset, I should stop unless I think the importance of what I’m doing outweighs their suffering.

Tags: #not sj go away

Post ID: 86516375754

Date: 2014-05-22 17:40:52 GMT

Reblogging: fourthroot

Body:

ozymandias271:
fuzziesandutilons:
worldoptimization:
fourthroot:
[…]
I really like these points on steelmanning. I guess generally I feel like there are two goals you might have in reading articles like this:
1) decide if there are good reasons to agree with the author’s point (i.e. self-driving cars are ethically problematic)
2) understand the author’s worldview (i.e. killing people in the trolley problem is bad)
These are both good goals and you have to read the article in different ways for each. Steelmanning is aimed at the first, not the second.
And the first is more practical to do in the short term. For instance, like 90% of what we read in my philosophy class is super deontological. If I had to read all of it as deontological, I guess there’s some small chance I’d come to understand their value system better and convert to deontology at some point. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t be able to believe anything they said, whereas by steelmanning them as consequentialist I can find some parts that make sense in my belief system.
worldoptimization has a good point. I think there are usually good reasons to agree with the author’s point, and good reasons not to; the question is of which outweigh the other.
I am not sure you have to read the article differently; however, since the second goal tends to support the first in many ways. Rather, it helps to understand the author’s worldview when reading ANYTHING because it will give us greater understanding and help keep our minds open, especially if the article discusses ideas that contradict our own.
See, a thing that’s interesting for this is that I’m pretty sure Jim’s objection to steelmanning is a result of his objection to Scott’s post about why people oppose homosexuality [content warning: neoreactionary], which is actually an objection to #1. Scott is saying, “Look, this particular dumb argument makes perfect sense if you just assume some people think such-and-such and other people are using arguments as soldiers” and Jim finds that totally offensive because he doesn’t think such-and-such at all.
So I think we’re steelmanning Jim’s opposition to steelmanning.
Ooh, this post is yielding all sorts of interesting examples of things I wanted to talk about but didn’t have examples for.
I think this is a good example of the limitations of the principle “don’t do things to people without their consent”¹. Here Jim has said pretty clearly that he doesn’t want people to steelman his arguments. And here we are, taking one of his arguments and steelmanning it². We are using something he made in a way he explicitly didn’t consent to.
But I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything wrong. We are having new and interesting thoughts and discussing them in a way we likely wouldn’t have otherwise; we’re learning³. And I suppose I can see why that would be upsetting; I certainly wouldn’t be too happy if Jim read one of my arguments and then blogged something about how it gave him this great new argument for why homosexuality is bad.
That wouldn’t be a violation of my consent though, even if I told people not to use my arguments in ways incompatible with my beliefs⁴. I guess mostly I’m just saying that you don’t get to claim ownership of your arguments after making them. Especially as it would be bad to say that Jim believed [your steelmanned argument] — once you’re asserting that he does still own the argument, it’s screwing with his consent to mess around with the argument in a way he doesn’t want.
I feel like this has some bearing on appropriation as well, but I can’t really figure it out. Something about rituals/ways of expressing oneself being part of culture but beliefs not being part of culture, so therefore you shouldn’t appropriate the former but you can the latter? I don’t like calling beliefs not a part of culture though, that seems wrong. Something about not appropriation only being problematic if you do it to a non-dominant culture? That would say we shouldn’t “appropriate” racists’ arguments that black people shouldn’t marry white people to show that arguments against gay marriage are bigoted, since the former belief is not dominant nowadays. That seems wrong too. I guess what I’m saying in this paragraph is that it seems like this example should illustrate some limits on the scope of “don’t appropriate,” but I don’t actually seem to be able to figure out anything new⁵.
A good principle in general, I’m not trying to say not to use it; I’m just trying to figure out limitations on its scope. And I think the fact that I didn’t have a handy example is that this isn’t a principle that’s applied too broadly very often; “consent” isn’t at the point of something like “freedom” where everyone claims they’re protecting it. ↩
Probably, anyway. I’m not sure we really are strengthening his argument, we mostly seem to be saying it’s not right, but I guess we’re debating against points that are not quite he said but rather something stronger (to us at least), and hence implicitly steelmanning his argument. ↩
I guess I shouldn’t speak for all of us on this point. I, at least, am learning (and having new and interesting thoughts, etc). ↩
Which, by the way, I like my beliefs and think they are right, and if you manage to interpret one my arguments so that it says that homosexuality is bad, it’s very very very likely that I’ve either said something really stupid or that you’re coming from a really messed up worldview. And in the latter case you should change your worldview to something that isn’t wrong. (In the former case you can just tell me that my arguments prove things they shouldn’t, and then I/we/you can try to sort out what the problem is.) ↩
But maybe someone else can? If you have thoughts, I’m interested. ↩

