
Tiburon Collared Lizard (Crotaphytus dickersoni) male, endemic to Western Mexico
photograph by Dick Bartlett
@lizardywizard, what do you think of the colour?
Tags:
#lizard

Tiburon Collared Lizard (Crotaphytus dickersoni) male, endemic to Western Mexico
photograph by Dick Bartlett
@lizardywizard, what do you think of the colour?
Tags:
#lizard
Now with a scoring guide (choose one or none from each sub-category)
Age:
- 21-25 years +1
- 16-20 +½
- 26-30 years +½
Jewishness:
- Yes +1
- Kind of + ½
Gender:
- trans woman (regardless of hormone usage) +1
- any kind of amab using estrogen +1
- amab non-binary (no estrogen) +¾
- other non-cis or dubiously cis (afab trans, agender, magic button trans, etc.) +½
- cis by default (not magic button trans) +¼
Poly:
- Yes +1
- Kind of, or open to the idea +½
Sexuality, part A:
- gray-asexual or demisexual +1
- asexual +½
- asexual and kinky +1
- kinky +½
Sexuality, part B (replace “sexual” with “romantic” if doing so would give you a higher score):
- bisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, any other kind of “gender isn’t really such a big deal”sexual +1
- any kind of “gender isn’t a massive deal but it’s somewhat of a deal”sexual +½
- gendersexual, but would take the bisexuality pill +½
Gifted child:
- very +½ (eg. peerless in one’s childhood environment, or not peerless, but with a highly unusual peer group)
- quite +¼ (eg. one of the highest-achieving in one’s slightly less highly unusual peer group)
Badbrains:
- at least 2 of: ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression at least to a sub-clinical but noticeable degree +½
- one of them +¼
Field:
- CS student, or working in programming, AI, CS, etc. +1
- self-learning any of the above +½
- student or working in mathematics +½
Politics, part 1:
- supports open borders, or at least massively increased immigration +½
- supports significantly increased immigration +¼
Politics, part 2:
- supports basic income by whatever name one wishes to use +½
- supports some other kind of less bureaucratic, more market-based approach to welfare +¼
Politics, extra questions (can’t increase the total politics score over 1):
- refuses to identify with ideological labels +½
- identifies with a weird made-up “non-“ideological label +½ (“futarchy”, “meta-level politics”, etc.)
Geeking out:
- transhumanist nerd stuff +1
- any other uncommon and specific nerd stuff +1
- less unusual SF/F or STEM nerd stuff +½
HPMoR, 3 Worlds Collide, Dragon-Tyrant (add scores from each):
- has read all of it, or most and intends to finish +1/3
- has read a lot but doesn’t intend to finish, or is starting +1/6
SSC:
- regularly +1
- sometimes +½
- rarely +¼
I tried to not break legacy results compatibility so most people’s scores should be the same and this would just clarify the questionnaire; if people’s results change, it’s because I’ve changed some things to better reflect the original intent based on data acquired so far (looking especially at you, @sigmaleph, because that “politics” answer was the most stereotypical rationalist thing ever and I’m embarrassed to have overlooked that possibility)
And now I have the result categories as well:
(break ties with Newcomb’s dilemma; one-boxers upwards, two-boxers downwards)
12: The Chosen One
10-12: True Yudbot of the Hivemind
8-10: Stereotypical Rationalist
6-8: Typical Rationalist
4-6: Quite rationalist-adjacent
2-4: Kind of adjacent I guess
0-2: I don’t know how you ended up taking the survey, please tell me your story
Taking the revised survey!
0.5 age, 1 Jewishness, 0.25 gender, 1 poly, proooobably 2 sexuality, 0.25 gifted, 0.25 badbrains, 1 CS, (tentatively) 0.5 immigration, (tentatively) 0.5 basic income, 1 transhumanist nerdery, 1 fiction, 1 SSC, putting me at… 10.25.
[attaches “True Yudbot of the Hivemind” keychain to keyring, which even without that has more random keychains than it does useful items]
I wonder if the Jewishness in the rationalist community is just confirmation bias, Jews inviting people from their peer group to join tumblr, or a memetic influence of Jewish scholarship. Like Saul Kripke’s direct reference theory, which applies principles from rabbinic literature and scholarship to the semantics of human language.
I kind of figured it’s because Jews and rationalists have similar taste in fiction. I mean, that’s probably not all there is to it, but Luminosity (the first ratfic I read, and so the one where I wasn’t judging it in comparison to other ratfic) definitely reminded me of the books of Jewish folktales I had as a kid. (“Clever, genre-savvy protagonist achieves goals by exploiting loopholes in the laws of nature.”)
6.5 typical rationalist, unless I subtract the scores for every “I have no idea what this is” answer, which puts me at a more likely 3.66 vaguely adjacent. ^_^ Lower if “probably Jewish-descended but not at all culturally Jewish” doesn’t count as “kind of”.
(Not really sure what rationalism entails, but I can’t resist a good quiz with scoring, especially when I’m putting off getting ready for school. XD)
Yeah, “kind of adjacent I guess” sounds more like you, since AFAIK you don’t follow anyone relevant other than me.
“Not really sure what rationalism entails“
(Disclaimer: while I have over a year’s experience now, I’m not some kind of Official Expert or anything, etc etc)
You’ll still find people claiming rationalism is an ideology–to be fair, the label is a legacy from when this was the case–but IME these tend to be non-rationalists from subcultures that think of themselves as ideologies first and cultures never (*cough*socialjustice*cough*). (Which reminds me…but that’s another post. I’ll dig it out of my drafts and finish writing it next.)
Rationalist Tumblr is a social group: a collection of people who generally recognise each other’s usernames and have varying amounts of readership, friendship and frequently (but not necessarily) romance with each other. (A large chunk of the rationalist-sphere consists of a single, complexly interconnected polycule, hence polyamory being listed above as a stereotype.) As a general rule, they enjoy nerding out on transhumanism and philosophy, and can often be found debating ethical thought experiments for fun. Somehow, despite a tendency to treat arguing with someone as a friendly greeting, they manage to be pretty welcoming and reassuring to conflict-avoidant people who are used to walking on eggshells. Maybe it’s the lampshading.
They descend from the commentariat of the blog Less Wrong, but while a modern-day member of the community is expected to be aware of Less Wrong’s existence and have some passing familiarity with the archive (one need not have this passing familiarity upon joining; links will come up during the abovementioned ethical thought experiments), being or having ever been a regular reader of Less Wrong is not required, and one certainly doesn’t have to agree with LW’s stances on things.
You’d probably recognise some of the names yourself, given that…let me go check…yes, all ten of my last ten reblogs were from rationalists. (Admittedly, six of those ten were @lizardywizard. I seem to be on a lizardywizard streak. These things happen.)
(SSC is short for Slate Star Codex, popular blog amongst the community (written by a community member), and source of intriguing-but-usually-tentative ideas and interesting links.)
—
Personally, I put myself down as “kind of” Jewish when calculating the numbers in the tags of my last post. I expect I could make a good case for being straight-up Jewish, but I don’t want to, and I think that’s telling in itself.
Tags:
#reply via reblog
Now with a scoring guide (choose one or none from each sub-category)
Age:
- 21-25 years +1
- 16-20 +½
- 26-30 years +½
Jewishness:
- Yes +1
- Kind of + ½
Gender:
- trans woman (regardless of hormone usage) +1
- any kind of amab using estrogen +1
- amab non-binary (no estrogen) +¾
- other non-cis or dubiously cis (afab trans, agender, magic button trans, etc.) +½
- cis by default (not magic button trans) +¼
Poly:
- Yes +1
- Kind of, or open to the idea +½
Sexuality, part A:
- gray-asexual or demisexual +1
- asexual +½
- asexual and kinky +1
- kinky +½
Sexuality, part B (replace “sexual” with “romantic” if doing so would give you a higher score):
- bisexual, pansexual, sapiosexual, any other kind of “gender isn’t really such a big deal”sexual +1
- any kind of “gender isn’t a massive deal but it’s somewhat of a deal”sexual +½
- gendersexual, but would take the bisexuality pill +½
Gifted child:
- very +½ (eg. peerless in one’s childhood environment, or not peerless, but with a highly unusual peer group)
- quite +¼ (eg. one of the highest-achieving in one’s slightly less highly unusual peer group)
Badbrains:
- at least 2 of: ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression at least to a sub-clinical but noticeable degree +½
- one of them +¼
Field:
- CS student, or working in programming, AI, CS, etc. +1
- self-learning any of the above +½
- student or working in mathematics +½
Politics, part 1:
- supports open borders, or at least massively increased immigration +½
- supports significantly increased immigration +¼
Politics, part 2:
- supports basic income by whatever name one wishes to use +½
- supports some other kind of less bureaucratic, more market-based approach to welfare +¼
Politics, extra questions (can’t increase the total politics score over 1):
- refuses to identify with ideological labels +½
- identifies with a weird made-up “non-“ideological label +½ (“futarchy”, “meta-level politics”, etc.)
