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LessWrong+s totally exist they're just not formalized.

In the novel "Ender's Game" there's these elite, invite-only political debates that are the only REAL source of political discussion anyone intelligent pays attention to.

Very disappointed to have reached the future and discovered Orson Scott Card was over-estimating people again.

Why can't we have nice walled gardens for advanced debate?

Even places like LessWrong are hardly exclusive - anyone can post there, it's hard to get banned, and people are biased against downvoting. There's not even a secret LessWrong+ that only invites the cream of the community to participate

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Mary Robinette Kowal says the secret is to say "modified $brandname gun", not "$brandname gun" . Then all the autists will focus their powers on explaining your gun.

speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.

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I am just now learning that Brian David Gilbert is some kind of famous? And I still can't tell for what.

It's so funny that Game Changer keeps having on guests that are incredibly iconic to the talent but because of generational gaps are literally just some guy to their much younger audience

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My feelings of urgency in finding a partner went down palpably as grocery delivery became available, because I no longer needed a romantic partner as a guaranteed errand runner while sick. I think the change in feelings might exceed the change in actual value, but it was shocking how tangible that change was.

Feels important to note I am partnered, it's not like grocery delivery + vibrator fulfilled every desire. But if I wasn't, I'd have more drive to get back out there if there was no delivery.

It seems to me that more women today than ever before are willing to be single for most of, if not their entire lives, and I'm not entirely sure of the reason. Do you think this is indeed a trend, and if so, why?

I absolutely think it's a trend that younger people in general are more willing to be single for longer periods of time or forever, and I can see a cluster of reasons for this but I think the main one is that we're getting more and more misanthropic in the sense of being afraid of forming connections with other humans. Technological changes as well as social evolution towards more fear-of-daily-occurrences-based mindsets has contributed this. We all still have our deeply-ingrained instincts towards wanting deep connections and to be in a position of taking care of someone, so a bunch of us pour all of those energies into pets, which further makes it harder to find the bandwidth to get a human significant other. (All of this is becoming a severe concern to me personally.)

As for this trend among women specifically, this is less visible to me but I can plausibly believe that women are more likely to fall into this camp of not caring to find a significant other. Reasons for this include a rise of a particular type of misandry that I don't think was prevalent before the 2010's in which men are seen as generally kind of scary and privileged in a way that affects our every move, and the fact that, while everyone a few decades ago was under more social pressure to follow the traditional path of getting married, women had more of that pressure, and maybe in trying to liberate themselves from this gendered expectation there has been some overcorrection.

(I would be very curious about how pet-ownership correlates with gender, actually. My instinct is to imagine that women are more likely to own pets and to put more energy into them, but quick googling gives mixed results.)

Of course, I don't really get why proportionately more women would prefer lifelong singleness rather than partnering with other women (bisexual-identification among women, after all, is shown to be steeply increasing nowadays).

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This comment struck a chord with me, but at the same time I know multiple dudes who only function due to the labor of their female partner.

Something that's stuck in my mind is how much "bad man" behavior is chronic illness type stuff that would be coddled and forgiven in a woman.

Shit like, "doesn't pull their weight on household tasks, constantly sleeping, or saying they're too tired to do anything but is playing videogames/watching TV/chatting with friends."

Shit like, "is unemployed/underemployed and either refused to get a (full-time/in their industry rather than low effort low pay) job while insisting they just can't work 40 hours or insisting on work conditions so specific that they're functionally unemployable."

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This feels like the kind of thing that's less different than it looks, because the phenomenon's presentation is gendered. Like how pop culture thinks men are more stoic in the face of pain and react to men's (manly expressions) of pain more strongly, despite research showing women have higher pain tolerances and complain less.

[the research I've seen focuses on female athletes and soldiers. I think this generalizes poorly, because boys are more likely to be pushed into these activities than girls. But since the bias is held by sports and military doctors treating injured girls/women, the complaint stands]

Men will get judged more harshly for not working, no dispute there. But people (in some subcultures) will say kinder words about disabled women than disabled men, while still judging a woman more for failing to keep a clean house. Doubly so if the disability is invisible.

Something that's stuck in my mind is how much "bad man" behavior is chronic illness type stuff that would be coddled and forgiven in a woman.

Shit like, "doesn't pull their weight on household tasks, constantly sleeping, or saying they're too tired to do anything but is playing videogames/watching TV/chatting with friends."

Shit like, "is unemployed/underemployed and either refused to get a (full-time/in their industry rather than low effort low pay) job while insisting they just can't work 40 hours or insisting on work conditions so specific that they're functionally unemployable."

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There are way more bones in the human body whose loss would necessitate >$1m in medical expenses than there are no-cost-to-loss bones. I might consider 1 if I was destitute, but after that it's clearly a bad plan.

I saw this question posed on tiktok, but I think Tumblr would really enjoy it too.

If a fae creature offered to give one million dollars for a bone chosen at random, how many bones would you allow them to take?

Light clarifications; The fae is not the one choosing the bones. The bone is taken at random. Each bone, no matter the size or importance, is worth a full million dollars. You must also declare the exact number first, you can't go bone-by-bone. You either say 2 or you say 10, you can't work your way up to a higher number. The bones are removed instantaneously, and the money is given immediately as well. You will not get in government trouble for acquiring the money.

Tell me in the tags/replies how many bones you'd let the fae take. And as always, reblog for bigger sample size.

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I also see Tchaikovsky used as an example. Which is dumb because Tchaikovsky is a romanization; if you wrote out "Czajkowski" Anglos would absolutely choke.

I keep thinking of those internet-brave people who say there's no excuse for mispronouncing people's names, if white people can learn Khaleesi they can learn yours. And sure, we know those now, because we heard them a lot. But the Game of Thrones audiobook reader can't say most names the same way twice, including ones that are very close to common English names. Is Petyr pronounced Peter? Like petard without the d? Peteeeeer? Patire? Every usage is a new adventure.

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I wouldn't pay for cancer treatment but I've found vets very prone to "oh well this test will be definitive" or "this treatment will definitely solve the problem" and it can be really hard to pull the plug on that process, especially if you want them to treat your other animals.

I'm a vegetarian but I don't really "get" people who get expensive medical treatments for their pets. Like. If my cat had cancer I'd be like. Bummer. Guess the humane thing to do is put her down. And I've had this cat like most of my life

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More evidence that the 90s were just as shallow and Hugh Jackman was underperforming as Woliverine

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

(that last one being especially egregious because he was supposed to be a loser nerd)

Farscape:

Hercules, who at least is supposed to look hot

Brendan Frasier

Admittedly that picture comes from an article whose title starts with "Brendan Frasier had to starve himself..."

Gilmore Girls:

Lost World (rando 1990s syndicated tv show)

and then there was the 80s:

Best fandom history commentary ever, courtesy of @tardistara

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Interesting to compare this to the "wolverine then and now" posts

Best fandom history commentary ever, courtesy of @tardistara

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I was trying to figure out who netflix Katara reminded me of and it finally clicked: ember island Katara.

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To clear up my past self's confusion (plus some context): both male and female reproductives in this species are produced parthenogenetically (without a father). This is normal for males in ants, bees, and wasps, but weird for daughters. It's especially weird that they do it for reproductives but not workers (maybe a disease thing?). It also means males never have grandchildren, so I'm not sure why they bother producing them.

This is absolutely wild.

Two populations of ants (Cataglyphis hispanica) in the deserts of Spain, the same species but separate genetic lineages. All workers are hybrids of both populations but in both cases, through social hybridogenesis the reproductive queens and males are only of one lineage or the other.

Queens of both species must mate out to produce workers (hybrids) but the workers never in turn reproduce.

They show it's been like this for a long long time!

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True smaller phones have never been tried: the iPhone mini was not that small compared to the same-number iphone. And on Android the smaller models (which are still bigger than my previous phone that was already too big) have worse technical specs than the even more giant ones. Looks like that's not true for the iphone, but it is true for iPad.

Nothing makes me more viscerally sympathetic to the "corporations decide what products people are going to want regardless of what people actually want" argument than the fact that all phones are giant tablets with no buttons. No one is making anything else, so everyone "has" to want one of those.

Except.

I really did care about this issue, so I looked into the details, and that's exactly backwards. When Motorola killed the Droid line of phones with slide-out keyboards, I went and read an interview with the product director. And he was like "yeah, I loved that feature, I really liked those phones, but we just couldn't get people to buy them."

And similarly, I'm always upset that no one is making reasonable-sized (under five inches) phones any more. But the thing is, when they do make those they can't sell them. For a long time Apple hung on with the mini line, which was the only thing that ever tempted me to do business with Apple. But they're discontinuing it because they just can't sell enough of them to justify keeping that line open—even though they have a total monopoly on the market for "small decent-quality smartphones".

These are both cases where the corporations keep trying to create demand for exactly the products I want. And it doesn't take because people authentically, organically, do not want them.

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respect for staying on task

See, I had all afternoon to work on my D&D city, and instead I spent it researching how rivers change course over time and Roman infrastructure.

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Addendum: I think the rationalists are closer to correct on personal spending than much of the rest of the world, and in particular more correct than my terminally scarcity-minded dad. The encouragement to spend more money, and to spend money on things I wasn't 100% sure would work out, have been very good for me. I object to saying that rationalists don't ever do status-driven spending, because they do and it sucks, but overall I like this equilibrium.

I guess it might still be incorrect to call it positional goods because while it will hurt your status to be frugal, it doesn't hurt anyone else's status when you spend more on yourself (except maybe by moving the average and overton window- but still nothing near normal positional goods). The only time one person's spending even arguably socially hurts another is ~excludable-spending, like hosting parties on shelling dates, and maybe funding sexy projects.

Parties are still underprovided and often badly implemented so I'm not worried about wasteful competition for those. And my only objection to competition for funding sexy projects is that sexiness doesn't track usefulness as well as I'd like.

I appreciate the existence of the Rationalist Community, because the whole point of The Sequences is that if you got it right, You Should Be Winning. And these people are actually out there, testing all these ideas. And on the whole, the thing we learn is that no, this does not really improve your win percentage by a significant amount. But occasionally they find something that does work, and I suddenly have a hundred relatively solid anecdotes to reason off of. They are very useful canaries, even if I would not want to be a canary

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I think this one is probably giving too much credit to rationalists.

Programmers have a fabulous ratio of salary:[social pressure for positional goods]. Bigtech parking lots look like they have genuine income diversity until you notice that while cars may be old or unglamorous, they never look unsafe.

Rationalists don't quite have positional goods, but many parts care about status a lot, and being frugal is low status. You don't need to buy any particular thing, but having a low threshold for buying things that might help you is considered virtuous.

While I'm complaining: I'm not saying everyone needs to know how to drive. But it would be nice if ability to drive was counted as kind of agency. But too many high status people never learned to drive, so they insist it's a non-factor.

I appreciate the existence of the Rationalist Community, because the whole point of The Sequences is that if you got it right, You Should Be Winning. And these people are actually out there, testing all these ideas. And on the whole, the thing we learn is that no, this does not really improve your win percentage by a significant amount. But occasionally they find something that does work, and I suddenly have a hundred relatively solid anecdotes to reason off of. They are very useful canaries, even if I would not want to be a canary