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Jul 1, 2022Edited
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I am very interested in surrogacy. Would you happen to know of good writing related to the benefits and costs of surrogacy, preferably with an ACX-like worldview?

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Jul 1, 2022
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Do you think your preference for surrogacy over adoption would decrease with additional children, assuming you wanted more than one child?

This is what I first thought of when I began reading your sentence, 'If your interest is in policy...' I have been thinking about the likely consequences of the overturning of Roe v. Wade; thus, about who decides to adopt, when, why.

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There’s a strong feminist opposition to surrogacy.

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Jul 1, 2022
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As far as I can figure out, Scott thought he was voting for the Elizabeth Warren who wrote The Two-Income Trap (2004), not the Elizabeth Warren who became a senator nine years later. The former seems to have had a brain.

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Voting Warren is literally on Scott's Mistakes page.

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Jul 1, 2022
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> I think the real point there is that it's difficult to separate moral judgements to aesthetic preferences, and I think there's some validity to that

True. I suspect our brain uses similar mechanisms for ethical and aesthetical intuitions. In the end some things just feel wrong and it's indeed hard to distinguish whether this wrongness has moral value or not. But this is the thing, when one threads on a risky path which can so easily lead astray, it's important to be constantly vigilant. To do your best to separate these confusing entities which our brain tend to mix in the same category, being an imperfect machine it is.

And when you meet a person who knows how hard it is to separate ethics and aesthetics who is self aware enough to see in great details how his mind invents ratiolizations for some of his views and actions which are actually based on simple disgust... and who then endorses these views anyway, and refuses to do the necessary mental work to figure out what is actually ethics and what is just aesthetics - this is extremely uncanny. To me it doesn't feel like stupidity. Nor like being evil. It's some very weird brand of irrationality which let people believe that they have successfully lied to themselves.

And to be clear, I think Hanania's essay is great and I'd prefer such clear line of thought amoung conservatives much more than traditional dodging and weaving around their prejudices. It's a breath of fresh, even though, extremely uncanny air.

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Jul 1, 2022Edited
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Jul 1, 2022
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> But focusing conservatives and their disgust seems like a way of scoring points against the enemy.

I mean sure, you can look at it like that. Hanania revealed his disgust based motivation thus showed some vulnerability and his outgroup is using it to score points. Now you are comming to his defence claiming that the outgroup is even worse that they are rationalising just as much plus lack the self awareness, and now I'm countering it with whatever I'm writing in this post. And so on and on.

Personally, I find such approach fruitless. Sure, people are indeed playing such status games. But focus on this meta level too much and you'll miss the actual thing that is being talked about. Can we just smugly acknowledge that something like this, with all its signalling and counter signalling is going on in the background and talk about the objective level, instead? Not because we are some naive fools who do not understand how the game is being played, but because we are wise independent thinkers who are expecting to find interesting insight. I unironically commit to giving you lots of status points in my mind if you accept this offer.

So, what's the objective level of focusing on conservative disgust? As Hanania more or less corectly mentioned, one of the fundamental liberal ideas is that the reason people are not liberals is due to their primitive impulses such as tribalism, ignorance and yes disgust. Those impulses had their evolutionary resons but now they are mostly irrational Smart people upon reflection can combat and overcome them. And that's how we can all go in the bright future where everyone has dealt with their prejudices.

Liberals know that this is true, because we have experienced this in the first place. Well, at least liberals from the conservative countries, like myself, definetely did. We were raised with prejudices. We questioned them, we found out they were baseless, we combated our disgust and won. We used to be homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, bigots, racists and sexists and now we are not, or at least much, much less because it's always an uphil battle. And if we could, others can too.

And when we meet a conservative who claims that they "have nothing against black/trans/gay people but..." we kind of suspect that they are lying to themselves. That they just didn't do the necessary work to self reflect and grow beyond their primitive bigotry, that if they actually didn't have anything agains these people they wouldn't be persuing their policies.

I've never endoursed such suspicion very much. Like sure, my personal experience and the experience of my ingroup is pointing in this direction, but it's not very nice to think that you know other people inner lives better than themselves and it doesn't usually lead to the productive discussion. And it can be just my own biases, typical mind fallacy, strawmanning the outgroup, etc. Claiming that your opponents are rationalizing is always cheap, having strong evidence in favour of it is the hard part.

