Last thing I’m gonna say about this. The whole bit about satire and farces and so on being judged on their own terms ignores the existence of things like Dr. Strangelove, which somehow manages to be taken very seriously, remain funny, and retain a decent degree of plausibility.
Here’s a nice story from the New Yorker to illustrate:
I’ve seen a number of people (in these comment sections, too) including Dr. Strangelove as an important parallel in their positive reviews of the film. I don’t think I’m very wide off the mark.
I think the film obviously took Dr. Strangelove as an inspiration in spirit if not in form, but that sounds to me like something that's trivially true. Satire about world-ending catastrophe is a small genre that Dr. Strangelove is the most famous example of, if not the originator.
Stupid question time: Dr Stangelove was made in the 60's. Since then, we now have computers, internet, smartphone. We have raised our expectations for lots of things. Why can't we raise our expectations for art in the same way?
I have a few hypotheses: 1) the human brain is the limiting factor, and "genius artists" today are basically the same as they were before, 2) art is measured relative to its constraints and context, so having more means doesn't always help, 3) Old stuff that we still remember has stood the test of time and thus is already filtered to have the very best, 4) The energy these days is mostly spent on making more very good thing than an even better thing. I took a look at my bandcamp a few hours ago and there are a few very small niches that are filled with people dedicating their life to it.
I'm clueless about most of that but it seems to be one of those things that we've just accepted for no evident good reason.
Old stuff is also, to be frank, graded on a curve. That's why Super Metroid gets such high rankings on "best game of all time" lists, whereas some modern equivalent (Metroid Dread? Metroid Fusion? Zero Mission? idk, pick your poison) doesn't. The original gets bonus points for being the original, even if some successor took all its ideas and iterated on them perfectly.
I think being the original is a big deal and should consequently be celebrated. The “curve” seems to me more like an attempt to properly grasp the creative effort behind an enterprise
Sure. But that means given that two works of equal "objective" quality (i.e. quality if given to an uninformed individual), we will tend to prefer the older one.
That more depends on whether you prefer the Progressive or the Reactionary story about history: is the present a Golden Age of hitherto untold prosperity and happiness, or a crumbling, decadent ruin left over from a past Golden Age?
I'm not actually sure that that's true, either - the *originator* gets a lot of bonus points, but the first clone gets no edge over the 10th clone, and that comparison is done basically on the merits.
You do have a point though that it means that we're actually talking about how praiseworthy the creators are rather than how much enjoyment the consumer will receive.
I think there's two grading systems that usually get conflated.
There's "is this good by modern standards", where Doctor Strangelove is honestly still great but Super Metroid is not.
There's also "was this great at the time", where Super Metroid admittedly fails kinda badly (also see original Star Trek.)
I think it's worth talking about them separately, but also acknowledging that they are both valid; Super Metroid really *was* a groundbreakingly good game, even if it's getting kind of rusty today.
I've never played the Metroid games myself, but from what I've heard there's no consensus on anything being a "perfect" iteration or successor to Super Metroid. That may be because people won't admit that a successor is better in every way, but that may also be because improving every single aspect has never been done. This part itself may be because you can't just decompose a game into parts, improve them and put them back together.
As an aside, I think the "modern equivalent" to Super Metroid would be either Hollow Knight as a "modern take on", or Dark Souls as a "genre-defining classic" while still having roots in the metroidvania genre and updating it for "modern tastes". But for all of these games we mentionned, you could make the point that they're all good in their own way. I think that at least Super Metroid, Dark Souls and Hollow Knight will endure for some time. But on the other hand, it's easy to take a metroidvania and say "this one will be forgotten, it wasn't that good".
Maybe my point is asking "why would people go out and do something mediocre?", to which the answer would be "most people just do their jobs" I guess. I'm a software engineer and the software I work on is good but it's not Dr Strangelove or Super Metroid good I think.
So, I haven't played any Metroid games *but* Super Metroid, and I can't speak to how well that series has been handled. But, with respect to a number of series I have followed, I think it's genuinely true that while the resources available for them have expanded, the games themselves have gotten worse. I don't think this is simply a matter of nostalgia. I've gotten the same impression from a game series I got into relatively recently. It's been running for a substantial time now, and I've been playing the games in order from the beginning, and I reached a point where the games jumped systems, got a huge boost to their graphics capabilities, full voice acting, etc. And my reaction was "Wow, they have so much more to put into these games now, and yet they've managed to make it so much worse." A game series in which every installment so far had managed to really wow me dropped to a level where I'm crawling through the next game on the list, often not feeling in the mood to pick it up even when I'm bored.
This is a subject I actually talk with people about quite often, and I think there's a lot more to be said about it than can reasonably be covered in a single comment. But I think that one of the relevant factors here is that game developers already had the resources to make genuinely excellent game experiences decades ago, but they haven't spent the years since then honing them. They've kept introducing new capabilities *which themselves take a lot of work to use properly,* and they often don't have the time to properly adjust and figure out how to make the best use out of them before they reach a point where they feel obligated to use something new or different to keep up with the standards of the field.
As I've gotten older I find myself less interested in a lot of modern games, and I've struggled to say exactly why. Then I think about Solitaire, a very simple game that has been around forever, and yet people play it a lot!
What I think is happening is that a lot of new games are more complex, with more features (and voice acting, and graphics, etc.), but not necessarily good in terms our human brains really appreciate. Our brains want a simple program that ticks a certain set of boxes in our head (think of setting, genre, and the type of functions it requires our brains to process). Solitaire checks some boxes on that list that apparently work very well for a bunch of human brains. Call of Duty apparently does as well, but I don't think a 2022 CoD necessarily does that any better than the original. Sure, the graphics are better and there are more features, but that may actually be worse. If our brains have to work harder to actually play the game, our brains may reject (find unfun) newer features. The Atari had two buttons, and more or less so did the Nintendo, but the games were still quite fun. Now controllers have 10+ buttons and we are required to use most or all of them. That's like an IQ test just to be able to complete the game - which not everyone finds fun. It's great for competitive gaming, as it allows skill to be more clearly evident, but that's not why most people play games.
I liked the open world and a lot of the features of Breath of the Wild, but found the combat system generally unfun. Not just that weapons break (a side issue to what I'm saying), but even the button combinations to use special attacks and whatnot. I stopped playing, because I didn't enjoy it. I wanted to explore the world, but I didn't want to spend a bunch of time practicing how to use the complex combat system. A lot of modern games combine multiple features that may have been separate games 30 years ago (or couldn't exist with that technology). If you like all of the features, then the game works for you. if you only like some of the features, maybe you just wont enjoy it.
It's odd that videogame controllers have gotten more complex while things like TV remotes and cell phones have gone the other way: a TV remote from the 1980s could have 100+ buttons, and phones rely on the touchscreen for most features.
I much prefer the physical controls (I wish modern cell phones had a physical brightness control, for example) but what a user interface really needs is to be easy to start using straight away and then have other features available when people get more comfortable with it.
A proper game with complicated controls will warm you up with only needing some buttons at first, so you can get used to the controls as you advance, and it becomes second-nature as to how to parry and spin and all.
I think it's pretty clearly 1, plus the fact that art is capped by skill rather than knowledge, so whereas todays mathematicians can learn all the work of previous mathematicians and go from there todays artists still have to start pretty much from scratch.
If you look at aspects of art that where human skill /isn't/ the limiting factor, things have definitely improved, though - most obviously, CGI now lets us put pretty much anything a creator can imagine on screen for the audience to see. But it turns out that in quite a lot of genres all the things people were visualising were people walking around and having conversations in the real world, and they could already put that on screen in the 60s, so improved craft hasn't contributed to those areas of art.
If you extend your timescale, you can see similar progress in other areas - better musical instruments, better pigments, the development of perspective and so on. but, again, by the 60s we had all that, and the only limiting factor in a lot of art forms was human skill.
Good point about the skill! So this wouldn't be exactly about "art", but about "craftsmanship", in which case I agree, the best of the best seems to be at the same level through ages.
"artists still have to start pretty much from scratch."
That's the attitude that makes today's artists not very good. Every artist is now following in the ideas of the people from the 30s and earlier whose idea was basically "we don't want to do anything that ordinary people might like, because that is boring."
I think this depends a lot on what you think of as 'good' and 'art'. Generally speaking, I think we are considerably better at 2d illustration than we used to be. Also, artists literally do the math thing you are describing for developing drafting skills. The classics of art school are, draw from life, and study the masters. In the past, the study the masters part wasn't actually super easy, a lot of times it involved going to the museum with a sketch book. Today, study the masters is dramatically easier, and there are just so many more 'masters' to study. You can do a study from Becky Cloonan's Instagram, then try your hand at a painting by Sargent, circle back to Jung Gi Kim, and finish off with one of Rembrandt's self-portraits, all from the comfort of your drafting table. Exposure to other artists is also huge part of the artistic process, and while the parasocial relationships of twitch might be lambasted generally, being a part of an artist social group, where you can share ideas with peers is another one of the best things about art school, and you can now get that anywhere in the world if you have an internet connection.
I think this has actually worked out in the real world, and modern illustrators are regularly creating pieces that rival or surpass the old masters in terms of technical ability, while also exploring a dramatically wider range of techniques and subject matters.
On a very long scale, it seems like very accurate representational art techniques have been discovered and lost several times. On a scale of centuries, I can probably buy an art commission that's better than a Renaissance master for a few hundred bucks. On a scale of decades/years, however, natural variation in talent/vision seems to matter much more than technology.
For what it's worth, this basically applies to CGI as well. We largely reached photorealism with Jurassic Park in '93. There are films today which look much worse. The *minimum* price tag has come down a lot, but the skill of the artists has generally been the most important factor in CGI quality for over 30 years.
Also, it's easier to appreciate Strangelove as a comedy because we're so separated from the issues of the time. "Look at all of those wacky goofballs and their nukes" is a bit funnier now than it was in the sixties.
Especially if you watch Don't Look Up as a climate-change allegory (which the creators intended but which I think diminishes the film), you're invariably thinking about how climate change isn't so easy to fix, that there are tradeoffs for everything, and how your political opponents (whoever they may be) hold views on climate change that infuriate you. It's harder to appreciate the comedy if you're actually angry at climate deniers or actually angry at those who think that solving climate change is as easy as pushing some "green energy button."
I'm sure at the time, there were a lot of people who felt Strangelove unfairly satirized hawks who were making serious points about the Soviet Union or who felt that nuclear war "wasn't funny, man." It's also notable that MAD _worked_, so in a sense, the film actually was very wrong. It's just that nobody cares about that today, the film was genuinely hilarious, and a lot of cold warriors really were lunatic warmongers who wanted total war (look up Curtis LeMay or Thomas Power if curious).
P.S. I'm also not so sure that the dangers of nuclear war have somehow dissipated just because the Soviets are gone, but that's for a different comment thread.
You say ""Look at all of those wacky goofballs and their nukes" is a bit funnier now than it was in the sixties.", but I don't see it that way. I am still just as scared of a nuclear war now as I was when I grew up in the '60~'70. You are right that it's probably better left for another comment thread, but we should have one at some point...
Yeah, seriously! I think nuclear war is still at least as significant a threat as AGI, and far, far more of a threat than a planet-killing asteroid.
Aging autocrats have a tendency to become senile and paranoid. An 85-year-old Putin (or Xi) in the early stages of dementia is a rather terrifying thought. Not to mention US leadership of late.
Nuclear war is unlikely to wipe out 100% of humanity even in the worst case scenario. Of course, it would hugely impact the lives of everybody, which is what normal people mostly care about, but to the sort of person who cares about "x-risks" there's a world of difference between 99% and 100% of humanity killed.
My working theory is that every form of entertainment has a sort of landscape or environment of possible forms whose niches fill up quite quickly once uncovered. Every now and then a new niche opens up thanks to changes in technology or taste, and a pioneer generation of artists starts filling it. And, once the large spaces are filled in, there's very little for subsequent artists to do except fiddle on the margins while they wait for a new niche to open.
The reason why we don't often see a modern-day version of the {mega-artist of your choice} in a given older genre/form is not that their descendants are lesser artistic creatures. It's because, once they've had their run, you cannot do too much with the same material except homage it, react against it, copy off it or work in the areas it did not touch on completely.
Seems so. Albrecht Dürer died in 1528 and if you look at his engravings, I don't think state of the art (heh) has been pushed forward at all. Regressed, if anything.
The baseline human brain is absolutely a bottleneck.
The development of the plot in Dr. Strangelove was nowhere near as contrived. Yes, there were over-the-top personalities in the movie, but the nature of nuclear war escalation is a game without too many individuals making decisions. There is no fucking way that a plot could have unfolded like this new movie. Here's how it would have gone down, really.
Scientists call other scientists for trajectory confirmation and encounter modeling. The same day, Hubble would be rotated to image the thing. Just like it took a week of (only!) heavy COVID for every nerd with a youtube channel to become an expert about R-values, it would take two days for all of us to grasp the broad outlines of how solar wind and solar heating can result in a few newtons of force decelerating the comet. Yes, the original discoverers would be famous, but they people who run the serious telescopes would be able to speak with much more authority. NASA people might be muzzled by politicians, and I could easily see their early steps being as pathetic as those made by the CDC in early 2020. But a comet is much easier to understand and model than a virus is.
It's just super stupid for the movie to suggest that we'd just carry on with worrying about our old problems. All evidence I know says we'd do exactly the opposite and insist that we DO SOMETHING NOW! even before we know what's wise. But then again, launching many nukes at the thing ASAP probably would be the best thing to do. In the months before the rendezvous, we would have plenty of time to game out how to place the detonations. My guess is that the wisest strategy would be to detonate the fastest nuke safely far from the comet, over one of its rotational poles, and study how it responds the the "gentle" heating. That data would guide the later detonations.
Just like the real president was completely sidelined in the early COVID reaction, she would be sidelined in the first days of this. Nobody would expect her to be a source of info on orbital mechanics. It would be made clear in the first week that China, France, India and Russia are each prepared to "fix" this with or without the USA, or each other. And everyone else would just be begging the rocket+nuke powers to use the UN to coordinate their plan.
I'm not saying that the movie can't take liberties with reality, especially if it's meant to be a roast of certain classes of people, like politicians, conspiracy theorists, anti-alarmists, etc. Fine, to some extent, I can pretend that these people can control the narrative in an especially unhinged way, even when I know they never could for a second. But here's what really really bothered me about the movie. I guess in America, we think that we are the only actors in the world. The countries of the kids table got together to do exactly one launch?? And it failed?? That's how much the billions of people in China, Europe, India, etc. were willing to invest in their own continued survival? One messed-up launch from Kazakhstan? Did they really not care because they thought "whatever, USA clearly got this"? I'm sorry, but I'm just seething about how myopic and culturally ignorant that is, and how people who review this movie are not screaming about this. I know this movie meant to point point fingers at the stupid politicians and tech capitalists, huh huh huh, yeah, they're the worst, right! But the movie itself is just reprehensible if it really tries to suggest that the people of the Earth are so fucking devoid of personal agency that they are like, eh, we just ride on the coattails of the USA, and if they let us down, then I guess we just accept death by fire. I mean, we're only like seven billion people. What could we possibly accomplish, being so thoroughly handicapped by our tragic non-Americanness? It's just so sad that everyone outside the USA is born with Tyrannosaurus arms and is so helpless that they basically have to wait around for Americans to save them. Seriously, how it is OK to make even a satire movie in 2021 whose plot depends on this characterization of foreigners?
I understood that launch was implied to be not failing, but being sabotaged/bombed by the US since they were all in on the tech CEO's plan. Might also explain why there weren't more launches, since soft pressure was enough to stop them, and they had to reach for the drones and long range missiles only once.
Then again I'm European, perhaps the US's reputation of a bloodthirsty global tyrant is not obvious inside the US.
I'm remembering this better now, and I suspect you're right. If that was implied, it's actually even worse, because it means according to the movie, literally every significant action that happens in the world is performed by Americans. Yes, we might be bad actors, but everyone else is a complete non-actor, and the fact they thought they might do something was just cute and silly.
I'd like someone to splice in a "happy" ending in which the comet is deflected, the Chinese premier gets on TV to announce that "we fixed it ourselves, you pathetic stooges," and then express his regret about the chunk that accidentally broke of and is tragically about to make a crater out of Washington DC.
How it would really have gone down, as already noted, is that the sensible people would have determined very early on that there was no possibility of diverting the comet, and gone on to do other things. Including but not limited to, hoping really hard that the braniacs had miscalculated and the comet was going to miss, praying real hard for God to stop the comet, partying like it's 1999, killing the people they hate most so the comet won't cheat them out of the chance, and digging mineshafts.
If we postulate a modestly changed scenario where it is possible to divert the comet, e.g. one where there's six years notice instead of six months, or one set far enough in the future that SpaceX has dozens of Starships in routine service, then that diversion effort will require A: bignum launches, not just one, and B: the active cooperation of the United States Government. The idea that you stop an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact with *one* super-special rocket is a Hollywood conceit, and the US really does have more of the relevant resources than everyone else in the world combined.
If you postulate a scenario where it's possible for other nations to stop the comet, then you're postulating 10+ years of warning time, in which case there's a full US election cycle before it's too late for the US to make a difference and that becomes a very different story.
Could I add 5) the culture war is really big, and Hollywood is now an active player in it, and art isn't a very good culture war weapon but propaganda is?
My expectations for art haven't gone down, but for Hollywood they have, severely
Among other things, Dr. Strangelove had *one* genuine villain, and maybe three people who could have made better decisions, but the basic premise was that we'd gotten ourselves in a corner where one highly-placed person going completely bugfuck nuts could kill us all(*), and then had basically everyone else doing their best to try and solve the problem but failing because the problem had been made insoluble. That's a lot more intuitively plausible than a story where literally everyone but the one or two protagonists is a complete idiot of one sort or another.
* Except for the ones in the mineshafts. Were there no mineshafts in this movie? Heck, there were mineshafts in "Seveneves", and that one dropped a whole lot more than a dinky 9-km comet on the Earth.
The existence of mineshafts is mentioned fairly early; it's an obvious thing for someone to at least try given the premise, so Stephenson mentions the people who try. I won't spoil anything about how they turn out.
I envy anyone who gets to read Seveneves for the first time. One of my absolute favorite books ever and Stephenson's best. You're in for a treat! (Also, don't worry about that spoiler above; it's trivial).
On your point about Seveneves being one of your favourite books, I have a question which is a huge spoiler so I'll ROT13:
V nofbyhgryl ybir gur svefg gjb guveqf bs gur obbx (gur ryrzragf frg va gur arne-shgher) ohg gur ynfg guveq (frg va gur sne shgher) frrzrq n uhtr jnfgr bs gvzr gb zr. V qvqa'g frr ubj vg pbaarpgrq jvgu nal bs gur gurzrf bs gur svefg ovg, naq V srry gur fgbel npghnyyl haqrezvarf n ybg bs gur grafvba bs gur fcnpr frpgvbaf ol erirnyvat gung npghnyyl gurer jrer abg Frira Rirf nsgre nyy. Va gehgu, V yvgrenyyl pbhyqa'g haqrefgnaq ubj gur ragver ynfg guveq bs gur obbx unq znqr vg cnfg na rqvgbe, fb gubebhtuyl qvq vg fcbvy zl rawblzrag bs gur svefg ovg.
Qvq lbh unir n qvssrerag rkcrevrapr bs gung ynfg guveq, svaqvat gung vg raunaprq lbhe rawblzrag? Be ner lbh fnlvat gung gur svefg gjb guveqf jrer fb zvaq-oybjvatyl tbbq gung n zrqvbper raqvat qvqa'g birenyy fuvsg lbhe raguhfvnfz sbe gur jbex? (V npghnyyl nterr gung Frirarirf vf bar bs zl snibhevgr obbxf bs nyy gvzr, rira qrfcvgr ubj zhpu V ungr gur raqvat)
V pbzcyrgryl nterr, vs V pbhyq phg bhg gur ynfg guveq vg jbhyq or n gbc 5 erpbzzraqngvba sbe FpvSv. Vs V erpbzzraqrq vg gb fbzrbar V jbhyq ubarfgyl fnl "Gnyx gb zr nsgre gur svefg frpgvba raqf" naq gura fnl "Gur obbx vf bire, fgbc abj".
Crefbanyyl, V ernyyl rawblrq gur svany cneg. Gur ratvarrevat qrivfrq ol na beovgny pvivyvmngvba erqvfpbirevat gur cynarg, ohvyqvat zrtnfgehpgherf yvxr—V guvax ur pnyyrq vg Gube’f Unzzre?—gung pbhyq syvc qbja, teno fbzrbar, rwrpg onyynfg naq xrrc tbvat onpx vagb beovg naq gur “onfxrg” gung qebccrq qbja gb rdhngbevny fbpxrgf va gur cynarg V sbhaq snfpvangvat. Nyfb, gur pbaprcg bs n pvivyvmngvba fpneerq ol fbpvny zrqvn naq sbphfrq ba “uneq” grpuabybtl jnf n qryvtugshy gubhtug rkcrevzrag.
V irel zhpu nterr jvgu Qbpgbe Zvfg, gubhtu: gur raqvat qvqa’g ernyyl jenc hc nalguvat. Vg npghnyyl raqf ba n tvnag pyvssunatre! V nyfb jnfa'g vairfgrq va gur punenpgref be gur bhgpbzr; V whfg sbhaq vg vagryyrpghnyyl vagrerfgvat. V ybbx ng vg yvxr n fhcre-rcvybthr. Vs lbh jnagrq n yvggyr tyvzcfr vagb ubj gur Frira Rirf erperngrq uhzna pvivyvmngvba, urer jnf lbhe yvggyr tyvzcfr. Ohg orpnhfr Fgrcurafba pna’g or oevrs, lbh npghnyyl raq hc jvgu n ovt tyvzcfr gung’f onfvpnyyl n obahf abiry—nyy sbe cevpr bs bar obbx!
Gur raqvat qvqa’g gnxr njnl nalguvat sbe zr, ohg V nyfb frr ubj crbcyr pbhyq svaq vg hafngvfslvat. V qvq yvxr xabjvat gung vg jnfa’g nyy sbe anhtug—gung gurl npghnyyl qvq fheivir rabhtu gb erohvyq pvivyvmngvba, naq gung Qvanu’f Qnq’f vqrn jbexrq nf jryy. Rira gubhtu gurer jnf n fgebat vzcyvpngvba gung yvsr va gung zvar ghearq bhg gb or engure uryyvfu, fb qvq yvsr sbe gur Nexvrf.
Gur svfu-crbcyr cybg yvar pnzr gbgnyyl bhg bs yrsg svryq. Vg’f n pbby vqrn gung jbhyq unir orra sha gb rkcyber, ohg gura jr’er ybbxvat ng rira n ybatre obbx V thrff. Hygvzngryl, gubhtu, V guvax V pbhyq yvir sbe n ybat gvzr va Fgrcurafba’f zvaq rawblvat zlfrys. Rira gur fghss gung qbrfa’g dhvgr unat gbtrgure vf fb qnzarq vagevthvat V pna’g fgbc guvaxvat nobhg vg. V jnag gb tb erernq guvf obbx abj. :)
Lrnu, V thrff gung'f n snve cbvag. Vg jnf fhcre vagrerfgvat, va n "irel-ybat-rcvybthr" jnl. V qrsvavgryl rawblrq ernqvat gung cneg, ohg vg ybfg gur qenzngvp grafvba sebz gur znva puhax. Vagrerfgvatyl V guvax gung vs vg jnf n pyrneyl-ynoryrq "rcvybthr" gung vg jbhyq unir sryg terng. Vg jbhyq unir sryg yvxr n ybj-fgnxrf jenc-hc jurer V pbhyq whfg or rkpvgrq ol gur pbby fpvraprl guvatf naq fgbel guernqf orvat gvrq bss, jvgu n pyrne rkcrpgngvba gung V jbhyqa'g ernyyl pner nobhg be rzcnguvmr jvgu terngk250 tenaqpuvyq bs gur punenpgref V qvq.
V'yy nterr jvgu gur guveq cneg orvat n wneevat punatr sebz gur svefg gjb. Gb or snve, V jvyy fnl gung V rawblrq vg - ohg vg arrqrq gb or n frpbaq abiry. Va snpg, gur ortvaavat bs n frpbaq abiry.
VVEP Fgrcurafba rkcerffrq vagrerfg va jevgvat zber fgbevrf va gung gvzryvar, naq V'z vagrerfgrq va ernqvat gurz vs ur qbrf. Nygubhtu, V jbhyq ernyyl, ernyyl yvxr gb frr zber bs gur Svefg Gjragl Lrnef gbyq.
Cnpvat: rira gur frpbaq guveq unq ceboyrzf, vs V'z pbagvahvat gb or snve. Ntnva, nf V erpnyy, gur abiry fgnegf jvgu znlor gur orfg teno V'ir rire ernq, gura tbrf snveyl pbagvahbhfyl guebhtu gur arkg ebhtuyl gjragl zbaguf be fb, guebhtu gur svefg naq frpbaq guveqf. Jr frr fghss unccra ng yrnfg bapr rirel srj jrrxf, hc guebhtu Juvgr Fxl, hagvy gur urebrf urne onpx sebz gur pbzrg perj. Gura gurer'f n gvzr whzc bire gur gevc gb ernpu vg, nsgre juvpu zber fghss unccraf sbe gur arkg srj zbaguf, raqvat jvgu gurz erwbvavat gur fgngvba naq fbzr fphssyvat. Gura pbzrf nabgure guerr-lrne whzc va gur cybg nf gurl yvsg rirelguvat gb yhane beovg, orsber jr erghea gb zber fphssyvat naq gur zbfg uneebjvat zretr vagb genssvp va uhzna uvfgbel, naq svanyyl ynaqvat, naq gur svany erpxbavat jr trg gb frr nzbat gubfr punenpgref.
Rira vs jr cergraq cneg guerr jnf n ybat-njnvgrq frdhry rneyl qensg gung tbg yrnxrq vagb gur nccraqvk, cneg gjb unq gbb znal tncf jurer V sryg zber fgbel orybatrq. Frireny punenpgref V terj gb pner nobhg raqrq hc jvgu ynpxyhfgre raqf gb gurve nepf, naq V pna'g rira ernq vagb gubfr noehcg raqvatf nf n pbzzragnel ba gur tenaq gurzrf bs gur cybg. Naq va ng yrnfg n srj pnfrf, gubfr tncf arprffvgngrq fbzr rkcbfvgvba juvpu V sryg ivbyngrq gur "fubj, qba'g gryy" cevapvcyr bs fgbelgryyvat.
V'z urnevat nobhg n cyna gb znxr n svyz bhg bs guvf, naq juvyr V yvxr gur crbcyr vaibyirq, V xrrc ubcvat vg'yy or n zvavfrevrf vafgrnq bs gelvat gb penz guvf rcvp fntn vagb gjb ubhef. Bgurejvfr vg'yy or n znwbe zvenpyr vs gur svyz znantrf gb pbeerpg gur synjf va gur obbx juvyr fgvyy birepbzvat gur hfhny obbx-gb-svyz punyyratrf.
> That's a lot more intuitively plausible than a story where literally everyone but the one or two protagonists is a complete idiot of one sort or another.
And of course, in Dr. Strangelove, doom is ultimately delivered by one set of protagonists (the flight crew) being remarkably COMPETENT. Every system involved delivering a thermonuclear explosion to the northern Soviet Union worked exactly as it was meant to, a skilled crew overcame significant hardship, an Air Force officer willingly sacrificed his life to complete the mission.
Competent, courageous, and *sensible*. Because of bad/insane decisions elsewhere, Kong and company are lead to reasonably believe that the United States of America is under nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. They have no reason to believe that the Soviet Union has a "doomsday device". Cut off from communication, they decide to A: carry out their orders to destroy a Soviet ICBM base, and B: when that is no longer possible, attack a different Soviet ICBM base that they can reach.
Absent the silly secret doomsday device, these are the actions that would minimize the expected loss of innocent life, undertaken at the near-certain cost of their own lives.
> That's a lot more intuitively plausible than a story where literally everyone but the one or two protagonists is a complete idiot of one sort or another.
I feel like this is still missing the point. Sorry to say, but everyone is a complete idiot outsides the subjects that interest them (sometimes even in those actually). Everyone being a bit of an idiot when it comes to one-very-hundred-million-year events is perfectly plausible.
People downplaying scientific warnings because science communication has been so bad the past few decades, and large financial interests have poisoned the well of factual discourse, is also perfectly plausible.
I honestly don't see what's so implausible about basic structure of the movie, aside from the usual artistic license. Are people just being too literal in this case for some reason?
Dr. Strangelove is a great example, both of good satire and of how bad contemporary satire has become. I have come to think that one reason is simply an unwillingness to take risks. To make good satire, you have to be willing to straddle the line that separates acceptable from unacceptable and take the risk that someone might take you seriously in your apostasy.
To be an artist/journalist/politician today is largely a function of superserving your ingroup. You can challenge your audience, but only in one direction. The demands of career preservation mean that creators can't do anything that might have them mistaken for the outgroup. The result is that most contemporary satire is full of moments when the creator is loudly signaling their adherence to the right side.
It's notable that Kubrick spent his life living far away from Hollywood in a rural English cottage.
Chidwickbury Manor a cottage? It has its own Wikipedia page: "The Manor House, mainly 18th century has 12 Reception Rooms, 18 Bed and Dressing Rooms, 11 Staff Bedrooms, and 10 Bathrooms."
Point noted. But I was not trying to imply that Kubrick lived in a small or modest house. Indeed, it was an estate. I was alluding to the fact that he located himself far from the traditional center of the movie industry.
Regarding Panama_Canal's comment: well the assumption is that the earth would be inhospitable to life for millions of years after the asteroid event. The oceans would have dried up, and things in general would be really crap. Them finding another earth-like planet is a perfectly fine plan
No, that's not what happens after a plausible cometary impact. Boiling off the oceans takes a *lot* more than that. The Dinosaur Killer killed the dinosaur by basically blotting out the sun with soot and dust for a few years or maybe decades, so that only a few scraggly plants would grow and anything whose diet required more than A: a few scraggly plants or B: a few small animals of the sort that could survive on a few scraggly plants, would starve.
*Full* recovery from Chicxulub required about ten million years, because Earth had to evolve a whole lot of new species to fill the empty niches. But in terms of having a place where humans can walk around in the open, breathe the air and drink the water, grow whatever crops they packed seeds for, and live long healthy lives with no worries about being eaten by large predators, ten thousand years would have been more than enough.
I took the whole spaceship-cryosleep-was-successful thing as an after-credits joke that's _meant to be_ far more fanciful than the rest of the movie.
As far as the concept of the escape spaceship itself goes, I think it's meant to illustrate that in the event of a not-humanity-ending threat, those most likely to survive will be the wealthiest, most powerful, best connected. That's not a particularly new moral in fiction, but it was still done very well IMO.
"Well, that would not be necessary Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years."
- Dr Strangelove & President Merkin Muffley
"Doctor, you mentioned the ration of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?"
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature"
I see "billionaires want to escape the planet in their spaceships and leave the rest of us to die from climate catastrophe!" a little too often to read the scene that blandly.
"I took the whole spaceship-cryosleep-was-successful thing as an after-credits joke that's _meant to be_ far more fanciful than the rest of the movie."
Right. It's just a variant on a comic trope from The Simpsons and Tracey Ullman in the 1990s, and probably goes back to some serious sci-fi show long before that.
22,740 years later... While watching I assumed that was from Earth's perspective and that time dilation meant they were only in cryosleep for like 25 years?
If you're in space you need reaction mass. If you're accelerating to .9c that's a LOT of reaction mass, but you could, say, have some type of space station or other device to provide you the boost you need. If you're accelerating to .9c and THEN decelerating? That's a ridiculous amount of reaction mass, and you have to carry it with you.
Whatever technology they used, it's safe to say that if you have a spaceship that's capable of doing it then using the same spaceship to deflect the comet should be trivial.