Ooh yay this is interesting. I feel like exchange and cross-pollination of ideas is really important so I’m skeptical of any limits on it except limits necessary to incentivize content creation (you can’t copypaste my book and then sell it). I don’t think Jim is going to stop coming up with ideas just because we steelman them. This is also why I get annoyed at authors who don’t want fanfic of their work written, and why I can’t suggest any new limits on “don’t appropriate,” because I don’t really get what’s bad about appropriation in the first place.

Maybe I just haven’t had the arguments against cultural appropriation properly explained to me? And I also think I lack the “being offended” gene. Like if I were an author and someone wrote terrible fanfic of my characters I don’t think I would mind at all, and on St Patrick’s Day (I was raised Irish Catholic) I recognize that there are lots of appropriation and bad Irish stereotypes going on but I don’t feel bothered by it.

Tags: #not sj go away, #r a t i o n a l i t y, #free culture

Post ID: 86514334509

Date: 2014-05-22 17:11:43 GMT

Reblogging: tropylium

Body:

tropylium:

justlingthings:
Hey everyone! I’m going to tell y’all something that totally blew my mind the other day. So we’re doing borrowing in my historical linguistics class, and here’s one of the examples my professor gave. So background info: English was conquered by the Normans at one point (not sure of the actual year), which is why our structure and sound systems are Germanic (English is a Germanic language) but have so many French and Romance loan words in our vocabulary. So the word gentil, French for nice, kind, etc. was borrowed into English four different times:
genteel
Gentile
jaunty
gentle
That’s not even the cool part. The cool part is we can actually tell the relative order in which the borrowing happened. So the general principle of linguistic borrowing is that when you’re looking at borrowed words, the longer they’ve been in the language, the more they’ll look and sound like words native to the language they were borrowed into, and vice-versa, the later they were borrowed, the less time they’ve been in the language, the more they look like the language they were borrowed from.
So take the modern French pronunciation of ‘gentil’, it’s something like /ʒã’ti/, with stress on the second syllable, and no pronounced /l/ at the end. But, we can tell by the spelling that there was once a pronounced /l/ at the end, which was lost. Well, out of all four words above, which of them doesn’t pronounce the /l/ at the end of the word? That’s right, jaunty is the latest borrowing of the word.
#4 jaunty (was imported into English around 1600)
Next we look at the vowels. One of the most major sound changes in the English language was the great vowel shift, which happened around the 16th or 17th century. I won’t explain all the changes here, that’s what Google is for, but it’s basically the reason English ‘five’ is pronounced /faiv/ and not /fiv/. The main difference between ‘genteel’ and ‘Gentile’ is the second vowel. We can tell that ‘Gentile’ was in the English language before the vowel shift, because the /i/ in it was shifted, making it older than the next oldest word, ‘genteel’. Notice that apart from ‘jaunty’, ‘genteel’ sounds the most like the modern French pronunciation.
#3 genteel (around 1600)
#4 Gentile (around 1400)
And finally, I don’t quite remember all the justifications my professor gave for knowing ‘gentle’ was number 1, but notice that the /l/ at the end is syllabic, and very strongly pronounced. Combine this with the fact that the first vowel is very different from the modern French pronunciation, and you can tell that ‘gentle’ is not only pronounced like very old French, but also that it is super “nativized” into the English language.
#1 gentle (imported as early as 1200)
This is why I think diachronic sound change and historical linguistics are so cool, if you learn the types of changes, you can use individual words like little time machines!
Ahh, loanword stratification. Gotta love it.(I’m tempted to investigate how large a similar set I could dig up for Finnish… etymological loan doublets are easy enough — e.g. juhla “fest” ~ joulu “Xmas”, vuoro “turn” ~ vuokra “rent” — but a quadruplet might not be.)

