scrape_r_rational/data/cache/3lfvef.md

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Post:

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

Comments:

• u/Magodo:

  With trepidation, I dredge up another probably controversial opinion of mine. Downvotes are welcome as long as it generates interesting conversation.  
  
  Star Wars sucks. I don't get it, I just don't. It's a stupid predictable plot in a world with inconsistent sci-fi and paper thin characters. How did something this bad get so big? Having forced myself to watch all 6 and finding that I enjoyed maybe half of the first one (of the original three), it's beyond me how these movies got past pre-production.  
  
  It doesn't help that the universe doesn't have any depth and seems to be targeted at kids who've just discovered sci-fi. Hell, even most of the fanbase seems to hate the prequels. The world is written to be as malleable as possible, allowing for 100 comic books, 30 graphic novels, and 20 more movies.  
  
  So, why is VII generating so much hype? Aren't they just trying to milk the franchise as much as possible at this point? Why do people still love SW so much?
  

  • u/alexanderwales:

    The *original* Star Wars trilogy harkened back to the pulp magazine era that George Lucas had grown up in (same for *Indiana Jones*). There wasn't much original about Star Wars even when it was first released in theaters. So I think if you want to ask why Star Wars was popular then, you have to ask why pulps were able to sell a million copies a week for a long period of time.
    
    I think there are three big factors at play.
    
    1. The pulps existed to fire the imagination. In the same way that the *Twilight* series is often criticized for having Bella be this blank character for the audience to project themselves into, the pulps often had a world that an adventure-hungry person could project their imagination into. This is where the paper-thin characters and loose rules of the Star Wars saga work in its favor; it's not really about the story, it's about imagining your own stuff. I never hear people rave about the story of Star Wars and very, very rarely hear people saying the characters were well-constructed. Instead, they're imagining lightsaber battles or cool ships flying around exotic worlds.
    2. Anything that runs for a long time is going to generate fans, even if it's crap. I haven't really figured out why this is the case, but part of it is that people gravitate to the familiar, and some other part must be that people get invested despite themselves. If you want fans, just keep churning out the same thing, week after week, or year after year, and eventually people will just ... have settled into it. Star Wars did that. At the place it's at now, it's an institution. *People like institutions.* (This was one of the basic models of the pulps.) People get done with a well-crafted story and think "I wish there were more of this" without really considering that maybe the story the author wanted to tell was done (alternately, without caring). George Lucas knew all this, which is why the series was calibrated towards repetition and familiarity.
    3. It's got spectacle. When the pulps weren't firing the imagination, they were showing things that were neat and shiny, new ideas that maybe didn't have much more than surface to them but by the time you started thinking about it, they were on to the next thing. Part of this feeds back into 1, because you want to leave things to the imagination and hint at a larger world, but also because spectacle is easier if you're not giving the full details of how, say, a plasma blaster actually works. Star Wars has spectacle in spades.
    
    Star Wars happened to come along at a time when the pulps had been dead for a while. It reintroduced that aesthetic to a new audience and hooked into those familiar patterns in the old audience who was familiar with the pulps. From there it gained institutional inertia and dug its hooks in with the expanded universe and loads of merchandise.
    

  • u/TaoGaming:

    I say this as someone who didn't like SW when I rewatched it as an adult, and who gave Phantom Menace a terrible review, publicly declaring that I would never give Lucas money again, because I felt at the time I was supporting a racist. I never saw the last two, although I've caught part of them on TV. So this is  the original trilogy for me.
    
    (I have softened in the last 15 years. Now I think Lucas is just tone deaf, and his donations of most of the proceeds from selling Star Wars make me think that I was far too rash in judging).
    
    1. The Best Special Effects award the year before Star Wars went to Logan's Run. From the looks of the two movies you'd expect a few decades between them. Star Wars looked amazing at the time, and it holds up well. 
    2. My father took the (very young me) see it in theaters a second time. What interested him was that the movie constantly had music and themes. The music is legitimately one of the great orchestral pieces of the last century. Would it be as popular if it wasn't a movie? Of course not. 
    3. The world's depth is implied. The cantina scene, for example, implies dozens of other worlds, and not just "Human with a ridged forehead."
    4. Having read Joseph Campbell, I'm not sure that it mattered that it tapped into the Hero's Journey architype, but there's certainly an argument to be made.
    
