Research reveals that there are two kinds of guides to writing sex scenes. The first advises you, in perfectly seriousness, to include all the most ghastly clichés (without characterizing them as such). The second goes through the same list and says “these are ghastly clichés.”
100% of the fiction writing guides I have read, I came away thinking “if you need this advice, you absolutely should not consider writing fiction even as a hobby.”
I read somewhere “sex scenes are highly technical; do not attempt without special training.” Because I am an idiot, I got intimidated by that, and somehow imagined that books about how to write properly literary sex scenes would say something non-obvious.
The TVTropes web site is not exactly *useful*, but as a guide to writing fiction it is way smarter and more fun than any of the books. [NSFW, cw: if you open any TVTropes page, you will be lost for the next few hours.]
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Why do *I* always get stuck with the thankless, grindy tasks the official experts in the field evade responsibility for?
Professional historians of science managed to gloss over “why exactly did logical positivism fail” because it was hard, so I had to write that up. Now this.
Historians’ passing over of the death of logical positivism: the camera tastefully cuts away from the scene and all we hear are muffled screams in another room. tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.…
They had to kill everyone off before starting the sequel (“Postmodernism Does Science”), but they’d written themselves into a corner.
Coming up with a convincing story for how the heroes of Season One all suddenly died would take way too much exposition. tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.…
Finding out what works in education would have greater leverage than nearly any other research. The field is treated as worthless: a self-fulfilling prophecy resulting in little worthwhile work attempted.
Nearly all the research is on K-12 education. Universities exempt themselves from study? They are assumed competent, where everyone accepts that K-12 is a swamp. Contributes to their slide into mere credential-granting.
A further step: the research on university level education is nearly all on undergraduates. I did a literature search recently on graduate school ed research (for obvious reasons). There’s practically nothing.
[NSFW-ish maybe] The beguiling yakshini (wood-nymph) who made her way from Maharashtra (central India) to Pompeii, shortly before burial by Vesuvius in 79 C.E.
There was extensive material trade and cultural exchange between India and Rome then.
Even the earliest known Buddhist temples were ornamented with yakshini sculptures that were unambiguously erotic, unambiguously Buddhist, and predate tantrism by centuries. What are we to make of that? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakshini
Wikipedia quotes some guy from 1967 who at least points out that there’s a problem here. (His two proposed solutions seem improbable to me.)
Outstanding 🧵 by @The_Lagrangian explains what is wrong with probabilistic/Bayesian rationalism, and what is so attractive about it that so many people adopt it despite its defects.
@The_Lagrangian Probabilistic analysis can be extremely powerful, but technically it has prerequisites that are *never* satisfied in macroscopic reality.
You have to make a small-world idealization in which you pretend it applies, and then do all this stuff meaningfully:
@The_Lagrangian You can always make up arbitrary numbers and hope that’s better than nothing, and sometimes it is, but it’s more likely garbage-in/garbage-out, and a way of fooling yourself into greater confidence than is warranted:
🎙 Two very different, worthwhile podcasts about the decaying university system:
🎙 @MeganMOConnor with @eriktorenberg on the unbundling of vocational/technical education. Universities aren’t well-suited for the current main purpose, educating people who want mainstream jobs. Megan and Erik discuss promising alternatives. spreaker.com/user/10197011/…
🎙 @PsychRabble on @fourbeerspod discussing the political corruption of academia, particularly social psychology.
The anecdotes are troubling, but as an outsider, I can’t tell quantitatively how bad this is. The hosts push back some at the end.