Millie Vs Fence

                                The Picket Fence Underestimated My Resolve.                                                  Aesthetic choices visible at millievfencelikes.tumblr.com

[millievfence]

There is a type of guy on OKC who I will describe as “well he’s either awesome or terrible and I will find out really fast”.  In the history of me investigating this class the answer has never been awesome.  Nonetheless, I still occasionally get sucked into a new one.  Part of me thinks this is a bad use of my time.  Part of me thinks it’s never taken more than 3 emails and shut up it’s interesting.

Simultaneously: I have both too easy and too hard a time saying “this is obvious I’m not going to do 101 for you”, especially if the person seems smart voices a willingness to change their mind when presented with new data. Simultaneously, what if I’m the one that’s wrong?  “This is so obvious I’m not going to explain it to you” is a good way to never learn otherwise.  Intellectually I realize the chances of either of these happening are slim, but that one time @slatestarscratchpad​ and I seriously changed each others’ mind on creepiness and Nice Guys and what if that happens again?

This is how I ended up debating feminism with Some Guy on OKC.  He goes out of his way to bash Anita Sarkeesian.  My first instinct is “look, maybe you are factually correct, but you’re still going out of your way to align yourself with a movement that works through rape and death threats.”  Which would be a totally valid argument if I wasn’t also defending social justice.  People have been driven to suicide in the name of social justice.

So my system kind of worked, in that I’m examining discordant parts in my thinking.  I still expect this to blow up at any moment but can’t let it go yet.

[voxette-vk]

that one time@slatestarscratchpad​ and I seriously changed each others’ mind on creepiness and Nice Guys and what if that happens again?

What time was that? I’m curious.

[gcu-sovereign]

Getting into the weeds with someone within 3 emails such that you reliably hit disqualifying responses seems…I guess self-destructive?  Treating OKC as a less-than-orthogonally DTF SSC comment section seems like a self-defeating strategy for the old reason that people are wont to misread each other into holes from which they cannot extract themselves.

On the other hand, if you want to know the measure of someone’s Willingness-to-Change-Their-Mind, why not just ask them about it directly?  Like, ‘what positions have you changed your mind on recently in a way that Past You would find abhorrent?’

/YMMV Caveat:  I have actually tried asking less rationalist-style versions of that very questions and gotten fuck-all for it./ 

[millievfence]

[thydungeongal]

Anyway the funny thing about D&D 4e is that if you actually listen to both sides and compare what they're saying to what's actually written in the books, you will soon realize that its biggest fans have actually played it while its loudest critics have actually not :)

[thydungeongal]

Like okay this will inevitably happen with almost any RPG: some people will simply choose to make hating a thing into their personality and insist on misinterpreting everything in the rules to support the Worst Possible Reading of the rules. And there are, in fact, people out there who have actually played D&D 4e and decided it's not for them. But D&D 4e, of pretty much any mainstream RPG of the past two decades, has attracted a disproportionate share of the former type of "critic."

[talenlee]

one of the wildest things about a lot of '4e hate' is how many people criticising it seem to be parroting like, three sources. Like I understand that for people who disliked the game, those sources may well have crystallised their opinions and given them tools to express those opinions, but it is pretty weird, especially when those sources include flat-out mistakes.

It's like when you find out a huge body of Dark Souls opinions stem from literally one video, quoted verbatim.

[dice-wizard]

Every anti 4e argument is the same three or four entirely incorrect and unfounded points flogged over and over again. If the critic's point contains the words "MMO, no role play, board game" I have no interest in discussing it further. I've started to tell people "You're wrong and you look silly trying to argue" which I've yet to see anyone know how to respond to.

[dice-wizard]

Oh sorry I ENTIRELY FORGOT "isn't D&D."

That one I ask "well what's D&D" and invariably their answer also invalidates current or favorite editions. They really hate that one!

