Here's the thing though - we can't implement laws based on what we think we know based on comments legislators made in the media. We need to implement laws based on what they actually say. And these are the same arguments that supporters of the earlier LGBT law made. But that law actually says "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
The problem is, there are no "state standards" that the law is referencing, and "heterosexual" is a sexual orientation; likewise cisgender male/female are gender identities. So according to the actual text of the law, instructing kindergarteners "OK everyone line up, boys over here for the boys bathroom and girls over there for the girls bathroom" violates what the law actually says. Now, you may say obviously that's not the intent, but if they intended something else they should have passed something else. They are trying to give a lot of press quotes saying "X", pass a law that actually says "Y", and then say "how dare anyone accuse us of passing Y, we passed X".
And this Stop WOKE act, along with the prior LGBT law, are intentionally vague in order to create a motte and bailey where teachers are legitimately afraid to talk about anything in the bailey, while when challenged the legislators and Governor are like "how can anyone be against [the motte]??!?"; avoiding political blowback for just saying that they want to ban the entire bailey while effectively in fact banning it.
I feel like I can't answer that because a major issue with these laws that there's a motte and a bailey. So, if there's an exquisitely clear law that banned [all things related to LGBT and Race that liberals think conservatives oppose and wish to ban], then I'd oppose that law. If there's an exquisitely clear law that banned [the most egregious examples conservatives cite of things they don't like that liberals teach] then I'd probably support it. So, if you have an exquisitely clear list of teaching you are talking about I'd be happy to opine but the fact that you aren't saying what the list is, is the whole G*d* point.
I mean, if you want to pre-emptively give up on trying to find any sort of common ground, that's your prerogative I guess. But I object to the idea that a precondition of discussion here is that I need to agree that it's a good idea to ban some unspecified thing. In the interest of attempting to proceed in argumentative good faith, I will give an example of a piece of extreme "gender ideology" that I would be OK with keeping out of public school and an example of extremely milquetoast "gender ideology" that I would definitely not be OK with keeping out of public school. There must be some in-between spot on the "gender ideology" dial that is the border between these two things, for me. If you don't want to either discuss these laws on the basis of what they actually say, nor actually be specific about what you want to ban or not ban, then I'm tapping out of this thread.
(deliberately extreme) Idea that I'm OK with keeping out: The concepts of "man" and "woman" are invented whole cloth by the patriarchy and imposed on society for the purpose of oppressing women; there are no actual differences whatsoever, even on average, between men and women.
(deliberately milquetoast) Idea that I'm not OK with keeping out: Although men and women have some differences on average, it's OK for women/girls to like stereotypically masculine things (think trucks, contact sports); and it's OK for men/boys to like stereotypically feminine things (think knitting, decorating).
The Florida law is what happens if educators stick their thumb in the eyes of parents repeatedly. It might not be ideal, but perhaps the teachers unions will show some introspection and humility.
I assume that parents can still send their children to private schools to learn gender theory, CRT, etc. in the same manner as other religious groups.
Your last sentence shows the true correct solution to this entire problem. Banning _can't_ and _won't_ work to solve the problem, although I agree the problem is real. School choice is the only real solution. Let people pick the schools they want with the pedagogy they want, and stop dictating pedagogy at all. Restricting this solution to only rich people is obviously bad. Kmele Foster of the Fifth Column podcast has, in my opinion, by far the best takes on this topic.
Because it's a social/cultural problem. It just escalates the culture war, and it's basically impossible to enforce in any except the most egregious examples. You might get half-way decent enforcement for the first little bit when it's in the spotlight, then the cultural zeitgeist moves on and it stops working....and the teachers keep teaching.
Not to mention the fact that in any halfway decent education (even as young as high school or middleschool), you _should_ be able to read and be exposed to bad ideas. You can't demonstrate why something is wrong without demonstrating that thing. I think the 1619 project is trash history with a misguided goal, but I'd hope that a teacher would be able to give specifics from the work itself in a refutation. And if your response is just "well don't teach about 1619 at all", I think that's naive. It's in the culture. You can't just ignore things.
The only parts of these laws that I think are in principle ok are ones that are already covered by civil rights law. THe portions that go beyond those protections are counter productive.