Tags: #linguistics

Post ID: 86429664159

Date: 2014-05-21 19:41:31 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

gruntledandhinged:

Your statistical power is WEAK, your effect size is SMALL, you will not survive the winter.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 86429460589

Date: 2014-05-21 19:39:13 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Quote: The truth is common property. You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by ‘outsiders’ on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 86429358689

Date: 2014-05-21 19:38:05 GMT

Reblogging: bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190

Body:

fuzziesandutilons:
worldoptimization:
fourthroot:
worldoptimization:
[…] Those 16,000 lives are unlikely to all be the same ones lost in an alternate world without robot cars. When we say autonomous cars can slash fatality rates by half, we really mean that they can save a net total of 16,000 lives a year: for example, saving 20,000 people but still being implicated in 4,000 new deaths. There’s something troubling about that, as is usually the case when there’s a sacrifice or “trading” of lives.”
—
- “The Ethics of Saving Lives With Autonomous Cars Is Far Murkier Than You Think”, Wired
sometimes I forget how objectively terrible the field of moral philosophy is
[clipped]
(via yxoque)
That article strikes me as a really poorly written version of this article. The argument as I understand it is that, while less people overall would die, it’s not just different people who would be killed, but a specific class of people would become more likely to be killed.
[…]
(via nextworldover)
Wow! It seems…. a little too generous to ascribe that stance to the Wired article, but that’s a much more interesting position and more worth discussing. […]
On one of his recent posts, Scott Alexander backed away a bit from steelmanning¹, in response to the comment
James A. Donald (external link)
Please, no more steelmanning.
Person A says something that Person B finds strange and unreasonable, something that makes no sense given the rest of Person B’s worldview. So, Person B, “charitably” invents a somewhat similar position that makes sense given person B’s worldview Which worldview person A massively disagrees with, and is indeed violently insulted by.
Whenever I see the word, I assume, usually correctly, that you are about to demonize your opponents with some version of their argument that only makes sense, only is steel, given that everything that they believe is wrong, everything you believe is correct, and they are evil and stupid.
And even if you have the best of intentions, and I doubt your intentions are as pure as you think, you are going to wind up inadvertently doing that.
This comment seemed a bit off to me, and with this example I see why. If you work under a moral system where the correct answer to the trolley problem is “don’t kill some small number of people to save a larger number of people”², then this does look like perverting an argument to some version that only makes sense if everything you believe³ is wrong.
On the other hand, for people who think the answer to the trolley problem is “do kill some small number of people to save a larger number of people” this steelmanned argument is important, interesting, novel, and potentially true where the previous argument seemed pretty clearly false⁴.
And I don’t think the point of steelmanning is to present someone else’s points the way that person would most like them presented. I think the point is to make the argument as strong as you can. And that’s very likely going to be by making it match your own belief framework⁵.
James A Donald is probably right that this doesn’t quite maximize charity. The person whose argument you’re rewriting will likely think it worse⁶. If you are valuing charity above all else⁷, this will likely fail. In most cases just republishing the other person’s argument will be more charitable.
But if you value being correct above all else⁸, I think steelmanning is a pretty good idea
He only mentioned it as a tangent to his main point, so I’m not sure how much this is a general shift in his approach and how much it was just about that one post. ↩
Which is presumably the Wired author’s moral system, judging by the article. ↩
or at least one thing you believe. ↩
and not in a particularly interesting way, either. ↩
Both because that’s probably where you’ll end up if you try to make the argument as strong as you can (since you believe what you believe), and also because each person has the most comparative advantage for strong argument writing under the “using own belief system” condition. ↩
This is not guaranteed; they might be persuaded by you or they might think you were better able than them to make the point they wanted to make. If one of these happens, everyone wins, and the rewrite will almost definitely be considered charitable by the involved parties. ↩
Valuing one thing above all else is usually a bad idea. ↩
See previous footnote. ↩
I really like these points on steelmanning. I guess generally I feel like there are two goals you might have in reading articles like this:
1) decide if there are good reasons to agree with the author’s point (i.e. self-driving cars are ethically problematic)
2) understand the author’s worldview (i.e. killing people in the trolley problem is bad)
These are both good goals and you have to read the article in different ways for each. Steelmanning is aimed at the first, not the second.
And the first is more practical to do in the short term. For instance, like 90% of what we read in my philosophy class is super deontological. If I had to read all of it as deontological, I guess there’s some small chance I’d come to understand their value system better and convert to deontology at some point. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t be able to believe anything they said, whereas by steelmanning them as consequentialist I can find some parts that make sense in my belief system.
worldoptimization has a good point. I think there are usually good reasons to agree with the author’s point, and good reasons not to; the question is of which outweigh the other.
I am not sure you have to read the article differently; however, since the second goal tends to support the first in many ways. Rather, it helps to understand the author’s worldview when reading ANYTHING because it will give us greater understanding and help keep our minds open, especially if the article discusses ideas that contradict our own.
See, a thing that’s interesting for this is that I’m pretty sure Jim’s objection to steelmanning is a result of his objection to Scott’s post about why people oppose homosexuality [content warning: neoreactionary], which is actually an objection to #1. Scott is saying, “Look, this particular dumb argument makes perfect sense if you just assume some people think such-and-such and other people are using arguments as soldiers” and Jim finds that totally offensive because he doesn’t think such-and-such at all.
So I think we’re steelmanning Jim’s opposition to steelmanning.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 86428634719