[unseenphil]

My 'favorite' anti-4E argument is "Disassociated mechanics" where someone complains that certain mechanics are abstract in a way they don't like. Where they're fine with like, hit points, but pretend that daily abilities for martial characters are some new abstraction that's a bridge too far despite existing forever. "But why does the player get to control this, it throws me out of the game!" etc. That one essay gave a bunch of people an easy turn of phrase to throw into their arguments and the guy who wrote it and coined the phrase makes publishing decisions for Feng Shui of all things.

[millievfence]

I feel like it's not that surprising people who didn't like a thing haven't played it very much?

Like the correct reaction is to be a little sad about the loss of investment in the version you liked and move on with your day, but complaining is still better than investing hundreds of hours and then playing.

[millievfence]

Having now played 4e for a while: I wouldn't walk away from a good GM over this, but I like it way less than 5 or 3.5

[the-dao-of-the-zerg]

In the novel "Ender's Game" there's these elite, invite-only political debates that are the only REAL source of political discussion anyone intelligent pays attention to.

Very disappointed to have reached the future and discovered Orson Scott Card was over-estimating people again.

Why can't we have nice walled gardens for advanced debate?

Even places like LessWrong are hardly exclusive - anyone can post there, it's hard to get banned, and people are biased against downvoting. There's not even a secret LessWrong+ that only invites the cream of the community to participate

[profound-yet-trivial]

If it existed, would you know about it?

[millievfence]

LessWrong+s totally exist they're just not formalized.

[roach-works]

speculative fiction writers i am going to give you a really urgent piece of advice: don't say numbers. don't give your readers any numbers. how heavy is the sword? lots. how old is that city? plenty. how big is the fort? massive. how fast is the spaceship? not very, it's secondhand.

the minute you say a number your readers can check your math and you cannot do math better than your most autistic critic. i guarantee. don't let your readers do any math. when did something happen? awhile ago. how many bullets can that gun fire? trick question, it shoots lasers, and it shoots em HARD.

you are lying to people for fun. if you let them do math at you the lie collapses and it's no fun anymore.

[roach-works]

YOU GET IT

[millievfence]

Mary Robinette Kowal says the secret is to say "modified $brandname gun", not "$brandname gun" . Then all the autists will focus their powers on explaining your gun.

[triviallytrue]

It's so funny that Game Changer keeps having on guests that are incredibly iconic to the talent but because of generational gaps are literally just some guy to their much younger audience

[triviallytrue]

To comedic actors in their 30s, Eric from Tim and Eric is basically god or whatever. To me (guy who has seen a handful of Tim and Eric sketches) it's a neat cameo but I still had to google him. And to the thousands of teenage fans it's basically like they grabbed someone off the street and added a little name card on top of him

[datafags]

but triv, think about it: to dropout's teenage audience, the most important comedians are like. internet nerds. the fact that they have brian david gilbert on, and frequently, means that they are adequately pandering to both sections of their audience

[triviallytrue]

admittedly Brian David Gilbert is an excellent cameo but I fear he is merely a peer to most of the cast, as opposed to someone who will draw a strong reaction out of them

[millievfence]

I am just now learning that Brian David Gilbert is some kind of famous? And I still can't tell for what.

[liskantope]

It seems to me that more women today than ever before are willing to be single for most of, if not their entire lives, and I'm not entirely sure of the reason. Do you think this is indeed a trend, and if so, why?

I absolutely think it's a trend that younger people in general are more willing to be single for longer periods of time or forever, and I can see a cluster of reasons for this but I think the main one is that we're getting more and more misanthropic in the sense of being afraid of forming connections with other humans. Technological changes as well as social evolution towards more fear-of-daily-occurrences-based mindsets has contributed this. We all still have our deeply-ingrained instincts towards wanting deep connections and to be in a position of taking care of someone, so a bunch of us pour all of those energies into pets, which further makes it harder to find the bandwidth to get a human significant other. (All of this is becoming a severe concern to me personally.)

