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:

nihilsupernum:

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:

untiltheseashallfreethem:

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:

nihilsupernum:

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:

dataandphilosophy:

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: