Jesus Christ, Ozy. I'm trying to decrease the amount of time I spend reading substack publications, and now I've got a dozen more tabs open (𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 filtering).
"the primary thing when you take a board game into your hands is your intention to defeat the enemy, whatever the means. If you think only of collecting Victory Points or building your engine, you will not be able actually to defeat him"
For what it's worth, my brother plays board games like this - I think of it as "seeing the Matrix" - and his victory rate is absolutely absurd. If five friends play 10 games, each of which can only have one winner, he'll win eight of them.
Thanks! I'd be curious if you (or he) ever end up reading the full post (https://inchpin.substack.com/p/board-game-strategy), and what you think! Ozy summarized the central point well enough but the post goes through a bunch of examples to help illustrate it.
Of course just using that strategy can't guarantee a success rate as high as your brother's (it also depends on other factors like intelligence-of-a-game-shaped-nature, experience with board games, how much you care about winning, and how good your opponents are, etc), but I do think it's a huge boost, especially for and against novices.
In regards to the one about how we don't know how to make good AI art yet, we already have a great science fiction example of good AI art: the Star Trek holodeck. Characters are shown putting a huge amount of creativity and effort into the holodeck programs that they write. They clearly do not design all the 3-D images and assets themselves, the ship's computer does much of it. But the programs they produce are still clearly a labors of love (most of the time, anyway). They don't use the ship's AI to churn out art, they use it to supplement their creativity.
The only true study of several twin/triplet pairs separated at birth and studied from birth (correct me if there are others), was never completed. The records are sealed in a vault until 2066. There's a movie about the triplets, Three Identical Strangers, and one of the twin pairs wrote a book on it.
Nowadays, just like during the baby boom, demand for infant adoption far exceeds available infants. And we now know that separating siblings should be avoided. So it will never be replicated, there's nothing like that study before or after.
People are strange when you are a stranger. I can logically accept that its bad to do things that predictably hurt people. No matter how insane their behavior seems. I cannot and dont need to understand it on a level deeper than "A causes B with high probability".
But I truly cannot fathom why people are upset with the Dad for banging a bunch of dudes without telling them. Nevermind the extremity of their reaction! Everyone tells me even if Im poly I should be able to understand being upset someone lied so often. But I cannot! When I was young, before I was poly, I was cheated on! My partner tearfully confessed she had been cheating for months. I told her to let me think about it for a second. I told her it was fine. We kept dating and she kept banging the guy.
I can see being upset the man was a distant father and partner. But the author seems to understand her dad was in a hard position. Even if he wasnt a great dad he wasnt terrible and he tried. They shared a lot of a life together. Why look back on things with such a venomous lens. The mom wrote this "he wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well." No ones life was wasted.
This is honestly why im a bit of a hermit. People are strange when your a stranger.
I keep thinking about what you said, and wondering if what I feel here is similar. Maybe not. I don't see a venomous lens. But I see an implicit value or assumption that a person we are intimately linked to will be legible to us, and that there's a kind of "secret keeping" that is unacceptable REGARDLESS OF THE SEXUAL "fidelity" aspect or active deception. Similar themes emerge when people feel somehow "betrayed" because their partner did not tell them that they had been adopted, or raped, or born in a different country or used to be a drug addict or had a child 25 years ago, etc etc etc. I literally saw a woman freaking out because her bf of few years told her he had sex with another man years before they met. Wtf even???
And I wonder how I would feel I'm such situation. I think I can imagine feeling *somewhat* upset about some secrets. But generally I don't think people have a kinda duty of full life disclosure to intimate friends or partners. It's a modern obsession that's gone way too far. Cheating is different because of deception but you don't cheat on your children FFS!
Re your woman freaking out: A *lot* of straight women don't want to date a bi man, either because of disease risks, fear of eventually losing him to a man, or because it seems less 'manly' in a heteronormative way. Looking back I think I was more bi than I admitted to myself but didn't act on it and don't plan to.
There's also the larger sense in which people fall in love with some concept of a person and then the revelation destroys that. Had been raped=not a real man or potentially gay (what if it was partially consensual?), born in a different country=not a real American, used to be a drug addict=not clean, etc. (You can think up left-coded ones but I'd guess they have to deal with politics.) It's unfair but attraction is very subconscious and it's entirely possible some revelation destroys the image of a person that produced the attraction in the first place. Ages ago when doing the kink thing I had a lady tell me she couldn't be attracted to me if she knew I'd switched roles. <shrug>
Yes, excellent elaborations here and in a sense they all have a sort of statistical/truth-in-stereotypes validity: while poorly predictive and thus prejudiced for a specific individual, they're probably pointing to something at a population level and that's why they stick.