As for this trend among women specifically, this is less visible to me but I can plausibly believe that women are more likely to fall into this camp of not caring to find a significant other. Reasons for this include a rise of a particular type of misandry that I don't think was prevalent before the 2010's in which men are seen as generally kind of scary and privileged in a way that affects our every move, and the fact that, while everyone a few decades ago was under more social pressure to follow the traditional path of getting married, women had more of that pressure, and maybe in trying to liberate themselves from this gendered expectation there has been some overcorrection.

(I would be very curious about how pet-ownership correlates with gender, actually. My instinct is to imagine that women are more likely to own pets and to put more energy into them, but quick googling gives mixed results.)

Of course, I don't really get why proportionately more women would prefer lifelong singleness rather than partnering with other women (bisexual-identification among women, after all, is shown to be steeply increasing nowadays).

[loki-zen]

Another posited reason for this trend amongst women Vs men (in the globally dominant cultureplex) is that women's expected gender role behaviour is less inhibitory of forging emotionally and physically intimate bonds outside of sexual or romantic relationships.

[isaacsapphire]

Just off the top of my head, in no particular order.

1. Women expect to be pursued, so women may appear willing to be alone when they actually don't want to be alone, but they're not doing anything because they expect someone else to pursue them. This strategy is more likely to end up Forever Alone as pursuing random women has become less socially acceptable in a variety of contexts, and the acceptable contexts are rarer and more opt-in.

2. Class, education, and ethnic issues: women expect/are expected to marry "up", to a man of equal or greater class status, education,and income. And generally the range of desired ethnicities, by the woman herself or her family and friends, is not unlimited. That is, women are trying to find a husband who is from a very specific demographic. As more women attend college then men, particularly in some demographics, and as more women make more money, there are portions of specific demographics of women who, statistically, would have to marry "down" to marry because there simply are not enough men in the correct demographic and cohort for them all to marry "up".

3. Meta around unmarried birth and single motherhood changed; a pregnant woman doesn't Need a husband ASAP socially anymore, and depending on her income level, she may be better off unmarried on paper. In terms of legal control over her child, being unmarried is superior regardless of income. Single mothers, however they came to be single and mothers, are no longer remarkable socially and punished as they used to be. Government benefits are more generous to single mothers than married mothers in many cases.

4. Social pressure to marry has actually reversed for some demographics. What is an "appropriate age" for marriage (and childbearing) has gotten older and older, as women are expected to complete more and more education, and marrying before completing education and starting a career is seen as a huge error and evidence of being stupid and a certain kind of retro slutty that remains frowned upon.

5. Social pressure to marry as a prerequisite for having sex has declined, probably related to Christianity's power having wained.

6. Women now are less horny than previous generations of women, due to a variety of factors but psych meds being a big part of it. Obesity may also play a role. I'm guessing more on this one.

7. Men have less to offer economicly than they used to.

8. The modern middle class job market requires regional mobility that a partnered person sacrifices unless the household is single earner, which few middle class households are

9. This all adds up to the fact that, for many women, they're unlikely to land a man who would be better than no man (and remember, the perfect man could get hit by a bus and become an invalid, or have a psychotic break (happened to the husband of my mom's friend), or divorce her, or lose his job tomorrow. There is always risk.) The effort and the social/economic cost of looking for a relationship may be too expensive for these marginal women.

Also I am confident that the radfems will chime in about how disgusting and horrible men are. Not sure if this opinion has gotten more widespread, but it's easier for women who feel that way to be single now, due to the above factors, which is for the best.

[theresponseblog]

and related to the "marrying up" thing, it's also expected that you will only form a relationship with someone who is 100% a match to you, who answered every question in that test OKCupid used to do exactly like you and marked them all "very important my partner feels the same". The idea that you might date or marry someone who doesn't reflexively raise a silent fist when you mutter "aye-see-aye-bee", that just isn't in anyone's picture anymore. Everyone is told that their politics and philosophy are inherently perfect, and that disagreement is a sign of moral rot and must be avoided.

[liskantope]

The response from isaacsapphire by itself is well enough thought out to be worth reblogging on its own. Just a couple of things I would add though.