And here is a smart conservative with great self reflection validating this important liberal point, that indeed the ultimate source of his views is disgust. It's not just about scoring points in the political battle, first of all it's about the truth. It's a very important piece of evidence and I'm very glad that we have it.

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Jul 7, 2022Edited
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I do not think that, for instance, outgroup hatered that many democrats feel toward republicans is the same thing as the disgust that transphobes feel toward trasgenders. While thery are similar in many ways, the direction of causality is the opposite.

In "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup" Scott says:

> The Blue Tribe has performed some kind of very impressive act of alchemy, and transmuted all of its outgroup hatred to the Red Tribe.

I believe this alchemy worked like this: the first generation of liberals overcome their irrational disgust the way I explained. They see the bright future where everyone is enlightened and liberal. They start spreading their liberalism and it works. Until they stumble upon people who do not want to overcome their prejudices. At first it seems that these people do not understand that they can do it. So liberals try to explain it, but to no avail. It seems that these people really identify with their bigotry, they do not want the bright future, they actually hate the idea. And so, after the initial disbelief, the liberals arrive to conclusion that these weird people are the outgroup That there is no other choice than to once again return to the combatative framework. They start perseiving them this way on the intellectual level and soon their emotions adapt. And thus the outgroup hatered which can manifest very similar to disgust.

Now, it may be the case that the next generation of liberals may start hating the outgroup instinctively, before they knew the actual reasons. I'm less qualified to speak for them. But the initial direction of causality is very important, nevertheless. For conservatives its disgust->rationalisation, for liberals its intellectual exploration->disgust. And while I personally endourse neither, the second path looks more reasonable.

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I don't think that people who are not already searching for a rationalization of such views could be persuaded by this line of reasoning. It's the same old motivated cognition, essentiually, the same statement as "science is also based on faith so I can believe whatever I want", dressed in the rational aesthetics, with all the talk about evolution, percentages and irrationality, but without substance and making the same non-sequitur.

If human cognition is broken it's the reason to be extremely careful and vigilant, improving upon the broken foundation, systematically making it less broken. The idea that it somehow is a reason to embrace the outside view from hundred years ago is bizzare. People from hundred years ago were even less aware of their brokenness, and had even less tools to deal with it, their systems were even less evolved.

The same goes for using Chesterton Fence as a universal argument agains change, instead of an argument in favour of understanding the reasons of current order before improving it.

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Jul 7, 2022Edited
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The way you talked about Chesterton Fence clearly frames it as an argument againts change. Tradition is smarter than you so don't try to change them. Just follow your aesthetics which is shaped by this traditions, amoung othe things. And this is a universal argument because it can be made about any tradition, any aesthetical preference, any fence without investigating the merits of it. This may not be the way you intended to invoke the Chesterton Fence, but to the best of my understanding that's the way you did and it's a pretty common trope amoung conservative-leaning people in general.

I agree that change is inevitable and that not any change is progress. This doesn't follow that no progress is real, though. The problem that the AI risk is an example of is disproportional progress in some spheres without corresponding progress in the others. Progress is an uphill battle, which doesn't make it not real.

I don't think either of us is qualified to talk about most people and their happiness. Your numbers do not look probable to me. Last time I checked there were subcultures even for not the brightest people plus getting married and having kids was still an option. It's true that there are people who struggle with social networks in our modern, rapidly changing world and it's a valid concern. Would you say that the situation in this regard is worse than in middle ages? I don't think so.

I also find completely backwards the idea that old traditions can be of much help in this regard. They used to be helpful in the environment they were selected for. Now the environment has changed. Thus we are developping new norms, fitting the modern world. Fallback to the old heuristics isn't a viable option.

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> There were also some interesting thoughts in that article and the comments about why so few real scholars are as outraged as he or I would expect by the presence of the charlatans in their midst.

Personally, I find Hanania's take that it's due to everybody being either stupid on conformist or both, to be the least impressive part of his essay. I think that people just do not consider the things, that Hanania and probably you think are bullshit and pseudoscience, to actually be bullshit and pseudoscience. And that they actually have good reasons to think that due to current memetic climate.

