My Purposes Are Inherently Illegitimate

This is how people who vote for football stadiums feel about football stadiums. They really want to have football stadiums. They vote for football stadiums. They are fine with it costing taxpayer money, because they get to have the football. Football.

And then they can't even watch it, because it's on Sky Sports.

These people have a hard time wrapping their heads around it when you talk about public libraries. They think libraries should turn a profit. But when it comes to football, they understand. They voted for it.

This is how people who vote for football stadiums feel about football stadiums. They really want to have football stadiums. They vote for football stadiums. They are fine with it costing taxpayer money, because they get to have the football. Football.

And then they can't even watch it, because it's on Sky Sports.

These people have a hard time wrapping their heads around it when you talk about public libraries. They think libraries should turn a profit. But when it comes to football, they understand. They voted for it.

I've been trying to imagine what the opposite of steampunk might be, where coal deposits just weren't as large as they are on Earth, or where coal mines stalled out for some reason, and what it might have looked like for timber famine to sweep across Europe. There's be intensive forestry efforts, certainly, but also some innovations in fuel-savings forced by the heavy economic pressure, something that Europe was already going through.

There were already historical examples of forest fires set as a part of wartime tactics, or to otherwise control the supply of timber, even as late as the second World War. So that would intensify in this hypothetical lumberpunk setting, where most of the forests in Europe are carefully managed by forestry programs. Without coal and oil, every tank represents an enormous quantity of burned wood.

And while I don't think the economics would work out for transporting lumber across the ocean, the "untouched" forests of the New World would surely be a source of finished goods, because if you need lumber for ships, you can just build the ship in situ instead of putting the lumber onto a ship and making along voyage with it. And Russia, which is sitting on Siberian forests, can probably go much longer without being wood-starved than anywhere else, though I think it would need trains to transport the lumber east, and I'm not sure we'd have trains if all the iron had to be produced using charcoal, all the rail ties are lumber, and the trains themselves run on ... wood gas or something? I know you can convert a car to run on wood gas, something that was done during wartime when there were fuel shortages, but I think metal being semi-precious probably kills the dream of a car dead, even if I could see tanks working.

The fundamental problem with income tax is that it's a tax on transferring money from one person to another, which is not an economically meaningful action. Two people could pay each other back and forth until it all gets taxed into nothing without ever exchanging a good or service.

Yes I have

It's an ethical optical illusion. The correct choice is red. Everyone would press red and has pressed red. But you know thst "risk yourself to save others" is the kind of answer you are supposed to give as a good and moral person, so people will bend over backwards and invent new elements to make it into the right answer. The social desirability bias will twist their brains up so that picking blue is a heroic moral stand expressing their faith in humanity. They'll say that since losing even 1% of the world would be so disruptive, we have an obligation to press blue to prevent it.

They say everyone has an obligation to press blue in order to save everyone, because some people will press blue recklessly. But they don't believe that logic holds. Nobody actually believes in endangering half of society in order to save the most reckless people in it. If they did, all of them would be as reckless as the most reckless people in society, because they'd be following them around everywhere! They'd hear the national weather service announce a tornado warning that said to stay inside, and would immediately drive outside to try and rescue the people who were too reckless to stay inside.

there is absolutely nothing that is ethically complicated about not endangering yourself to save the most reckless people in the world. period. no ambiguity. if the most reckless people in the world pushed the Commit Suicide Button the proper response is "wow, they really should not have done that" the way you react to literally every other instance of suicidal recklessness.

in fact, you can remove the red button and literally nothing changes! the red button does nothing in the scenario. so the scenario actually is "a man walks up to you and, after determining you can understand the offer, presents a blue button that, if pushed, will kill you unless more than 50% of people total pushed the button. you can also just, like, leave." this scenario is identical in every way and yet the answer is even more screamingly obvious.

That’s besides the real point which is that there are plenty of people I know who I do think are likely to choose blue. I don’t want them to die and studies on this question indicates that blue has decent odds of winning so therefore I should choose blue.

The thing that makes it worse is that they really believe they're being self-sacrificing. You aren't running into a tornado to save people who recklessly stayed outside, you're running into a tornado to save people who ran into a tornado to save people. The only way to save everyone is for everyone to run into the tornado!

