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I think the synthesis is that the intended experience is probably a niche one, but emergent player behavior has supported other playstyles that widen the range of possible ways to get through the game. But the devs have always left some space for this, and it's grown in recent games like ER

Once again, everything is Evangelion now

Sure, but I don't know how much this distinction matters- the effect quickly becomes another aggravating cause that maintains the whole edifice. What do you think private equity will do in the face of a political program aimed at depreciating their holdings here?

Can we get this list? I've been rereading a lot of Discworld lately, and somehow these books are even better than I remembered. Best villains in my rereads so far are probably Reacher Gilt, Vorbis, and the Elf Queen.

But this lesson goes for me, too. Adorno’s lesson is that thought always goes beyond its object; it can never fully coincide with it. The concept of fascism is “wrong” in that actual reality never fully accords with our concepts. This is a necesssary and unavoidable part of intellectual activity: it’s always speculative and imaginative work. The temptation now will be to take the fascism analogy too literally and insist on its absolute validity. But this was never really my contention. Analogies are always imperfect and need to be refined. I ultimately thought the fascism thesis was what the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos called a “progressive research programme:” that is to say, it could make certain strong interpretations and even predictions about what was going on and it had a fairly good track record in that regard. There are other frameworks for understanding the present that might be more subtle, more sophisticated, and more accurate. But I do believe that this idea has earned its place in any serious consideration of the present. The work will now be to synthesize it into a broader horizon.

I think John Ganz's piece on the fascism debate managed to synthesize all of this in a pretty compelling way. www.unpopularfront.news/p/there-was-...

I think it's possible, but I think that it's also a very easy excuse that people fall back on to avoid really grappling with what went wrong in their own process (I've also been guilty of this). The "right for the wrong reasons" bit is definitely a lot more common than "wrong for the right reasons."

I also did not realize it would get this bad, in large part because of the stories about Israel I was raised with. And I do hate how this extreme fascist turn has retroactively justified a lot of bigoted accounts of the history that I do NOT agree with. But I have had to adjust a lot of priors here.

Maybe the fact that this "new, unprecedented monster" emerged so quickly from the previously sacrosanct, "most ethical military ever" should inspire some humility about whether people who saw these features in Israel before Trump II maybe noticed certain things you were too quick to dismiss!

I forget whether which pro-war hack it was, but I think it was one of the Chait, Haidt, Sullivan trifecta who claimed he was "wrong on Iraq for the right reasons" while his left anti-war critics were "right on Iraq for the wrong reasons." This blinkered account of Israel's conduct is just as silly.

hell? yea, brother

I actually would be interested in a version of this book that reckons with the trade-offs the authors think are and aren't worth making for a stabilized future, as well as the political possibilities for getting there. Even if the data isn't all there- much of the data is missing for this book also!

You can always find proponents of some cause that requires huge sacrifices either pretending or genuinely believing that they can somehow have all the benefits without any of the costs. It's why this book's complete blindness to politics and persuasion is such a damning omission.

I mean, I think the relationship is more complex than that too- I just think that those extra complexities are a) not anywhere near as well understood and b) point to solutions that are much less politically likely, so the path of least resistance to addressing this issue goes right through Gilead.

This is a glaringly obvious place to go if you think about the problem for more than two seconds. It's also why pro-natalist conferences almost invariably wind up reproducing this cursed fusion of quiverfull christians + techbro eugenicist types that's taken over American politics.

Ex: the authors say that we don't understand falling birthrates. But to the extent we do understand them so far, one clear trend seems to be that (all else being equal) less coercive gender relations lead to lower birth rates. Want to get the birth rates up? Well, a solution springs to mind here...

There's a pattern that crops up again and again in political discourse will people will draw attention to some problem without offering any clear agenda for resolving it because any viable solution necessarily runs through some highly unpopular places.

But there's literally a chapter called "Depopulation won’t fix itself," and the book clearly takes a stand (again, using quite poor evidence) that a depopulated future is not only undesirable but also likely barring some left-unstated intervention. That's the issue here!

You say that "The whole point of the book is showing how big a difference it will make IF the long run birth rate is, say, 1.6 or 2.0" like the book is just modelling the potential outcomes of one possible trajectory without making any claims as to its likelihood.

Here, I've created a new crisis known as the "my huge dog" crisis. If my 8-month-old puppy keeps growing at her current rate, we expect her to reach Clifford's size in about 7 years. It's really disturbing how nobody is talking about this and investing in solutions like a comically large doghouse.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't think "if the line keeps dipping, then it won't level off" is all that novel an observation? That's just... definitionally true. But the whole point is that their evidence for these trends holding in perpetuity is incredibly slim!

This makes it even funnier that Eric Adams landed on "I live a plant-based life" as his go-to response when reporters found out he was eating a bunch of fish.

I think some people even talked about this dynamic at the time- "realistically we can't do this to every guy who engages in [insert anti-social behavior here], but we can make an example of this bozo in the firing line!" Turns out this approach actually works, but not to the intended effect.

The other big issue is that randos with minor offenses were never on the receiving end of these big online mobs all THAT often, even at the high watermark of 1.0, but anyone online at the time saw online mobs go after randos with minor offenses. Blows the odds out of proportion in people's heads.

One issue with cancel culture is that there was never much proportionality. (In fact, you could say that an inability to control proportionality is one of the big features.) So it's hard to turn up the dial for increasingly bad behavior without veering into offline tactics and reprisals.

To the extent that "vice signalling" is a real thing, I think a lot of it is just this- people showing off the fact that they're not afraid of cancellation as a way of attracting followers who also resent these dynamics.

Adding to this- I think that the author also REALLY doesn't want to tackle the fact that a lot of people were negatively polarized into backing a culture of reactionary transgression and spectacle because of their instinctive dislike for the social dynamics of these online pile-ons.

wazzzaaaa dude happy birthday lol 😝

hope you’re having a good one wish i was there

Also we all know the secret we share. Into the depths of darkness men like us tread. The hunger that drives us away from the light.

Really funny that this is the angle Drake tried to go with as well

That famous meme'd scene does this perfectly, where there are three or four bad assumptions that need to be corrected before Hitler reaches peak crash-out. He learns about both the eponymous Downfall AND about the extent of his exclusion from the real decision-making loop simultaneously.

I'd add to that the modern-day image of the emperor with no clothes: a charismatic authoritarian leader surrounded by sycophants finally coming up against the hard limits past which their managed delusions can no longer be sustained. Hard to be the decider when you don't actually know shit!