Regarding (1), I wasn't interpreting the ask, or aiming my answer, to address the frequency of women publicly appearing to be content with being alone, but rather, what women say that they want (either in surveys, or casually to their friends, etc.), in which I think they tend to be honest about what they really want rather than it being any kind of display of passivity. If we look at how many women don't show outward signs of badly wanting a partner, of course isaacsapphire is pointing to something that has always caused the gender skew to be further in the direction of men openly wanting partners.

Regarding (2), yes, I've been hearing more and more talk about that lately and should have thought to mention it. Specifically, I'm hearing that (a) women tend to want to "marry up" in terms of income and degrees (which, in a way, has always been true?), and (b) women are outpacing men in terms of higher degrees nowadays, and have more or less closed the wage gap among non-parents. The combination of (a) and (b) spells obvious trouble for both straight single women and straight single men.

And yeah, theresponseblog, this is one of the ways that the ubiquity of online dating (or just the move in the direction of more choices in general) is screwing us up. It's gone farther towards the opposite extreme from "marry whomever is of an appropriate sex/age in your small community and don't worry about what you have in common because through the act of being together long-term you'll fall in love" than could have been imagined even probably as recently as thirty years ago.

[liskantope]

@loki-zen replied: Sorry but no it isn't, Isaac sapphire's comment is an unsourced reiteration of tired mra talking points. Who the fuck thinks it's easy to raise kids on your own now? There's no evidence that women are staying single because they can't find guys who are richer than them . Etc

Hmm. So admittedly I do feel very slightly uneasy (and like I should be exercising more skepticism) around the claim that women are still trying to "marry up", because I've heard it repeated over and over on certain YouTube channels that may be too skewed in a certain direction. I'm thinking mainly of Chris Williamson, who I would not characterize as an MRA but who is really into men's issues, often goes against the grain of more common feminist beliefs, and probably does get regularly accused of being one. That said, I had heard the study cited over and over (and to be clear, from far more commentators than Williamson -- I wouldn't be surprised if Robert Wright is also one of the people who have mentioned it) and not heard of any pushback from anywhere, so I assumed the result was mostly true. Quick Googling suggests that the claim probably has its origins in this study from back in 2016 (seems already a little dated and it's a little troubling if this is the only study the claim rests on and it didn't start getting brought up everywhere until the 2020's, but I don't know). A little bit more searching shows other articles addressing the issue by saying something like "women are now marrying down more than they used to, due to getting more degrees and the wage gap shrinking", but that doesn't seem to be claiming anything about women's preferences, just that as a result of getting more degrees and more income, women's marrying decisions have had to adjust at least a little to it.

Does anyone have any concrete data on this?

(I also feel slightly icky about using phrases like "marrying up/down", but apart from maybe employing terms like "hypergamy" I'm not sure how to correct this without making my paragraphs even wordier than they already are.)

As for anyone thinking it's easy to raise kids on their own nowadays, I don't see where isaacsapphire said or implied this (saying that single mothers aren't socially stigmatized the way they used to be is different!). Most people with any sense know it's not at all easy to be a single parent and don't regard it as an ideal outcome. I tend to suspect, though, that it's seen as a viable option (at least for women) at least marginally more than in decades past. Some of this is visible in looking through women's online dating profiles, where it's not incredibly rare to run across someone who chose to be a parent without a partner (counterpoints: (1) I don't really have good evidence that this has increased in the past decade, only my suspicions; the fact that it's more visible to me than a decade ago may in theory be entirely explainable by my changing age group; and (2) an uptick in conception without a partner is probably more a result of women wanting children but finding it harder to get a partner or not wanting to get a partner for other reasons covered elsewhere).