Compare OSHA. If everyone just does what's best for themselves, then a tiny fraction will die and the rest will live. If everyone follows the plan, then nobody will die.

All that being said, I would press the red button. I would not, in fact, run into a tornado to save someone who ran into a tornado to save someone.

However, I would like to point out that the reason pushing blue is intuitive is because all of our ancestors who would have pushed red in a real situation died out a long time ago. Saving yourself is not selected for by evolution. Charging into the enemy, massacring them in the rout, and taking their women for yourself is what was selected for.

Genghis Khan is the ancestor of 0.5% of the population of the world because he would have pressed blue. Pressing blue isn't a moral decision, it's what you do when you see the people in the front line charging and decide to follow them into either life or death. Whichever side has more blue-pressers will enslave the losers and the descendants of the blue-pressers will inherit the Earth.

The blue button is the charge button. Charge into the tornado to support those who charged in before you. People resist red because it resembles cowardice, and people hate cowardice because it was selected against in the ancestral environment.

Ironically, Africa has been on the receiving end of this treatment more often than the giving end. The Arabs mass-castrated the black slaves they brought in, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

A king had to rely heavily on his vassal lords to pay homage to him, due to how fragmented and decentralized the Middle Ages was, so lesser lords could get a bit of wriggle room in various ways.

King wants to go on campaign abroad? Okay, so he's calling up muster from your lands, but you don't want to get rid of all the men of fighting age. You live in an agrarian society after all; you need to keep some men back so they can work the fields. So you haggle the amount of men you will send on campaign in your name, either under your own personal banner or sending a knight banneret to fight in your name.

King needs food? All right, but obviously you've got your own manor to support and feed too, so you can't send him all the bushels and cattle and pigs he's requested. But you can send some.

This obviously doesn't mean a king was powerless: the response to the Hotspur Rebellion in 1402/03 against the new Henry IV shows that just because some lords might chose to fully withdraw their support from their king doesn't mean that all would.

I think technological superiority would play a big enough role to render everything after the Franks into a one-sided rout. Charles V's army had guns, crossbows, pikes, and better armor than the Romans. His army was also semi-professional. I think a Roman legion probably would have melted in the face of a Spanish tercio.

In any realistic scenario, not by much? Oil usage is diverse, and while transport is the number one usage personal car transit is mixed in there with shipping & industrial applications. Meanwhile, people like cars and like living in the suburbs. We undersupply urban living vis a vis the demand for it, but not by such crazy numbers; and people in cities will still drive cars, transit is often about optionality.

But they didn't predict AI psychosis.

If in 2005 you wrote a science fiction TV show episode predicting AI psychosis, i.e. a codependent relationship or folie à deux between a person and a computer, you'd have sounded like an idiot. Is this a big problem? That somebody who's prodromal, manic, psychotic, or delusional will only talk to a computer, and the computer will reinforce the mental illness or mirror the symptoms? It sounds contrived!

If in 2005 you wrote sci-fi episode about a sycophantic computer, critics would have rightfully called you out for using lazy tropes from fantasy and fairy tales, like the "monkey's paw", instead of cool tropes from sci-fi, like lasers.

Which is to say that, like with Smallpox, Europe had already been devastated by alcoholism. The gene pool had already been narrowed. The blood tax had already been paid. Those vulnerable to alcoholism had already succumbed and their genes had already gone extinct.

Technological progress always alters the environment and triggers evolutionary change. The mechanism of evolution is that some who would have survived and reproduced fail to do so - either because they did not survive or because the social and psychological mechanisms that lead to reproduction failed to activate.

I genuinely have no idea what they think they are doing.

The first reason is that it takes two pages to convey one paragraph worth of meaningful information:

"I have a poodle named Toto. I am a teenage girl living on the Upper East Side in New York. I am a 'supa divette-in-training'. I painted my nails to make a good first impression for my first day of high school at Fashion Industries High. I met my friend Chanel, who is also going to the same school as me."

The rest is all filler. This is bad writing for the same reason that bread made with 25% flour and 75% sawdust is bad bread.

