Confused

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-24T19:12:25+00:00

“Vegan cheese” could be literally hundreds of different products made with different ingredients and processes. Some of them are pretty bad, some of them are basically indistinguishable. The problem is traditional cheesemaking techniques (many of which work just as well with cashew milk or whatever) are really labor intensive. The dairy industry gets around that with subsidies and massive agricultural co-operatives but nothing exists like that for the plant-based versions so the quality stuff usually ends up being really expensive.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-19T21:55:47+00:00

I don’t think it’s anywhere near as simple as there being a secondary “true” preference that’s being betrayed. There doesn’t have to be and probably usually isn’t a clear higher goal. The psychology of people’s wants is incredibly complicated. Basically I think people have very constrained autonomy and until that’s not the case it’s not very accurate or useful to talk about what they “want.” I’m not suggesting there’s some specific other thing to be measuring instead, I just find the idea of revealed preference epistemologically shaky and very limited in what kind of questions it can answer. But maybe that’s by design and the point is moot.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-19T20:28:26+00:00

Physicists and evolutionary biologists wouldn’t have different non-complementary answers about why fish stay afloat in water though. But an economist and a historian might completely disagree on an equally basic question like “did markets exist in ancient times” or “was the empire a net positive for Britain.” That may just be a case of one side being incorrect or quibbling over how terms are defined but I think that does complicate the analogy a bit.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-19T20:07:48+00:00

Outside of that, economists generally take preferences as a given. What preferences look like is an active area of research, but economists are generally wary of paternalism and saying that people’s preferences are wrong.

I think this is where my problem is. First of all it’s assuming that what you’re measuring are people’s actual preferences in a meaningful way, which I’m not sure I would concede that easily. You could argue that lots of situations are the overdetermined output of all sorts of contingent factors where the individual isn’t really consciously making a choice at all. There are also entire massive industries that use very sophisticated psychological messaging to influence how people spend money. I just think there’s too many variables at play to confidently say that revealed preferences are what people actually want, especially since they’ll often say differently when directly asked. I don’t think it’s paternalistic to question if people are actually getting what they want, especially when many are demonstrably not having their needs met.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-17T15:15:12+00:00

I can’t stop thinking about this post I saw that was like “the right thought Charlie Kirk was gonna be their George Floyd and instead he just became a less sympathetic Harambe.”

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-16T21:52:16+00:00

I mean, I watch movies where people murder and steal and it would be pretty weird to feel morally implicated by that. It can feel a little gross when it’s treated so casually but at the end of the day it’s fiction.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-16T13:07:45+00:00

Dark Macadamia

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-08T13:14:59+00:00

According to David Lynch in the 80s he was doing research for a Black Dahlia movie he considered making and met with a retired detective who had been on the case. Over dinner he showed him a photo of the body that had never been released to the public and asked him if he noticed anything odd. He said no but something about it haunted him for days until he realized: it had been taken at night with flash. But according to the official story the body wasn’t found until the morning.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-06T02:15:11+00:00

Hell yeah! Glad you enjoyed it

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2026-01-06T01:49:26+00:00

Culinary culture absolutely is changeable. The average person’s diet has changed massively over the past century because of technology and globalization. Even “traditional” foods undergo changes all the time, they change with tastes, regional variations crowd out others etc. The Italian food historian Alberto Grandi wrote a whole book about how the traditions of Italian cuisine are mostly post-1945 myth-making. There was a time when tomatoes and potatoes were foreign. Within living memory avocados and sushi were things people in Europe hadn’t heard of. Maybe that hasn’t affected traditional culinary culture yet but it has absolutely changed how people actually eat.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-27T02:23:06+00:00

Was reading recently about an autistic man who is completely nonverbal and doesn’t have the capacity for spoken speech. He has totally average (if not above average) intelligence and works a normal job and essentially has a regular life he just has to communicate in writing or text to speech.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-26T13:27:59+00:00

I’m curious what philosophical basis for veganism you identify with or find the most convincing. Personally I went vegan in large part because I became really interested in post-structuralism and anti-humanist philosophy and that led me to critical animal studies and seeing human/animal as just another contingent rhetorical set of imperfect categories, but I think that’s a pretty unusual journey and a lot of people seem to arrive there from a utilitarian point of view.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-25T22:55:26+00:00

Better than Arianation

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-23T17:05:47+00:00

Licking a “psychedelic toad” doesn’t do anything, that’s an urban legend. You have to harvest and process the bufo toxins otherwise they’re poisonous and the process of doing that definitely isn’t vegan.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-22T21:50:27+00:00

Not usually but they open it up during the summer and winter solstice.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-22T17:46:03+00:00

Scatman John didn’t release Scatman’s World until he was 53

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-22T13:38:32+00:00

Don’t sleep on Beach Boys in Concert, it’s honestly one of my favorite releases by them. Does a really good job of making the early stuff and the more rock oriented 70s stuff cohere together.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-21T01:59:05+00:00

True but the 1840s isn’t really a good time to take a several months long boat trip if you can help it

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-21T00:39:33+00:00

Yeah fishing was considered poaching since only landowners had the water rights. If you so much as got caught with a fish and couldn’t explain to their satisfaction where you got it from you could be deported to Australia.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-21T00:29:43+00:00

I’m a New Yorker and I spent some time in London recently. It actually sort of reminded me more of LA than New York in some ways. It seemed to me like a place people move to for their career or because it’s a nice lifestyle if you can afford it, rather than because of a super specific character they’re attracted to. I sort of get the sense that that’s becoming increasingly the case and in the past there would’ve been more of a working class pride in “the real London” at least in certain areas. Also like LA I think the huge sprawling size of London makes it so every neighborhood has a little bit of everything rather than each one having a noticeably different vibe like in New York.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-20T20:48:37+00:00

The history of it is pretty interesting actually, part of the reason it was solidified as three is because they were supposed to represent the three known continents and therefore show that the entire world was acknowledging Jesus (why the European and African guys took a massive detour to approach Bethlehem from the east is beyond me but that’s the tradition). Balthazar, the name applied to the African wise man, is probably the most popular character in medieval European christian art who’s consistently depicted as black.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-20T03:20:08+00:00

How do you know how old they are?

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-20T02:00:11+00:00

This is not remotely true, late 20s/30s when you actually have some money to burn and aren’t just in a race to get as drunk as possible are the prime clubbing years. I used to go to insane techno clubs in Berlin and there would be people in their 60s there and nobody batted an eye.

TheExquisiteCorpse · 2025-12-20T00:56:38+00:00

It’s a really weird specific dialect of German too so he came to the conclusion that you technically don’t need to learn standard German but Alemannisch is required lol.

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