But I think for romantic/erotic relationships the "image that produced the attraction" is key! So it might be not JUST >they had a secret re something important, I wasn't "worth" sharing it with, boo< but also >they are not the person I like/love< very specifically.
I keep forgetting about it because I seem to be doing that kind of thing less than population average, the image-creating thing (obviously we all do but the idea of eg falling in love with someone in a few days seems bizarrely alien to me, and I actively like discovering new things about people later, tho there is a limit to that still!).
And yes sexual attraction is very uncontrollably visceral in that sense. Tangent here: What you said re kink roles mirrors my experience observing how SURPRISINGLY MANY het fem subs talk about sub men or even switchy men: the very idea of a man bottoming/ submitting is an active turn off. It's interesting and asymmetric for me as a largely het fem dom because while sexually dominant behaviour from men IS an active turn off when directed AT ME, I like switchy men (maybe more than fully s-types) and that switchiness doesn't bother me at all. I think it'd bother me more in a woman, but I haven't had enough female play partners to test this. Much of it is probably confused by social gender norms and intrasexual competition even maybe.
And yet the "knowing X is a boner killer for the whole dynamic" still is a thing sometimes, eg I recall a fairly promising prospect who disclosed a fairly extreme/rare kink, and while he reassured me he didn't expect me to engage (WHY DISCLOSE THO?) that was it. I couldn't see myself even very potentially engage physically with someone who'd DONE THAT/MIGHT WANT TO DO THAT. I knew rationally it was probably fine, at least worth testing but nope. I've seen women describe such reactions to discovering their long term partners crossdressing which is, as a reaction, utterly unintelligible and unrelatable to me, but in principle it's no different to my noping-out on that dude.
So perhaps it's less HAVING a secret than what it is. But I wonder if having one -- even if not repulsive -- is still not destabilising for many people. I remember someone feeling distraught because they weren't told partner had been adopted until it surfaced years later.
I agree with the conservatives that stereotypes are true in aggregate. I agree with the liberals in that (1) something being true in aggregate doesn't mean it's desirable (appeal to nature fallacy), (2) just because something is true in aggregate doesn't mean you have a *moral* obligation to conform to it (3)
Not just mirrors, that was an actual example of it! I was the D, she (het) was the s and couldn't get turned on if I had switched. I had in fact ordered someone to do impact on me a couple of times so I knew what I was doing and she was OK with that. There was another case with the same roles and she (bi) admitted she secretly didn't respect sub guys but we both agreed it was none of our business to be kink-shaming when we had gotten together to do kink stuff so we never brought it up with anyone. So, yeah, maybe het fem subs, but n=2. Those are the only two times I can remember now that I've specifically discussed the issue, though I feel like I've alluded to it other times and don't remember now.
I get it with the 'you don't match my mental subconscious sexy image' thing. I do see how if it's an extreme kink you might be afraid they might want to do it to you eventually or have something dangerous done to them and then you're going to jail to be raped and get HIV (I guess that doesn't happen to women though). I haven't really had that particular issue of someone not conforming to my mental image of them being a bonerkiller, but I know it happens a lot from talking to people. It's not fair but it's definitely out there. You could make a pretty good argument that's why people should talk more about this stuff before getting serious...but a lot of people find mystery sexy!
I don't date anymore, but if I were seeing someone and she were a drag king... eh, no biggie, I always had a thing for tomboys and nerdettes.
As you point out, sometimes you can't win. Secrets are a burden, but sometimes revealing them can be worse. Sadly, there are few foolproof strategies in life. We all cope the best we can.
What I like about lists like this is that they expose a culture by its curiosities rather than its conclusions. You’re not arguing for a worldview so much as mapping what people find worth thinking about, which feels more honest. It reads less like canon-building and more like a snapshot of minds at play
The bit about boardgame strategy seems to apply to life, oddly enough. Lots of people maximize their early life strategy but screw up in midlife, or go well through midlife but crash in old age.
Speaking of "people are strange when you're a stranger"...
it has not even occurred to me that someone would write a substantial comment on an article WITHOUT READING IT OR SAYING SO. This seems unthinkable. In fact if you didnt finish the article you are supposed to explain what parts you read. This is acceptable if the article is long. Of course you dont have to read every footnote or follow every link. I really thought we all agreed on this norm. But maybe people just dont care. Truly, truly strange.
I was already pretty negative on rationalist/nerd critical culture. But I was apparently not pessimistic enough.
Jesus Christ, Ozy. I'm trying to decrease the amount of time I spend reading substack publications, and now I've got a dozen more tabs open (𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 filtering).
