For those diagnosed with Autism or something similar as adults - did anything change for you after the diagnosis? Was is positive or negative?
I highly suspect both my partner and I are on the spectrum, but the general advice I hear from people is that it's best not to find out, as not to give yourself excuses for your behavior or make it part of your identity. But wouldn't it also feel like a weight off your shoulders to know that you're not just bad at certain things, and make it easier to build a support network? Can't you still strive to overcome your shortcomings after you find out the cause?
I was pretty glad when my therapist pointed me there. A lot of my experiences made sense in hindsight. It didn't occur to me that I might use it as an excuse for shortcomings. The superpower aspect was tainting and it took some time for me to get down to earth. Having my love at my side helped a lot, starting to consider Hitler a fellow aspie, too. A man has responsibility for his words and actions, neurotypical or not.
I was found to have ADHD in my early twenties and did not go on medication; while my situation is different, there are parallels.
Some people describe a moral relief about past experiences upon receiving the label, but I didn't feel that way. It has been incredibly valuable to understand how my limitations relate to one another and to the rest of my life. I've often (though certainly not always) been able to pick my battles. I've made life choices to avoid talking on responsibilities I couldn't have fulfilled; sometimes that's been painful, but it's also been wise. I can make day by day decisions that are better informed than they would have been otherwise.
One of the important realizations that come with this is that you have limitations you can work around but will never grow beyond or train your way out of. You can and should develop coping strategies and improve your environment to be friendlier to those limitations. It's a more prudent goal, and it requires understanding, not just effort.
Some people will categorize this as making excuses and making the disorder part of your identity. But acknowledging the facts does not make you responsible for creating them, and targeting your efforts where they will do good is not the same as abandoning them. As a practical matter, you should be careful how often you bring up the disorder in conversation with most of your friends and family to avoid overwhelming them.
So I highly recommend being evaluated. If you're right, it will help you to know; if you're mistaken, it's good to know that too. You're better off working from a deeper understanding of reality as it is.
> Can't you still strive to overcome your shortcomings after you find out the cause?
Sure, and then you fail every time, and then you drop out of school, and then you contemplate suicide for a decade. Fun times!
...Look, who cares? It's not a weight off your shoulder because you are, in fact, bad at those things. No amount of effort is going to fully make up for that deficiency. But if you're able to survive regardless, who cares, right? Gotta work with what you have.
Does anyone know what happened with CA Prop 34 and the AHF? Did they comply? Are they challenging it? I can't find any news since the election about it.
Anyone have experience switching from Concerta to Vyvanse or something else for their ADHD? Concerta is just not working for me anymore.
Related, anyone know a good Telehealth ADHD provider who will be significantly cheaper than the $350 my current one wants to see me for 15 minutes and prescribe something else?
Have heard a bunch of 1st hand 'didn't like previous med, moved to Vyvanse, love it' stories. Vyvanse worked for me from day 1, so I never tried the others.
I like the slow release element. Doesn't build addiction/dependency (for me) because the hit is not noticeable. I only notice the effect a couple of hours in. I skip meds on alternate days to be sure I am not becoming dependent on them. There's a noticeable difference in productivity at adhd-adversarial tasks between both days.
Psychs are expensive, esp,. if not covered by insurance,
I don’t have a suggestion for an ADHD telehealth provider, but I do have a suggestion about the situation as a whole. The fee you’re paying is standard for high-end providers in big coastal elite cities. A lot of providers who charge this much actually do have special expertise, and if you have a complicated problem, or have failed to respond to the standard drug treatments it is worth seeing one of these pricey people if you can afford it. If your situation is simpler, though, I think a much better approach is to study up on the options, decide what you want to try next, and then go to some standard unpretentious practitioner and ask for it. So long as you are not asking for something non-standard, they will probably give it to you. If you search in Psychology Today, or go through your PCP, you can often find nurse practitioners or physician assistants who prescribe psych meds. Their fees are much lower than you are paying and most take insurance.
When I say study up on ADHD meds, though, I really mean study up. If you’re going to try to supplement the deficiencies in our medical system by using self-education, you have to be a good student. Asking GPT4 is not a bad way to gather basic info, though it is a good idea to ask for its sources and check any that cover crucial points. You should ask for info about significance of your med failing after a period of working, what’s the recommended fallback (there’s an algorithm), pros and cons of different ADHD meds (success rate, side effects, possible dangers to health), research findings, consumer ratings, whether there are currently shortages of various meds.
Oh, and one other thing. Sometimes tweaking dose schedule of a med gets it working. Have you tried that with your current med? Switch from time release to regular, or vice versa, changing dosing schedule, can make a big difference — though I presume your expensive doc has had you try all that.
I'm an undergraduate student in statistics. I'm graduating in about a year and considering my options re: going to grad school.
One thing I've noticed is that at nearly every Statistics PhD program I look at, the overwhelming majority of the student body is international students, primarily from East Asia. Often the American students will be 10% of the student body. I have absolutely no problem going to school with international students, but I am curious why the ratio is so skewed. What are all the American undergrads doing? Are the international students just better at math and therefore getting all the spots in the programs? Are American students going straight into the workforce?
Not really an aswer to your question but maybe of interes to you. Physicians rely heavily on study results in their decisions and most of them don't grok statistics, like not at all. I'm not much better and prefer to be careful. A business model of pharmaceutic companies seems to be to make failed scientists who know a bit about statistics sell their products to doctors.
Many if not most international students view higher education as a path to permanent settlement in the US(this applies to all the other Western countries as well). Very few move with solely education in mind.
Are American students going straight into the workforce?
Yes.
It is the same in all scientific programs. Also, fwiw, the dropout rate among Americans was much higher than among internationals when I was in grad school. It is much easier to quit when things get rough when you can just get a job. For most internationals, getting a PhD is the only path to a job, unless you can marry an American.
I have a mental model of NY resolutions being a mental tool for avoidance, i.e., the purpose of it is to feel ok not doing the thing that one resolves to do. So I’m kind of surprised? to see you having some?
Unless these are only for the purpose of replying to the OP.
A friend rather startled and impressed me on Boxing Day with the revelation that his resolution for 2024 had been to read a short story every day. Five days later, he reported successful completion.
It's a familiar view that good resolutions are positive not negative. My best one was the slightly nebulous "to become more knowledgeable about Italian wine". But the short story triumph eclipses anything else I've seen.
No these are real, though not exactly NY resolutions. They are the main items in a list I made 10
days ago when I began a 2
week vacation. I made this list because I have had a strong feeling for the past few months that too much of my life is in disarray, and I am neglected the projects I would benefit from the most. I never make New Year’s
resolutions and very rarely make lists like this. I started on the first 3 items already, and think I will
probably stick with them and do the other stuff on the list because of being motivated by dread of the disorganized feeling returning.
I have decided that New Year is the worst possible time to try to make resolutions, at least for me.
Why? Because I'm out of my routine. I'm away from work for a couple of weeks, I'm in a different place, and all the usual frictions and problems in life are missing. It's easy to pile up a whole bunch of big plans in conditions like these, only to realise once you get back to the taxing, repetitive routine of everyday life that these plans are stupid, impractical, and not actually in line with your true priorities.
If you want to stick to your resolutions, make them on the 23rd of January, when you're back to being your usual day-to-day self.
Sasha Gusev posted an interesting article about the polygenic liability threshold model. "Our intuitions break down and can lead to misconceptions about familial risk or how quickly a condition will be selected out of the population. Let’s look at how polygenic conditions are modeled and the implications for multi-generational patterns."
I found the model to be attractive to my prejudices — and my academic experience (way back in the dark ages) when I was looking at HLA distributions in human populations as a probable response to historical plagues. I located a couple of studies on Google Scholar where the authors claimed a PLT model couldn't explain the data (a paper on sex differences in autism rates and a paper on heart disease, CVD, and Type II diabetes in Korean populations). In the pro-PLT model camp, I found a meta-study that implied that a PLT model worked for the observed data for 8 psychiatric disorders. Gusev was kind enough to respond to my questions on his substack...
But worth reading if you're interested in heritability and gene expression.
A question in the middle of a new year's eve: are there différence between right and left-handed people with regard to driving cars (eg: more or less accidents, shorter or longer time to learn to drive, etc), and if there are, are they reversed in Britain and other countries that drive on the left of the road?
Directly from a point of manual dexterity, there should not be a difference. With a manual transmission (and cars where the driver sits on the left), you use you right hand to change gears, but this hardly seems a major cause of accidents.
You could argue that brain differences which cause left-handedness also cause a difference in accident statistics, but I think this effect is certainly small. Likely, you will be dominated by confounders, for example men are more likely to be left-handed, and there is likely some sex difference for accidents in whatever direction.
Pure anecdata, but FWIW I'm right-handed, my wife is left-handed, we both learned to drive on the left, but have spent the last few years traveling and driving on both the right and left - and neither of us notice any difference once readjusted to a given side.
I dove down an Internet rabbit hole for you. There were a bunch of studies done in the 1980s that suggested left-handers had more car accidents (I couldn't find any of them online, though). There was some pushback in the 1990s that suggested these studies had issues with sampling errors, etc. ChatGPT said there were meta-studies that it claimed showed that left-handed drivers experience more accidents was a myth. It admitted that it couldn't give me any links when I prompted it. The one meta-study I looked at didn't actually say that. The data was more ambiguous. So, YMMV.
I'm familiar with two stated goals: the denazification of Ukraine & returning Ukraine to Russia.
I don't believe the first one because Nazism does not appear to be a problem in Ukraine, so for it to merit an invasion seems extremely implausible. My own anecdotal evidence comes for having met many Ukrainians without detecting Nazism.