I forget the story, but Larry Niven wrote two analogies that I recall that illustrate the perils of assuming Better Technology A necessarily implies more success at even pretty closely-related Problem B, viz.: (1) How fast could a Greyhound bus have crossed North America in 1830? (2) What would a circling 747 have been able to do to help the sinking Titanic in 1912?
Point being, the technological solutions to problems landscape isn't smooth and differentiable, in part because technologies hang together in complex ways with various forms of social infrastructure, so it's not infrequently the case that it's not possible to extrapolate even a small distance across that landscape.
Other illustrations: we mastered nuclear fusion in principle in 1952, but we are still waiting for the steady-state power-generating kind, and the most promising approaches take a radically different path (high temperature rather than high density) than bombs. Who would have guessed that the biggest immediate impact of the PCR would be in...criminology? Rather than individualized medicine, say, or selecting the characteristics of offspring, on both of which we're still kind of waiting.
Haven't watched the movie, but I doubt time dilation would be a factor. If you accelerate to the point where time dilation makes a significant difference, you also increase the rest mass of the ship to the point where even total conversion of the ship to energy won't help./
Significant time dilation really only happens to things that have been accelerated by an external force.
Which means the passengers would have been in cryosleep for almost all of that period - and are able to be revived. Which might as well be magic from the current state of the art (rather like the starship able to last that long, but details, details...).
> Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now.
Chelyabinsk also caused pretty substantial damage, over a hundred people ended up in the hospital from the broken glass. And there's some fun theories that the Great Tianqi Explosion in 1646 (thousands killed, square mile of city leveled) was caused by a meteor airburst.
I was on my way to post this link. Worth pointing out for people too lazy to click that this event was very likely the historical basis for the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The article also mentions Abu Hureyra, a prehistoric settlement destroyed in a similar manner. This one is less interesting only because it didn't leave any written records nor traces in oral legends (as far as we can tell).
Some people have suggested that the Peshtigo Fire, Great Chicago Fire, and Great Michigan Fires, all of which started on Oct 8, 1871, were caused by meteor showers.
Other people say that this is obvious nonsense - meteorites are cold by the time they hit the ground.
I don't know enough about the context to comment on what marxbro said previously, but I want to mention that if they believed your previous article contained a factual inaccuracy, it seems reasonable to me for them to bring it up again here. I do the same when I see an error in something I'm reading; I want to minimize the number of people who come away misinformed, so it makes sense to post a correction in as many (relevant) places as possible.
I'm not denying that they're obnoxious in other ways, but I don't think bringing the conversation to this thread should add to their obnoxiousness rating.
He's been bringing up the alleged error literally for years, and other commenters have discussed it in the comments of dozens if not hundreds of articles by now. There is, let's say, considerable disagreement over whether the points he alleges constitute genuine errors (and my position is that there are at the very least strong enough arguments on the "no" side that intellectual honesty does not oblige Scott to acknowledge it as an error; whether Marxbro should be written off as entirely talking out his ass on the subject is more of an open question.)
When he fails to convince other commenters, he falls back on repeating himself ad infinitum. And the "ad infinitum" is much more literal in his case than most, since this has constituted dozens, maybe sometimes hundreds of comments *per article* averaging several articles a month for years, and he's showed no inclination to stop any time soon.
My immediate reaction was "oh thank god," but there's an identifiable, non-god person here, so thank you.
I know there are some people who profess to enjoy Marxbro's engagement, but I strongly suspect he's a deliberate troll, and even if not, I find his involvement not only toxic to productive discourse, but so frustrating that I've found it's better for my mental well-being to simply avoid any discussion he participates in entirely. I'm honestly kind of shocked that he wasn't banned immediately as soon as the capability to do so was implemented.
He reminds me of several “long-form trolls” I've known, met, and even befriended in one memorable case.
The insight I have to share is that they are, in fact, entirely convinced they are in the right. Insofar as they would describe themselves as trolls, they wound probably frame it as “trolling with the truth”.
Contrary to the other commenters, I hope the ban isn't permanent. Marxbro may be mean and annoying, but I personally doubt it's deliberate. I feel like they have been getting better lately, and it's very rare to see an actual, bona fide Marxist sincerely engage with something outside of their bubble.
Also, it seems to me that marxbro usually gets responses that are just as mean, but also rather uncharitable on top of that. Admittedly, I don't read the comment section of the blog very often, so maybe they haven't had quite as much time to get under my skin, but I can't help but feel as if getting rid of them would be a vaguely un-rationalist thing to do.
If there were any way of resolving this objectively, I would legitimately be prepared to bet thousands of dollars against "I don't think it's deliberate." I am the type of person who has to exert significant willpower not to feed trolls, and I engaged with him personally on a number of occasions, and assuming bad faith does not come naturally to me. But having followed his engagement across hundreds and hundreds of comments, I am by this point pretty certain that if he's not deliberately trolling, he's legitimately mentally ill.
I absolutely disagree that it is un-rationalist to want to ban him. I think that he's long been taking advantage of exactly that impulse to engage in extended nerd-sniping.
He’s been banned multiple times over several years on multiple Scott-adjacent forums. If there was a genuine desire to “get better” it would have happened already.
Marxbro is either a highly-dedicated troll or someone who combines a highly dogmatic adherence to Marxism with a total inability (or refusal) to comprehend any viewpoint that is not his own. As others have pointed out, he has been banned multiple times across this section of the blogosphere for this exact same behavior. Is it adherent to the morals of liberalism to ban someone for the crime of persistently being an annoying and daft Communist, or for holding an entirely different conversation than the one you're having? No, but this isn't Parliament or the floor of Congress, this is a comments section. Banning someone for lowering the quality of discourse or tone is fine.
I also hope it isn’t permanent, but I do think that some ban was deserved. Usually marxbro only appears if you mention anything related to communism, and since nothing related to communism was mentioned here, he probably shouldn’t have made the post
>Usually marxbro only appears if you mention anything related to communism
Not at all the case in my experience. For years now, he's been starting countless comment threads in the vein of "how can people take Scott seriously on (completely unrelated subject) when he hasn't even acknowledged his errors regarding Marx?"
I do think his ban should be permanent, and I'm shocked that it's taken this long.
To Marxbro, EVERYTHING is related to Communism, not in the least because anyone who hasn't acknowledged how everything in Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto is objectively correct is clearly a fool.
Someone who characterizes right-wing populism and radical libertarianism as establishment because only Communism is anti-establishment has political blinkers on that are so immense that they can't have any meaningful political conversations that don't devolve into endlessly repeating dogma- and anyone who's observed Marxbro's activity will notice this is exactly what happens.
I'm biased, of course, but it was nice to see a lone marcher waving the red flag in a comment section (and on a blogging platform, arguably) that skews heavily the other way, even if his single-mindedness and lack of social nous drove me up the wall sometimes.
I'm pretty sure that he was a deliberate troll; I'm less sure, but still strongly suspect, that he was actively trying to make communists look bad. The lengths he went to in some comment threads to argue that there is no legitimate basis to believe that North Korea is not a nice place to live, I think is the strongest point of evidence in favor.
Even if he wasn't doing it on purpose, I honestly think Communism would be better represented in the comments with *no* commenters arguing in its favor than with only him arguing in favor.
> If you think everyone but Bernie Sanders is a corrupt hack that knows nothing,
I must note how hilarious is that a person who has been in politics since 1970s and achieved nothing much except for owning three houses, is the example of an exception from general rule of politicians being corrupt hacks that know nothing.
Less of this, please. I think there's a decent case for Sanders having achieved a lot, and I also think this is especially inflammatory and provocative.
The social acceptability of attacking a politician is proportional to how correct, fair, and justified the attack is, not which party it is attacking. The parent post about Bernie is just weird and gratuitous, and it makes perfect sense not to condone it.
(Incidentally I feel like this answer -- "well see the difference is in the specifics" -- is the correct reply to all what-about-ism, which this is.)
I'd be interested to know what's "a lot" that he achieved. I mean things that wouldn't happen without him, and that actually happened. Reading about his career I see a lot of railing against things that happened anyway (like tax cuts) and for things that never happened (like auditing the Fed), and occasional agreement with the left agenda item that also had support of the whole Dem party so his role was just +1 on the vote count. Maybe a couple of successful amendments, but really singling him out as a paragon of success is a bit much.
Now I recognize that it's a rather high standard to apply to a politician, and significant part of them wouldn't clear it - but if he's singled out as the only politician not being a hack, the high bar is appropriate.
TBH, I am not particularly upset about this - in fact, as a survivor of socialism, I wish Bernie a long, healthy life, full of political failure and disappointment in every possible way - I just find it strange he is being lauded as the best politician ever.
I would also be interested in hearing if he achieved anything of note in his career! I wasn't alive for much of it and I'm not an American, so it wouldn't especially surprise me to learn he did - perhaps at the state level, which seems more tractable to things getting done in general?
Oh I dunno, I think Sanders deservers a nontrivial amount of credit for preventing the election of Hillary Clinton. That's definitely a substantial achievement.
Because the personally well-disliked Clinton relied on a lesser-evil strategy to get over the top (i.e. reach 50% + 1 from her starting base of actual enthusiasts, which was well below that). Sanders (1) gave a focal point for a young educated demographic on the left who thought Clinton too cynical and corupt, and, when he lost the nomination in a process held in contempt as rigged by many of his followers, that drained their enthusiasm for the eventual nominee; and (2) crystallized fears among an older demographic on the center-left[1] that the Democratic Party had lurched to the college-sophomore left, more concerned with cultural totems than a chicken in every pot working-class economic issues, and drove them into the arms of Trump (which they regretted in 2020, as it turned out, but too late to help Clinton). In short, a classic spoiler, like Ross Perot in 1992 only on a smaller scale.
---------------
[1] Exactly the demographic that to everyone's surprise put Trump over the top in 2016 and to everyone's surprise again abandoned him in 2020: older non-college-educated suburban and exurban white men, more or less the spiritual heirs of Reagan Democrats or Truman lunch-pail Democrats.
Well, this is an angle I did not consider, but I am not sure you can call it a "success" and promote him to best politician ever. Not that I am not appreciating his role in keeping Hillary from power, to anybody who aided that America owes an enormous debt of gratitude, but I think unwittingly temporarily saving America still does not qualify one as the best politician ever. Maybe we can get him some kind of participation trophy? "At least you tried" medal or something.
I guess if you were a Bernie fan, you could say he has pushed the Overton Window a bit wider for the left. I don't find this particularly laudible, personally, because making a case for policies that are slightly outside the mainstream isn't terribly difficult if you've got half-decent rhetorical skills, and it's not like he flipped Tennessee from red to Red, if you take my meaning--he's in a pretty safe seat--but nonetheless, I could see somebody on the left considering this valuable.
My sense is that this is exactly what the Bernie fans find so laudable. If you start from the premise that most institutions in the US are controlled by an oligarchy that is impoverishing the working class and preventing the development of rich, social-democratic institutions, the best you can hope for from a politician is that they draw attention to this, articulate a vision for what the country could be like without oligarchic control, and try to build a coalition to challenge the oligarchy. I think it's clear that by those standards, Bernie Sanders is the most successful politician in America. The only real competitor is Donald Trump, if you buy his particular vision of which oligarchic elite is controlling American democracy.
I don't see the country this way and don't have a particularly high opinion of Bernie Sanders, but I don't think it's a totally unreasonable perspective.
Could you explain what corruption Bernie Sanders engaged in, that caused him to own three houses? Your comment seems to imply he acquired them in a corrupt manner, which I would be interested to learn about.
His wife's time running Burlington College was pretty corrupt, and I suppose her income got merged in with his. I can't think of anything he did though.
Lifelong politician having a lot of money is always suspect. Lifelong politician arguing nobody should have the kind of money he has is doubly suspect. But that's theory.
We can see some specifics:
1. Sanders appointed his wife to various positions of influence and paid her salary while he was mayor of Burlington
2. Sanders funneled a lot of campaign money into a media company which was owned by his family
3. His endorsement of other candidates was curiously linked to the fact that they used his wife's company to manage media affairs
4. His presidential campaign funds were funneled through another murky company that was run by his wife's associates
5. His wife was appointed a head of Burlington College thanks to Sander's political position. The college proceeded to hire his daughter to run woodworking school, and paid her over half a million dollars. She also secured some very expensive loans to the college, which FBI investigated on suspicion that she was trading on her husband's influence, but as is almost always happens, they could prove nothing. She was fired shortly afterwards, taking another $200K as severance, and the college collapsed several years later.
By the standards of American politicians, this is nothing special - some politicians have the baggage way worse than that, and one can't certainly single him out as being the most corrupt one - he's probably pretty average in this regard, maybe even less than average (he doesn't seem to inside trade, for example, which a lot of congressmen do). But as a shining beacon towering alone in a sea of political corruption - doesn't look exactly that.
> Lifelong politician having a lot of money is always suspect
Sanders has been a congressman since 1991. Congress has an annual income of $174k (in the past the nominal salary was lower, but the inflation adjusted salary was higher)
With a good bit of saving from that and his previous jobs, combined with some sound investment, if is not at all unrealistic that Sanders would be able to scrape enough money together to buy three houses through complety non-corrupt means.
Except that the whole concept Sanders promotes is based on the premise that it is impossible to become a millionaire by "sound investment, savings and scraping enough money", there's always something wrong with the fact that millionaires exist, and Sanders is literally on record railing against people having too many houses. Of course, since then "millionaire" turned to "billionaire", and "too many houses" now is more than three (and if in the future he buys the fourth one, the limit will be adjusted accordingly).
Sanders spoke specifically about millionaires - and millionaire politicians - being immoral. Sure, there was some inflation, but not *that* much. He did it as late as 2015 at least. There wasn't so much inflation between 2015 and 2020 to make becoming a millionaire a mere trifle.
So why he switched to shaming billionaires only? Very simple, he became a millionaire himself. You want to argue he did it through frugality, hard work and smart life decisions? Fine. I would say it's not all he had, and access to distributing public funds helped quite a bit - but let's set this aside for a moment and assume you're right. That means he himself is a primary example of the whole concept he has built his political life on being wrong. As a candidate for the best politician evar, it's a very poor (what's the opposite of "pun"?) candidate. As an example of a "political hack", it's practically begging to be put in a dictionary.
That's him raving about proliferation of millionaires in billionaires: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4692018/user-clip-sanders-millionaires-billionaires - months away from becoming millionaire himself (or maybe he already was, we just didn't know it then). Did he do anything about childhood poverty, when he got these cool millions, or did he buy a third house? I mean if he bought his first, sure, even a socialist must have a roof over his head. But I am pretty sure people survived in America with mere two houses.
I don't think America's problems are anybody's personal fault, neither millionaires not billionaires, and if a guy earned his money by honest means, he is entitled to do with them as he very well pleases. But when I see a politician shaming everybody about not fixing child poverty and then getting some chunk of cash and turns out fixing child poverty is way below on his priority list than having three houses - yes, I'd call such person a "political hack" and a hypocrite.
Plus he made a ton of money off of his book. I personally find pocketing the money you make selling a campaign book a little unseemly, especially when you're asking low-income people to give you money to fund your campaign, but it's not corrupt.
If you mean "not criminal" - for sure. But if you're a guy who says nobody should be rich, and money should be forcefully taken from people who are too rich, and then you write a book, take a cool couple of millions of dollars from your supporters for it, and buy a third house - I'd say this looks almost like a hack. I mean as a non-socialist, I am happy for him, and while there are a lot of corrupt "book deals", I have no reason to assume Bernie's one of this kind, but the problem is *he* is a socialist.
I'm pretty sympathetic to this perspective. I definitely agree with you that I find it counter to Bernie's stated ideals to buy himself a house with the money he made from his book, rather than use the money to further his political cause in some way (I think he gave some of it to charity, but a small amount). I especially feel this way since people were buying the book to support his candidacy and/or to understand his candidacy, not just because he happened to write a very good explanation of his philosophy. It feels to me like a way of profiting off of his political position at the expense of his supporters.
All that said, I also understand why his supporters are willing to accept this from him. Part of what I understand you to be saying is that the problem here is hypocrisy: it's fine for Newt Gingrich to profit off of his campaign book, because he's a capitalist, but it's not okay for Bernie Sanders to do the same thing because he's a socialist. The consequence of this is to make being a socialist politician a lot less pleasant than being any other kind of politician. It means that Bernie is expected to spend decades in the Senate, around people who are openly accepting opportunities enrich themselves with little to no negative consequence, while passing up the trappings of an upper-middle-class life himself. It's not unreasonable to worry that this would lead a lot of politicians to decide not to be socialists anymore.
So, if you're a socialist who worries about government corruption, you might be willing to say: I'm going to accept my candidates enriching themselves in the least harmful ways, as long as they still avoid the most corrupt and harmful ways of enriching themselves. And you might see selling your book to your supporters as the least harmful and least corrupting way to get rich, since it's out in the open and it doesn't involve taking money from powerful interests.
I should also note that Bernie's perspective is slightly more complicated than "nobody should be rich." When he was mayor, he worked closely with local business leaders and told them, basically, that he has no problem with small-scale capitalists, only with billionaires and other large-scale capitalists. I don't know if he's ever criticized someone else for getting modestly wealthy by writing a successful book.
Yeah, the fact that he's done this while repeatedly demonizing people whose personal wealth exceeds a certain somewhat-arbitrarily-chosen number and positioning himself as a champion of the working class is what really rubs me the wrong way. Come to do good, stay to do well?
- the smallest DC townhome I've ever seen, and I lived there for 8 years. it looks like it's about 20 feet wide
- a very normal suburban-style home in Vermont
- a lake cabin
Bernie Sanders, who has worked for thirty years in the legislature of the most wealthy nation in the history of the planet, lives the lifestyle of a reasonably successful dentist. Personally, I don't see any credible case there for allegations of corruption or hypocracy.
How many Ameircans, on average, have three houses? How many of non-millionaire Americans (which do not include Sanders anymore) have three houses? I know I don't, and I am part of the society that socialists probably would call "the rich" (I would disagree) and tax until my nose bleeds, but I don't have three houses. I don't have a lake cabin either. I suspect most of poor and middle-class Americans do not have lake cabins. And if somebody thinks the lifestyle of a reasonably successful dentist is immoral and repeatedly publicly announces it and raises millions on the promise to make it impossible - yes, living the same lifestyle for him is hypocrisy.
Where I live and where I grew up, it was not remotely uncommon for people to have modest vacation properties (granted, the locals didn't have 'em--but the people who did have them were dentist-tier upper-middle class people from the cities who liked to fish or deer hunt). It wasn't even uncommon in the *Soviet Union*, to the point where they have a special word for it that is relatively well known in English (dacha).
A third house, of course, is more atypical for those who are not truly rich, which is why this line is so popular despite becoming pretty risible with a little research, but it's also extremely atypical for people to have a career that requires a person to live for extended periods in two completely different places. And, seriously, man, look at the dang thing: https://www.washingtonian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/berniesanders.jpg
I do not believe that Sanders has said, or believes, that professionals who make their money off wages and maybe some light investments in retirement accounts are not allowed to live upper-middle-class lifestyles, particularly in the latter part of their lives. There's also no evidence that he intends himself to be exempt from any of taxation schemes he proposes.
Again, I personally have zero problem with dentist-tier upper-middle class people and wish them to buy as many houses as their hard work and luck would allow. But I am not the top, most prominent socialist in the US, who is repeatedly on record saying "millionaires" are immoral - Sanders is. He has to answer for that.
The mention of "dacha" is interesting here. Dachas served a dual function in the USSR. One was to reward the elite with a house away from the big city's annoyances, away from prying eyes, where the elite's thurst for luxury could be fully realized without coming into the contradiction with the image of "servants of the people". You can't have a golden toilet in your official office - but you could in your dacha, if you wanted to. This tradition is still alive and well - look up the reports of insanely luxurious residences of Putin and his top henchmen. They try to conceal it, but people have ways of finding out. You can start looking it up by keyword "Rublyovka".
The second function, drastically different, is to cover up for a failure of the Party to supply the people with the most basic nutrition. Highly urbanized soviet population had scarce access to most basic things, like potatoes, vegetables, fruit, etc. To alleviate that, the urban office dwellers were given a small plot of land, about 6K sqft - with strict limitations on how it could be used - and told to grow some produce by themselves, spending their weekends and vacation time on that. Bonus if one or more members of the family is recently retired - still healthy enough for garden work and has a lot of free time now!
Of course, USSR has no "upper middle class" as such, at least not legally, so you had to fit into one of these categories. Techically speaking, Sanders fits into neither, but on the substance, I think the former would be much more fitting.
> I do not believe that Sanders has said
You can believe it or not, that's your business, but Sanders repeatedly - from 1970s to at least 2015s - criticized "millionaires" as being morally reprehensible for not contributing into solving society's problems. Whether or not he intends to pay the future taxes is immaterial here - if he thought the moral thing to do, once becoming a millionaire, is to contribute the money to solving society's problems, why after becoming a multi-millionaire he didn't do just that? He doesn't need IRS involvement for that - of course, 2-3 millions won't fix child poverty all over America, but I'm sure they could make at least some impact for some people.
So the claim that “no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history.” May not actually be true, archeological evidence suggests that at least one city in the near east was wiped out be an asteroid around 1600 BC:
It would appear that the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah was based on an asteroid strike of Sodom, which completely destroyed the city, melted everything and everyone in it (the fact that everything is melted is what first caught people’s attention) and did damage as far as Jericho.
I mean, the destruction of Sodom was recorded, the Bible doesn’t use the word asteroid, but “fire from heaven” seems pretty close. Not to mention that the asteroid, for reasons discussed in the article, likely caused salt to rain down on the surrounding lands, which is also recorded.
There's also a theory that the explosion at the Wanggongchang Armory in 17th century Beijing that reportedly killed tens of thousands was caused by a bolide. Dunno how seriously to take it. Presumably lots of other things could cause a gunpowder stockpile to explode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion#Bolide
The account that Tell el-Hammam is Sodom or was even destroyed by an object from space is heavily disputed.
In short, a lot of their evidence seems to be misinterpreted and according to experts the evidence they present is not as unique as it seems to a layperson and is not indicative of an extraordinarily violent event such as the claimed airburst. Some of the photo evidence they presented they've subsequently admitted was minorly photoshopped, but even that calls the whole thing into question.
I think you have to take the comments about "peer review" more as a metaphorical standin for the general temperature of scientific opinion that the audience can grasp. What you're supposed to understand is that you have scientists on a payroll who have gone rogue relative to the general views of the scientific community in the same way scientists employed by petrochemical companies or thin tanks funded by them might not be the best gauge of the most reasonable views to hold on global warming.
You can't have characters debating impact ratings of journals without losing almost everyone. On that level, what it is trying to say is reasonably comprehensible even if people who understand scientific legitimacy might think this is silly because peer review is a more complicated subject than that. It's like a continuity error more than a fundamental flaw in its themes.
A few weeks ago I was studiously reading reddit threads as the first data started to filter in about omicron. I remember a lot of comments about early preprints which suggested that they don't count because they're "not peer reviewed".
As if peer review would make any difference. If some hospital director in Johannesberg says he's got 572 covid patients including 13 on ventilators then either he's right or he's wrong, but if he's wrong then the peer review process isn't going to catch it.
My point is that a lot of laymen do seem to believe, these days, that peer review is a magical process that separates true science from bullshit.
I find it helps to explain that the *main* purpose of peer review is to ensure that what is published is sufficiently precise and detailed that other people can duplicate the work to check it -- and that *that* -- the duplication/checking -- is ultimately how we avoid the propagation of error and outright fraud. Peer review can't do this unless the reviewers actually duplicate the work, and they don't have time for that.
But what reviewers can and should do is ensure that the publication includes all the relevant data, makes its statements precise enough, includes all the math, et cetera, so that someone else skilledin the field can do the duplication, and whether the results are confirmed or not is then crystal clear -- you can't do some bullshit social science thing where you say "oh that's not really what I meant, it's a question of what "is" is blah blah."
I agree that this is what peer review should be like.
However, for almost all peer-reviewed papers, no attempt to replicate is made (it was thought that replication was not interesting enough to get something publishable).
Recently a few have attempted replication of fairly famous and much quoted experiments. In all of the attempts, they found that most of the experiments they looked at could not even be attempted (not enough detail, impossible setups, etc.). Of the ones that could be attempted, most of them failed to replicate.
These replication attempts >did< get publishable results because they were so egregiously different from what was expected.
I can only come to the conclusion that peer review is ineffective, or corrupt, or its real purpose is not its ostensible purpose.
Peer review is not replication. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where peer-reviewers had the budget to replicate a study, but we do not. Increase NSF funding and the rate of PhD production 10-100x and you can have that world, if you think it makes sense.
Peer review is an attempt to examine the experimental methods and the description of an experiment (and its results) to ensure they meet area standards, and to make sure the description is sufficient that experiment *can* be replicated. One of the things we learned from the replication crisis is that our statistical requirements were too loose, and so peer-reviewers now apply tighter standards such as pre-registration etc.
Peer review is not perfect and it's a moving target. It is like a spam filter. Take it away and everything is garbage. But even with it, you're still going to get a decent amount of spam.
Sure. I think MM agreed that the goal was that peer review would ensure that replication was possible, and was noting that this is a pretty empty accomplishment even when it works, because mostly nobody ever bothers to replicate.
We wouldn't have a replication crisis in a world where people literally never bothered to replicate. It's true that replication is rare, but it's always a possibility *and that is a powerful thing.* To elide from "replication is rare" to "replication never happens" to "peer review is therefore an empty accomplishment" is a series of big steps that don't quite fit together.
In any case, anyone who says "peer review doesn't work" has literally no idea what the *input* to the peer review process looks like. Try serving on a reputable conference PC for a while and you'll see the alternative.
That is certainly not true. People replicate all the time -- whenever it matters to them. If I'm running an organic chemistry lab, say, and my student comes to me and says "oh look I found this JACS paper that can cut 3 steps out of my proposed synthesis and save us a week, how about I do that?" the first thing I'm going to say is "that's nice -- now go duplicate what they did, to make sure it actually works, before we invest in relying on it."
Now what you may be saying is that people don't bother to try to replicate stuff that *doesn't* matter to them personally, as part of some altruistic ideal of ensuring that whatever is published is gospel truth, whether or not I (or anyone) actually gives a shit whether it is or not.
Yeah well, if you (personally, or as a taxpayer) want to fork out the umpty $millions that would require to hire people skilled in the field as your blanket scientific literature proofreader, be my guest. I'm sure people will take the money.
But by me this is a needlessly expensive and silly idea. Indeed, the whole expectation that everything published in a peer-reviewed journal ought to meet some gold standard of truth is deeply silly, in my mind. We're not talking about textbooks, where some naive mind might be poisoned by falsehood if we're not careful to vet them. (And if you want to argue *textbooks* should be vetted a lot more carefully, I'm 100% on board with that, and so would be almost every practicing scientist I know -- especially at the K12 level, where the crimes against truth are legion.)
A scientific journal is just a glorified lab notebook exchange, where workers in the field say "here, I thought this was interesting, take a look, maybe you can use it, and if you do be sure to cite me 'cause owning the credit will do me good." It's absurd to expect it to rise to a higher level of reliability than a lab notebook would. It's *going* to be full of error and misinterpretation, because it's a first draft of cutting edge stuff. It's not archival, it's not meant to be. (There *are* archival compedia of stuff we think we know for sure, these are monographs and reviews, and they do indeed examine what they say more critically and attempt to summarize broad surveys of evidence.)
This whole thing has been wildly blown out of proportion and the purpose of scientific publication grossly distorted by a deeply unfortunate half-accidental conspiracy of I Fucking Love Science cultists, social "science" wannabes, axe-grinding politicians (of course), and uneducated (in science, or any quantitative empirical discipline) click-hungry journalists, and, alas, by the scientific community itself in a deeply misguided effort to measure quantitatively the contributions of its members -- as if that made any kind of sense at all in the first place.
Far as I know, you're talking about social science, and I'm parochial enough to not even really think of social science as real "science" at all. My personal evaluation is that it's where medicine was circa 1600, stuffed with a farrago of superstition and tribal prejudice, with the occasional nugget of truth by some unusually capable and dispassionate observer here and there, and generally not really meeting standards of empirical investigation that physics met in the 1660s.
Give it a century or two, and perhaps the field will rise to the level of objectivity and quality of empirical investigation where a "replication crisis" could indeed be declared because it would *surprising* that results were not duplicable.
Yes, the stuff I read about replication problems were about social science.
Your earlier comment about replicating the organic chemistry paper are reasonable - after all, you are attempting to use it as part of your own process.
There seems to be a rather sharp divide here.
One side side there are areas where replication attempts are routine (such as your lab) because the replication part matters and you can do it as part of another process - you have an end product to get out and either the whole thing works or it doesn't. The JACS paper in your example either provides a process so you get product or else someone has used it and you can get it from them - or it's wrong.
There are other areas where replication is not done. These areas seem to be observational rather than "fabricational" (not sure what to call them, but they involve making something rather than observing something in nature), so replication is fairly difficult.
Examples would be social science, psychology and health.
They would also include areas where modelling is extensively used because of the systems studied are too large or the time scales are too long - epidemics and climate science are two recent (controversial) areas where the models don't seem to be measuring up.
These areas are reported on with the same aura of respectability as the first areas because a) reporters don't know anything, b) they report on things that people would find useful if they were true (power posing, carbs are good for you, etc.) and c) every area of science has to some extent inherited the enormous success (for values of same) of the nuclear bomb.
I'm not sanguine that the observational fields will rise to the same level with simple passage of time. I think they are getting worse not better.
I will only add that I strongly resist what I see as an obnoxious postmodern tendency to shrug the shoulders about what you are calling the "observational" fields and say "Well, what can you do? Reaching the canonical standards of empirical rigor and/or objectivity is impossible or at least prohibitively expensive, so let's not even try." We'll just adopt the point of view that it's all relative and subjective, the narrative depends on the point of view, truth is in the eye of the beholder, or [insert other postmodernist rationalizing bullshit].
I think this is just lazy, or decadent. Our ancestors could have said exactly the same thing about science or medicine at any time from Plato to Paracelsus, and very often they did. But a courageous few did not accept this premise, and struggled across centuries to find ways to become more empirical and objective. To them we owe all our present technological prowess, and we let down our own descendants to the extent we decline to continue the struggle because of ennui, cynicism, or despair.
Duplication/checking is important, but a whole lot has gotten "peer reviewed" without the data or code being available to check. Fortunately, norms are shifting so that's more expected nowadays compared to pre-replication crisis.
Creationism looms large here as creationist writing has been almost completely locked out of legitimate scientific journals, with the few instances it has snuck through being very famous. Otherwise, their publications are relegated to incestuous journals they started for themselves, pay to play publications, and philosophy journals willing to indulge the argument.
One of the ways you try to show to the public, and court systems, that creationism is scientifically illegitimate is by pointing out that scientists generally have a low opinion of it. And one of the ways you do that is by showing how it is almost wall to wall rejected from peer reviewed publications.
This exact point got imported over to the issue of climate change where there is a similar, albeit not quite as extreme phenomenon going on. Very, very few articles skeptical of anthropogenic global warming get published in legitimate peer reviewed articles, which is a point people trying to communicate that global warming denialism is illegitimate have tried to hammer home, often borrowing directly the lessons of combatting creationist pseudoscience.
This movie was written as a very thinly veiled story about climate change, and it is influenced by this thinking that is all over combatting climate change denialism. "Lack of peer review" is meant to stand in for "scientists generally seem not to think highly of this." That's how it ends up functioning in the story, which makes sense when you think about where the importance of the point came from.
To what "scientific" journal would you submit an article on Creationism? Nature? JACS? PNAS? One of the APS journals?
All the soi-disant science journals I know are devoted to empirical science: you do an experiment, or at worst someone else does an experiment, and you report the results and/or argue about what the data mean using math for the most part.
So what *experiment* could you do that would shed any light on the hypothesis that the Universe had a sentient Creator? What data could you collect and argue about?
I don't see it as strange or corrupt that journals devoted to empirical science decline to publish articles on epistemology and philosophy. There are philosophical journals for that kind of thing, or more commonly you write a book. I dunno if the philosophical journals reject Creationist screeds -- I hope not, the social sciences publish a crapton of crap already and some well-argued Creationist papers would raise the overall intellectual tone considerably -- but I'm pretty sure Creationist philosophers have no problem publishing books. I've read some myself.
It's not for lack of trying that the intelligent design movement didn't get articles published in appropriate journals minus a couple of notorious exceptions:
Creationism purports to be science. That it is a biological design argument based on the same flawed argument from ignorance reasoning they all tend to be, often phrased in terms of anti-evolutionism, makes it difficult to see it as science, but that's what it presents itself as. To say it is not empirical is to endorse the critics position and to reject what creationism has to say about itself.
So if you say a paper trying to show that a biological system is made up of many parts such that if you knock out one part the entire system ceases to function, so this cannot evolve via stepwise changes, and this is a hallmark of intentional design that can be inferred isn't really science, you're not wrong. At the same time, you are fundamentally criticizing what that paper is likely presenting itself as.
I don't care what it purports to be. If you don't do experiments, you're not an empirical science. That's why history isn't a science. It's not that history isn't full of measurement, and study, and logic, and closely-argued reasoning -- and it's not that the field cannot earn intellectual respect equal to physics or biology -- it's that they do not do experiments to test their hypotheses, and (barring some kind of Star Trek parallel universe transporter) they can't. So it's not an empirical science, khattam-shud.
As I said, so far as I know, there is no lack of outlets for people who are interested in making philosophical or logical arguments about the origin of species, or of the universe, or the Purpose Of It All. But it's not in the pages of a journal devoted to empirical science.
Heck, *scientists* don't put their epistemological speculations there. When Lee Smolin wanted to argue that physics was going about its business all wrong these days, he wrote a book on the subject, he didn't submit a paper to Phys. Rev. A, and if he had, the editors would've been 100% right to reject it[1] on the grounds that it was not empirical science, but philosophy or epistemology.
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[1] I'm not saying they *would* have, unfortunately, editors being as human and subject to tribal and social psychological influences as anyone, but I'm saying they *should* have.
Demarcation criteria for science is hard, but it's reasonably clear you can be doing science without doing experiments in the normal sense that term is used. If you expand the word "experiment" to mean loosely mean something like "test risky predictions against observations" then you've got a defensible criteria, but this is something creationism says it does. That it doesn't really do this is a point its critics are trying to make. And when those critics are trying to convince the public that it's not scientifically legitimate, one of the ways they have tried to do that is by pointing out creationist arguments are resoundingly rejected by legitimate peer reviewed publications for reasons like that no science appears to be being done. And this species of argument, that lack of success with peer reviewed publications is a sign of illegitimacy, was influential on how critics of climate change denialists make their case. And that's why Don't Look Up! talks about peer review the way it does.
The biggest problem with the comet impact as an allegory for global warming (or covid) is that a comet impact is a simple, discrete disaster. It either happens or it doesn't, the trajectory and the effects are easily predictable, the options for dealing with it are very few and easy to choose between, and your attempt to mitigate it either succeeds or it doesn't.
Climate change and covid are far better analogues for each other than comet impacts are, so I'm wondering why we're not putting more thought into learning the lessons we wish we'd learned about covid and applying them to climate change. Climate change is like a slow-motion version of covid where it's still March 2020 and it's going to stay that way for many years, so we still have a lot of time to learn our lessons.
Possible covid lessons to apply to climate change:
1. Models suck. They say that "all models are wrong, but some are useful", but you probably won't know which ones were useful until after the fact.
2. You will be living in an information environment that is optimised for something other than truth. Statements from supposedly-scientific sources will be contaminated by a desire to get people to do certain things.
3. The powers that be will make some good decisions and some bad ones . They will have a very hard time admitting that the bad ones were bad even when faced with overwhelming evidence.
4. Many people are likely to react less-than-optimally to the increasingly-obvious wrongness of the powers that be, and are likely to start rejecting the true parts of the message as well as the false ones. This may wind up being a major part of the problem in itself.
5. You will hear many predictions about what will happen. The predictions that you are most likely to hear will be the most extreme ones. Boring predictions are more likely to be true but less likely to reach your ears.
6. We will do many things. Some of them will have an excellent cost-benefit ratio, others will have a terrible cost-benefit ratio. The things that have the best cost-benefit ratio probably won't be tried at all for one reason or another. People would rather "increase our sacrifices to the gods" than do a detailed cost-benefit analysis.
7. Once it's all over, we still won't have much of an idea of what we did right and what we did wrong.
> The predictions that you are most likely to hear will be the most extreme ones. Boring predictions are more likely to be true but less likely to reach your ears.
Notably, "most extreme" applies in both direction with COVID. The predictions that were wrong were both "nothing is going to happen, everything is fine" and "every person on earth is going to die" (and obviously a lot more in between). A boring prediction could still be have a very bad result.
Thanks so much for your comment, I think you are spot-on. Regarding climate change, I would add "The cure will be worse than the disease". I'm not sure that is true for COVID, although I'm sure many would say it is.
8. And once it's over we still won't have much of an idea how serious a problem it was in the first place.
Perhaps not obvious, but sort of follows on from 7. And compare it to the debrief of acid rain - the sceptics and the alarmists both think they have been entirely vindicated - confirmation bias and motivated reasoning don't stop when the phenomenon does!
ETA As others have mentioned, a really cogent comment.
I was specifically referring to climate change, and generally agree with you about Covid. However 'pretty big problem' isn't very helpful on its own - it's an order of magnitude worse than a bad Flu season but the best part of two orders of magnitude less bad than Spanish Flu.
Without having watched the program, I was curious whether it presents any conceivably plausible rationale for the President to dismiss or downplay the danger. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that the President would be interested in parochial electoral considerations when everyone is going to die in a few months. Comedies tend to work for me only when there is an internal logic that makes it cohere on its own absurd terms.
The President says: “Do you know how many ‘the world is ending’ meetings we’ve had over the years? Economic collapse, loose nukes, car exhaust killing the atmosphere, rogue AI, alien invasion, population growth, hole in the ozone...”
Without having seen the movie, it also seems implausible to me because most Presidents *seize* on existential threats, real or imagined, as opportunities to Stand Out As A Leader, or at worst argue You Don't Want To Switch Horses In Midstream. Generally, crises are seen as *good* for the leadership in office, provided it doesn't utterly screw them up.
In a more interesting version of this movie, scientists discover a comet that will just miss the Earth, and the President immediately starts a ten-trillion dollar campaign to deflect it anyway.
The deflection causes the comet to break apart, and some of the smaller chunks collide with Earth but only kill a few million people. The final shot is the President standing in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
You laugh, but honestly I think that is actually the most general recipe for a successful political career in a democracy: you find a train going in the right direction and act like you're pulling it:
The president did seize on the threat, and exactly in order to stand out as a leader. It just didn't happen immediately. Her initial reaction was "this is a bad time for this," and a week later she changed her mind and decided that the threat was now useful.
>it's just a movie, not a PhD thesis on Epistemology
stance is kind of an interesting form of motte-and-bailey. Like, yes, it's just a movie, but a movie is a story, and we tell stories because they're sticky in our brains. Humans have turned knowledge and lessons into stories for as far back as we can tell. Most people aren't going to read a book on epistemology, but most people seem to acknowledge that our society has a hard time agreeing on things and that that's a problem. This movie will still influence the way people think about this subject, and so, like all popular media, it's important what lessons people are likely to draw from it.
If Disney made a cartoon movie where the villain was a pharma CEO making brain-chip vaccines to control everybody, that would be worth criticizing, and criticizing the criticism with "cmon it's just a movie guys" would be weird.
The media got all upset about the Richard Jewell movie because it portrayed a journalist behaving unethically, and I remember thinking "yeah, well you weren't too torn up about a pharma company killing people with hitmen in The Constant Gardiner"
The Richard Jewell movie portrayed a real, named person, who had died by the time the movie was made, as behaving unethically (sleeping with an FBI agent to get information), which the moviemakers admitted was made-up. Her former colleagues got mad. The Constant Gardener is understood to be a work of fiction.
It also ignores the role of art generally - artists making observations about the human condition via art goes back a very, very long way.
All, or nearly all, artists are attempting to communicate something with their art - it is entirely appropriate to react to what they are (intentionally, or not) communicating.
There's an old line about how artists are just philosophers who can't stomach rebuttals. I think you're right, this is absolutely fair grounds for discussion and always has been.
Art can have two components: meaning and technique, and they can ride on independent axes. Both probably contribute to one's overall impression of a work independently. In some cases it seems like one can override the other, but for the most part it's useful to separate out these two dimensions.
So if you plot works this way, with technique on the y-axis, and meaning on the x-axis, then you get four quadrants of works. The First Quadrant would be works that are well executed, but with a questionable message.
For example, I think Hero is an exceptionally beautiful film, even though its surface level conclusion ("yay tyranny!") seems pretty awful.
Wall-E would be another Q1 film for me, but not for everybody. It takes the trappings of a movie about advanced robots and spaceships and argues we should all live in agrarian communes. It's a sci fi arguing that sci fi aspirations are sinful. But it's also beautifully made. (If you are a committed agrarian who hates sci fi tropes, then this would probably flip to a Q4 film for you.)
For Q4, there are a few novels and series I think are really profound but also interminable slogs. Not through intentional pacing, just for lack of a bold enough editor. Or for Q4, maybe a better example is country music.
Chuck Klosterman once argued that, although he doesn't primarily listen to country, he grants that its songs tend to at least try to be about something, an aspiration rock has mostly discarded. You can find some country party songs with no message, sure. But you can also find some really moving songs about pangs of nostalgia, or about feeling trapped in a small town. You might still not listen to them because you just don't like twangy guitars. It's usually hard to talk about songs you like, but don't like listening to. Just put them in Q4.
Q2 holds all the sublime works, beautiful and resonant. Q3 is just bad stuff that's bad.
Ok, sound like a good patch?
Unfortunately it's actually pretty leaky if you look too closely.
The substance axis gets complicated by the realization that works can often be interpreted in multiple coherent ways.
Take Hero. Another coherent reading is that the title is ironic, that actually nobody in the film acts heroically, because there are no heroic options under tyranny. (Your choices for a hero are a genocidal tyrant, an assassin who abandons his cause after a two word counterargument, a woman willing to die and kill her beloved for politics, and a man trying to simply run away and hide from it all. Maybe the title is ironic, and there is no hero in the film?)
Then comedy throws a huge monkey wrench into the technique axis.
Comedy is tricky because its effectiveness is completely entwined with substance.
Satire lands because you're saying society's quiet parts out loud.
Political comedy is so damn hard. You can't trivially shout something that's both novel and true. For half the audience it's not true, and for the other half it's not novel.
For almost any politician, Trump included, supporters will not find the portrayal convincing, and detractors don't actually get much ironic contrast out of it. (Arguably what they're getting is the smug feeling of somebody taking their side, which is subtly different than a comic prompting a sudden new realization.)
Another form of satire takes people who are generally considered staid and respectable and points out how they're just ridiculous flawed humans like the rest of us. Armando Iannucci is pretty genius at this. Christopher Guest sometimes pulls this off for people we don't necessarily respect in the first place, Fred Armisen does that sometimes too.
"Ronald Reagan, Mastermind" is a good old SNL sketch that somehow pulls off this contrast in the opposite direction. Maybe it's skewering the dueling characterizations of Reagan as incompetent and ultra-competent by just taking one of those and playing it out to its extreme. That's probably a good recipe for a lot of political satire, since so many political positions paint opponents in those contradictory ways.
I feel like a better satire would pick some lazy characterization of a politician and just play it all the way out.
Or if you really want to skewer the politician, take something that politician doesn't want to say out loud, but have them say the quiet part loud.
Trump generally has no filter, and regardless of whether you find that endearing or exhausting, it makes him mostly immune to that type of satire.
Ok, comedy is hard. Finding the meaning of a work is hard. But zooming out, I still think in most cases a two axis system is going to be the most productive for analyzing works and heading off criticisms like "it's just a movie" when you're trying to explain exactly why you did or didn't enjoy a particular movie.
There's a trick that "comedians" do where they use their "comedy" to opine on some real-life issue, but get things wrong, either out of negligence or on purpose. When someone calls them on it, they say "it's just comedy, it doesn't have to be accurate" even though they seriously believe and intend to promote the positions expressed by the "comedy".
So I think the objection "Even though the satire bites and the allegory is spot on, Don’t Look Up is a COMEDY. Getting serious about the license it takes on characters and cliches is an error of over-thinking." is really inappropriate. It was trying to make serious points about the real-life world; once you do that, you don't get to lie and say "it was just comedy".
There's also a related trick where a "comedian" says something that he may mean seriously to some degree, but where it's exaggerated as "comedy", because he isn't sure just how much he can get away with, and he wants to be able to say that anything that he can't get away with is comedic exaggeration. (Scott himself seems to have done that in the past, where he jokingly says that he hates Republicans. Which may be a joke, but may also be 'I really hate Republicans, but let's see if my readers will call me on it. If they do, I can say that it's just a joke'.)
Regarding "It's just a movie, you should really just relax", this only applies when you don't construct a message you intend to be taken seriously. If you do construct a message you intend to be taken seriously, everything in service of that message is fair game.
People keep assuming certainty that a chicxulub-equivalent asteroid would extinct humans, without analyzing it. Only 75% of animal species on earth went extinct at the K–Pg boundary. Let's call 75% the outside-view for the chance humans will go extinct in such an impact.
Many factors favor non-extinction of humans relative to other species:
* Humans are extremely widespread (vs. the vast majority of species have a very narrow territory).
* Humans are extremely intelligent and able to cultivate new food sources.
* When the earth cools a lot due to the 5-20% dimming of sunlight, Human farmers can cultivate plants that were previously used at much higher latitudes. Other animals don't have the intelligence and transportation necessary to bring seeds 2000 miles south from where they usually grow.
* Humans have buildings with air filters that can protect us from inhaling the volcanic ash falling from the sky, roofs to protect us from acid rain (claim: hurricane force winds only extended ~3000km from the impact site https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/Chicxulub/regional-effects/, so buildings farther away may remain standing if they can survive the earthquake)
* Humans have some preppers who stockpiled years of provisions in underground bunkers, all over the globe. I'm sure some preppers' bunkers on the opposite side of the planet will survive the impact.
On the other side of the ledger, humans have higher caloric requirements than most species, but that's a minor issue if we can still farm.
Considering all this it seems appropriate to adjust the 75% base case down to <3%.
On the other hand, the 25% that survived were primarily water-based or quite small, so I'd want to adjust that upwards. In addition, it's likely that even if the preppers survive in their bunkers, they would not be able to rebuild civilization since a lot of the low-hanging fruit of resources would be destroyed or have already been used up by humanity. Most oil remaining underground is quite deep underground or underwater and requires advanced technology to access. Same with a lot of minerals (though some could be harvested from the wreckage of civilization).
Across an entire hemisphere of the planet, anything too large to shelter in a burrow, hole or under the water got cooked as re-entering rock turned the sky into an oven. Anything in the water and near the shore ("near" meaning something like 100km in this case) has a good chance of getting washed up or smashed by a mega-tsunami. Thereafter, anything not able to live off of scraps of dead animal, scraps of dead or dying plant matter, insects or the occasional seed died of starvation. And anything not able to live in cold conditions died of cold. And, of course, being widespread and generalist in terms of lifestyle helped. Things that lived entirely in the deep or open ocean (which are actually a rather small subset of life on earth) got by as well. The ability to fly also helps.
In modern times this would leave many insect species, many arachnids, many rodents, various riverine or swamp species, bats, birds, perhaps some generalist burrowing species (eg: badgers and the like), some lizards and snakes, many flowering plants (those with deep seed beds or seeds that could go years without germinating), many gymnosperms (ditto), mosses and ferns, many molluscs (both terrestrial and aquatic), many deep-sea creatures, some oceanic fish, many oceanic crustaceans, perhaps a lucky species of porpoise or dolphin, perhaps crabeater seals, and of course jellyfish. Corals might actually make it, although for a while there'd be precious few creatures to live on the reefs.
Yeah, but they'd have nearly all of our civilizational knowledge. Presumably, some of these preppers are smart enough to have offline copies of Wikipedia saved somewhere and a simple bicycle-generator to view it on a laptop. Even a print copy of Britannica would shave _millennia_ off of restarting civilization.
Yes, it would take several generations, but probably not all that many. Imagine telling some smart people "hey, if you get rocks really hot, some useful stuff will drain out of them; some of that shiny stuff will be weirdly attracted to other shiny stuff; if you spin that stuff in concentric circles and hook up some wires, then rotors made of other shiny stuff at the other end of the wires will spin, and you'll be able to transmit energy across large distances." Take tens of thousands of people who grew up hearing that story, and I bet it doesn't take long for some burgeoning engineers to reinvent electricity.
So much of invention is the discovery of what is even possible.
Agree, printing and universal literacy makes it hard to lose knowledge. Conditional on at least 1 million humans surviving, I think we probably don't lose the ability to make cars or computers (although it will be really inefficient for a while due to lacking economies of scale)
That's a wonderful quote. I have to admit that I never read PL; up until a few years before my senior year, it was a requirement at my school, but they had dumbed-down the curriculum by the time I graduated. I do have a "classics list" of books I want to read, but PL has always seemed one of the more intimidating ones!
The OP was discussing extinction, not end-of-civilisation. I think there's at least an order of magnitude between the two in the scale of the required calamity, and while a collapse back to the bronze age would be incredibly awful it would not be extinction and humanity would probably eventually build back.
Not sure it would build back, it really seems hard to kick of an industrial revolution without easily available coal and oil, and we've used up all the easiest one already.
I lean your direction, wiping out anything is hard. Roots are stubborn.
Passenger pigeons suggest a possible counterargument. I've heard that they were so dependent on their colonies that just wiping out the first 50% was a death knell for the species.
(I'm not sure how much that narrative is a just so story or if it's widely believed by ornithologists today.)
I'm encouraged though by independent communities like the Amish, or isolated cases like Karp Lykov, whose family survived in the Taiga for 40 years. Both of which suggest our dependencies on civilization are not quite so total as it might sometimes feel.
Stupid plan: Since there's all this talk about counteracting global warming by dumping particulates in the stratosphere, why not counteract the cooling after an impact by releasing greenhouse gasses?
Manufacture strong greenhouse gasses with a short half life, such as the refrigirant R134a or some other haloalkane. Release them shortly after the impact to keep the Earth warm during the following years.
Mitigate against the other effects using cold war era civil defense techniques such as expedient shelters and food stockpiles.
The problem isn't so much the cooling, as the lack of sunlight. Many years with insufficient sunlight for plant growth, will wreck a biosphere no matter how comfy the temperatures.
And yes, this probably isn't a literal extinction risk because of mineshafts, unless we up the comet to ocean-boiling size in which case A: that's ludicrously unlikely and B: there is no possible defense.
Is that 20% of total radiation or what gets photosynthesised? If particulates absorb blue light, warm up and re-emit IR, that light will be heating up the surface but the photons will not be energetic enough to be absorbed by chlorophyll.
In any case, insufficient light levels make plants underperform but a bad frost will kill them overnight so I'd still take my chances with the extra temperature.
NatGeo says 15% of sunlight was blocked. Presumably by sunlight they mean visible wavelengths. If the atmosphere ever got so opaque that nothing-but-infrared reached the surface, I'd expect at least triple that as a decrease in total irradiance.
Wikipedia says we already have 4-20% dimming due to pollution, which was about the same as that other site's estimate of the impact effect, but also so subtle that we barely noticed.
The relationship of predator to prey follows a power law [1]. 75% of animal life going extinct is apocalyptic on our food chain. We might have a snowball's chance in hell because we're omnivores, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Yeah, I'd agree that a nine-kilometre comet just isn't big enough. Even Chicxulub was only as bad as it was because of the impact site being full of dust-forming minerals (a deep ocean impact wouldn't have done nearly as much), and humanity is much, much harder to kill than "75% of animal species" (there are a few macroscopic animals that I'd put above humans in the "Least Concern" category, but the list isn't long and mostly consists of generalist arthropods plus *maybe* rats/mice).
Not sure exactly what size you'd need to wipe us out, although I'm pretty sure Ceres would do it.
I think the second comment on Sirota/Bernie is way off base. That's a severe misunderstanding of Sirota. Maybe it confuses campaign rhetoric with actual beliefs if I want to be charitable.
Also of note is the claim that the left is so small they should be bunched in with liberals. Well you have to ask why they are that small if you believe that.
Also the view of non-cult Sanders supporters is more like most people are corrupt, some of them are actually pretty competent, say Reid and both Clintons, but notably not Obama which Obama himself admitted, well claimed when trying to rally support for Hillary, and that Bernie himself is pretty competent but has issues working in groups which hurts him staffing wise and working with anyone who isn't in Congress.
What is the case that Bernie is pretty competent and that Obama is not? Obama was able to put together a primary campaign that beat Clinton, who was the presumptive frontrunner; this was something that Bernie was unable to do. And Obama ran the most competent presidential administration in recent memory: no major policy missteps, no scandals, no embarrassing personnel moves, and one major legislative accomplishment.
My view is that the more legitimate criticism of Obama was that his competency belied the fact that he did not accomplish much in the way of significant reform. Of course, then your views will be impacted by how much you think needs to be reformed and in which direction.
Who sells more cars, an incompetent Toyota salesman or a competent Lada salesman? It's probably still the Toyota salesman, because people want Toyotas, not Ladas.
Bernie Sanders is a Lada salesman, out there pushing products that very few people want. His competence is beside the point; the people who want Ladas will buy them from him and think he's great because he's the only Lada salesman in town. Everyone else will ignore him and go to one of the many Toyota or Ford dealers.
The fact that Bernie Sanders can make a living selling Ladas _at all_ means that he must be reasonably competent. But he's not as smooth or polished as a top-grade Toyota dealer like Obama.
Obama has social talents Bernie lacks. He was a competent campaigner but the comparison was meant to be him vs either of the Clintons. He said he wasn't prepared to actually lead while Hillary was. Sanders is not a strong coalition builder.
Additionally being successful on the left vs the business friendly liberal is much harder. Could Obama do the same thing with Bernie positions and not double dealing on campaign promises? Probably not.
I think the core of the comment is an important point (followed by some rather aside-the-point hate toward the left *omg he says mean things on twitter* lol) - this is a movie that's criticizing liberals just as much as conservatives. Remember the picture of Orlean embracing Bill Clinton? They weren't hiding it.
I never really think it's fair to lump two groups together when they themselves absolutely would not, and leftists do not think of themselves as liberals. This is poorly understood even by liberals, let alone by libertarians/conservatives.
> On the one hand I'm tempted to offer a critique of this community for often not "getting" the left/liberal divide, but on reflection, that seems unfair. The left are so culturally insignificant everywhere except Twitter & Podcasts that compacting them into the liberals is probably fair enough. (Sadly).
As someone decidedly on the liberal side of that divide: Yes, this distinction is important, and this is one more reason why a left/right political spectrum is a bad model (no, liberalism does *not* go in the center; it is not some lesser version of leftism but a distinctly different thing), but Scott uses it so you can to some extent expect the commenters will as well. :P
I disagree with the idea that leftism is so insignificant though... but then, I say that partly because I'm grouping in the SJers with the leftists. And the SJers are not insignificant at all. I realize these are not the same thing exactly, but the essential style of thought seems similar to me, while decidedly distinct from liberalism, so I group them together...
(But also, plenty of prominent politicians seem to espouse pretty notably leftist ideas? Maybe not *powerful* ones, necessarily, but *prominent* ones, and we're talking culture, so...)
I mean, I think if we're going to talk about politics on a left-right axis at all (which isn't great, but it's the terminology used by everyone on the damn planet so we're stuck with it) then it's fair to label everyone to the left of the median as "The Left" and everyone to the right of the median as "The Right".
If you want to define "Left" or "Right" more narrowly then we might as well tear up the whole naming scheme and start again. (And while we're at it let's get rid of rather non-descriptive labels like "conservative", "progressive" and "liberal" where the meanings don't have a particularly good match to the groups typically thus labelled).
A lot of SJers spout superficially-marxist ideas about billionares being fundamentally evil and socialism as a panacea, but there's a distinct group of dedicated marxists who are strongly opposed to SJ and identity politics. (Freddie deBoer, for example.) I don't think it's correct to lump them together, they're pretty distinct clusters in my mind.
Well, I'm not grouping them together because their beliefs are identical, but because they reflect similar patterns of thought or underlying assumptions, even if applied differently. E.g., both take groups as the fundamental unit of analysis, not individuals, but they differ as to which groups they analyze things in terms of. Both are focused on distribution, not creation, seemingly based on some idea of limited good. Both believe in equality of outcome, both are skeptical of the idea of local validity... I could go on.
Basically, I'm grouping them together in the same way one might, say, group together Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists; from an insider perspective they may be opposed to one another due to their disagreements on who is or is not the messiah or the final prophet, but from an outsider perspective this is less important than the basic similarity in thought.
This might be a matter of scale. From a right-of-center standpoint, they're certainly similar. But as someone with a lot of left-learning acquaintances, I see many clashes between the two. This may be my own biases coloring my view, but from the SJers I get a strong "belief as attire" vibe. (See Scott's "The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars" article from May.) Whether their beliefs are actually true is seen as a minor detail or a distraction from the important things. Those important things mostly being dunking on people on Twitter.
The "true" marxists (and anarchists, who I'm grouping in with marxists for now) appear very different to me. I may not agree with them, but I think they at least have a principled stance. Many of them were marxists/anarchists long before it was the "hot new thing" to be. And they're much more willing to take real action in favor of their goals; they're the ones stockpiling guns and calling for an armed revolution, not social media slacktivism.
I think your points about groups vs. individuals and distribution vs. creation are correct, but they don't tell the whole story. Class solidarity vs. race/gender solidarity is a big schism. The SJers decry billionaires but support Rihanna; the true marxists support poor white men over rich black women. The SJers will denounce fascism and censorship when it comes from republicans, but happily engage in it whenever it's in their favor. The true marxists apply more consistent standards.
I do want to add the caveat that this is largely based on my personal experience of a few hundred of my friends and acquaintances. I try to maintain a diverse social circle, but It's possible that the subset of people I interact with are not representative of the general left-of-center community.
"Class solidarity vs. race/gender solidarity is a big schism."
Yes, but also no.
My own rule of thumb is that the left desires equality and the right desires hierarchy (or, more charitably, believes that hierarchy is just).
Progressives and class reductionists (or wokes and dirtbags, I suppose, if they happen to be your outgroup) do joust bitterly over which axis of equality is important. But they both employ the critical lens of examining power and who has it, and they agree on tearing down systems of oppression.
Also, it's easy to frame all progressives as the most annoying too-online person you've ever run into on Twitter, but there is a lot of decent, quiet, real world activism out there that seeks to mitigate the impact of identity-based discrimination - for one example, helping homeless trans people by setting up shelters that won't sort them on the basis of biological sex.
All right, I'll take that under consideration. I wasn't trying to be uncharitable, but that's always a danger when oversimplifying.
The conservative believes that traditional hierarchies (family, church, social classes) represent the natural order and ought be altered with the greatest care (if at all).
The right-libertarian believes that individuals should be left alone to sort themselves into a hierarchy on the presumed basis of merit.
The fascist, well, you know.
Hierarchy here forms the basis of a useful heuristic. It's not a throwaway slur.
> But the worst part is…well, basically every scientific institution ends up lying
Was this supposed to be an object lesson that we missed? A bunch of prestigious (not that that matters) researchers and universities all checked the data and said "yup, we're boned". But they keep looking and checking, and then *one* org (NASA) says it's all fine, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that everything is now fine. It may as well be "Confirmation Bias: The Musical", and good thing too!
Then you're telling us you watched the movie, and *one* (or two, or three, out of the lot) of the orgs is corrupt... so now all of them are lying?
Very refreshing to see someone see another angle. I believe I saw yours after reading your review. I am weary or smugness and cynicism and a rethink helped me see that viewing. Creeps in around the edges, though.
Your "movie criticism" isn't movie criticism. Manny Farber wrote movie criticism. You don't know anything about movies. What you wrote was a sociological interpretation of a movie, which had little to do with the subject of movies, which is an art form you don't appear to be interested in. It's like you wrote an interpretation of the lyrics of a hit song without realizing that music is about much more than its lyrics.
That said, I enjoyed your post about the movie. But what you wrote wasn't a movie review.
An indignant defence of the sanctity of a niche writing genre that no one really cares about - complete with namedropping! - is the most annoying manifestation of arguing from definition, something annoying enough already, that I've seen so far.
Now that you've acknowledged it, sort of, I want to know for real why you missed the point of this extremely unsubtle movie, because that fact doesn't fit into my model of the world, the whole being biased by other reviewers excuse just doesn't cut it for me. Despite the creators being so very ideologically dissimilar, they have constructed a story which among other things gets at some of the same points as the Meditations on Moloch and Ivermectin essays. It's built from the exact sort of insight porn which is your specialty, not entirely trivial, not commonly understood, but easy enough to pick up and after that seemingly obvious in retrospect. I clicked the link imagining I'd be reading about your delight in having found such an unusual common ground, imagine my disappointment! So what's the hold up, where's the blockage? If we can't get a spark of understanding across this tiny gap, what possible hope is there for any of us to understand the other enough to meaningfully coordinate?
> But also, Tech CEO kind of randomly builds a starship, complete with a 2,000 person passenger capacity and working cryosleep pods, in the space of six months. Was the starship peer-reviewed?
Sounds like very standard motivated reasoning that anyone could be sucked in by.
This was especially grating because, earlier in the movie, DeCaprio's work gets ignored because he's "only at Michigan State." But he immediately tries to gatekeep the other guy.
I had the impression that the starship had been planned and secretly built long before the comet threat for the same reason a large number of hedge fund managers work hard to get dual citizenship to New Zealand. When shit hits the fan, they want to have an escape plan. I suspect Musk and Bezos want the same thing in case some civilization-engulfing phenomena (intentional or accidental) looms as an inevitability so starships ARE coming...
OK. not the rock band, or the kind with warp drive, but the SpaceX kind?
Right now we *just* have a few prototype Starships in various states of assembly, and that's no help at all because a Starship alone can't even reach Low Earth Orbit. Or maybe it can, but as a stunt with no payload capacity. We also need the Super Heavy booster, and that's going to be a while.
If we just have a few Starships and a Super Heavy or two to boost them, it doesn't change much. A Starship launch would basically count as two or three Falcon Heavy launches for this purpose, and we needed over a thousand Falcon Heavy launches in three months or so.
Where things get interesting is if SpaceX builds a modest fleet of Starships and Super Heavy boosters and establishes a rapid, reliable launch cadence and with the on-orbit refueling Elon is planning for his Mars missions. By my math, they'd need to be able to launch Starships twice a day. Elon claims each Starship will be able to fly three times a day, but I'm exceedingly skeptical on that part. Still, if it takes a week to turn around a Starship after each flight, then a fleet of sixteen Starships (and Super Heavies) would do the job. If he can do one-day turnaround, maybe four Starships and Super Heavies would be enough.
Except, we also need thirteen Starships that we can send out on kamikaze missions, though we'll get the boosters back from those at least. So, twenty-nine Starships and sixteen Super Heavies, give or take.
Even with the Starship part already working, I'm going to assume the prep work will take a month; there's plenty of planning, and some custom hardware development. But mostly we're going to do this with off-the-shelf hardware, because we don't need the impossibly optimistic upper stages I used in the Falcon scenario.
So, 260 post-boost vehicles from Trident DII submarine-launched ballistic missiles, each carrying eight W88 475-kiloton warheads, total mass about 4 metric tons. Actually, we never built that many W88s, so some of these will be MX busses carrying W87 warheads and whatnot, and maybe we'll ask the Russians and Chinese to throw in a few of theirs, but to simplify the math I'll assume all W88s. And there will need to be some modifications like extended-life batteries on the post-boost vehicles and warheads, lots of software changes, lots of chances to screw this up given the short timescale and lack of opportunity for testing.