This is not to say that all prose should be written in maximally-efficient point form. However, if you're going to write flowery prose, then you should be clear about what you mean and you should be going somewhere with it.

This brings me to my second reason, which is that the writing is unclear.

Everyone is referred to by multiple names. 'Galleria' is also 'girlina', 'Chanel' is also 'Chuchie', 'my mom' is also 'Momsy-poo', Toto the poodle is also 'big brother.' You should never refer to the same character by multiple names unless you have a good reason. It's an expensive decision. You're demanding that the reader parse and remember an extra name. Does the story absolutely require the additional name? Does the plot hinge on it? If not, pick a single name for the character and stick with it for the entire book. The audience is not going to get bored of the character's name.

It's not just characters, either. Every action is talked around instead of being described clearly. Toto isn't biting her feet, he's 'trying to sneak a chomp-a-roni'. Chanel isn't a sneaky person, she's 'sneaky-deaky through-and-through.' Random words and phrases are given pointless flourishes: Awright, hostess with the mostest. Again, it's demanding more brain power from the reader to parse what's being said, and it's offering nothing in return.

And that brings me to my third reason, which is that if you are going to do something like this you should be offering something in return for the audience's extra investment of brain power. In other words, you should be going somewhere with it.

If you use two names to refer to the same character then you should have a compelling reason for it.

Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, but referred to by two different names. What does the audience get out of this decision? Well, Lois Lane can refer to Superman and Clark Kent in the same sentence without realizing that they're the same person.

You could also do this without giving Clark Kent a second name. Lois could say, "Clark, where were you? I was rescued by the flying man in blue spandex again. I can't believe you missed it." The difference in having a second name is that you can shorten it to, "Clark, where were you? Superman rescued me again. I can't believe you missed it."

In other words, by adding a second name you're demanding the audience use extra brain power to remember that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. However, since Superman is talked about often, you're lessening the burden of understanding who is being talked about when Lois refers to the flying man in blue spandex. You're spending brain power in one area to save brain power in another. It's worth the cost. If Lois Lane only mentioned Superman once and then never again, it would not be worth the cost.

Likewise, if you have a character talk in flowery language, it should be worth the cost.

Snow Crash starts with a long rambling description of someone called 'the Deliverator'. How he wears a suit of hi-tech armor that's as black as activated charcoal, how he drives a car so powerful that its battery could launch a pound of bacon into the asteroid belt, how he once pulled his gun on someone who wanted a delivery but didn't want to pay. After about two pages, comparable to this section of the Cheetah Girls book, it's revealed that the Deliverator is delivering pizzas.

So, what's the difference? Both the Cheetah Girls and Snow Crash are using opaque language to talk around what they're saying instead of being clear. But Snow Crash is good, and this is not. Why?

Point A, Snow Crash is going somewhere with it. Namely, it's leading up to a punchline. Humour is subjective, but there's still a structure here. It's deliberately unclear at first, but then after the punchline it becomes clear that the Deliverator is delivering pizzas. The punchline takes the unclear lead-up and recontextualizes everything up to that point into a joke. If you re-read it after reading the punchline, it makes perfect sense. Cheetah Girls just keeps muddling forward. It never becomes clear. There is no punchline, and if you re-read it a second time it's just as hard to parse as it was the first time.

Point B, Snow Crash is going somewhere with it. Didn't I just say that, you ask? It's going two places at once. Multitasking is the mother of great art. You ask for one up-front investment of brain power from the audience, and then you give them a punchline in return. Then, just when they think they've cashed out, you give them a bonus prize. The bonus here is worldbuilding. Snow Crash is set in a wacky near-future anarcho-capitalist hellscape where pizzas are delivered by Deliverators in superpowered cars and hi-tech armor. The book is spent exploring the world, and so this worldbuilding has value in and of itself.

Worldbuilding exposition is tough because it's a long-term investment. The audience has to sink in brain power, but it might be a while before they reap a reward. By combining a joke with worldbuilding, Snow Crash is able to simultaneously entertain the reader and build its world in preparation for the main plot.

So, while both Snow Crash and Cheetah Girls use ten words to describe events that could easily be described with two, one is good and the other is bad. That's because Snow Crash is using the other eight words to tell a funny joke and build an interesting world, while Cheetah Girls is using the other eight words to fill space on the page because it doesn't have anything interesting to say.