Here is how it works from inside, from my own perspective. I expect some of the stuff discussed in modern social sciences to be wrong on a general principle of imperfect human cognition. Though I can't really trust my intuition to distinguish which is which. Some things that may look bizzare to me would actually be true, and some would indeed be wrong. I'm not an expert in the field and I'm not trying too hard to be one, so by default I assume that the ratio of good science to bad science is okayish in this field, of course we would like do better and all that, but probably people who are studying and researching social sciences know what they are doing, again just on priors.

Then I hear some people claim, that actually social scientists do not know what they are doing, that they are all crackpots and so on. Huge controversy is going on, and every side assumes that the other one is arguing in bad faith and can't be trusted. Being a currious rational person, I investigate what the people on the other side are talking about. And turns out that they are outraged at something completely reasonable as critical legal studies. I observe how they start huge smear campain, very resembling the way propaganda works in my own country, strawmanning and misinterpreting the facts and just in time to capitalize it into more votes in the upcomming election. This inoculates me from their position. Next time my priors will be that these people are likely wrong, but their arguments are still worth checking. And the time after that I would be even less sure about the possible merits of their arguments. At some moment I'll just start assuming that these people are wrong on priors. And those who agree with these people, well they are probably just stupid conformists or something.

I believe this process is somewhat symmetric. Polarization in the society systematically innoculates us from the other side of the discourse. And even knowing about it doesn't help much. It's not the question of individual failure as truthseeker or non-conformist. it's a systemic issue, a broken memetic equilibrium.

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Jul 1, 2022
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That's a great one. I didn't know that they were used by intellectuals; wouldn't the dangers of usage (excluding the idea of the benefits for the moment) have been high?

I personally like the idea that the growing popularity of coffee/coffee-houses did manifest an actual change in intellectual cultures (or at least, cultures of wit)

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Jul 1, 2022
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Extremely interesting, thanks. (I especially like "You've set mathematics back a month.")

There's scepticism about amphetamines today involving the idea that we're 'overstimulated' so it's good to hear that people prior the the internet also discussed similar problems anyway. I'll read more about it, since it would be interesting to know more about how young he was when he started using them (I doubt he began his mathematical career whilst on them?).

I'm personally too paranoid to try amphetamines; are there substances which you've tried which produce similar effects? I've heard some people talk about caffeine that way (obviously not a s strong), but I'm doubtful. Have you been off of them for any amount of time (e.g. a month or longer) and noticed similar? I don't know where to begin to find out more about ADHD, so I'll have a look around to see if Scott's written much about it.

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Jul 1, 2022Edited
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Thanks so much for the info!

I'm sorry you have it so severely, I know people with it really bad and I can't imagine trying to live with it unmedicated.

I also have similar experiences with coffee- a friend has recently advised me to try drinking it after meals, or with a more sugar/milk with it(?) and oddly enough it seems to help. Not sure about the sugar helping to be honest-- I've had mixed results --but definitely after eating it's much better (an Italian friend also says that's the best way to drink it).

I'm currently reading https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/17/joint-over-and-underdiagnosis/, https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/know-your-amphetamines (i'm still part way through the first so no clue if the latter two are actually related!), but from what I've read so far the issue is more that people with minor issues (or students) will do what they can to get their hands on Adderall. This would definitely explain my distorted perception of them as risky/over-prescribed, but again, knowing people who have really severe ADHD, I don't know how they functioned before medication (also it seems like over-prescription is an American thing and is much less common elsewhere).

It still strikes me as a very deep problem, and not one which leaves me confident in our current handling of it... I also wanted to look at how much it has been increasing over time, but it's still very early so I guess it's hard to tell how much of the increase is just improved diagnoses-- add to that the fact that many people get a diagnosis when they don't really need it and it gets harder to evaluate the bigger picture.

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Jul 1, 2022
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Same experience. Large doses of caffeine cause me to have a severe crash. non-XR adderall will cause a crash but its mostly me just being tired, not headache or anything.

Caffeine (up to 100mg at a time) with L-theanine avoids the crash. Therefore I default to tea for my caffeine.

I am also a programmer with ADHD (inattentive type and moderate). The meds help me get started, I think of it like getting the ball rolling. Then I fall into the groove and can get stuff done.