It's also funny that the question of "do women feel more in favor of being single mothers rather than raising their children alongside a man" is coming up right now, because just yesterday I was listening to the new Feminine Chaos podcast episode and Rosenfield and Maltz Bovy were addressing this very question because of an apparent trend in this direction among the "chattering classes" culture they spend much of their time commenting on. And I can't help mentioning that nine years ago, on what I believe was my once-ever social event in my academic life where I was the only man among women, I accidentally overheard a young female grad student saying, "I know being a single mother would probably be hard, but honestly I sometimes think it would be worth it so that I don't have to deal with some stupid man being around." (She then gave a visible start when she saw that I was just arriving back from the bathroom.) My point in bringing all of this up is that, while going around saying "women nowadays tend to prefer to raise a child as a single parent than to have a male partner" would be blatantly weakmanning, this is not entirely a strawman at least when applied to certain kinds of progressive subcultures. My suspicion is that also, it's at least marginally less of a strawman now than in decades past, but I really don't know how women in the '90's, say, talked about male partners, single motherhood, etc.

[millievfence]

My feelings of urgency in finding a partner went down palpably as grocery delivery became available, because I no longer needed a romantic partner as a guaranteed errand runner while sick. I think the change in feelings might exceed the change in actual value, but it was shocking how tangible that change was.

Feels important to note I am partnered, it's not like grocery delivery + vibrator fulfilled every desire. But if I wasn't, I'd have more drive to get back out there if there was no delivery.

[isaacsapphire]

Something that's stuck in my mind is how much "bad man" behavior is chronic illness type stuff that would be coddled and forgiven in a woman.

Shit like, "doesn't pull their weight on household tasks, constantly sleeping, or saying they're too tired to do anything but is playing videogames/watching TV/chatting with friends."

Shit like, "is unemployed/underemployed and either refused to get a (full-time/in their industry rather than low effort low pay) job while insisting they just can't work 40 hours or insisting on work conditions so specific that they're functionally unemployable."

[millievfence]

This feels like the kind of thing that's less different than it looks, because the phenomenon's presentation is gendered. Like how pop culture thinks men are more stoic in the face of pain and react to men's (manly expressions) of pain more strongly, despite research showing women have higher pain tolerances and complain less.

[the research I've seen focuses on female athletes and soldiers. I think this generalizes poorly, because boys are more likely to be pushed into these activities than girls. But since the bias is held by sports and military doctors treating injured girls/women, the complaint stands]

Men will get judged more harshly for not working, no dispute there. But people (in some subcultures) will say kinder words about disabled women than disabled men, while still judging a woman more for failing to keep a clean house. Doubly so if the disability is invisible.

[millievfence]

This comment struck a chord with me, but at the same time I know multiple dudes who only function due to the labor of their female partner.

[isaacsapphire]

Something that's stuck in my mind is how much "bad man" behavior is chronic illness type stuff that would be coddled and forgiven in a woman.

Shit like, "doesn't pull their weight on household tasks, constantly sleeping, or saying they're too tired to do anything but is playing videogames/watching TV/chatting with friends."

Shit like, "is unemployed/underemployed and either refused to get a (full-time/in their industry rather than low effort low pay) job while insisting they just can't work 40 hours or insisting on work conditions so specific that they're functionally unemployable."

[millievfence]

This feels like the kind of thing that's less different than it looks, because the phenomenon's presentation is gendered. Like how pop culture thinks men are more stoic in the face of pain and react to men's (manly expressions) of pain more strongly, despite research showing women have higher pain tolerances and complain less.

[the research I've seen focuses on female athletes and soldiers. I think this generalizes poorly, because boys are more likely to be pushed into these activities than girls. But since the bias is held by sports and military doctors treating injured girls/women, the complaint stands]

Men will get judged more harshly for not working, no dispute there. But people (in some subcultures) will say kinder words about disabled women than disabled men, while still judging a woman more for failing to keep a clean house. Doubly so if the disability is invisible.

[wormy-business]

I saw this question posed on tiktok, but I think Tumblr would really enjoy it too.

If a fae creature offered to give one million dollars for a bone chosen at random, how many bones would you allow them to take?