    >inconsistent sci-fi 
    
    5. It's a sci-fi movie based on Swashbucklers and Samurai Movies. It's a glorious hodgepodge.
    
    That being said, it's overlong, poorly edited (sometimes deliberately so, like the pulps), and the trilogy is repetitive.
    

  • u/ArgentStonecutter:

    I loved Star Wars when I first saw it, back in the '70s, right up to the point where Luke turned off his targeting computer.
    
    Even as a teenager that pissed me off.
    

  • u/ToaKraka:

    Most of my love of *Star Wars* is for the Expanded Universe novels (Thrawn Trilogy, New Jedi Order, Legacy of the Force, and many stand-alone books), rather than for the movies or the cartoons. The books expand (duh) the background a lot, even if they can be inconsistent at times. I like the original trilogy, but certainly don't care enough about it to rewatch it, as I do with the books; I probably skipped half of every prequel movie when I watched it on DVD (romance? who cares?), but I loved the ship designs and visual effects.
    
    (I may count only as "a kid who's just discovered sci-fi", though, since I read only for entertainment, rather than for any depth.)
    

    • u/whywhisperwhy:

      This is exactly where I'm at- the books just add so much depth to the universe and characters. The EU novels' vary a lot in quality (there are some really horrible or just bland books out there) but it's a very rich, vibrant universe with epic story lines. Overall I agree it's mostly entertainment sci-fi except there are some amazing books in there. I think everyone knows the Thrawn Trilogy is a staple recommendation, but for example *Traitor* is pretty unique (and probably the closest example to a relationship like Quirrel/Harry's in HPMoR, now that I think of it). 
      
      Whereas the movies? Great special effects, some memorable scenes/actors, and that's probably all good I can say about them.
      

  • u/None:

    I wouldn't say it sucks, but yeah, it's kind of dumb and not all that special or great.
    

  • u/FuguofAnotherWorld:

    >So, why is VII generating so much hype? Aren't they just trying to milk the franchise as much as possible at this point? Why do people still love SW so much?
    
    Well, personally I think I'm hyped for two reasons. One, Star Wars got to me before I had seen enough films to start picking things apart. Fleeing through an asteroid field for example was a new and exciting way to get rid of chasers, rather than that thing any fighter pilot in a film does. Second reason is fond memories of KOTOR and KOTOR II. That's all there is too it. I see a star wars VII trailer and my mind just links it to all those hours spent happily cutting people up with lightsabers.
    

• u/None:

  Since Alicorn's [Dogs](http://alicorn.elcenia.com/stories/dogs.shtml) story was posted here a while ago, I'm interested in knowing what you think about the following issue.
  
  You probably know about the reducing animal suffering section in the EA movement? Anyway, [the co-founder of Giving What We Can argued that we should start killing predators](http://qz.com/497675/to-truly-end-animal-suffering-the-most-ethical-choice-is-to-kill-all-predators-especially-cecil-the-lion/) because they cause suffering by eating prey animals alive. Of course that was a really dumb suggestion because it's really hard to predict what the actual effects are of that kind of intervention. 
  
  As you could guess, [the response to this was a bit hostile.](http://thehsi.org/2015/09/10/animal-rights-gone-wrong/) [In Facebook discussion about this](https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10153646854454700&id=99206759699) many people suggested killing the authors. [People argued that nature is sacred, that we should leave it alone, that morality doesn't apply to animals](https://www.facebook.com/VeganDotCom/posts/10153217867161872?hc_location=ufi):
  
  >One of the most problematic elements of this piece is that it presumes to impose human moral values on complex ecosystems, full of animals with neither the inclination, nor the capacity, to abide by them.
  
  I don't think we should start killing animals to reduce suffering. Setting aside that, the question is, which is more important, the suffering of individual animals, or the health of the ecosystem or species as a whole?
  

  • u/captainNematode:

    My cumulative concern for individual animals vastly outweighs my concern for "species" or "ecosystems" or "nature" or whatever, so I regard ecosystem re-engineering or anti-conservationist destruction (probably through gradual capture, sterilization, and relocation) fairly positively. Which isn't to say that I don't value the knowledge-of-how-the-world-works represented by extant species (they're sorta important for my work in evolutionary biology and ecology, for one), nor that I don't have some purely "aesthetic" appreciation for nature shit (I've spent many thousands of hours hiking, backpacking, climbing, paddling, etc. You probably won't find an outdoorsier person than me outside a pub table of wilderness guides), nor that there aren't "practical" benefits to be found in preserving nature (e.g. medicinal herbs, though I think targeted approaches far more effective), etc. but rather that I value closing the hellish pit that is the brutal death and torture of trillions of animals per year (roughly) above the potential and current benefits that that suffering brings. 
    