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Jul 1, 2022
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Thanks for responding! If you have something which works as well as you describe then that's great! I think personally I'm too worried about it affecting me in some way I can't understand/undo, but people make good use of these substances for long times, and the alternative seems much much worse. I wasn't advocating you try going without them btw, I just wanted to know what the experience was like. I was just thinking about how Erdös wasn't using them until later in his life, and was absolutely a high achiever early on in mathematics, despite his account that going without them made him 'ordinary'. I don't really know what to make of that, other than that the problems can become more pronounced as you get older? I guess I shouldn't draw too much from single cases. Thanks again

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They left this out of my son's copy of "The Boy Who Loved Math"

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Hmm, this is a bit disturbing. Have we really sabotaged our futures by making powerful brain stimulants illegal?

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Jul 1, 2022
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The Germans used them to great effect in the Blitzcrieg.

Then I guess they had to crash…

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Similarly and more recently

"The use of amphetamines in U.S. Air Force tactical operations during Desert Shield and Storm"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7661838/

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Sure.

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I think Ayn Rand was on amphetamines too! (I think they were mostly referred to as 'diet pills' back then.)

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Whilst she was a prodigious thinker and writer, the terrible judgement that she exhibited in her personal life certainly doesn't provide a good advertisement for whatever pharmaceuticals she was guzzling.

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Or at least not at the _doses_ she was using!

Scott's post about 'AD(H)D medication basically being meth' made me update towards 'there IS a plausibly/feasibly reasonable way to use these drugs safely, effectively, and with net benefits'.

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Michael Pollan wrote a book in which he explains how the Enlightenment was caused by coffee-house culture.

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And there's The Baroque Cycle book series by Neal Stephenson that has some vivid illustrations of the 'scene'!

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I hadn't realized this thought was there in Michael Pollan, but I did have this thought once in a conversation with some friends that if the rise of capitalism/enlightenment is connected with the transition from alcohol as the primary daily drink (before safe municipal water) to caffeine as the primary daily drink (boiled water is safe even if it's non-alcoholic), then there might be an interesting further change if cannabis starts displacing alcohol and/or caffeine as the primary psychoactive substance people consume.

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That's an interesting line of thought!

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I would expect cannabis to displace alcohol some - I've heard that combo described as "pissing into the wind". But I don't think cannabis will displace caffeine at all.

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There _are_ some nice 'head high' strains that are possible substitutes, at least along some dimensions, and for some people.

But mostly I think you're right that "cannabis" mostly won't displace caffeine at all.

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Another good/crazy theory is that it accounts for the decline in testosterone (and that this helps explain some things about the Amish). Of course, there are plenty of better-attested explanations for the endocrine damage we seem to be taking.

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Aha- I like that. Friends have spoken to me about pipe-smoking being less damaging because you aren't supposed to inhale -- if that's the case I wonder if it would still produce the 'beneficial' effects at all? Luttwak's solution (nicotine patches) loses some of the charm!

Endocrine disruptors --Bisphenols and so on? I recently read about (typical) shampoos and soaps having a similar effect, and with the whole plastic/micro-plastic issue & pesticides in many things it's very easy to become paranoid about 'disruptive' stuff being everywhere. Hopefully it's not as bad as that...

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Doc Huberman tells us that it's agricultural runoff and that it's everywhere, hence the what, halving of testosterone numbers and sperm counts?

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Legal amphetamine production is at an all time high. There was an American crackdown in 1970, but by 2010 it had returned to the previous peak and just kept going up.

Prescription status is a red herring.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/

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Jul 1, 2022
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I'm an ass man, and I like the song, but I like medium-sized butts.

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Shape > size. In all things.

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Agreed, a well rounded beginning with a smooth finish. Like a fine wine.

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I like fine wine and I cannot lie!

You connoisseurs can't deny!

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For sure - a finely-shaped and smoothly-textured dick is a delight to savor. We’re all gourmands here!

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Yeah! A nicely-shaped dick is the best!

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Medium-sized dicks are great, too! How nice that there are folks like us who aren’t size queens, amirite?

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Mix-a-Lot probably just helped kickstart the conversation. I think Hanania basically has it right, that the Internet "democratized" male preferences, which are much more rooted in biology than fashion, by getting past "gatekeepers" that are more influenced by fashion.