Date: 2014-05-21 19:29:41 GMT

Reblogging: thededekindadafunction-deactiva

Body:

curiosamathematica:

Some days ago I noticed a brilliant bumper sticker, saying “I ♥ topology” where the heart was replaced by a topologically homeomorphic disk (●). Amused by the idea, I tried to work out some related versions for other mathematical subjects. Here they are:
For geometry, the obvious choice was a cardioid:
I’m thinking of changing “Algebra” into “Arithmetic” here:
A connect-the-dots heart for graph theory:
Perhaps fractals aren’t really a mathematical subject on their own, but nevertheless they are too popular:
Too bad a heart shape doesn’t have that many symmetries:
This one is difficult categorizing! It’s related to Frobenius algebras, module and representation theory, topological quantum field theory… Which mathematical subject should it represent?
A knotted heart for knot theory:
I like this one, the Lorenz attractor for chaos theory:
The heart-shaped Bonne projection:
I hope you recognize a Venn diagram here:
Hmmm, statistics, a pie chart?
Finally, this is the one it all started with:
What do you guys think? I’m still thinking about a heart for genuine algebra, linear algebra, number theory, combinatorics and mathematical logic. Please share any remarks, ideas, subjects?

Tags: #math

Post ID: 86386567969

Date: 2014-05-21 06:30:25 GMT

Reblogging: fourthroot

Body:

