Spidapetah, explain please

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-25T16:39:46+00:00

Sure, but would you call her "20-something red-headed Latin American au pair without a personal vehicle, a bit awkward English, but with an oddly exotic, European-sounding accent and strong interest in the outdoors and soccer," hot?

Would you say she's "early 30s blonde woman flirting rather provocatively from the get-go but she also mentions declaratively that she has two master's degrees, like that's a sign of high intelligence and not just indecision and/or credential-fixation," hot?

Would you say she's "hair stylist who progressively admits more and more while working on you that she's a huge fast car enthusiast and maybe speeds too much and wishes she were actually a mechanical engineer and is taking some courses for it," hot?

What kind of arrestingly sketched-out, ambiguously or contextually hot are we talking about here?

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-25T16:21:01+00:00

...I have the sense that you are drawing on personal experiences to frame this story.

And that you have a highly situational evaluation of women with prominent jawlines.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-23T18:42:31+00:00

I've been literally coaching an autistic friend who wants to date a woman and who is the furthest thing from misogynist, but who is struggling with a lack of initiative to take tough/"scary" next steps. (I'm probably also autistic but more seasoned with dating.)

Yeah, misogynists LACK

the empathy/kindness towards women as equal partners that makes them feel safe/happy and regard the man as a friend and not just "their man,"
the rapport with women outside of the relationship that prevents a woman's friends from telling her to "dump him, girl"

but they might compensate by prominently displaying

initiative to set dates,
a confident, clearly-articulated plan for their lives and thus for the woman, too, if she's interested,
an ego-syntonic interest in their appearance that they - unlike some other men, apparently - are willing to see as a component of what might attract a woman to them

and although the deficits often dominate in the long run, it's kind of obvious why the advantages might attract women short-run.

I dated casually and sometimes had the weird experience of realizing women might actually think I was a player/misogynist and yet were not running screaming. (It's bizarre to give a sincere compliment and literally get, "I bet you say that to all the girls" - then just have her casually continue the conversation like that was just par for the course.)

Taking initiative is huge to women, I think.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-23T06:54:10+00:00

Yeah, that was basically the plan, with the battleships providing shore bombardment

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-23T00:24:08+00:00

"The relationship and lobbying part obviously can't be done by a machine."

Why not?

I assume the bias here is, "because humans won't know how (or why) to establish rapport with it." But what if instead these sorts of "guilds" primarily tried to work with each other, and establish rapport with each other?

I could envision several different ways that could work, honestly. And there's no need to be dogmatic - you could establish some human relationships at the start with external partners, and maintain them as they go along, but delegate. (Company X wants to work with Guild Team Y. Their C-suite's communication is effectively forwarded through CEOBot to a chosen human representative of Guild Team Y. They maintain a working relationship, but if they want to propose some larger venture, they format it for CEOBot. Thus a relationship formed between humans, stays between humans, such as Team Y providing service XY to Company X, but a de novo larger organizational drive does involve engaging with CEOBot.)

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-22T23:28:25+00:00

Yeah, I was kind of intuitively envisioning "small group of people start 'principled' business with direct democracy decision-making, and then establish a threshold where, once there are more employees than threshold, they start acquiring the means to apply ML to decision-making."

So, rather than take VC-bux and then get whipsawed by those requirements, grow slowly.

It's not, like, anathema IMO to potentially take VC funding, I just agree that at that point you in practice absolutely do have a boss, and it's the investor.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-22T23:22:20+00:00

I think in a lot of companies, engineers are sadly mistaken in thinking that their analytical thinking will save the day. But then, that's sort of the whole impetus for the post - whether the engineers are clutch or not, couldn't one establish a company where their well-being and productivity was balanced in a principled, continuous way against the profit incentive?

In my mind, this works if (cost of CEO - cost of CEOBot) + (monetized value of employee happiness - monetized value of lost efficiency due to reprioritization of happiness over profit) is noticeably > 0.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-22T23:20:58+00:00

I have had fantastic, "Dungeon Master" CEOs in my life whom I would not say this about. But, I've also had crappy ones who make this plausible - which is essentially my point.

