a thread on the missing trickster hero in modern western myth:
the trickster is a common mythological or culture hero archetype across many, many cultures. wily odysseus, coyote, maui, anansi the spider, monkey king β all are both tricksters and heroes.
I think it's cool how Arabic is basically cursive Aramaic. Apparently this is a trend. Nearly all scripts tend to develop cursive forms over time. Like carcinization, call it cursivization. Thread of examples.
1. Arabic
in college this drunken frat bro started making clicking noises at me because I said I was east african. i said "you racist piece of shit, i bet you have no idea where i'm from" and with no hesitation he said "you're probably from eritrea"
"[some] girls want a college educated guy with upperclass aspirations, middleclass sensibilities, & a lowerclass willingness to defend them with force"
is this the girl equivalent of guys wanting a lady in the streets and freak in the sheets?
it's an extremely disappointing feeling to realize that someone is only smart or interesting because you're unconsciously finding and pulling that out of them and if you ever stopped they'd be boring again. like talking to a sock puppet.
@VivaldiVril
The father overreacted because the boy does not have a duty to bring his daughter into compliance with his rules on his behalf.
Reasonable responses would have been punishing the daughter for being the person who violated the rules he set and or kicking the boy out.
the more I think about this actually, the more I recognize a general trend. why is Chinese moral reasoning so simplistic?
I know that sounds uncharitable, but think about it for a second. itβs unsubtle and uncomplicated in the definition of right and wrong. why?
I will unapologetically defend Chinaβs insensitivity to animals. Animal protection law is baizuo and incoherent. Where do you stop? What about bacteria? Do they have human rights too? So we Chinese stop at humans. All non humans are metaphysically no different.
@reasonisfun
the main thing having a kid taught me about this is:
1) the way people talk to babies is substantially instinctual
2) the way people talk to pets is derivative of this instinct
some grasshoppers do this thing where if they bump into each other more than a few times over a 4 hour period they dramatically change their behavior and we then call them locusts and I wonder what similar effects like this exist in humans that we just haven't discovered
@TheEcho13
idk if girls know this but their handwriting and those hand clapping games are intensely intimidating to boys
like, "clearly either I am r*tarded or they possess some supernatural ability I do not"
here's another example of a person who's way, way more concerned with "being nice" and enforcing norms of "niceness" than protecting the vulnerable from predators.
read the whole thread if you're interested in understanding this sort of individual, the Enabler.
My final point here is that I worry this sort of "cute" little rhyme empowers girls to be cruel to boys who have no ill intent toward them.
This is highly nuanced, as lots of teens and grown men do harm without bad intent and we need to hold them accountable.
Masculine men find most career women disgusting. Let me break it down for you:
To become successful, you have to develop certain traits such as stubbornness, argumentativeness, dominance, and assertiveness.
Also, this will remove your femininity, nurturing abilities, and
@_ali_taylor
you think so? I always figured it was because she hits a super relatable target (relationship associated feelings) relentlessly. Like if eminem channeled frustrated anger, taylor channels love-ennui
@silken_roses
I wonder if saying that women require a very stereotypically attractive man, someone they cannot become, is an excuse to avoid the reality which is that being attractive and finding love is likely within their reach but they do not reach for it.
@TylerAlterman
rationalists sowing: these societal rules are archaic, ridiculous, unneeded
rationalists reaping: what the hell why is my social life dissolving into undifferentiated slop
so this gets to the operative question, why are our heroes low agency? those who dream of a different, better world in our modern myths are always the villains. the heroes preserve or restore, they do not create
trickster prometheus stole fire for us, and where did that get him?
how does one get 'haters'? I would like haters. my wife is napping and my son is hanging out with his grandma, I am having a relaxing saturday morning and I desire adversity.
Today I investigated how well can LLMs multiply two numbers and what makes them perform better or worse. Let's start with a couple baselines. I evaluated gpt-3.5-turbo (L) and gpt-4o (R) on the task of multiplying two numbers that were both either two, three, four, or five digits
@shinboson
That would be great. I have been wanting someone to look at large arithmetic problem performance since it came out. I believe it's revealing fundamental limitations of this architecture
i loved the first girl i was with so completely and so blindly and so naively, like she was part of my flesh, like we were of the same body, that when i found out she fucked another guy after we broke up it felt like i had been raped; i vomited
my least libertarian belief is that all land is common property of the people because land can neither be created nor destroyed and is secured only through the capacity of oneβs people for collective violence
what I love about generating things in the style of Norman Rockwell is that he imbues everyone and everything with dignity. the essence of Rockwell is that he takes the mundane facts of life incredibly seriously. he treats it as something valuable, to be treasured
@TylerAlterman
1) they are a democracy and the most functional of their local cluster of nations and so a useful regional hegemon
2) America is a democracy and the Israel issue is disproportionately relevant for campaign fundraising
@MEASURED_HEAD
this is like a Hemingway short story except if he wrote it the ending would be that he chooses to die in the desert in the hope that she finds his body and feels bad about it
@simoj_
this is absolutely the case and why I think the Chinese government might actually be sort of right in controlling the spread of judeo-christianity. it's an invasive mimetic species. it's cats introduced to a pacific island. it's honed to be a hyperefficient predator of the mind.
another distinction between the trickster hero and the modern hero is that the trickster acts β schemes, plans, plots β but the hero reacts.
the hero does not set out on their journey without being called to it. the trickster does it because they want to.
no answers here, just an observation. modern western mythology fiercely rebukes agency, trickery, and progress that isn't revanchism.
it is, in some sense, shockingly interpersonally conservative.