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> signing "I like big butts and I cannot lie" repeatedly in the car

You mean something like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7JaGoYdc_M&t=1m23s

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Thanks

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I suspect there may be some cross-contamination there between "big butt with a high fat percentage" and "big butt with a low fat percentage". Current fascination with big butts among the whites probably leans more to the latter (alongside with the general trend for normalization of more muscular women), while blacks (both then and now) are probably more appreciative of the former. The shift in tastes is still socially influenced, of course, but it's not quite the straightforward reversal suggested by the poster.

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Excellent point.

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LOL – damn; you all are on fire in the comments on this post :)

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Statistics on butts: a bayesian posterior

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LOL

I expect to see that in a future Rick and Morty episode :)

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O hello is this the thread where we talk about gendered body preferences? Let me be the first to declare that I’m open-minded too -I love a big dick, but a well-formed medium dick isn’t too shabby, either! Just so long as it’s in a nice, straight line. I sing about my preferred dick shapes in my car all the time! Thanks for making space for us all to talk about other people’s bodies with such candor! It sure makes me feel welcome as a woman to know that I can share my opinions about men’s bodies just as easily as you can share yours about women’s bodies.

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I get the impression you're being sarcastic, but you actually are welcome to share your dick preferences.

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Yup! :)

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I would love to read/listen-to your own alternate-lyrics version of "I Like Big Butts"! :)

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"Feminism through unionizing female college party-goers"

This is congruent with my observations about the persistence of frats (and typical complaints about them): https://jakeseliger.com/2014/02/20/if-you-want-to-understand-frats-talk-to-the-women-who-party-at-them-paging-caitlin-flanagan/.

Note the publishing date.

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I think that's further congruent with the broader points about intrasexual aggression and cartel dynamics. What the women form there is your classic cartel intended to reduce supply and increase prices - complete with the exact same PR justifications every cartel uses about how they increase public safety (where the truth usually has some more warts). But cartels are unstable because the more they succeed, the bigger the rewards for defection, and the uglier punishment of scabs has to get to keep it going.

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Really the cartel and union comparisons seem off to me, perhaps because they're not actually negotiating for anything. They're just sharing information about the best parties and agreeing to hang out together. Perhaps the frat parties will eventually improve, but so far the story seems to be that's not what's happening, the women are just working together to identify bad parties and find the best parties and then all going to them together as a huge group.

There's probably a tradeoff here between having enough women in the network to get good information about parties and having so many that they overwhelm the good parties when they show up at them. I suppose defection happens when individuals start absorbing information about parties to avoid but stop sharing information about good parties to attend.

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I think there's a little more to it than that, though, which comes out obliquely when the "union organizer" starts describing the college administrator's ham-fisted attempts to raise concerns about a social blacklist.

She's right that the administrator's out of her jurisdiction there. But it does seem like that's the actual point of leverage the "union" is trying to work. They're giving a more or less explicit ultimatum to the frats about particular partygoers: you can have us or you can have him. The idea is that it might be one thing to say "bros over hoes" when it's your friend versus one hot girl threatening to leave. But if you're faced with either throwing him out or having 35 girls all walk out at once?

So there's a real strategy there, potentially. But I suspect it's not going to work, for essentially the reason Gwern identified. An even better way of individually getting favorable treatment is to have the other 34 women walk out while you stay.

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What? No. That’s how to get gang-raped.

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Probably only in quite extreme circumstances, but I understand your point. The question is like, what's the tipping point? Maybe 1/34 feels too risky, but 5/30? 7/28?

And also, it's not like you're the only woman left at the party even in the 1/34 scenario. The Hoe Union has walked out, but there are almost certainly some other non-unionized girls still sticking around.

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I suspect that many of those girls will be looking around and saying "OK, why are there suddenly no other girls here, and should I leave as well?" I'm assuming here that having the union walk out will noticeably tilt the sex ratio.

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> What the women form there is your classic cartel intended to reduce supply and increase prices

That's certainly the concern about gender ratios. They appear to have other legitimate concerns that I don't think should be put in that framework, such as the clause about girls being allowed to prepare their own drinks.

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Yeah - admittedly my college had no frat scene but what kind of bizzaro-world party has a "no you may not make your own drink" rule?

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I was confused as to why the hoe union won't attend parties that have a gender ratio.

Women don't enjoy sausage parties, surely?

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That's sort of tautological, though, insofar as "sausage party" is slang for an event that's male-dominated in a way that's lame and uncool and unappealing to women.