Geeking out:
- transhumanist nerd stuff +1
- any other uncommon and specific nerd stuff +1
- less unusual SF/F or STEM nerd stuff +½
HPMoR, 3 Worlds Collide, Dragon-Tyrant (add scores from each):
- has read all of it, or most and intends to finish +1/3
- has read a lot but doesn’t intend to finish, or is starting +1/6
SSC:
- regularly +1
- sometimes +½
- rarely +¼
I tried to not break legacy results compatibility so most people’s scores should be the same and this would just clarify the questionnaire; if people’s results change, it’s because I’ve changed some things to better reflect the original intent based on data acquired so far (looking especially at you, @sigmaleph, because that “politics” answer was the most stereotypical rationalist thing ever and I’m embarrassed to have overlooked that possibility)
And now I have the result categories as well:
(break ties with Newcomb’s dilemma; one-boxers upwards, two-boxers downwards)
12: The Chosen One
10-12: True Yudbot of the Hivemind
8-10: Stereotypical Rationalist
6-8: Typical Rationalist
4-6: Quite rationalist-adjacent
2-4: Kind of adjacent I guess
0-2: I don’t know how you ended up taking the survey, please tell me your story
Taking the revised survey!
0.5 age, 1 Jewishness, 0.25 gender, 1 poly, proooobably 2 sexuality, 0.25 gifted, 0.25 badbrains, 1 CS, (tentatively) 0.5 immigration, (tentatively) 0.5 basic income, 1 transhumanist nerdery, 1 fiction, 1 SSC, putting me at… 10.25.
[attaches “True Yudbot of the Hivemind” keychain to keyring, which even without that has more random keychains than it does useful items]
I wonder if the Jewishness in the rationalist community is just confirmation bias, Jews inviting people from their peer group to join tumblr, or a memetic influence of Jewish scholarship. Like Saul Kripke’s direct reference theory, which applies principles from rabbinic literature and scholarship to the semantics of human language.
I kind of figured it’s because Jews and rationalists have similar taste in fiction. I mean, that’s probably not all there is to it, but Luminosity (the first ratfic I read, and so the one where I wasn’t judging it in comparison to other ratfic) definitely reminded me of the books of Jewish folktales I had as a kid. (“Clever, genre-savvy protagonist achieves goals by exploiting loopholes in the laws of nature.”)
Tags:
#I get 7 and 1/6 with a very conservative reading of the checklist #8 and 5/12 with a less conservative reading #(the other 1.25 is ”pan-kinky” and ”maybe probably qualifies as having anxiety”) #(a *remarkable* number of people have gendered kink preferences) #(this confuses me greatly)
Well, it’s not really their fault if they can’t eat it due to intolerance.
Milk chocolate is exponentially better though.
Ngl I got into dark chocolate for the caffiene
MILK CHOCOLATE OR DEEEEEEEEEEEATH
Milk chocolate is an affront against nature. Especially Hershey’s Milk Chocolate.
OH GOD hershey’s okay. hershey’s is not chocolate. hershey’s is wax and plastic scrapings solidified into a chocolate coloured bar. I am from England and the first time I tasted a Reese’s peanut butter cup my mouth caved in on itself and refused to open again for two days, so offended was it.
