2025-12-27
amon
Aidan Kankyoku with the animal welfare implications of different AI takeoff scenarios. In some ways it feels like worrying about the layout of the deck chairs on the Titanic, but actually anyone who has a pet topic should probably be doing something similar. That they aren’t more common seems to be an indication that people really aren’t taking the prospect of AGI seriously enough yet.
Thomas Pueyo with the global distribution of population density as the output of a temperate-rainfall mapping algorithm.
Andrés Gómez-Emilsson on the side-effects of common medications.
Chad Nauseum on how girls will watch shows targeted to men while most men do not watch girl shows1. It’s not actually clear to me this is the case, since it seems to me that most shows are more or less gender-neutral, and specifically seinen or josei demographic-targeting is the exception rather than the norm.
CHH on possible reasons for not having a core group of friends, including speculation about whether this is related to lacking the propensity towards team affiliation.
Daniel Frank on overoptimization for legibility as the source of dissatisfaction with society. But actually, it seems to me that legibility, as a means for allowing outsiders to enter, is increasingly prevalent exactly because it is so enjoyable. The issue is when systems purport to be legible when they actually run on illegible discretionary mechanisms. As an example, Lana Li writes about the self-understanding she gained by dating a 6’2”, blue eyed man in finance; if there actually was an accurate way to match people based on compatible personalities2, it seems to me that dating apps would be far better regarded than they are currently.
Julia Wise on how you don’t need a large income to have kids, although notably her budget is about fifty percent higher than the median personal income3. Somewhat related, Angadh on the nature and consequences of the London flat.
Tyson Duffy in the Metropolitan Review on the works and nature of Saul Bellow.
Similarly, he uses harem animes as a concept targeted towards male viewers, but it seems to me that gender targeting is less about these surface trappings and more about underlying psychology. For example, Empresses in the Palace is an example of a harem drama clearly targeted to women, since more attention to detail and accuracy is placed on the plausibility and consequences of social rather than mechanistic actions. This is why I think anime tended towards a male audience historically, because josei shows are typically oriented around the investigation of social norms among Japanese women, which is probably harder to understand than an edgy seinen which entertains through violence and pretty 2-d girls. Actually, for guys interested in viewing media for women, Asian dramas are a pretty good starting point, since in Asia most media is primarily consumed by women, which means that while female-centric TV tends towards the lowbrow in the West, Korean and Chinese dramas have a decent number of high-complexity stories which are meant for female consumption. The Story of Minglan is a pretty good example of the latter which I enjoyed recently.
Edit: to provide a short synopsis, The Story of Minglan is a subversive fusion of the harem drama (eg. Yanxi Palace) and the succession drama (eg. Yongzheng Dynasty), two genres respectively oriented around female and male ambition and how its unrelenting pursuit produces hollow alienation, where both stories are acted on from the periphery by the protagonists, who model “proper” and virtuous Confucian ambition. It’s also a social commentary on how concubinage is incentive-incompatible with Confucian morality, a sort of apologia for contemporary feminist dislike of Confucianism as a female-controlling ideology (although this wasn’t particularly persuasive to me given how tied together the concubinage and slavery systems were in dynastic China, and how slavery is essentially glossed over in the series). Finally, it’s also a romance story of a protagonist who grew up in adversity, and in doing so developed the mentality and capability to protect herself and the ones that she loves, who finally learns how to let herself be vulnerable in love. Even though I’m not the target demographic and don’t really agree with most of the messaging, I found it to be just as good as the best male-targeted Chinese Dramas, like Langya Bang or Ming Dynasty 1566.
Edit: Margarita Lovelace on human variety in desires (in relationship structure).
Only 80% of the median household income though.