And of course, there is also the fact that you are creating a situation where, everytime legistlative power/control flips, _what_ gets banned and allowed is going to flip. That's a losing game. I'd really rather not turn the curriculum into yet another political football. Give control back to the parents. Let them choose what school their students will be taught at. It's a simple solution that not only fixes this problem but a _host_ of other schooling problems.
When I hear these stories of the worst excesses of what's taught in some schools, I find it pretty terrible, and I would hate to have my kids being taught that kind of material. But bans aren't the solution. Let parents pick their schools, and have money follow those kids. I think that the worst of these schools will lose all their students pretty fast, because I honestly think these ideas are not popular hardly anywhere.
Every one of these issues is fixed by school choice, with none of the downsides I'm talking about. You mention using weapons. I dont' like the analogy to war. I think it's bad and makes our society worse, but you are complaining that "not using guns will make it harder to win", when I'm telling you that you can end the war in an instant, with no more fighting needed at all.
That's not the enemy of the good, that's preferring the fight. I just can't agree with that.
I'm an "Aspie", which they up and decided to start calling a type of autism a few years back. This "masking" controversy looks pretty stupid to me. Maybe the same sort of phenomenon as deaf activists objecting to curing deafness?
I mask. I put long hard years into learning to do it. Before I finally got good enough at it to have something vaguely resembling a normal social life, my life was miserable; Bullied and shunned in K-12, lonely as an adult, gradually slipping into depression. Just because I was terrible at social interactions didn't mean I didn't have a psychological need for them. It meant I went without and suffered. It took me until I was middle aged to get good enough at it to date, marry, and finally have a kid at 50. And enjoy being HAPPY.
What do they want those of us with Asperger's to do, embrace the loneliness? Create Aspie communities where we can live in some sort of ghetto?
It's the sort of thing where you have to find a happy medium. Not having social skills is not a good way to live. But neither is constantly fighting your natural tendencies and second-guessing yourself to ensure that you don't say anything "too autistic."
I think the solution for autistic people is to work for progress on both fronts: both develop social skills and seek to find a social environment where your particular kind of weirdness is tolerated. For example, it's good to be able to exercise tact and avoid controversial subjects in some settings, but it's also good to have close friends and family with whom you can relax a little bit and be blunt.
That was sort of the problem: I didn't have much in the way of "natural tendencies". When I was in my teens I literally had my mother scream because I'd neglected to put an expression on my face; She was not reassured when I told her that my face had been blank because I hadn't actually been feeling anything at that moment.
After that I made a point of keeping an expression on my face when around other people; That was "masking", right? It certainly made life easier than looking for some ghetto where often having a blank face wouldn't get me in trouble.
Asperger's isn't all downsides; It made me a good engineer, for instance. But lacking any natural gift for social interaction is a handicap in the truest sense, and "masking" is how you overcome that handicap.
But it's possible to "mask" to the extent that you are never comfortable, can never relax, never really feel like yourself—and to the extent that people who want to get to know you and who might like your natural self never see that natural self. If your sort of masking doesn't cause you distress, great, but it does to some people. That's the steelman version of what people mean when they talk about masking being harmful to one's mental health.
I might have some insight for you, as someone who was diagnosed as a teenager a few years before Asperger's syndrome was made obsolete, and is now pushing 30 and into the age range at which a lot of these people (especially women) are now receiving diagnoses for the first time.
For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you. I've spent many years struggling to cobble together a patchwork of social rules to follow and communication strategies to use, as well as discreet coping mechanisms for my sensory issues. That's my mask, and it's been a tremendous asset for my social and professional life. I'm married, have some friends, am well liked enough at work.
The mask is useful, but it's fucking exhausting to consciously do all of these things that my nonautistic friends don't think about. Before I had a diagnosis, and still to some extent before I heard of the concept of "masking" a few years ago, I didn't really understand why these things were so exhausting to me and why they took so much conscious effort. I sympathize a lot with these women who are now in their 20s and 30s and 40s, who struggled to do all these things for many years without knowing why it was so hard for them and apparently so much easier for their peers. I'm watching them do now what I did at 16/17/18: latch onto this explanation given to them (often by a credentialed professional), that it's not their fault that the world is not designed without their needs in mind or that other people have such different and specific expectations of their behavior. I think there's often an adjustment phase where you decide to reject the way that others expect you to be, to reject the way the world is, especially if you've been internalizing it as *your own fault* your whole life but are now given this paradigm shift. And sometimes that results in taking questionable advice ("masking is always bad and you should stop") from people that you think understand what you're experiencing, when no one understood it before. So the woman in the video takes that questionable advice, is rejected by people she thought liked her, and now fears that it *was* actually her all along that wasn't good enough, and that she *is* meant to be alone and isolated after all. Or maybe I'm projecting, haha.