The second is probably my crux: my understanding is that Ukraine became an independent state following the dissolution of the USSR. It may have had close ties with Russia since then, but it did so as an independent entity. But Russian appears to be stating that that was never true, that Ukraine had never been granted independence. I fail to see how this version can be true given that Ukraine is recognized as an independent state by other states, in a way that, for example, Belarus isn't.
It seems it's a big gamble on Russian side to try and prove that the latter interpretation is true.
"Nazism does not appear to be a problem in Ukraine,"
Yeah, it...very much does appear to be a problem in Ukraine, and it has for some years now. In the military, in the government, and, to the extent that society continues to tolerate it, in society.
This is not to say, of course, that Putin's "denazification" rationale for the invasion isn't horseshit.
No it doesn’t. Please stop spreading despicable Russian lies. There’s a small number of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just like there’s in any other country, including Russia. Last time an ultra-nationalist party ran for parliament there it received 2% of the vote.
Unlike the Jew who ran for president in 2019 and received some 70% of the vote. Some Nazi country you have there.
Both Belarus and Ukraine are universally recognized as independent countries, outside of Russia. They were even both founding members of the United Nations and had voting rights (meaning that the Soviet Union effectively had three votes in the General Assembly rather than one).
"Nazi" is an almost meaningless word these days, so I rarely take it seriously unless someone is actually embracing the regime that governed Germany between 1933-1945, but for the Russian political establishment it seems to refer to Ukrainian nationalists in general, so what they're really asking for is a purge of all the nationalists from Ukrainian political life. (As a start). Which is clearly not something Ukraine is going to accept.
on the other hand, the Ukrainian state (and this is a problem with the dictatorial government and the nationalist fringe, not ordinary people) just appointed a neo-nazi as their UN ambassador
Russia is absolutely using the issue as an excuse for land-grabbing but don't be in denial; there's something very wrong with a country where Bandera is an official hero and scum like Andriy Melnyk get chosen to represent the government abroad
Other than his comments about Bandera, it does not appear that Andriy Melnyk subscribes to any neo-Nazi beliefs. It would be odd, if he did, that he would serve under a Jewish leader.
Only Russians hell-bent on finding something “wrong” about Ukraine consider Bandera a “Nazi” - but use this word as “people we don’t like” anyway. Bandera refused to cooperate with actual Nazis and was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, FFS.
Basically anytime Russians call someone a Nazi outside of discussing WWII they should be ignored.
Ukraine was officially recognized as an independent state *by Russia*, until Putin decided otherwise. Propagandists don't care whether the things they say are true.
True. When pressed, Putin claims "Since 2014 (the revolution of dignity), Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine it was when those treaties were signed." - Is Russia the same?
Curious to hear other people's thoughts and anecdotes regarding the recent rise in prudishness. Is it just an American thing? Am I imagining it?
And if it is real, what's driving it (other than folks becoming more conservative on average)?
Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I see a rising consensus that boobs and butts aren't funny, and if you make jokes about them you need to "grow up". Most recently I saw the latest x-rated Jackbox game getting slaughtered in the steam reviews for it's lewd content.... which is a tad baffling. What did they think they were buying? Same with negative reviews for the film "Poor Things". Despite all of the commentary, people just couldn't seem to get past "but it has SEX in it!"
Bonus thought: Would Game of Thrones still be as popular as it was if it came out today? Or would the same people be riling against it's "sickening portrayal of incest"?
> Bonus thought: Would Game of Thrones still be as popular as it was if it came out today? Or would the same people be riling against its "sickening portrayal of incest"?
Er, yeh? Incest is popular on porn sites. At least the step version of it is.
The era is strange. I Was watching the original Italian job with my gen Z niece (and others from her college class) the other day.
She enjoyed it except for the sexism and the misogyny prevalent in the era. (1969). Of course what she sees as sexism - the Michael Caine character having sex with about a dozen women on release from prison as a gift from his girlfriend - that era saw this as sexual liberation. That’s not the kind of thing you would see in 1951, after all, the then liberated mind would think itself modern and open minded.
The door was closed during that sex scene ( although Caine walked out looking disheveled and a bit wobbly on his feet to indicate that it was a heavy session) but these days you can pop online to see any version of that you wanted. And multiple other types of orgies.
The same Gen Z who despise the objectification of women behind closed doors are fans of sex workers, and porn, the ideology that tut tutted page 3 girls, and racy posters at work is happy with the clear objectification of sex workers.
It's actually pretty simple. I already said this below, but, they don't approve of the objectification at all and will typically frequently shit all over the consumers of porn. The thing is that approximately all the girls currently working in the porn industry are Gen Z; as such, they exhibit solidarity with "their own" which makes it forbidden to criticize the performer, her activities, tastes etc. An analogue here is the way that you can't criticize a girl for liking older men, BUT at the same time any age gap over like 4 years makes the man a pedo to be reviled, abusing the poor girl whose tastes, however, are sacrosanct. Although this also cracks occasionally, e.g. in the case of that girl who slept with 100 guys in one day recently, the break is always in the same direction, namely casting the Gen Z girl involved as a victim. All this fits hand in glove with feminism's general victimization... ethos? so it's worked out pretty frictionlessly for the online shitlib.
> I already said this below, but, they don't approve of the objectification at all and will typically frequently shit all over the consumers of porn.
I don’t see that in the real world. Maybe online. The niece is pro sex worker and pro porn ( in as much as I can ascertain as I don’t pursue the subject) but anti objectification.
Maybe it's a reaction against an increase in general disorder?
I think I'm seeing this in the NYC subway. After the pandemic, it was a hot mess. People smoking in the cars, kids going wild, teens blasting music on their phones. Lots of people wearing sweat pants, pajamas even.
Now I'm seeing more people wearing suits or dressed up smart casual than ever before. I think that maybe its a message, "yeah, everythings a mess, but I have my shit in order here. _Im one of the adults_"
“The Modern Girl with the lipstick and the cocktail is as much a rebel against the Woman's Rights Woman of the '80's, with her stiff stick-up collars and strict teetotalism, as the latter was a rebel against the Early Victorian lady of the languid waltz tunes and the album full of quotations from Byron: or as the last, again, was a rebel against a Puritan mother to whom the waltz was a wild orgy and Byron the Bolshevist of his age. Trace even the Puritan mother back through history and she represents a rebellion against the Cavalier laxity of the English Church, which was at first a rebel against the Catholic civilisation, which had been a rebel against the Pagan civilisation. Nobody but a lunatic could pretend that these things were a progress; for they obviously go first one way and then the other. But whichever is right, one thing is certainly wrong; and that is the modern habit of looking at them only from the modern end. ”
All human civilizations have had to deal with the fact that the selfish genes contained within sperm cells want to penetrate the ovum of anything that will accept them. ¹
America is no exception to this rule however, rather than sticking with things that have worked (different roles for the genders and monogamy being the main two) America is a perpetual revolution machine based upon a vitimhood merit system.
This keeps Americans in a constant state of ethical confusion as they swing from pillar to post and back again every 70-80 years.
The brilliance of it lies in a near universal sentiment in believing our own generation to be wiser than earlier generations, thus generating an ethos of disrespect for one's elders, especially one's parents. ²
I'm sure you can fill in most of the cause/effect details on your own.
Euros and other CANZUKS accuse Americans of being prudes. Asians and Africans accuse Americans of being degenerates. Both sides claim Americans are prudes/sluts unlike the "rest of the world". Americans just cant win lol.
Yeah, I take it back. We tried the new Jackbox naughty pack tonight and it was so much worse than the bad reviews made it out to be. Even if you're into lewd humor it's like having chat GPT make a bunch of edgy jokes that fall flat or don't make any sense. Avoid at all costs.
I mean, it's not as crazy as it sounds. The actual problem is that the pack has three games for $20 and they're not particularly good. ...Though, Fakin' It still does make for some good content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CTiVJ9Yof0
What's there to say? Love is dead, and people are already having their fill of sexual fulfillment on their own time. It should be mentioned that pornography is a tricky industry to make money in, simply due to how picky people's tastes are, far more so than any other type of entertainment. So... don't be surprised when people aren't happy about some unprompted sex scene. It's just awkward.
> It should be mentioned that pornography is a tricky industry to make money in, simply due to how picky people's tastes are, far more so than any other type of entertainment.
Why do you say this? Aylo group (pornhub, redtube, youporn, brazzers, etc) makes like $400M a year. Only Fans prints billions a year in revenue *and* income, just the *founder* makes a billion every 3 years in income.
As far as I knew, porn is a great business to be in. What I don't understand is why there aren't a zillion OF clones trying to snipe them, with margins and founder income like that.
Sure, the marginal consumer is worth a lot less than the marginal FB or GOOG user (by roughly 10-20x), but they still seem to do okay?
...Well yes, the distributors are doing fine, obviously, but that's the case for the entire media industry. And you don't see any competition because it's impossible to compete with these entrenched monopolies unless you already own a bunch of high value content that you can remove off of your competitors service and host on your own service, like what happened with streaming. It also makes no sense to compete because, as you said, the profitability is way worse than other fields, and also the government and credit card companies are becoming a lot more hostile lately.
...Anyways, getting off topic here. I was talking about the people actually making the content, not the distributors. Not only do you have to deal with the same problems that other fields are dealing with, mostly that there's just too much competition that's provided for literally free, but you also have to deal with just how god damn picky people are with their porn. And you can't accrue the clout that, say, a music artist would be able to acquire, since people will be too embarrassed to publicly associate with you. AND you still have to deal with credit card companies trying to screw you, even if you're operating independently.