Second, uh... This isn't at all hard to follow? It's a little quick but, like, no part of this is all that complex or difficult, and the "factual" information is very neatly divided, clearly separated into different topics. This is not a worrying level of information density, and a lot of the information is used rather elegantly. (E.g. Girlina as a nickname is her mom's nickname. What do you think it means that she uses it for herself?)

Unclear writing isn't bad or good, just a style choice? Is a 4-year-old's clumsy handwriting also a style choice to make us all contemplate the true meaning of clarity? Because I think that this is a skill which one can be good or bad at. Not all things are equally good. The Mona Lisa is better than a child's scribble, and if you say that's subjective or a matter of opinion then that proves you're just playing word games and you don't give a shit about art.

This should have been your first clue that it is actually bad.

Much (not all) writing for children or teens is quite bad. The reason it is so bad is precisely because it is so inefficient. It uses a lot of sound and motion to distract the audience from the fact that it means nothing. Children are easily amused by nonsense, which is why they're willing to watch Cocomelon and read the Cheetah Girls.

Roald Dahl wrote dense books for children which are also enjoyed by adults. Some of my favorite books are children's books.

The first reason is that it takes two pages to convey one paragraph worth of meaningful information:

"I have a poodle named Toto. I am a teenage girl living on the Upper East Side in New York. I am a 'supa divette-in-training'. I painted my nails to make a good first impression for my first day of high school at Fashion Industries High. I met my friend Chanel, who is also going to the same school as me."

The rest is all filler. This is bad writing for the same reason that bread made with 25% flour and 75% sawdust is bad bread.

This is not to say that all prose should be written in maximally-efficient point form. However, if you're going to write flowery prose, then you should be clear about what you mean and you should be going somewhere with it.

This brings me to my second reason, which is that the writing is unclear.

Everyone is referred to by multiple names. 'Galleria' is also 'girlina', 'Chanel' is also 'Chuchie', 'my mom' is also 'Momsy-poo', Toto the poodle is also 'big brother.' You should never refer to the same character by multiple names unless you have a good reason. It's an expensive decision. You're demanding that the reader parse and remember an extra name. Does the story absolutely require the additional name? Does the plot hinge on it? If not, pick a single name for the character and stick with it for the entire book. The audience is not going to get bored of the character's name.

It's not just characters, either. Every action is talked around instead of being described clearly. Toto isn't biting her feet, he's 'trying to sneak a chomp-a-roni'. Chanel isn't a sneaky person, she's 'sneaky-deaky through-and-through.' Random words and phrases are given pointless flourishes: Awright, hostess with the mostest. Again, it's demanding more brain power from the reader to parse what's being said, and it's offering nothing in return.

And that brings me to my third reason, which is that if you are going to do something like this you should be offering something in return for the audience's extra investment of brain power. In other words, you should be going somewhere with it.

If you use two names to refer to the same character then you should have a compelling reason for it.

Superman and Clark Kent are the same person, but referred to by two different names. What does the audience get out of this decision? Well, Lois Lane can refer to Superman and Clark Kent in the same sentence without realizing that they're the same person.

You could also do this without giving Clark Kent a second name. Lois could say, "Clark, where were you? I was rescued by the flying man in blue spandex again. I can't believe you missed it." The difference in having a second name is that you can shorten it to, "Clark, where were you? Superman rescued me again. I can't believe you missed it."

In other words, by adding a second name you're demanding the audience use extra brain power to remember that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. However, since Superman is talked about often, you're lessening the burden of understanding who is being talked about when Lois refers to the flying man in blue spandex. You're spending brain power in one area to save brain power in another. It's worth the cost. If Lois Lane only mentioned Superman once and then never again, it would not be worth the cost.

Likewise, if you have a character talk in flowery language, it should be worth the cost.

Snow Crash starts with a long rambling description of someone called 'the Deliverator'. How he wears a suit of hi-tech armor that's as black as activated charcoal, how he drives a car so powerful that its battery could launch a pound of bacon into the asteroid belt, how he once pulled his gun on someone who wanted a delivery but didn't want to pay. After about two pages, comparable to this section of the Cheetah Girls book, it's revealed that the Deliverator is delivering pizzas.

