jenn

Cal­ibra­tion and Maybe Some Other Games

Vibe Cod­ing Schel­ling Point

Water­loo Petrov Day

Math and Cal­ibra­tion Games

• jenn 26 Aug 2025 0:00 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform

  to complicate this along gender lines for fun, when i first read your first sentence i totally reversed the descriptions since it’s rugged and masculine to tackle problems and elegant and feminine to tolerate them. per a random edgy tumblr i follow:

  

  that sounds more “rugged” than “elegant” by your definitions, no?

McLuhan’s Probes

AlphaGo 10-ish Year Retrospective

Crit­i­cize Our ACX Grant Application

ACX Mee­tups Every­where Fall 2025

Not At All Ex­ploita­tive Kandi Skillshare

Thank You For Sub­scribing to Bug Facts

An­i­mal Welfare Ad­vo­cacy Strategies

Officer Hours

Take the Grill Pill

The Con­tem­po­rary Dis­si­dent Right

• jenn 30 Jun 2025 23:35 UTC

  10 points

  6

  on: Sup­port for bedrock liberal prin­ci­ples seems to be in pretty bad shape these days

  i’ve been working my way through the penguin great ideas series of essays at a pace of about one a week, and i’ve never been more of a supreme respecter for bedrock enlightenment and classical liberal principles—these guys make such passionate and intelligent arguments for them! i wonder if some part of this fading support is just that reading a lot of these thinkers used to be standard in a high school and university education (for the elite classes at least) and this is no longer the case; people might not really know why these principles are valuable any more, just that they’re fashionable. in retrospect; reading js mill on freedom of speech is what truly locked that in for me as a sacred value, way back in my early 20s.

  ...wait, i just re-derived the “this is why classical liberal arts education is important” argument, didn’t i 😅

Facts in Five Trivia

• jenn 23 Jun 2025 18:29 UTC

  43 points

  8

  on: Ra­cial Dat­ing Prefer­ences and Sex­ual Racism

  oh hey, didn’t know you had a substack! giving it a follow :)

  i think the analysis here is a reasonable assessment of one part of the elephant. here are some thoughts on another part, as an asian woman whos dated pretty broadly—my longest relationship was with a west indian, but ive also dated white and asian people.

  the white person i dated was from a fairly well to do white family. the asian person was, too; they were adopted as an infant by white parents. the west indian had parents who worked prestigious jobs, grew up in one of the wealthiest and whitest toronto exurbs, and went to lego camp every summer.

  all of them had a way of interfacing with the world that i’d describe as something like—without baggage? without bitterness or grievance at the world. a thing some might call “white privilege”, but actually if you look under the hood you might not be surprised to find that it is actually class privilege.

  when i was in high school in toronto, there was this dynamic where all the most popular kids were white. you can become pretty popular no matter what your ethnicity is, but it was more like second tier popularity, and there was always something defensive in the posture of these popular minorities. they thought of themselves as second class citizens that by some luck and hard work made it to the top, but they had to hustle for it, and it did not come naturally to them; it was not their birthright.

  this was the thing that was unattractive to me, this defensive posture. but when you grow up in a poor immigrant household as a minority, and you knew what it was like to go without, it’s hard not to acquire it.

  the interesting thing is that this is changing. asia is becoming wealthier, and when new immigrants come, they no longer start from the very bottom. there are also more 2.5gen and 3rd gen asian kids now; asian immigration into north america didn’t really exist before the 70s-80s, yeah? now there’s more asian kids who come from nice middle class asian american households where they went to summer camp every summer and had like, dogs and backyards and stuff. their parents likely had that defensive posture; but they themselves will not.

  i find myself in a few zoomer circles these days. the most jarring thing to me at first was that the popular non-white kids do not have that defensive posture to them at all. confidence looks great on them, every bit as great as it looks on white people. (nb: i live in a college town for a fairly prestigious university, so, selection effects there.)

  in a room of ones own, virginia woolf writes about what changed after her aunt died suddenly and left her “five hundred pounds per year for ever”:

  No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race.
  ...
  By degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me.

  and on reading another woman novelist, at the dawn of that being a thing that was a viable career for woman:

  Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money, and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought.
  
  Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time.

  she had this whole thing, about how women wrote too defensively, and that this came from their diminished social circumstances. and that as society became more egalitarian, as more women had a room with a door that locked and five hundred a year, she expects to see more and more interesting works by women.

  non-white people of dating age historically did not come from backgrounds where they had a room of their own, and the modern equivalent of five hundred a year. this will change. and i think dating preferences will soon change along with it.

• jenn 16 Jun 2025 18:12 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: jenn’s Shortform

  i think these facts can be consistent with a theory like, the rationalists went from being 15% right wing to 20% right wing in the last ten years?

• jenn 16 Jun 2025 17:51 UTC

  14 points

  6

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: jenn’s Shortform

  ah, i think i misspoke by saying “the community becoming right wing” in my original post. that is a strong overstatement, I’ll correct that.

  i agree that rationalists are still very progressive, but i think there’s also been a noticeable but small rightward shift. some examples of what ive noticed outside of reflexive allergy responses to social justice posts:

  • increasing endorsement/​linking of right wing figures like hanania and cremieux

  • at the same time, increasing… ~culture of silence? around certain controversial left-coded topics, eg what happened with nick decker

  • increased distrust in the government’s capacity to do things by default, more advocacy of pro-capitalist, free market and libertarian ideals. low confidence but i feel like i can kind of assume that the median rat has libertarian sympathies now in a way that i couldn’t before?

  • [from another comment i made] scott’s description of the grey tribe characterizes members as like, feeling vaguely annoyance that the issue of gay marriage even comes up, but because of the pronatalism it feels like re-litigation of abortion rights and gay acceptance are beginning to enter the community overton window again. to me, this feels like going further than reflexive anti-wokeism. meanwhile technological solutions seem to be somewhat sidelined^[1].

  i think a lot of the above examples are quite path dependent and im even sympathetic to some of their developments. im even fine if some would like to make the claim that these are all indicators of the community becoming more well-calibrated in a certain sense. but it does kind of seem like a real rightward trend to me?

  i also don’t think this shift will result in significantly more rats voting republican, but that’s because i think voting republican is more of a signal of red tribe belonging than it is of like, actual political belief. one of my good friends from this community is a republican who hasn’t voted red in the presidential elections in ages.

  1. ^

     sidelined in the discourse. individual people and organizations loosely affiliated with rationality are doing really cool things around reproductive tech, and this is of course much more important.