I think it's over-exposure. Sex is in everything and everywhere. All kinds of every interaction you can think of (heterosexual anal sex is now mainstream, not sure what the next crossover from porn will be).
And just like having too much chocolate will make you slightly sick and not want any more chocolate, then having sex in everything from the moment you can open your eyes means that "this doesn't need sex in, can we avoid it?" is the reaction against "all boobs and butt all the time!"
I think it's not so much prudishness as indigestion.
It's capitalism writ large – as long as something sells, it has to be strip-mined, so to speak, until it doesn't. See also enshittification, recommendation algorithms, ever-fractalling remakes/sequels/superhero flicks, large tracts of pop music, and of course large sugared drinks in New York.
Still, successfully executing generational aversion therapy to sex itself is an impressive feat even by the standards of Monopoly Man.
It's real, and what's driving it is probably Gen Z being exposed to internet porn from a young age. It seems this produces two reactions as the kids come of age: disgust or full-blown whoring. Since Gen Z are currently in or approaching the prime porn-producing years (18-28) generational solidarity means they've made a carveout for "sex workers" being "valid" and forbidden to criticize (although oddly the consumers are fair game somehow, some sort of Nordic Model thing going on there), but the flipside of the agreement is they feel that sex should not be anywhere else BUT Onlyfans.
I do think it is over-saturation. Teenagers (hell, even adults) have enough anxieties around love and sex and romance and dating and the rest of it. Now they're swimming in porn since they're eight years of age, and they have imbibed the notion that they have to be up to all the tricks and performances of professional whores.
No wonder that they're turning away from sex. How can a 14 year old live up to that standard of "I have to be able to act like the men/women on screen because that's what sex is really like, and if I fail, I'll be forever alone and despised"?
It's a bit long, but the summary sections are easy to read and it's mostly appendices that go into detail about how they evaluate each of the studies they are meta-reviewing.
- fluoride in water appears naturally in many places;
- about 60% of Americans get fluoridated tap water. The federally recommended dose is 0.7mg/L, and actual quantities range from 0.7-1.2 mg/L;
- water fluoridation definitely and massively helps reduce cavities (somewhere between 25-60% decrease in cavities);
- at > 2x recommended levels, there's consistent evidence of small IQ decreases in children and not much else;
- at recommended levels, there's no indication of risk of basically any kind. This is partly due to the lack of studies at the lower range (most studies measure outcomes at 2mg/L or higher).
Sweet. I see that Auckland lowered it's target to 0.7 in 2016 (although up to 1.0 before it alarms) so I can continue to feel vaguely miffed that I can't easily get fluoride-free water for the kids but looks harmless enough to not actually do anything about it.
I use absurdly small quantities of adult toothpaste (smaller than the "grain of rice" recommendation) and am encouraging spitting as they get old enough, I should really work out how much additional dosage this comes to.
Thank you, this was illuminating. I guess I’ve been lucky with my dentists so far. The current one keeps telling me there’s a spot on a molar, but “we’ll just keep an eye on it”. We’ve kept an eye on it for several years now.
Good question. I don't know, but a priori id assume fake cavity diagnosis is invariant to water fluoridation. You could argue that dentists in unfluoridated areas are more likely to falsely diagnose cavities, but that seems like a really weird correlation and I'd need hard data to show that's the case
Thanks that worked! I think the study he's talking about is broadly aligned with the nih meta analysis linked above. There's really very little effect at levels recommended in the US.
First, to be on the same page about numbers, it looks like the adjusted beta of fluoride to iq is roughly -2, i.e every 1mg/L increase above 2mg/L leads to -2 IQ pts drop. At around 1.5mg/L there's questionable evidence of a 0.5-1 IQ drop, and at lower levels than that there seems to be no observable difference in IQ.
To answer your question, all of this is dose dependent, not absolute. If someone drinks twice as much water they may be getting twice as much fluoride in absolute terms, but it doesn't matter because it gets diluted the same amount and flushed out the same amount. The real risk is actually if your kids are getting fluoride that's more concentrated -- for example, if they were eating adult toothpaste. Use kids toothpaste, it has lower fluoride levels.
RIP President Jimmy Carter. My mother was appointed by him to a high-ish federal position (below cabinet level) and always had a high regard for him.
His general historical reputation as POTUS is not strong, and all things considered I can't disagree. Reading this recent attempt at a positive revisionist history of the man
("His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life" by Jonathan Alter, 2020)
did add to my sense of Carter as a good and interesting and really-gutsy person; but the author's arguments for him being an underrated POTUS were overall unconvincing. Considering all aspects of the jobs Carter would have been a better Congressional leader than he was a president.
With all that said -- I am old enough to remember clearly what 11 to 13 percent inflation was like for non-wealthy families, and also how much things like retail banking and phone companies and freight shipping and airlines _sucked_ if you weren't rich enough to pay staff to deal with them. Therefore I hope this Reason writeup on Carter gets some circulation. It remains an irritation how much his immediate successor gets credit for two very important positive things that in fact Carter was the key leader on and knowingly took the heat to get done: deregulating various hidebound industries, and taking a sledgehammer (whose name was Paul Volcker) to the 1970s stagflation cycle.
A friend found some antique mannequins in Monterrey, Mexico, he wants to buy and has this idea he can drive from Texas to Mexico to pick them up. I told him he's crazy to make such a drive through Mexico. Even assuming he made the drive safely, he'd still have to deal with getting the merchandise across the border back into the US.
From a logistics perspective, what's the best way one could get this legal, relatively heavy merchandise from Mexico into the US? My guess is if he paid to have it shipped in a straightforward fashion it would cost a fair amount, at least as much as he thinks he's saving by purchasing it cheaply in Mexico. What do others think? It's only a few hundred dollars in merchandise but weighs maybe 200 pounds.
An additional risk coming up is of some border-closing type presidential executive orders being issued the afternoon of January 20th. A lot of US universities have issued formal warnings to foreign-born students and faculty to "be back here by January 19th." No one knows exactly what will be issued along those lines or what specific impacts such orders may have, but there is a strong expectation of something. Will it impact US citizens, who knows.
And whatever the new president does sign may be litigated in the courts for a while, also who knows. Still though -- the potential immediate hassle/chaos factor for anybody, citizen or no, trying to cross the border back into the US seems meaningful. And perhaps the fact of carting a bunch of unusual merchandise will ratchet that risk up some more as Border Patrol staff are trying to apply in practice whatever the new president has issued?
Nit: ``formal warnings to foreign-born students and faculty" - I think you mean foreign, not foreign-born. Foreign = is not a US citizen. Foreign born = was not a US citizen at the time of birth. The distinction is not merely pedantic, since roughly one in ten US citizens is foreign born (meaning that they acquired their citizenship through naturalization rather than birth), and on many university faculties that fraction will be well North of 10%. (There is also the category of `native-born foreigners,' meaning people who were US citizens at the time of their birth but are not now, who would also be covered by the warnings, although that category is small enough in number as to be ignorable for conversational purposes).
-- some of Trump's core supporters would also like to start rolling back some naturalizations (I'm personally acquainted with one such individual and through him have learned that there are more.) But that does seem for now to be a fringe view not gaining real traction.
-- an executive order could attempt to shut the border temporarily on an emergency-response basis, a la "we need to shut the whole thing down for a while and figure out what's going on". That would certainly be challenged in court, and perhaps with bills in Congress too, on behalf of US citizens crossing the border. But while those processes were playing out for however long there could be real headaches for everybody. Put it this way: no member of my extended family of native-born citizens is going to risk being outside of the US on January 20th, including the ones who voted for Trump.
I know US citizens who make the drive down to Guadalajara area (big retirement communities down there) and down to little retirement communities along the coast in La Paz (down in Baja) frequently. I don't know if there are areas people avoid, but people have been doing it safely for years. Watch for speed traps if you get off the highway. They like to ticket speeding Americans (by their plates). A friend got a ticket and had to detour to city hall to pay it. Paying the ticket (bribes) to the officer is no longer common from what I hear.
I rember a (now deceased, bless his soul) friend of mine telling how he got into some tight situation in Mexico which was solved by someone saying: "Esta aleman." But I'm not sure having a german driver would help much nowadays.
I worked with some Mexicans until about a year ago, and one of them had a couple of trucks attempt to force him to stop (while he had his family with 'im) on the way down; the other's brother-in-law had the same thing happen, but didn't manage to bust a U-turn in time & got kidnapped for ransom. He was held for about a week, the ransom was paid, and they let him go ("and even paid for a burner phone so he could call for help once they dropped him off in Juarez!"¹—but coworker said that that doesn't always happen; he had a cousin or something that similarly called about a ransom, but then never called again to give directions re: where to take/send the $$, and never showed up again; that was about five years ago—still missing to this day).
They said that a) driving in a nice vehicle makes it more dangerous (first guy above had a new SUV; unrelated, but he was also a massive douche & the only person I ever worked with there whom I could never get on side), and b) probably if you're white you're safer, especially if you're not going into less-frequented-by-tourists-y areas—"they don't want the U.S. to freak out, nor to lose the tourist $$, since the cartels have fingers in all such pies".
(IIRC, anyway. Maybe they said that white people are in MORE danger—this WAS years ago, heh—but I THINK I'm remembering correctly... the first guy was headed somewhere I don't recall—very well might have been Monterrey, come to think of it—and the second's brother-in-law had been headed to a village in Guanajuato.)
