2025-10-15
reflections on milkweed
Snowden Todd on how Chuseok is celebrated in South Korea depending on religious and gender politics. While on the topic of gender politics, Aella posts her reflections on Slutcon, as does attendee Nintil, and maybe inspired by that, Magdalene Taylor Joy on how men and women should like and be nice to each other1.
Daniel Frank writes his opinions on living in New York City after moving there for a year. It’s interesting that he says the food is not that good and expensive, when the consensus opinion is that the food scene there is the best in the world. I think the problem is that ethnic food in Toronto (and maybe Vancouver) is actually just too good, that it ruins your expectations for everywhere else. It really does seem like it’s a city better for visiting than living in (unless you are playing the game where your wife is stuck in NYC, and your goal is to find her and get her out), so it’s both understandable (given the Piltover and Zaun dynamics mentioned) and a terrible shame, that short-term rentals were banned.
Alex Tabarrok on the strong correlation between economic freedom and democracy. Somewhat related, Martin Susrik on what the Peace of Westphalia tells us about living with your enemies, but about how narratives usually aren’t as neat and tidy as they are most commonly described.
Greg Burnham at Epoch AI on OpenAI’s projected revenue growth. Related tweets: Gabriel on how AI is entering an inference-dominated era, and clem on custom fine-tuning and specialization.
Consumer Reports states that Huel Black has excessive concentrations of lead, but most sources I can find, seem to indicate that these levels are more or less fine, actually: an interpretation of FDA guidelines; interpretation of a 2021 paper in Scientific Reports; Huel’s response. (Edit: Cremieux writeup, Ben Shindel).
Etirabys on babies and pooping. Reminds me of how, for some reason, Hacker News was re-discussing the death of Daniel Kahneman a couple of days ago.
The intersection of these two topics has me in the mood to elaborate again on my unfounded gender war theories. If we consider that different cultures have very different gender politics, then what people from different societies are looking for and therefore the most effective means to perform courtship will also be culture dependant. To women, the most desirable men should be those who can perform well according to societal expectations of masculinity, while also shielding them from the most disagreeable societal expectations of womanhood, and carrying the burden of the resulting cognitive dissonance2. For Confucian societies, where male dominance is maintained while running female strategies through the oppression of women, this would entail doing well professionally and attaining high prestige, but not participating in societally expected female oppression3. For Hispanics, where adherence to public gender performance is enforced, one should be publically strong and macho but secretly vulnerable, while being fully accepting of their partner’s family, full personality, and private insecurities. For Anglo societies, where the gender wars are about women attaining male privileges and status, I expect this involves treating them as an equal, but also as a princess, choosing correctly depending on the situation. Others I’m less clear on, but I guess in India, you would want someone with proven martial valor but who nevertheless lets you take the public stage.
Presumably, for women trying to attract men, the reverse applies. Anglo men would like women who are capable of pulling their own weight, but who also need them. Confucian men would want women capable of fulfilling all the societal expectations placed on them, while boosting their own ego in the process4; this is dissonant because these expectations are so high that fulfilling them means being extremely competent, such that you would overshadow most men.
I suspect the fact that White male Asian female pairings are so common is because this is actually not that hard for people from WEIRD societies to do, in that it does not produce any cognitive dissonance at all: within the WEIRD framing, this is something one would want to do anyways. Whereas this produces dissonance in Confucian cultures because protecting your wife from societal oppression includes favoring them over their in-laws, which violates filial piety.
Possibly a stretch, but I’m reminded of Aella’s interpretation of status games as “playing low” and “playing high”. I suspect one reason for the bamboo ceiling is that the emphasis on modesty means everyone plays low by default. In WEIRD societies, of course one plays high in response to someone else playing low, but how women flirt in Confucian cultures is to respond by playing just slightly lower. Anyway, somewhat related, more on the Polar Asian theory by David Sun and how well Confucian cultures might be adapted to space travel; the Koreans better hope this is true.