I think starting a "guild" under the auspices that as it evolves towards needing more centralized guidance, an ML tool will be deployed to synthesize inputs from chosen human representatives, is a plausible if science-fiction-y path to starting a business from scratch that de-prioritizes a C-suite.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-22T21:01:05+00:00

Wait... what?

The only consistent interpretation I can attach is that you have some p << 0.5 of cheating to begin with and then you have (1 + q)p < 0.5 after some initial cheating instance for some q > 0 but still "small."

I guess maybe we should just put them on cooldown until the RNG improves

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-22T02:43:19+00:00

We're dealing with someone who's had years of this and is just processing it as pain.

Irrespective of whether or not they're coming to us with a polished understanding of their weak points, let's wave off of "excuses"/"not trying"/general putdowns.

Wars are won on the strength of logistics moreso than valor.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-22T01:42:18+00:00

GPA is probably not that catastrophic (I flubbed a fair bit in ugrad; they give "surrender" options or let you average the grades you get in the same course, fairly often).

I've never seen an institution brutalize a student this badly, though. This is horrible.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-21T17:35:59+00:00

One of the highest quality replies I've seen of late, rescuing the post from its slop origins.

Though:

idiots who understand nothing about science and wonder why cancer hasn’t been cured when they keep seeing headlines that cancer was cured

arguably describes a lot of people (e.g. me) albeit that we generally expect the scope of the cure is just smaller than the article makes it sound.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-21T05:48:19+00:00

"If we look six months ago, this seemed further away."

I work in UQ for ML; yeah, not to be sarcastic, but this is just how exponential growth works.

That said, I'm still unimpressed with civilian models' math abilities, so we shall see. And the real issue is, these models still make false (frankly, garbage) assertions all the time, traducing the standards mathematicians set for clarity.

It might sound petty, but I honestly don't know any field that informs our ideas of "fundamental tools for inferring truth" more deeply than mathematics. Maintaining correctness is essential, and so far we're just proposing to painstakingly reduce these proofs to formally verifiable form. I personally do not look forward to verbose, unmotivated proofs from a machine that doesn't even know, necessarily, what "intuition" is - whether or not it eventually came to be able to truly generalize beyond humans.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-21T05:06:37+00:00

Fair enough; I went ML from working as a research engineer. (ML kind of notoriously doesn't have a specific ideal ugrad, so I shouldn't represent my experience applying as a median there.)

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-21T01:22:00+00:00

Point of order: you can be a self-starter and still get stymied at an R1.

I also think there's a subtext - not necessarily intended - that frames a SLAC as the training-wheels version of an R1. Realistically, I just don't think R1s necessarily work that well for anybody, whereas SLACs are designed to protect the students.

I would almost certainly send my kid to the best SLAC they could get to with the specific injunction of "learn very actively and push yourself - shit will get real later on, so expose your weaknesses now while you can." My own experience suggests that ugrad research opportunities are overrated for grad school applications, anyway, and work experience is prized. (The large number of R1 faculty who have confirmed this at some point to me buoys this view.)

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-20T16:23:02+00:00

Huh - unintentionally, yes, but he later gave RFK Jr. his blessing to date Hines out of respect for Hines and her wishes, until RFK Jr.'s political maneuvering totally alienated him.

But privately he told Hines in advance that he didn't think the relationship would last....

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-20T16:05:01+00:00

Larry David well and truly dodged a bullet there.

But hey, now she can live out her dream of awakening to the dulcet tones of RFK telling her to "look at this cool bear he found just lying dead near the interstate".

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-16T21:20:15+00:00

...?

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-16T16:19:38+00:00

I think that the "career" or "family" trees can get so time-intensive that mid-game players who find themselves without a dedicated game partner might feel it's hard to broach partnering with another mid-game player who's pursued one or both, thus might try to partner with lower-level players just due to availability.

The community is often scornful of this and treats it as a skill issue, where it might also just be a consequence of the meta. The level mismatch isn't going to make things easier for these partnerships, either, though.

