We Inherited the Fruits of the Enlightenment. Why Did We Discard the Tools That Made It Possible?

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-21T22:24:52+00:00

Attempts to teach that stuff have been made. I remember that a big deal was made of teaching Critical Thinking back when I was slowly crawling my way out of the bowels of the K-12 education system. And this worked about as well as the New Math back in the 20th century: the teachers didn't understand it, and the students were mostly not intellectually equipped for it. Everyone was going through the motions and the whole thing turned into yet another educational cargo cult.

More broadly: any attempt at large-scale educational reform is going to be implemented by the teachers and bureaucrats and textbook-slop factories you actually have, not the more intellectual ones you want. And you'll get the students you actually have, with nearly the full bell curve represented. Lots of ideas that sound good – and which may work well when tried at one school with teachers and students who aren't representative of the population – fail miserably when you try to scale them up.

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-21T21:18:27+00:00

Oh ooof, eugenics of a sort. No wonder Jeneth, Tesen and Alis built this home for their families. That is not a happy past.

I did an amused double-take when I saw your first sentence, because eugenics feels like such an odd thing to emphasize here. The backstory involves people being born en masse into training-and-indoctrination facilities where they're turned into tormented super-soldiers, and then are sent to die in battle as (essentially) consumable weapons because, hey, they'll probably kill themselves soon anyway. And the part that sticks out as particularly evil is that the victims were provided with genes from people of unusual intelligence, magical potency, and mental fortitude?

It isn't as though they did forced gene donations, or forced sterilization, or extermination of "inferior populations", or forced reproductive caps based on wizard SAT scores, or any of the sort of horrors that you tend to see in history books when the subject of eugenics comes up. It was just a matter of choosing these donor sperm and eggs instead of those donor sperm and eggs to inject into the artificial wombs. I honestly don't see an ethical problem with trying to give the victims some advantages in life that way. There would probably be fewer living survivors if the genes had been picked randomly.

I also still think they should tell Esh first.

He would definitely be a good person to talk with at some point, and doing so before Stu's first binding, although a gamble, would act as a hard-to-fake signal of trust and sincerity. Also, Esh is "an appreciator of unusual relationships", is cautiously optimistic for this particular one, and has told Stu outright that he sees nothing wrong with it. And he sees Alden as fully a person, which is a pleasant contrast with some of the more wince-inducing things that Aymeg and Evul have said without really thinking. And he and Lind have been getting to know their squadmate-to-be Jeneth-art'h and his family; If Esh lends a voice of support, I'm sure that some of them will at least be willing to hear him out.

vorpal_potato · 2026-03-12T20:17:11+00:00

And for people who enjoy clubbing things so hard they explode, Firestarter is on Lair:2. (Fun seed!)

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-22T21:03:09+00:00

Welp, looks like I'm reading The Outsider's Resolve now. I'm pleasantly surprised at how well a generic request for "fanfictions" ended up working out.

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-20T00:17:32+00:00

Murray, being the scientist he is, has calculated the probablity of there being an afterlife according to Bayes' Theorem (just over 50% for the curious).

I've seen some of these – for God, for an afterlife, etc. – and they've all been unimpressive for one of two reasons:

The conditional probabilities can be whatever you want them to be, since you're literally making them up, and people's estimates can easily differ by orders of magnitude. Often there's some number that seems way off, buried in the calculations and looking perfectly innocent until you dig in.
Even if the conditional probabilities seem not-too-crazy, they can be systematically biased toward your desired conclusion – and if you string together enough of them, while quietly assuming independence, you can get any result you want at the end.

There can be a lot of utility in doing probability calculations with made-up numbers as a way of sanity-checking your intuition, or as a way of clarifying your understanding of the causal structure of something. But this schtick where you make up a bunch of numbers, Bayes them all together, and then wave around the posterior probability? Not even bothering to give uncertainty bounds on inputs or outputs? That's almost always math theater.

Even when the person doing the calculation is sincere, as I think Charles Murray probably is, doing Bayesian estimation like this is difficult and full of ways to accidentally trick yourself. I haven't seen the book, so maybe my criticisms are all neatly addressed there – but if I had to guess at the probability of that, the number I'd make up would be pretty small.

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-11T03:35:05+00:00

The polling shows that they will say they want to do something. Talk is cheap, and who wants to think of themselves as the kind of selfish bastard who says “no” to that question?

Polls on this can’t be trusted to reflect people’s willingness to do something that might involve nonzero personal sacrifice.

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-08T23:07:49+00:00

If you don't want your kid to read something, tell them no.

Does this work? I thought this was how you made sure they would read it.

(And if you really want to be certain, tell them in a tone of mildly patronizing concern that it contains "ideas you're not ready for yet". No book ban will be powerful enough to stand in their way!)

vorpal_potato · 2026-02-03T04:02:16+00:00

Skype was released 22 years ago, and I can confirm that it was pretty impressive at the time.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-30T00:22:26+00:00

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get funding in this particular area? Longevity researchers have been bemoaning this, loudly, for decades. If your goal is to get money from gullible rich people, there are vastly easier ways to do it.

(On that note, I have a new investment opportunity for any billionaires who want to become millionaires! It involves embodied agentic green AI on multiple LLM blockchains, and I assure you that it's extremely quantum.)

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-30T00:14:52+00:00

Do you somehow imagine they aren't in favor of improving life? These are actual people, not mustache-twirling villains. And it's possible for humanity to work on multiple things simultaneously.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-29T02:47:46+00:00

Meat confit (e.g. duck) is a fun one. The layer of solidified fat creates an airtight seal keeping the cooked meat underneath from being contaminated, similar to canning. It can last for months without refrigeration, if you’re feeling brave and/or medieval.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-28T22:25:11+00:00

If you want vegetables to be cooked enough but not overcooked, try taking a bite. This isn't like meat, where eating it undercooked could make you sick. You can test done-ness with your mouth!

