One reason not to share this idea goes like this:
If you shared this idea, you would gain more fans. You would also gain more detractors, but maybe this would be because of people thinking that other people help or praise you more than you deserve, so they try to give balance, and the same logic works the other way: people can support someone more exactly because they see detractors.
Your fans think that you deserve to be a happy person with a good life. For most people, being in a relationship is important. If you wanted to be a relationship with me, your fans would think that it was important that you could be in a relationship with me.
Suppose that I was lying. Your fans would have a negative opinion of me.
It's always possible that I was lying. Even if I wasn't lying, there are circumstances where I would want you to think that I was lying, as with any drama. Suppose you wanted to have the best outcome for me even if it was possible that I was lying. If you had to choose between these possibilities,
1) You share the idea; maybe I was lying and your fans hate me, or
2) Someone else shares the idea. You have fewer fans who could possibly hate me
you might logically conclude that the second is better for me.
"Everything is important. Nothing is important. Do you identify with one of these views. Do you identify with both of them"
https://daughterofankh.blogspot.com/2009/06/bananas.html
(I think this was from an email I sent to Laura, which would have been on my military email account)
Do you really think it would be better if Yara shared this idea, than if you shared it?
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Update 21 May 2026, 05:00
Poll: Which do you think would be better for your teeth? Brushing once a day with toothpaste that costs $10, or brushing twice a day with toothpaste that costs $1?
Poll: Who do you think is more likely to be dishonest? A stupid person, or a smart person?
Poll: Which is more important? Deciding who will be in power, or deciding what policy changes need to happen after those people are in power?
ask AI: short story about a group of lions who are being hunted relentlessly by humans. Explores the emotions of the lions as they suffer losses, and the planning that leads to their eventual victory.
Same, but giraffes instead of lions.
Same, but kangaroos instead of lions.
Poll: do you know why Japan attacked the US in World War II?
Poll: Criminals who believe that there is a serious problem in society are motivated to commit crimes. Would you rather the criminals target people who have become famous for their accomplishments, or ordinary people?
Poll: Would you rather move the appearance of all humans 20% closer to society's unrealistic ideal of male body and face shape, or 20% closer to society's unrealistic ideal of female body and face shape?
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Update 22 May 2026, 01:00
Thought of another poll: "Only a stupid person would put themselves in a situation where no one would take them seriously."
The last tab I had open was this: https://web.archive.org/web/20090205190936/http://japanesestudies.org.uk/discussionpapers/2008/Goodman.html
Added to Wikipedia by someone in India in 2014.
That Discworld novel where someone threw a custard pie at Vetinari, I don't even know which book it was.
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Update 22 May 2026, 15:19
A poll because I can't create polls:
"A powerful witch gives Greta Thunberg minor superpowers that make her immune to any negative effects of climate change, including heat resistance. These powers scale exponentially with the ppm of CO₂ in the atmosphere. Does this make her efforts to stop climate change more effective or less effective?"
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Update 23 May 2026, 12:15
As I write this, my relatives are having burgers at my sister's house. I'm not going because I'm not doing anything interesting, as has generally been the case for many years, with rare exceptions due to mistakes (like when I said my reason for not going to my sister's wedding was lack of suitable clothes, and so she bought me clothes).
Another two thousand people died from suicide, and probably hundreds died from warfare yesterday.
I am not someone who can act like this isn't important. There was that post I made in the now-banned pro-eating disorder community, in which I implicitly criticized talking about fashion and celebrities when there are problems in the world (and suggested that ignoring problems was the reason for e.g. a boyfriend acting in a way that led to a pro-ED mindset), and someone suggested it was fine for other people to post about fashion and celebrities. Shortly before a musical concert of someone with one of the most-followed Instagram accounts was bombed by the Islamic State.
I rather consider "acting like this idea isn't important" is a trend that was started by Sherine. I wonder if it doesn't make sense to criticize it at all; I compared it to the northern route vs southern route debate in Japan before WWII.
Didn't read:
https://www.google.com/search?q=northern+route+southern+route+japan+wwii
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokushin-ron
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1nu7q85/could_japan_have_fared_better_in_wwii_if_they/
https://www.pacificatrocities.org/blog/hokushin-ron-vs-nanshin-ron
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/japan-goes-north-instead-of-south-in-wwii.483574/
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=northern+route+southern+route+japan+wwii
But why did Sherine choose this path? I would say that it was a stratagem to try to get Yoko Ono to share this idea. What I was thinking was that I was unwilling to act like Yoko Ono was a bad person because she wasn't sharing this idea, despite the 2k people dying of suicide each day. So maybe Sherine was acting like she was following Yoko Ono's example.
