November 2014 Media Thread

I'm always so impressed by how much you contribute to these threads. Thanks.

Peak scientist

I am living this reality every day...

Why did you call the Google article "exit, voice, and loyalty"? That's the title of a book by Hirschman and on first skimming it seems to be related but I don't understand why exactly you chose that line.

"The Acquired Immune System: A Vantage from Beneath", Hedrick 2004 (immune systems as parasites; excerpts)

I absolutely loved this. The concept of the adaptive immune system as something that gives the ability to get a slight advantage over your conspecifics, at the expense of selecting your pathogens to be more virulent such that loss of the adaptive system becomes fatal, reminds me forcefully of all sorts of things in prokaryotic and eukaryotic genome structure. Things that happen because they can and then get locked in place by other things built on top of them even though they themselves are harmful, or sheer selfish elements. Like poison/antidote pairs of genes in bacteria that stick around even though they increase average generation time because fluctuations in the levels of the two make a small fraction of bacteria grow extra slowly and be stress-resistant, or the evolution of the spliceosome to make sure self-splicing introns always leave leading to vertebrate genes that are 90% spliceosome-requiring introns, or the sheer abundance of transposons that make up more than half of our genomes...

Do you actually read that amount of links every month? If so, can I borrow your time-turner?

I thought the Dominic Cummings post, in particular, was excellent. Perhaps the best blogpost I've read this year. I've already recommended it to several other people. But, warning:

• It is perhaps over-long
• If you are not British, it is possible you will be missing important context

The deliberate practice link is dead for me, but this works.

I'm reading it right now, I love it too!

Just following links from your link, the translation is at http://lemniscatranslations.wordpress.com/io/

the poignant drama and character development, and the poetic narrative delivery

Have you considered other VNs? You could look at the top rated VNs on VNdb and see whether they sound dramatic enough for you; for example, Umineko (although I'm not sure if I recommend it or not).

I think I might like Toradora a tiny bit less than you, but apart from that, I'm surprised to agree with pretty much everything you've said on these particular titles. I didn't watch Akuma all the way through though, I figured it was trash about 2 minutes into the first episode and dropped it without looking back.

Although your friend is right about Kishi, it's pretty much AoT in space in terms of premise.

For those who aren't aware, Fate/stay night (the visual novel) has been mentioned/recommended here before in Eliezer's Three Worlds Collide short story:

I suspect the aliens will consider this one of their great historical works of literature, like Hamlet or Fate/stay night -

Reading the visual novel can take some time, so anyone who isn't interested in that should really consider watching this TV adaption instead. Personally, I found Unlimited Blade Works to be the best part of Fate/stay night (closely followed by Heaven's Feel, which they've also promised to make a TV adaption of), so you wouldn't be missing too much in my opinion.

(From what I hear, previous adaptations weren't too good).

You probably already know all of this, but for the sake of completeness, IMHO (Thar be spoliers below!):

The original eroge novel had (as is the tradition) several endings and plotlines. The "Fate" plotline mostly dealt with Shirou/Saber; the "Unlimited Blade Works" (UBW) plotline resolves Shirou and Archer's relationship while focusing on Shirou/Rin (and to some extent Shirou/Rin/Saber); and "Heaven's Feel" focuses on Shirou/Ilya and explains Sakura's backstory. Then there's Realta Nua, an expansion of UBW that rewrites the ending into Shirou/Saber forever (literally). There's also a sequel called Fate/hollow ataraxia which supplies a lot of the backstory and the metaphysics of how the grail war actually works.

As is the tradition will multi-ending visual novel adaptations, Fate/stay night (the original anime adaptation) tries to combine several elements of Fate with Heaven's Feel, and hints of the ending of Realta Nua. The animation is not great e.g., most fights are still-shot montages and even if it were, there are few high-powered attacks in the fifth grail war, other than perhaps Archer's version of UBW and Enuma Elish. For crying out loud, Enuma Elish is represented by flat red splotches.