In hindsight I definitely should have been able to guess the answer to “why is milk so expensive in Hawaii” without following that link.
And here I was worried my smut wasn't sincere enough for Smut Saturday.
It has the official Smut Saturday seal of approval!
"the primary thing when you take a board game into your hands is your intention to defeat the enemy, whatever the means. If you think only of collecting Victory Points or building your engine, you will not be able actually to defeat him"
For what it's worth, my brother plays board games like this - I think of it as "seeing the Matrix" - and his victory rate is absolutely absurd. If five friends play 10 games, each of which can only have one winner, he'll win eight of them.
Thanks! I'd be curious if you (or he) ever end up reading the full post (https://inchpin.substack.com/p/board-game-strategy), and what you think! Ozy summarized the central point well enough but the post goes through a bunch of examples to help illustrate it.
Of course just using that strategy can't guarantee a success rate as high as your brother's (it also depends on other factors like intelligence-of-a-game-shaped-nature, experience with board games, how much you care about winning, and how good your opponents are, etc), but I do think it's a huge boost, especially for and against novices.
In regards to the one about how we don't know how to make good AI art yet, we already have a great science fiction example of good AI art: the Star Trek holodeck. Characters are shown putting a huge amount of creativity and effort into the holodeck programs that they write. They clearly do not design all the 3-D images and assets themselves, the ship's computer does much of it. But the programs they produce are still clearly a labors of love (most of the time, anyway). They don't use the ship's AI to churn out art, they use it to supplement their creativity.
The only true study of several twin/triplet pairs separated at birth and studied from birth (correct me if there are others), was never completed. The records are sealed in a vault until 2066. There's a movie about the triplets, Three Identical Strangers, and one of the twin pairs wrote a book on it.
Nowadays, just like during the baby boom, demand for infant adoption far exceeds available infants. And we now know that separating siblings should be avoided. So it will never be replicated, there's nothing like that study before or after.
People are strange when you are a stranger. I can logically accept that its bad to do things that predictably hurt people. No matter how insane their behavior seems. I cannot and dont need to understand it on a level deeper than "A causes B with high probability".
But I truly cannot fathom why people are upset with the Dad for banging a bunch of dudes without telling them. Nevermind the extremity of their reaction! Everyone tells me even if Im poly I should be able to understand being upset someone lied so often. But I cannot! When I was young, before I was poly, I was cheated on! My partner tearfully confessed she had been cheating for months. I told her to let me think about it for a second. I told her it was fine. We kept dating and she kept banging the guy.
I can see being upset the man was a distant father and partner. But the author seems to understand her dad was in a hard position. Even if he wasnt a great dad he wasnt terrible and he tried. They shared a lot of a life together. Why look back on things with such a venomous lens. The mom wrote this "he wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well." No ones life was wasted.
This is honestly why im a bit of a hermit. People are strange when your a stranger.
I keep thinking about what you said, and wondering if what I feel here is similar. Maybe not. I don't see a venomous lens. But I see an implicit value or assumption that a person we are intimately linked to will be legible to us, and that there's a kind of "secret keeping" that is unacceptable REGARDLESS OF THE SEXUAL "fidelity" aspect or active deception. Similar themes emerge when people feel somehow "betrayed" because their partner did not tell them that they had been adopted, or raped, or born in a different country or used to be a drug addict or had a child 25 years ago, etc etc etc. I literally saw a woman freaking out because her bf of few years told her he had sex with another man years before they met. Wtf even???
And I wonder how I would feel I'm such situation. I think I can imagine feeling *somewhat* upset about some secrets. But generally I don't think people have a kinda duty of full life disclosure to intimate friends or partners. It's a modern obsession that's gone way too far. Cheating is different because of deception but you don't cheat on your children FFS!
Re your woman freaking out: A *lot* of straight women don't want to date a bi man, either because of disease risks, fear of eventually losing him to a man, or because it seems less 'manly' in a heteronormative way. Looking back I think I was more bi than I admitted to myself but didn't act on it and don't plan to.
There's also the larger sense in which people fall in love with some concept of a person and then the revelation destroys that. Had been raped=not a real man or potentially gay (what if it was partially consensual?), born in a different country=not a real American, used to be a drug addict=not clean, etc. (You can think up left-coded ones but I'd guess they have to deal with politics.) It's unfair but attraction is very subconscious and it's entirely possible some revelation destroys the image of a person that produced the attraction in the first place. Ages ago when doing the kink thing I had a lady tell me she couldn't be attracted to me if she knew I'd switched roles. <shrug>
Yes, excellent elaborations here and in a sense they all have a sort of statistical/truth-in-stereotypes validity: while poorly predictive and thus prejudiced for a specific individual, they're probably pointing to something at a population level and that's why they stick.