-------------
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(¹: or wherever, but I think it was Juarez. he said they stuck him on a bus with some other captives & everyone had to put their original cells in a bag, at which point the devices were disappeared)
Gemini was slightly helpful. The script has a little going for it, but not much:
Title: Plastic Ladies
Logline: Two down-on-their-luck antique dealers hatch a bizarre scheme to smuggle antique mannequins from Mexico into Texas, only to find themselves entangled with eccentric collectors, suspicious border patrol agents, and the surprisingly fragile nature of vintage fiberglass.
Characters:
Burt: A fast-talking, perpetually optimistic Texan antique dealer, prone to outlandish schemes.
Ernesto: A more cautious, world-weary Mexican antique dealer, Burt's reluctant partner.
Agent Ramirez: A sharp, by-the-book border patrol agent with a dry sense of humor.
Madame Evangeline: An eccentric, wealthy collector of vintage mannequins, obsessed with their "silent stories."
Scene 1:
INT. DUSTY ANTIQUE SHOP - DAY
Burt's shop is cluttered with junk. He's trying to sell a chipped Elvis bust to a disinterested customer.
BURT
(Smoothly)
…and this, my friend, is a genuine piece of rock and roll history. Touched by the King himself! (Whispers) Probably.
The customer leaves. Burt sighs. Ernesto enters, looking worried.
ERNESTO
Burt, I have found them. The mannequins. They are… magnificent.
BURT
(Eyes lighting up)
The French ones? The Art Deco darlings?
ERNESTO
Older. Much older. From a closed-down department store in Guadalajara. Full figures. Beautifully painted. But… getting them across the border…
Scene 2:
EXT. US-MEXICO BORDER - NIGHT
A beat-up van, driven by Ernesto, approaches the border crossing. Burt is nervously sweating in the passenger seat. Hidden amongst old furniture are several carefully wrapped mannequins.
AGENT RAMIREZ
(Deadpan)
Purpose of your trip?
BURT
(Forcing a smile)
Just bringing some… personal belongings. You know, furniture. Stuff.
Agent Ramirez circles the van, tapping the side.
AGENT RAMIREZ
That's a lot of "stuff." Smells like… old perfume. And fiberglass.
Scene 3:
INT. MOTEL ROOM - NIGHT
Burt and Ernesto carefully unpack a mannequin. Its painted face is eerily lifelike.
BURT
(Admiringly)
Look at her. A real beauty. Madame Evangeline is going to flip.
Suddenly, the mannequin’s head falls off.
ERNESTO
(Exasperated)
Burt! You are handling her like a sack of potatoes!
Scene 4:
INT. MADAME EVANGELINE’S MANSION - DAY
Madame Evangeline's mansion is filled with mannequins in various poses. She examines one of Burt's mannequins with a magnifying glass.
MADAME EVANGELINE
(Whispering)
She has seen things… things we can only imagine. The silent stories she holds…
She offers Burt and Ernesto a large sum of money.
Scene 5:
EXT. HIGHWAY - DAY
Burt and Ernesto are driving back to Texas, much richer. They argue about what to do with the money. Suddenly, they see Agent Ramirez’s patrol car in the rearview mirror. A high-speed chase ensues, with mannequins bouncing around in the back of the van.
Ending:
The ending could go several ways:
Burt and Ernesto are caught, but their story becomes a local legend.
They escape, but the experience has taught them a lesson (maybe).
They successfully deliver the mannequins, but a new, even more bizarre opportunity presents itself.
Themes:
The allure of the past.
The pursuit of the American Dream (or a variation thereof).
Throw in Agent Ramirez thinking he's busting a sex-trafficking ring (though that might be a bit iffy to pull off in a comedy) and that Madame Evangeline is the madame of the brothel the 'girls' are being trafficked to, and the big reveal that it's actually amazingly life-like mannequins and not real women will be hilarious.
Probably right, a quick check on DHL (https://www.dhl.com/mx-en/home/get-a-quote.html) had shipping a pallet that weighed 150kg was going to be about $1500 US for air freight. Certainly much less for going by ocean but they wouldn't give an online quote for that.
Sometimes, when rating a film on IMDb, I give either 1 or 10 stars—not my honest rating—to maximally steer the average toward what I think it should be.
Has anyone explored the dynamics of what happens if everyone always votes maximally or minimally to steer the average toward their desired value? Does this behavior have a name? I couldn’t find anything in a quick search.
I’ve done some thinking myself, and Monte Carlo simulations show a surprisingly low average deviation (around 0.6*/10 stars) between the steering equilibrium and the honest average when the population is split into a few distinct groups with different preferences, and then a stochastic generator spits out a new voter with probabilities ~ sizes of groups. It’s relatively straightforward to calculate where the vote would settle mathematically in this case.
If the groups appear in some order instead of being evenly mixed, this strategy favors the last group extremely heavily.
But even in an evenly mixed population, 0.6* isn’t 0, and I wonder if the golden rule would imply I should never do this for stable ratings (e.g., films). For dynamic things like restaurants, though, steering seems reasonable since their quality changes over time, and faster convergence to the “true” value might help everyone.
• 0.6 value obtained with GPT-o1 generated code without unit testing or reviewing the code.
Thats how I vote for office. Dont have to agree with the candidate as long as they are steering the balance of power within that particular govt to my preferred point.
> Sometimes, when rating a film on IMDb, I give either 1 or 10 stars—not my honest rating—to maximally steer the average toward what I think it should be.
But you don't.
The average of what people think this movie is worthwhile in points stays the same. You said it yourself: not your honest rating. You just do something to deceive people about that average.
Well, what makes *you* the expert on what the 'true' value should be? If it's very bad or very good, be it a movie or a restaurant, people will agree on that.
It's the "I liked it/I didn't" cases that are where the discussion comes in, and if you are trying to steer the score downwards because "I didn't like this movie", you are not really any better than the guy giving it 10/10 because he likes explosions, or the guy giving it 1/10 because the women didn't have big enough tits.
I read this when it was first posted and forgot to save it. I didn't realize it was posted on theschism; I thought it was older than maybe posted on the original /r/SSC subreddit.
Thanks for digging it up!
E: I actually think I am not going crazy; this theschism post is I think adapts an older CWR post that specifically mentioned a bus, not a car, and there were more short stories, and the replies added even more. The search continues!
I really dont think there was an older one. Ape mentioned the idea a bit before, but I remember him presenting this to me as an expansion, and never a mention of an ealier version. Also this one already has a bus in #3-6. And have you considered just asking in the comments of that post?
That would (at least in the limit of a large number of votes, assuming people see the current average before they vote) give as output the median rating instead of the mean, but the distribution of results would be less informative than if people voted honestly. If you're voting on an actual policy, I could understand this extreme-vote behaviour, but when giving ratings, I don't see why you would want the outcome to reflect your view enough to make you want to vote in an unhelpful way.
I believe people should vote honestly; that provides the maximum signal.
One solution might be to weight people's votes dependant on how well spread their voting distribution is. Anything from a flat distribution to a bell curve is reasonable. Votes from people who only use the extremes shouldn't count for much because it's effectively a simple like/dislike.
If the voting population can be divided into distinct subgroups with distinct preferences that is extremely useful information for the target audience - if it's basically 'all' personal preference, a population average is basically worthless.
I rather believe some odd poll results where some large portion of population seems to hold an extreme-ish view on whatever subject is specifically the result of this sort of minmax /thumb-on-scale answering.
For those diagnosed with Autism or something similar as adults - did anything change for you after the diagnosis? Was is positive or negative?
I highly suspect both my partner and I are on the spectrum, but the general advice I hear from people is that it's best not to find out, as not to give yourself excuses for your behavior or make it part of your identity. But wouldn't it also feel like a weight off your shoulders to know that you're not just bad at certain things, and make it easier to build a support network? Can't you still strive to overcome your shortcomings after you find out the cause?
I was pretty glad when my therapist pointed me there. A lot of my experiences made sense in hindsight. It didn't occur to me that I might use it as an excuse for shortcomings. The superpower aspect was tainting and it took some time for me to get down to earth. Having my love at my side helped a lot, starting to consider Hitler a fellow aspie, too. A man has responsibility for his words and actions, neurotypical or not.
I feel like I went to see a doctor about a warm forehead, and was diagnosed with a fever.
wow. thanks mr expert. very science.
I was found to have ADHD in my early twenties and did not go on medication; while my situation is different, there are parallels.
Some people describe a moral relief about past experiences upon receiving the label, but I didn't feel that way. It has been incredibly valuable to understand how my limitations relate to one another and to the rest of my life. I've often (though certainly not always) been able to pick my battles. I've made life choices to avoid talking on responsibilities I couldn't have fulfilled; sometimes that's been painful, but it's also been wise. I can make day by day decisions that are better informed than they would have been otherwise.
One of the important realizations that come with this is that you have limitations you can work around but will never grow beyond or train your way out of. You can and should develop coping strategies and improve your environment to be friendlier to those limitations. It's a more prudent goal, and it requires understanding, not just effort.
Some people will categorize this as making excuses and making the disorder part of your identity. But acknowledging the facts does not make you responsible for creating them, and targeting your efforts where they will do good is not the same as abandoning them. As a practical matter, you should be careful how often you bring up the disorder in conversation with most of your friends and family to avoid overwhelming them.
So I highly recommend being evaluated. If you're right, it will help you to know; if you're mistaken, it's good to know that too. You're better off working from a deeper understanding of reality as it is.
> Can't you still strive to overcome your shortcomings after you find out the cause?
Sure, and then you fail every time, and then you drop out of school, and then you contemplate suicide for a decade. Fun times!
...Look, who cares? It's not a weight off your shoulder because you are, in fact, bad at those things. No amount of effort is going to fully make up for that deficiency. But if you're able to survive regardless, who cares, right? Gotta work with what you have.