Relatedly--there is definitely more of a possibility now for us aspies to ghettoize ourselves. Wrong Planet forums existed when I was diagnosed, but #actuallyautistic communities on every social media platform didn't. I understand the temptation to give up on trying to meet the world halfway, and instead to try to meet your social needs through people who are much less likely to judge you for the things that got you bullied as a kid or ostracized in adulthood, or to expect you to socially perform in ways that tire you out. I really don't think we auties/aspies should totally isolate ourselves as a group--the world is too big for that. But I understand the temptation, if it's a path of less resistance.
The older I get (though like I said, I haven't even hit 30 yet), and the more I cultivate a sense of agency over the direction of my own life, the more I understand masking as something that needs to be balanced with un-masking, the same way that a stressful day at work needs to be balanced with a period of rest. But it doesn't surprise me at all to see someone struggling with the implications of a new diagnosis be uncertain about what it means for her and how she should make her way through the world.
I am a big fan of re-reading books that I love both for their language and their depth.
I have my own modest free sub stack and my last post was prompted by my re-reading Seize the Day by Bellow. It was the first time I really connected with the book in a deeper way. We experience great literature in different ways as we change.
"Games are responsible if someone says the wrong thing to an underage person in the in-game chat. There is no good way to be sure a given person is not underage. The response of most games I know that don’t need chat for coordination between players is… to kill the chat function entirely."
I do not believe this. The average MMO has text chat and the average shooter has voice chat, but no one has shut down COD over strangers cussing at little Timmy. I am willing to believe game developers are scared of letting people send words over the internet, but when circumstances force the them to do it anyway, they seem to be fine. This suggests that those complying with the imagined incentives are simply wrong.
This is still a real chilling effect, but it has a much simpler solution. Stop being such cowards, nothing bad will happen!
Anecdotally, I know several people who actively don't want to play a game that has chat. So perhaps its a market signal - some games have chat and some people play those; other games don't have chat and some people prefer to play those. There's diversity in the market, and different people can choose different things based on what they like. Seems fine.
"An argument (now gated) that chickens should be kept caged because keeping them ‘cage-free’ is bad even for the chickens, who are violent animals that will kill each other and get sick and die from each others’ filth, and that these are the main reasons caging is actually cheaper. I am sure some will say ‘this is an argument that chickens should not be used for food at all’ or even ‘this is an argument for Wild Chicken Suffering and we need to exterminate chickens’ and one of the things I could but choose not to is even. "
Is there a missing word in the last sentence?
What was missing from that argument was any attempt at quantification. I want to see some nerdy EA try to measure how much chickens suffer when caged vs cage-free vs state of nature.
No, there is no missing word (I meant a reference to the 'can't even' concept). Someone might do the math but that someone is not going to be me in any sane world.
I think Noah Smith is unfair to the 1950s house. I live in one, built 1958, 950 sqft. It looks very much like the one in his twitter thread. Its fine for me, I live here alone, its actually more space than I need. It might be tight if you are a married and have even one kid, but, you should be buying a bigger house in that case. But I'm personally somewhat in the anti-natalist camp so I think more people should not have kids, or have 1 kid, and thus live in smaller houses. (For one thing, the income and job security requirements to raise 2 or more kids are so high in the US, that the bigger house will seem cheap by comparison to other related expenses).
A point Noah missed. Those 1950s houses were often built on pretty big lots. Including mine, most of which is trees and grass. If I had the money and will, I could put a large extension on it. Many of my neighbors have done that. Some have put second floors on their house. You can also expand the house in different directions at different times, and some have clearly done that at well.
There are many other ways I live the 1950s lifestyle. I don't go to restaurants. I don't use streaming (I have a hand-me-down TV which is currently unplugged). I have one old car. Its fine, no complaints, and actually I have ADHD too so the fewer things I need to keep track of, the better.
Re books, I think the problem with discoverability of new books is a major issue. There was another study recently showing bestseller books are increasingly concentrated on a small number of authors, which also makes social recommendations harder (since what I read by default is more correlated with what my friends read).