Light clarifications; The fae is not the one choosing the bones. The bone is taken at random. Each bone, no matter the size or importance, is worth a full million dollars. You must also declare the exact number first, you can't go bone-by-bone. You either say 2 or you say 10, you can't work your way up to a higher number. The bones are removed instantaneously, and the money is given immediately as well. You will not get in government trouble for acquiring the money.

How many bones do you give?

NONE MY BONES ARE MINE!!!!

Only one.

2-5

6-10

11-30

31-60

61-99

100-125

126-150

151-175

176+

Just take 'em all

Voting ended onMay 5, 2024

Tell me in the tags/replies how many bones you'd let the fae take. And as always, reblog for bigger sample size.

[sluggnya]

if you want to test your luck, this site lets you choose a random human bone :) https://randomlistgenerator.com/human-bones

[millievfence]

There are way more bones in the human body whose loss would necessitate >$1m in medical expenses than there are no-cost-to-loss bones. I might consider 1 if I was destitute, but after that it's clearly a bad plan.

[millievfence]

I keep thinking of those internet-brave people who say there's no excuse for mispronouncing people's names, if white people can learn Khaleesi they can learn yours. And sure, we know those now, because we heard them a lot. But the Game of Thrones audiobook reader can't say most names the same way twice, including ones that are very close to common English names. Is Petyr pronounced Peter? Like petard without the d? Peteeeeer? Patire? Every usage is a new adventure.

[millievfence]

I also see Tchaikovsky used as an example. Which is dumb because Tchaikovsky is a romanization; if you wrote out "Czajkowski" Anglos would absolutely choke.

[transgenderer]

I'm a vegetarian but I don't really "get" people who get expensive medical treatments for their pets. Like. If my cat had cancer I'd be like. Bummer. Guess the humane thing to do is put her down. And I've had this cat like most of my life

[transgenderer]

@sabakos said:

fortunately ive never had to put a cat down yet, as long as they aren't obviously in pain and can still eat/use the litter box i think its best to just let them die naturally

i often worry that my old-ass cat is in a lot of pain. how would i know...her species isnt social the way ours is so maybe shed hide it yknow. i mean theyre kind of social now that theyre domesticated. cat colonies and all. but still. i wish there were opiates that only worked on cats so they could just give em out like candy

[tanadrin]

cats still have pretty reliable behaviors associated with illness like isolating themselves and not grooming. i think as long as a cat is able to eat and groom themselves and use the litterbox normally you can be reasonably confident they have a decent quality of life.

[millievfence]

I wouldn't pay for cancer treatment but I've found vets very prone to "oh well this test will be definitive" or "this treatment will definitely solve the problem" and it can be really hard to pull the plug on that process, especially if you want them to treat your other animals.

[olderthannetfic]

Best fandom history commentary ever, courtesy of @tardistara

[i-call-me-clarence]

For your viewing pleasure:

[millievfence]

Interesting to compare this to the “wolverine then and now” posts

[millievfence]

More evidence that the 90s were just as shallow and Hugh Jackman was underperforming as Woliverine

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

(that last one being especially egregious because he was supposed to be a loser nerd)

Farscape:

Hercules, who at least is supposed to look hot

Brendan Frasier

Admittedly that picture comes from an article whose title starts with "Brendan Frasier had to starve himself..."

Gilmore Girls:

Lost World (rando 1990s syndicated tv show)

and then there was the 80s:

[olderthannetfic]

Best fandom history commentary ever, courtesy of @tardistara

[i-call-me-clarence]

For your viewing pleasure:

[millievfence]

Interesting to compare this to the "wolverine then and now" posts

[futurebird]

This is absolutely wild.

Two populations of ants (Cataglyphis hispanica) in the deserts of Spain, the same species but separate genetic lineages. All workers are hybrids of both populations but in both cases, through social hybridogenesis the reproductive queens and males are only of one lineage or the other.

Queens of both species must mate out to produce workers (hybrids) but the workers never in turn reproduce.

They show it's been like this for a long long time!