worldoptimization:
[…] Those 16,000 lives are unlikely to all be the same ones lost in an alternate world without robot cars. When we say autonomous cars can slash fatality rates by half, we really mean that they can save a net total of 16,000 lives a year: for example, saving 20,000 people but still being implicated in 4,000 new deaths. There’s something troubling about that, as is usually the case when there’s a sacrifice or “trading” of lives.”
—
- “The Ethics of Saving Lives With Autonomous Cars Is Far Murkier Than You Think”, Wired
sometimes I forget how objectively terrible the field of moral philosophy is
[clipped]
(via yxoque)
That article strikes me as a really poorly written version of this article. The argument as I understand it is that, while less people overall would die, it’s not just different people who would be killed, but a specific class of people would become more likely to be killed.
[…]
(via nextworldover)
Wow! It seems…. a little too generous to ascribe that stance to the Wired article, but that’s a much more interesting position and more worth discussing. […]
On one of his recent posts, Scott Alexander backed away a bit from steelmanning¹, in response to the comment
James A. Donald (external link)
Please, no more steelmanning.
Person A says something that Person B finds strange and unreasonable, something that makes no sense given the rest of Person B’s worldview. So, Person B, “charitably” invents a somewhat similar position that makes sense given person B’s worldview Which worldview person A massively disagrees with, and is indeed violently insulted by.
Whenever I see the word, I assume, usually correctly, that you are about to demonize your opponents with some version of their argument that only makes sense, only is steel, given that everything that they believe is wrong, everything you believe is correct, and they are evil and stupid.
And even if you have the best of intentions, and I doubt your intentions are as pure as you think, you are going to wind up inadvertently doing that.
This comment seemed a bit off to me, and with this example I see why. If you work under a moral system where the correct answer to the trolley problem is “don’t kill some small number of people to save a larger number of people”², then this does look like perverting an argument to some version that only makes sense if everything you believe³ is wrong.
On the other hand, for people who think the answer to the trolley problem is “do kill some small number of people to save a larger number of people” this steelmanned argument is important, interesting, novel, and potentially true where the previous argument seemed pretty clearly false⁴.
And I don’t think the point of steelmanning is to present someone else’s points the way that person would most like them presented. I think the point is to make the argument as strong as you can. And that’s very likely going to be by making it match your own belief framework⁵.
James A Donald is probably right that this doesn’t quite maximize charity. The person whose argument you’re rewriting will likely think it worse⁶. If you are valuing charity above all else⁷, this will likely fail. In most cases just republishing the other person’s argument will be more charitable.
But if you value being correct above all else⁸, I think steelmanning is a pretty good idea
He only mentioned it as a tangent to his main point, so I’m not sure how much this is a general shift in his approach and how much it was just about that one post. ↩
Which is presumably the Wired author’s moral system, judging by the article. ↩
or at least one thing you believe. ↩
and not in a particularly interesting way, either. ↩
Both because that’s probably where you’ll end up if you try to make the argument as strong as you can (since you believe what you believe), and also because each person has the most comparative advantage for strong argument writing under the “using own belief system” condition. ↩
This is not guaranteed; they might be persuaded by you or they might think you were better able than them to make the point they wanted to make. If one of these happens, everyone wins, and the rewrite will almost definitely be considered charitable by the involved parties. ↩
Valuing one thing above all else is usually a bad idea. ↩
See previous footnote. ↩

I really like these points on steelmanning. I guess generally I feel like there are two goals you might have in reading articles like this:

1) decide if there are good reasons to agree with the author’s point (i.e. self-driving cars are ethically problematic)

2) understand the author’s worldview (i.e. killing people in the trolley problem is bad)

These are both good goals and you have to read the article in different ways for each. Steelmanning is aimed at the first, not the second.

And the first is more practical to do in the short term. For instance, like 90% of what we read in my philosophy class is super deontological. If I had to read all of it as deontological, I guess there’s some small chance I’d come to understand their value system better and convert to deontology at some point. But in the meantime, I wouldn’t be able to believe anything they said, whereas by steelmanning them as consequentialist I can find some parts that make sense in my belief system.

Tags: #ethics, #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 86282125074

Date: 2014-05-20 04:32:00 GMT

Tags: #my philosophy class is often silly but sometimes interesting, #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 86272402679

Date: 2014-05-20 02:40:19 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Quote: Still, there’s little doubt that robot cars could make a huge dent in the car-accident fatality rate, which is obviously a good thing — isn’t it?

Actually, the answer isn’t so simple. It’s surprisingly nuanced and involves some modern tech twists on famous, classical ethical dilemmas in philosophy.

Let’s say that autonomous cars slash overall traffic-fatality rates by half. So instead of 32,000 drivers, passengers, and pedestrians killed every year, robotic vehicles save 16,000 lives per year and prevent many more injuries.

But here’s the thing. Those 16,000 lives are unlikely to all be the same ones lost in an alternate world without robot cars. When we say autonomous cars can slash fatality rates by half, we really mean that they can save a net total of 16,000 lives a year: for example, saving 20,000 people but still being implicated in 4,000 new deaths.

There’s something troubling about that, as is usually the case when there’s a sacrifice or “trading” of lives.

Tags: #ethics, #shut up and multiply

Post ID: 86271810209

Date: 2014-05-20 02:34:15 GMT

Reblogging: eccentric-opinion

Tags: #listen to economists they know things

Post ID: 86173464884

Date: 2014-05-19 02:38:00 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Quote: I should probably mention that from now on I will be preceding the names of leaders in the effective charity movement with the honorific “St”, because people’s social status and recognition ought to accurately track the level of effect they are having on the world. If through persistence and self-sacrifice someone manages to save the lives of a couple dozen people they never met, I don’t think even the harshest advocatus diaboli could object to an impromptu sainting or two.