I don't think I can fully solve this problem with old books - finding more B-tier old books is easy, but I've read enough of the known good ones that finding new A-tier ones is pretty hard and new S-tier ones is incredibly hard. Ideally there being more writers today would help the rate of S-tier books being written go up, but the actual rate (or at least the rate at which I can discover then) seemtto be even or declining.
Epistemic status: probably wrong, but moderately interesting. After 50+ years of just being weird and having people comment on it, "masking" is second nature. I've never thought of myself as spectrumy (see the age above), but I sure didn't/don't fit well with most people and have worked hard to cultivate a professional/family/friend group which generally (sometimes greatly) appreciates me. Even among them, I'm most comfortable with are my kids because they only know me the way I am. Doesn't mean that I don't mask with them, but I think almost everyone does (reading Aella's poll results, you gotta think everyone masks). At the risk of referencing Freud, if you're weird, your Id/drive is deeply or distractibly interested in things other than just cake and sex, and Ego can take a long time to mature. Of course the booze helps.
Question then: at what point did people begin to think that you can survive without working hard on filters?
Shoulda mentioned when I filter/mask long enough with people you find interesting (or even just in close proximity) I can see other people's masks slip and find out that I'm less weird than I think.
Wealth isn't the only determinant of wellbeing. While people that I grew up with in NH during the 1950s were less well off, we were, in some ways, better off: I was a "free range" child and roamed wherever I pleased and played with whomever I wanted to without supervision. One learned of necessity to negotiate relations with others.
"Coffee machines continue to improve, the exception among kitchen appliances. The general lack of improved kitchen technology remains strange to me"
I feels like there is plenty of improvement in the technology though. The efficiency of fridges has been going up quite a bit. Dishwashers consume way less water and energy for cycle.
If you want to talk about functional improvements instead, fridges and freezers are now often "no frost", which is nice (yes, a century old technology, but i don't remember seeing it available in mid-range prices before. I actually don't remember seeing it at all, though i didn't check high end models).
There are also self cleaning ovens. I don't remember seeing them available say, 10 years ago.
Here's the thing though - we can't implement laws based on what we think we know based on comments legislators made in the media. We need to implement laws based on what they actually say. And these are the same arguments that supporters of the earlier LGBT law made. But that law actually says "Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards."
The problem is, there are no "state standards" that the law is referencing, and "heterosexual" is a sexual orientation; likewise cisgender male/female are gender identities. So according to the actual text of the law, instructing kindergarteners "OK everyone line up, boys over here for the boys bathroom and girls over there for the girls bathroom" violates what the law actually says. Now, you may say obviously that's not the intent, but if they intended something else they should have passed something else. They are trying to give a lot of press quotes saying "X", pass a law that actually says "Y", and then say "how dare anyone accuse us of passing Y, we passed X".
And this Stop WOKE act, along with the prior LGBT law, are intentionally vague in order to create a motte and bailey where teachers are legitimately afraid to talk about anything in the bailey, while when challenged the legislators and Governor are like "how can anyone be against [the motte]??!?"; avoiding political blowback for just saying that they want to ban the entire bailey while effectively in fact banning it.
I feel like I can't answer that because a major issue with these laws that there's a motte and a bailey. So, if there's an exquisitely clear law that banned [all things related to LGBT and Race that liberals think conservatives oppose and wish to ban], then I'd oppose that law. If there's an exquisitely clear law that banned [the most egregious examples conservatives cite of things they don't like that liberals teach] then I'd probably support it. So, if you have an exquisitely clear list of teaching you are talking about I'd be happy to opine but the fact that you aren't saying what the list is, is the whole G*d* point.
I mean, if you want to pre-emptively give up on trying to find any sort of common ground, that's your prerogative I guess. But I object to the idea that a precondition of discussion here is that I need to agree that it's a good idea to ban some unspecified thing. In the interest of attempting to proceed in argumentative good faith, I will give an example of a piece of extreme "gender ideology" that I would be OK with keeping out of public school and an example of extremely milquetoast "gender ideology" that I would definitely not be OK with keeping out of public school. There must be some in-between spot on the "gender ideology" dial that is the border between these two things, for me. If you don't want to either discuss these laws on the basis of what they actually say, nor actually be specific about what you want to ban or not ban, then I'm tapping out of this thread.