    Or at least reducing it somewhat. Maybe instead of trillions of animals, keep it in the billions, or at least don't terraform future worlds to bring the numbers into the quadrillions and up. Maybe don't gently let *everything* die, but keep some animals in pleasant, controlled, zoo-like environments in perpetuity (i.e. create a "technojainist" welfare state). And don't do this immediately, necessarily -- perhaps once the "diminishing returns of studying nature" have set in, or we have good surrogates for outdoorsy stuff, and especially once we 1) are fairly secure in our own survival as humans, and 2) have a good idea of the short and long term ecological effects (e.g. the population dynamics of mesopredator release). All keeping in mind that for every moment of hesitation and delay untold numbers of beings wail in agony, and all.
    
    I reckon most people oppose stuff like this because they either don't value animal welfare very strongly, are very confident that non-human animals are incapable of suffering, very strongly value the preservation of nature intrinsically (at least when it can't affect them, though I'm sure plenty of people lamented the eradication of smallpox on the basis of not tinkering with That Which Man Was Not Meant To Tinker With), or have a Disney-fied view of how the natural world works.
    
    As a moral anti-realist/subjectivist, I don't think there's a "right" answer to the value-laden bits of the above, so when you ask
    
    >which is more important, the suffering of individual animals, or the health of the ecosystem or species as a whole
    
    I see it as ultimately a "personal" question, with the necessary qualification of *important to whom* or *important for what*. Within my own set of values, the bit that cares about stuff like this vaguely resembles preference utilitarianism, and I'm pretty sure your average, say, field mouse cares a lot more for not starving or being torn limb from limb by a barn owl than it does about complex abstractions like the "good of the species" (with all the evolutionary misconceptions that term entails). Of course, it probably cares a fair bit about raising young and fucking (perhaps less than avoiding a painful death, though), but "ecosystem health" and "species preservation" are not on the agenda.
    
    Of the people I know, Brian Tomasik has probably written the most about these issues (followed maybe by David Pearce). I'd start [here](http://reducing-suffering.org/#Animals) under "Wild-animal suffering", if you're interested in reading some essays and discussions.
    

  • u/MugaSofer:

    I think ecosystems have some value of their own, as an interesting thing that could be permanent lost. But it's unreasonable to value them *more* than their constituent parts, considering the suffering involved.
    
    I don't know of any way to systematically reduce wild animal suffering; I'd suggest some sort of large-scale zoo or adoption system, possibly prioritizing prey animals and highly intelligent species somewhat. But while this might reduce suffering on the margin, it could never scale to eliminate even a noticable amount of animal suffering.
    
    On the other hand, I'm *extremely* dubious about the idea that animal lives *aren't worth living*. You don't even have the evidence of suicidality with animals; they demonstrably aren't suicidal. So I'm not really comfortable with attempting to euthanize or sterilize large portions of the biosphere, a task which would merely require a one-world government to accomplish.
    
    In short, I think animal suffering is bad and should be prevented; but I don't think it's possible to bring animals as a group up to our living standard, at current levels of technology. Technology will advance, though, and we can still help individual animals to an extent.
    
    The issue of suffering in *domesticated* animals, however, is both far larger per individual animal and much easier to address.
    

    • u/captainNematode:

      Animal lives could be worth living*, but we still wouldn't want to create any more of them (depending on your thoughts concerning stuff like Parfit's mere addition paradox and Benatar's Asymmetry, etc. Humans with tremendously unfortunate diseases might still have lives worth living but would still want to prevent creating more humans with those diseases, especially when alternatives exist). Currently existing animals wouldn't necessarily die (except, perhaps, by old age), but I don't feel as strong an impetus to let them breed. And if, for example, we can't feasibly round up the predators and let them live well without harming others, we'd have to weigh their preference for life against the preferences of all the animals they'd otherwise kill (averaged across our uncertainty in predicting the effects of any sort of ecological intervention).
      