But Yoko Ono has never acknowledged this idea. Sherine has, when she shared the post with her name in the title. This is the difference, and why I say that Sherine started this trend, not Yoko Ono. (I frequently violate rule 14 of Extended Rules for Commas Purdue OWL, "INCORRECT (compound object)", just like I sometimes use sentences without a verb, which I remember my oldest sister criticizing in Quicksilver in 2005.)
My understanding is that (see poll above, about whether people know why Japan attacked the US in WWII) the US cut off oil supplies because Japan invaded French Vietnam and threatened Thailand. Maybe Japan could have complied with some demands and regained access to oil at that point. But after Japan attacked the US, deliberately attacking the Soviet Union as well was out of the question, even though the US and USSR were allies at that point. Perhaps staying neutral with the US and attacking the USSR would have been better for Japan (or even not attacking anyone), but it ceased to exist as a viable option after a certain point.
I don't see anything that restricts someone from changing from acting like this idea isn't important, to acting like it's important.
If I had died in the past 13 years, like from Covid, then Sherine could act like what she did was completely fine. I was thinking of the song and video, Byakuyakou MV - Promise Me.
Point: Yoko Ono could have just killed herself, like 30 years ago. Then Sherine would have had no reason to act like this idea wasn't important, according to the above explanation. Can someone cause harm by simply being alive? If this is true, I don't think Yoko Ono would object to people learning the truth.
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Update 24 May 2026, 20:46
It has taken me hours to read just 115 pages from The Ogre Downstairs, from page 95 to 210. I assume nobody has shared the idea during this time.
I am not making a new post so that this post, as the most recent post, can accumulate more views. If it reaches 20 views before someone shares this idea I will take the action described in an unpublished post.
On page 210, the last crisis is resolved. An older person learns a solution, which they find by taking a logical action. But before they can apply the solution, the problem has been solved by younger people.
One might say that in general, stories for younger people are about young or small people (or sentient non-human entities) doing interesting things, while in stories for older people, it's older people who are doing interesting things, with younger people in the story only as context and maybe to confuse older people (such as in horror movies where the main character has a young child). So why are Diana Wynne Jones's stories special, such that my oldest sister recommended them when I was 5~10 years old?
The Harry Potter stories, as presented in the films: older people play a large role. In the final battle, as shown in the films, young people may have been on one side of the battle, but that battle also had older people — the teachers — and the other side also had older people.
The Ogre Downstairs: the enemies, as portrayed at the start, are also younger people. Many older people are suggested to lack perception: the teacher who mistook living toffee for a mouse, the woman at the party who incorrectly perceived a close blood connection, and everyone at school who didn't notice the invisible fingertip.
In the Harry Potter stories, people who expect older people to fix problems are usually right. This is presented humorously — the journalist who doesn't listen to what the title character is saying, such as what his age is — but organizational structures are described which characters in the stories believe are competent.
Why aren't all stories like Diana Wynne Jones's, and how does it fit in culture etc.? It benefits young people to believe that older people will not fix or prevent all problems, and that they need to be careful. The early scene with someone spilling ink. The youngest character in the story taking on the most responsibility, including making food. But because of the hidden problem, and more generally the 'low signal accuracy' problem as a relevant problem which people have not solved, older people are reluctant to support attitudes which would seem to absolve older people of responsibility: if younger people are competent and responsible, then older people might feel it's acceptable to just relax and enjoy themselves instead of stressing themselves out by watching the news.
I don't think China has this problem. I thought of these Chinese videos from the large platform Youku, using AI-generated images to tell a complex story:
ENGSUB【公主的迷宫】合集（上）：小红帽被狼人跟踪，快来和她来一起破解谜题 | 经典童话互动解谜 | 动画/卡通片 | YOUKU KIDS | 优酷少儿
At several points, it poses a question and invites the user the guess the answer, with a timer. Like at 20:58.
It's well-known that Asian parents put pressure on their children to do well; the tiger mom stereotype. "Tiger parents' emphasis on academics has been portrayed as abuse in Western society, but is seen as acceptable by many Asian parents."