(deliberately extreme) Idea that I'm OK with keeping out: The concepts of "man" and "woman" are invented whole cloth by the patriarchy and imposed on society for the purpose of oppressing women; there are no actual differences whatsoever, even on average, between men and women.
(deliberately milquetoast) Idea that I'm not OK with keeping out: Although men and women have some differences on average, it's OK for women/girls to like stereotypically masculine things (think trucks, contact sports); and it's OK for men/boys to like stereotypically feminine things (think knitting, decorating).
The Florida law is what happens if educators stick their thumb in the eyes of parents repeatedly. It might not be ideal, but perhaps the teachers unions will show some introspection and humility.
I assume that parents can still send their children to private schools to learn gender theory, CRT, etc. in the same manner as other religious groups.
Your last sentence shows the true correct solution to this entire problem. Banning _can't_ and _won't_ work to solve the problem, although I agree the problem is real. School choice is the only real solution. Let people pick the schools they want with the pedagogy they want, and stop dictating pedagogy at all. Restricting this solution to only rich people is obviously bad. Kmele Foster of the Fifth Column podcast has, in my opinion, by far the best takes on this topic.
Because it's a social/cultural problem. It just escalates the culture war, and it's basically impossible to enforce in any except the most egregious examples. You might get half-way decent enforcement for the first little bit when it's in the spotlight, then the cultural zeitgeist moves on and it stops working....and the teachers keep teaching.
Not to mention the fact that in any halfway decent education (even as young as high school or middleschool), you _should_ be able to read and be exposed to bad ideas. You can't demonstrate why something is wrong without demonstrating that thing. I think the 1619 project is trash history with a misguided goal, but I'd hope that a teacher would be able to give specifics from the work itself in a refutation. And if your response is just "well don't teach about 1619 at all", I think that's naive. It's in the culture. You can't just ignore things.
The only parts of these laws that I think are in principle ok are ones that are already covered by civil rights law. THe portions that go beyond those protections are counter productive.
And of course, there is also the fact that you are creating a situation where, everytime legistlative power/control flips, _what_ gets banned and allowed is going to flip. That's a losing game. I'd really rather not turn the curriculum into yet another political football. Give control back to the parents. Let them choose what school their students will be taught at. It's a simple solution that not only fixes this problem but a _host_ of other schooling problems.
When I hear these stories of the worst excesses of what's taught in some schools, I find it pretty terrible, and I would hate to have my kids being taught that kind of material. But bans aren't the solution. Let parents pick their schools, and have money follow those kids. I think that the worst of these schools will lose all their students pretty fast, because I honestly think these ideas are not popular hardly anywhere.
Every one of these issues is fixed by school choice, with none of the downsides I'm talking about. You mention using weapons. I dont' like the analogy to war. I think it's bad and makes our society worse, but you are complaining that "not using guns will make it harder to win", when I'm telling you that you can end the war in an instant, with no more fighting needed at all.
That's not the enemy of the good, that's preferring the fight. I just can't agree with that.
Heaven forbid white people be taught something other than white supremacist history for once in their lives
I'm an "Aspie", which they up and decided to start calling a type of autism a few years back. This "masking" controversy looks pretty stupid to me. Maybe the same sort of phenomenon as deaf activists objecting to curing deafness?
I mask. I put long hard years into learning to do it. Before I finally got good enough at it to have something vaguely resembling a normal social life, my life was miserable; Bullied and shunned in K-12, lonely as an adult, gradually slipping into depression. Just because I was terrible at social interactions didn't mean I didn't have a psychological need for them. It meant I went without and suffered. It took me until I was middle aged to get good enough at it to date, marry, and finally have a kid at 50. And enjoy being HAPPY.
What do they want those of us with Asperger's to do, embrace the loneliness? Create Aspie communities where we can live in some sort of ghetto?
Screw that.
It's the sort of thing where you have to find a happy medium. Not having social skills is not a good way to live. But neither is constantly fighting your natural tendencies and second-guessing yourself to ensure that you don't say anything "too autistic."
I think the solution for autistic people is to work for progress on both fronts: both develop social skills and seek to find a social environment where your particular kind of weirdness is tolerated. For example, it's good to be able to exercise tact and avoid controversial subjects in some settings, but it's also good to have close friends and family with whom you can relax a little bit and be blunt.