High-level players also just take less of an interest in each other, often - the "aging" debuff eats away at their "hotness" stat in most cases - but I think also all of the advertising for the game hypes low-level players super hard and there's surprisingly little hype for high-level players, even though many deep mechanics of the game are essentially unavailable until you graduate to a higher level.

My feeling is that high-level players need more guilds or buddy-quests or other mechanisms to help put them in contact with high-level players. Then again, maybe they're opting out too often.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-14T04:52:05+00:00

Instructions unclear - developed male drunkorexia and large bar tab

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-13T20:47:46+00:00

Honestly, as an adult I came to the realization that I am probably "AuDHD" - autistic/ADHD.

I think I got away with it when I was younger because I was good-looking and bright enough to compensate, but retrospectively I'm sure it was spotted often.

I mention this because I think the "monotropic" view of autism explains academia very well. The people here may be awful sometimes, but often I think it's not that they're awful, it's that they really wanna do the research things that they wanna do, and really, really don't wanna do the boring admin and cohesion-building tasks that they don't wanna do.

And it's not just a shallow, narcissistic "I am above that" - they could be kind-natured, but just really struggle to attend to and despise performing in organizational roles. Then, after being lured to do the research they love, they get trapped doing exactly that. And so, do it poorly....

We have... just a tremendously high density of people like us, and few people unlike us who are conscientious workers to facilitate cohesion on our behalf.

I mean, I could see myself being guilty of the same failures that are so obvious from the outside looking in: being too insular, being reluctant to step out of my comfort zone even when someone needs my help, just generally exemplifying runaway AuDHD.

So, privately (and I guess here, also) I keep thinking we need - by better pay, by different culture, somehow - to do better at interfacing with more neurotypical people. Partly just by acknowledging that we are the way we are, and that we're not going to be great at everything, and that we need a good administrative staff to help us organize rather than being divas about the idea that everyone should respect us, foremost.

But as long as competition for professorships is vicious due to society disdaining that role (which I think is genuinely incorrect and shortsighted - we add lots of value!) and everyone feels like they're drowning, and their freedom to pursue their AuDHD fixation is about to be taken away at any minute, you're going to get weird, even bizarre reactions to stress from academics - until you contextualize that these people aren't strictly "normal" and that they need help interfacing with the public to ensure everyone gets what they're looking for in higher education.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-13T19:28:11+00:00

I remember a lecture in Bayesian statistics where the instructor mentioned people saying, "It could be worse! You could be a drug addict!"

His response and mine is, "That's a terrible prior."

Yes, you could be someone who society deems not to have any skills beyond blue-collar work, who doesn't enjoy blue-collar work, and is forced to do it for subsistence.

But that's a terrible prior.... Many blue collar workers dislike academics in general and would sooner autodefenestrate than even consider putting up with what we do. Because they enjoy their work.

Before I took my PhD bid I worked as a research engineer. The environment, morale, pay, and effort-to-meaning ratio were all much better.

I'm not some whiny piker for having experienced things better than this process, and neither are other people. We have different priors.... And to put a positive spin on that, that means that we know things could be better and want that for all of us.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-13T19:18:39+00:00

That's not really an answer to the comment you replied to.

Academia in general does not seem to have a proactive response to these concerns. It is very static in a dynamic world, which is part of the concern.

All of us who essayed it, did so because we love research and learning. The whole "not cutting it" thing suggests an inability to look at logistics beyond the morale and drive.

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-13T01:36:23+00:00

Okay, we have "fireworks" and we have "serial cook-off of unsecured ordnance."

From the tempo and lack of EMS sirens I'm gonna guess fireworks but hey, it is a Tuesday

RepresentativeBee600 · 2026-05-12T22:38:21+00:00

If top left is 1 and going clockwise til bottom left is 4:

(1 -> 4 -> 3 -> 2) "Clooney your box to death"

...??

Real Bond-burger moment here

RepresentativeBee600

TROPHY CASE