And two examples from costume dramas: the portrayal of the young characters in Lost You Forever (2023), including the king taking seriously the young male character's talk of wanting to be the ruler and saying he would have to be stronger, and the behavior of the titular character of the Youku drama, The Legend of Anle. At 10~12 years old she is threatened with death, but faces it as Theodora, wife of Emperor Justinian, said that a leader should during the Nika riots of 532: not fleeing from death. (Note that history has a bias towards leaders who fled from death, as with the saying, "He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day.")
While looking up Youku dramas to see if there were any that I recognized, I also saw Till the End of the Moon. The bullying the main male character experienced during his childhood could also be said to promote taking a serious and realistic attitude towards the challenges faced by young people. While one character who participated in the bullying later lost his eyesight and perhaps his life, it was not the level of revenge that one might see in a Korean story that features childhood bullying. In Korean drama The Glory, the pretty main character gets revenge on everyone who bullied her, and then is ready to kill herself to show that bullying can cause psychological harm to someone such that they do things that do not benefit them. (In contrast to a story which suggests that bullying spreads being mean as the dominant strategy, which could imply that it helps someone to be bullied if they then become mean and this later potentially causes them to become rich.)
Also, the way that Douyin accounts that feature very young people dancing also often (based of my sample size of approximately 2 accounts) post videos showing their academic achievements like handwriting practice. A culture in which parents put high expectations on their children cannot easily thrive if the rest of society does not share those views.
This book, The Ogre Downstairs, shows the drawbacks of a non-Chinese, 'individually-oriented morality' culture. The young people take it for granted that they need to deceive their parents, and at least one parent also assumes that there is no point in telling the truth to young people. It is, basically, experience with a natural environment. Page 209 to 210:
But the Ogre was not angry with Caspar. "What a very unpleasant old fellow that is!" he said. "He laughed his head off at our misfortunes." [Note: this includes two attempted murders.]
"Didn't he tell you the antidote?" Caspar asked, wondering what on earth they would do.
"Yes, when I threatened to wring his neck," said the Ogre.
After a bit of thought, remembered the other observation about consequences of moral culture. US not taking care of poor people; having a reputation for less welfare than similarly-rich countries in Europe, in any case.
People can think it's reasonable to have the attitude, "I just need to do my job, and if it's important for society to redirect the productive output from my job in a certain direction, then society would do that." So if the US has a bunch of homeless people, it's because society doesn't feel it's important to fix the problem of people becoming homeless. Some people disagree and say that evil rich people are to blame for most problems, presumably including homelessness, but it's reasonable for someone to have the attitude that evil rich people are not the cause of most other problems and that there is no need for them to care about how to solve the problem of evil rich people, such as by spending more time deciding whom to vote for in the next elections.
Most problems have an opposing problem: giving more money to poor people risks letting people exploit the system, with a much larger risk than in private commercial transactions because when governments give money to people, the people who make decisions about whether to give money to a certain person rarely are harmed if they decide to give money to the wrong person. So US culture leads to a cultural optimum with lower taxes and lower welfare spending.
And regarding the fact of the people with power, which is older people, having primary control over which stories that younger people encounter and deciding on 'stupid' stories, people see the potential for mistakes that comes from an inaccurate view of the world (that describes organizations as more competent than they are) as a way for people to get closer to each other, as I observed in a post that I linked recently but will link again. So even someone who thinks hard about this topic will find it hard to agree that stories like Diana Wynne Jones's should be more popular, unless they believe that the "love makes you evil" meme can be fixed. Which requires fixing the problems that a reasonable person would believe can be fixed.
Immediately after updating with the above, I remembered something else, but then forgot it due to being distracted by the question of whether I needed a new update. Oh: I mentioned to Laura in 2007 or 2008, probably in a blog comment, how good books could be useful when read at different points in one's life. These are the useful, but uninteresting thoughts that I had from reading a children's book that was written in 1974.
And it's minor, but the way the text challenges the reader to think. One character correcting another's use of convent to coven, with some readers perhaps not realizing at first that "coven" was a correction. Some of my notes, that aren't just words whose precise meanings I'm not sure of:
p88 We Three Kings of Orient Are lyrics, wise, insult?
p135 that bucket. You don't think they were brainwashing her, do you
p138 he had fortunately been overcome by a sudden attack of coughing. Character perspective, doesn't work in visual media
p140 "I want two volunteers: you and you", quote from movie?
p168 Bluebeard, wives
p183 burning kind of soda
Also, the back of the book has a review describing it as "a hilarious, magical adventure". Again: two attempted murders.