Tags: #effective altruism, #my issues with catholicism let me show you them

Post ID: 86172599064

Date: 2014-05-19 02:29:21 GMT

Reblogging: theunitofcaring

Quote: Still, there’s little doubt that robot cars could make a huge dent in the car-accident fatality rate, which is obviously a good thing — isn’t it?

Actually, the answer isn’t so simple. It’s surprisingly nuanced and involves some modern tech twists on famous, classical ethical dilemmas in philosophy.

There’s something troubling about that, as is usually the case when there’s a sacrifice or “trading” of lives.

Tags: #ethics

Post ID: 86140138559

Date: 2014-05-18 20:20:42 GMT

Reblogging: michaelblume

Body:

I also find it weird that everyone is like “ah, yes, the thing we shall base our assessments of moral weight on is the person’s ability to formulate the concept of ‘I’”
like
…even ignoring disability issues that seems like a really weird and specific thing to base your “this being is in my sphere of morality” assessments on
like why is being able to have a self-model and say “I exist” more important than, like, tool use or something
OTOH if you drop that you start getting inconvenient questions like “okay, the vast majority of beings have a strong preference to keep existing, does that mean it’s immoral to kill any being” and then we’re all Jains
I mean obviously it is bad to kill humans, and it would be really inconvenient if it were bad to kill plants, but I’m not sure where I draw the line between the two

Tags: #ethics

Post ID: 86139519174

Date: 2014-05-18 20:14:12 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Body:

fuzziesandutils:

dataandphilosophy:
fuzziesandutils:
shlevy:
So obviously I don’t think homosexuality is a sin and in that context it’s pretty shitty…
But “love the sinner, hate the sin” seems pretty damn important to me? Like, even leaving aside mistakes and moments of weakness and such and just considering explicit, proudly-held views, I can count on one hand the number of people in my life that I consider to have a completely moral worldview. And most of the rest of them are wrong on things that I consider fundamental and extremely important. And yet, here I am, loving them. People can be valuable even if they do bad, and denying that is an act of injustice toward their good traits and will likely leave you bitter and alone. On the other hand, morality matters and failing to acknowledge (to yourself, at least) the flaws in those around you leaves you at risk of sacrificing your and their good traits to their bad ones, and acknowledged or not the problems cause actual harm to your values.
Basically I’m saying I can’t live without “love the sinner” or “hate the sin”. I genuinely love a lot of people who do and believe things I think are awful. I want them to stop and change their views (though that doesn’t mean I berate them or whatever), and at the same time they are more than just their flaws.
In a sense, this is the definition of unconditional love. On the other hand, can some people not truly be awful to the core? There most likely has been someone so despicable that not one person could find something to love.
If peoples’ value is measured in their actions and impact on the world, people can have a certain amount of value if others love them, since they positively impact the world in that way. On the other hand, they may have huge negative value.
Don’t we all? The negative impact of our lives is huger than we realize. In fact, just by spending one day lazing around on a wooden bench in an air conditioned lobby, our negative effect on the world thrives. By this argument, we have no choice but to “love the sinner, hate the sin” or else we would not be able to stand ourselves, let alone each other.
My stance on this one is formed from the rule I developed to make relationships of all sorts possible, and I find it a useful one: My relationship with someone depends solely on my relationship with that person. That is, in my dealings with person Y, I ignore what they do or how they act towards person X, unless this would impact how I deal with person Y. There are people I like who I don’t have great interactions with, and people I have no reason to like that I have wonderful interactions with. I don’t let my general opinion of the person override my opinion of my relationship with that person.
I don’t believe in not interacting with people because I dislike their views, and I think that people should be able to act on their views, so my only standard of judging a relationship is how I think of that relationship.
Obviously how they behave towards others influences my likelihood of inviting the person to join in group activities, and I try to avoid having two people who have issues with each other being in the same room to the extent that I can help it.
I know that some people see this “not expelling people from my life when I am told that they hurt others” policy as supporting those in power against the powerless. Being judged a bad person for not harming others when my social group, or any member of it, is pushing me to harm someone is the sort of thing I would like to be resistant to.
Like fuzziesandutils is saying, from a consequentialist scalar (and especially from a consequentialist absolute) perspective, everybody is a horrible human being, including myself. So I won’t expel someone from my life just because of a tiny extra marginal bit of hurting someone. And that is assuming that all accusations are true. Someone is openly homophobic? Does less harm to humanity than their stance on effective altruism.
I admit that this rule is somewhat self-interested. I developed it so that I would have a general rule that permitted me to have interesting conversations. But I don’t think that it’s a bad one.
I get that some feel that they are obligated not to be friends with someone who is insufficiently progressive, and doesn’t get social justice issues reflexively right. I get that others feel that they are obligated to not be friends with non-christians who might tempt them from the path. I admit that I have lied by omission about the faith that I was raised with, to get along with people who might have changed their views about our relationship based on irrelevant facts about me. I think that it is a worse world when we try to expel everybody we dislike. Now go forth, and be excellent to each other!
Good response. I agree, although there are certain situations in which it can be taken to dangerous extremes. Hypothetical situation: I am best friends with Hitler. Given what he is doing, it would be my duty as a person to stand in his way, and if I like him as a person, I should still try to prevent him from doing anything.
Is it my duty, or acceptable, for me to kill him? On the one hand, I have unique access as a friend. On the other hand, that is major backstabbing.