      I also don't know that the suffering of agricultural animals is necessarily worse than that of wild animals. Perhaps for some types of animals (esp. in factory farms), suffering induced by being kept in a tiny box your whole life compares unfavorably to an hour of bleeding out as a hyena chews your leg off ([as one example](http://foundational-research.org/publications/importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/#How_Wild_Animals_Suffer)), but I think definitive statements to that effect are hard to make. And certainly some domesticated animals (e.g. many pet dogs) live far more pleasant lives than exist for the majority of animals in nature.
      
      As for addressing the issue, I agree that ecosystem reformation is far harder a question than just closing down farms or improving slaughter practices. And it's certainly far less palatable to the average person, so there'd be considerable social pushback, at least in the present social climate. But there are still practical questions to consider today, like reintroducing predators to areas where they'd previously been depopulated (e.g. the Yellowstone wolves), or replanting the rainforest, or mitigating the less desirable effects of global warming, or whatever.
      
      edit: though the suicidality observation doesn't necessarily demonstrate this, as non-human animals might just be really bad at forecasting the future. I'm sure a gazelle would "prefer" to die painlessly just before being disemboweled by a hungry lioness, perhaps even some considerable amount of time in advance. But since gazelles can't predict well what the future holds, they might "choose" to live on in the present, even if, with perfect foreknowledge, they'd have chosen to die.
      

  • u/None:

    False dichotomy: ecosystems sustain individuals, and will do so until we maybe someday stop being made of meat.  Then it will just be social and infrastructural systems.
    

    • u/None:

      The key question is should we spread wildlife to other planets, and the options are: no wildlife = no suffering, healthy ecosystem = loads of suffering, or some kind of artificial system with animals in it. So in that case it's not a false dichotomy.
      
      edit. /u/captainNematode also mentioned ecosystem re-engineering which is also an example in which the question is not a false dichotomy
      

• u/ToaKraka:

  What option(s) for neuter-gender English pronouns do you prefer?
  
  **1\.** `He` universally
  
  **2\.** `She` universally
  
  **3\.** `He` and `she` alternating (by example, paragraph, chapter, etc.)
  
  **4\.** `They` universally
  
  **5\.** A new word (`ze`, `xe`, etc.) universally
  
  **6\.** `It` universally
  
  **7\.** The writer's preferred pronoun
  
  Generally, I lean toward options 3, 5, and 6.
  
  Feel free to suggest further options.
  

  • u/Escapement:

    I usually use, and prefer, "they" universally. I have seen he/she alternating done well but it seems harder to do well than just using "they". As far as neologisms goes, I don't really like them, and only use them in reference to those who desire them explicitly (rather than using them for everyone). My least favoured alternative is the "He or she", an awkward construction that I particularly dislike for it's inelegance.
    

  • u/Charlie___:

    They, or he and she chosen randomly per person we are asked to imagine.
    

  • u/alexanderwales:

    Depends on why I'm being gender neutral.
    
    If it's a *hypothetical* person I'm using in an example, I flip a coin to decide whether I'm using he or she, or otherwise just avoid using anything gendered. For example "when a Jedi draws [flip coin, tails] her lightsaber". If it's a persistent hypothetical person, I'll keep gender the same for as long as I'm talking about [flip coin, heads] him.
    
    If it's a *real* person whose gender I don't know, I'll generally go with "they", though sometimes to avoid this I'll make a token effort to determine gender (on reddit it's easy to check user pages).
    
    "It" is usually considered offensive; I haven't ever met someone who liked being called an it. Pronouns like "ze" and "xe" I find jarring, though I understand why people use it.
    

  • u/FuguofAnotherWorld:

    I find myself in a quandry. If ze or xe were common enough for me to not get looked at funny using them, then I would use them. They are not, however, so I do not.
    

• u/Sagebrysh:

  It seems like there's occasionally going around, these "What is the most rational thing to do in X situation" threads. 
  
  They're like those "Scenario" threads from spacebattles, where someone proposes a scenario and people well go back and forth deciding what the best thing to do in it is, and the original poster will act as 'nature' and describe the responses to their actions. 
  
  I sort of like the concept as a game, but I feel like things could be done to make it more rational and interesting, otherwise the original poster is basically God/game master, and can just distort things however they want. Many any attempted munchkin will know the wrath of a vengeful GM. 
  
  At what point does it lose its value as a learning tool, and starting being a very loose form of online roleplaying? Is it even really the sort of thing we should have here? I'm not sure whether or not I'm in favour of it, because it seems pretty ill defined right now.
  