[millievfence]

To clear up my past self's confusion (plus some context): both male and female reproductives in this species are produced parthenogenetically (without a father). This is normal for males in ants, bees, and wasps, but weird for daughters. It's especially weird that they do it for reproductives but not workers (maybe a disease thing?). It also means males never have grandchildren, so I'm not sure why they bother producing them.

[jadagul]

Nothing makes me more viscerally sympathetic to the "corporations decide what products people are going to want regardless of what people actually want" argument than the fact that all phones are giant tablets with no buttons. No one is making anything else, so everyone "has" to want one of those.

Except.

I really did care about this issue, so I looked into the details, and that's exactly backwards. When Motorola killed the Droid line of phones with slide-out keyboards, I went and read an interview with the product director. And he was like "yeah, I loved that feature, I really liked those phones, but we just couldn't get people to buy them."

And similarly, I'm always upset that no one is making reasonable-sized (under five inches) phones any more. But the thing is, when they do make those they can't sell them. For a long time Apple hung on with the mini line, which was the only thing that ever tempted me to do business with Apple. But they're discontinuing it because they just can't sell enough of them to justify keeping that line open—even though they have a total monopoly on the market for "small decent-quality smartphones".

These are both cases where the corporations keep trying to create demand for exactly the products I want. And it doesn't take because people authentically, organically, do not want them.

[lumsel]

This happens so, so often, and I think most people don't want to believe it. Sometimes it really is your tastes that are the niche!

[loki-zen]

Hey so like. What if everything wasn't a relentless race to maximum profit and so you could get more than the one most popular type of thing.

[triviallytrue]

I feel like this is one of those questions that doesn't make sense without proposing some other reason why manufacturers would devote a lot of resources to creating stuff that doesn't benefit from economies of scale. Like are there government subsidies for this kind of thing or are the manufacturers just doing it for the love of the game or what

[tanadrin]

Yeah, the world in which there is less profit motive to produce goods is a world with less variety of goods, not a world with more. Like, this is why you see all these leftist memes about how we don't need a dozen brands of peanut butter, we need healthcare, right? Certainly the history of socialism-as-she-is-practiced is not one in which there are tons of niche brands and customizable options for consumer goods! It's more usually the case that there is One Good Per Category and if you don't like it, well, tough tiddies.

Which is a system some people are fine with, given the tradeoffs! Maybe we don't need dozens of different models of everything. But I don't know what system would encourage producing niche goods more than capitalism, or at least a market economy. Maybe more robust anti-trust enforcement to increase competitiveness between firms? But that's still just making technocratic tweaks to capitalism.

[maaruin]

I suspect that patriarchal capitalism (I think that is what it is called - the kind where one person owns the company) would lead to more niche products than shareholder capitalism (the kind where many individuals own shares and can hire and fire the CEO), because if one or a few individuals own a company their individual likes influence what that company does in addition to the desire for profit. Shareholders on the other hand generally don‘t care about the product and may push the company towards copying the most successful product on the market.

[phaeton-flier]

I mean, maybe, but the most famous patriarchal capitalist companies I can think of, Twitter and Apple under Jobs, each have fairly bad results!

[morlock-holmes]

Capitalism with robust anti-trust laws would produce more variety, don't you all think?

There's a weak version of this argument, which is, "Corporations can force large numbers of people to like whatever they make " and that's obviously non-sense.

The stronger version is "corporations can often get people to buy something that suffices, even when they dislike it"

I plum forgot to check whether my phone had a headphone jack before I bought it, because I literally never had to before.

But it's not such a dealbreaker that it outweighs the inconvenience of returning the phone and doing more comparison shopping.

I find it impossible to believe that consumers don't want headphone jacks; I find it quite possible to believe that headphone jacks are not a breaking point and that consumers will deal with it not being there in order to get some other feature that they do want.

Part of the reason you deal with Windows 11 is because you don't like the exactly two other competitors on the market, but that's hardly a plethora of options!