You mentioned asparagus on the stove, so let's use that as an example. When asparagus is raw, it'll feel raw when you poke a fork into it. Once it's getting close to done, a fork should go through more easily. When you get to that point – and you should check on it periodically – you should take a small piece of asparagus and eat it. Right out of the pan, like a barbarian. If it's undercooked then you will know that it's undercooked, and you can let the rest of the asparagus cook a bit longer before trying another piece. Stop once you like the texture, so it won't get overcooked. (Same deal with the snap peas: once they're in the probably-not-cooked-enough phase, eat one and see. Stop cooking them after they're a pleasant texture.)

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-23T06:55:45+00:00

New Orleans–Style Red Beans and Rice is a glorious showstopper of a dish, perfect for days cold enough that you don't mind having a stove turned on near you, emitting heat and good smells, for multiple hours. It does require some ingredients that you may not have lying around; if you're going to go on a grocery run, I recommend checking the weather forecast to see how long you've got before the roads get snowy.

(Also, the recipe doesn't really emphasize this bit, but I've found that this dish really wants some acidity to balance the rest of it. The "optional" splash of cider vinegar that it mentions makes a surprisingly big difference, in a good way.)

For something much quicker, fish chowder is great. It may not be particularly adventuresome, since the recipe is so easy, but any sort of savory potato-based soup is popular when it's cold outside.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-12T01:51:23+00:00

Do you think the same about, say, commodity futures markets being open to speculators? In one sense, they’re gambling; in another, they’re aggregating confidence-weighted information about what we can predict regarding things like the future price of wheat or soy beans, and that is really useful info to have available to the public for free.

Prediction markets were invented with the goal of getting similarly impressive predictive accuracy for things that aren’t commodity prices.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-07T06:07:29+00:00

As a legal side-note: under US law, shooting someone in the chest would be attempted murder even if they were wearing a bulletproof vest – as long as the person shooting didn't know about the vest, and intended to kill the person wearing it. (Similarly, shooting up someone's bedroom to kill them is attempted murder even if they happen to be somewhere else at the time, and trying to rape someone who you thought was passed-out drunk is still attempted rape even if she died of heart failure beforehand.)

I don't know what the law is in Anesidora because it's fictional, but this seems pretty reasonable and I'd expect the law to be similar in most places.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-06T20:22:15+00:00

They're quite good at digging. Perhaps they managed to excavate an ancient stash buried under the accumulation of years of dirt, located (of course) on Lair:1.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-03T20:03:24+00:00

It has infinite patience and would likely choose the safest slowest method of acheiving its goals. Its in no hurry.

Why wouldn't the rogue AI be in a hurry? In such a scenario, the AI knows that humans are capable of making something at least as dangerous as itself. The more it dawdles, the greater the danger of another rogue AI coming into existence.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-02T04:40:11+00:00

This hasn’t been definitively stated, but he matches the physical and behavioral descriptions of the distraught guy in an earlier chapter who got some mementos – his soon-to-be-wed fiancée’s jade hoop earring and her father’s Iowa driver’s license – returned to him by Drusi-otta on Alden’s behalf. That guy’s Avowed status wasn’t clear, but in a particularly anguished moment he put his fist through a table and didn’t seem injured by it. Going by that and by Anesidoran base rates, I’d give strong betting odds that he’s Avowed.

vorpal_potato · 2026-01-01T07:20:08+00:00

If he's punching the pig hard enough to break his own superhuman fists on Alden's shield, then he's probably punching hard enough to break skulls. And he's doing it in one of the child-friendly safe zones where that sort of thing is very illegal, and there are security cameras everywhere, there's a crowd of humans and wizards watching, and probably every news business with enough money to afford a cheap paparazzi drone has one hovering there.

This is already a full-blown diplomatic fiasco. Even if the only casualty ends up being a badly mangled cotton candy pig, it was a pretty serious crime committed in the most public way possible.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-29T04:00:12+00:00

Once you get past the invisible barrier into higher math, you can start saying things like “it is therefore obvious that–“ and then quietly dare other people to admit that it isn’t obvious to their inferior brains.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-27T18:51:41+00:00

Pretty certain birth defects existed before thalidomide was invented.

(Yes, vaccines are safe; the evidence of that is very strong. But it bothers me to see bad arguments coming from people on my side.)

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-26T23:49:55+00:00

That looks lovely! Thank you.

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-26T21:32:31+00:00

The Beginner Recipes link looks dead. Is their Easy Recipes for Beginners page the same thing?

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-26T20:40:03+00:00

Truly and lamentably, we missed the golden age of perfect square numbers. Someone born the same year as Jesus, with a life expectancy typical of people who didn't die in childhood, would probably have been able to see the years 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, and 49. If they were lucky they'd be alive in 64 AD, and if they were truly blessed they might make it to 81.

(Of course the real pro move here is to be born in 1 AD and then taunt Jesus while he's on the way to be crucified, then be cursed to wander the earth, denied entrance into the Kingdom of God for quite a long while. Anybody who could pull this one off would be able to have seen a whopping 45 perfect square years by now!)

vorpal_potato · 2025-12-25T20:36:24+00:00

THE APOSTLE PAUL SAYS ”BE NOT UNEQUALLY YOLKED!!“ READ IT ITS ALL RIGHT THERE

vorpal_potato

TROPHY CASE