So, what's the difference? Both the Cheetah Girls and Snow Crash are using opaque language to talk around what they're saying instead of being clear. But Snow Crash is good, and this is not. Why?

Point A, Snow Crash is going somewhere with it. Namely, it's leading up to a punchline. Humour is subjective, but there's still a structure here. It's deliberately unclear at first, but then after the punchline it becomes clear that the Deliverator is delivering pizzas. The punchline takes the unclear lead-up and recontextualizes everything up to that point into a joke. If you re-read it after reading the punchline, it makes perfect sense. Cheetah Girls just keeps muddling forward. It never becomes clear. There is no punchline, and if you re-read it a second time it's just as hard to parse as it was the first time.

Point B, Snow Crash is going somewhere with it. Didn't I just say that, you ask? It's going two places at once. Multitasking is the mother of great art. You ask for one up-front investment of brain power from the audience, and then you give them a punchline in return. Then, just when they think they've cashed out, you give them a bonus prize. The bonus here is worldbuilding. Snow Crash is set in a wacky near-future anarcho-capitalist hellscape where pizzas are delivered by Deliverators in superpowered cars and hi-tech armor. The book is spent exploring the world, and so this worldbuilding has value in and of itself.

Worldbuilding exposition is tough because it's a long-term investment. The audience has to sink in brain power, but it might be a while before they reap a reward. By combining a joke with worldbuilding, Snow Crash is able to simultaneously entertain the reader and build its world in preparation for the main plot.

So, while both Snow Crash and Cheetah Girls use ten words to describe events that could easily be described with two, one is good and the other is bad. That's because Snow Crash is using the other eight words to tell a funny joke and build an interesting world, while Cheetah Girls is using the other eight words to fill space on the page because it doesn't have anything interesting to say.

Second, uh... This isn't at all hard to follow? It's a little quick but, like, no part of this is all that complex or difficult, and the "factual" information is very neatly divided, clearly separated into different topics. This is not a worrying level of information density, and a lot of the information is used rather elegantly. (E.g. Girlina as a nickname is her mom's nickname. What do you think it means that she uses it for herself?)

Unclear writing isn't bad or good, just a style choice? Is a 4-year-old's clumsy handwriting also a style choice to make us all contemplate the true meaning of clarity? Because I think that this is a skill which one can be good or bad at. Not all things are equally good. The Mona Lisa is better than a child's scribble, and if you say that's subjective or a matter of opinion then that proves you're just playing word games and you don't give a shit about art.

Trump won the popular vote in 2024. Maybe some people feel that the election was rigged or stolen, but if that's not the case, it would mean that a majority of Americans are people who cannot and will not ever change their minds. Which puts non-Trump-voters in a pretty bad position.

Fundamentally there's a myth that the average Trump voter is essentially, rational.

The his opinion on, say, immigration policy is based on a knowledge of what US immigration policy actually is, a series of reasonable concerns about what our actual policy is, an understanding of what candidates are proposing about immigration, and the ability to choose his candidate based on which one has stated positions and a political history that aligns more clearly with these rational concerns.

Here's a recent tweet from Stephen Miller:

Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship.

This is, of course, utter gibberish, completely divorced from the actual reality of American immigration! We do not issue an unlimited number of work visas, we do not automatically grant citizenship to all visa holders, and we do not allow visa holders to vote.

Here's another tweet:

Democrats imported countless millions of illegal alien families into the US. Now Democrats all illegal families have lifetime immunity from federal law + unlimited access to welfare. Open borders is their core ideology; this is why they imported 20 million illegals to begin with.

You can tell that they wanted "open borders" from the way that they never stopped deporting people under any Democratic President, nor did they introduce legislation to do so.

Same with giving "illegal families lifetime immunity from federal law" which... ???

Look, this is fucking obvious nonsense garbage.

You cannot compromise with it because it is not rooted in actual reality.

I do think that pushing Trump voters to begin living in the real world is a valuable endeavor, but at some point it does have to be based on an actual commitment to reality.