Does anyone know what happened with CA Prop 34 and the AHF? Did they comply? Are they challenging it? I can't find any news since the election about it.
Just finished "Firewatch" a great game, about 5 hours of play time and $2 during steam sale.
Love this one, it's such comfort food.
Anyone have experience switching from Concerta to Vyvanse or something else for their ADHD? Concerta is just not working for me anymore.
Related, anyone know a good Telehealth ADHD provider who will be significantly cheaper than the $350 my current one wants to see me for 15 minutes and prescribe something else?
Haven't switched, but am on Vyvanse right now.
Have heard a bunch of 1st hand 'didn't like previous med, moved to Vyvanse, love it' stories. Vyvanse worked for me from day 1, so I never tried the others.
I like the slow release element. Doesn't build addiction/dependency (for me) because the hit is not noticeable. I only notice the effect a couple of hours in. I skip meds on alternate days to be sure I am not becoming dependent on them. There's a noticeable difference in productivity at adhd-adversarial tasks between both days.
Psychs are expensive, esp,. if not covered by insurance,
I don’t have a suggestion for an ADHD telehealth provider, but I do have a suggestion about the situation as a whole. The fee you’re paying is standard for high-end providers in big coastal elite cities. A lot of providers who charge this much actually do have special expertise, and if you have a complicated problem, or have failed to respond to the standard drug treatments it is worth seeing one of these pricey people if you can afford it. If your situation is simpler, though, I think a much better approach is to study up on the options, decide what you want to try next, and then go to some standard unpretentious practitioner and ask for it. So long as you are not asking for something non-standard, they will probably give it to you. If you search in Psychology Today, or go through your PCP, you can often find nurse practitioners or physician assistants who prescribe psych meds. Their fees are much lower than you are paying and most take insurance.
When I say study up on ADHD meds, though, I really mean study up. If you’re going to try to supplement the deficiencies in our medical system by using self-education, you have to be a good student. Asking GPT4 is not a bad way to gather basic info, though it is a good idea to ask for its sources and check any that cover crucial points. You should ask for info about significance of your med failing after a period of working, what’s the recommended fallback (there’s an algorithm), pros and cons of different ADHD meds (success rate, side effects, possible dangers to health), research findings, consumer ratings, whether there are currently shortages of various meds.
Oh, and one other thing. Sometimes tweaking dose schedule of a med gets it working. Have you tried that with your current med? Switch from time release to regular, or vice versa, changing dosing schedule, can make a big difference — though I presume your expensive doc has had you try all that.
This is all very valuable and useful feedback, thank you very much for putting the time in to write it up
I'm an undergraduate student in statistics. I'm graduating in about a year and considering my options re: going to grad school.
One thing I've noticed is that at nearly every Statistics PhD program I look at, the overwhelming majority of the student body is international students, primarily from East Asia. Often the American students will be 10% of the student body. I have absolutely no problem going to school with international students, but I am curious why the ratio is so skewed. What are all the American undergrads doing? Are the international students just better at math and therefore getting all the spots in the programs? Are American students going straight into the workforce?
Not really an aswer to your question but maybe of interes to you. Physicians rely heavily on study results in their decisions and most of them don't grok statistics, like not at all. I'm not much better and prefer to be careful. A business model of pharmaceutic companies seems to be to make failed scientists who know a bit about statistics sell their products to doctors.
Many if not most international students view higher education as a path to permanent settlement in the US(this applies to all the other Western countries as well). Very few move with solely education in mind.
Are American students going straight into the workforce?
Yes.
It is the same in all scientific programs. Also, fwiw, the dropout rate among Americans was much higher than among internationals when I was in grad school. It is much easier to quit when things get rough when you can just get a job. For most internationals, getting a PhD is the only path to a job, unless you can marry an American.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
ACX PERSONAL RESOLUTIONS IN ALL CAPS, GO:
RESET MY SLEEP SCHEDULE!
(Seriously - getting enough sleep is *the most* effective mental health intervention I have ever tried. Nothing else comes close.)
OK, I’ll play.
-refresh my memory of calculus
-publish, on a blog?, some fruits of my interactions with AI — favorite images and verbal exchanges that turn grotesque
-make & experiment with a toy model of a neural net
-go see the horrifying waves in Nazare
-break habit of being late
-do some clever rearranging of stored money
-(and also, I guess, disobey demands for all caps)
I have a mental model of NY resolutions being a mental tool for avoidance, i.e., the purpose of it is to feel ok not doing the thing that one resolves to do. So I’m kind of surprised? to see you having some?
Unless these are only for the purpose of replying to the OP.
A friend rather startled and impressed me on Boxing Day with the revelation that his resolution for 2024 had been to read a short story every day. Five days later, he reported successful completion.
It's a familiar view that good resolutions are positive not negative. My best one was the slightly nebulous "to become more knowledgeable about Italian wine". But the short story triumph eclipses anything else I've seen.
No these are real, though not exactly NY resolutions. They are the main items in a list I made 10
days ago when I began a 2
week vacation. I made this list because I have had a strong feeling for the past few months that too much of my life is in disarray, and I am neglected the projects I would benefit from the most. I never make New Year’s
resolutions and very rarely make lists like this. I started on the first 3 items already, and think I will
probably stick with them and do the other stuff on the list because of being motivated by dread of the disorganized feeling returning.
I have decided that New Year is the worst possible time to try to make resolutions, at least for me.
Why? Because I'm out of my routine. I'm away from work for a couple of weeks, I'm in a different place, and all the usual frictions and problems in life are missing. It's easy to pile up a whole bunch of big plans in conditions like these, only to realise once you get back to the taxing, repetitive routine of everyday life that these plans are stupid, impractical, and not actually in line with your true priorities.
If you want to stick to your resolutions, make them on the 23rd of January, when you're back to being your usual day-to-day self.
Sasha Gusev posted an interesting article about the polygenic liability threshold model. "Our intuitions break down and can lead to misconceptions about familial risk or how quickly a condition will be selected out of the population. Let’s look at how polygenic conditions are modeled and the implications for multi-generational patterns."
I found the model to be attractive to my prejudices — and my academic experience (way back in the dark ages) when I was looking at HLA distributions in human populations as a probable response to historical plagues. I located a couple of studies on Google Scholar where the authors claimed a PLT model couldn't explain the data (a paper on sex differences in autism rates and a paper on heart disease, CVD, and Type II diabetes in Korean populations). In the pro-PLT model camp, I found a meta-study that implied that a PLT model worked for the observed data for 8 psychiatric disorders. Gusev was kind enough to respond to my questions on his substack...
But worth reading if you're interested in heritability and gene expression.
https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/what-happens-to-heritable-conditions
A question in the middle of a new year's eve: are there différence between right and left-handed people with regard to driving cars (eg: more or less accidents, shorter or longer time to learn to drive, etc), and if there are, are they reversed in Britain and other countries that drive on the left of the road?
Directly from a point of manual dexterity, there should not be a difference. With a manual transmission (and cars where the driver sits on the left), you use you right hand to change gears, but this hardly seems a major cause of accidents.
You could argue that brain differences which cause left-handedness also cause a difference in accident statistics, but I think this effect is certainly small. Likely, you will be dominated by confounders, for example men are more likely to be left-handed, and there is likely some sex difference for accidents in whatever direction.
Pure anecdata, but FWIW I'm right-handed, my wife is left-handed, we both learned to drive on the left, but have spent the last few years traveling and driving on both the right and left - and neither of us notice any difference once readjusted to a given side.
I dove down an Internet rabbit hole for you. There were a bunch of studies done in the 1980s that suggested left-handers had more car accidents (I couldn't find any of them online, though). There was some pushback in the 1990s that suggested these studies had issues with sampling errors, etc. ChatGPT said there were meta-studies that it claimed showed that left-handed drivers experience more accidents was a myth. It admitted that it couldn't give me any links when I prompted it. The one meta-study I looked at didn't actually say that. The data was more ambiguous. So, YMMV.
That's actually a good question!
I'm familiar with two stated goals: the denazification of Ukraine & returning Ukraine to Russia.
I don't believe the first one because Nazism does not appear to be a problem in Ukraine, so for it to merit an invasion seems extremely implausible. My own anecdotal evidence comes for having met many Ukrainians without detecting Nazism.
The second is probably my crux: my understanding is that Ukraine became an independent state following the dissolution of the USSR. It may have had close ties with Russia since then, but it did so as an independent entity. But Russian appears to be stating that that was never true, that Ukraine had never been granted independence. I fail to see how this version can be true given that Ukraine is recognized as an independent state by other states, in a way that, for example, Belarus isn't.
It seems it's a big gamble on Russian side to try and prove that the latter interpretation is true.
"Nazism does not appear to be a problem in Ukraine,"
Yeah, it...very much does appear to be a problem in Ukraine, and it has for some years now. In the military, in the government, and, to the extent that society continues to tolerate it, in society.
This is not to say, of course, that Putin's "denazification" rationale for the invasion isn't horseshit.
No it doesn’t. Please stop spreading despicable Russian lies. There’s a small number of neo-Nazis in Ukraine, just like there’s in any other country, including Russia. Last time an ultra-nationalist party ran for parliament there it received 2% of the vote.
Unlike the Jew who ran for president in 2019 and received some 70% of the vote. Some Nazi country you have there.
Both Belarus and Ukraine are universally recognized as independent countries, outside of Russia. They were even both founding members of the United Nations and had voting rights (meaning that the Soviet Union effectively had three votes in the General Assembly rather than one).