But I think for romantic/erotic relationships the "image that produced the attraction" is key! So it might be not JUST >they had a secret re something important, I wasn't "worth" sharing it with, boo< but also >they are not the person I like/love< very specifically.
I keep forgetting about it because I seem to be doing that kind of thing less than population average, the image-creating thing (obviously we all do but the idea of eg falling in love with someone in a few days seems bizarrely alien to me, and I actively like discovering new things about people later, tho there is a limit to that still!).
And yes sexual attraction is very uncontrollably visceral in that sense. Tangent here: What you said re kink roles mirrors my experience observing how SURPRISINGLY MANY het fem subs talk about sub men or even switchy men: the very idea of a man bottoming/ submitting is an active turn off. It's interesting and asymmetric for me as a largely het fem dom because while sexually dominant behaviour from men IS an active turn off when directed AT ME, I like switchy men (maybe more than fully s-types) and that switchiness doesn't bother me at all. I think it'd bother me more in a woman, but I haven't had enough female play partners to test this. Much of it is probably confused by social gender norms and intrasexual competition even maybe.
And yet the "knowing X is a boner killer for the whole dynamic" still is a thing sometimes, eg I recall a fairly promising prospect who disclosed a fairly extreme/rare kink, and while he reassured me he didn't expect me to engage (WHY DISCLOSE THO?) that was it. I couldn't see myself even very potentially engage physically with someone who'd DONE THAT/MIGHT WANT TO DO THAT. I knew rationally it was probably fine, at least worth testing but nope. I've seen women describe such reactions to discovering their long term partners crossdressing which is, as a reaction, utterly unintelligible and unrelatable to me, but in principle it's no different to my noping-out on that dude.
So perhaps it's less HAVING a secret than what it is. But I wonder if having one -- even if not repulsive -- is still not destabilising for many people. I remember someone feeling distraught because they weren't told partner had been adopted until it surfaced years later.
I agree with the conservatives that stereotypes are true in aggregate. I agree with the liberals in that (1) something being true in aggregate doesn't mean it's desirable (appeal to nature fallacy), (2) just because something is true in aggregate doesn't mean you have a *moral* obligation to conform to it (3)
Not just mirrors, that was an actual example of it! I was the D, she (het) was the s and couldn't get turned on if I had switched. I had in fact ordered someone to do impact on me a couple of times so I knew what I was doing and she was OK with that. There was another case with the same roles and she (bi) admitted she secretly didn't respect sub guys but we both agreed it was none of our business to be kink-shaming when we had gotten together to do kink stuff so we never brought it up with anyone. So, yeah, maybe het fem subs, but n=2. Those are the only two times I can remember now that I've specifically discussed the issue, though I feel like I've alluded to it other times and don't remember now.
I get it with the 'you don't match my mental subconscious sexy image' thing. I do see how if it's an extreme kink you might be afraid they might want to do it to you eventually or have something dangerous done to them and then you're going to jail to be raped and get HIV (I guess that doesn't happen to women though). I haven't really had that particular issue of someone not conforming to my mental image of them being a bonerkiller, but I know it happens a lot from talking to people. It's not fair but it's definitely out there. You could make a pretty good argument that's why people should talk more about this stuff before getting serious...but a lot of people find mystery sexy!
I don't date anymore, but if I were seeing someone and she were a drag king... eh, no biggie, I always had a thing for tomboys and nerdettes.
As you point out, sometimes you can't win. Secrets are a burden, but sometimes revealing them can be worse. Sadly, there are few foolproof strategies in life. We all cope the best we can.
I had had three tabs open in my "leisure Internetting" window and now I have almost 40...
What I like about lists like this is that they expose a culture by its curiosities rather than its conclusions. You’re not arguing for a worldview so much as mapping what people find worth thinking about, which feels more honest. It reads less like canon-building and more like a snapshot of minds at play
The bit about boardgame strategy seems to apply to life, oddly enough. Lots of people maximize their early life strategy but screw up in midlife, or go well through midlife but crash in old age.
Speaking of "people are strange when you're a stranger"...
it has not even occurred to me that someone would write a substantial comment on an article WITHOUT READING IT OR SAYING SO. This seems unthinkable. In fact if you didnt finish the article you are supposed to explain what parts you read. This is acceptable if the article is long. Of course you dont have to read every footnote or follow every link. I really thought we all agreed on this norm. But maybe people just dont care. Truly, truly strange.
I was already pretty negative on rationalist/nerd critical culture. But I was apparently not pessimistic enough.
Wait, you think commenting on articles without reading the whole thing is unique to rationalist/nerd culture? ;)