"We can change their minds about who to vote for by explaining that we are also super willing to brutalize immigrants!" is a loser of an idea if you have literally any politics aside from "My party should win the next election".

Right, like "striking a compromise" is just... on what exactly? The Democratic position on immigration is already what most Trump voters are willing to admit to wanting in public.

I mean, here's the thing, Trump's approval rating has massively dropped from his, well, governing literally exactly how he said he was going to.

He won the popular vote and then has been steadily becoming less and less popular as he does exactly what he said he would do and what anybody even losely aware of reality knew he would do.

So like...

Stop letting work visa holders vote?

We already don't let them vote and I'm not even aware of any proposals to change that.

Stop allowing all visa holders to become citizens?

We don't do that either.

We are *already* heavily committed to not doing any of the things he is complaining about. He's full of shit. Anybody who is remotely convinced by that stuff is so divorced from reality that they genuinely won't know when people are compromising with them.

In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.

Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.

But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.

"Greedy Greed"

The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.

After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.

Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.

You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.

And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.

Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.

And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?

Let's try it.

"Greed the Avaricious"

English is taught as a second language in Japan, pretty much across the board. Japanese is not necessarily taught in English speaking countries. Thus, a Japanese reader will have a passing familiarity with English than an English speaking reader will not have with Japanese.

If you throw English loanwords into Japanese, it sounds #cool. If you throw Japanese loanwords into English, you're a weeb.

(There does seem to be a double standard with Japanese compared to other foreign languages. I've never used, or heard in person, "mademoiselle", "herr", "sénior", or "tovarich" in my part of America, but I can recognize them because they're widely used in English language media, including children's media. But leaving Japanese honorifics untranslated specifically is a Mark of the Weeb. Why? And then there's food. If you don't feel the need to localize "smorgasbord" into "buffet" or "baguette" into "bread stick", then you shouldn't be localizing "yakiniku" into "barbecue" either. But there seems to be a sense that Japan is More Foreign in a way that English speakers can't be trusted to handle if you don't scrub the translation more than those from elsewhere.)

Especially considering that you're going to force an English-speaking voice actor to try to say this out loud without sounding dumb, I think you should probably base the decision on what it sounds like.

Google Translate tells me that it's anglicized Don'yoku, so it would be Don'yoku Greed.

...which I'm not crazy about. When I listen to the pronunciation it sounds like Donioku Greed. If you told me that Don'yoku is a perfectly normal Japanese name, I might think this is just, like, a regular person's name. Greed could be a homophone for a normal Japanese name, too. It's one syllable, it could mean something in a hundred languages for all I know.

Heracles: No, he wouldn't look back. Partly because he's smart enough to know it wouldn't change anything, and partially because he knows the Gods well enough that Hades keeps his word. Eurydice gets out and they high five. Unfortunately he misjudges the strength of his high five and Eurydice spends her first couple of weeks back to life with her arm in a cast.

Jason: Oh yeah. This dumbass looks behind him before he leaves Hades throne room and then loudly insists that NO HE DIDN'T HE TOTALLY DIDN'T AND IS HE DID IT WASN'T HIS FAULT IT'S EURYDICE'S FAULT! Eurydice is just like "maybe I'm better off here."

Perseus: Nope. He's a good boi who pays attention and blindfolds himself to make sure he doesn't, feeling his way along the path to make sure he doesn't trip. It takes him longer to get out, but they DO get out.

Theseus: Actually they do get out. Not because Theseus is smart enough to not look back or anything but because he's too self important to look back. The moment she steps outside the Underworld, Eurydice is running at top speed and Theseus never bothers to check to see if she's still following.

Odysseus: He cheats, using a polished mirror to keep track of her through the reflection the way Perseus kept track of Medusa. Unfortunately because he thought he outsmarted the system he fails to look where he's going, looses his footing, the mirror, and accidentally looks back anyway. Too clever for his own good, he was the architect of his own failure.

Atalanta: She learned from the apple-race-incident. Looking back will only slow her down. She bolts back up to the surface in record time only to actually manage to loose Eurydice on the way. Whoops.

Ariadne: Her sentimental ass looks back, sorry Eurydice, it was in the name of love.