"Nazi" is an almost meaningless word these days, so I rarely take it seriously unless someone is actually embracing the regime that governed Germany between 1933-1945, but for the Russian political establishment it seems to refer to Ukrainian nationalists in general, so what they're really asking for is a purge of all the nationalists from Ukrainian political life. (As a start). Which is clearly not something Ukraine is going to accept.
On the one hand, your anecdotes
on the other hand, the Ukrainian state (and this is a problem with the dictatorial government and the nationalist fringe, not ordinary people) just appointed a neo-nazi as their UN ambassador
Russia is absolutely using the issue as an excuse for land-grabbing but don't be in denial; there's something very wrong with a country where Bandera is an official hero and scum like Andriy Melnyk get chosen to represent the government abroad
Other than his comments about Bandera, it does not appear that Andriy Melnyk subscribes to any neo-Nazi beliefs. It would be odd, if he did, that he would serve under a Jewish leader.
Only Russians hell-bent on finding something “wrong” about Ukraine consider Bandera a “Nazi” - but use this word as “people we don’t like” anyway. Bandera refused to cooperate with actual Nazis and was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, FFS.
Basically anytime Russians call someone a Nazi outside of discussing WWII they should be ignored.
Ukraine was officially recognized as an independent state *by Russia*, until Putin decided otherwise. Propagandists don't care whether the things they say are true.
True. When pressed, Putin claims "Since 2014 (the revolution of dignity), Ukraine is no longer the Ukraine it was when those treaties were signed." - Is Russia the same?
Curious to hear other people's thoughts and anecdotes regarding the recent rise in prudishness. Is it just an American thing? Am I imagining it?
And if it is real, what's driving it (other than folks becoming more conservative on average)?
Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I see a rising consensus that boobs and butts aren't funny, and if you make jokes about them you need to "grow up". Most recently I saw the latest x-rated Jackbox game getting slaughtered in the steam reviews for it's lewd content.... which is a tad baffling. What did they think they were buying? Same with negative reviews for the film "Poor Things". Despite all of the commentary, people just couldn't seem to get past "but it has SEX in it!"
Bonus thought: Would Game of Thrones still be as popular as it was if it came out today? Or would the same people be riling against it's "sickening portrayal of incest"?
> Bonus thought: Would Game of Thrones still be as popular as it was if it came out today? Or would the same people be riling against its "sickening portrayal of incest"?
Er, yeh? Incest is popular on porn sites. At least the step version of it is.
The era is strange. I Was watching the original Italian job with my gen Z niece (and others from her college class) the other day.
She enjoyed it except for the sexism and the misogyny prevalent in the era. (1969). Of course what she sees as sexism - the Michael Caine character having sex with about a dozen women on release from prison as a gift from his girlfriend - that era saw this as sexual liberation. That’s not the kind of thing you would see in 1951, after all, the then liberated mind would think itself modern and open minded.
The door was closed during that sex scene ( although Caine walked out looking disheveled and a bit wobbly on his feet to indicate that it was a heavy session) but these days you can pop online to see any version of that you wanted. And multiple other types of orgies.
The same Gen Z who despise the objectification of women behind closed doors are fans of sex workers, and porn, the ideology that tut tutted page 3 girls, and racy posters at work is happy with the clear objectification of sex workers.
This is hard to explain, so I don’t bother.
"This is hard to explain, so I don’t bother."
It's actually pretty simple. I already said this below, but, they don't approve of the objectification at all and will typically frequently shit all over the consumers of porn. The thing is that approximately all the girls currently working in the porn industry are Gen Z; as such, they exhibit solidarity with "their own" which makes it forbidden to criticize the performer, her activities, tastes etc. An analogue here is the way that you can't criticize a girl for liking older men, BUT at the same time any age gap over like 4 years makes the man a pedo to be reviled, abusing the poor girl whose tastes, however, are sacrosanct. Although this also cracks occasionally, e.g. in the case of that girl who slept with 100 guys in one day recently, the break is always in the same direction, namely casting the Gen Z girl involved as a victim. All this fits hand in glove with feminism's general victimization... ethos? so it's worked out pretty frictionlessly for the online shitlib.
> I already said this below, but, they don't approve of the objectification at all and will typically frequently shit all over the consumers of porn.
I don’t see that in the real world. Maybe online. The niece is pro sex worker and pro porn ( in as much as I can ascertain as I don’t pursue the subject) but anti objectification.
Anyway it’s highly inconsistent.
Maybe it's a reaction against an increase in general disorder?
I think I'm seeing this in the NYC subway. After the pandemic, it was a hot mess. People smoking in the cars, kids going wild, teens blasting music on their phones. Lots of people wearing sweat pants, pajamas even.
Now I'm seeing more people wearing suits or dressed up smart casual than ever before. I think that maybe its a message, "yeah, everythings a mess, but I have my shit in order here. _Im one of the adults_"
I like that thought. Besides dressing up, there is posture and way of movement of course, which is harder to fake.
“The Modern Girl with the lipstick and the cocktail is as much a rebel against the Woman's Rights Woman of the '80's, with her stiff stick-up collars and strict teetotalism, as the latter was a rebel against the Early Victorian lady of the languid waltz tunes and the album full of quotations from Byron: or as the last, again, was a rebel against a Puritan mother to whom the waltz was a wild orgy and Byron the Bolshevist of his age. Trace even the Puritan mother back through history and she represents a rebellion against the Cavalier laxity of the English Church, which was at first a rebel against the Catholic civilisation, which had been a rebel against the Pagan civilisation. Nobody but a lunatic could pretend that these things were a progress; for they obviously go first one way and then the other. But whichever is right, one thing is certainly wrong; and that is the modern habit of looking at them only from the modern end. ”
- G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1933.
All human civilizations have had to deal with the fact that the selfish genes contained within sperm cells want to penetrate the ovum of anything that will accept them. ¹
America is no exception to this rule however, rather than sticking with things that have worked (different roles for the genders and monogamy being the main two) America is a perpetual revolution machine based upon a vitimhood merit system.
This keeps Americans in a constant state of ethical confusion as they swing from pillar to post and back again every 70-80 years.
The brilliance of it lies in a near universal sentiment in believing our own generation to be wiser than earlier generations, thus generating an ethos of disrespect for one's elders, especially one's parents. ²
I'm sure you can fill in most of the cause/effect details on your own.
______________________
¹ https://youtu.be/gztT47LlpUg
² https://youtu.be/CNgEnnCJTAc
Every 70-80 years, in America? How many swings have there been? Has the frequency varied? Weak data, I guess.
Euros and other CANZUKS accuse Americans of being prudes. Asians and Africans accuse Americans of being degenerates. Both sides claim Americans are prudes/sluts unlike the "rest of the world". Americans just cant win lol.
>the latest x-rated Jackbox game
Wait, they did WHAT? The Quiplash guys went full porn, what the hell were they thinking?!
Yeah, I take it back. We tried the new Jackbox naughty pack tonight and it was so much worse than the bad reviews made it out to be. Even if you're into lewd humor it's like having chat GPT make a bunch of edgy jokes that fall flat or don't make any sense. Avoid at all costs.
I mean, it's not as crazy as it sounds. The actual problem is that the pack has three games for $20 and they're not particularly good. ...Though, Fakin' It still does make for some good content. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CTiVJ9Yof0
Seeing that they used Ren And Stimpy-style animations for it, no it's definitely as crazy as it sounds.
...That's not new, Fakin' It is a game from an existing pack. They just made a version of it that's horny.
I enjoyed Ren and Stimpy back in the day. That does not mean I want to see Ren and Stimpy porn.
Though somebody out there probably does. Ouch.
Anyway, Happy New Year to you all while I go get a dose of brain bleach to clean that mental image out of my mind!
And kept the deliberately ugly children's entertainment animations.
What's there to say? Love is dead, and people are already having their fill of sexual fulfillment on their own time. It should be mentioned that pornography is a tricky industry to make money in, simply due to how picky people's tastes are, far more so than any other type of entertainment. So... don't be surprised when people aren't happy about some unprompted sex scene. It's just awkward.
> It should be mentioned that pornography is a tricky industry to make money in, simply due to how picky people's tastes are, far more so than any other type of entertainment.
Why do you say this? Aylo group (pornhub, redtube, youporn, brazzers, etc) makes like $400M a year. Only Fans prints billions a year in revenue *and* income, just the *founder* makes a billion every 3 years in income.
As far as I knew, porn is a great business to be in. What I don't understand is why there aren't a zillion OF clones trying to snipe them, with margins and founder income like that.
Sure, the marginal consumer is worth a lot less than the marginal FB or GOOG user (by roughly 10-20x), but they still seem to do okay?
...Well yes, the distributors are doing fine, obviously, but that's the case for the entire media industry. And you don't see any competition because it's impossible to compete with these entrenched monopolies unless you already own a bunch of high value content that you can remove off of your competitors service and host on your own service, like what happened with streaming. It also makes no sense to compete because, as you said, the profitability is way worse than other fields, and also the government and credit card companies are becoming a lot more hostile lately.
...Anyways, getting off topic here. I was talking about the people actually making the content, not the distributors. Not only do you have to deal with the same problems that other fields are dealing with, mostly that there's just too much competition that's provided for literally free, but you also have to deal with just how god damn picky people are with their porn. And you can't accrue the clout that, say, a music artist would be able to acquire, since people will be too embarrassed to publicly associate with you. AND you still have to deal with credit card companies trying to screw you, even if you're operating independently.
I think it's over-exposure. Sex is in everything and everywhere. All kinds of every interaction you can think of (heterosexual anal sex is now mainstream, not sure what the next crossover from porn will be).