  • u/alexanderwales:

    I'm generally against them. To me it's like having dessert without dinner. If you don't have a story to wrap the exploits, it's just ... meaningless? I think that they have a place here, but I'd like to see less of them, ideally in favor of workshopping stories. (I also feel like people talking about their stories before writing them makes them less likely to write them because they get some of the same hedons with none of the production.) But I know this is down to personal preference and don't really think I'm in the majority.
    

• u/Kishoto:

  Two questions.
  
  1. Do you ever find yourself arguing with non-rationalists, and trying to use rational arguments to convince them of something, and they refuse to accept your point? For example, I got into an argument with an older lady (I'm 22, she is about 40) about colds. She said I shouldn't go in the rain, because I would catch a cold, due to both the general cold of the water and the cold inflicted on me by the wet clothes drying on me. I said that I wouldn't, as the cold isn't caused by low temperatures, it's caused by a type of virus. She proceeded to tell me about how her mother, who was very wise, told her that growing up, and she noticed that it was indeed true. I told her that it's more likely she was either incorrectly remembering, or selectively remembering things. That it was likely she mentally disregarded the times she caught a cold without being wet, subconsciously. She proceeded to accuse me of always trusting science over the wisdom of elders. I proceeded to say "I'm not saying old people don't have knowledge from sheer time spent on the Earth. But I definitely trust facts verified by thousands of intelligent minds, over advice from a single old person, if the two directly conflict." This argument spiraled, and the rest isn't important, as it quickly became more about how I was always a "know-it-all that trusted Google more than those who know more because they are older". Anyway. So that's the question. Have you ever tried to appeal to the rational side of a non-rationalist, only to get rebuffed? And does said rebuff ever make you almost irrationally angry?
  
  2. Do you ever find yourself feeling unjustifiably superior, on the intelligence scale? Like, obviously, you know you aren't Einstein or Hawking. But you know that you probably know more than the average Joe on a lot of topics, as a student of rationalism, or even just someone who likes to read or learn new things. It also seems to take someone smarter than the average bear (*he he he*) to really grasp some of the basic concepts of rationalism, meaning you can almost assume a budding rationalist is smarter than average (please regard the **almost**. I'm not making a concrete statement, I haven't done any formal research on this, it just seems like  a sensible conclusion, based on what I've seen of many core rational elements, and the knowledge it takes to begin grasping them) So, as a result of said intelligence, do you find that, often, you're disregarding the opinions of those around you as almost lesser than your own? This isn't a good thing, as you are obviously only one person. You will be biased and/or wrong a lot, naturally. But this still seems like an easy trap to fall into, especially when you aren't in an academic setting, so you find yourself just naturally more intelligent than those around you (And yes, I know, intelligence is an abstract concept, but come on. Please infer what I mean, here.)
  

  • u/xamueljones:

    Neither actually....
    
    1. [Note that these strategies are for when arguing with people who refuse to pay attention to my side of the argument] I usually do my absolute best to avoid arguments with people on how to do some task which I don't consider to be important. My reasoning is that it's easier to just go along with what they need done, since the amount of time it takes for me to change their mind is often more than just letting the results prove them wrong. If the argument is important enough (such as money is at stake, this is my domain of expertise, or we are about to start on a time-consuming project), then I often can demonstrate why I'm more likely to be right such as being educated in this field, prior experience with this task, or some way to prove why I'm one of the right people for the job. Don't appeal to **logic**, appeal to **authority** of being in a higher-level position, or appeal to the **emotion** of don't-you-trust-me?, or appealing to their **laziness** (I know better and you can just let me take responsibility for any potential shit-hitting-the-fan problems). It's dipping into Dark Rationality, but these kind of people aren't going to listen to logic, you need something else. If it's to do with facts, then if they aren't going to listen to the reasons for my answer in the first place, I usually just prove a link to some respectable source from online (this is a bit hit-and-miss at times). If that still doesn't work, I walk away. They aren't going to ever listen to me, so why spend more time with them? I am the *master* of walking away and not letting it bother me ever again.
    
    2. I'm surrounded by smart people and I make mistakes in a ridiculous variety of situations. I *know* I am not smart. I have been called a genius by several people, and one person (after watching me mess up in a social situation) asked me if I was an idiot savant. However, I just feel awkward when that happens. My reasoning is that I'm lucky to like learning for its sake and I'm very well-educated. So I just chalk these comments to people seeing a well-educated person for a genuinely *smart* person.
    

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