I think it is totally reasonable to be friends with Hitler if he’s a good friend to you. But you would also be obligated to kill him. As for backstabbing, I don’t think “kill your best friend only if they’re going to cause large numbers of people to die” will create that much of a slippery slope. But maybe I’m wrong.

Tags: #ethics

Post ID: 86033998524

Date: 2014-05-17 19:37:05 GMT

Reblogging: queenshulamit-deactivated201602

Body:

girl-in-the-tardis:

firstofficerwillow:
arrogant characters
arrogant characters refusing to admit they care about people
arrogant characters not realizing they care about people
arrogant characters realizing they care about someone after something terrible happens to them

Tags: #sherlock

Post ID: 85938126914

Date: 2014-05-16 20:01:23 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Question: Hermione Granger.

Answer:

itsbenedict:

I’m kinda on board with Hermione being canon Gryffindor? Like, if you look at it from a motivations standpoint as opposed to a (smart|brave|hardworking|evil) standpoint, Hermione’s approach to studying is typically one of “I have to know all the things, because academic achievement is Important”- she doesn’t strike me as especially curious. Plus, yeah, she is hella brave, that’s a thing.
D&D alignment is Lawful Good, like come on if anyone’s Lawful Good it’s Hermione Granger. She’s the first one to be “oh my god harry that’s against the rules”, but she’s definitely got that heroic instinct.
Sburb classpect… Mage is the active Know class, and while knowing doesn’t necessarily motivate her, it’s how she accomplishes her goals. And… Light would cover her expository proclivities, but generally she tells people things to help them make choices, rather than bring additional options to light… I’d say Mage of Rage, maybe? Mage of Granger.
Palace Caprae, again, she’s concerned mainly with the limiting of choices for others’ benefit, so she’s Walls/Skies and probably allies with the Walls queen.

Tags: #HP

Post ID: 85878573299

Date: 2014-05-16 02:39:39 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Body:

fuzziesandutils:

yxoque:
1) A post about liking cheese became a giant debate on utilitarianism and what it means to make the universe happy. 2) A cute post about how cool/cute internet people tend to live far away from you became a giant proof of the people on tumblr actually existing and/or trying to explain the effort someone had to put in to fake all that.
And also, of course, it has made me an objectively better, more effective person.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 85878268164

Date: 2014-05-16 02:36:22 GMT

Reblogging: scientiststhesis-at-pillowfort

Quote: I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 85761473054

Date: 2014-05-14 22:46:33 GMT

Reblogging: towardsagentlerworld

Quote: At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn’t.

Tags: #r a t i o n a l i t y

Post ID: 85673154679

Date: 2014-05-14 00:29:43 GMT

Reblogging: michaelblume

Body:

thepasta-nerada:

vvrathia:
the sexual tension when u and ur crush are online on fb at the same time and u just stare at their lil green dot
and suddenly you know what gatsby felt like

Tags: #personal

Post ID: 85648972244

Date: 2014-05-13 19:56:59 GMT

Reblogging: creativepooping-deactivated2022

Tags: #we'll see if Cthulhu gives them EA grandchildren

Post ID: 85646854214

Date: 2014-05-13 19:32:46 GMT

Reblogging: fuzziesandutilons

Body: