You're seeing this message again because we've recently updated our partners and privacy controls.
Click ‘I accept’ to agree to these updates and to allow our updated partners to access your device, set cookies, and use your data to provide relevant ads and measure their effectiveness.
Click ‘Manage Options’ to review and choose how our updated partners use your data.
I’m a fan of both of your brands of poorly-channeled-but-obviously-heartfelt rage, so let me give you a hint:
When Brazen says “nerd”, he means anyone who enjoys learning languages, or studying the composition of some rare type of asteroid, or bird-watching, or doing anything at all except playing hyper-toxic online popularity games, and so inevitably gets ground beneath the boots of the people who win those games.
When Freddie says “nerd”, he means people who have been permanently stunted by spending all their time screaming about obscure differences on Twitter, or by calling people racist for incorrectly cosplaying a character from their Hamilton-Avengers crossover mpreg fanfic - instead of ever going outside or reading a good book or having friends.
You’re not just using the word differently, but in almost opposite ways. And it’s not just a meaningless verbal difference, you actually build the underlying categories you use to think about the world in almost opposite ways.
I’ve had a couple requests on here to talk about my feelings towards comic book movies. I’m gonna try to make this as direct and simple as I can.
There are a lot of wonderful things that art made for children can do. We all have beloved books and movies that moved us as children that still move us, and I certainly would never want anyone to feel shame over continuing to access them. But there are also many things that child-appropriate art cannot do. Yes, there’s the obvious in terms of sex, violence, and language, but that’s not exactly what I mean here. I mean that there are themes and subject matter that are not typically found in art for children, even though precocious children can sometimes enjoy them. I am thinking of topics like infidelity, the meaninglessness of existence, loneliness, perversion, the pain of the absence of god, the crushing boredom of adult life, and so on. These topics matter, but both the culture and economics of art for children prevent them from being encountered there, at least in most cases.
There are aspects of the human condition that can be explored through art, that must be explored through art, that are not conducive to stories about superheroes, wizards, cyborgs, monsters, or similar. And, in those cases where such themes are explored with genre tropes, they are generally unattractive to (some would say inappropriate for) children. And so adults should look beyond art intended for children, in order to deepen their understanding of life and the world and grapple with what it means to live a mortal life in a universe without meaning.
Here I think of a film like Michael Haneke’s Amour. Among other things, it’s about the horrors of aging and the inevitability of death. These are heady topics, to be sure, and perhaps not ones that we want to expose to younger children, if only because they should probably enjoy the fact that they are blissfully unaware of these sad conditions. But adults need to access them; we need to process them, and art can help. Unless you’re unlucky, you too will grow old. You will inevitably die. So you have to do the emotional and intellectual work of coming to terms with those things, and for that reason you turn to a movie like Amour. You cannot find those things in Narnia, nor are you meant to.
Beyond the goal of art that is morally edifying is the goal of art to induce various kinds of pleasure. Different kinds of art impart different kinds of pleasure; it’s no insult to either to say that Carly Rae Jepsen and Merzbow intend to produce different feelings in their listeners. In life we have both cookies and kimchi, both lemonade and whiskey. There are, in other words, acquired tastes as well as obvious ones, and the former are some of the best stuff in life.
Now the common rejoinder is to say “do both!” And indeed - watch both, read both. I can’t complain about that. But the entire point is that people aren’t watching both. Do you know how many people consume literally nothing but superheroes, sci-fi, zombies, video games, and so on? Very, very many. And how could there not be? Any sense that we should feel embarrassed to remain fixated on art for children in existence that once existed - and I have never been convinced that it ever did - has long since been utterly obliterated in our current moment, a time when art populism manages to both be utterly commercially and critically dominant and yet cast as a perpetual underdog. Precisely because they need to be acquired, acquired tastes have a higher barrier to entry than others, and so their embrace by the public will always be more tenuous. But there are treasures there. Think of how much is lost for so many when there is no social pressure at all to try new things, new types of things.
