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This is true of any tool, and is not relevant in any obvious way. That a tool could be used in any way doesn't mean that it's a bad tool to use in other contexts. No one is saying that the existence of social consequences for objectionable behavior is always good, just that it happens to seem...

Yeah, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about racism and anti-semitism, and I'm pretty comfortable with viewing those as deeply objectionable. I've been seeing people's arguments for them for decades now, and have not found any that were any good yet.

They're not stopping you from making things better. They might make things worse. They might make things better. But they don't prevent you from affecting the world immediately around you. You can, every day, decide to be kind to people or to be cruel to them. It may not have a huge impact on...

"You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it." I know I can't make everything better for everyone. But I've saved lives, and I've gotten people out of horrible situations, and I can look at the world I live in and see that it's better for me having...

That happens fairly often, in fact. Look up Darryl Davis, or look at what happened to the son of the guy who runs Stormfront. But it also happens in a context of society unambiguously and clearly rejecting the inappropriate behavior. You can, in fact, persuade people to stop being like that, but...

There's an old story about a farmer who decided to hire a scientist so he could impress all his friends, and after a few months of work, the scientist announced he was ready to present his results, so all the farmers came over to see what he'd come up with. And he drew a circle on the...

I call it "what you search for twice exists". It might not exist where you searched for it, but the fact that you looked twice means you will find the setting more realistic if it exists somewhere.

You're missing the point. Most of the time you aren't fighting horde after horde of 10hp enemies. But sometimes you fight a horde of them, or you fight some 10hp enemies next to other things. The spell is situational; if you carefully define the situation you're looking at to be the one it's not...

It's too situational to get a single overall number. Sometimes you have a lot of weak enemies, and doing 100 damage to one of them is not practically any better than doing 10 damage to one of them, because they're already down at 10.

Degree of literalism and metaphor vary a lot with context and topics, too, and with writers. Idioms change over time. Words move, too. I don't think it's necessarily safe to generalize too much. Kennings are more of a thing in my conversations today than they were 20 years ago.

Consider the Quaker thing of refusing to be excessively fancy and formal and address people with honorifics, thus, calling everyone "thee" instead of "you". This was called "plain speech" because it was a refusal to adopt spurious honorifics. It now sounds archaic and indeed overly formal to...

Yes. But that doesn't mean that the classics are valuable and memes aren't. It just means that they're all valuable. It is not clear to me that reading the classics would be any better than watching Star Trek for producing better-rounded people who have a broader set of things they can connect.

I mean, they might, but it's not clear it does them much good.

pedantic moment: "IQ" as usually understood is a statistically-normed test and values >170-175 or so are basically meaningless. You can make up numbers in that category, but you can't validate them with small enough error bars to make them meaningful. So, any number over 170 is either (1) fake...

Also code-switching is fun and coming up with inderect referential terms can be really entertaining. I referred to a recent video game involving jumping and fighting things, done by a guy famous for doing such games in the past, as "noted lightbulb manufacturer General Electric" and at least one...

Never forget that references you don't spot are still references to other media. They're gonna be there in anything from academic papers to source code, or even just forum posts. Give writers credit for the fact that they're probably saying something, even if you don't know what it is. That's...

I don't think this has actually happened. Part of what you're seeing here is that you're comparing formal things that got kept to the bulk of daily communication, but also you're missing the depth and poetry of the modern communications as well. They're not worse, they're not less nuanced or...

I think Stoneskin was originally added in Unearthed Arcana.

I always thought of eldritch blast as Beam Weaponry -- instantaneous line of effect -- but most things I think are moving around arrow-speed, maybe, but also it specifically doesn't matter -- they happen on your turn, that's it, there is no more detailed modelling happening.

Some day, I am going to read someone's coming-out story and it's going to start with "so everyone in my party in a D&D game ate a magical banana, and it turned us into girls, and at first I was sort of bothered, but it actually felt really comfortable for some reason..."