[millievfence]

True smaller phones have never been tried: the iPhone mini was not that small compared to the same-number iphone. And on Android the smaller models (which are still bigger than my previous phone that was already too big) have worse technical specs than the even more giant ones. Looks like that's not true for the iphone, but it is true for iPad.

[freebroccoli]

See, I had all afternoon to work on my D&D city, and instead I spent it researching how rivers change course over time and Roman infrastructure.

[millievfence]

respect for staying on task

[the-dao-of-the-zerg]

I appreciate the existence of the Rationalist Community, because the whole point of The Sequences is that if you got it right, You Should Be Winning. And these people are actually out there, testing all these ideas. And on the whole, the thing we learn is that no, this does not really improve your win percentage by a significant amount. But occasionally they find something that does work, and I suddenly have a hundred relatively solid anecdotes to reason off of. They are very useful canaries, even if I would not want to be a canary

[profound-yet-trivial]

When discussing the degree to which rationalists have an improved win rate, it's important to remember that the control group for LessWrong isn't "startup founders" or something like that, it's r/atheism (or perhaps a more neurodivergent version of it).

Rationalists were well ahead of academia + industry on AI risk, we were well ahead of the "nerdy Bay Area" curve on taking COVID seriously, and (although I'm not endorsing the externalities, and I personally missed the boat) many rationalists were well ahead of the curve on cryptocurrency.

The only real area I can think of where rationalists are plausibly doing worse than control (and here we run into massive selection effects) is mental health and vulnerability to cults. Rationalist techniques haven't paid off as substitutes for therapy and medication, and it's possible that indulging one's disposition to take weird ideas seriously is a risk factor for mental illness and cult susceptibility, above the risk factor inherent in simply having that disposition.

(The number of people attempting to build cults in the vicinity is a curse of success in my opinion; charlatans are drawn to communities with money and status where people will hear out a weird outsider.)

Anything obvious I'm missing?

[ghostpalmtechnique]

I am far from the central example of a rationalist*, but I am certainly adjacent, and one way that I am definitely winning relative to the average person is that I don't waste money on positional goods. I think this is more common among rationalists than non-rationalists; however, I don't know whether rationalism causes this or it's simply that the kind of person who is resistant to the cognitive processes that lead to buying useless status signals is more likely to be drawn to rationalism in the first place.

not autistic (and not poly or LBGT), not a programmer or even in STEM, not a resident of the Bay Area, or within an urban core at all, for that matter

[millievfence]

I think this one is probably giving too much credit to rationalists.

Programmers have a fabulous ratio of salary:[social pressure for positional goods]. Bigtech parking lots look like they have genuine income diversity until you notice that while cars may be old or unglamorous, they never look unsafe.

Rationalists don't quite have positional goods, but many parts care about status a lot, and being frugal is low status. You don't need to buy any particular thing, but having a low threshold for buying things that might help you is considered virtuous.

While I'm complaining: I'm not saying everyone needs to know how to drive. But it would be nice if ability to drive was counted as kind of agency. But too many high status people never learned to drive, so they insist it's a non-factor.

[millievfence]

Addendum: I think the rationalists are closer to correct on personal spending than much of the rest of the world, and in particular more correct than my terminally scarcity-minded dad. The encouragement to spend more money, and to spend money on things I wasn't 100% sure would work out, have been very good for me. I object to saying that rationalists don't ever do status-driven spending, because they do and it sucks, but overall I like this equilibrium.

I guess it might still be incorrect to call it positional goods because while it will hurt your status to be frugal, it doesn't hurt anyone else's status when you spend more on yourself (except maybe by moving the average and overton window- but still nothing near normal positional goods). The only time one person's spending even arguably socially hurts another is ~excludable-spending, like hosting parties on shelling dates, and maybe funding sexy projects.

Parties are still underprovided and often badly implemented so I'm not worried about wasteful competition for those. And my only objection to competition for funding sexy projects is that sexiness doesn't track usefulness as well as I'd like.