People were rather unhappy that UBW got shafted, and so Type-Moon produced an OVA (now-confusingly also called Unlimited Blade Works) that tries to do too much from UBW in too little time with practically no budget. The animation quality is crappier than Fate/stay night and the plot hangs together with duct tape and string cheese.

Then ufotable came along, and Fate/zero was mindblowingly awesome.Some of this, IMO, is just because the heroes of the fourth grail war have attacks that are far greater in scope (Ionian Hetaroi, fully-powered Excalibur, Enuma Elish, For Someone's Glory and Prelati's Spellbook) than the fifth (shitty Excalibur, Archer's UBW, Enuma Elish, Gae Bolg?). That and they had a vastly larger production budget.

I enjoyed it a lot at the time, but it's diminished in the memory (I think mostly due to what I see as a lack of ambition). (I think I said much the same thing in a previous thread)

I liked it but it could have been so much better if they actually committed to doing a serious plot in their over-the-top style rather than just going "fuck it, we'll make the plot stupid too".

I thought it got off to a great start, dragged a bit in the middle (too many standard anime extremely long battles), but had a decent ending.

Been reading it for months. Seconded.

Just to add to this recommendation, Aaron Reed's Blue Lacuna is one of the best pieces of interactive fiction I've read/played. It's practically novel-length, well-written, contains some interesting puzzles to solve (or skip, if that's not your jam), and has some pretty rich world-building. And it's free.

Also, for those interested in interactive fiction, Andrew Plotkin's long-delayed commercial IF Hadean Lands is finally available. I haven't yet finished it, so I can't offer a fully informed recommendation, but I'm enjoying it so far. It's very puzzle-dense, and a lot of the puzzles center around its extremely elaborate alchemy system. Figuring out how alchemy works in the game has a sort of HPMOR-esque "apply rationalist methods to a magical system" feel. Avoid if you don't like having to sort through a deluge of information in order to solve puzzles and make progress.

And, finally, if you are unfamiliar with Plotkin's work, I highly highly recommend Spider and Web, which is free to play. It also has the theme of figuring out how things work in an almost-but-not-quite-familiar setting (technological rather than magical, this time around). It has a very clever narrative hook, where you're a captured spy being inerrogated and the game is your (often unreliable) account of what happened. And it has probably the best narrative-integrated puzzle in any game I've played (you'll know it when you see it -- or solve it, rather).

You'll need to install a Z-code interpreter like Gargoyle to play any of these.

I rate this as "sucky ripoff of the original utility monster comic" http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2569

Honestly, I'm having a hard time extracting an actual point from all the dog-whistle in those posts.

We can't observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along. If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light - well, you can't blame that on theology, now, can you?

Of course you can. Theology is very easily observable. One can ask what the theology should be blamed on, but that goes back to the dawn of history and is but speculation and fog.

So here's some speculation for why patriarchal traditions are so prevalent, which I suppose has been at the back of my mind for as long as I've been aware of such issues, although I've never seen it stated so starkly as I am about to.

1. Men are physically stronger than women.

2. Without modern science, paternity cannot be observed, only enforced (see (1)).

It seems to me that these two facts are a sufficient explanation for the entire phenomenon of both religious and secular suppression of women. Men have been able to, men have wanted to, men have done. Might makes might. "If you want a picture of the past, imagine a man's boot stamping on a woman's face – for ever."

Explanations of how all women really want to be controlled by a strong man are window dressing, excreted by the virtual outcome pumps in the heads of those who find current mores uncongenial to continuing in that way, and who nowadays must use ideas as ammunition instead of stones.

Please stop making comments like this.

The linked article is so misleading that I wouldn't try to derive any true statements about reality from it. It fails to mention any legitimate points of their opponents, and then concludes they don't have any. Five minutes on google would probably give better results.