The Starships get automated deployment racks for twenty PBVs (160 warheads) each. Or if we can't debug those, a couple of kamikaze astronauts who can just shove the things out the cargo door and then die as heroes.
Day 31, we launch one of these Starships with its load of warheads into Low Earth Orbit. Then twelve more Starships launch over the next six days, each loaded with fuel to transfer to Starship #1. On day 38, the now fully-fueled Starship departs Earth orbit. Its delta-V with that load is 7.2 km/s, which gives it a hyperbolic excess velocity of 10.1 km/s.
At that low a velocity, it won't reach the comet (really, the comet will reach it) until Day 159, roughly 23.4 days before impact and about twenty million kilometers from Earth. About two days before that, it will start kicking out the post-boost vehicles which will deploy their 160 warheads in a string maybe 50,000 kilometers long.
On Day 159, 160 warheads explode maybe a kilometer away from the comet at five-second intervals. That's really faster than I'd like; there's no way to update targeting and it is possible that the comet will break apart, but it's better than seventy-six megatons all at once. The combined effect of all these two-petajoule X-ray flashbulbs should be to vaporize enough of the comet's surface that the transient pressure will push it off course at a whole ten centimeters per second.
Which, over 23.5 days, is enough to move the impact point 200 kilometers.
But we haven't been standing still. Kamikaze Starship #2 launched on Day 37, departed Earth orbit on Day 45, and is scheduled to meet the comet on Day 160, just one day after Kamikaze Starship #1. This time, we do get a chance to watch what happened and carefully target the next string of warheads accordingly. But, the deflection imparted by these warheads has only 22.4 days to act, and so shifts the impact point 190 kilometers.
Cut to the chase, Kamikaze Starship #13 arrives on Day 171, a bare 11.7 days before impact, and delivers enough of a nudge that the comet will pass 90 kilometers overhead at closest approach.
That's cutting it a bit close, and I wouldn't blame you for sending out one more just to be safe.
But to make this work, you have to be able to launch two Starships a day for three months, with almost no failures. SpaceX is currently at the one Starship a month level, and the Super Heavy hasn't even flown yet.
So how does it change the story if it isn't the Prudent NASA Scientists vs the Greedy Tech Billionaire with competing plans to save the world; the Tech Billionaire is the only one with a chance at all (if we're willing to give him two thousand hydrogen bombs)?
Interesting that there's actually a scenario where this is possible.
I'm doubtful that Starship will work as advertised, and even more so that we'll see a fleet of 30 of them. But it shows how much a game changer it (or something like it) could be.
Where do you get your estimate of the momentum change per explosion? That strikes me as a very complicated calculation, and I can't even think of a back of the envelope estimate of which I'd be confident within an order of magnitude.
Not nearly so qualified as Dr. Schilling, but I imagine it would start with the following givens:
- Pulse duration of the detonation
- Total energy released by the warhead
- Diameter of the comet
- Distance between the detonation and the comet
That gives us total energy absorbed by the comet (total energy released * the fraction of solid angle occupied by the comet from the bomb's point of view at its detonation distance). With the total energy absorbed by the comet, combined with the area and time over which it's absorbed, we can get the change in temperature at the surface. You could get pretty complicated here depending on how accurately you want to model the change in temperature and and surface characteristics, but in theory that should give us the mass of ice converted to vapor and its exhaust velocity / Isp. Integrate that over the surface and you have your change in momentum of the comet.
For that, I did (~6 years ago) a deep dive into the literature of the various researchers and teams who had done fairly detailed modeling of a number of potential diversion methods. And I had recently done my own work on pulsed plasma thrusters, which use one of the postulated mechanisms (pulsed radiation ablation of a solid to produce thrust), so I was reasonably confident that I could recognize who was doing it right. And the people who were doing it right, were getting very similar numbers.
All that I have at hand without digging into boxes of old files is the summary sheet I wrote for future reference. For yields of up to 75 R^2 [edit: I originally had this as R^3] kilotons, where R is the radius of the asteroid or comet in kilometers, combined X-ray and neutron ablation results in a propulsive impulse of ~1.5E8 Newton-seconds per kiloton, assuming a typical modern H-bomb at optimal standoff.
Because neutrons are much more efficient than X-rays in this context (penetrating deeper and producing "softer" ablation), you could get better results with a bomb optimized for neutron production in a way military H-bombs aren't. Yes, there are or at least were "neutron bombs", but they are very low yield and designed in a way that doesn't really scale to the high yields you want for this purpose. But for an optimal design based on "conventional" Li6-D fusion, you'd get ~3E8 N-s/kT, and for a fusion device using just cryogenic deuterium, ~5E8 N-s/kT.
All of these are relatively independent of target composition, though I believe somewhat less efficient for metallic asteroids.
If you bury the bomb at an optimal depth of ~100 m/kT^0.33, you get greater propulsive coupling, ~1.7 N-s/kT for a typical comet (or 9.2E-9 for a big rock, 4.2E-9 for a metallic asteroid, or 3.8E-10 for a carbonaceous asteroid). However, you have to rendezvous with the asteroid to drill into it, and if you count the weight of the propulsion system you'd need to rendezvous at typical intercept velocities (never mind the 200 lbs of ham to operate the drill), you're better off with more and/or bigger bombs than with a soft-landed bomb and a drill.
No, you can't just have the bomb punch deep into the asteroid with its own impact velocity; at these velocities, basically everything instantly vaporizes. Best you could do is have the bomb detonate at impact, and if you're not going to bury it, you want it standing off a few hundred meters for more uniform ablation.
Ah so OK thanks. I don't doubt the calculation *can* be done, all of this is pretty straightforward physics. It's just that you flung out the number without any indication that it came from some long train of careful calculation, and because of that it seemed to me like it was a back of the envelope calculation you ripped off in 5 minutes and I'm like -- wait, how the heck do you do that?
That's interesting about the neutrons, though. I would not have thought about that right off the bat, but it makes sense.
Excellent treatment of how the Starship+SH stack changes the scenario at hand (If it performs as advertised). I just want to add that for anyone concerned about the real world rather than the movie scenario, the most significant advantage Starship would bring (again assuming the economics actually work out at least somewhat as Musk claims) would be making it a lot cheaper and more practical to launch some of those "large space based telescopes designed specifically for asteroid+comet hunting" thus allowing us to have more than 6 months notice so we can do things the easy way.
Excellent point. Even a single telescope deployed in Earth's orbit 180º away from Earth would dramatically improve the situation, because stuff couldn't sneak up on us in the glare of the Sun. (Note that such a deployment also requires deploying a relay satellite, probably at Earth-Sun L4 or L5, so you can get the telemetry back to Earth.)
SpaceX has recently decided to move to 9 engines on Starship, and increase the tankage to hold more prop. I'm guessing 1500t, because that's what's required to do the NASA Artemis mission without refueling in cislunar space. If you have an expendable Starship with no thermal tiles, no flaps, and probably a jettisoned fairing, getting down to 80t dry mass seems pretty likely. With 5t of nukes and their PBVs, you could then generate 10.85km/s of delta-v. From a 400x400km orbit, that's v∞=15km/s. That should help quite a bit.
Estimates for the payload to LEO with the new configuration are about 200t. That would mean 8.5 launches per kamikaze mission. Getting 15 of them (let's be conservative) on the way in 90 days would cost 2 launches every 3 days. (There are likely to be two pads up and running in fairly short order, one in Texas and one in Florida, so working it this way makes more sense. It also makes the rendezvous mechanics a bit more tractable.)
Like you, I'm also skeptical of the "fly 3x per day" boundless enthusiasm, and it's really not needed until there's some application that requires that many launches. If they get the point-to-point thing working for cargo, that might drive them to maintain a bigger fleet of Starships and move their cadence forward more aggressively, but I suspect acquiring the overflight and landing rights to make that a real thing will take a while.
Still, they seem on track to have engine production capacity up to 3-5 per day (1/day in Hawthorne and 2-4/day in McGregor), and that's really the gating factor. So they seem to think that they need to be able to build 2-3 Starships per week or, alternatively, a SuperHeavy every week to week and a half.
I suspect that fleet expansion would turn out to be the gating factor in figuring out what's possible, rather than maximum rate that they could turn launches around. They appear to be taking this fast turnaround stuff very seriously, given all the effort they're investing in the ground support equipment at Boca Chica.
One last thing: Almost all launches are tanker launches. Losing a tanker here and there is no big deal if you have the production capacity to replace them. That can make them fairly low-quality vehicles, with minimal checkout. But the same is not true for SuperHeavies, because when they fail, that likely takes the pad out of service as well. That would be pretty much all she wrote.
Or... Bezos could have Blue Origin build a space station orbiting the earth and just build a rocket powerful enough to get him to it if disaster was impending to wait out the worst of it.
A few widely-spaced bunkers on Earth would be a much cheaper way of accomplishing the same thing. And safer; you really *don't* want to be in Low Earth Orbit when a large asteroid or comet hits the Earth.
One thing that seemed _totally obvious_ to me was that that the Mark Rylance character was a direct stand-in for Mark Zuckerberg. I thought this was as obvious as seeing Meryl Streep as Trump. The entire film, I was saying to my wife "wow, this actor has _completely nailed_ Zuckerberg, from the oddly forced facial expressions, the thousand-yard-stare when talking to people, the psychotic laugh, lack of emotion, and total amorality. At the beginning, he's even talking excitedly (or his forced, unemotional version of "excitedly") about determining users' emotional states and then manipulating them via algorithmically-selected videos (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/), after which he complains to his staff that the feel-good video wasn't engaging enough.
And then I read a bunch of reviews that compared him to Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, some other tech titan, or a pastiche of "tech CEOs." Maybe I'm just crazy, but the Zuckerberg comparison seemed so obvious to me.
The Musk connection in particular seems completely off base. The Rylance character had zero interest in space until he figured out it could make him vastly richer by minimizing the costs of cell-phone production. Musk is a weirdo, but he's very much on Team Prevent Human Extinction. He's also oddly amaterialistic, living in an unpleasant part of the country to be close to SpaceX and renting a pretty modest home. I'm sure he has plenty of extravagances, but he doesn't seem all that obsessed with increasing his material wealth compared to Zuckerberg (basically buying Kauai) or Bezos with his daughter-yachts. I don't see Musk (or Steve Jobs for that matter) as being willing to gamble with civilization for a few more bucks.
Anyway, it's a small thing, but I'm still surprised that I haven't read any reviews that make this connection that seemed so obvious to me.
I am about as far as possible from a fan of Zuckerberg, but this:
"Zuckerberg (basically buying Kauai)"
I love/hate to be pedantic, but it looks like it's 2 square miles out of like 500. Not an invisible fraction, and I have no idea whether it's the absolute best 2 sq mi, but an amount that in other less-fraught contexts we might call "in the noise".
Oh, yeah totally fair. I really just meant it as an exaggerated way to say "buying more land than a normal human being would ever want." I don't have any problem with that: it's his money, and Kauai is legitimately like paradise; I'd love to buy some land there too someday.
But it does indicate that he is very focused on accumulation, whereas someone like Musk seems mostly focused on building cool things, with money and possessions as mostly byproducts.
I've also seen the character compared to Larry Page, based presumably on physical appearance. In any case, the fact that many people have come up with different "obvious" inspirations is good evidence that it was an amalgamation of various people.
"Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now."
On the subject of Starship; as a first approximation SpaceX is projecting approximately 100 tons to Low Earth Orbit, 5x the payload capacity as a Falcon 9, in its fully reusable configuration. Assuming their estimate pans out, that's approximately 220 flights instead of 1100. Harder to approximate are the additional savings of full reusability (versus F9's first stage reusability) and Starship's planned refuel-in-orbit capability.
"There are at least 2-3 substantial damage events in the ancient world possibly tied to asteroid impacts".
I'm torn about how much to believe this. On one hand, the "ancient world" might generously be taken to cover, say, 4000 BC to 1000 AD, so three in that time frame compared to probably zero in the last millennium is not ridiculous. On the other hand, the ancient world had so *very* much smaller a footprint that the base rate of asteroid impacts would, I fear, have to be implausibly large for there to have been three of them that actually hit a city.
But of course you said, "This may not be true!" and I can't argue with that.
"Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now."
The difficulty of deflecting this comet in the allotted time definitely makes the movie better. The scientists at the beginning aren't saying, "This is what we need to do," they're freaking out. They aren't sure of the details of what needs doing, which is one reason the talk goes badly. They know, however, that saving humanity is worth trying.
As far as "peer review" and other issues go, see my comments on the other thread, where I also made the Apple connection despite having no conscious knowledge of that guy.
"Look, there’s a weird game called “movie criticism”, where you take a movie as a jumping-off point to have thoughts on Society or the Human Condition. In the real world, people watch movies because they’re funny, or they have cool action sequences, or because the lead actress is really hot. But the rules of the “movie criticism” game say you have to ignore this stuff and treat them as deep commentary."
// pedantic mode on
Is this irony? I hope so! There is good and bad comedy and "movie criticism" also deals with this classification - why the comedy of the Marx brothers, Monty Python, Mel Brooks or Seinfeld is sometimes brilliant and why this brilliance is hard to achieve. Or why the movies of directors such as Kubrick or Kurosawa or David Lynch are so often great. And "deep comentary" is never a necessary factor to a movie being great.
I don't think Scott was being ironic -- just that he's more interested in general in what *all* things say about Society or the Human Condition than in what makes a movie good or successful. There certainly are movie critics that incline in the same direction, though like you I'm inclined to call what they do by some other name. That doesn't make them unrewarding to read.
Most film critics don't have much in the way of larger thoughts about society, but they do know a whole bunch about movies and they have strong confidence that their taste in movies is right. I'm a weird exception in that I don't know all that much about movies and am not impressed much by my own taste, but I do find movies a good jumping off point for discussing the subject of the movie so that the viewer can come up with an intelligent opinion of his own.
For example, here's my review of Adam McKay's last movie "Vice," a Dick Cheney biopic starring an excellent Christian Bale:
"McKay utterly bypasses the one interesting mystery still surrounding Dick Cheney’s career: What happened in the 1990s following Cheney’s impressive performance as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense that then led to his disastrous years as George W. Bush’s veep? Why did the man who prudently sided with GHWB to not go to Baghdad in 1991 fanatically encourage GWB to go to Baghdad in 2003?"
I think to understand how complicated narrative about systemic failure where even experts themselves are corrupted can be compressed into "trust the experts" message, we should very explicitly distinguish two problems of epistemics: a hard one and an easy one.
The hard one is how to consistently beat experts and markets, finding truth in an adversary environment where everything is broken, people are corrupt and follow their perversed initiatives, being part of inadequate equilibria. And as the name suggest this problem is hard. One have to be very smart, be fluent in reading scientific papers, be actually capable to do your own research, know everything about systemic failures and posses some of the best heuristic developped by the best communities of rational thinkers.
The easy one is how not to be a crazy conspiracy theorist. For this we should just trust the scientific consensus. It's an easy and cheap heuristic. Which will obviously fail us from time to time but at least it won't fail us as bad as other easy heuristics. It's the baseline.
I understand and agree that the hard question is much more interesting, noble and virtuous. That one can develop as a rationalist only by trying to answer it and not the easy one. But it seems that the easy question is more important from utilitarian perspective due to sheer number of people performing worse than our baseline.
I agree with you about this, and you put it clearly and concisely.
However, I see an additional problem, which is discerning a scientific consensus in the first place - easier said than done.
Take the scientific consensus on climate change, perhaps as exemplified by Cook's iconic 97% study. You can find any number of references to this (including from the POTUS) claiming it confirms the potentially catastrophic consequences of AGW and that it ends the debate about whether humanity should act or not.
The study itself merely claims that 97% of published papers on the subject assert, either explicitly or implicitly, that mankind is having an effect on the climate. Which is something believed by every single climate sceptic I know.
Actually finding and defining a scientific consensus is much harder than it seems. And that is true even for the mythical rationalist free from all the biases that afflict run of the mill human beings.
I agree, but I do not think that the difficulty lie in the scientific consensus per se, maybe I will rephrase what you say but for me the issue is that what is discussed is:
1) a set of facts
2) a theory explaining those facts
3) use the theory to predict what will happen in the future, given some assumption on the input (null policy)
4) provide an assessment on how good or bad what will happen is
5) propose a new policy (basically propose to a way to alter the inputs) and show, using the theory (3) and assessment of (4), that the proposed policy will make the future better than the null policy.
While politically this is proposed in bulk, explicitly or implicitly; the scientific consensus is always on 1), often on 2) (depending on how coarse or fine you expect the theory to be), but rarely on 3) when the issue is complex (the coarse, consensual, theory is not predictive enough, fine theories allowing predictions accurate enough to allow 3->5 are rarely consensual on the current sensitive issues (covid, CC,...) and almost never on 4) and 5).
Still, the consensus on 1, 2 (and coarse 3) is used to justify 1->5 and this color the debate so much that opponents to the politics (1-5) ends up challenging 1-2, either because they really doubt it (which is indeed anti-science and likely to be false, even if there are (very few) counter examples), or because the way the debate has been framed it's the only way for opponents to be heard.
While I agree that there are some possibilities for miscommunication between scientists and general population that make finding what is the scientific consensus on some matter not very easy especially for people who are bad at searching information, I respectfull disagree with the sentiment that it's a considerebly hard issue on an absolute scale. Most of the time in order not to dramatically fail bellow the baseline it's enough to read some Wikipedia or pop-science. Getting more nuanced perspective is harder depending on how much nuance we want but again, in order not to become a conspiracy theorist not much nuance is required.
Also, I don't think that your example is very good. Majority of modern global warming sceptics may have more reasonable position than outright denialism, but the goalpost had to be moved quite a lot in order to let it be the case. Also there are still outright denialists.
I also think Musk is an obviously terrible analog for the CEO in this movie. Musk is very concerned about x-risk and did a lot to combat climate change in particular. He's also unusually competent. He would almost certainly urge to destroy the comet if the movie plot were to happen in real life.
The other thing I would say is that I didn't get the impression that any moment in this movie was trying to be funny, and there certainly wasn't any moment I found funny.
Endless Legend is excellent and way more polished, but the ridiculous amount of content to explore and experiment with in Fall From Heaven is unmatched, imho
"Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now."
There are actually two historical impact events that might have caused tens of thousands of deaths. The first is Ch'ing-yang event in 1490 and the second is Wanggongchang explosion in 1626. Both in China, both hard to verify.
Isherwell is based on Marshall Applewhite, the leader of Heaven's Gate! He matches Applewhite perfectly, it's too much of a coincidence.
Heaven's Gate was a cult that became infamous for its 1997 mass suicide. Their website is still running, and you can find videos of the group members discussing their imminent suicides on Youtube.
> And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks.
Would we know in advance where it hits? I mean more than a few hours in advance?
For crashing satellites we don't know at all, because if the crash is a few minutes earlier or later, this translates into huge differences in the location. I could imagine that it's different for comets (because they are much faster than satellites, so error terms from atmospheric disturbances matter less), but I am not sure.
Kerbal Space Program is great for developing an intuition: by the time a hyperbolically deorbiting münar mission hits the atmosphere, it's much too late for that atmosphere to affect the impact site. You can choose between a slug and a neat shotgun blast ring, but you know exactly where Jeb's final resting place will be long before he reaches it.
Very roughly speaking, six months out you'd be able to draw a roughly east-west line a few thousand kilometers long on a map of the Earth and say "it will be somewhere on that line". As the comet gets closer, you can narrow it down further.
If the line crossed, say, New York City, you might start a crash program to turn NASA's next interplanetary probe into a nuclear missile, but probably by the time you were ready to launch you'd have narrowed that down to "the Atlantic ocean 2-300 km offshore", and then you just reroute air and shipping traffic on impact day and tell New Yorkers to stay clear of east-facing windows and beaches just to be safe.
There is one buried reference to climate change, when the black scientist (I forget his name) goes on his protest bent, flags and banners fly across the screen, some of which mention fossil fuels. There may be other climate-based Easter Eggs, I just noticed that on a first pass.
> a 2,000 person passenger capacity and working cryosleep pods, in the space of six months.
I don't think we should assume that this happened in the space of six months. We should assume that the tech CEO has been building this for *years*, and more out of a dislike for current humanity and governments than any expectation of a comet. That's also the reason it doesn't come back to Earth - it was never intended to come back to earth, and he doesn't change the original mission parameters.
What I find most fascinating about the cloud of feedback is that a lot can be summarized as critics struggling with a movie that has no heroes. It demonstrates how ingrained the heroes journey narrative is, and emphasizes the most important contribution of Don't Look Up, namely it's departure from that template.
It would be great if you could perform your amazing analytical skills on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. There seems to be growing evidence it is correct.
One thing for the era of disaster movies such as "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure", they didn't do moralising, they were just meant as specatcle. And the press certainly didn't write pieces about "does this relate to the recent scandal in marine insurance fraud?" or whatever about them.
> I think a lot of my unease about the movie came from the moralizing in the press about it.
Agree. When they *don't* do this, we can just consume the thing as art. But the narrative-shoveling class can't do anything with actual art, because it's ineffective as an object-level political tool.
They used to churn out propaganda disguised as art, but I think at this point they think so little of our intelligence, they just came out and said "It's propaganda! It is!"
> That suggests a per-century rate of 1-in-a-million for the former and 1% for the latter. And a century from now, we’ll either enough new tech to trivially solve the problem, or something else will have killed us already.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of times "1% is something to worry about when talking about existential threat" in the context of e.g. rogue AI. I do feel somewhat less worried about the meteor - there's some overlap between what's needed to fix that, and "Tech CEO #4 wants a car in space" / "we need to figure out how to better blow up our enemies". But the considerations of John Schilling about putting whatever deflects the comet in its path in time come from basic Newtonian mechanics. Unless we discover the Reactionless Drive TM (doubt intensifies), we had better work on improving early-warning systems _specifically_ for this scenario.
My personal highlight was the comment by Running Burning Man which stated that moving the comet "is stupid beyond description" and contained a personal attack on Scott. Or more precisely, the productive discussion it generated:
1. The personal attack was uncalled for, so understandably Scott did not appreciate it.
2. A share of the discussion moved away from the critical point that comets might not be deflectable and discussed if there was a personal attack. Therefore, amusingly, a theme of the movie was almost replicated: the urgent issue being missed due to the commenter being too shrill.
3. However, a serious and scientific discussion ensues. +1 for the community.
4. The consensus seems to shift: From an initial "we have a chance to deflect a comet", to "we can not for this size and timeline."
5. Most critically: People did Fermi estimates for the risk for humanity from asteroids & comets. Meaning it was hard to point to good literature and the work in assessing the risks has not progressed far. It is baffling and a point Bostrom made before that we have scientific articles on almost anything, but few on existential risks.
The pop-star character played by Ariana Grande blasts the 'trust the experts' message clearly at the climax of the movie. To me it is pretty clear and Scott's take is correct. Even if you take your own message away from the movie, the people making the movie were literally shouting this message at you.
> I feel like asking “okay, but did he also do a Google search for ‘journal with low standards’ and then get Reviewer #3 to sign off on it?” is not a high bar.
You're right, it's not a high bar, but it couldn't even hurdle that bar and yet was taken seriously, which I took as the point of that off hand peer review comment.
Peer review at any journal usually takes at least 2 months. In the context of the movie, (AFAICT, since I have not watched it) I am not sure whether the plan was was submitted and rejected or not submitted to some reason (urgence, impatience, or self-serving reasons). In the latter case, stating "it was not peer reviewwed" does not mean (unlike in the former case) that it lacks the merit to clear even a low bar.
The point was not that it lacks merit simply because it wasn't reviewed, but that it was given high credence simply because of *who* presented the plan (fallacious), and was arguably given higher credence than work that *was* peer reviewed.
Scott, I kind of felt like you misjudged this comedy as well but please don't be disheartened. You're a Great Man and also a great guy. Perfection is beyond the capabilities of all flesh.
I find it weird that so many readers are resistant to the idea that the movie could be interpreted as a metaphor for Covid/Climate Change/etc.
The first I heard about it was via Reddit posts that were screencaps of Twitter. Someone tweeted something anti these issues, then someone replied “You are the people Don’t Look Up tells us to worry about” or “You are the people that Don’t Look Up is criticizing”. Theses screenshots would get a couple thousand upvotes.
I addition, I have seen lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio has made a few tweets using the film to draw attention to Climate Change. Some imply this link was an intentional aspect of the movie.
I commented this downthread, but I'll continue to say it: I think at least a portion of the people going "it's just a silly farce, it's not 'about' anything real!" are engaging in motte-and-bailey tactics. It's just a silly farcical movie... so long as people are accusing it of being ham-fisted propaganda. Then, once those people leave, it's right back to using it as a political bludgeon.
> But also, Tech CEO kind of randomly builds a starship, complete with a 2,000 person passenger capacity and working cryosleep pods, in the space of six months. Was the starship peer-reviewed?
I've been an engineer a while and never seen a design that doesn't get peer-reviewed. It may not happen in the public eye like science unless it's open source software, but peer review happens. It's even an audit point for accreditation bodies that certify companies on a scale of how mature they are as engineering organizations.
The movie suffered from the inconsistency of the characters, Leo and Jen. There's complexity, then there's just inconsistency. Jen was the adult in the room, then she wasn't. Leo was a fool, then he wasn't. Also, the screaming "We're all gonna die," was just a boring crutch. As a 12-year-old, I burst into tears spontaneously, involuntarily at the end of Dr. Strangelove.
The only part of the movie that has a rational social commentary is when the BASH elites cull criticism while making the drones. All progress comes from criticism of our best hard-to-vary explanations. The hard-to-vary aspect doesn't require gatekeepers, neither does the criticism part. The movie doesn't make that point obvious, so it ends up being cynical blind pessimism--which is comforting to a large body of the public that relies purely on the infinite regression of inductivism to justify their historicist argument. Good on the producers, because it's also super cathartic in a time where it's confusing why things aren't panning out the way most have predicted based on their accumulation of "data", to see everyone die. The great thing about the apocalypse is how simple it makes everything.
I think Scott's original review was probably closer to the truth. The movie was trying to spread the message "Trust The Science" and it just didn't do a good job. Because its moral was too simplistic, and its writing lacked subtlety or sophistication. (Especially when compared to satires like "The Thick of It" or "Succession".)
Last thing I’m gonna say about this. The whole bit about satire and farces and so on being judged on their own terms ignores the existence of things like Dr. Strangelove, which somehow manages to be taken very seriously, remain funny, and retain a decent degree of plausibility.
Here’s a nice story from the New Yorker to illustrate:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true
If you expect all your satires to measure up to Dr. Strangelove, you're going to be generally disappointed
I’ve seen a number of people (in these comment sections, too) including Dr. Strangelove as an important parallel in their positive reviews of the film. I don’t think I’m very wide off the mark.
I think the film obviously took Dr. Strangelove as an inspiration in spirit if not in form, but that sounds to me like something that's trivially true. Satire about world-ending catastrophe is a small genre that Dr. Strangelove is the most famous example of, if not the originator.
Stupid question time: Dr Stangelove was made in the 60's. Since then, we now have computers, internet, smartphone. We have raised our expectations for lots of things. Why can't we raise our expectations for art in the same way?
I have a few hypotheses: 1) the human brain is the limiting factor, and "genius artists" today are basically the same as they were before, 2) art is measured relative to its constraints and context, so having more means doesn't always help, 3) Old stuff that we still remember has stood the test of time and thus is already filtered to have the very best, 4) The energy these days is mostly spent on making more very good thing than an even better thing. I took a look at my bandcamp a few hours ago and there are a few very small niches that are filled with people dedicating their life to it.
I'm clueless about most of that but it seems to be one of those things that we've just accepted for no evident good reason.
Old stuff is also, to be frank, graded on a curve. That's why Super Metroid gets such high rankings on "best game of all time" lists, whereas some modern equivalent (Metroid Dread? Metroid Fusion? Zero Mission? idk, pick your poison) doesn't. The original gets bonus points for being the original, even if some successor took all its ideas and iterated on them perfectly.
I think being the original is a big deal and should consequently be celebrated. The “curve” seems to me more like an attempt to properly grasp the creative effort behind an enterprise
Sure. But that means given that two works of equal "objective" quality (i.e. quality if given to an uninformed individual), we will tend to prefer the older one.
That more depends on whether you prefer the Progressive or the Reactionary story about history: is the present a Golden Age of hitherto untold prosperity and happiness, or a crumbling, decadent ruin left over from a past Golden Age?
I'm not actually sure that that's true, either - the *originator* gets a lot of bonus points, but the first clone gets no edge over the 10th clone, and that comparison is done basically on the merits.
You do have a point though that it means that we're actually talking about how praiseworthy the creators are rather than how much enjoyment the consumer will receive.
I think there's two grading systems that usually get conflated.
There's "is this good by modern standards", where Doctor Strangelove is honestly still great but Super Metroid is not.
There's also "was this great at the time", where Super Metroid admittedly fails kinda badly (also see original Star Trek.)
I think it's worth talking about them separately, but also acknowledging that they are both valid; Super Metroid really *was* a groundbreakingly good game, even if it's getting kind of rusty today.
I've never played the Metroid games myself, but from what I've heard there's no consensus on anything being a "perfect" iteration or successor to Super Metroid. That may be because people won't admit that a successor is better in every way, but that may also be because improving every single aspect has never been done. This part itself may be because you can't just decompose a game into parts, improve them and put them back together.
As an aside, I think the "modern equivalent" to Super Metroid would be either Hollow Knight as a "modern take on", or Dark Souls as a "genre-defining classic" while still having roots in the metroidvania genre and updating it for "modern tastes". But for all of these games we mentionned, you could make the point that they're all good in their own way. I think that at least Super Metroid, Dark Souls and Hollow Knight will endure for some time. But on the other hand, it's easy to take a metroidvania and say "this one will be forgotten, it wasn't that good".
Maybe my point is asking "why would people go out and do something mediocre?", to which the answer would be "most people just do their jobs" I guess. I'm a software engineer and the software I work on is good but it's not Dr Strangelove or Super Metroid good I think.
So, I haven't played any Metroid games *but* Super Metroid, and I can't speak to how well that series has been handled. But, with respect to a number of series I have followed, I think it's genuinely true that while the resources available for them have expanded, the games themselves have gotten worse. I don't think this is simply a matter of nostalgia. I've gotten the same impression from a game series I got into relatively recently. It's been running for a substantial time now, and I've been playing the games in order from the beginning, and I reached a point where the games jumped systems, got a huge boost to their graphics capabilities, full voice acting, etc. And my reaction was "Wow, they have so much more to put into these games now, and yet they've managed to make it so much worse." A game series in which every installment so far had managed to really wow me dropped to a level where I'm crawling through the next game on the list, often not feeling in the mood to pick it up even when I'm bored.
This is a subject I actually talk with people about quite often, and I think there's a lot more to be said about it than can reasonably be covered in a single comment. But I think that one of the relevant factors here is that game developers already had the resources to make genuinely excellent game experiences decades ago, but they haven't spent the years since then honing them. They've kept introducing new capabilities *which themselves take a lot of work to use properly,* and they often don't have the time to properly adjust and figure out how to make the best use out of them before they reach a point where they feel obligated to use something new or different to keep up with the standards of the field.
As I've gotten older I find myself less interested in a lot of modern games, and I've struggled to say exactly why. Then I think about Solitaire, a very simple game that has been around forever, and yet people play it a lot!
What I think is happening is that a lot of new games are more complex, with more features (and voice acting, and graphics, etc.), but not necessarily good in terms our human brains really appreciate. Our brains want a simple program that ticks a certain set of boxes in our head (think of setting, genre, and the type of functions it requires our brains to process). Solitaire checks some boxes on that list that apparently work very well for a bunch of human brains. Call of Duty apparently does as well, but I don't think a 2022 CoD necessarily does that any better than the original. Sure, the graphics are better and there are more features, but that may actually be worse. If our brains have to work harder to actually play the game, our brains may reject (find unfun) newer features. The Atari had two buttons, and more or less so did the Nintendo, but the games were still quite fun. Now controllers have 10+ buttons and we are required to use most or all of them. That's like an IQ test just to be able to complete the game - which not everyone finds fun. It's great for competitive gaming, as it allows skill to be more clearly evident, but that's not why most people play games.
I liked the open world and a lot of the features of Breath of the Wild, but found the combat system generally unfun. Not just that weapons break (a side issue to what I'm saying), but even the button combinations to use special attacks and whatnot. I stopped playing, because I didn't enjoy it. I wanted to explore the world, but I didn't want to spend a bunch of time practicing how to use the complex combat system. A lot of modern games combine multiple features that may have been separate games 30 years ago (or couldn't exist with that technology). If you like all of the features, then the game works for you. if you only like some of the features, maybe you just wont enjoy it.
It's odd that videogame controllers have gotten more complex while things like TV remotes and cell phones have gone the other way: a TV remote from the 1980s could have 100+ buttons, and phones rely on the touchscreen for most features.
I much prefer the physical controls (I wish modern cell phones had a physical brightness control, for example) but what a user interface really needs is to be easy to start using straight away and then have other features available when people get more comfortable with it.
A proper game with complicated controls will warm you up with only needing some buttons at first, so you can get used to the controls as you advance, and it becomes second-nature as to how to parry and spin and all.
I think it's pretty clearly 1, plus the fact that art is capped by skill rather than knowledge, so whereas todays mathematicians can learn all the work of previous mathematicians and go from there todays artists still have to start pretty much from scratch.
If you look at aspects of art that where human skill /isn't/ the limiting factor, things have definitely improved, though - most obviously, CGI now lets us put pretty much anything a creator can imagine on screen for the audience to see. But it turns out that in quite a lot of genres all the things people were visualising were people walking around and having conversations in the real world, and they could already put that on screen in the 60s, so improved craft hasn't contributed to those areas of art.
If you extend your timescale, you can see similar progress in other areas - better musical instruments, better pigments, the development of perspective and so on. but, again, by the 60s we had all that, and the only limiting factor in a lot of art forms was human skill.
Good point about the skill! So this wouldn't be exactly about "art", but about "craftsmanship", in which case I agree, the best of the best seems to be at the same level through ages.
"artists still have to start pretty much from scratch."
That's the attitude that makes today's artists not very good. Every artist is now following in the ideas of the people from the 30s and earlier whose idea was basically "we don't want to do anything that ordinary people might like, because that is boring."
I think this depends a lot on what you think of as 'good' and 'art'. Generally speaking, I think we are considerably better at 2d illustration than we used to be. Also, artists literally do the math thing you are describing for developing drafting skills. The classics of art school are, draw from life, and study the masters. In the past, the study the masters part wasn't actually super easy, a lot of times it involved going to the museum with a sketch book. Today, study the masters is dramatically easier, and there are just so many more 'masters' to study. You can do a study from Becky Cloonan's Instagram, then try your hand at a painting by Sargent, circle back to Jung Gi Kim, and finish off with one of Rembrandt's self-portraits, all from the comfort of your drafting table. Exposure to other artists is also huge part of the artistic process, and while the parasocial relationships of twitch might be lambasted generally, being a part of an artist social group, where you can share ideas with peers is another one of the best things about art school, and you can now get that anywhere in the world if you have an internet connection.
I think this has actually worked out in the real world, and modern illustrators are regularly creating pieces that rival or surpass the old masters in terms of technical ability, while also exploring a dramatically wider range of techniques and subject matters.
On a very long scale, it seems like very accurate representational art techniques have been discovered and lost several times. On a scale of centuries, I can probably buy an art commission that's better than a Renaissance master for a few hundred bucks. On a scale of decades/years, however, natural variation in talent/vision seems to matter much more than technology.
For what it's worth, this basically applies to CGI as well. We largely reached photorealism with Jurassic Park in '93. There are films today which look much worse. The *minimum* price tag has come down a lot, but the skill of the artists has generally been the most important factor in CGI quality for over 30 years.
There is a divide between "fine" art (what goes in galleries) and "everyday" art (commercial and what ordinary people try for when learning).
Fine art seems to me deliberately ugly and non-representational.
Semi-related post from earlier this week: https://www.cold-takes.com/wheres-todays-beethoven/
Thanks, that was interesting.
Also, it's easier to appreciate Strangelove as a comedy because we're so separated from the issues of the time. "Look at all of those wacky goofballs and their nukes" is a bit funnier now than it was in the sixties.
Especially if you watch Don't Look Up as a climate-change allegory (which the creators intended but which I think diminishes the film), you're invariably thinking about how climate change isn't so easy to fix, that there are tradeoffs for everything, and how your political opponents (whoever they may be) hold views on climate change that infuriate you. It's harder to appreciate the comedy if you're actually angry at climate deniers or actually angry at those who think that solving climate change is as easy as pushing some "green energy button."
I'm sure at the time, there were a lot of people who felt Strangelove unfairly satirized hawks who were making serious points about the Soviet Union or who felt that nuclear war "wasn't funny, man." It's also notable that MAD _worked_, so in a sense, the film actually was very wrong. It's just that nobody cares about that today, the film was genuinely hilarious, and a lot of cold warriors really were lunatic warmongers who wanted total war (look up Curtis LeMay or Thomas Power if curious).
P.S. I'm also not so sure that the dangers of nuclear war have somehow dissipated just because the Soviets are gone, but that's for a different comment thread.
That's a good point that I didn't think about, thanks.
To be able to make fun of a crisis while in the middle of it is a special kind of skill.
You say ""Look at all of those wacky goofballs and their nukes" is a bit funnier now than it was in the sixties.", but I don't see it that way. I am still just as scared of a nuclear war now as I was when I grew up in the '60~'70. You are right that it's probably better left for another comment thread, but we should have one at some point...
Yeah, seriously! I think nuclear war is still at least as significant a threat as AGI, and far, far more of a threat than a planet-killing asteroid.
Aging autocrats have a tendency to become senile and paranoid. An 85-year-old Putin (or Xi) in the early stages of dementia is a rather terrifying thought. Not to mention US leadership of late.
For what it's worth, we survived a Reagan in the early stages of dementia...
Nuclear war is unlikely to wipe out 100% of humanity even in the worst case scenario. Of course, it would hugely impact the lives of everybody, which is what normal people mostly care about, but to the sort of person who cares about "x-risks" there's a world of difference between 99% and 100% of humanity killed.
My working theory is that every form of entertainment has a sort of landscape or environment of possible forms whose niches fill up quite quickly once uncovered. Every now and then a new niche opens up thanks to changes in technology or taste, and a pioneer generation of artists starts filling it. And, once the large spaces are filled in, there's very little for subsequent artists to do except fiddle on the margins while they wait for a new niche to open.
The reason why we don't often see a modern-day version of the {mega-artist of your choice} in a given older genre/form is not that their descendants are lesser artistic creatures. It's because, once they've had their run, you cannot do too much with the same material except homage it, react against it, copy off it or work in the areas it did not touch on completely.
Seems so. Albrecht Dürer died in 1528 and if you look at his engravings, I don't think state of the art (heh) has been pushed forward at all. Regressed, if anything.
The baseline human brain is absolutely a bottleneck.
The development of the plot in Dr. Strangelove was nowhere near as contrived. Yes, there were over-the-top personalities in the movie, but the nature of nuclear war escalation is a game without too many individuals making decisions. There is no fucking way that a plot could have unfolded like this new movie. Here's how it would have gone down, really.
Scientists call other scientists for trajectory confirmation and encounter modeling. The same day, Hubble would be rotated to image the thing. Just like it took a week of (only!) heavy COVID for every nerd with a youtube channel to become an expert about R-values, it would take two days for all of us to grasp the broad outlines of how solar wind and solar heating can result in a few newtons of force decelerating the comet. Yes, the original discoverers would be famous, but they people who run the serious telescopes would be able to speak with much more authority. NASA people might be muzzled by politicians, and I could easily see their early steps being as pathetic as those made by the CDC in early 2020. But a comet is much easier to understand and model than a virus is.
It's just super stupid for the movie to suggest that we'd just carry on with worrying about our old problems. All evidence I know says we'd do exactly the opposite and insist that we DO SOMETHING NOW! even before we know what's wise. But then again, launching many nukes at the thing ASAP probably would be the best thing to do. In the months before the rendezvous, we would have plenty of time to game out how to place the detonations. My guess is that the wisest strategy would be to detonate the fastest nuke safely far from the comet, over one of its rotational poles, and study how it responds the the "gentle" heating. That data would guide the later detonations.
Just like the real president was completely sidelined in the early COVID reaction, she would be sidelined in the first days of this. Nobody would expect her to be a source of info on orbital mechanics. It would be made clear in the first week that China, France, India and Russia are each prepared to "fix" this with or without the USA, or each other. And everyone else would just be begging the rocket+nuke powers to use the UN to coordinate their plan.
I'm not saying that the movie can't take liberties with reality, especially if it's meant to be a roast of certain classes of people, like politicians, conspiracy theorists, anti-alarmists, etc. Fine, to some extent, I can pretend that these people can control the narrative in an especially unhinged way, even when I know they never could for a second. But here's what really really bothered me about the movie. I guess in America, we think that we are the only actors in the world. The countries of the kids table got together to do exactly one launch?? And it failed?? That's how much the billions of people in China, Europe, India, etc. were willing to invest in their own continued survival? One messed-up launch from Kazakhstan? Did they really not care because they thought "whatever, USA clearly got this"? I'm sorry, but I'm just seething about how myopic and culturally ignorant that is, and how people who review this movie are not screaming about this. I know this movie meant to point point fingers at the stupid politicians and tech capitalists, huh huh huh, yeah, they're the worst, right! But the movie itself is just reprehensible if it really tries to suggest that the people of the Earth are so fucking devoid of personal agency that they are like, eh, we just ride on the coattails of the USA, and if they let us down, then I guess we just accept death by fire. I mean, we're only like seven billion people. What could we possibly accomplish, being so thoroughly handicapped by our tragic non-Americanness? It's just so sad that everyone outside the USA is born with Tyrannosaurus arms and is so helpless that they basically have to wait around for Americans to save them. Seriously, how it is OK to make even a satire movie in 2021 whose plot depends on this characterization of foreigners?
I understood that launch was implied to be not failing, but being sabotaged/bombed by the US since they were all in on the tech CEO's plan. Might also explain why there weren't more launches, since soft pressure was enough to stop them, and they had to reach for the drones and long range missiles only once.
Then again I'm European, perhaps the US's reputation of a bloodthirsty global tyrant is not obvious inside the US.
I'm remembering this better now, and I suspect you're right. If that was implied, it's actually even worse, because it means according to the movie, literally every significant action that happens in the world is performed by Americans. Yes, we might be bad actors, but everyone else is a complete non-actor, and the fact they thought they might do something was just cute and silly.
I'd like someone to splice in a "happy" ending in which the comet is deflected, the Chinese premier gets on TV to announce that "we fixed it ourselves, you pathetic stooges," and then express his regret about the chunk that accidentally broke of and is tragically about to make a crater out of Washington DC.
As Bill Maher said, the Chinese are not a silly people.
How it would really have gone down, as already noted, is that the sensible people would have determined very early on that there was no possibility of diverting the comet, and gone on to do other things. Including but not limited to, hoping really hard that the braniacs had miscalculated and the comet was going to miss, praying real hard for God to stop the comet, partying like it's 1999, killing the people they hate most so the comet won't cheat them out of the chance, and digging mineshafts.
If we postulate a modestly changed scenario where it is possible to divert the comet, e.g. one where there's six years notice instead of six months, or one set far enough in the future that SpaceX has dozens of Starships in routine service, then that diversion effort will require A: bignum launches, not just one, and B: the active cooperation of the United States Government. The idea that you stop an extinction-level asteroid or comet impact with *one* super-special rocket is a Hollywood conceit, and the US really does have more of the relevant resources than everyone else in the world combined.
If you postulate a scenario where it's possible for other nations to stop the comet, then you're postulating 10+ years of warning time, in which case there's a full US election cycle before it's too late for the US to make a difference and that becomes a very different story.
Could I add 5) the culture war is really big, and Hollywood is now an active player in it, and art isn't a very good culture war weapon but propaganda is?
My expectations for art haven't gone down, but for Hollywood they have, severely
Among other things, Dr. Strangelove had *one* genuine villain, and maybe three people who could have made better decisions, but the basic premise was that we'd gotten ourselves in a corner where one highly-placed person going completely bugfuck nuts could kill us all(*), and then had basically everyone else doing their best to try and solve the problem but failing because the problem had been made insoluble. That's a lot more intuitively plausible than a story where literally everyone but the one or two protagonists is a complete idiot of one sort or another.
* Except for the ones in the mineshafts. Were there no mineshafts in this movie? Heck, there were mineshafts in "Seveneves", and that one dropped a whole lot more than a dinky 9-km comet on the Earth.
Spoiler alert! I have to finish the baroque cycle before I read Seveneves.
The existence of mineshafts is mentioned fairly early; it's an obvious thing for someone to at least try given the premise, so Stephenson mentions the people who try. I won't spoil anything about how they turn out.
The opening chapters of Seveneves make up an entire Chekhov's Arsenal. And the title for that matter.
I envy anyone who gets to read Seveneves for the first time. One of my absolute favorite books ever and Stephenson's best. You're in for a treat! (Also, don't worry about that spoiler above; it's trivial).
On your point about Seveneves being one of your favourite books, I have a question which is a huge spoiler so I'll ROT13:
V nofbyhgryl ybir gur svefg gjb guveqf bs gur obbx (gur ryrzragf frg va gur arne-shgher) ohg gur ynfg guveq (frg va gur sne shgher) frrzrq n uhtr jnfgr bs gvzr gb zr. V qvqa'g frr ubj vg pbaarpgrq jvgu nal bs gur gurzrf bs gur svefg ovg, naq V srry gur fgbel npghnyyl haqrezvarf n ybg bs gur grafvba bs gur fcnpr frpgvbaf ol erirnyvat gung npghnyyl gurer jrer abg Frira Rirf nsgre nyy. Va gehgu, V yvgrenyyl pbhyqa'g haqrefgnaq ubj gur ragver ynfg guveq bs gur obbx unq znqr vg cnfg na rqvgbe, fb gubebhtuyl qvq vg fcbvy zl rawblzrag bs gur svefg ovg.
Qvq lbh unir n qvssrerag rkcrevrapr bs gung ynfg guveq, svaqvat gung vg raunaprq lbhe rawblzrag? Be ner lbh fnlvat gung gur svefg gjb guveqf jrer fb zvaq-oybjvatyl tbbq gung n zrqvbper raqvat qvqa'g birenyy fuvsg lbhe raguhfvnfz sbe gur jbex? (V npghnyyl nterr gung Frirarirf vf bar bs zl snibhevgr obbxf bs nyy gvzr, rira qrfcvgr ubj zhpu V ungr gur raqvat)
V nyfb ybirq gur svefg gjb guveqf, ohg jnf qvfnccbvagrq rabhtu ol gur ynfg guveq gung vg fcbvyrq vg sbe zr -- vg jnf nyzbfg (ohg V nqzvg abg dhvgr) yvxr n guevyyre gung vf erfbyirq ol erirnyvat gung vg jnf nyy n qernz.
V pbzcyrgryl nterr, vs V pbhyq phg bhg gur ynfg guveq vg jbhyq or n gbc 5 erpbzzraqngvba sbe FpvSv. Vs V erpbzzraqrq vg gb fbzrbar V jbhyq ubarfgyl fnl "Gnyx gb zr nsgre gur svefg frpgvba raqf" naq gura fnl "Gur obbx vf bire, fgbc abj".
Lrnu, ohg zl bowrpgvba gb gur raqvat vf abg gung gurer jnf ernyyl nalguvat jebat jvgu vg ohg gung vg snvyrq gb qryvire gur cnlbss cebzvfrq. Jr frr gur urebrf pbcvat jvgu rfpnyngvat qvfnfgre, naq jr jnag gb frr gurz fnir gur qnl. Whzcvat gb 5000 gubhfnaq lrnef yngre jvgu n "Jurj, gung jnf pybfr" jnf onq, ohg whfg fgbccvat jbhyq unir orra jbefr.
Ohg jub nz V gb whqtr? V pna'g jevgr n abiry.
Crefbanyyl, V ernyyl rawblrq gur svany cneg. Gur ratvarrevat qrivfrq ol na beovgny pvivyvmngvba erqvfpbirevat gur cynarg, ohvyqvat zrtnfgehpgherf yvxr—V guvax ur pnyyrq vg Gube’f Unzzre?—gung pbhyq syvc qbja, teno fbzrbar, rwrpg onyynfg naq xrrc tbvat onpx vagb beovg naq gur “onfxrg” gung qebccrq qbja gb rdhngbevny fbpxrgf va gur cynarg V sbhaq snfpvangvat. Nyfb, gur pbaprcg bs n pvivyvmngvba fpneerq ol fbpvny zrqvn naq sbphfrq ba “uneq” grpuabybtl jnf n qryvtugshy gubhtug rkcrevzrag.
V irel zhpu nterr jvgu Qbpgbe Zvfg, gubhtu: gur raqvat qvqa’g ernyyl jenc hc nalguvat. Vg npghnyyl raqf ba n tvnag pyvssunatre! V nyfb jnfa'g vairfgrq va gur punenpgref be gur bhgpbzr; V whfg sbhaq vg vagryyrpghnyyl vagrerfgvat. V ybbx ng vg yvxr n fhcre-rcvybthr. Vs lbh jnagrq n yvggyr tyvzcfr vagb ubj gur Frira Rirf erperngrq uhzna pvivyvmngvba, urer jnf lbhe yvggyr tyvzcfr. Ohg orpnhfr Fgrcurafba pna’g or oevrs, lbh npghnyyl raq hc jvgu n ovt tyvzcfr gung’f onfvpnyyl n obahf abiry—nyy sbe cevpr bs bar obbx!
Gur raqvat qvqa’g gnxr njnl nalguvat sbe zr, ohg V nyfb frr ubj crbcyr pbhyq svaq vg hafngvfslvat. V qvq yvxr xabjvat gung vg jnfa’g nyy sbe anhtug—gung gurl npghnyyl qvq fheivir rabhtu gb erohvyq pvivyvmngvba, naq gung Qvanu’f Qnq’f vqrn jbexrq nf jryy. Rira gubhtu gurer jnf n fgebat vzcyvpngvba gung yvsr va gung zvar ghearq bhg gb or engure uryyvfu, fb qvq yvsr sbe gur Nexvrf.
Gur svfu-crbcyr cybg yvar pnzr gbgnyyl bhg bs yrsg svryq. Vg’f n pbby vqrn gung jbhyq unir orra sha gb rkcyber, ohg gura jr’er ybbxvat ng rira n ybatre obbx V thrff. Hygvzngryl, gubhtu, V guvax V pbhyq yvir sbe n ybat gvzr va Fgrcurafba’f zvaq rawblvat zlfrys. Rira gur fghss gung qbrfa’g dhvgr unat gbtrgure vf fb qnzarq vagevthvat V pna’g fgbc guvaxvat nobhg vg. V jnag gb tb erernq guvf obbx abj. :)
Lrnu, V thrff gung'f n snve cbvag. Vg jnf fhcre vagrerfgvat, va n "irel-ybat-rcvybthr" jnl. V qrsvavgryl rawblrq ernqvat gung cneg, ohg vg ybfg gur qenzngvp grafvba sebz gur znva puhax. Vagrerfgvatyl V guvax gung vs vg jnf n pyrneyl-ynoryrq "rcvybthr" gung vg jbhyq unir sryg terng. Vg jbhyq unir sryg yvxr n ybj-fgnxrf jenc-hc jurer V pbhyq whfg or rkpvgrq ol gur pbby fpvraprl guvatf naq fgbel guernqf orvat gvrq bss, jvgu n pyrne rkcrpgngvba gung V jbhyqa'g ernyyl pner nobhg be rzcnguvmr jvgu terngk250 tenaqpuvyq bs gur punenpgref V qvq.
Gunaxf sbe lbhe pbzzragf!
V'yy nterr jvgu gur guveq cneg orvat n wneevat punatr sebz gur svefg gjb. Gb or snve, V jvyy fnl gung V rawblrq vg - ohg vg arrqrq gb or n frpbaq abiry. Va snpg, gur ortvaavat bs n frpbaq abiry.
VVEP Fgrcurafba rkcerffrq vagrerfg va jevgvat zber fgbevrf va gung gvzryvar, naq V'z vagrerfgrq va ernqvat gurz vs ur qbrf. Nygubhtu, V jbhyq ernyyl, ernyyl yvxr gb frr zber bs gur Svefg Gjragl Lrnef gbyq.
Cnpvat: rira gur frpbaq guveq unq ceboyrzf, vs V'z pbagvahvat gb or snve. Ntnva, nf V erpnyy, gur abiry fgnegf jvgu znlor gur orfg teno V'ir rire ernq, gura tbrf snveyl pbagvahbhfyl guebhtu gur arkg ebhtuyl gjragl zbaguf be fb, guebhtu gur svefg naq frpbaq guveqf. Jr frr fghss unccra ng yrnfg bapr rirel srj jrrxf, hc guebhtu Juvgr Fxl, hagvy gur urebrf urne onpx sebz gur pbzrg perj. Gura gurer'f n gvzr whzc bire gur gevc gb ernpu vg, nsgre juvpu zber fghss unccraf sbe gur arkg srj zbaguf, raqvat jvgu gurz erwbvavat gur fgngvba naq fbzr fphssyvat. Gura pbzrf nabgure guerr-lrne whzc va gur cybg nf gurl yvsg rirelguvat gb yhane beovg, orsber jr erghea gb zber fphssyvat naq gur zbfg uneebjvat zretr vagb genssvp va uhzna uvfgbel, naq svanyyl ynaqvat, naq gur svany erpxbavat jr trg gb frr nzbat gubfr punenpgref.
Rira vs jr cergraq cneg guerr jnf n ybat-njnvgrq frdhry rneyl qensg gung tbg yrnxrq vagb gur nccraqvk, cneg gjb unq gbb znal tncf jurer V sryg zber fgbel orybatrq. Frireny punenpgref V terj gb pner nobhg raqrq hc jvgu ynpxyhfgre raqf gb gurve nepf, naq V pna'g rira ernq vagb gubfr noehcg raqvatf nf n pbzzragnel ba gur tenaq gurzrf bs gur cybg. Naq va ng yrnfg n srj pnfrf, gubfr tncf arprffvgngrq fbzr rkcbfvgvba juvpu V sryg ivbyngrq gur "fubj, qba'g gryy" cevapvcyr bs fgbelgryyvat.
V'z urnevat nobhg n cyna gb znxr n svyz bhg bs guvf, naq juvyr V yvxr gur crbcyr vaibyirq, V xrrc ubcvat vg'yy or n zvavfrevrf vafgrnq bs gelvat gb penz guvf rcvp fntn vagb gjb ubhef. Bgurejvfr vg'yy or n znwbe zvenpyr vs gur svyz znantrf gb pbeerpg gur synjf va gur obbx juvyr fgvyy birepbzvat gur hfhny obbx-gb-svyz punyyratrf.
> That's a lot more intuitively plausible than a story where literally everyone but the one or two protagonists is a complete idiot of one sort or another.
And yet here we are.
There is at least talk about mineshafts in the movie. We can't allow a mineshaft gap!
And of course, in Dr. Strangelove, doom is ultimately delivered by one set of protagonists (the flight crew) being remarkably COMPETENT. Every system involved delivering a thermonuclear explosion to the northern Soviet Union worked exactly as it was meant to, a skilled crew overcame significant hardship, an Air Force officer willingly sacrificed his life to complete the mission.
Competent, courageous, and *sensible*. Because of bad/insane decisions elsewhere, Kong and company are lead to reasonably believe that the United States of America is under nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. They have no reason to believe that the Soviet Union has a "doomsday device". Cut off from communication, they decide to A: carry out their orders to destroy a Soviet ICBM base, and B: when that is no longer possible, attack a different Soviet ICBM base that they can reach.
Absent the silly secret doomsday device, these are the actions that would minimize the expected loss of innocent life, undertaken at the near-certain cost of their own lives.
> That's a lot more intuitively plausible than a story where literally everyone but the one or two protagonists is a complete idiot of one sort or another.
I feel like this is still missing the point. Sorry to say, but everyone is a complete idiot outsides the subjects that interest them (sometimes even in those actually). Everyone being a bit of an idiot when it comes to one-very-hundred-million-year events is perfectly plausible.
People downplaying scientific warnings because science communication has been so bad the past few decades, and large financial interests have poisoned the well of factual discourse, is also perfectly plausible.
I honestly don't see what's so implausible about basic structure of the movie, aside from the usual artistic license. Are people just being too literal in this case for some reason?
Dr. Strangelove is a great example, both of good satire and of how bad contemporary satire has become. I have come to think that one reason is simply an unwillingness to take risks. To make good satire, you have to be willing to straddle the line that separates acceptable from unacceptable and take the risk that someone might take you seriously in your apostasy.
To be an artist/journalist/politician today is largely a function of superserving your ingroup. You can challenge your audience, but only in one direction. The demands of career preservation mean that creators can't do anything that might have them mistaken for the outgroup. The result is that most contemporary satire is full of moments when the creator is loudly signaling their adherence to the right side.
It's notable that Kubrick spent his life living far away from Hollywood in a rural English cottage.
Chidwickbury Manor a cottage? It has its own Wikipedia page: "The Manor House, mainly 18th century has 12 Reception Rooms, 18 Bed and Dressing Rooms, 11 Staff Bedrooms, and 10 Bathrooms."
It's not Hollywood (or in a few places favored by the beautiful people), so it's in the sticks.
There are no people so provincial as jetsetting movie people.
Point noted. But I was not trying to imply that Kubrick lived in a small or modest house. Indeed, it was an estate. I was alluding to the fact that he located himself far from the traditional center of the movie industry.
It's the heart of the British movie industry. 10 miles from Leavesden Studios (Harry Potter) and maybe twice as far from Pinewood (James Bond).
Regarding Panama_Canal's comment: well the assumption is that the earth would be inhospitable to life for millions of years after the asteroid event. The oceans would have dried up, and things in general would be really crap. Them finding another earth-like planet is a perfectly fine plan
No, that's not what happens after a plausible cometary impact. Boiling off the oceans takes a *lot* more than that. The Dinosaur Killer killed the dinosaur by basically blotting out the sun with soot and dust for a few years or maybe decades, so that only a few scraggly plants would grow and anything whose diet required more than A: a few scraggly plants or B: a few small animals of the sort that could survive on a few scraggly plants, would starve.
*Full* recovery from Chicxulub required about ten million years, because Earth had to evolve a whole lot of new species to fill the empty niches. But in terms of having a place where humans can walk around in the open, breathe the air and drink the water, grow whatever crops they packed seeds for, and live long healthy lives with no worries about being eaten by large predators, ten thousand years would have been more than enough.
Agree. 10,000 years ago, the place where I live was under about a mile of ice. It's fairly nice now.
If you want to read a planet destroying space event where humanity has to escape to space only to return thousands of years later there's Seveneves
I took the whole spaceship-cryosleep-was-successful thing as an after-credits joke that's _meant to be_ far more fanciful than the rest of the movie.
As far as the concept of the escape spaceship itself goes, I think it's meant to illustrate that in the event of a not-humanity-ending threat, those most likely to survive will be the wealthiest, most powerful, best connected. That's not a particularly new moral in fiction, but it was still done very well IMO.
"Well, that would not be necessary Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years."
- Dr Strangelove & President Merkin Muffley
"Doctor, you mentioned the ration of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?"
"Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature"
- General Buck Turgidson & Dr Strangelove
> those most likely to survive will be the wealthiest, most powerful, best connected.
They also made it clear with all the gratuitous butt shots that they'd be uniformly geriatric.
I see "billionaires want to escape the planet in their spaceships and leave the rest of us to die from climate catastrophe!" a little too often to read the scene that blandly.
Ditto.
"I took the whole spaceship-cryosleep-was-successful thing as an after-credits joke that's _meant to be_ far more fanciful than the rest of the movie."
Right. It's just a variant on a comic trope from The Simpsons and Tracey Ullman in the 1990s, and probably goes back to some serious sci-fi show long before that.
22,740 years later... While watching I assumed that was from Earth's perspective and that time dilation meant they were only in cryosleep for like 25 years?
If they were going 90% of c is that 10,000 subjective years? How long did it take for the earth to calm down to pleasant levels after the dinosaurs?
How would you decelerate from whatever absurd speed that suggests, though?
Presumably the same way you accelerated up to it in the first place?
If you're in space you need reaction mass. If you're accelerating to .9c that's a LOT of reaction mass, but you could, say, have some type of space station or other device to provide you the boost you need. If you're accelerating to .9c and THEN decelerating? That's a ridiculous amount of reaction mass, and you have to carry it with you.
Whatever technology they used, it's safe to say that if you have a spaceship that's capable of doing it then using the same spaceship to deflect the comet should be trivial.
I forget the story, but Larry Niven wrote two analogies that I recall that illustrate the perils of assuming Better Technology A necessarily implies more success at even pretty closely-related Problem B, viz.: (1) How fast could a Greyhound bus have crossed North America in 1830? (2) What would a circling 747 have been able to do to help the sinking Titanic in 1912?
Point being, the technological solutions to problems landscape isn't smooth and differentiable, in part because technologies hang together in complex ways with various forms of social infrastructure, so it's not infrequently the case that it's not possible to extrapolate even a small distance across that landscape.
Other illustrations: we mastered nuclear fusion in principle in 1952, but we are still waiting for the steady-state power-generating kind, and the most promising approaches take a radically different path (high temperature rather than high density) than bombs. Who would have guessed that the biggest immediate impact of the PCR would be in...criminology? Rather than individualized medicine, say, or selecting the characteristics of offspring, on both of which we're still kind of waiting.
"still waiting for"
maybe not
https://www.space.com/china-artificial-sun-fusion-reactor-five-times-hotter-than-the-sun
Mag sails.
But I don't get any sense that the spaceship in the final scene was traveling at relativistic speeds.
Haven't watched the movie, but I doubt time dilation would be a factor. If you accelerate to the point where time dilation makes a significant difference, you also increase the rest mass of the ship to the point where even total conversion of the ship to energy won't help./
Significant time dilation really only happens to things that have been accelerated by an external force.
Which means the passengers would have been in cryosleep for almost all of that period - and are able to be revived. Which might as well be magic from the current state of the art (rather like the starship able to last that long, but details, details...).
> Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3
Chelyabinsk also caused pretty substantial damage, over a hundred people ended up in the hospital from the broken glass. And there's some fun theories that the Great Tianqi Explosion in 1646 (thousands killed, square mile of city leveled) was caused by a meteor airburst.
I was on my way to post this link. Worth pointing out for people too lazy to click that this event was very likely the historical basis for the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The article also mentions Abu Hureyra, a prehistoric settlement destroyed in a similar manner. This one is less interesting only because it didn't leave any written records nor traces in oral legends (as far as we can tell).
Specifically, we know it is the historical basis for Sodom and Gomorrah because they found Lot's wife.
I hear this paper has serious problems. Here is Scott Manley on the matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0h4QNt4FLE (Also, see the comments.)
From reading the Wikipedia articles alone, the events of 1490 and 1626 in China seem a lot more plausible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion (a.k.a. "Great Tianqi Explosion")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1490_Ch'ing-yang_event
Some people have suggested that the Peshtigo Fire, Great Chicago Fire, and Great Michigan Fires, all of which started on Oct 8, 1871, were caused by meteor showers.
Other people say that this is obvious nonsense - meteorites are cold by the time they hit the ground.
I still think you're wrong, and I also think bringing it into this post's comments too crosses the line to obnoxious enough that I've got to ban you.
Not saying you're wrong to do it, but I'm gonna miss that guy.
I won't.
Ditto.
Yeah, no, good riddance.
Yeah, I'll never understand his inexplicable enthusiasm for the 80s pop stylings of Richard Marx. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_E2EHVxNAE
I don't know enough about the context to comment on what marxbro said previously, but I want to mention that if they believed your previous article contained a factual inaccuracy, it seems reasonable to me for them to bring it up again here. I do the same when I see an error in something I'm reading; I want to minimize the number of people who come away misinformed, so it makes sense to post a correction in as many (relevant) places as possible.
I'm not denying that they're obnoxious in other ways, but I don't think bringing the conversation to this thread should add to their obnoxiousness rating.
He's been bringing up the alleged error literally for years, and other commenters have discussed it in the comments of dozens if not hundreds of articles by now. There is, let's say, considerable disagreement over whether the points he alleges constitute genuine errors (and my position is that there are at the very least strong enough arguments on the "no" side that intellectual honesty does not oblige Scott to acknowledge it as an error; whether Marxbro should be written off as entirely talking out his ass on the subject is more of an open question.)
When he fails to convince other commenters, he falls back on repeating himself ad infinitum. And the "ad infinitum" is much more literal in his case than most, since this has constituted dozens, maybe sometimes hundreds of comments *per article* averaging several articles a month for years, and he's showed no inclination to stop any time soon.
well, now there's a streisand effect, because naturally reading this one is curious as to what his reapeated argument actually is.
It's that Scott made a mistake about Marxism and won't admit it.
I don't think anyone, even marxbro, remembers what he thinks Scott was wrong about, but he's angry Scott won't admit he was wrong.
My immediate reaction was "oh thank god," but there's an identifiable, non-god person here, so thank you.
I know there are some people who profess to enjoy Marxbro's engagement, but I strongly suspect he's a deliberate troll, and even if not, I find his involvement not only toxic to productive discourse, but so frustrating that I've found it's better for my mental well-being to simply avoid any discussion he participates in entirely. I'm honestly kind of shocked that he wasn't banned immediately as soon as the capability to do so was implemented.
He reminds me of several “long-form trolls” I've known, met, and even befriended in one memorable case.
The insight I have to share is that they are, in fact, entirely convinced they are in the right. Insofar as they would describe themselves as trolls, they wound probably frame it as “trolling with the truth”.
long overdue ban IMO. marxbro's presence make the comments noticeably worse on almost every single ACX post.
Thanks, thanks, thanks for banning them! It was one of more annoying accounts.
Contrary to the other commenters, I hope the ban isn't permanent. Marxbro may be mean and annoying, but I personally doubt it's deliberate. I feel like they have been getting better lately, and it's very rare to see an actual, bona fide Marxist sincerely engage with something outside of their bubble.
Also, it seems to me that marxbro usually gets responses that are just as mean, but also rather uncharitable on top of that. Admittedly, I don't read the comment section of the blog very often, so maybe they haven't had quite as much time to get under my skin, but I can't help but feel as if getting rid of them would be a vaguely un-rationalist thing to do.
If there were any way of resolving this objectively, I would legitimately be prepared to bet thousands of dollars against "I don't think it's deliberate." I am the type of person who has to exert significant willpower not to feed trolls, and I engaged with him personally on a number of occasions, and assuming bad faith does not come naturally to me. But having followed his engagement across hundreds and hundreds of comments, I am by this point pretty certain that if he's not deliberately trolling, he's legitimately mentally ill.
I absolutely disagree that it is un-rationalist to want to ban him. I think that he's long been taking advantage of exactly that impulse to engage in extended nerd-sniping.
https://xkcd.com/356/
Being vulnerable to deliberate nerd-sniping is not a rationalist virtue.
If you have rules, you need to enforce them.
Also: https://siderea.livejournal.com/1230660.html
He’s been banned multiple times over several years on multiple Scott-adjacent forums. If there was a genuine desire to “get better” it would have happened already.
Marxbro is either a highly-dedicated troll or someone who combines a highly dogmatic adherence to Marxism with a total inability (or refusal) to comprehend any viewpoint that is not his own. As others have pointed out, he has been banned multiple times across this section of the blogosphere for this exact same behavior. Is it adherent to the morals of liberalism to ban someone for the crime of persistently being an annoying and daft Communist, or for holding an entirely different conversation than the one you're having? No, but this isn't Parliament or the floor of Congress, this is a comments section. Banning someone for lowering the quality of discourse or tone is fine.
This is one of the funniest comments I've ever read.
I also hope it isn’t permanent, but I do think that some ban was deserved. Usually marxbro only appears if you mention anything related to communism, and since nothing related to communism was mentioned here, he probably shouldn’t have made the post
>Usually marxbro only appears if you mention anything related to communism
Not at all the case in my experience. For years now, he's been starting countless comment threads in the vein of "how can people take Scott seriously on (completely unrelated subject) when he hasn't even acknowledged his errors regarding Marx?"
I do think his ban should be permanent, and I'm shocked that it's taken this long.
To Marxbro, EVERYTHING is related to Communism, not in the least because anyone who hasn't acknowledged how everything in Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto is objectively correct is clearly a fool.
Someone who characterizes right-wing populism and radical libertarianism as establishment because only Communism is anti-establishment has political blinkers on that are so immense that they can't have any meaningful political conversations that don't devolve into endlessly repeating dogma- and anyone who's observed Marxbro's activity will notice this is exactly what happens.
Thank you
I'm biased, of course, but it was nice to see a lone marcher waving the red flag in a comment section (and on a blogging platform, arguably) that skews heavily the other way, even if his single-mindedness and lack of social nous drove me up the wall sometimes.
I'm pretty sure that he was a deliberate troll; I'm less sure, but still strongly suspect, that he was actively trying to make communists look bad. The lengths he went to in some comment threads to argue that there is no legitimate basis to believe that North Korea is not a nice place to live, I think is the strongest point of evidence in favor.
Even if he wasn't doing it on purpose, I honestly think Communism would be better represented in the comments with *no* commenters arguing in its favor than with only him arguing in favor.
> If you think everyone but Bernie Sanders is a corrupt hack that knows nothing,
I must note how hilarious is that a person who has been in politics since 1970s and achieved nothing much except for owning three houses, is the example of an exception from general rule of politicians being corrupt hacks that know nothing.
Less of this, please. I think there's a decent case for Sanders having achieved a lot, and I also think this is especially inflammatory and provocative.
The social acceptability of attacking a politician is proportional to how correct, fair, and justified the attack is, not which party it is attacking. The parent post about Bernie is just weird and gratuitous, and it makes perfect sense not to condone it.
(Incidentally I feel like this answer -- "well see the difference is in the specifics" -- is the correct reply to all what-about-ism, which this is.)
I don't like Sanders's politics, not at all, but it seemed lame to bring it up here where we're not discussing it.
I'd be interested to know what's "a lot" that he achieved. I mean things that wouldn't happen without him, and that actually happened. Reading about his career I see a lot of railing against things that happened anyway (like tax cuts) and for things that never happened (like auditing the Fed), and occasional agreement with the left agenda item that also had support of the whole Dem party so his role was just +1 on the vote count. Maybe a couple of successful amendments, but really singling him out as a paragon of success is a bit much.
Now I recognize that it's a rather high standard to apply to a politician, and significant part of them wouldn't clear it - but if he's singled out as the only politician not being a hack, the high bar is appropriate.
TBH, I am not particularly upset about this - in fact, as a survivor of socialism, I wish Bernie a long, healthy life, full of political failure and disappointment in every possible way - I just find it strange he is being lauded as the best politician ever.
I would also be interested in hearing if he achieved anything of note in his career! I wasn't alive for much of it and I'm not an American, so it wouldn't especially surprise me to learn he did - perhaps at the state level, which seems more tractable to things getting done in general?
Oh I dunno, I think Sanders deservers a nontrivial amount of credit for preventing the election of Hillary Clinton. That's definitely a substantial achievement.
What makes you believe he does? He campaigned for her during the general.
Because the personally well-disliked Clinton relied on a lesser-evil strategy to get over the top (i.e. reach 50% + 1 from her starting base of actual enthusiasts, which was well below that). Sanders (1) gave a focal point for a young educated demographic on the left who thought Clinton too cynical and corupt, and, when he lost the nomination in a process held in contempt as rigged by many of his followers, that drained their enthusiasm for the eventual nominee; and (2) crystallized fears among an older demographic on the center-left[1] that the Democratic Party had lurched to the college-sophomore left, more concerned with cultural totems than a chicken in every pot working-class economic issues, and drove them into the arms of Trump (which they regretted in 2020, as it turned out, but too late to help Clinton). In short, a classic spoiler, like Ross Perot in 1992 only on a smaller scale.
---------------
[1] Exactly the demographic that to everyone's surprise put Trump over the top in 2016 and to everyone's surprise again abandoned him in 2020: older non-college-educated suburban and exurban white men, more or less the spiritual heirs of Reagan Democrats or Truman lunch-pail Democrats.
Well, this is an angle I did not consider, but I am not sure you can call it a "success" and promote him to best politician ever. Not that I am not appreciating his role in keeping Hillary from power, to anybody who aided that America owes an enormous debt of gratitude, but I think unwittingly temporarily saving America still does not qualify one as the best politician ever. Maybe we can get him some kind of participation trophy? "At least you tried" medal or something.
I guess if you were a Bernie fan, you could say he has pushed the Overton Window a bit wider for the left. I don't find this particularly laudible, personally, because making a case for policies that are slightly outside the mainstream isn't terribly difficult if you've got half-decent rhetorical skills, and it's not like he flipped Tennessee from red to Red, if you take my meaning--he's in a pretty safe seat--but nonetheless, I could see somebody on the left considering this valuable.
My sense is that this is exactly what the Bernie fans find so laudable. If you start from the premise that most institutions in the US are controlled by an oligarchy that is impoverishing the working class and preventing the development of rich, social-democratic institutions, the best you can hope for from a politician is that they draw attention to this, articulate a vision for what the country could be like without oligarchic control, and try to build a coalition to challenge the oligarchy. I think it's clear that by those standards, Bernie Sanders is the most successful politician in America. The only real competitor is Donald Trump, if you buy his particular vision of which oligarchic elite is controlling American democracy.
I don't see the country this way and don't have a particularly high opinion of Bernie Sanders, but I don't think it's a totally unreasonable perspective.
Could you explain what corruption Bernie Sanders engaged in, that caused him to own three houses? Your comment seems to imply he acquired them in a corrupt manner, which I would be interested to learn about.
His wife's time running Burlington College was pretty corrupt, and I suppose her income got merged in with his. I can't think of anything he did though.
Lifelong politician having a lot of money is always suspect. Lifelong politician arguing nobody should have the kind of money he has is doubly suspect. But that's theory.
We can see some specifics:
1. Sanders appointed his wife to various positions of influence and paid her salary while he was mayor of Burlington
2. Sanders funneled a lot of campaign money into a media company which was owned by his family
3. His endorsement of other candidates was curiously linked to the fact that they used his wife's company to manage media affairs
4. His presidential campaign funds were funneled through another murky company that was run by his wife's associates
5. His wife was appointed a head of Burlington College thanks to Sander's political position. The college proceeded to hire his daughter to run woodworking school, and paid her over half a million dollars. She also secured some very expensive loans to the college, which FBI investigated on suspicion that she was trading on her husband's influence, but as is almost always happens, they could prove nothing. She was fired shortly afterwards, taking another $200K as severance, and the college collapsed several years later.
By the standards of American politicians, this is nothing special - some politicians have the baggage way worse than that, and one can't certainly single him out as being the most corrupt one - he's probably pretty average in this regard, maybe even less than average (he doesn't seem to inside trade, for example, which a lot of congressmen do). But as a shining beacon towering alone in a sea of political corruption - doesn't look exactly that.
> Lifelong politician having a lot of money is always suspect
Sanders has been a congressman since 1991. Congress has an annual income of $174k (in the past the nominal salary was lower, but the inflation adjusted salary was higher)
With a good bit of saving from that and his previous jobs, combined with some sound investment, if is not at all unrealistic that Sanders would be able to scrape enough money together to buy three houses through complety non-corrupt means.
Except that the whole concept Sanders promotes is based on the premise that it is impossible to become a millionaire by "sound investment, savings and scraping enough money", there's always something wrong with the fact that millionaires exist, and Sanders is literally on record railing against people having too many houses. Of course, since then "millionaire" turned to "billionaire", and "too many houses" now is more than three (and if in the future he buys the fourth one, the limit will be adjusted accordingly).
Billionaires, not millionaires. Millionaires are fairly common now due to inflation.
Sanders spoke specifically about millionaires - and millionaire politicians - being immoral. Sure, there was some inflation, but not *that* much. He did it as late as 2015 at least. There wasn't so much inflation between 2015 and 2020 to make becoming a millionaire a mere trifle.
So why he switched to shaming billionaires only? Very simple, he became a millionaire himself. You want to argue he did it through frugality, hard work and smart life decisions? Fine. I would say it's not all he had, and access to distributing public funds helped quite a bit - but let's set this aside for a moment and assume you're right. That means he himself is a primary example of the whole concept he has built his political life on being wrong. As a candidate for the best politician evar, it's a very poor (what's the opposite of "pun"?) candidate. As an example of a "political hack", it's practically begging to be put in a dictionary.
That's him raving about proliferation of millionaires in billionaires: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4692018/user-clip-sanders-millionaires-billionaires - months away from becoming millionaire himself (or maybe he already was, we just didn't know it then). Did he do anything about childhood poverty, when he got these cool millions, or did he buy a third house? I mean if he bought his first, sure, even a socialist must have a roof over his head. But I am pretty sure people survived in America with mere two houses.
I don't think America's problems are anybody's personal fault, neither millionaires not billionaires, and if a guy earned his money by honest means, he is entitled to do with them as he very well pleases. But when I see a politician shaming everybody about not fixing child poverty and then getting some chunk of cash and turns out fixing child poverty is way below on his priority list than having three houses - yes, I'd call such person a "political hack" and a hypocrite.
Plus he made a ton of money off of his book. I personally find pocketing the money you make selling a campaign book a little unseemly, especially when you're asking low-income people to give you money to fund your campaign, but it's not corrupt.
If you mean "not criminal" - for sure. But if you're a guy who says nobody should be rich, and money should be forcefully taken from people who are too rich, and then you write a book, take a cool couple of millions of dollars from your supporters for it, and buy a third house - I'd say this looks almost like a hack. I mean as a non-socialist, I am happy for him, and while there are a lot of corrupt "book deals", I have no reason to assume Bernie's one of this kind, but the problem is *he* is a socialist.
I'm pretty sympathetic to this perspective. I definitely agree with you that I find it counter to Bernie's stated ideals to buy himself a house with the money he made from his book, rather than use the money to further his political cause in some way (I think he gave some of it to charity, but a small amount). I especially feel this way since people were buying the book to support his candidacy and/or to understand his candidacy, not just because he happened to write a very good explanation of his philosophy. It feels to me like a way of profiting off of his political position at the expense of his supporters.
All that said, I also understand why his supporters are willing to accept this from him. Part of what I understand you to be saying is that the problem here is hypocrisy: it's fine for Newt Gingrich to profit off of his campaign book, because he's a capitalist, but it's not okay for Bernie Sanders to do the same thing because he's a socialist. The consequence of this is to make being a socialist politician a lot less pleasant than being any other kind of politician. It means that Bernie is expected to spend decades in the Senate, around people who are openly accepting opportunities enrich themselves with little to no negative consequence, while passing up the trappings of an upper-middle-class life himself. It's not unreasonable to worry that this would lead a lot of politicians to decide not to be socialists anymore.
So, if you're a socialist who worries about government corruption, you might be willing to say: I'm going to accept my candidates enriching themselves in the least harmful ways, as long as they still avoid the most corrupt and harmful ways of enriching themselves. And you might see selling your book to your supporters as the least harmful and least corrupting way to get rich, since it's out in the open and it doesn't involve taking money from powerful interests.
I should also note that Bernie's perspective is slightly more complicated than "nobody should be rich." When he was mayor, he worked closely with local business leaders and told them, basically, that he has no problem with small-scale capitalists, only with billionaires and other large-scale capitalists. I don't know if he's ever criticized someone else for getting modestly wealthy by writing a successful book.
Yeah, the fact that he's done this while repeatedly demonizing people whose personal wealth exceeds a certain somewhat-arbitrarily-chosen number and positioning himself as a champion of the working class is what really rubs me the wrong way. Come to do good, stay to do well?
the "3 houses" are:
- the smallest DC townhome I've ever seen, and I lived there for 8 years. it looks like it's about 20 feet wide
- a very normal suburban-style home in Vermont
- a lake cabin
Bernie Sanders, who has worked for thirty years in the legislature of the most wealthy nation in the history of the planet, lives the lifestyle of a reasonably successful dentist. Personally, I don't see any credible case there for allegations of corruption or hypocracy.
How many Ameircans, on average, have three houses? How many of non-millionaire Americans (which do not include Sanders anymore) have three houses? I know I don't, and I am part of the society that socialists probably would call "the rich" (I would disagree) and tax until my nose bleeds, but I don't have three houses. I don't have a lake cabin either. I suspect most of poor and middle-class Americans do not have lake cabins. And if somebody thinks the lifestyle of a reasonably successful dentist is immoral and repeatedly publicly announces it and raises millions on the promise to make it impossible - yes, living the same lifestyle for him is hypocrisy.
Where I live and where I grew up, it was not remotely uncommon for people to have modest vacation properties (granted, the locals didn't have 'em--but the people who did have them were dentist-tier upper-middle class people from the cities who liked to fish or deer hunt). It wasn't even uncommon in the *Soviet Union*, to the point where they have a special word for it that is relatively well known in English (dacha).
A third house, of course, is more atypical for those who are not truly rich, which is why this line is so popular despite becoming pretty risible with a little research, but it's also extremely atypical for people to have a career that requires a person to live for extended periods in two completely different places. And, seriously, man, look at the dang thing: https://www.washingtonian.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/berniesanders.jpg
I do not believe that Sanders has said, or believes, that professionals who make their money off wages and maybe some light investments in retirement accounts are not allowed to live upper-middle-class lifestyles, particularly in the latter part of their lives. There's also no evidence that he intends himself to be exempt from any of taxation schemes he proposes.
Again, I personally have zero problem with dentist-tier upper-middle class people and wish them to buy as many houses as their hard work and luck would allow. But I am not the top, most prominent socialist in the US, who is repeatedly on record saying "millionaires" are immoral - Sanders is. He has to answer for that.
The mention of "dacha" is interesting here. Dachas served a dual function in the USSR. One was to reward the elite with a house away from the big city's annoyances, away from prying eyes, where the elite's thurst for luxury could be fully realized without coming into the contradiction with the image of "servants of the people". You can't have a golden toilet in your official office - but you could in your dacha, if you wanted to. This tradition is still alive and well - look up the reports of insanely luxurious residences of Putin and his top henchmen. They try to conceal it, but people have ways of finding out. You can start looking it up by keyword "Rublyovka".
The second function, drastically different, is to cover up for a failure of the Party to supply the people with the most basic nutrition. Highly urbanized soviet population had scarce access to most basic things, like potatoes, vegetables, fruit, etc. To alleviate that, the urban office dwellers were given a small plot of land, about 6K sqft - with strict limitations on how it could be used - and told to grow some produce by themselves, spending their weekends and vacation time on that. Bonus if one or more members of the family is recently retired - still healthy enough for garden work and has a lot of free time now!
Of course, USSR has no "upper middle class" as such, at least not legally, so you had to fit into one of these categories. Techically speaking, Sanders fits into neither, but on the substance, I think the former would be much more fitting.
> I do not believe that Sanders has said
You can believe it or not, that's your business, but Sanders repeatedly - from 1970s to at least 2015s - criticized "millionaires" as being morally reprehensible for not contributing into solving society's problems. Whether or not he intends to pay the future taxes is immaterial here - if he thought the moral thing to do, once becoming a millionaire, is to contribute the money to solving society's problems, why after becoming a multi-millionaire he didn't do just that? He doesn't need IRS involvement for that - of course, 2-3 millions won't fix child poverty all over America, but I'm sure they could make at least some impact for some people.
Simply not an accurate representation of Sander's (or socialism's, for that matter) statements or beliefs.
If the USA empties its nuclear arsenal diverting an asteroid, it no longer has a nuclear deterrent. What could possibly go wrong!
You can't deter anybody if you're dead, though.
There would be no-one to deter.
Now *that* would be a funny movie!
So the claim that “no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history.” May not actually be true, archeological evidence suggests that at least one city in the near east was wiped out be an asteroid around 1600 BC:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/fernandezelizabeth/2021/09/23/a-massive-meteor-may-have-destroyed-the-biblical-city-of-sodom/?sh=4a110fba5826
It would appear that the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah was based on an asteroid strike of Sodom, which completely destroyed the city, melted everything and everyone in it (the fact that everything is melted is what first caught people’s attention) and did damage as far as Jericho.
Rip, someone lower down beat me to it. Glad I’m not the only one who thought of this though
If no historians recorded it, does it count as recorded history?
I mean, the destruction of Sodom was recorded, the Bible doesn’t use the word asteroid, but “fire from heaven” seems pretty close. Not to mention that the asteroid, for reasons discussed in the article, likely caused salt to rain down on the surrounding lands, which is also recorded.
There's also a theory that the explosion at the Wanggongchang Armory in 17th century Beijing that reportedly killed tens of thousands was caused by a bolide. Dunno how seriously to take it. Presumably lots of other things could cause a gunpowder stockpile to explode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanggongchang_Explosion#Bolide
Half-assed theory I thought up a few minutes ago:
Chinese scholars at the time knew what a bolide looked like, and claimed it looked like that in order to push the "judgement of Heaven" narrative.
The bolide theory is just a coverup for a lab accident at the Wanggongchang Armory. Wake up sheeple.
The account that Tell el-Hammam is Sodom or was even destroyed by an object from space is heavily disputed.
In short, a lot of their evidence seems to be misinterpreted and according to experts the evidence they present is not as unique as it seems to a layperson and is not indicative of an extraordinarily violent event such as the claimed airburst. Some of the photo evidence they presented they've subsequently admitted was minorly photoshopped, but even that calls the whole thing into question.
For more detail:
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/10/01/criticism-engulfs-paper-claiming-an-asteroid-destroyed-biblical-sodom-and-gomorrah/
And from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28717721:
https://twitter.com/ChrisStantis/status/1440404380386160646
https://twitter.com/petrabonegirl/status/1440833392006688768
https://twitter.com/FlintDibble/status/1440416847841546247
https://twitter.com/MTB_Archaeology/status/14404733356876308...
https://twitter.com/elleryfrahm/status/1440510054369677314
https://twitter.com/NErbSatullo/status/1440615036691501059
https://twitter.com/MichaelDPress/status/1440654636705140747
Thanks for this.
edit: for the interested, here's a link to a Skeptical Inquirer article about the paper: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2021/12/sodom-meteor-strike-claims-should-be-taken-with-a-pillar-of-salt/
I think you have to take the comments about "peer review" more as a metaphorical standin for the general temperature of scientific opinion that the audience can grasp. What you're supposed to understand is that you have scientists on a payroll who have gone rogue relative to the general views of the scientific community in the same way scientists employed by petrochemical companies or thin tanks funded by them might not be the best gauge of the most reasonable views to hold on global warming.
You can't have characters debating impact ratings of journals without losing almost everyone. On that level, what it is trying to say is reasonably comprehensible even if people who understand scientific legitimacy might think this is silly because peer review is a more complicated subject than that. It's like a continuity error more than a fundamental flaw in its themes.
A few weeks ago I was studiously reading reddit threads as the first data started to filter in about omicron. I remember a lot of comments about early preprints which suggested that they don't count because they're "not peer reviewed".
As if peer review would make any difference. If some hospital director in Johannesberg says he's got 572 covid patients including 13 on ventilators then either he's right or he's wrong, but if he's wrong then the peer review process isn't going to catch it.
My point is that a lot of laymen do seem to believe, these days, that peer review is a magical process that separates true science from bullshit.
I find it helps to explain that the *main* purpose of peer review is to ensure that what is published is sufficiently precise and detailed that other people can duplicate the work to check it -- and that *that* -- the duplication/checking -- is ultimately how we avoid the propagation of error and outright fraud. Peer review can't do this unless the reviewers actually duplicate the work, and they don't have time for that.
But what reviewers can and should do is ensure that the publication includes all the relevant data, makes its statements precise enough, includes all the math, et cetera, so that someone else skilledin the field can do the duplication, and whether the results are confirmed or not is then crystal clear -- you can't do some bullshit social science thing where you say "oh that's not really what I meant, it's a question of what "is" is blah blah."
I agree that this is what peer review should be like.
However, for almost all peer-reviewed papers, no attempt to replicate is made (it was thought that replication was not interesting enough to get something publishable).
Recently a few have attempted replication of fairly famous and much quoted experiments. In all of the attempts, they found that most of the experiments they looked at could not even be attempted (not enough detail, impossible setups, etc.). Of the ones that could be attempted, most of them failed to replicate.
These replication attempts >did< get publishable results because they were so egregiously different from what was expected.
I can only come to the conclusion that peer review is ineffective, or corrupt, or its real purpose is not its ostensible purpose.
Peer review is not replication. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where peer-reviewers had the budget to replicate a study, but we do not. Increase NSF funding and the rate of PhD production 10-100x and you can have that world, if you think it makes sense.
Peer review is an attempt to examine the experimental methods and the description of an experiment (and its results) to ensure they meet area standards, and to make sure the description is sufficient that experiment *can* be replicated. One of the things we learned from the replication crisis is that our statistical requirements were too loose, and so peer-reviewers now apply tighter standards such as pre-registration etc.
Peer review is not perfect and it's a moving target. It is like a spam filter. Take it away and everything is garbage. But even with it, you're still going to get a decent amount of spam.
Sure. I think MM agreed that the goal was that peer review would ensure that replication was possible, and was noting that this is a pretty empty accomplishment even when it works, because mostly nobody ever bothers to replicate.
We wouldn't have a replication crisis in a world where people literally never bothered to replicate. It's true that replication is rare, but it's always a possibility *and that is a powerful thing.* To elide from "replication is rare" to "replication never happens" to "peer review is therefore an empty accomplishment" is a series of big steps that don't quite fit together.
In any case, anyone who says "peer review doesn't work" has literally no idea what the *input* to the peer review process looks like. Try serving on a reputable conference PC for a while and you'll see the alternative.
That is certainly not true. People replicate all the time -- whenever it matters to them. If I'm running an organic chemistry lab, say, and my student comes to me and says "oh look I found this JACS paper that can cut 3 steps out of my proposed synthesis and save us a week, how about I do that?" the first thing I'm going to say is "that's nice -- now go duplicate what they did, to make sure it actually works, before we invest in relying on it."
Now what you may be saying is that people don't bother to try to replicate stuff that *doesn't* matter to them personally, as part of some altruistic ideal of ensuring that whatever is published is gospel truth, whether or not I (or anyone) actually gives a shit whether it is or not.
Yeah well, if you (personally, or as a taxpayer) want to fork out the umpty $millions that would require to hire people skilled in the field as your blanket scientific literature proofreader, be my guest. I'm sure people will take the money.
But by me this is a needlessly expensive and silly idea. Indeed, the whole expectation that everything published in a peer-reviewed journal ought to meet some gold standard of truth is deeply silly, in my mind. We're not talking about textbooks, where some naive mind might be poisoned by falsehood if we're not careful to vet them. (And if you want to argue *textbooks* should be vetted a lot more carefully, I'm 100% on board with that, and so would be almost every practicing scientist I know -- especially at the K12 level, where the crimes against truth are legion.)
A scientific journal is just a glorified lab notebook exchange, where workers in the field say "here, I thought this was interesting, take a look, maybe you can use it, and if you do be sure to cite me 'cause owning the credit will do me good." It's absurd to expect it to rise to a higher level of reliability than a lab notebook would. It's *going* to be full of error and misinterpretation, because it's a first draft of cutting edge stuff. It's not archival, it's not meant to be. (There *are* archival compedia of stuff we think we know for sure, these are monographs and reviews, and they do indeed examine what they say more critically and attempt to summarize broad surveys of evidence.)
This whole thing has been wildly blown out of proportion and the purpose of scientific publication grossly distorted by a deeply unfortunate half-accidental conspiracy of I Fucking Love Science cultists, social "science" wannabes, axe-grinding politicians (of course), and uneducated (in science, or any quantitative empirical discipline) click-hungry journalists, and, alas, by the scientific community itself in a deeply misguided effort to measure quantitatively the contributions of its members -- as if that made any kind of sense at all in the first place.
Far as I know, you're talking about social science, and I'm parochial enough to not even really think of social science as real "science" at all. My personal evaluation is that it's where medicine was circa 1600, stuffed with a farrago of superstition and tribal prejudice, with the occasional nugget of truth by some unusually capable and dispassionate observer here and there, and generally not really meeting standards of empirical investigation that physics met in the 1660s.
Give it a century or two, and perhaps the field will rise to the level of objectivity and quality of empirical investigation where a "replication crisis" could indeed be declared because it would *surprising* that results were not duplicable.
Yes, the stuff I read about replication problems were about social science.
Your earlier comment about replicating the organic chemistry paper are reasonable - after all, you are attempting to use it as part of your own process.
There seems to be a rather sharp divide here.
One side side there are areas where replication attempts are routine (such as your lab) because the replication part matters and you can do it as part of another process - you have an end product to get out and either the whole thing works or it doesn't. The JACS paper in your example either provides a process so you get product or else someone has used it and you can get it from them - or it's wrong.
There are other areas where replication is not done. These areas seem to be observational rather than "fabricational" (not sure what to call them, but they involve making something rather than observing something in nature), so replication is fairly difficult.
Examples would be social science, psychology and health.
They would also include areas where modelling is extensively used because of the systems studied are too large or the time scales are too long - epidemics and climate science are two recent (controversial) areas where the models don't seem to be measuring up.
These areas are reported on with the same aura of respectability as the first areas because a) reporters don't know anything, b) they report on things that people would find useful if they were true (power posing, carbs are good for you, etc.) and c) every area of science has to some extent inherited the enormous success (for values of same) of the nuclear bomb.
I'm not sanguine that the observational fields will rise to the same level with simple passage of time. I think they are getting worse not better.
Yes, I agree. Well put.
I will only add that I strongly resist what I see as an obnoxious postmodern tendency to shrug the shoulders about what you are calling the "observational" fields and say "Well, what can you do? Reaching the canonical standards of empirical rigor and/or objectivity is impossible or at least prohibitively expensive, so let's not even try." We'll just adopt the point of view that it's all relative and subjective, the narrative depends on the point of view, truth is in the eye of the beholder, or [insert other postmodernist rationalizing bullshit].
I think this is just lazy, or decadent. Our ancestors could have said exactly the same thing about science or medicine at any time from Plato to Paracelsus, and very often they did. But a courageous few did not accept this premise, and struggled across centuries to find ways to become more empirical and objective. To them we owe all our present technological prowess, and we let down our own descendants to the extent we decline to continue the struggle because of ennui, cynicism, or despair.
Duplication/checking is important, but a whole lot has gotten "peer reviewed" without the data or code being available to check. Fortunately, norms are shifting so that's more expected nowadays compared to pre-replication crisis.
Creationism looms large here as creationist writing has been almost completely locked out of legitimate scientific journals, with the few instances it has snuck through being very famous. Otherwise, their publications are relegated to incestuous journals they started for themselves, pay to play publications, and philosophy journals willing to indulge the argument.
One of the ways you try to show to the public, and court systems, that creationism is scientifically illegitimate is by pointing out that scientists generally have a low opinion of it. And one of the ways you do that is by showing how it is almost wall to wall rejected from peer reviewed publications.
This exact point got imported over to the issue of climate change where there is a similar, albeit not quite as extreme phenomenon going on. Very, very few articles skeptical of anthropogenic global warming get published in legitimate peer reviewed articles, which is a point people trying to communicate that global warming denialism is illegitimate have tried to hammer home, often borrowing directly the lessons of combatting creationist pseudoscience.
This movie was written as a very thinly veiled story about climate change, and it is influenced by this thinking that is all over combatting climate change denialism. "Lack of peer review" is meant to stand in for "scientists generally seem not to think highly of this." That's how it ends up functioning in the story, which makes sense when you think about where the importance of the point came from.
To what "scientific" journal would you submit an article on Creationism? Nature? JACS? PNAS? One of the APS journals?
All the soi-disant science journals I know are devoted to empirical science: you do an experiment, or at worst someone else does an experiment, and you report the results and/or argue about what the data mean using math for the most part.
So what *experiment* could you do that would shed any light on the hypothesis that the Universe had a sentient Creator? What data could you collect and argue about?
I don't see it as strange or corrupt that journals devoted to empirical science decline to publish articles on epistemology and philosophy. There are philosophical journals for that kind of thing, or more commonly you write a book. I dunno if the philosophical journals reject Creationist screeds -- I hope not, the social sciences publish a crapton of crap already and some well-argued Creationist papers would raise the overall intellectual tone considerably -- but I'm pretty sure Creationist philosophers have no problem publishing books. I've read some myself.
It's not for lack of trying that the intelligent design movement didn't get articles published in appropriate journals minus a couple of notorious exceptions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sternberg_peer_review_controversy
Creationism purports to be science. That it is a biological design argument based on the same flawed argument from ignorance reasoning they all tend to be, often phrased in terms of anti-evolutionism, makes it difficult to see it as science, but that's what it presents itself as. To say it is not empirical is to endorse the critics position and to reject what creationism has to say about itself.
So if you say a paper trying to show that a biological system is made up of many parts such that if you knock out one part the entire system ceases to function, so this cannot evolve via stepwise changes, and this is a hallmark of intentional design that can be inferred isn't really science, you're not wrong. At the same time, you are fundamentally criticizing what that paper is likely presenting itself as.
I don't care what it purports to be. If you don't do experiments, you're not an empirical science. That's why history isn't a science. It's not that history isn't full of measurement, and study, and logic, and closely-argued reasoning -- and it's not that the field cannot earn intellectual respect equal to physics or biology -- it's that they do not do experiments to test their hypotheses, and (barring some kind of Star Trek parallel universe transporter) they can't. So it's not an empirical science, khattam-shud.
As I said, so far as I know, there is no lack of outlets for people who are interested in making philosophical or logical arguments about the origin of species, or of the universe, or the Purpose Of It All. But it's not in the pages of a journal devoted to empirical science.
Heck, *scientists* don't put their epistemological speculations there. When Lee Smolin wanted to argue that physics was going about its business all wrong these days, he wrote a book on the subject, he didn't submit a paper to Phys. Rev. A, and if he had, the editors would've been 100% right to reject it[1] on the grounds that it was not empirical science, but philosophy or epistemology.
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[1] I'm not saying they *would* have, unfortunately, editors being as human and subject to tribal and social psychological influences as anyone, but I'm saying they *should* have.
Demarcation criteria for science is hard, but it's reasonably clear you can be doing science without doing experiments in the normal sense that term is used. If you expand the word "experiment" to mean loosely mean something like "test risky predictions against observations" then you've got a defensible criteria, but this is something creationism says it does. That it doesn't really do this is a point its critics are trying to make. And when those critics are trying to convince the public that it's not scientifically legitimate, one of the ways they have tried to do that is by pointing out creationist arguments are resoundingly rejected by legitimate peer reviewed publications for reasons like that no science appears to be being done. And this species of argument, that lack of success with peer reviewed publications is a sign of illegitimacy, was influential on how critics of climate change denialists make their case. And that's why Don't Look Up! talks about peer review the way it does.
Isn't astronomy a purely observational science?
The biggest problem with the comet impact as an allegory for global warming (or covid) is that a comet impact is a simple, discrete disaster. It either happens or it doesn't, the trajectory and the effects are easily predictable, the options for dealing with it are very few and easy to choose between, and your attempt to mitigate it either succeeds or it doesn't.
Climate change and covid are far better analogues for each other than comet impacts are, so I'm wondering why we're not putting more thought into learning the lessons we wish we'd learned about covid and applying them to climate change. Climate change is like a slow-motion version of covid where it's still March 2020 and it's going to stay that way for many years, so we still have a lot of time to learn our lessons.
Possible covid lessons to apply to climate change:
1. Models suck. They say that "all models are wrong, but some are useful", but you probably won't know which ones were useful until after the fact.
2. You will be living in an information environment that is optimised for something other than truth. Statements from supposedly-scientific sources will be contaminated by a desire to get people to do certain things.
3. The powers that be will make some good decisions and some bad ones . They will have a very hard time admitting that the bad ones were bad even when faced with overwhelming evidence.
4. Many people are likely to react less-than-optimally to the increasingly-obvious wrongness of the powers that be, and are likely to start rejecting the true parts of the message as well as the false ones. This may wind up being a major part of the problem in itself.
5. You will hear many predictions about what will happen. The predictions that you are most likely to hear will be the most extreme ones. Boring predictions are more likely to be true but less likely to reach your ears.
6. We will do many things. Some of them will have an excellent cost-benefit ratio, others will have a terrible cost-benefit ratio. The things that have the best cost-benefit ratio probably won't be tried at all for one reason or another. People would rather "increase our sacrifices to the gods" than do a detailed cost-benefit analysis.
7. Once it's all over, we still won't have much of an idea of what we did right and what we did wrong.
An excellent summary, I wish I had the ability to put that (my thoughts exactly) in such a cogent form
> The predictions that you are most likely to hear will be the most extreme ones. Boring predictions are more likely to be true but less likely to reach your ears.
Notably, "most extreme" applies in both direction with COVID. The predictions that were wrong were both "nothing is going to happen, everything is fine" and "every person on earth is going to die" (and obviously a lot more in between). A boring prediction could still be have a very bad result.
Thanks so much for your comment, I think you are spot-on. Regarding climate change, I would add "The cure will be worse than the disease". I'm not sure that is true for COVID, although I'm sure many would say it is.
8. Most people will find some way to blame all the bad parts on their outgroup.
But yes, excellent and insightful summary.
8. And once it's over we still won't have much of an idea how serious a problem it was in the first place.
Perhaps not obvious, but sort of follows on from 7. And compare it to the debrief of acid rain - the sceptics and the alarmists both think they have been entirely vindicated - confirmation bias and motivated reasoning don't stop when the phenomenon does!
ETA As others have mentioned, a really cogent comment.
I think that we can say with a decent degree of confidence that COVID was indeed a pretty big problem, and it did kill a lot of people
I was specifically referring to climate change, and generally agree with you about Covid. However 'pretty big problem' isn't very helpful on its own - it's an order of magnitude worse than a bad Flu season but the best part of two orders of magnitude less bad than Spanish Flu.
Without having watched the program, I was curious whether it presents any conceivably plausible rationale for the President to dismiss or downplay the danger. It doesn’t make a lot of sense that the President would be interested in parochial electoral considerations when everyone is going to die in a few months. Comedies tend to work for me only when there is an internal logic that makes it cohere on its own absurd terms.
The President says: “Do you know how many ‘the world is ending’ meetings we’ve had over the years? Economic collapse, loose nukes, car exhaust killing the atmosphere, rogue AI, alien invasion, population growth, hole in the ozone...”
Without having seen the movie, it also seems implausible to me because most Presidents *seize* on existential threats, real or imagined, as opportunities to Stand Out As A Leader, or at worst argue You Don't Want To Switch Horses In Midstream. Generally, crises are seen as *good* for the leadership in office, provided it doesn't utterly screw them up.
"But if I'm right, then you, Mr. Mayor, you will have saved the lives of millions of eligible voters."
In a more interesting version of this movie, scientists discover a comet that will just miss the Earth, and the President immediately starts a ten-trillion dollar campaign to deflect it anyway.
The deflection causes the comet to break apart, and some of the smaller chunks collide with Earth but only kill a few million people. The final shot is the President standing in front of a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
Morgan Freeman plays the President, right? That was an underrated movie.
Oh, and Frodo had a motorbike!
You laugh, but honestly I think that is actually the most general recipe for a successful political career in a democracy: you find a train going in the right direction and act like you're pulling it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiWEVns7niY
The president did seize on the threat, and exactly in order to stand out as a leader. It just didn't happen immediately. Her initial reaction was "this is a bad time for this," and a week later she changed her mind and decided that the threat was now useful.
The
>it's just a movie, not a PhD thesis on Epistemology
stance is kind of an interesting form of motte-and-bailey. Like, yes, it's just a movie, but a movie is a story, and we tell stories because they're sticky in our brains. Humans have turned knowledge and lessons into stories for as far back as we can tell. Most people aren't going to read a book on epistemology, but most people seem to acknowledge that our society has a hard time agreeing on things and that that's a problem. This movie will still influence the way people think about this subject, and so, like all popular media, it's important what lessons people are likely to draw from it.
If Disney made a cartoon movie where the villain was a pharma CEO making brain-chip vaccines to control everybody, that would be worth criticizing, and criticizing the criticism with "cmon it's just a movie guys" would be weird.
The media got all upset about the Richard Jewell movie because it portrayed a journalist behaving unethically, and I remember thinking "yeah, well you weren't too torn up about a pharma company killing people with hitmen in The Constant Gardiner"
The Richard Jewell movie portrayed a real, named person, who had died by the time the movie was made, as behaving unethically (sleeping with an FBI agent to get information), which the moviemakers admitted was made-up. Her former colleagues got mad. The Constant Gardener is understood to be a work of fiction.
It also ignores the role of art generally - artists making observations about the human condition via art goes back a very, very long way.
All, or nearly all, artists are attempting to communicate something with their art - it is entirely appropriate to react to what they are (intentionally, or not) communicating.
There's an old line about how artists are just philosophers who can't stomach rebuttals. I think you're right, this is absolutely fair grounds for discussion and always has been.
Art can have two components: meaning and technique, and they can ride on independent axes. Both probably contribute to one's overall impression of a work independently. In some cases it seems like one can override the other, but for the most part it's useful to separate out these two dimensions.
So if you plot works this way, with technique on the y-axis, and meaning on the x-axis, then you get four quadrants of works. The First Quadrant would be works that are well executed, but with a questionable message.
For example, I think Hero is an exceptionally beautiful film, even though its surface level conclusion ("yay tyranny!") seems pretty awful.
Wall-E would be another Q1 film for me, but not for everybody. It takes the trappings of a movie about advanced robots and spaceships and argues we should all live in agrarian communes. It's a sci fi arguing that sci fi aspirations are sinful. But it's also beautifully made. (If you are a committed agrarian who hates sci fi tropes, then this would probably flip to a Q4 film for you.)
For Q4, there are a few novels and series I think are really profound but also interminable slogs. Not through intentional pacing, just for lack of a bold enough editor. Or for Q4, maybe a better example is country music.
Chuck Klosterman once argued that, although he doesn't primarily listen to country, he grants that its songs tend to at least try to be about something, an aspiration rock has mostly discarded. You can find some country party songs with no message, sure. But you can also find some really moving songs about pangs of nostalgia, or about feeling trapped in a small town. You might still not listen to them because you just don't like twangy guitars. It's usually hard to talk about songs you like, but don't like listening to. Just put them in Q4.
Q2 holds all the sublime works, beautiful and resonant. Q3 is just bad stuff that's bad.
Ok, sound like a good patch?
Unfortunately it's actually pretty leaky if you look too closely.
The substance axis gets complicated by the realization that works can often be interpreted in multiple coherent ways.
Take Hero. Another coherent reading is that the title is ironic, that actually nobody in the film acts heroically, because there are no heroic options under tyranny. (Your choices for a hero are a genocidal tyrant, an assassin who abandons his cause after a two word counterargument, a woman willing to die and kill her beloved for politics, and a man trying to simply run away and hide from it all. Maybe the title is ironic, and there is no hero in the film?)
Then comedy throws a huge monkey wrench into the technique axis.
Comedy is tricky because its effectiveness is completely entwined with substance.
Satire lands because you're saying society's quiet parts out loud.
Political comedy is so damn hard. You can't trivially shout something that's both novel and true. For half the audience it's not true, and for the other half it's not novel.
For almost any politician, Trump included, supporters will not find the portrayal convincing, and detractors don't actually get much ironic contrast out of it. (Arguably what they're getting is the smug feeling of somebody taking their side, which is subtly different than a comic prompting a sudden new realization.)
Another form of satire takes people who are generally considered staid and respectable and points out how they're just ridiculous flawed humans like the rest of us. Armando Iannucci is pretty genius at this. Christopher Guest sometimes pulls this off for people we don't necessarily respect in the first place, Fred Armisen does that sometimes too.
"Ronald Reagan, Mastermind" is a good old SNL sketch that somehow pulls off this contrast in the opposite direction. Maybe it's skewering the dueling characterizations of Reagan as incompetent and ultra-competent by just taking one of those and playing it out to its extreme. That's probably a good recipe for a lot of political satire, since so many political positions paint opponents in those contradictory ways.
I feel like a better satire would pick some lazy characterization of a politician and just play it all the way out.
Or if you really want to skewer the politician, take something that politician doesn't want to say out loud, but have them say the quiet part loud.
Trump generally has no filter, and regardless of whether you find that endearing or exhausting, it makes him mostly immune to that type of satire.
Ok, comedy is hard. Finding the meaning of a work is hard. But zooming out, I still think in most cases a two axis system is going to be the most productive for analyzing works and heading off criticisms like "it's just a movie" when you're trying to explain exactly why you did or didn't enjoy a particular movie.
There's a trick that "comedians" do where they use their "comedy" to opine on some real-life issue, but get things wrong, either out of negligence or on purpose. When someone calls them on it, they say "it's just comedy, it doesn't have to be accurate" even though they seriously believe and intend to promote the positions expressed by the "comedy".
So I think the objection "Even though the satire bites and the allegory is spot on, Don’t Look Up is a COMEDY. Getting serious about the license it takes on characters and cliches is an error of over-thinking." is really inappropriate. It was trying to make serious points about the real-life world; once you do that, you don't get to lie and say "it was just comedy".
There's also a related trick where a "comedian" says something that he may mean seriously to some degree, but where it's exaggerated as "comedy", because he isn't sure just how much he can get away with, and he wants to be able to say that anything that he can't get away with is comedic exaggeration. (Scott himself seems to have done that in the past, where he jokingly says that he hates Republicans. Which may be a joke, but may also be 'I really hate Republicans, but let's see if my readers will call me on it. If they do, I can say that it's just a joke'.)
Jon Stewart built an entire career doing exactly this.
Regarding "It's just a movie, you should really just relax", this only applies when you don't construct a message you intend to be taken seriously. If you do construct a message you intend to be taken seriously, everything in service of that message is fair game.
People keep assuming certainty that a chicxulub-equivalent asteroid would extinct humans, without analyzing it. Only 75% of animal species on earth went extinct at the K–Pg boundary. Let's call 75% the outside-view for the chance humans will go extinct in such an impact.
Many factors favor non-extinction of humans relative to other species:
* Humans are extremely widespread (vs. the vast majority of species have a very narrow territory).
* Humans are extremely intelligent and able to cultivate new food sources.
* When the earth cools a lot due to the 5-20% dimming of sunlight, Human farmers can cultivate plants that were previously used at much higher latitudes. Other animals don't have the intelligence and transportation necessary to bring seeds 2000 miles south from where they usually grow.
* Humans have buildings with air filters that can protect us from inhaling the volcanic ash falling from the sky, roofs to protect us from acid rain (claim: hurricane force winds only extended ~3000km from the impact site https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/Chicxulub/regional-effects/, so buildings farther away may remain standing if they can survive the earthquake)
* Humans have some preppers who stockpiled years of provisions in underground bunkers, all over the globe. I'm sure some preppers' bunkers on the opposite side of the planet will survive the impact.
On the other side of the ledger, humans have higher caloric requirements than most species, but that's a minor issue if we can still farm.
Considering all this it seems appropriate to adjust the 75% base case down to <3%.
On the other hand, the 25% that survived were primarily water-based or quite small, so I'd want to adjust that upwards. In addition, it's likely that even if the preppers survive in their bunkers, they would not be able to rebuild civilization since a lot of the low-hanging fruit of resources would be destroyed or have already been used up by humanity. Most oil remaining underground is quite deep underground or underwater and requires advanced technology to access. Same with a lot of minerals (though some could be harvested from the wreckage of civilization).
" the 25% that survived were... quite small"
Is there a reason for that besides needing fewer calories to sustain a breeding population?
They can get a lot of low-hanging-fruit by sifting through dead people's stuff.
Across an entire hemisphere of the planet, anything too large to shelter in a burrow, hole or under the water got cooked as re-entering rock turned the sky into an oven. Anything in the water and near the shore ("near" meaning something like 100km in this case) has a good chance of getting washed up or smashed by a mega-tsunami. Thereafter, anything not able to live off of scraps of dead animal, scraps of dead or dying plant matter, insects or the occasional seed died of starvation. And anything not able to live in cold conditions died of cold. And, of course, being widespread and generalist in terms of lifestyle helped. Things that lived entirely in the deep or open ocean (which are actually a rather small subset of life on earth) got by as well. The ability to fly also helps.
In modern times this would leave many insect species, many arachnids, many rodents, various riverine or swamp species, bats, birds, perhaps some generalist burrowing species (eg: badgers and the like), some lizards and snakes, many flowering plants (those with deep seed beds or seeds that could go years without germinating), many gymnosperms (ditto), mosses and ferns, many molluscs (both terrestrial and aquatic), many deep-sea creatures, some oceanic fish, many oceanic crustaceans, perhaps a lucky species of porpoise or dolphin, perhaps crabeater seals, and of course jellyfish. Corals might actually make it, although for a while there'd be precious few creatures to live on the reefs.
Yeah, but they'd have nearly all of our civilizational knowledge. Presumably, some of these preppers are smart enough to have offline copies of Wikipedia saved somewhere and a simple bicycle-generator to view it on a laptop. Even a print copy of Britannica would shave _millennia_ off of restarting civilization.
Yes, it would take several generations, but probably not all that many. Imagine telling some smart people "hey, if you get rocks really hot, some useful stuff will drain out of them; some of that shiny stuff will be weirdly attracted to other shiny stuff; if you spin that stuff in concentric circles and hook up some wires, then rotors made of other shiny stuff at the other end of the wires will spin, and you'll be able to transmit energy across large distances." Take tens of thousands of people who grew up hearing that story, and I bet it doesn't take long for some burgeoning engineers to reinvent electricity.
So much of invention is the discovery of what is even possible.
Agree, printing and universal literacy makes it hard to lose knowledge. Conditional on at least 1 million humans surviving, I think we probably don't lose the ability to make cars or computers (although it will be really inefficient for a while due to lacking economies of scale)
"Even a print copy of Britannica would shave _millennia_ off of restarting civilization."
Alas, I already promised not to spoil SevenEves, but yeah. As well as providing interesting characters like Fbane Gnkynj.
Yeah, I have to admit that Fbane Gnkynj was absolutely in my mind when I wrote that!
> Th’invention all admir’d, and each, how he to be th’inventor miss’d;
so easy it seem’d once found, which yet unfound most would have thought impossible.
(Paradise Lost)
That's a wonderful quote. I have to admit that I never read PL; up until a few years before my senior year, it was a requirement at my school, but they had dumbed-down the curriculum by the time I graduated. I do have a "classics list" of books I want to read, but PL has always seemed one of the more intimidating ones!
The OP was discussing extinction, not end-of-civilisation. I think there's at least an order of magnitude between the two in the scale of the required calamity, and while a collapse back to the bronze age would be incredibly awful it would not be extinction and humanity would probably eventually build back.
Not sure it would build back, it really seems hard to kick of an industrial revolution without easily available coal and oil, and we've used up all the easiest one already.
I lean your direction, wiping out anything is hard. Roots are stubborn.
Passenger pigeons suggest a possible counterargument. I've heard that they were so dependent on their colonies that just wiping out the first 50% was a death knell for the species.
(I'm not sure how much that narrative is a just so story or if it's widely believed by ornithologists today.)
I'm encouraged though by independent communities like the Amish, or isolated cases like Karp Lykov, whose family survived in the Taiga for 40 years. Both of which suggest our dependencies on civilization are not quite so total as it might sometimes feel.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/
Stupid plan: Since there's all this talk about counteracting global warming by dumping particulates in the stratosphere, why not counteract the cooling after an impact by releasing greenhouse gasses?
Manufacture strong greenhouse gasses with a short half life, such as the refrigirant R134a or some other haloalkane. Release them shortly after the impact to keep the Earth warm during the following years.
Mitigate against the other effects using cold war era civil defense techniques such as expedient shelters and food stockpiles.
The problem isn't so much the cooling, as the lack of sunlight. Many years with insufficient sunlight for plant growth, will wreck a biosphere no matter how comfy the temperatures.
And yes, this probably isn't a literal extinction risk because of mineshafts, unless we up the comet to ocean-boiling size in which case A: that's ludicrously unlikely and B: there is no possible defense.
The dimming is only 5-20% according to this: https://eos.org/articles/asteroid-impact-not-volcanism-likely-spelled-dinosaurs-end
That won't impair agriculture that much.
Is that 20% of total radiation or what gets photosynthesised? If particulates absorb blue light, warm up and re-emit IR, that light will be heating up the surface but the photons will not be energetic enough to be absorbed by chlorophyll.
In any case, insufficient light levels make plants underperform but a bad frost will kill them overnight so I'd still take my chances with the extra temperature.
NatGeo says 15% of sunlight was blocked. Presumably by sunlight they mean visible wavelengths. If the atmosphere ever got so opaque that nothing-but-infrared reached the surface, I'd expect at least triple that as a decrease in total irradiance.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/volcanoes-helped-life-bounce-back-afterdinosaur-killing-asteroid
Wikipedia says we already have 4-20% dimming due to pollution, which was about the same as that other site's estimate of the impact effect, but also so subtle that we barely noticed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
The relationship of predator to prey follows a power law [1]. 75% of animal life going extinct is apocalyptic on our food chain. We might have a snowball's chance in hell because we're omnivores, but I wouldn't bet on it.
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aac6284
Yeah, I'd agree that a nine-kilometre comet just isn't big enough. Even Chicxulub was only as bad as it was because of the impact site being full of dust-forming minerals (a deep ocean impact wouldn't have done nearly as much), and humanity is much, much harder to kill than "75% of animal species" (there are a few macroscopic animals that I'd put above humans in the "Least Concern" category, but the list isn't long and mostly consists of generalist arthropods plus *maybe* rats/mice).
Not sure exactly what size you'd need to wipe us out, although I'm pretty sure Ceres would do it.
I think the second comment on Sirota/Bernie is way off base. That's a severe misunderstanding of Sirota. Maybe it confuses campaign rhetoric with actual beliefs if I want to be charitable.
Also of note is the claim that the left is so small they should be bunched in with liberals. Well you have to ask why they are that small if you believe that.
Also the view of non-cult Sanders supporters is more like most people are corrupt, some of them are actually pretty competent, say Reid and both Clintons, but notably not Obama which Obama himself admitted, well claimed when trying to rally support for Hillary, and that Bernie himself is pretty competent but has issues working in groups which hurts him staffing wise and working with anyone who isn't in Congress.
What is the case that Bernie is pretty competent and that Obama is not? Obama was able to put together a primary campaign that beat Clinton, who was the presumptive frontrunner; this was something that Bernie was unable to do. And Obama ran the most competent presidential administration in recent memory: no major policy missteps, no scandals, no embarrassing personnel moves, and one major legislative accomplishment.
My view is that the more legitimate criticism of Obama was that his competency belied the fact that he did not accomplish much in the way of significant reform. Of course, then your views will be impacted by how much you think needs to be reformed and in which direction.
Who sells more cars, an incompetent Toyota salesman or a competent Lada salesman? It's probably still the Toyota salesman, because people want Toyotas, not Ladas.
Bernie Sanders is a Lada salesman, out there pushing products that very few people want. His competence is beside the point; the people who want Ladas will buy them from him and think he's great because he's the only Lada salesman in town. Everyone else will ignore him and go to one of the many Toyota or Ford dealers.
The fact that Bernie Sanders can make a living selling Ladas _at all_ means that he must be reasonably competent. But he's not as smooth or polished as a top-grade Toyota dealer like Obama.
Obama has social talents Bernie lacks. He was a competent campaigner but the comparison was meant to be him vs either of the Clintons. He said he wasn't prepared to actually lead while Hillary was. Sanders is not a strong coalition builder.
Additionally being successful on the left vs the business friendly liberal is much harder. Could Obama do the same thing with Bernie positions and not double dealing on campaign promises? Probably not.
Do you read David Sirota's Twitter feed?
I've spoken to him personally before. The comment by Franco is not a correct theory of his beliefs.
Ah my apologies, I thought you were responding to my comment.
Ah yeah your comment is above his, so first rather than second.
I think the core of the comment is an important point (followed by some rather aside-the-point hate toward the left *omg he says mean things on twitter* lol) - this is a movie that's criticizing liberals just as much as conservatives. Remember the picture of Orlean embracing Bill Clinton? They weren't hiding it.
I never really think it's fair to lump two groups together when they themselves absolutely would not, and leftists do not think of themselves as liberals. This is poorly understood even by liberals, let alone by libertarians/conservatives.
Best part of this article is the Fall from Heaven call-out. Never goes out of style! Just wanted to express appreciation.
> On the one hand I'm tempted to offer a critique of this community for often not "getting" the left/liberal divide, but on reflection, that seems unfair. The left are so culturally insignificant everywhere except Twitter & Podcasts that compacting them into the liberals is probably fair enough. (Sadly).
As someone decidedly on the liberal side of that divide: Yes, this distinction is important, and this is one more reason why a left/right political spectrum is a bad model (no, liberalism does *not* go in the center; it is not some lesser version of leftism but a distinctly different thing), but Scott uses it so you can to some extent expect the commenters will as well. :P
I disagree with the idea that leftism is so insignificant though... but then, I say that partly because I'm grouping in the SJers with the leftists. And the SJers are not insignificant at all. I realize these are not the same thing exactly, but the essential style of thought seems similar to me, while decidedly distinct from liberalism, so I group them together...
(But also, plenty of prominent politicians seem to espouse pretty notably leftist ideas? Maybe not *powerful* ones, necessarily, but *prominent* ones, and we're talking culture, so...)
I mean, I think if we're going to talk about politics on a left-right axis at all (which isn't great, but it's the terminology used by everyone on the damn planet so we're stuck with it) then it's fair to label everyone to the left of the median as "The Left" and everyone to the right of the median as "The Right".
If you want to define "Left" or "Right" more narrowly then we might as well tear up the whole naming scheme and start again. (And while we're at it let's get rid of rather non-descriptive labels like "conservative", "progressive" and "liberal" where the meanings don't have a particularly good match to the groups typically thus labelled).
> I'm grouping in the SJers with the leftists.
A lot of SJers spout superficially-marxist ideas about billionares being fundamentally evil and socialism as a panacea, but there's a distinct group of dedicated marxists who are strongly opposed to SJ and identity politics. (Freddie deBoer, for example.) I don't think it's correct to lump them together, they're pretty distinct clusters in my mind.
Well, I'm not grouping them together because their beliefs are identical, but because they reflect similar patterns of thought or underlying assumptions, even if applied differently. E.g., both take groups as the fundamental unit of analysis, not individuals, but they differ as to which groups they analyze things in terms of. Both are focused on distribution, not creation, seemingly based on some idea of limited good. Both believe in equality of outcome, both are skeptical of the idea of local validity... I could go on.
Basically, I'm grouping them together in the same way one might, say, group together Christian fundamentalists and Muslim fundamentalists; from an insider perspective they may be opposed to one another due to their disagreements on who is or is not the messiah or the final prophet, but from an outsider perspective this is less important than the basic similarity in thought.
This might be a matter of scale. From a right-of-center standpoint, they're certainly similar. But as someone with a lot of left-learning acquaintances, I see many clashes between the two. This may be my own biases coloring my view, but from the SJers I get a strong "belief as attire" vibe. (See Scott's "The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars" article from May.) Whether their beliefs are actually true is seen as a minor detail or a distraction from the important things. Those important things mostly being dunking on people on Twitter.
The "true" marxists (and anarchists, who I'm grouping in with marxists for now) appear very different to me. I may not agree with them, but I think they at least have a principled stance. Many of them were marxists/anarchists long before it was the "hot new thing" to be. And they're much more willing to take real action in favor of their goals; they're the ones stockpiling guns and calling for an armed revolution, not social media slacktivism.
I think your points about groups vs. individuals and distribution vs. creation are correct, but they don't tell the whole story. Class solidarity vs. race/gender solidarity is a big schism. The SJers decry billionaires but support Rihanna; the true marxists support poor white men over rich black women. The SJers will denounce fascism and censorship when it comes from republicans, but happily engage in it whenever it's in their favor. The true marxists apply more consistent standards.
I do want to add the caveat that this is largely based on my personal experience of a few hundred of my friends and acquaintances. I try to maintain a diverse social circle, but It's possible that the subset of people I interact with are not representative of the general left-of-center community.
"Class solidarity vs. race/gender solidarity is a big schism."
Yes, but also no.
My own rule of thumb is that the left desires equality and the right desires hierarchy (or, more charitably, believes that hierarchy is just).
Progressives and class reductionists (or wokes and dirtbags, I suppose, if they happen to be your outgroup) do joust bitterly over which axis of equality is important. But they both employ the critical lens of examining power and who has it, and they agree on tearing down systems of oppression.
Also, it's easy to frame all progressives as the most annoying too-online person you've ever run into on Twitter, but there is a lot of decent, quiet, real world activism out there that seeks to mitigate the impact of identity-based discrimination - for one example, helping homeless trans people by setting up shelters that won't sort them on the basis of biological sex.
I think your characterization of the right is extremely uncharitable, akin to saying that people on the left desire authoritarianism or some such
All right, I'll take that under consideration. I wasn't trying to be uncharitable, but that's always a danger when oversimplifying.
The conservative believes that traditional hierarchies (family, church, social classes) represent the natural order and ought be altered with the greatest care (if at all).
The right-libertarian believes that individuals should be left alone to sort themselves into a hierarchy on the presumed basis of merit.
The fascist, well, you know.
Hierarchy here forms the basis of a useful heuristic. It's not a throwaway slur.
> But the worst part is…well, basically every scientific institution ends up lying
Was this supposed to be an object lesson that we missed? A bunch of prestigious (not that that matters) researchers and universities all checked the data and said "yup, we're boned". But they keep looking and checking, and then *one* org (NASA) says it's all fine, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief that everything is now fine. It may as well be "Confirmation Bias: The Musical", and good thing too!
Then you're telling us you watched the movie, and *one* (or two, or three, out of the lot) of the orgs is corrupt... so now all of them are lying?
If there's one thing I can say I know for sure about Elon Musk, it's that he'd definitely be on team "destroy the asteroid"
Very refreshing to see someone see another angle. I believe I saw yours after reading your review. I am weary or smugness and cynicism and a rethink helped me see that viewing. Creeps in around the edges, though.
Your "movie criticism" isn't movie criticism. Manny Farber wrote movie criticism. You don't know anything about movies. What you wrote was a sociological interpretation of a movie, which had little to do with the subject of movies, which is an art form you don't appear to be interested in. It's like you wrote an interpretation of the lyrics of a hit song without realizing that music is about much more than its lyrics.
That said, I enjoyed your post about the movie. But what you wrote wasn't a movie review.
Wait until you find out about his book reviews…
An indignant defence of the sanctity of a niche writing genre that no one really cares about - complete with namedropping! - is the most annoying manifestation of arguing from definition, something annoying enough already, that I've seen so far.
Now that you've acknowledged it, sort of, I want to know for real why you missed the point of this extremely unsubtle movie, because that fact doesn't fit into my model of the world, the whole being biased by other reviewers excuse just doesn't cut it for me. Despite the creators being so very ideologically dissimilar, they have constructed a story which among other things gets at some of the same points as the Meditations on Moloch and Ivermectin essays. It's built from the exact sort of insight porn which is your specialty, not entirely trivial, not commonly understood, but easy enough to pick up and after that seemingly obvious in retrospect. I clicked the link imagining I'd be reading about your delight in having found such an unusual common ground, imagine my disappointment! So what's the hold up, where's the blockage? If we can't get a spark of understanding across this tiny gap, what possible hope is there for any of us to understand the other enough to meaningfully coordinate?
> But also, Tech CEO kind of randomly builds a starship, complete with a 2,000 person passenger capacity and working cryosleep pods, in the space of six months. Was the starship peer-reviewed?
Sounds like very standard motivated reasoning that anyone could be sucked in by.
This was especially grating because, earlier in the movie, DeCaprio's work gets ignored because he's "only at Michigan State." But he immediately tries to gatekeep the other guy.
I had the impression that the starship had been planned and secretly built long before the comet threat for the same reason a large number of hedge fund managers work hard to get dual citizenship to New Zealand. When shit hits the fan, they want to have an escape plan. I suspect Musk and Bezos want the same thing in case some civilization-engulfing phenomena (intentional or accidental) looms as an inevitability so starships ARE coming...
By request: What if we have Starships?
OK. not the rock band, or the kind with warp drive, but the SpaceX kind?
Right now we *just* have a few prototype Starships in various states of assembly, and that's no help at all because a Starship alone can't even reach Low Earth Orbit. Or maybe it can, but as a stunt with no payload capacity. We also need the Super Heavy booster, and that's going to be a while.
If we just have a few Starships and a Super Heavy or two to boost them, it doesn't change much. A Starship launch would basically count as two or three Falcon Heavy launches for this purpose, and we needed over a thousand Falcon Heavy launches in three months or so.
Where things get interesting is if SpaceX builds a modest fleet of Starships and Super Heavy boosters and establishes a rapid, reliable launch cadence and with the on-orbit refueling Elon is planning for his Mars missions. By my math, they'd need to be able to launch Starships twice a day. Elon claims each Starship will be able to fly three times a day, but I'm exceedingly skeptical on that part. Still, if it takes a week to turn around a Starship after each flight, then a fleet of sixteen Starships (and Super Heavies) would do the job. If he can do one-day turnaround, maybe four Starships and Super Heavies would be enough.
Except, we also need thirteen Starships that we can send out on kamikaze missions, though we'll get the boosters back from those at least. So, twenty-nine Starships and sixteen Super Heavies, give or take.
Even with the Starship part already working, I'm going to assume the prep work will take a month; there's plenty of planning, and some custom hardware development. But mostly we're going to do this with off-the-shelf hardware, because we don't need the impossibly optimistic upper stages I used in the Falcon scenario.
So, 260 post-boost vehicles from Trident DII submarine-launched ballistic missiles, each carrying eight W88 475-kiloton warheads, total mass about 4 metric tons. Actually, we never built that many W88s, so some of these will be MX busses carrying W87 warheads and whatnot, and maybe we'll ask the Russians and Chinese to throw in a few of theirs, but to simplify the math I'll assume all W88s. And there will need to be some modifications like extended-life batteries on the post-boost vehicles and warheads, lots of software changes, lots of chances to screw this up given the short timescale and lack of opportunity for testing.
The Starships get automated deployment racks for twenty PBVs (160 warheads) each. Or if we can't debug those, a couple of kamikaze astronauts who can just shove the things out the cargo door and then die as heroes.
Day 31, we launch one of these Starships with its load of warheads into Low Earth Orbit. Then twelve more Starships launch over the next six days, each loaded with fuel to transfer to Starship #1. On day 38, the now fully-fueled Starship departs Earth orbit. Its delta-V with that load is 7.2 km/s, which gives it a hyperbolic excess velocity of 10.1 km/s.
At that low a velocity, it won't reach the comet (really, the comet will reach it) until Day 159, roughly 23.4 days before impact and about twenty million kilometers from Earth. About two days before that, it will start kicking out the post-boost vehicles which will deploy their 160 warheads in a string maybe 50,000 kilometers long.
On Day 159, 160 warheads explode maybe a kilometer away from the comet at five-second intervals. That's really faster than I'd like; there's no way to update targeting and it is possible that the comet will break apart, but it's better than seventy-six megatons all at once. The combined effect of all these two-petajoule X-ray flashbulbs should be to vaporize enough of the comet's surface that the transient pressure will push it off course at a whole ten centimeters per second.
Which, over 23.5 days, is enough to move the impact point 200 kilometers.
But we haven't been standing still. Kamikaze Starship #2 launched on Day 37, departed Earth orbit on Day 45, and is scheduled to meet the comet on Day 160, just one day after Kamikaze Starship #1. This time, we do get a chance to watch what happened and carefully target the next string of warheads accordingly. But, the deflection imparted by these warheads has only 22.4 days to act, and so shifts the impact point 190 kilometers.
Cut to the chase, Kamikaze Starship #13 arrives on Day 171, a bare 11.7 days before impact, and delivers enough of a nudge that the comet will pass 90 kilometers overhead at closest approach.
That's cutting it a bit close, and I wouldn't blame you for sending out one more just to be safe.
But to make this work, you have to be able to launch two Starships a day for three months, with almost no failures. SpaceX is currently at the one Starship a month level, and the Super Heavy hasn't even flown yet.
So how does it change the story if it isn't the Prudent NASA Scientists vs the Greedy Tech Billionaire with competing plans to save the world; the Tech Billionaire is the only one with a chance at all (if we're willing to give him two thousand hydrogen bombs)?
Of all the comments, yours re: Starship was the one I most looked forward to, and you exceeded my expectations to boot. Fun stuff.
Thanks for the detailed analysis!
Interesting that there's actually a scenario where this is possible.
I'm doubtful that Starship will work as advertised, and even more so that we'll see a fleet of 30 of them. But it shows how much a game changer it (or something like it) could be.
Where do you get your estimate of the momentum change per explosion? That strikes me as a very complicated calculation, and I can't even think of a back of the envelope estimate of which I'd be confident within an order of magnitude.
Not nearly so qualified as Dr. Schilling, but I imagine it would start with the following givens:
- Pulse duration of the detonation
- Total energy released by the warhead
- Diameter of the comet
- Distance between the detonation and the comet
That gives us total energy absorbed by the comet (total energy released * the fraction of solid angle occupied by the comet from the bomb's point of view at its detonation distance). With the total energy absorbed by the comet, combined with the area and time over which it's absorbed, we can get the change in temperature at the surface. You could get pretty complicated here depending on how accurately you want to model the change in temperature and and surface characteristics, but in theory that should give us the mass of ice converted to vapor and its exhaust velocity / Isp. Integrate that over the surface and you have your change in momentum of the comet.
For that, I did (~6 years ago) a deep dive into the literature of the various researchers and teams who had done fairly detailed modeling of a number of potential diversion methods. And I had recently done my own work on pulsed plasma thrusters, which use one of the postulated mechanisms (pulsed radiation ablation of a solid to produce thrust), so I was reasonably confident that I could recognize who was doing it right. And the people who were doing it right, were getting very similar numbers.
All that I have at hand without digging into boxes of old files is the summary sheet I wrote for future reference. For yields of up to 75 R^2 [edit: I originally had this as R^3] kilotons, where R is the radius of the asteroid or comet in kilometers, combined X-ray and neutron ablation results in a propulsive impulse of ~1.5E8 Newton-seconds per kiloton, assuming a typical modern H-bomb at optimal standoff.
Because neutrons are much more efficient than X-rays in this context (penetrating deeper and producing "softer" ablation), you could get better results with a bomb optimized for neutron production in a way military H-bombs aren't. Yes, there are or at least were "neutron bombs", but they are very low yield and designed in a way that doesn't really scale to the high yields you want for this purpose. But for an optimal design based on "conventional" Li6-D fusion, you'd get ~3E8 N-s/kT, and for a fusion device using just cryogenic deuterium, ~5E8 N-s/kT.
All of these are relatively independent of target composition, though I believe somewhat less efficient for metallic asteroids.
If you bury the bomb at an optimal depth of ~100 m/kT^0.33, you get greater propulsive coupling, ~1.7 N-s/kT for a typical comet (or 9.2E-9 for a big rock, 4.2E-9 for a metallic asteroid, or 3.8E-10 for a carbonaceous asteroid). However, you have to rendezvous with the asteroid to drill into it, and if you count the weight of the propulsion system you'd need to rendezvous at typical intercept velocities (never mind the 200 lbs of ham to operate the drill), you're better off with more and/or bigger bombs than with a soft-landed bomb and a drill.
No, you can't just have the bomb punch deep into the asteroid with its own impact velocity; at these velocities, basically everything instantly vaporizes. Best you could do is have the bomb detonate at impact, and if you're not going to bury it, you want it standing off a few hundred meters for more uniform ablation.
Ah so OK thanks. I don't doubt the calculation *can* be done, all of this is pretty straightforward physics. It's just that you flung out the number without any indication that it came from some long train of careful calculation, and because of that it seemed to me like it was a back of the envelope calculation you ripped off in 5 minutes and I'm like -- wait, how the heck do you do that?
That's interesting about the neutrons, though. I would not have thought about that right off the bat, but it makes sense.
Excellent treatment of how the Starship+SH stack changes the scenario at hand (If it performs as advertised). I just want to add that for anyone concerned about the real world rather than the movie scenario, the most significant advantage Starship would bring (again assuming the economics actually work out at least somewhat as Musk claims) would be making it a lot cheaper and more practical to launch some of those "large space based telescopes designed specifically for asteroid+comet hunting" thus allowing us to have more than 6 months notice so we can do things the easy way.
Excellent point. Even a single telescope deployed in Earth's orbit 180º away from Earth would dramatically improve the situation, because stuff couldn't sneak up on us in the glare of the Sun. (Note that such a deployment also requires deploying a relay satellite, probably at Earth-Sun L4 or L5, so you can get the telemetry back to Earth.)
SpaceX has recently decided to move to 9 engines on Starship, and increase the tankage to hold more prop. I'm guessing 1500t, because that's what's required to do the NASA Artemis mission without refueling in cislunar space. If you have an expendable Starship with no thermal tiles, no flaps, and probably a jettisoned fairing, getting down to 80t dry mass seems pretty likely. With 5t of nukes and their PBVs, you could then generate 10.85km/s of delta-v. From a 400x400km orbit, that's v∞=15km/s. That should help quite a bit.
Estimates for the payload to LEO with the new configuration are about 200t. That would mean 8.5 launches per kamikaze mission. Getting 15 of them (let's be conservative) on the way in 90 days would cost 2 launches every 3 days. (There are likely to be two pads up and running in fairly short order, one in Texas and one in Florida, so working it this way makes more sense. It also makes the rendezvous mechanics a bit more tractable.)
Like you, I'm also skeptical of the "fly 3x per day" boundless enthusiasm, and it's really not needed until there's some application that requires that many launches. If they get the point-to-point thing working for cargo, that might drive them to maintain a bigger fleet of Starships and move their cadence forward more aggressively, but I suspect acquiring the overflight and landing rights to make that a real thing will take a while.
Still, they seem on track to have engine production capacity up to 3-5 per day (1/day in Hawthorne and 2-4/day in McGregor), and that's really the gating factor. So they seem to think that they need to be able to build 2-3 Starships per week or, alternatively, a SuperHeavy every week to week and a half.
I suspect that fleet expansion would turn out to be the gating factor in figuring out what's possible, rather than maximum rate that they could turn launches around. They appear to be taking this fast turnaround stuff very seriously, given all the effort they're investing in the ground support equipment at Boca Chica.
One last thing: Almost all launches are tanker launches. Losing a tanker here and there is no big deal if you have the production capacity to replace them. That can make them fairly low-quality vehicles, with minimal checkout. But the same is not true for SuperHeavies, because when they fail, that likely takes the pad out of service as well. That would be pretty much all she wrote.
Or... Bezos could have Blue Origin build a space station orbiting the earth and just build a rocket powerful enough to get him to it if disaster was impending to wait out the worst of it.
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/orbital-reef-commercial-space-station
A few widely-spaced bunkers on Earth would be a much cheaper way of accomplishing the same thing. And safer; you really *don't* want to be in Low Earth Orbit when a large asteroid or comet hits the Earth.
One thing that seemed _totally obvious_ to me was that that the Mark Rylance character was a direct stand-in for Mark Zuckerberg. I thought this was as obvious as seeing Meryl Streep as Trump. The entire film, I was saying to my wife "wow, this actor has _completely nailed_ Zuckerberg, from the oddly forced facial expressions, the thousand-yard-stare when talking to people, the psychotic laugh, lack of emotion, and total amorality. At the beginning, he's even talking excitedly (or his forced, unemotional version of "excitedly") about determining users' emotional states and then manipulating them via algorithmically-selected videos (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/), after which he complains to his staff that the feel-good video wasn't engaging enough.
And then I read a bunch of reviews that compared him to Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, some other tech titan, or a pastiche of "tech CEOs." Maybe I'm just crazy, but the Zuckerberg comparison seemed so obvious to me.
The Musk connection in particular seems completely off base. The Rylance character had zero interest in space until he figured out it could make him vastly richer by minimizing the costs of cell-phone production. Musk is a weirdo, but he's very much on Team Prevent Human Extinction. He's also oddly amaterialistic, living in an unpleasant part of the country to be close to SpaceX and renting a pretty modest home. I'm sure he has plenty of extravagances, but he doesn't seem all that obsessed with increasing his material wealth compared to Zuckerberg (basically buying Kauai) or Bezos with his daughter-yachts. I don't see Musk (or Steve Jobs for that matter) as being willing to gamble with civilization for a few more bucks.
Anyway, it's a small thing, but I'm still surprised that I haven't read any reviews that make this connection that seemed so obvious to me.
I am about as far as possible from a fan of Zuckerberg, but this:
"Zuckerberg (basically buying Kauai)"
I love/hate to be pedantic, but it looks like it's 2 square miles out of like 500. Not an invisible fraction, and I have no idea whether it's the absolute best 2 sq mi, but an amount that in other less-fraught contexts we might call "in the noise".
Oh, yeah totally fair. I really just meant it as an exaggerated way to say "buying more land than a normal human being would ever want." I don't have any problem with that: it's his money, and Kauai is legitimately like paradise; I'd love to buy some land there too someday.
But it does indicate that he is very focused on accumulation, whereas someone like Musk seems mostly focused on building cool things, with money and possessions as mostly byproducts.
Also fair.
Larry Ellison, on the other hand, did buy 98% of Lanai
Ha, well son of a gun, so he has.
I've also seen the character compared to Larry Page, based presumably on physical appearance. In any case, the fact that many people have come up with different "obvious" inspirations is good evidence that it was an amalgamation of various people.
The Silicon Valley TV show characters were each a “merger” between real people. I think here it’s a merge between Larry Page and Elon Musk.
"Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now."
This may not be true! There are at least 2-3 substantial damage events in the ancient world possibly tied to asteroid impacts, of 26 confirmed craters from the last million years, including 3 that were in the continent-killer weight class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_possible_impact_structures_on_Earth#Overview
On the subject of Starship; as a first approximation SpaceX is projecting approximately 100 tons to Low Earth Orbit, 5x the payload capacity as a Falcon 9, in its fully reusable configuration. Assuming their estimate pans out, that's approximately 220 flights instead of 1100. Harder to approximate are the additional savings of full reusability (versus F9's first stage reusability) and Starship's planned refuel-in-orbit capability.
"There are at least 2-3 substantial damage events in the ancient world possibly tied to asteroid impacts".
I'm torn about how much to believe this. On one hand, the "ancient world" might generously be taken to cover, say, 4000 BC to 1000 AD, so three in that time frame compared to probably zero in the last millennium is not ridiculous. On the other hand, the ancient world had so *very* much smaller a footprint that the base rate of asteroid impacts would, I fear, have to be implausibly large for there to have been three of them that actually hit a city.
But of course you said, "This may not be true!" and I can't argue with that.
"Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now."
This assumption may be false: see the recent paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3?f
edit: As a number of people have pointed out, this paper is not great, and should probably be ignored. For the interested, here is a link to a Skeptical Inquirier article about the paper: https://skepticalinquirer.org/2021/12/sodom-meteor-strike-claims-should-be-taken-with-a-pillar-of-salt/
The difficulty of deflecting this comet in the allotted time definitely makes the movie better. The scientists at the beginning aren't saying, "This is what we need to do," they're freaking out. They aren't sure of the details of what needs doing, which is one reason the talk goes badly. They know, however, that saving humanity is worth trying.
As far as "peer review" and other issues go, see my comments on the other thread, where I also made the Apple connection despite having no conscious knowledge of that guy.
"Look, there’s a weird game called “movie criticism”, where you take a movie as a jumping-off point to have thoughts on Society or the Human Condition. In the real world, people watch movies because they’re funny, or they have cool action sequences, or because the lead actress is really hot. But the rules of the “movie criticism” game say you have to ignore this stuff and treat them as deep commentary."
// pedantic mode on
Is this irony? I hope so! There is good and bad comedy and "movie criticism" also deals with this classification - why the comedy of the Marx brothers, Monty Python, Mel Brooks or Seinfeld is sometimes brilliant and why this brilliance is hard to achieve. Or why the movies of directors such as Kubrick or Kurosawa or David Lynch are so often great. And "deep comentary" is never a necessary factor to a movie being great.
// pedantic mode off
I don't think Scott was being ironic -- just that he's more interested in general in what *all* things say about Society or the Human Condition than in what makes a movie good or successful. There certainly are movie critics that incline in the same direction, though like you I'm inclined to call what they do by some other name. That doesn't make them unrewarding to read.
Most film critics don't have much in the way of larger thoughts about society, but they do know a whole bunch about movies and they have strong confidence that their taste in movies is right. I'm a weird exception in that I don't know all that much about movies and am not impressed much by my own taste, but I do find movies a good jumping off point for discussing the subject of the movie so that the viewer can come up with an intelligent opinion of his own.
For example, here's my review of Adam McKay's last movie "Vice," a Dick Cheney biopic starring an excellent Christian Bale:
"McKay utterly bypasses the one interesting mystery still surrounding Dick Cheney’s career: What happened in the 1990s following Cheney’s impressive performance as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense that then led to his disastrous years as George W. Bush’s veep? Why did the man who prudently sided with GHWB to not go to Baghdad in 1991 fanatically encourage GWB to go to Baghdad in 2003?"
https://www.takimag.com/article/anchorman-without-laughs/
Cheney is a more considerable and interesting figure than McKay, so I devote much of my review to speculating upon Cheney's change.
I think to understand how complicated narrative about systemic failure where even experts themselves are corrupted can be compressed into "trust the experts" message, we should very explicitly distinguish two problems of epistemics: a hard one and an easy one.
The hard one is how to consistently beat experts and markets, finding truth in an adversary environment where everything is broken, people are corrupt and follow their perversed initiatives, being part of inadequate equilibria. And as the name suggest this problem is hard. One have to be very smart, be fluent in reading scientific papers, be actually capable to do your own research, know everything about systemic failures and posses some of the best heuristic developped by the best communities of rational thinkers.
The easy one is how not to be a crazy conspiracy theorist. For this we should just trust the scientific consensus. It's an easy and cheap heuristic. Which will obviously fail us from time to time but at least it won't fail us as bad as other easy heuristics. It's the baseline.
I understand and agree that the hard question is much more interesting, noble and virtuous. That one can develop as a rationalist only by trying to answer it and not the easy one. But it seems that the easy question is more important from utilitarian perspective due to sheer number of people performing worse than our baseline.
I agree with you about this, and you put it clearly and concisely.
However, I see an additional problem, which is discerning a scientific consensus in the first place - easier said than done.
Take the scientific consensus on climate change, perhaps as exemplified by Cook's iconic 97% study. You can find any number of references to this (including from the POTUS) claiming it confirms the potentially catastrophic consequences of AGW and that it ends the debate about whether humanity should act or not.
The study itself merely claims that 97% of published papers on the subject assert, either explicitly or implicitly, that mankind is having an effect on the climate. Which is something believed by every single climate sceptic I know.
Actually finding and defining a scientific consensus is much harder than it seems. And that is true even for the mythical rationalist free from all the biases that afflict run of the mill human beings.
I agree, but I do not think that the difficulty lie in the scientific consensus per se, maybe I will rephrase what you say but for me the issue is that what is discussed is:
1) a set of facts
2) a theory explaining those facts
3) use the theory to predict what will happen in the future, given some assumption on the input (null policy)
4) provide an assessment on how good or bad what will happen is
5) propose a new policy (basically propose to a way to alter the inputs) and show, using the theory (3) and assessment of (4), that the proposed policy will make the future better than the null policy.
While politically this is proposed in bulk, explicitly or implicitly; the scientific consensus is always on 1), often on 2) (depending on how coarse or fine you expect the theory to be), but rarely on 3) when the issue is complex (the coarse, consensual, theory is not predictive enough, fine theories allowing predictions accurate enough to allow 3->5 are rarely consensual on the current sensitive issues (covid, CC,...) and almost never on 4) and 5).
Still, the consensus on 1, 2 (and coarse 3) is used to justify 1->5 and this color the debate so much that opponents to the politics (1-5) ends up challenging 1-2, either because they really doubt it (which is indeed anti-science and likely to be false, even if there are (very few) counter examples), or because the way the debate has been framed it's the only way for opponents to be heard.
While I agree that there are some possibilities for miscommunication between scientists and general population that make finding what is the scientific consensus on some matter not very easy especially for people who are bad at searching information, I respectfull disagree with the sentiment that it's a considerebly hard issue on an absolute scale. Most of the time in order not to dramatically fail bellow the baseline it's enough to read some Wikipedia or pop-science. Getting more nuanced perspective is harder depending on how much nuance we want but again, in order not to become a conspiracy theorist not much nuance is required.
Also, I don't think that your example is very good. Majority of modern global warming sceptics may have more reasonable position than outright denialism, but the goalpost had to be moved quite a lot in order to let it be the case. Also there are still outright denialists.
I also think Musk is an obviously terrible analog for the CEO in this movie. Musk is very concerned about x-risk and did a lot to combat climate change in particular. He's also unusually competent. He would almost certainly urge to destroy the comet if the movie plot were to happen in real life.
The other thing I would say is that I didn't get the impression that any moment in this movie was trying to be funny, and there certainly wasn't any moment I found funny.
In regard to Civ4 FFH, I'll endanger ACX by mentioning Endless Legend is a thing.
Endless Legend is excellent and way more polished, but the ridiculous amount of content to explore and experiment with in Fall From Heaven is unmatched, imho
"Given that no asteroid has substantially damaged a city in recorded history, the per year rate seems pretty low, even granting that much more land is urban now."
There are actually two historical impact events that might have caused tens of thousands of deaths. The first is Ch'ing-yang event in 1490 and the second is Wanggongchang explosion in 1626. Both in China, both hard to verify.
Isherwell is based on Marshall Applewhite, the leader of Heaven's Gate! He matches Applewhite perfectly, it's too much of a coincidence.
Heaven's Gate was a cult that became infamous for its 1997 mass suicide. Their website is still running, and you can find videos of the group members discussing their imminent suicides on Youtube.
https://www.heavensgate.com/
Oh, damn, thank you! He was in the back of my head but as soon as you said Heaven's Gate I realized that connection.
> And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks.
Would we know in advance where it hits? I mean more than a few hours in advance?
For crashing satellites we don't know at all, because if the crash is a few minutes earlier or later, this translates into huge differences in the location. I could imagine that it's different for comets (because they are much faster than satellites, so error terms from atmospheric disturbances matter less), but I am not sure.
Kerbal Space Program is great for developing an intuition: by the time a hyperbolically deorbiting münar mission hits the atmosphere, it's much too late for that atmosphere to affect the impact site. You can choose between a slug and a neat shotgun blast ring, but you know exactly where Jeb's final resting place will be long before he reaches it.
Very roughly speaking, six months out you'd be able to draw a roughly east-west line a few thousand kilometers long on a map of the Earth and say "it will be somewhere on that line". As the comet gets closer, you can narrow it down further.
If the line crossed, say, New York City, you might start a crash program to turn NASA's next interplanetary probe into a nuclear missile, but probably by the time you were ready to launch you'd have narrowed that down to "the Atlantic ocean 2-300 km offshore", and then you just reroute air and shipping traffic on impact day and tell New Yorkers to stay clear of east-facing windows and beaches just to be safe.
There is one buried reference to climate change, when the black scientist (I forget his name) goes on his protest bent, flags and banners fly across the screen, some of which mention fossil fuels. There may be other climate-based Easter Eggs, I just noticed that on a first pass.
I thought it was just the way left-wing protests all merge into one amorphous blob of all issues
> a 2,000 person passenger capacity and working cryosleep pods, in the space of six months.
I don't think we should assume that this happened in the space of six months. We should assume that the tech CEO has been building this for *years*, and more out of a dislike for current humanity and governments than any expectation of a comet. That's also the reason it doesn't come back to Earth - it was never intended to come back to earth, and he doesn't change the original mission parameters.
What I find most fascinating about the cloud of feedback is that a lot can be summarized as critics struggling with a movie that has no heroes. It demonstrates how ingrained the heroes journey narrative is, and emphasizes the most important contribution of Don't Look Up, namely it's departure from that template.
Surprised to see that you actually paid attention to the discord for once. Maybe if you did that more often it wouldn't be such a shitshow.
It would be great if you could perform your amazing analytical skills on the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. There seems to be growing evidence it is correct.
One thing for the era of disaster movies such as "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure", they didn't do moralising, they were just meant as specatcle. And the press certainly didn't write pieces about "does this relate to the recent scandal in marine insurance fraud?" or whatever about them.
> I think a lot of my unease about the movie came from the moralizing in the press about it.
Agree. When they *don't* do this, we can just consume the thing as art. But the narrative-shoveling class can't do anything with actual art, because it's ineffective as an object-level political tool.
They used to churn out propaganda disguised as art, but I think at this point they think so little of our intelligence, they just came out and said "It's propaganda! It is!"
> That suggests a per-century rate of 1-in-a-million for the former and 1% for the latter. And a century from now, we’ll either enough new tech to trivially solve the problem, or something else will have killed us already.
On the other hand, I've seen plenty of times "1% is something to worry about when talking about existential threat" in the context of e.g. rogue AI. I do feel somewhat less worried about the meteor - there's some overlap between what's needed to fix that, and "Tech CEO #4 wants a car in space" / "we need to figure out how to better blow up our enemies". But the considerations of John Schilling about putting whatever deflects the comet in its path in time come from basic Newtonian mechanics. Unless we discover the Reactionless Drive TM (doubt intensifies), we had better work on improving early-warning systems _specifically_ for this scenario.
My personal highlight was the comment by Running Burning Man which stated that moving the comet "is stupid beyond description" and contained a personal attack on Scott. Or more precisely, the productive discussion it generated:
1. The personal attack was uncalled for, so understandably Scott did not appreciate it.
2. A share of the discussion moved away from the critical point that comets might not be deflectable and discussed if there was a personal attack. Therefore, amusingly, a theme of the movie was almost replicated: the urgent issue being missed due to the commenter being too shrill.
3. However, a serious and scientific discussion ensues. +1 for the community.
4. The consensus seems to shift: From an initial "we have a chance to deflect a comet", to "we can not for this size and timeline."
5. Most critically: People did Fermi estimates for the risk for humanity from asteroids & comets. Meaning it was hard to point to good literature and the work in assessing the risks has not progressed far. It is baffling and a point Bostrom made before that we have scientific articles on almost anything, but few on existential risks.
The pop-star character played by Ariana Grande blasts the 'trust the experts' message clearly at the climax of the movie. To me it is pretty clear and Scott's take is correct. Even if you take your own message away from the movie, the people making the movie were literally shouting this message at you.
"Look up, what he's really trying to say
Is get your head out of your ass
Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists
We really fucked it up, fucked it up this time
It's so close, I can feel the heat big time
And you can act like everything is alright
But this is probably happening in real time"
> I feel like asking “okay, but did he also do a Google search for ‘journal with low standards’ and then get Reviewer #3 to sign off on it?” is not a high bar.
You're right, it's not a high bar, but it couldn't even hurdle that bar and yet was taken seriously, which I took as the point of that off hand peer review comment.
Peer review at any journal usually takes at least 2 months. In the context of the movie, (AFAICT, since I have not watched it) I am not sure whether the plan was was submitted and rejected or not submitted to some reason (urgence, impatience, or self-serving reasons). In the latter case, stating "it was not peer reviewwed" does not mean (unlike in the former case) that it lacks the merit to clear even a low bar.
The point was not that it lacks merit simply because it wasn't reviewed, but that it was given high credence simply because of *who* presented the plan (fallacious), and was arguably given higher credence than work that *was* peer reviewed.
Scott, I kind of felt like you misjudged this comedy as well but please don't be disheartened. You're a Great Man and also a great guy. Perfection is beyond the capabilities of all flesh.
You always choose comments by John Schilling? Does that make him.... the Schilling point?
I find it weird that so many readers are resistant to the idea that the movie could be interpreted as a metaphor for Covid/Climate Change/etc.
The first I heard about it was via Reddit posts that were screencaps of Twitter. Someone tweeted something anti these issues, then someone replied “You are the people Don’t Look Up tells us to worry about” or “You are the people that Don’t Look Up is criticizing”. Theses screenshots would get a couple thousand upvotes.
I addition, I have seen lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio has made a few tweets using the film to draw attention to Climate Change. Some imply this link was an intentional aspect of the movie.
https://twitter.com/leodicaprio/status/1478779661832187904?s=21
https://twitter.com/leodicaprio/status/1478406606220001281?s=21
https://twitter.com/leodicaprio/status/1474439731731734528?s=21
https://twitter.com/leodicaprio/status/1478116457498103809?s=21
The last Tweet I linked has a video that starts with co-star Jennifer Lawrence saying the movie is a metaphor for Climate Change.
I commented this downthread, but I'll continue to say it: I think at least a portion of the people going "it's just a silly farce, it's not 'about' anything real!" are engaging in motte-and-bailey tactics. It's just a silly farcical movie... so long as people are accusing it of being ham-fisted propaganda. Then, once those people leave, it's right back to using it as a political bludgeon.
> But also, Tech CEO kind of randomly builds a starship, complete with a 2,000 person passenger capacity and working cryosleep pods, in the space of six months. Was the starship peer-reviewed?
I've been an engineer a while and never seen a design that doesn't get peer-reviewed. It may not happen in the public eye like science unless it's open source software, but peer review happens. It's even an audit point for accreditation bodies that certify companies on a scale of how mature they are as engineering organizations.
The movie suffered from the inconsistency of the characters, Leo and Jen. There's complexity, then there's just inconsistency. Jen was the adult in the room, then she wasn't. Leo was a fool, then he wasn't. Also, the screaming "We're all gonna die," was just a boring crutch. As a 12-year-old, I burst into tears spontaneously, involuntarily at the end of Dr. Strangelove.
@spork: Someone did rewrite the ending: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/opinion/dont-look-up-decadence.html
That's a good one!
The only part of the movie that has a rational social commentary is when the BASH elites cull criticism while making the drones. All progress comes from criticism of our best hard-to-vary explanations. The hard-to-vary aspect doesn't require gatekeepers, neither does the criticism part. The movie doesn't make that point obvious, so it ends up being cynical blind pessimism--which is comforting to a large body of the public that relies purely on the infinite regression of inductivism to justify their historicist argument. Good on the producers, because it's also super cathartic in a time where it's confusing why things aren't panning out the way most have predicted based on their accumulation of "data", to see everyone die. The great thing about the apocalypse is how simple it makes everything.
TL/DR Netflix stock is still a "buy"
I think Scott's original review was probably closer to the truth. The movie was trying to spread the message "Trust The Science" and it just didn't do a good job. Because its moral was too simplistic, and its writing lacked subtlety or sophistication. (Especially when compared to satires like "The Thick of It" or "Succession".)