That was sort of the problem: I didn't have much in the way of "natural tendencies". When I was in my teens I literally had my mother scream because I'd neglected to put an expression on my face; She was not reassured when I told her that my face had been blank because I hadn't actually been feeling anything at that moment.
After that I made a point of keeping an expression on my face when around other people; That was "masking", right? It certainly made life easier than looking for some ghetto where often having a blank face wouldn't get me in trouble.
Asperger's isn't all downsides; It made me a good engineer, for instance. But lacking any natural gift for social interaction is a handicap in the truest sense, and "masking" is how you overcome that handicap.
But it's possible to "mask" to the extent that you are never comfortable, can never relax, never really feel like yourself—and to the extent that people who want to get to know you and who might like your natural self never see that natural self. If your sort of masking doesn't cause you distress, great, but it does to some people. That's the steelman version of what people mean when they talk about masking being harmful to one's mental health.
I might have some insight for you, as someone who was diagnosed as a teenager a few years before Asperger's syndrome was made obsolete, and is now pushing 30 and into the age range at which a lot of these people (especially women) are now receiving diagnoses for the first time.
For what it's worth, I mostly agree with you. I've spent many years struggling to cobble together a patchwork of social rules to follow and communication strategies to use, as well as discreet coping mechanisms for my sensory issues. That's my mask, and it's been a tremendous asset for my social and professional life. I'm married, have some friends, am well liked enough at work.
The mask is useful, but it's fucking exhausting to consciously do all of these things that my nonautistic friends don't think about. Before I had a diagnosis, and still to some extent before I heard of the concept of "masking" a few years ago, I didn't really understand why these things were so exhausting to me and why they took so much conscious effort. I sympathize a lot with these women who are now in their 20s and 30s and 40s, who struggled to do all these things for many years without knowing why it was so hard for them and apparently so much easier for their peers. I'm watching them do now what I did at 16/17/18: latch onto this explanation given to them (often by a credentialed professional), that it's not their fault that the world is not designed without their needs in mind or that other people have such different and specific expectations of their behavior. I think there's often an adjustment phase where you decide to reject the way that others expect you to be, to reject the way the world is, especially if you've been internalizing it as *your own fault* your whole life but are now given this paradigm shift. And sometimes that results in taking questionable advice ("masking is always bad and you should stop") from people that you think understand what you're experiencing, when no one understood it before. So the woman in the video takes that questionable advice, is rejected by people she thought liked her, and now fears that it *was* actually her all along that wasn't good enough, and that she *is* meant to be alone and isolated after all. Or maybe I'm projecting, haha.
Relatedly--there is definitely more of a possibility now for us aspies to ghettoize ourselves. Wrong Planet forums existed when I was diagnosed, but #actuallyautistic communities on every social media platform didn't. I understand the temptation to give up on trying to meet the world halfway, and instead to try to meet your social needs through people who are much less likely to judge you for the things that got you bullied as a kid or ostracized in adulthood, or to expect you to socially perform in ways that tire you out. I really don't think we auties/aspies should totally isolate ourselves as a group--the world is too big for that. But I understand the temptation, if it's a path of less resistance.
The older I get (though like I said, I haven't even hit 30 yet), and the more I cultivate a sense of agency over the direction of my own life, the more I understand masking as something that needs to be balanced with un-masking, the same way that a stressful day at work needs to be balanced with a period of rest. But it doesn't surprise me at all to see someone struggling with the implications of a new diagnosis be uncertain about what it means for her and how she should make her way through the world.
I am a big fan of re-reading books that I love both for their language and their depth.
I have my own modest free sub stack and my last post was prompted by my re-reading Seize the Day by Bellow. It was the first time I really connected with the book in a deeper way. We experience great literature in different ways as we change.
If anyone's interested, below is my post.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/carpe-diem
"Games are responsible if someone says the wrong thing to an underage person in the in-game chat. There is no good way to be sure a given person is not underage. The response of most games I know that don’t need chat for coordination between players is… to kill the chat function entirely."
I do not believe this. The average MMO has text chat and the average shooter has voice chat, but no one has shut down COD over strangers cussing at little Timmy. I am willing to believe game developers are scared of letting people send words over the internet, but when circumstances force the them to do it anyway, they seem to be fine. This suggests that those complying with the imagined incentives are simply wrong.
This is still a real chilling effect, but it has a much simpler solution. Stop being such cowards, nothing bad will happen!
