"Unalive" is superior to the alternatives given here in one important respect: it's shorter and thus faster to say, write, and read.

i know that "unalive" is part of larger worrying trend of self censorship but if you really are in a situtation where you have to avoid the words "die" or "kill" the english language already has centuries worth of much better euphemisms. the iconic and perennial "six feet under"? the lovely imagery of "pushing up daisies"? "shuffle off this mortal coil"????? literally anything from the monty python dead parrot bit???? you have so many options. please try to be more creative at least

its really funny that roman mithras doesnt seem to actually have anything in common with persian mitra. like. the roman soldiers just developed their own orientalism religion where they worshipped a guy in persian-style clothes. cf early nation of islam, which had basically nothing to do with actual islam

Y'know, for all the talk of porn acceleration and the way aspirational content is raising many people's standards for partners way above anyone who would actually date them, I pretty strongly suspect that porn is only a small factor in all that.

If anything, porn is rather less picky about body type than Hollywood and popular non-pornographic media more generally. There's definitely still an element of idealization, but you can see the same process going on even more intensively on netflix and instagram.

I've never seen an autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!" but my worldview feels much more "everything is connected" than "everything is separate." "I have a deeply felt intuition that everything is connected" feels right to me as an explanation of a lot of my strengths and weaknesses and eccentricities, and lots of features of the autistic personality look to me like plausible reactions to having a strong "everything is connected" intuition. E.g., yes, that would explain why we're prone to OCD and scrupulosity; we have a deeply and strongly felt intuition that if we're wrong about something lots of our thoughts, inferences, feelings, intuitions, and opinions might be tainted by garbage input and if we're bad in some way that badness is part of the context everything else about us should be understood in and thus taints everything about us!

On the other hand, I think it would explain a lot about society if neurotypicals don't have a strong "everything is connected" intuition and thus tend to be much less concerned about world-model consistency and moral consistency than people like me.

Maybe autistics and schizophrenics have different variations on "intuitively thinks everything is connected" and neurotypicals are the "intuitively thinks things are separate" neurotype?

Keep protesting, keep boycotting, and keep talking about Gaza. This headline (from March 27th) would have been unthinkable a few months ago.

Reading Scott Alexander on capitalism, wealth, and power is a frustrating experience. He's on the right track to reach what I think are true and important insights (low-visibility cultural transmission chains are politically important, a lot of conservative and neoliberal policies aren't particularly popular but are implemented anyway because of the disproportionate leverage rich people, political class insiders, and older culturally conservative white people have in the system), but he instead veers off into one the smuggest elitist neoliberal bullshit takes imaginable.

I think the solution is there should be spaces where it's low-risk to ask someone out and there should be spaces where people who don't want that kind of attention don't have to deal with it. Of course, that then turns into how society should be divided between those. I suspect a lot of the people who freak out about people asking them out do want there to be spaces where it's socially acceptable to casually ask people out, they just want those spaces to be small parts of society, very legibly courtship-oriented, easy to avoid, and more-or-less strictly opt-in (so dating apps, bars, etc.).

I basically think if you freak out about people asking you out you are burning the commons. Surely someone not finding a suitable partner is much worse over their lifetime than having to deal with unwanted attention sometimes

Ooh, interesting hypothesis!

A few other possibilities that occurred to me:

1) During the ice ages much of the Eurasian landmass was chilly steppe and steppe-tundra. In terms of land area that was nice for very low-tech humans and proto-humans (ancestrally warm-weather creatures that lacked natural insulation) Africa might have had more of it for much of the Pleistocene. The warmer climate of Africa would have meant more photosynthetic productivity and hence more available food. Africa might have had the majority of humanity for much of the Pleistocene. Even if Eurasia had more humans total, Africa plausibly had denser human populations at least during the colder eras, and denser populations would have meant easier diffusion of genes and ideas, so plausibly faster evolution, faster accumulation of cultural complexity, and faster technological innovation.