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Update 25 May 2026, 05:24
Poll: "Is it ethical to wage war without killing anyone under the age of 18?"
So much of my life has been wasted trying to go to sleep when I wasn't sleepy, because I was trying to do nothing.
Wasn't particularly planning to say anything else; I didn't even want to explain that this poll question sprang from thoughts that I forgot almost immediately upon thinking of this question.
Questions from 27 Oct 2011:
"if everyone you had any obligation to were to, one day, forget everything you had ever said or done, what would you then do"
If everyone you knew were able to convince you that they had forgotten everything you had ever said or done, what would you do
Something I managed to avoid talking about earlier today: maybe a poll about whether it's realistic for someone to earn significantly more by fighting for better wages. If not, then most people being sort of apathetic about earning more money leads to everyone having bad wages, and money going to billionaires etc. (Example: someone earns $100k, makes $200k profit for company, if they fought for wages they could make $150k which is still $150k profit.) The usual complication of 'some companies are more efficient than others, and so if everyone got better wages, some companies would go out of business.' This is where the effects of different spending from someone working less comes into play, which is distinct from the observation of 'decreased marginal propensity to consume' (this is a link to a page with math, and I know basic calculus, but I don't want to imply I understand most of the math in economics).
Something else I was thinking about yesterday (here meaning at some point before midnight, possibly on 23 May) was the study that Catherine Rampell linked in like 2015, about females who were wearing high heels receiving more help when they dropped a folder on a sidewalk. I replied comparing it to smiling vs acting in a hostile manner. Suppose this is correct. Then it could be viewed as a costly signal. If it was not costly, then everyone might do it, and the signal would be muddled. Not everyone wants help, or to be treated in a different way.
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Update 26 May 2026, 03:11
Read about a book from Korea with a lot of copies sold, and the 4B movement. Was thinking about whether it made any sense to try to contact them, and found that the answer is no, because I don't have the right signals. Compared it to ants, and it turns out to be a useful comparison with human culture signals, that I've probably thought about before but never mentioned. Ants distinguish which colony they're from through pheromones. (I assume that insects and spiders that infiltrate colonies use the same pheromones.) Even if an ant looks similar, if it has the wrong pheromones, it's an enemy. It's just like how if an ant has the chemical that dead ants emit, then other ants will treat the ant as if she's dead and take her to the trash heap, even if she is still perfectly healthy and was only treated with the chemical by a human.
Ants don't have much in the way of brains, although I am still impressed at how doliolids have cells that move buds in a specific path to the opposite side of the doliolid's body, and those cells obviously don't even have anything like a network of nerve cells, the way we have brains. So ants cannot decide to ignore one pheromone signal based on an expectation, or projection, of the result of doing so.
Humans can do this. But most humans rarely do so. This is what the 'conflicting goals' bit does: it makes humans more interested in questioning the accuracy of the signals they know of, due to perceiving it to be an outcome that could benefit them (because of a high risk of encountering someone with a non-beneficial interpretation of signal components). Like with the red and blue buttons when people are randomly and separately assigned buttons with the 'good' and 'evil' labels.
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Update 26 May 2026, 03:30
(A couple minutes after updating with the above) As I might have mentioned before, the whole signals bit is basically 'headology' from the Discworld novels. Respecting someone because she's wearing a pointy hat, just as people in the real world respect someone who is wearing a suit (sense 1).
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Update 26 May 2026, 04:41
I have failed to get Imane to share this idea. If Imane is not upset by the fact that I have failed, then there's no reason for me to be upset either.
And so I am mentioning the useless fact that I am thinking of the song '歪國人 International · 玖壹壹' and the performances by the group 跳跳糖 Pop Candy using this song (also featuring the songs 9453 Remix, 再會中港路Remix, and 棟未條), like on 2016.06.10, 2016.05.22, 2016.06.09, 2016.06.04 (another angle and a duplicate upload), 2016.04.09 (another angle maybe), 2018.03.11, and I guess 2016.06.17. This should be enough that at least one video has not been removed by YouTube. (Others: 1iKwTdpVmiw, PBzFOwVjg1M, 0X2GST97qhM, RqRf3sc7zgI)
Note definition of 歪國人: "(neologism, slang, humorous) alternative form of 外國人 / 外国人 (wàiguórén, “foreigner”)", and 歪:
1. slanted; inclined; askew; awry; crooked; lopsided
2. crooked; perverse; improper; evil
Is it funny because foreigners mispronounce words, or because foreigners have slanted morals?