Had her over last night to make dinner and figured Iβd impress her and make a dessert too.
Always goes off how she likes strawberry cake.
Have her over and show her. βOh uh I like strawberry flavored cake not cake with strawberriesβ
End of conversation.
I have a crackpot theory that thereβs some kind of built in feedback loop related to something weird, like how many people you see in a day or how many old people you see or something like that that either reduces the motivation to have kids or reduces fecundity directly
Why does fertility fall in dense cities? Anecdotes like this suggest it's not just selection effects or options delaying commitments.
Maybe we need open spaces and to feel like we're building a home of our own.
my pet theory is that this rejection of trickster behavior is an organic solution to the problem that
1) you want to have a few people acting this way
2) but the rewards for doing so are large
3) if you have a large number of people acting this way, your society falls apart
@eigenrobot
I say this as someone from a family of blue blood Dartmouth WASPs but there is actually no group of people I trust more with the education system than moderately conservative jews.
one more thought:
without being conspiratorial, I will say that the world is almost entirely run by visionary-tricksters.
the higher up any power scale you go, the higher agency and wilier people get.
the trickster hero is interesting because they have access to the full range of human behaviors.
the trickster hero may be martial and courageous, they may be giving and forgiving, they may be selfish and cruel, honest, deceitful, or any of these things in turn.
tortured forever by an eagle, on the orders of zeus.
syndrome from the incredibles is a modern prometheus, and somehow in our modern stories we've gone from being on the side of prometheus to being on the side of zeus.
@indif4ent
but why my friend, why? why is it this way?
alternatively what problem does moral debate solve? why is this not a problem in China? or is it, and if so what are the alternative solutions?
apparently the main thing the sirens promised odysseus was knowledge, which is just perfect because he tied himself to the mast because he wanted to know what their song sounded like
Only one
Her shoulders with fair braids are graced,
Lithe as the wheat-stem is her waist,
Her sable apron laced with taste β
She's all in all for me.
When she is near, I take alarm;
When she is off, I come to harm;
When others take her by the arm,
Priests pray to set me free!
I don't think anyone mentioned that jealousy is real and painful and exclusive love is sweet and fulfilling - go ahead and rationalize them away at your peril
There's a beautiful Romanian poem written from the POV of a guy in love with a girl, he talks about how beautiful she
@alexriesart
actual AI bro, almost all your replies are wrong and they illustrate one of the main reasons why language models hallucinate:
they're trained on human behavior but *must* provide an answer, even when a human wouldn't, which shifts the distribution towards the confidently wrong
Fun fact about Kipling, when he lived in Japan he fell in love with a geisha who went by O-Toyo. In general he would go on to fall in love with more or less every woman he met.
this would be funny if it didnβt drip with a pathetic, lowborn misogyny.
this person has no idea, at all, what the internal life of that βnormie girlβ is like. he cannot even begin to imagine it.
Done with the weird bitches. Gonna meet a normie girl on hinge. 27 or so with a boring professional email job. Likes to go to brunch. Has a βdoggo.β Dyed blonde hair. Goes to the gym and does meme workouts to make her ass bigger. Has never felt real pain in her life.
If you're a little bit interesting and not afraid of everything and like women β as in like them, not just want to sleep with them β you're in the top percentile of men. The bar is so low.
@VivaldiVril
Within the rules of the house, the daughter is the one principally at fault but the boy is the one who got punched in the face by a grown man. How do you square that?
people will tolerate a higher level of nonsense when you talk faster and I think it's because you're just basically less comprehensible overall, so they have to judge you on vibes
even when trickster heroes show up, their trickster nature gets retconned out of them. maui tricks one character (the protagonist) and does it to selfishly escape. in the legends, he tricks the goddess of fire to give up her burning fingernails in order to bring fire to mankind.
but in modern western mythology (Disney), while the hero may be cunning, they are not usually a trickster. instead, the archetype of the trickster is usually filled by the villain, and if that villain is a woman, they are almost always a trickster.
in the modern western frame, we would not consider them a pure hero, instead they'd be an antihero at best. much more commonly they're relegated to being a side-character.
@the_wilderless
my favorite rule for executive function is that youβre not prioritizing until youβre uncomfortable with what youβve decided not to do. prioritization means giving up something you care deeply about. it has to hurt.
I like when zoomers talk about rizz and on closer inspection they're describing having an absolute basic level of ability to interact and relate to another human one on one
This is actually the worst thing about American culture. We're are atomized. Separated from kith and kin. It is a conceit that this is how human beings were meant to live.