And just like having too much chocolate will make you slightly sick and not want any more chocolate, then having sex in everything from the moment you can open your eyes means that "this doesn't need sex in, can we avoid it?" is the reaction against "all boobs and butt all the time!"
I think it's not so much prudishness as indigestion.
Much agreed. Boobs'n butts are funny as they have ancient memetical weight. Any meme can be overplayed.
It's capitalism writ large – as long as something sells, it has to be strip-mined, so to speak, until it doesn't. See also enshittification, recommendation algorithms, ever-fractalling remakes/sequels/superhero flicks, large tracts of pop music, and of course large sugared drinks in New York.
Still, successfully executing generational aversion therapy to sex itself is an impressive feat even by the standards of Monopoly Man.
It's real, and what's driving it is probably Gen Z being exposed to internet porn from a young age. It seems this produces two reactions as the kids come of age: disgust or full-blown whoring. Since Gen Z are currently in or approaching the prime porn-producing years (18-28) generational solidarity means they've made a carveout for "sex workers" being "valid" and forbidden to criticize (although oddly the consumers are fair game somehow, some sort of Nordic Model thing going on there), but the flipside of the agreement is they feel that sex should not be anywhere else BUT Onlyfans.
I do think it is over-saturation. Teenagers (hell, even adults) have enough anxieties around love and sex and romance and dating and the rest of it. Now they're swimming in porn since they're eight years of age, and they have imbibed the notion that they have to be up to all the tricks and performances of professional whores.
No wonder that they're turning away from sex. How can a 14 year old live up to that standard of "I have to be able to act like the men/women on screen because that's what sex is really like, and if I fail, I'll be forever alone and despised"?
I spent some time reading about water fluoridation. I know a few folks here were curious about what the latest research says on the matter.
I think the best resource on the impacts of fluoridation on cognition is this NIH monograph: https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/fluoride_final_508.pdf
It's a bit long, but the summary sections are easy to read and it's mostly appendices that go into detail about how they evaluate each of the studies they are meta-reviewing.
There's also an earlier 2006 review about a broader set of effects here: https://www.actionpa.org/fluoride/nrc/NRC-2006.pdf
Key takeaways:
- fluoride in water appears naturally in many places;
- about 60% of Americans get fluoridated tap water. The federally recommended dose is 0.7mg/L, and actual quantities range from 0.7-1.2 mg/L;
- water fluoridation definitely and massively helps reduce cavities (somewhere between 25-60% decrease in cavities);
- at > 2x recommended levels, there's consistent evidence of small IQ decreases in children and not much else;
- at recommended levels, there's no indication of risk of basically any kind. This is partly due to the lack of studies at the lower range (most studies measure outcomes at 2mg/L or higher).
Scott previously wrote about this here (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/obscure-pregnancy-interventions-much#%C2%A7activated-alumina-water-filter-tier) -- @Scott would be curious to know if your opinion on the subject changed at all in the last ~2.5 years.
I wrote up a longer thing about water fluoridation and how we should think about societal defaults here: https://theahura.substack.com/p/societal-defaults
in case the more political angle is also interesting to people
Sweet. I see that Auckland lowered it's target to 0.7 in 2016 (although up to 1.0 before it alarms) so I can continue to feel vaguely miffed that I can't easily get fluoride-free water for the kids but looks harmless enough to not actually do anything about it.
I use absurdly small quantities of adult toothpaste (smaller than the "grain of rice" recommendation) and am encouraging spitting as they get old enough, I should really work out how much additional dosage this comes to.
I have heard that the majority of cavities are fabricated by dentists to sell fillings. How sure are we that the cavity data is correct?
This sounds unbelievable, as in ‘I don’t believe it’. Got a source for it?
https://open.substack.com/pub/theskepticalcardiologist/p/skeptical-thoughts-from-the-dentists?r=65p2a&utm_medium=ios
Thank you, this was illuminating. I guess I’ve been lucky with my dentists so far. The current one keeps telling me there’s a spot on a molar, but “we’ll just keep an eye on it”. We’ve kept an eye on it for several years now.
Good question. I don't know, but a priori id assume fake cavity diagnosis is invariant to water fluoridation. You could argue that dentists in unfluoridated areas are more likely to falsely diagnose cavities, but that seems like a really weird correlation and I'd need hard data to show that's the case
...Wouldn't that mean the fluoride is more effective than stated, since the number of fake cavities wouldn't change before and after fluoridation?
Cremieux discusses this here: https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1853263599680061564.
Link isn't working for me
Works for me! You can also try looking at it archived here: https://archive.is/6qsYt or shown here: https://nitter.poast.org/cremieuxrecueil/status/1853263599680061564, although formatting and images may be lost in those, and the latter doesn't always work.
Thanks that worked! I think the study he's talking about is broadly aligned with the nih meta analysis linked above. There's really very little effect at levels recommended in the US.
> at > 2x recommended levels, there's consistent evidence of small IQ decreases in children and not much else
That doesn't sound reassuring. What if my kids drink twice as much water as normal?
First, to be on the same page about numbers, it looks like the adjusted beta of fluoride to iq is roughly -2, i.e every 1mg/L increase above 2mg/L leads to -2 IQ pts drop. At around 1.5mg/L there's questionable evidence of a 0.5-1 IQ drop, and at lower levels than that there seems to be no observable difference in IQ.
To answer your question, all of this is dose dependent, not absolute. If someone drinks twice as much water they may be getting twice as much fluoride in absolute terms, but it doesn't matter because it gets diluted the same amount and flushed out the same amount. The real risk is actually if your kids are getting fluoride that's more concentrated -- for example, if they were eating adult toothpaste. Use kids toothpaste, it has lower fluoride levels.
I really liked the post. I'm not even sure "more political" is really the right way to describe it, so much as opinionated on meta political norms.
RIP President Jimmy Carter. My mother was appointed by him to a high-ish federal position (below cabinet level) and always had a high regard for him.
His general historical reputation as POTUS is not strong, and all things considered I can't disagree. Reading this recent attempt at a positive revisionist history of the man
("His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life" by Jonathan Alter, 2020)
did add to my sense of Carter as a good and interesting and really-gutsy person; but the author's arguments for him being an underrated POTUS were overall unconvincing. Considering all aspects of the jobs Carter would have been a better Congressional leader than he was a president.
With all that said -- I am old enough to remember clearly what 11 to 13 percent inflation was like for non-wealthy families, and also how much things like retail banking and phone companies and freight shipping and airlines _sucked_ if you weren't rich enough to pay staff to deal with them. Therefore I hope this Reason writeup on Carter gets some circulation. It remains an irritation how much his immediate successor gets credit for two very important positive things that in fact Carter was the key leader on and knowingly took the heat to get done: deregulating various hidebound industries, and taking a sledgehammer (whose name was Paul Volcker) to the 1970s stagflation cycle.
https://reason.com/2024/12/29/rip-jimmy-carter-the-passionless-president/
Interesting article, thank you.
A friend found some antique mannequins in Monterrey, Mexico, he wants to buy and has this idea he can drive from Texas to Mexico to pick them up. I told him he's crazy to make such a drive through Mexico. Even assuming he made the drive safely, he'd still have to deal with getting the merchandise across the border back into the US.
From a logistics perspective, what's the best way one could get this legal, relatively heavy merchandise from Mexico into the US? My guess is if he paid to have it shipped in a straightforward fashion it would cost a fair amount, at least as much as he thinks he's saving by purchasing it cheaply in Mexico. What do others think? It's only a few hundred dollars in merchandise but weighs maybe 200 pounds.
An additional risk coming up is of some border-closing type presidential executive orders being issued the afternoon of January 20th. A lot of US universities have issued formal warnings to foreign-born students and faculty to "be back here by January 19th." No one knows exactly what will be issued along those lines or what specific impacts such orders may have, but there is a strong expectation of something. Will it impact US citizens, who knows.
And whatever the new president does sign may be litigated in the courts for a while, also who knows. Still though -- the potential immediate hassle/chaos factor for anybody, citizen or no, trying to cross the border back into the US seems meaningful. And perhaps the fact of carting a bunch of unusual merchandise will ratchet that risk up some more as Border Patrol staff are trying to apply in practice whatever the new president has issued?
Nit: ``formal warnings to foreign-born students and faculty" - I think you mean foreign, not foreign-born. Foreign = is not a US citizen. Foreign born = was not a US citizen at the time of birth. The distinction is not merely pedantic, since roughly one in ten US citizens is foreign born (meaning that they acquired their citizenship through naturalization rather than birth), and on many university faculties that fraction will be well North of 10%. (There is also the category of `native-born foreigners,' meaning people who were US citizens at the time of their birth but are not now, who would also be covered by the warnings, although that category is small enough in number as to be ignorable for conversational purposes).
Yes that is correct, with two caveats:
-- some of Trump's core supporters would also like to start rolling back some naturalizations (I'm personally acquainted with one such individual and through him have learned that there are more.) But that does seem for now to be a fringe view not gaining real traction.
-- an executive order could attempt to shut the border temporarily on an emergency-response basis, a la "we need to shut the whole thing down for a while and figure out what's going on". That would certainly be challenged in court, and perhaps with bills in Congress too, on behalf of US citizens crossing the border. But while those processes were playing out for however long there could be real headaches for everybody. Put it this way: no member of my extended family of native-born citizens is going to risk being outside of the US on January 20th, including the ones who voted for Trump.
I know US citizens who make the drive down to Guadalajara area (big retirement communities down there) and down to little retirement communities along the coast in La Paz (down in Baja) frequently. I don't know if there are areas people avoid, but people have been doing it safely for years. Watch for speed traps if you get off the highway. They like to ticket speeding Americans (by their plates). A friend got a ticket and had to detour to city hall to pay it. Paying the ticket (bribes) to the officer is no longer common from what I hear.