(I strongly bite my tongue here to avoid going into specific details, but I spent the last month observing GamerGate and it is fascinating to watch how good job can media do to prevent some information from being ever mentioned, and how all information about this topic ultimately comes from the same two or three people.)

One thing, though. The article is pushing a narrative "all our opponents are actually the same" while in fact the only thing conecting them is, well, being opponents of one specific group in one specific topic. For example, there are many feminists in the GamerGate movement (no, Christina Hoff Sommers is not the only example), and also there are many people believing that feminism and men's rights are not contradictory. So the whole paradigm of "dark forces are rising" may be just a convenient excuse to explain away some specific failures or a specific group.

Dark Enlightenment/Neoreaction is an ideology by a very small amount of bloggers who don't matter in the overall discourse. It's in no way the same thing as the MRA-movement.

I can see why the emergence of secular sexism drives progressive nuts, because they wrongly believed that sexism depended on certain kinds of god beliefs that have fallen into decline, as this AlterNet article explores. Uh, no, why would anyone have ever thought that?

Starting with a straw man and then asking " Why would anyone have ever thought that" is pretty bad form. National Socialism in Germany was largely a secular movement that also was sexist. Assuming that in general progressive thought ignores that history is something that says a lot more about the writer than about progressive ideas.

We can't observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along.

LOL: "had" to live with them. I like (= I find humorous) the implied, possibly unintended, sexism.

If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light - well, you can't blame that on theology, now, can you?

Why not? I mean, I don't say that we should or shouldn't put women in a bad light, nor that we should or shouldn't blame theology for that. But why we can't blame theology?
It's not like memes evolve to attain truthiness, or that humans are automatic maximizers / strategizers. Pretty any memeplex I know of has some form of "push away / ostracize my enemies". Understood, any meme that contains "kill all women" would have a pretty short lifespan. But one containing "enslave all women and use them as breeding cattle" could survive indefinitely, whether women are cattle or not. Isn't the whole Neoreactionary movement born under the fallacy that equates survivability with adherence to truth? I find this to be a somewhat inclusive description.

Despite this, I still find the linked article to be appalingly bad at presenting the issue with some form of objectivity. They are not even trying. But I don't know the site and I'm possibly mistaken assuming that it has as mission disseminating informations of some quality.

"If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light - well, you can't blame that on theology, now, can you?"

This starts from a false assumption ("the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition") and implies a false dichotomy (that men either dominate society because of religious beliefs, or because of some reason that progressives would prefer not to blame), and someone who posts on a website dedicated to rationality should see that. I also don't agree with the claim that history paints women in a bad light compared to men. Until recently we've seen an ugly domination of both men and women by men, and we still that in much of the world.

I see other commenters making the assumptions that historical authoritarianism by men signifies that this trait must have at some point either been advantageous to the species, or advantageous to women who chose to mate with "dominant" men and/or the children they bore. This assumption underlies a lot of anti-feminist philosophy online. Have you considered the possibility that there have been men who have passed along their genes by intimidating others (including other men)? Considering our species' history of violence, is it any wonder that tyrannical and Machiavellian males have had an evolutionary advantage? I have noticed that, especially in large societies, living under said men appears to be unpleasant for the masses who don't reign supreme.

It only proves that religion is useful, but not indispensable, if you can equally use any excuse to mistreat women, let's say, for example, a heavily motivated interpretation of evolutive psychology.

Uh, no, why would anyone have ever thought that? We can't observe gods, but women exist empirically, and men have had to live with them all along. If the resulting body of experiences with women have condensed into a patriarchal tradition which puts women in a bad light - well, you can't blame that on theology, now, can you?

Well, nearly all of progressivism can be summarized as an attempt to ignore this kind of logic and see what happens.

Thank you. Moved to here.

Thanks! If you like my rationality-themed stories, you might also be interested in Happily Ever After and The Thousand Year Romance Of Clover The Clever.