(slight exaggeration)
As an Official Brit I can tell you that 99% of American chocolate is Some Bullshit and you are Being Swingdled by the candy police, who want you to remain miserable all of your days. but there is hope! and light in this chocolateless wasteland!
which is to say HAVE YOU EVER TASTED BRITISH CHOCOLATE cause if you havent my frand im gonna deliver some a that shit DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR so that your mouth can experience the joy of EXPLODING OFF YOUR FACE like you’re in some old spice commercial. i’m on an iron horse.
and if you have then consider me duly corrected but i might deliver it anyway
My Girl Scout troop did a taste test when I was a kid: we took American Cadbury Dairy Milk bars and British Cadbury Dairy Milk bars and compared them. The more people go on about how superior British chocolate is (including all the other girls in my troop), the more I wonder if I got two American bars by mistake, because they were fucking identical.
(I would say “and I have a very good sense of taste, too”, but said good sense of taste needs a few months of training on a subject to fully kick in. If I eat a given processed food (yogurt, peanut butter granola bars, etc.) regularly, after a while I start tasting the batch variation, but I generally can’t do that right away.)
(The worst part is when you start developing opinions on which batches are better than others, or sometimes (for extra “fun”) which batches are good at all. Because grocery shopping totally needed more complexity and tradeoffs.)
Anyway, regarding milk vs dark, it really depends on what you’re used to. Dark chocolate seems too bitter if you’re used to milk, but if you keep at it (maybe in stages, using chocolates with intermediate cocoa concentrations), you get used to it and milk chocolate starts seeming too sweet.
To be fair, Dairy Milk is one of the less discernable ones because they actually try to make the American version taste like the British version. (I find American Dairy Milk edible.) I would try with say a Twix bar if you like those.
But they are indeed objectively different recipes! So it’s possible you did get the wrong ones by mistake.
(And yes I do the batch thing too sometimes!)
Like I said, everyone else could tell the difference. Mind you, I don’t think that one was a blind test, so who knows how much of it was power of suggestion. (The test we did a few years later, comparing a few different brands of bottled water and tap water, was blind. Everyone else thought the tap water we’d been raised on was best; I ranked it a close second behind the expensive-even-by-bottled-water-standards water. A bit awkward, that.)
Twix don’t have very much chocolate involved, do they? It’s a thin coating over the cookie and caramel. They’re okay, but I don’t actively seek them out. I note that the article you linked uses Kit Kats as one of the examples of differences, and I do sometimes seek out Kit Kats. (Snickers are my favourite, though.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #food #chocolate #home of the brave
Well, it’s not really their fault if they can’t eat it due to intolerance.
Milk chocolate is exponentially better though.
Ngl I got into dark chocolate for the caffiene
MILK CHOCOLATE OR DEEEEEEEEEEEATH
Milk chocolate is an affront against nature. Especially Hershey’s Milk Chocolate.
OH GOD hershey’s okay. hershey’s is not chocolate. hershey’s is wax and plastic scrapings solidified into a chocolate coloured bar. I am from England and the first time I tasted a Reese’s peanut butter cup my mouth caved in on itself and refused to open again for two days, so offended was it.
(slight exaggeration)
As an Official Brit I can tell you that 99% of American chocolate is Some Bullshit and you are Being Swingdled by the candy police, who want you to remain miserable all of your days. but there is hope! and light in this chocolateless wasteland!
which is to say HAVE YOU EVER TASTED BRITISH CHOCOLATE cause if you havent my frand im gonna deliver some a that shit DIRECT TO YOUR DOOR so that your mouth can experience the joy of EXPLODING OFF YOUR FACE like you’re in some old spice commercial. i’m on an iron horse.
and if you have then consider me duly corrected but i might deliver it anyway
My Girl Scout troop did a taste test when I was a kid: we took American Cadbury Dairy Milk bars and British Cadbury Dairy Milk bars and compared them. The more people go on about how superior British chocolate is (including all the other girls in my troop), the more I wonder if I got two American bars by mistake, because they were fucking identical.
(I would say “and I have a very good sense of taste, too”, but said good sense of taste needs a few months of training on a subject to fully kick in. If I eat a given processed food (yogurt, peanut butter granola bars, etc.) regularly, after a while I start tasting the batch variation, but I generally can’t do that right away.)
(The worst part is when you start developing opinions on which batches are better than others, or sometimes (for extra “fun”) which batches are good at all. Because grocery shopping totally needed more complexity and tradeoffs.)
Anyway, regarding milk vs dark, it really depends on what you’re used to. Dark chocolate seems too bitter if you’re used to milk, but if you keep at it (maybe in stages, using chocolates with intermediate cocoa concentrations), you get used to it and milk chocolate starts seeming too sweet.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #food #chocolate #home of the brave
Does anyone else have, like, a detached anthropological interest in blogs full of very niche erotica that has no appeal for you?
Seeing what the most vital components are, seeing how it’s cross-pollinated with other fetishes, Discourse about it- it’s all such a blast.
I thought I was the only one!
I love reading about niche fetishes and kinks and sexual orientations. I’m fascinated by looners, sneeze fetishists, bug-chaser fantasies, even things that I personally find unpleasant like emetophilia, because I love seeing how the minds of other people work.
And especially the Discourse. I love the Discourse.
Oddly enough, even as a religious person myself, I enjoy examining cults and niche religions in a very similar way.
I don’t think “detached” is quite the right word in my case, but yeah. It’s fascinating, and getting a glimpse of that vast diversity often makes me feel better about things.
(What are looners? “Sneeze fetish” and “emetophilia” are both self-explanatory (and I’ve heard of them before anyway), “bugchasing” refers to STD fetishists if I recall correctly, but I don’t think I’ve encountered the term “looner” before.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #(<– you might find some interesting anthropological material in that kink tag) #the wondrous variety of sapient life
{{I’m deliberately leaving the line-breaks weird because they were weird in the original, and in a way that helps get the post’s point across.}}
Okay, what the fuck is going on? I can’t edit my posts, I *can’t make new
posts*, I *can’t reblog posts*. Nothing happens when I press any of those
buttons. If I press reblog while on the post’s permalink page, it takes me
to a “reblogging” page, but the draft of the reblog doesn’t appear: all I
can see is my dashboard, which is supposed to just be in the background.
Oh, and clicking the “account” button on the top bar doesn’t do anything
either.Liking posts still works. This clearly isn’t happening to *everyone*,
because @sdhs-rationalist has made multiple reblogs since this started
happening to me. (I noticed it maybe half an hour ago, but it’s possible
it’s been happening all day and I just didn’t try to do anything that would
set it off until recently.)I’m going to try using the post-by-email function. Let’s see what happens.
(It said I can add tags by writing hashtags at the bottom of the post, so
I’ll give that a shot.)Hmmmm…maybe log into a new account?
…and the reblog button appears to have magically started functioning again, sometime in the past couple of minutes. Let me go see if I can do the editing I wanted.
Yep, it works. It seems the lockout has ended as it began: for no apparent fucking reason.
Tags:
#oh look an update #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse
brin-bellway replied to your post: I was checking Hurricane over pre-ride and somehow…
Get well soon, Hurricane. (Huh, my road test is also on Wednesday.)
Aw thank you from both of us. <3
Oh huh! Bike, car or something else?
#also i realised you like my posts a lot #but i don’t think we’ve ever talked #so hiii
Hi!
We had an IM conversation once: copingkin, psychological otherkin, and the distinction or lack thereof.
As for the test, it’s car: I’ve got a learner’s permit right now, and I’m going for my intermediate license.
For context, getting your intermediate is, in terms of practical benefits, a much bigger deal than getting your full license. The difference in driving restrictions between intermediate and full in Ontario is very small, and even smaller if you’re age 20+ (which I am):
(The Ontarian terminology for car license types is “G1”, “G2”, and “G”, but I’ve used “learner”, “intermediate”, and “full” here because they’re more widely recognised terms.)