I rember a (now deceased, bless his soul) friend of mine telling how he got into some tight situation in Mexico which was solved by someone saying: "Esta aleman." But I'm not sure having a german driver would help much nowadays.
I worked with some Mexicans until about a year ago, and one of them had a couple of trucks attempt to force him to stop (while he had his family with 'im) on the way down; the other's brother-in-law had the same thing happen, but didn't manage to bust a U-turn in time & got kidnapped for ransom. He was held for about a week, the ransom was paid, and they let him go ("and even paid for a burner phone so he could call for help once they dropped him off in Juarez!"¹—but coworker said that that doesn't always happen; he had a cousin or something that similarly called about a ransom, but then never called again to give directions re: where to take/send the $$, and never showed up again; that was about five years ago—still missing to this day).
They said that a) driving in a nice vehicle makes it more dangerous (first guy above had a new SUV; unrelated, but he was also a massive douche & the only person I ever worked with there whom I could never get on side), and b) probably if you're white you're safer, especially if you're not going into less-frequented-by-tourists-y areas—"they don't want the U.S. to freak out, nor to lose the tourist $$, since the cartels have fingers in all such pies".
(IIRC, anyway. Maybe they said that white people are in MORE danger—this WAS years ago, heh—but I THINK I'm remembering correctly... the first guy was headed somewhere I don't recall—very well might have been Monterrey, come to think of it—and the second's brother-in-law had been headed to a village in Guanajuato.)
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(¹: or wherever, but I think it was Juarez. he said they stuck him on a bus with some other captives & everyone had to put their original cells in a bag, at which point the devices were disappeared)
I can't help you with your query, but I do think mannequin smuggling through Mexico does sound like a good premise for a comic movie.
If the border patrol catches you smuggling mannequins, you just tell them they're illegal immigrants standing very still.
Probably starring Pedro Pascal.
It was more for some ACX-reading filmmaker who's browsing and bored.
Gemini was slightly helpful. The script has a little going for it, but not much:
Title: Plastic Ladies
Logline: Two down-on-their-luck antique dealers hatch a bizarre scheme to smuggle antique mannequins from Mexico into Texas, only to find themselves entangled with eccentric collectors, suspicious border patrol agents, and the surprisingly fragile nature of vintage fiberglass.
Characters:
Burt: A fast-talking, perpetually optimistic Texan antique dealer, prone to outlandish schemes.
Ernesto: A more cautious, world-weary Mexican antique dealer, Burt's reluctant partner.
Agent Ramirez: A sharp, by-the-book border patrol agent with a dry sense of humor.
Madame Evangeline: An eccentric, wealthy collector of vintage mannequins, obsessed with their "silent stories."
Scene 1:
INT. DUSTY ANTIQUE SHOP - DAY
Burt's shop is cluttered with junk. He's trying to sell a chipped Elvis bust to a disinterested customer.
BURT
(Smoothly)
…and this, my friend, is a genuine piece of rock and roll history. Touched by the King himself! (Whispers) Probably.
The customer leaves. Burt sighs. Ernesto enters, looking worried.
ERNESTO
Burt, I have found them. The mannequins. They are… magnificent.
BURT
(Eyes lighting up)
The French ones? The Art Deco darlings?
ERNESTO
Older. Much older. From a closed-down department store in Guadalajara. Full figures. Beautifully painted. But… getting them across the border…
Scene 2:
EXT. US-MEXICO BORDER - NIGHT
A beat-up van, driven by Ernesto, approaches the border crossing. Burt is nervously sweating in the passenger seat. Hidden amongst old furniture are several carefully wrapped mannequins.
AGENT RAMIREZ
(Deadpan)
Purpose of your trip?
BURT
(Forcing a smile)
Just bringing some… personal belongings. You know, furniture. Stuff.
Agent Ramirez circles the van, tapping the side.
AGENT RAMIREZ
That's a lot of "stuff." Smells like… old perfume. And fiberglass.
Scene 3:
INT. MOTEL ROOM - NIGHT
Burt and Ernesto carefully unpack a mannequin. Its painted face is eerily lifelike.
BURT
(Admiringly)
Look at her. A real beauty. Madame Evangeline is going to flip.
Suddenly, the mannequin’s head falls off.
ERNESTO
(Exasperated)
Burt! You are handling her like a sack of potatoes!
Scene 4:
INT. MADAME EVANGELINE’S MANSION - DAY
Madame Evangeline's mansion is filled with mannequins in various poses. She examines one of Burt's mannequins with a magnifying glass.
MADAME EVANGELINE
(Whispering)
She has seen things… things we can only imagine. The silent stories she holds…
She offers Burt and Ernesto a large sum of money.
Scene 5:
EXT. HIGHWAY - DAY
Burt and Ernesto are driving back to Texas, much richer. They argue about what to do with the money. Suddenly, they see Agent Ramirez’s patrol car in the rearview mirror. A high-speed chase ensues, with mannequins bouncing around in the back of the van.
Ending:
The ending could go several ways:
Burt and Ernesto are caught, but their story becomes a local legend.
They escape, but the experience has taught them a lesson (maybe).
They successfully deliver the mannequins, but a new, even more bizarre opportunity presents itself.
Themes:
The allure of the past.
The pursuit of the American Dream (or a variation thereof).
The absurdity of human desires.
Throw in Agent Ramirez thinking he's busting a sex-trafficking ring (though that might be a bit iffy to pull off in a comedy) and that Madame Evangeline is the madame of the brothel the 'girls' are being trafficked to, and the big reveal that it's actually amazingly life-like mannequins and not real women will be hilarious.
In my language, "mannequin" meant a live human woman working as a model.
The audience has to know they are mannequins while the both cops and mules think they are real, then its a comedy
The drive is 3 hours, and a lot of freeway from what i can see. Is there a specific danger for US registered cars in Mexico?
Probably right, a quick check on DHL (https://www.dhl.com/mx-en/home/get-a-quote.html) had shipping a pallet that weighed 150kg was going to be about $1500 US for air freight. Certainly much less for going by ocean but they wouldn't give an online quote for that.
Sometimes, when rating a film on IMDb, I give either 1 or 10 stars—not my honest rating—to maximally steer the average toward what I think it should be.
Has anyone explored the dynamics of what happens if everyone always votes maximally or minimally to steer the average toward their desired value? Does this behavior have a name? I couldn’t find anything in a quick search.
I’ve done some thinking myself, and Monte Carlo simulations show a surprisingly low average deviation (around 0.6*/10 stars) between the steering equilibrium and the honest average when the population is split into a few distinct groups with different preferences, and then a stochastic generator spits out a new voter with probabilities ~ sizes of groups. It’s relatively straightforward to calculate where the vote would settle mathematically in this case.
If the groups appear in some order instead of being evenly mixed, this strategy favors the last group extremely heavily.
But even in an evenly mixed population, 0.6* isn’t 0, and I wonder if the golden rule would imply I should never do this for stable ratings (e.g., films). For dynamic things like restaurants, though, steering seems reasonable since their quality changes over time, and faster convergence to the “true” value might help everyone.
• 0.6 value obtained with GPT-o1 generated code without unit testing or reviewing the code.
Thats how I vote for office. Dont have to agree with the candidate as long as they are steering the balance of power within that particular govt to my preferred point.
> Sometimes, when rating a film on IMDb, I give either 1 or 10 stars—not my honest rating—to maximally steer the average toward what I think it should be.
But you don't.
The average of what people think this movie is worthwhile in points stays the same. You said it yourself: not your honest rating. You just do something to deceive people about that average.
Well, what makes *you* the expert on what the 'true' value should be? If it's very bad or very good, be it a movie or a restaurant, people will agree on that.
It's the "I liked it/I didn't" cases that are where the discussion comes in, and if you are trying to steer the score downwards because "I didn't like this movie", you are not really any better than the guy giving it 10/10 because he likes explosions, or the guy giving it 1/10 because the women didn't have big enough tits.
This silly post on Reddit explores that theme, iterated: https://www.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/jsb50n/n_short_stories_about_the_car_thermostat/
I read this when it was first posted and forgot to save it. I didn't realize it was posted on theschism; I thought it was older than maybe posted on the original /r/SSC subreddit.
Thanks for digging it up!
E: I actually think I am not going crazy; this theschism post is I think adapts an older CWR post that specifically mentioned a bus, not a car, and there were more short stories, and the replies added even more. The search continues!
I really dont think there was an older one. Ape mentioned the idea a bit before, but I remember him presenting this to me as an expansion, and never a mention of an ealier version. Also this one already has a bus in #3-6. And have you considered just asking in the comments of that post?
That would (at least in the limit of a large number of votes, assuming people see the current average before they vote) give as output the median rating instead of the mean, but the distribution of results would be less informative than if people voted honestly. If you're voting on an actual policy, I could understand this extreme-vote behaviour, but when giving ratings, I don't see why you would want the outcome to reflect your view enough to make you want to vote in an unhelpful way.
I believe people should vote honestly; that provides the maximum signal.
One solution might be to weight people's votes dependant on how well spread their voting distribution is. Anything from a flat distribution to a bell curve is reasonable. Votes from people who only use the extremes shouldn't count for much because it's effectively a simple like/dislike.
If the voting population can be divided into distinct subgroups with distinct preferences that is extremely useful information for the target audience - if it's basically 'all' personal preference, a population average is basically worthless.
I rather believe some odd poll results where some large portion of population seems to hold an extreme-ish view on whatever subject is specifically the result of this sort of minmax /thumb-on-scale answering.