It is no coincidence that we are all living in the digital world alongside a cadre of angry, embittered, activist nerds who rage out endlessly about all of the perceived slights against them. After all, there culture has told them to never leave their fantasies behind, so how can we be surprised that they react violently to the difference between those fantasies and their reality? That’s what all of this does, after all - it gives us an excuse to remain in the numbing bubble of fantasy, forever. Sometimes you have to force yourself outside of the comforting worlds you can find in fiction. There are people who spend their whole lives waiting for that letter to come from Hogwarts. And sometimes, when that doesn’t happen, they snap, and that’s how you get the toxicity of online fandom.
In life you should want there to be an arc to your tastes. Just as you moved on from a mac’n’cheese and popsicle diet as a child, you move on to a more varied, more complex, more challenging diet as an adult. But in art, so many people like the same things at 40 as they did at 10. That can’t be healthy. But it is understandable, in a world where the likes of Stranger Things tells you to be 10 years old forever.
Also I just don’t think comic book movies are any good, when we aren’t grading them on a huge curve. Every Avengers movie is a bloated mess. Logan was good, up until the ending. But your tastes will be different than mine. So knock yourself out. Just understand all that you might be missing, if you’re not careful.
Isn't food fortification with iodine and iron more helpful than bednets, because it raises IQ which has a positive impact on individual health and life outcomes, economic development at the population level, as well as negatively correlates with fertility rates?
This gets the heart of my problem with GiveWell, which is that often I hear about something that sounds potentially really effective, I look for it on GiveWell’s site, they’ve analyzed it to death, and their conclusion is “yes, this potentially sounds really effective, but we decided not to make it one of our top charities”, without great explanation of why.
The best I can do is this quote from the last source:
“The major unresolved issue with these charities is that GiveWell has “thus far been unable to document a demonstrable track record of impact; we believe it may have had significant impacts but we are unable to be confident in this with what we know now.” Essentially, since these charities assist governments and salt producers in iodising salt, the counterfactual impact (what would have happened if not for the charity?) is very difficult to assess.”
Whenever I reach this point, I get confused about how to deal with this lack of perfect information (see http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/08/doctor-there-ar.html ). Surely if it sounds really promising, but we don’t have perfect evidence that every step works, we should revert to our prior that it’s really promising, right?
I *think* the argument here is the same one I made about the Reverse Streetlight Fallacy a few days ago - that charities have such a bad track record of working that GiveWell’s prior is strongly weighted towards “doesn’t work” until all of the evidence comes in, even if it looks very promising.
Another argument might be that if you’re trying to raise IQ and you don’t care that much about whether the evidence is absolutely perfect, deworming might be higher expected value.
Like you, I’m a little disappointed all of this isn’t more explicit so that I can have an informed opinion on it just from reading websites and stuff.
Please do something about the subreddit (probably shutter it); the mod team has gone fucking insane. To be absolutely clear, I do not necessarily believe that you have a moral obligation to manage the subreddit; I'm basically just pleading to the skies here.
I’ve heard some complaints about the subreddit, but none of them have focused on the mod team; can you be more specific about what your concerns are?
(don’t do this unless you really want; right now I have a high prior on trusting the mods and it’s unlikely you’ll change that with standard “they banned me when I didn’t deserve it” level complaints, although if you have something worse than this by all means let me know.)
As many of you know, in my day job I’m a journalist, and one of my colleagues is covering the tumblr changes and wants to talk to anyone who has been affected, creatively or financially, by the new policy, so that we can get your story out there. If that’s you, PM me or email her at kaitlyn.tiffany@vox.com.
We pester you more about meditation because all that psychiatry can offer, despite its ambitiousness, are modest effect sizes, 1/3rd of treatment-resistant patients, low replication rates and an overwhelming confusion before we can describe and affect anything at the computational level. Rationality-guided, secular Buddhist practices are at least concerned with human suffering at the broad level and give hopes for its cessation (either through arhatship or becoming a chronic jhana junkie).
I worry this (and the post on fish-oil/bioperine earlier) are a kind of reverse streetlight fallacy. IE when we investigate things we figure out they don’t work very well, so everyone gets bored of them and interested in subjects that can’t be or aren’t investigated rigorously.