Women looking to go out and talk to guys they're attracted are absolutely prepared to enjoy parties oversupplied with attractive guys and undersupplied with female competition. What they're trying to avoid are parties where the gender ratio has been manipulated so as to assure the lowest-appeal dude in attendance a strong chance of getting laid.

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This might be kind of what you're saying, but I'm thinking the possibility of finding a party that's oversupplied with attractive guys is very much a secondary concern. I'd say the primary one is the signal that a highly aggressive approach to gender ratios sends.

Men in this age bracket who are throwing a party are typically going to have two main goals, at varying levels of priority: (1) have fun and (2) get with girls. The girls want to attend parties where (1) is a strong priority over (2), in which the guys might even be open to meeting new male friends. The more the men act like elephant seals defending their harems in response to the possibility of male competition showing up, the more clearly the party is prioritizing (2).

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Right, because how dare those subhuman ugly males desire to get laid.

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I am 100% in favor of literally everybody desiring and achieving getting laid. I'm not endorsing anything about what the hoe union does, just explaining my sense of what they're likely optimized for.

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Speaking as a guy who was good friends with a few women in high school and college, I read that as wanting to avoid parties where the frat tries to block male friends from attending.

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This article seems to imply that women have no reason to want to attend a party other than getting laid. This seems deeply silly, and also like the sort of fallacy this crowd in particular might fall into.

To spell it out: in addition to various sexual desires, many college students have a deep and abiding need to get drunk in crowds of people even if there is zero chance that they'll have sex as a result. Parties may be a means to obtain sex, sometimes, but they are also much more than that. "That's where the party's at" is not code for "that's where the dick is," and the author of this article is bragging about listening to women while also radically misinterpreting their words to fit his priors.

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"Furthermore, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities."

That seemed to be about 70% of the appeal of joining a fraternity when I was in college in the mid '00's. Good link.

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On the one hand, the "hoe union" makes sense economically -- it's kind of the modern version of the Lysistrata gambit. On the other hand, though, the implicit assumption appears to be that companionship, party attendance, and perhaps even sex (with men, at least) is merely a valuable commodity that women have available for trade. No sane woman would ever hang out with men just for fun, after all; it's just a big chore.

To be fair, this specific Twitter post does not go nearly that far, but I think it is still an example of feminism objectifying women -- or, at least, dehumanizing them in an effort to homogenize them.

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You can be unionised and still inherently enjoy what you do. I don't see actors or plumbers as being homogenised and dehumanised.

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The situation seems to be that there are multiple party options, or at least potential party options, and they are strategically leaving one to go to another. This doesn't require any such implicit assumption.

An analogy might be to famous athletes who wear branded (for example) sneakers. The athletes don't view wearing sneakers as a chore - they would greatly prefer to wear sneakers when playing their sport than dress shoes or no shoes at all. But they recognize that the sneaker company also benefits, and they can use that as leverage to get something else. The fact that there are multiple sneaker companies is crucial here.

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I joined a fraternity partly in order to have more sex. I never got laid thru the fraternity. Neither did anyone in my pledge class, so far as I know. We threw lots of wild house parties, and sometimes there was sex there, but as far as I know, it was only ever between people who'd already paired up beforehand.

We didn't throw parties to get sex; we threw parties to pay the rent. You can't easily fill your house with hundreds of drunk undergraduates and then sneak off to your bedroom for sex. You're busy the whole time. The main way people get laid at parties is to meet someone there AND THEN LEAVE WITH THEM. You can't leave when it's your party. You have to stay to the bitter end, kick out the drunks who refuse to leave, try to figure out where to put the ones who've fallen asleep, and maybe clean up some vomit before falling asleep. That's if the party isn't broken up or raided by the police.

Sorority parties were another matter. They didn't typically throw open parties; they'd invite one fraternity over for a party. But they weren't orgies. Most sisters didn't expect, nor I think want, to get laid /during/ a party. They might like to meet someone. But it seemed to me that most women went to or hosted such parties in order to party, maybe to try to be the center of attention, but not so much to get laid.

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I banged my head against this -- and this was ages ago, but still -- in college debates about frats. The bad actors connected to frat parties are almost invariably not brothers, but free riders who can skate if the party gets shut down.

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It's a bit of a tangent, but could you explain how throwing parties helped pay the rent? was there a door charge?

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Yes. The key is to buy really cheap beer, in balls or kegs.