2) Per Bergman's rule, in a colder climate animal biomass tends to be more concentrated into smaller numbers of big animals. Plant foods edible to humans also tend to be less abundant in cold climates (IIRC, the traditional Inuit diet is pretty close to pure carnivory). Edible to humans biomass in the cold ice age Eurasian steppes might have been heavily concentrated in big animals. To exploit the main edible to humans biomass reservoir of the ice age Eurasian cold steppe, humans might have had to learn how to efficiently take down animals substantially bigger and stronger than themselves, many of which moved in herds. This might have been quite challenging and taken a long time to figure out. Before humans learned how to be efficient big game hunters the Eurasian cold steppe's heavy concentration of theoretically edible to humans biomass into big, powerful, formidable herbivores might have seriously constrained the population of ice age Eurasian humanity. By contrast, Africa, being warmer, would have had more fruit, tubers, medium-sized animals, small animals, etc. that humans could eat with less effort and less danger. African humanity being more numerous would plausibly have meant African humanity would have accumulated cultural complexity and useful technologies and beneficial mutations faster.

3) Homo sapiens evolving in Africa might have been downstream of Homo erectus evolving in Africa. The Homo erectus out-of-Africa dispersal would have been a genetic bottleneck for Eurasian Homo erectus, i.e. Eurasian Homo erectus would have had less genetic diversity than African Homo erectus. More genetically diverse African Homo erectus might have evolved faster because more genetic diversity meant more variation for natural selection to act on.

Do you think it's possible there's a planet with multiple stable sentient species who interact? Or would such a situation inevitably end up with one getting wiped out or the two hybridizing

Well, they could only hybridize if they were closely related, like humans and Neanderthals. And IIRC there's some evidence that humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans probably weren't all that interfertile to begin with, with most coding Neanderthal alleles getting weeded out of our genome.

I think it would be very difficult for two sentient species that shared overlapping niches to survive. H. sapiens and Neanderthals were both smart, seem to have both had language and culture, and had similar levels of technological sophistication, but the latter had a much lower population and so couldn't really compete when their cousins invaded their territory. And maybe some of this is a function of the wider human clade's tendency to engage in warfare and ecologically disruptive hunting--there's a big wave of megafauna extinction that seems to have followed the expansion of human populations all over the globe--but I'm not sure how many species of big-brained tool-users any niche could support.

But I do think that species with very different niches could coexist peacefully, at least long enough to work out that species in other niches were sentient, and to develop the ethical frameworks necessary for coexistence. If there were superintelligent squid, they wouldn't ever compete directly with humans for habitat (though we might have eaten a fair few by accident). We have also managed (just!) not to render extinct cetaceans, which are fairly intelligent, or our close cousins the chimpanzee. I could also imagine a science fictional scenario where two intelligent species were in some kind of important symbiotic or commensalist relationship that would stabilize their coexistence.

I think the other tricky thing though would be timing. It took a long time for the genus Homo to develop intelligence. AFAICT the australopithecines were closer to chimpanzees in terms of intelligence than they were to us; H. erectus was a lot smarter, but probably didn't have language; it's not until 700,000 to 200,000 years ago you get human species that are more fully developed in terms of their intelligence, and that feels like a super narrow window in terms of evolution for another intelligence species to also emerge. Because once you do get intelligent tool-users who spread over most of the globe, they seem likely to me to start to modify their environment in profound ways, like we have. So if another intelligent species doesn't already exist, the circumstances in which it is likely to arise after one species comes to prominence are going to be very different--more of an uplift scenario, maybe. Like I think if we discovered a group of chimpanzees with rudimentary language tomorrow, we would do our best not to fuck with them, but we would inevitably have some kind of impact on their existence for better or worse, right?

Maybe your best bet for multiple sentient species would be to have a reason that the first species (singular or plural) that arose didn't come to dominate the entire planet--they were aquatic, and so never mastered fire; or they were otherwise highly restricted in the biomes they could inhabit; or they were small in number like the Neanderthals, but could retreat to refugia in mountains and forests rather than be wiped out; or they were a diverse clade like early humans, but they also spread out very rapidly, and were subsequently isolated by climate conditions. Like, imagine Denisovans (who were already in Asia) had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge to the Americas, and then sea levels rose cutting them off until the Age of Discovery. If you had a planet that didn't effectively have a two supercontinents like Earth, you might have many more opportunities for related-but-geographically-divided species to develop (though that doesn't avoid the problem of what happens when they meet each other and start competing then).

The reclassification of Pluto was a "we've decided to slice up the world in categories along different lines," but it was in response to new knowledge, namely that Pluto is less unusual than we thought it was. You're correct that "Pluto is still a planet to me" is different from and less objectionable than global warming denial, YEC, etc., but it's not wrong to see Pluto's reclassification as an example of "science marches on."

I've noticed something I find somewhat concerning and it's that for a lot of people, 'pluto is a planet' has fallen into the stock list of examples for what one might call 'science denialism', along with things like antivaxx, denying the existence of feathered (non-avian) dinosaurs, and flat earthers

there's a sentiment that goes like 'well, sure, you learned in school that the solar system has nine planets, but Science Marches On and we now know it has eight' and while certainly people should not take what they learned in school to be immutable law they should also like. have a concept of the rather significant difference between 'we've learned something new about the world' and 'we've decided to slice up the world in categories along different lines'

slicing up the world into categories is one of the basic operations of human thought and if you do not understand it well enough that you think 'people used to think the earth flat -> now we know better' and 'astronomers used to call pluto a planet -> now they don't' are analogous processes then you fucked up somewhere.

and if you don't think they are analogous, if you understand the difference i am pointing out and think it does not matter to the quest of listing stock examples of people disagreeing with things scientists say, well. you fucked up in a different place, probably.

Conversations like this really hit me with awareness that I may have had unusually good parents and I may have an unusually loving relationship with my parents.

"theres no much emotional closeness there. and i feel like thats a big part of incest fetish when its parent/child? like. the distance/discipline aspects?"

My visceral reaction to this is "sounds bleak, glad I was raised by people I actually liked who actually liked me."

I am close to my mom, I have an incest kink, and the parent/offspring incest dynamics I like involve approximately the kind of closeness I have with my mom. Parent/offspring incest appeals to me in a similar way to sibling incest; it feels like if done by well-intentioned people it might be very convenient, comfortable, safe, and intimate. For me the kinda kinking on hierarchy part of the appeal of parent/offspring incest isn't the parent as a source of commands and punishments, it's the parent as a source of mentoring, material support, and emotional support.

Lewis:

[Aquinas] is aware that affection between the parties concerned increases sexual pleasure, and that union even among the beasts implies a certain kindliness—suavem amicitiam—and thus seems to come to the verge of the modern conception of love. But the very passage in which he does so is his explanation of the law against incest: he is arguing that unions between close kinsfolk are bad precisely because kinsfolk have mutual affection, and such affection would increase pleasure.

and indeed, Aquinas:

[S]ince there is in matrimony a union of diverse persons, those persons who should already regard themselves as one because of having the same origin are properly excluded from matrimony, so that in recognizing themselves as one in this way they may love each other with greater fervor [...] Furthermore, the enjoyment of sexual relations “greatly corrupts the judgment of prudence.” So, the multiplication of such pleasure is opposed to good behavior. Now, such enjoyment is increased through the love of the persons who are thus united. Therefore, intermarriage between relatives would be contrary to good behavior, for, in their case, the love which springs from community of origin and upbringing would be added to the love of concupiscence, and, with such an increase of love, the soul would necessarily become more dominated by these pleasures.

incest is just too pleasurable to be allowed, confirmed by the Doctor Angelicus

Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised.  Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”

Continue Reading.

"Anyway, diagnosis is the only way out of the dilemma. It's the only way your reality can be different from other people's without someone being at fault - is if you have a word like "sensory overwhelm" to explain the difference."

It's frustrating how this person gets so close to understanding the actual fundamental problem but then veers off into, not just ignoring the fundamental problem, but reinforcing it even as they make well-intentioned attempts to mitigate it.

I have never seen an autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!" I don't think my parents even knew what autism was when I was little, and they had no notion that I might have it. And yet they functionally did a lot of autism accommodation for me, because they were respectful of my stated preferences and self-reported experiences and allowed me significant autonomy and input on how I was raised.

My parents didn't know about autistic restricted eating. But they did not force me to eat aversive foods, because they didn't force me to eat food I disliked, they provided me with food I liked, and they allowed me substantial input on what I was fed.

My parents didn't know my stimming was an autism thing. But they let me do it anyway, because they realized that sometimes children do odd quirky harmless things and that's fine.

My parents didn't know about autistic sensory sensitivities. But they didn't force me to wear clothes that triggered them, because they didn't force me to wear clothes that were uncomfortable for me, they gave me input on what clothes they bought for me, and if necessary my mother was willing to modify clothes to be more comfortable for me e.g. by sowing patches of soft cloth over scratchy underwear tags.

When I was very little my mom took me see a live theatrical performance and when the lights went off I had what in retrospect I think was a meltdown. My mother didn't know about autistic meltdowns, but she could see that I was distressed and didn't want to be where I was and reacted correctly: she immediately moved me to a more familiar and comfortable environment (the plaza outside the theater) and treated me with compassion. She didn't try to make me stay in the scary environment, she didn't try to talk me into ignoring my discomfort, she didn't guilt me for ruining her fun, and she didn't get mad at me for ruining the enriching cultural activity she had planned for me. She accommodated my meltdown because she had an empathetic and compassionate response to my obvious distress and she felt that the problem that should be prioritized in that situation was my pain, not the inconvenience the outward expressions of my pain caused for her and the other adults around me.

My parents didn't realize they were (probably) raising a special needs child, but their parenting failed gracefully because they respected and accommodated my preferences, desires, and aversions. I think promoting that approach to children is probably a more reliable way of getting the needs of disabled and neurodivergent children accommodated than keeping authoritarian parenting norms and adding a bunch of diagnosis-specific carve-outs for children with legible disabilities and neurodivergences, because respecting a child's preferences doesn't require the child's difference be conveniently legible to medical bureaucracies. Also, authoritarian parenting hurts able-bodied neurotypical children too.

"They will tell someone they're in pain, someone they trust, and that person will say no they're not. That didn't hurt. It can't have. They're being selfish/dramatic/lying."

Yeah, that sounds like an awful thing for a child to experience. The reason it happens so often is that a lot of adults have a default assumption about child behavior something like "If a child acts like an ordinary experience was some kind of torment for them, they're probably lying or exaggerating or being manipulatively dramatic in an attempt to weasel out of having correct discipline imposed on them, and the correct reaction is to punish or at least shame them for it so they learn it's antisocial behavior and adults will not indulge it." If you have that as a default assumption about how children behave, it is likely to make you abuse children. The correct thing to do with that assumption is discard it and replace it with assumptions that are more respectful of children's explicitly and implicitly stated preferences, not add a bunch of "but if they're autistic or..." disclaimers to it.

One of the most horrifying things about that tweet sequence is the possible implication that, for all their good intentions, Victoria Duncan thinks that kind of invalidation would be an appropriate response to default presumed unreasonable by the adult complaints of a neurotypical child. I hope I'm being inaccurately uncharitable there, but it's hard to not suspect it when she puts so much emphasis on medical diagnosis as the only way to prevent disabled and neurodivergent children from being abused this way.

If I got killed by being run over by a bus tomorrow and it turned out reincarnation was real and I got some input on what family my next reincarnation would be born to, I think I might take a family like my previous set of parents (clueless about autism but inclined to accommodate their child's preferences) over a family with the mindset of Victoria Duncan. I'd trust the former more to not abuse me if I had some difference that wasn't conveniently legible to the family pediatrician and school nurse.