I can see a level on which this makes sense - if you have two options, 1 and 2, and 1 is definitely bad, and 2 is unknown, go with 2.
But I think there’s another level where if you have one hundred options, and you’ve investigated 1 through 99, and they all looked really promising at first, but in the end 98 of them were useless and 50 was merely okay, and now you also have a new uninvestigated option 100 that looks really promising at first, you should still have a prior that option 50 is better than option 100.
That was a terrible explanation but hopefully helped communicate what I mean? I just see this in medicine all the time, where we keep getting promised miracle cures, most of them fall apart, a few of them work sort of okay, and people ignore those and get really excited about the next potential miracle cure here. I’m not talking about homeopathy, I’m talking about the thing which has good theory behind it, is very promising, but realistically will fall apart just like everything else or work a little like everything else.
This is such a good speech by Nathan Cullen where he picks apart Justin Trudeau’s hypocrisy on democratic matters, while debating Bill C-76, the Liberal’s bill to reform the election system.
I agree with your post on Trump curbing Trumpism, but it leaves me puzzled about decision-making heuristics for consequentialists. One could argue that voting for Trump was good for public, because it showed how bad populist authoritarianism can be and ensured that public develops a deep disdain for it. I could argue that the toxic behavior of my ex was good, because otherwise hypothetical marriage and children could have ruined my life. How to navigate such backfire effects in macro and micro?
I’m mostly against doing this.
First, I might be wrong about Trump. But even if I’m right, there were many other people who were aggressive and unpopular during their own time but who as far as I can tell ended up being a net positive to their movements. FDR and Reagan seem like good examples here. I don’t think anyone is very good at predicting who will be in this category and who will be in the more Trump-ish category.
Second, even if Trump has caused a 5 pp shift away from populist attitudes and this was predictable beforehand, I think you would have to weight this against all the other potential effects of him being in power. Before his election, it wasn’t really clear if he was restrained enough not to start a great power war. Now that he’s demonstrated a tendency to concentrate on tweeting and not personally make major foreign policy decisions I’m a little less concerned; maybe there are people who could have predicted this beforehand, but I couldn’t. Progressives should also be concerned about his two Supreme Court appointments, his climate policy, et cetera. Even if I’m 100% right that Trump caused populism to lose support in a way other people wouldn’t, and even if this change is lasting, it has to be balanced against both his expected and his real downsides.
Third, making decisions like this creates weird incentives; if some candidates know you’re supporting the worst person with an ideology, in order to discredit that ideology, they will try to get worse.
I think these are important enough points that I would be very reluctant to try to make something like this happen strategically.
For a counterpoint, Nick Land believes the winning conservative strategy is to try to never win the presidency, then blame the (liberal) president for everything - see http://www.xenosystems.net/popcorn-activism/ . I think this could work, but only because Nick doesn’t really care about policy in a normal way and is just trying to maximize conservative popularity and/or lulz.
I am sort of tempted to apply something like this to Bernie Sanders, but only because I think it would be good for the country to be shifted towards a welfare state in the short-term, practical way that a president can do, and also good for socialism to be discredited in a longer-term more philosophical way. This is sufficiently weird that I don’t think it generalizes to very much else.
Blood thinning and decreasing chronic inflammation reduce two major health risks (cardiovascular stuff and cancer). Given that aspirin doesn't look promising in the light of recent studies and is dangerous for stomach, would it make sense to replace it with a combination of fish oil and curcumin-bioperine?
There’s an issue where it looks like lots of stuff should work for health, and then we test it and it doesn’t.
And some people use this to conclude “I guess we should be much more rigorous before trying anything, because the stuff we try based on mere conjecture never ends up working.”
And other people use it to conclude “Well, then let’s try this next thing!”
I think it’s *possible* to justify the second one, with some argument like “The risk is very low and I guess there’s a chance this is the one that might work”, except the risk being low is another one of those assumptions which frequently doesn’t work out.