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This was an especially excellent link Roundup!

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Agreed, must have been an interesting month :)

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Yes, thank you Scott!

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Some civil engineers build down.

University of Minnesota Civil Engineering Building. One floor up. Seven down.

https://www.minnpost.com/stroll/2015/09/seven-stories-down-u-building-serves-tribute-minnesota-experimentalism/

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What's your summary for why it made sense (if it did) for that building specifically?

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It turned out to be a bad idea. The plan was not fully baked. The article covers some of the problems they ran into after construction. The system to bring outdoor daytime light to the lower level never really panned out for one thing.

There was a location on the lowest floor where mirrors brought an image of street view down. Only one person at a time could use it though. They called it an ectosope I believe. That hardly redeemed the project.

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Thanks! I added the article to my read-later queue; curious about the details of the failures!

Reminds me of thinking about, e.g. 'how _would_ dwarves in Middle Earth engineer their homes/fortresses/mines underground' :)

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Point #6 is unworthy of your excellent writing. We cannot have a book review by someone who states definitively that he has not read the book.

I purchased "sadly, Porn" due to the wonderful article on ACT about it. Quoting second hand sources is one of the problems with modern liberalism.

Please, please please from a Fan Boi ? Don't do it. You're my only hope Astral Codex-Wanobi

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I think it's less of a book review and more an interesting essay in its own right that uses my review as a jumping-off point to talk about something which is interesting and (IMHO) in fact relevant to the book.

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It's possible I discounted it.

And - obviously it's your blog

Your rules.

However, if it's a comparison between 2 archetypes and he hasn't read the first then it's not even trying to "control" inputs. It's just poor journalism then. Don't we enjoy enjoy enough of this Already ?

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It's not claiming to be journalism, it's the personal blog of a fiction writer.

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It's an extremely basic point - how can one comment on a book one has not read? And substack is a paywall - it's modern journalism wether he considers himself a fiction writer or book reviewer.

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Since you ask: Pierre Bayard, "How to talk about books you haven't read", Bloomsbury.

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LOL

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That book changed my life. What a fascinating, illuminating insight into the power of literature and its place in a modern culture increasingly oriented towards immediacy and excess.

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> how can one comment on a book one has not read?

It's easy. Andrew Gelman had the last word on this here ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2010/07/02/the_moral_of_th/ )

> I can’t really criticize the guy for slamming my book without having read it. After all, I think the autobiography of Uri Geller and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are almost certainly full of crap, but I haven’t ever read a page of either.

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One could comment on its quality as firewood

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I appreciate Nelson's honesty about not liking being sneered at. At the same time, the harshness of Teach's Lacanian universality is what makes his work challenging. Softening his "everyone and yes that includes you, probably by nature" to Auden's "only some people, and probably due to recent changes" deprives it of piquancy and strength. We may all hope that this is more accurate.

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Agree. I've found Sadly, Porn deeply challenging to read and to reveal deeper truths about my own motivations. I believe that's where it is such a compelling book - and it would be very hard to summarise it. Scott did a great job.

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Peacefully merging some African countries could be good, but isn't DR Congo still an epic basket case, though with less war now?

The others can do better!

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Also, re: the African Space Program - the Zambian Space Program is worth reading about too https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-zambian-afronaut-who-wanted-to-join-the-space-race

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Not sure Burundi and South Sudan are better. But at least without the DRC the East African Union won't reach the western coast of Africa.

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DRC doesn't have good access to the sea anyway. AFAIK most of their exports go through other countries.

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A national government will have a hard time voting for its own dissolution and I'm not convinced it would help (except, as low-hanging fruit, Moldovans should consider Greater Romania). The East African countries might risk having this be an all-or-nothing proposition, while the European countries took it one treaty at a time and the sum of these decisions created a large power bloc with free travel and a currency.

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I'm fairly certain the facemorphed Senators is fake.

Here's an actual facemorph of all Democrats in Congress vs. all Republicans in Congress,

https://ychef.files.bbci.co.uk/1600x900/p05k91jb.webp

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171018-this-is-the-face-of-the-average-american-politician

The BBC does include Representatives as well as Senators, but I don't think that can entirely explain the difference. At minimum, I'd expect to see the 32% of Democratic Senators who are women to have *some* influence on the overall features.

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