Tags:
#driving #reply via reblog #my driving instructor told me not to drive myself home from a successful road test if I can avoid it #because people who have just passed a road test tend to be intoxicated by the glow of success #and as such are at rather increased crash risk #so one should drive as little as possible until one starts to get over the excitement of passing #not sure how much of that is practical with a motorcycle
Why do people drink alcohol it tastes disgusting
you don’t drink it for the taste. u drink shit like apple juice for the taste. you drink alcohol to get rid of the bad taste that every awful person in your life has left
Maybe you don’t drink alcohol for the taste, but plenty of us do. I do like getting a good buzz, but frankly, the amount of alcohol I want to drink because (many) alcoholic beverages are fucking delicious vastly exceeds the amount of alcohol that would take me over the line from enjoyably to unpleasantly altered. Hell, depending on my mood, it often exceeds the amount that would take over the line from alive to dead. (Needless to say, I therefore do not drink as much as I want to.)
A lot of people who are just starting to drink drink the cheapest shit that’s available, and often that’s not very good. If they like the effects but dislike they taste, then they often keep drinking the cheapest shit that’s available, because “it all tastes like shit anyway.” It’s a vicious cycle. If your experience of alcohol is limited to Natty Ice and/or whatever vodka happens to be cheapest at the local liquor store, you’re not going to have a very good basis for understanding “what alcohol tastes like.”
if all alcohol tastes bad, does that mean people who like wine are doing absolutely nothing but posturing?
Remarkably, there are multiple people (who are active on the forum of a single comic) who actually believe this (and multiple others who believe different things that are equally nuts)! See this completely asinine xkcd comic, and an alarming fraction of the official forum discussion of it.
There’s enough of this going around that when I type “xkcd beer” (without the quotation marks) into Google, the third suggestion is “xkcd beer stockholm syndrome.”
The hell?
(And I say this as someone who hates 97% of all beer I have ever tasted, even.)
I find beer to be delicious and refreshing. Not all beer – I used to think I hated beer until a few years back when I was getting a tattoo and was having drinks with the artist afterwards (she’s a cool person, owns many reptiles). She gave me a Tecate and maybe it was because I was wired and dehydrated from several hours of being inked, but it was the best thing I could have had in that moment.
So I don’t like a lot of beer. I’ve tried fancy microbrews and supermarket brands alike, and a lot of them are shitty. But I will knock back a Tecate any day.
I don’t assume that people who like alcohol have Stockholm Syndrome; I simply assume their perception of alcohol is different. I’ve shared drinks that the people I was sharing with liked, that the people I was sharing with could distinguish flavours in, but all I could “taste” was the sensation of pins and needles.
I also perceive carbonation as causing pins and needles (before you ask, non-carbonated alcohol is still stabby). Similarly, I assume that people who claim to like soda perceive it as tasting more pleasant, and are not merely choking it down for the caffeine high. My avoidance of soda and alcohol alike is not a reflection on others.
(I note that–very often in speech, but occasionally in text–I have trouble expressing my theory of mind even when I actually do possess it. Acknowledgements that other people are unlike me tend to get lost on the way to my mouth. If someone sounds like they are claiming alcohol tastes bad to everyone, you might want to double-check that they actually meant it that way. I can guarantee you there’s at least one person in the world–*gestures at self*–who is likely to say that and not mean it, and where there’s one there might be more.)
Tags:
#alcohol #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
so- the reply button shows up on reblogs sometimes, now (apparently not on image posts, for no good reason, even if it’s not a reblog, thanks tumblr), but like… if you reply to something someone reblogged, does that reply go to the source, or the person who reblogged it?
I recently got a reply on a post I reblogged, and it showed up in my activity. I don’t know whether it also shows up in the OP’s activity or not. It’d make sense if it shows up there too, since that’s how likes and reblogs work, but, you know, Tumblr.
(I suppose the simplest way I could find that out is to just try replying to this reblog and have you see if it shows up in your activity.)
P.S. Except I’m not getting a reply button, so scratch that. Maybe I have to follow the OP for two weeks like the old replies required? I stop by your blog fairly often, but I’ve never officially followed you.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide