Recent discourse reminds me of that cult indoctrination trick that's often used to weed out more difficult marks early on, where they tell you all that you aren't allowed to eat rice on Tuesdays and then if you protest they go "wow SOMEBODY likes rice a little much huh" as if you're the fucking weirdo who cares too much about how much rice is consumed between Monday and Wednesday instead of them.

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.

And if instead you do decide to push back further, after your abrupt departure from the group ("You're seriously leaving us over RICE?!? Seriously?") and subsequent ostracism, you can then be used as a demonstration to the others who were more pliable, of how the outgroup is full of people like you who are obsessed with violating the No-Tuesday-Rice rule to the point where they'll abandon all their friends, who cared so much for them, so it clearly isn't an arbitrary restriction, you're the kind of monster these rules are intended to protect them from, thus all the other wise and esoteric precepts of the charismatic leader are implied to be equally justified.

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Kong Shangren, the guy who became popular at the early Qing court for writing a play that was (in part) about how sad it was that the Qing had taken over, was alive at the time glasses came to Qing via the Portuguese. He wrote this poem:

White glass from across the Western Seas Is imported through Macao: Fashioned into lenses big as coins, They encompass the eyes in a double frame. I put them on—it suddenly becomes clear; I can see the very tips of things! And read fine print by the dim-lit window Just like in my youth.

ngl, I kind of teared up.

There is something about this dynamic and I want more XD

The Rationalist Fujoshi

The opposite of conspiracy theories isn't "rational thinking" its just "coincidence theories"

[scrolling down dash] nice post--oh the third reply is the person who told me i'm probably a violent bully who would've beaten them to death in high school because I said "reactionary ideology contributes to school shootings"

something that always bothered me about the worm fanfic scene is that they always try to cram everyone together. There's always the scene where taylor meets lisa in a coffee shop or whatever. I get it, it's a fanfic, you can't just make up a character for her to meet.

But one of the things i always liked about worm was that it stayed away from the comic trope of making everyone connected. Like, if Worm was a comic book, Armsmaster would be her teacher, She'd end up being friends with Kid Win, Cherie would attend Winslow, Annette would end up being still alive and a secret agent for Cauldron but with amnesia or something, over-the-top soap opera shit, right?

What I always liked was that in Worm, Taylor's just some girl. She only knows one hero out of costume, and it's the girl who ruined her life. Her dad's just the head of hiring for the union. Her mom was just a college professor. If you asked the mayor about Danny Hebert, he'd say "who?" A lot of fanfics have him be like seinfeldian rivals with the mayor, but like he just writes petitions. If you asked Lustrum about Annette Hebert, she'd have no clue who you're talking about, because Annette was just like a member of her organization.

What I'm trying to stress, is that in superhero comics, everything's connected. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone's a super genius, or met at The Science Expo, or their dad was a famous crime fighter. Comics have all these sorts of big dramatic irony reveals. In comic books, there is never a character who's just some guy.

This sort of thing is great for making everything feel connected, and it's good for keeping out extraneous exposition.

But Worm doesn't do that. It's all just like. They're just regular ass people. Of course they don't know each other. They live in a city with 300 thousand people, none of them would have ever met each other if it weren't for capeshit.

And, I mean, it does remove a lot of the potential for shenanigans but it really does a lot to make everything feel more real.

There's also something there about capeshit being a metaphor for shared trauma where like these people would not know each-other were it not for shared trauma.

The undersiders, the great team, the bestest friend team, they don't meet if not for capeshit. They have no connection to eachother outside this. These are kids who would have never met, they would never have come within 20 degrees of separation were it not for the fact they have powers. This is integral to worm's worldbuilding. It's maybe the closest you ever get to a positive aspect of gaining powers, and yet for so many capes there is no undersiders, just the fighting and loneliness and eventual violent death.

Genuinely the fans who are like "ohhhh worm is so cool ohhh power and escalation" BAFFLE me. Especially when they're hardcore Who Would Win numerical power rankers. Like

>S-class citywide threat >this next villain ups the power level so much!!! >look inside >S-class citywide threat

I think it's a case of being blinded by the finale. You blow up ONE multiverse...

i think if i was gonna rationality post, my neorationality corrective to the immortal science of bayesianism-kahnemanianism it would be that one should qualify one's beliefs on a two-spectrum axis, the standard credence (as determined by the odds you would accept in a bet with an atemporal all-knowing demon, as is the fashion), and the importance, as determined by the amount of utility an atemporal all-knowing demon (as is the fashion) would have to give you in exchange for magically changing your credence of that belief.

mostly i would do this so people would go around posting like, "epistemic confidence in this claim: 80% or a large pepperoni pizza"

Giuseppe Terragni - House for an artist, Milan 1933

ok i've seen you talk about oda nobunaga and also the westernization of japan in the Meiji period quite a bit and I'm wondering about that 260 or so years in between: what's your take on the Edo period? Deeply repressive isolationist state? Pinnacle of high culture and the golden age of nihongo? Both at the same time? Neither? Some kind of crypto-edoist stance that means you'll dodge my ask by not really answering the question?

Oh the Edo period is actually my favorite period of Japanese history. Maybe tied with Heian. It's hard to say if it was "good" or not, I mean... the end of a century of constant war was certainly a good thing. Sakoku was, I mean, in a certain sense obviously bullshit, it's bullshit to say no one can come in and no one can leave. That's not very nice. On the other hand maybe this was instrumental in Japan's ultimate rise, I don't know. Maybe keeping Christian influence and Western political meddling at bay was the right longterm play. I can't imagine that the spread of Christianity in Japan could possibly have been a good thing. So it's hard to say, hard to say what I would have done if I had been Tokugawa Ieyasu. I don't approve of the witch hunts against kakure kirishitan. They should have been allowed to chill and do their thing, man.

But of course this is not really the level on which I like to engage with history, especially history so dead as the shogunate. What's done is done, and so on. The import question is, was it Neat? And yeah it was pretty fucking neat. I'm obviously a huge ukiyo-e head which can be seen in #aestheticposting, that's all Edo shit. And I love me a good sangaku, and dope shit like that.

Confession: in my teenage rationalist phase Luminosity shaped my worldview more than HPMOR

Concept:

Instead of a conventional government that covers its ass when making stuff up through "misinformation" censorship and aligned press...

A "rationalist" government that covers its ass by assigning everything probability values and describing everything as tentative, preliminary, experimental.

"When we told you to stand 6 feet apart to reduce the risk to reduce the risk of Covid exposure, that was just a preliminary estimate. We estimated only a 35% probability that was within 1 ft of the correct distance to reduce the spread by 10% or more. That policy was enforced, of course, but we never told you it was perfect. With the termination of the policy, as was conditional on below-expected returns to disease prevention, you will now be refunded the enforcement fines you paid during the enforcement period."

"Will we be paid interest for the time our money was tied up in fines?"

"No."

Underused in fanwork: Rudolf experiencing inner conflict re: his deep beliefs in scientific rationality and lack of faith in metaphysics vs. his [redacted] [redacted] bdsm imaginary friend existing, seemingly on a semi-physical level

I really feel like Nate Silver should be more of a rationalist icon than he is.

He's an outspoken Bayesian who believes in probabilistic reasoning and does explicit calibration tests of himself. He's incredibly good at this, producing consistently well-calibrated forecasts across multiple domains. (And he's winning!)

He even exemplifies the actual primary rationalist virtue, which is pissing people off by being contrarian on the internet.

I suspect he loses points for forecasting with actual math, rather than putting a number on his intuition and muttering something about priors. Doing math in your Bayesian updates is cheating!