Anecdotally, I know several people who actively don't want to play a game that has chat. So perhaps its a market signal - some games have chat and some people play those; other games don't have chat and some people prefer to play those. There's diversity in the market, and different people can choose different things based on what they like. Seems fine.
"An argument (now gated) that chickens should be kept caged because keeping them ‘cage-free’ is bad even for the chickens, who are violent animals that will kill each other and get sick and die from each others’ filth, and that these are the main reasons caging is actually cheaper. I am sure some will say ‘this is an argument that chickens should not be used for food at all’ or even ‘this is an argument for Wild Chicken Suffering and we need to exterminate chickens’ and one of the things I could but choose not to is even. "
Is there a missing word in the last sentence?
What was missing from that argument was any attempt at quantification. I want to see some nerdy EA try to measure how much chickens suffer when caged vs cage-free vs state of nature.
No, there is no missing word (I meant a reference to the 'can't even' concept). Someone might do the math but that someone is not going to be me in any sane world.
I think Noah Smith is unfair to the 1950s house. I live in one, built 1958, 950 sqft. It looks very much like the one in his twitter thread. Its fine for me, I live here alone, its actually more space than I need. It might be tight if you are a married and have even one kid, but, you should be buying a bigger house in that case. But I'm personally somewhat in the anti-natalist camp so I think more people should not have kids, or have 1 kid, and thus live in smaller houses. (For one thing, the income and job security requirements to raise 2 or more kids are so high in the US, that the bigger house will seem cheap by comparison to other related expenses).
A point Noah missed. Those 1950s houses were often built on pretty big lots. Including mine, most of which is trees and grass. If I had the money and will, I could put a large extension on it. Many of my neighbors have done that. Some have put second floors on their house. You can also expand the house in different directions at different times, and some have clearly done that at well.
There are many other ways I live the 1950s lifestyle. I don't go to restaurants. I don't use streaming (I have a hand-me-down TV which is currently unplugged). I have one old car. Its fine, no complaints, and actually I have ADHD too so the fewer things I need to keep track of, the better.
Re books, I think the problem with discoverability of new books is a major issue. There was another study recently showing bestseller books are increasingly concentrated on a small number of authors, which also makes social recommendations harder (since what I read by default is more correlated with what my friends read).
I don't think I can fully solve this problem with old books - finding more B-tier old books is easy, but I've read enough of the known good ones that finding new A-tier ones is pretty hard and new S-tier ones is incredibly hard. Ideally there being more writers today would help the rate of S-tier books being written go up, but the actual rate (or at least the rate at which I can discover then) seemtto be even or declining.
Epistemic status: probably wrong, but moderately interesting. After 50+ years of just being weird and having people comment on it, "masking" is second nature. I've never thought of myself as spectrumy (see the age above), but I sure didn't/don't fit well with most people and have worked hard to cultivate a professional/family/friend group which generally (sometimes greatly) appreciates me. Even among them, I'm most comfortable with are my kids because they only know me the way I am. Doesn't mean that I don't mask with them, but I think almost everyone does (reading Aella's poll results, you gotta think everyone masks). At the risk of referencing Freud, if you're weird, your Id/drive is deeply or distractibly interested in things other than just cake and sex, and Ego can take a long time to mature. Of course the booze helps.
Question then: at what point did people begin to think that you can survive without working hard on filters?
Shoulda mentioned when I filter/mask long enough with people you find interesting (or even just in close proximity) I can see other people's masks slip and find out that I'm less weird than I think.
+1 to its own post on management as a technology. +100 to it being its own recurring series of thoughts.
Wealth isn't the only determinant of wellbeing. While people that I grew up with in NH during the 1950s were less well off, we were, in some ways, better off: I was a "free range" child and roamed wherever I pleased and played with whomever I wanted to without supervision. One learned of necessity to negotiate relations with others.
"Coffee machines continue to improve, the exception among kitchen appliances. The general lack of improved kitchen technology remains strange to me"
I feels like there is plenty of improvement in the technology though. The efficiency of fridges has been going up quite a bit. Dishwashers consume way less water and energy for cycle.
If you want to talk about functional improvements instead, fridges and freezers are now often "no frost", which is nice (yes, a century old technology, but i don't remember seeing it available in mid-range prices before. I actually don't remember seeing it at all, though i didn't check high end models).
There are also self cleaning ovens. I don't remember seeing them available say, 10 years ago.