It's disturbing that Victoria Duncan apparently thinks a medical diagnosis is "the only way your reality can be different from other people's without someone being at fault" (charitable interpretation is she's describing an approach lots of parents and adult authority figures take toward children, not her own beliefs). People have different subjective realities and different preferences all the time and learning to accommodate that is a very basic social skill that's basically expected in settings where people interact as more-or-less equals; maybe Jane in accounting thinks dark chocolate is awesome and Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and her colleague David thinks dark chocolate tastes terrible and Citizen Kane is over-rated crap, that doesn't mean one of them is "at fault" and in need of correction, it just means they have different tastes and there might need to be some negotiation if they're going to share a dessert or watch a movie together. A lot of neurodivergence accommodation is basically taking that attitude and social skill and applying it to preferences and desires and aversions that are farther toward the thin tails of the bell curve. If it's especially hard to get adults to apply this social skill in interactions with children, I think it's because of the authoritarian approach many adults take toward children.

I'm not one of those full-on anti-psychiatry people, but when I see stuff like this I empathize with where they're coming from. You shouldn't need a doctor's note to make you treat your child as a person whose preferences, desires, and aversions matter.

Trope that drives me insane basically every time: mirrored speeches/ceremonies/celebrations/etc that specifically draw out the distinctions between them.

Like

two rivals for the throne - how do they organize their coronations? Where, by whom, what's the crowd like? What sort of oaths do they make as they take the crown?

different institutions/factions/polities competing to welcome and woo some third party. What sort of parties do they throw/gifts do they give/accomplishments do they show off?

An electoral campaign or just PR war between two dramatic ideological rivals - what does their propaganda look like? How do they frame the issue and their opponents?

That sort of thing. Incredible enrichment for both the worldbuilding- and dramatic/symbolic- analysis parts of my brain.

This is different from but feels related to commodity fetishism:

"The term commodity fetishism objectively should bring to mind the way economic actors, both rich and poor, declare themselves powerless before the pressures exerted by the world of commodities (“I’m sorry I have to fire you, but the market told us your services aren’t needed”). ... Commodity fetishism describes the objective fact that in capitalism we don’t generally relate to each other as humans asking each other to do things, but rather indirectly command each other through commodities. If I go to a restaurant, I don’t beg the cook to make me a meal and the waiter to deliver it, nor do I imperiously threaten them with violence, nor do I cajole them into it. I just buy the meal. The meal itself then appears to command them to move, like a little god! And I in turn must similarly follow the commands of commodities in order to acquire the money to purchase such meals. ... From this perspective, one of the central tasks of communists is to liberate workers not from work or desire itself, but from a generalized lack of decision-making agency in the face of crude economic fetishism. People should decide what people do, not commodities!"

I think this kind of strategic diffusion of responsibility is a major tool of social control in capitalism.

Consider, for example, the following situation. A characteristically modern form of social interaction, familiar from the rail and air travel industries, has become ubiquitous with the development of the call centre. Someone – an airline gate attendant, for example – tells you some bad news; perhaps you’ve been bumped from the flight in favour of someone with more frequent flyer points. You start to complain and point out how much you paid for your ticket, but you’re brought up short by the undeniable fact that the gate attendant can’t do anything about it. You ask to speak to someone who can do something about it, but you’re told that’s not company policy. The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of the corporate hierarchy. It’s often a frustrating experience; you want to get angry, but you can’t really blame the person you’re talking to. Somehow, the airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it as if it were a person like yourself. Bad people react to this by getting angry at the gate attendant; good people walk away stewing with thwarted rage, and they may give some lacerating feedback online. Meanwhile, the managers who made the decision to prioritise Gold Elite members are able to maximise shareholder value without any distractions from the consequences of their actions. They have constructed an accountability sink to absorb unwanted negative emotion.

If a worker who isn't the owner says ANYTHING similar to "I'm not really supposed to do this but-" and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)