CinnasVerses

An aging population too. Young people commit more violence, use more substances, and get into more accidents. The Boomers still have massive influence on culture even though its not cool to market to them.

My understand that the decline of tobacco use, alcohol use, sex, and pregnancy among youth in the USA are well-established (but how many young US people are sharing naughty texts or photos when before the smartphone they would be making out?)

And isn't the trans and nonbinary stuff a norm that teh yoofs are enthusiastically breaking while people over 50 fret?

Adam Mastroianni has the audacity to claim that people don't seem to join phygs any more, gets clip art from Astral Codex Ten and hosts a vlog for Inkhaven guests https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance

Pepper

That post does sound like she thinks race and sex determine mathematical ability a la James Damore, Larry Summers, or Charles Murray and other backwards Americans.

Automattic has a budget for sponsoring events https://automattic.com/events/ but a web host based in San Francisco does not sponsor Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, and Gwern by accident.

I think she would be willing to learn how to cite things, not sure whether she wants to learn why just surveying people is not the best way to find the truth. Pretty sure that her interest in trans people is not purely scientific.

I'm not sure her work is any worse than the average psychology paper that ends up in a magazine rack, but I am not signing up for her Substack to see. And "no worse than the average psychology paper" is not high praise.

So pre-teen me reading the Biggles books with the gag about the pilot who tries to do ballistic calculations during a dogfight was saving me from being as stupid as a Californian?

Show them the RationalWiki page where Scott Alexander promised that he could only absorb the smart racism from crazy bloggers and ignore the stupid stuff, Elizabeth Sandifer warned him this was like drinking sewer water with just one filter, and then Alexander posted about how all of a sudden he was feeling more conservative and maybe the things he was reading were connected to that

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander (also archive.is and other backups)

A Spider Robinson short story covers "is pederasty always wrong?" I think the topic was popular in American sci fi fandom in the late 20th century, Jerry Pournelle posted about it.

Yud is more comfortable using his position in the community to discourage people from taking LSD than discourage them from screwing much younger people or violating BDSM protocols. He has written many times about how he wanted to be treated as a credentialed adult when he was a precocious teenager, and about the roles he likes to take in BDSM play. He does not seem keen on the idea that a community's norms around high-risk behaviour will attract or repulse people who you really do not want in your community, he is more comfortable with asking "is LSD generally harmful to the individual person who uses it?"

If I was the leader of a community which had to expel someone for plying people with narcotics, having sex with them underage, and pushing them into extreme BDSM scenarios, I would simply not post that each of those acts is OK sometimes and its not my business to investigate them.

Bloomberg names the person I am thinking of and mentions the first and third accusations

An obit for James Watson and his Dawkins- or Pinker-like path from a scientist to a bitter reactionary https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/

Sure, saying that about being in the wrong body was a dick move. You don't have to accept all the theory to see that many people are in bodies that feel wrong to them, and many people are expected to present in ways that feel wrong to them. The quote implies that they should just try harder to perform the gender they were assigned at birth.