I suspect something like that is true. When I was a kid, people used to say that men think about sex multiple times per hour, but I think there are lots and lots of things that we think about.
What's missing here is a comparison to other ancient and less ancient states - Egypt, Greece, China, Japan etc. Maybe a large part of the stuff ACX readers commonly think about is related to history in some way.
I think other major empires would be the best comparison: the British, Mongols, Greece. I'm not sure any would come close, despite the British empire having an even greater cultural impact and being more recent.
This would be a great comparison. The British empire in particular.As you said, much more recent and more direct impact on the world today, but I bet it’s thought of less than half as much as the Roman Empire, probably more like a quarter.
But that's because you conceive of thinking about the British empire much more narrowly than thinking about Rome. Thinking about Latin, Roman Emperors, the wars Rome fought, Roman engineering, Roman literature and Roman religion all count as thinking about Rome. But thinking about the English language, British Kings and prime ministers, the second world war and all the others, the industrial revolution, English literature, and the Anglican, Baptist and Methodist churches together with the Quakers somehow doesn't count as thinking about the British empire.
Yeh I feel you can make that distinction. To think of Rome is to think of the Empire. That’s the criteria. Thinking of Spanish culture, including South American culture (literally called Latin) isn’t to think about Rome. Same with English and the British Empire.
Not very much, actually. The Church arguably had more of a 'Roman' cultural impact on Britain than any Roman soldiers and baths did.
If you want to stretch the idea of "Roman-derived" to mean "anything related to the Church," then I suppose the Romans had a large impact. But that would be a stretch. I'd say feudalism and the Normans had a much bigger influence.
Of course, the Normans themselves were just Christianized Norsemen, but that only makes them a derivative of a derivative of a derivative of ancient Rome, whereas their true architectural genius, social organization, leadership, etc., were all quite Germanic in expression.
"Their true architectural genius, social organization, leadership, etc., were all quite Germanic in expression." Like the Anglo-Saxons before them, they copied Roman institutions a lot once their conquests demanded a more sophisticated form of administration. Granted, they mixed in their own ideas, but they ideas that there was some wholesale replacement is just flat out wrong. As often happens in history when a militarily superior people conquer a people with a legacy and ideas of more sophisticated cultural, legal, and political institutions; those institutions are often adopted rather than destroyed.
In architecture the Romanesque style (a direct descendant of Roman architecture) continued for a century after the Battle of Hastings. It was replaced by Gothic Architecture, which was (as far as can be told), purely French in origin rather than Norman.
A great deal of the political culture and legal of most Western states still is somewhat Roman inspired, Britain included. The proclamation of the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 was, "Elizabeth II, Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Regina, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor." A good deal of all the political symbolism is Roman-derived i.e the scepter and orb. The Mace, which must be present, to this day, in the House of Commons when it is in session, is actually something adopted from the practices of the Byzantine Empire, which still counts. The personification of Lady Justice, which adorns court houses, is also Roman derived.
One could easily argue that the entire attempt to establish a unified monarchy in the Island from Alfred onward was an attempt to bring back the unified order that had prevailed during the Roman period. Even British common law, had a lot of origins in the writings of clerics who had studied the Code of Justinian. Lady Justice is also Roman derived, of course and common law uses Roman concepts and vocabulary significantly (written legal records were in Latin and/or "Law French" until the 1730s). Before Common Law came into its own, Roman Law and Canon Law were studied at Oxford and Cambridge.
All the concepts of "British liberty" that were argued about during the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution were heavily inspired by the ideas of Roman Republican politicians as read almost universally by educated people in Britain. The bicameral system of Lords and Commons echoes the Roman Senate and Popular assemblies. I could go one, but the point is that Roman influence was not entirely extirpated by either Saxon or Norman conquest.
Yes. Id say thinking about the roman empire should also be defined more narrowly than thinking about any event or idea originating in the roman empires space-time. It should only mean thinking about the empire as a political entity. Thinking about jesus should not count unless you are considering the constraints and motivations of pontius pilate.
Still, I suspect thinking about events in rome space-time is more likely to trigger thoughts of the empire itself, than is the case with the British empire probably overall due to more proximity and points of contact to those events.
To be fair a reasonable sunset of respondents will think about Britain regularly, either because they live there or because it's the great villain of several narratives of global history (anti-colonialism, Russian foreign policy etc).
A reasonable amount, yes. As Geoff says half or a quarter of the Roman figures, which would be 10-25% of respondents. The former figure if you only count non-UK residents.
This raises the question of whether the Roman number grows for Italians. I assume ACX doesn't have a significant enough number of Italian readers to calculate. Greece and Mongolia surely have huge numbers that reflect on the glories of their past empires.
It's worth remembering that the population of every former empire probably reflects on its existence. Sometimes to unhealthy extremes (see Russia at present). Sometimes with much more considered judgement (the Germans on the Prussian-German empire for example). It is a good question as to how many who live in Europe reflect on the Ming Empire or how many who live in East Asia regularly thinks of the Aztecs. Although the question of how to justify the effort to establish this is of course relevant.
We British almost never reflect on the empire. We were mostly disinterested in it, to be fair, as it happened. Unlike Rome which changed the built environment of most of Europe, the Empire’s obvious achievements are overseas where indigenous opinion is hostile regardless of what beneficial technology or culture was exported.
Where money from the empire was used to build out the great houses and some public structures, it’s not really emphasised, and in any case the great mass of people didn’t benefit.
Some historians say that as a whole Britain itself didn’t benefit from the Empire, the growth in income and wealth being primarily driven by the Industrial Revolution, which financed the empire rather than the reverse. I’m inclined to agree.
There’s also a feeling here that these things are better off not being looked into, in case we find creepy crawlies under the rocks.
Podcasts, TV shows and books on British history tend to stick to the country itself, and there’s a lot of that for a large island.
After all, the history of Canada, the early American colonies pre the formation of the US, Australia and New Zealand are their own history and no doubt well taught there, but a Londoner probably doesn’t care either way unless he has a particular interest in history.
The existence of the empire and especially British maritime supremacy between 1814 and 1914 greatly facilitated global trade for everyone involved. And since Britain had the largest share of global trade this was of immense value. But the empire itself was a bit of an albatross. If someone else had had a global empire and maritime supremacy that benefitted global trade in the same way, Britain would have had the same economic benefit without the expense.
Probably worth flagging I'm British too. Actually I agree with you on this; it's very much another age to modern discourse (other than the idiots who want to try and guilt me out about the actions of someone else's great-grandfather). However it also still exists: the UK and it's dependencies are still the much smaller British Empire, so my reasoning was that most British people probably think of the UK pretty regularly.
"Mongolia surely ha[s] huge numbers that reflect on the glories of their past empires"
Somewhat limited by the relatively small number of ethnic Mongols (approx 10M per Wiki), but from some limited interactions with them, they *do* in fact think of the glories of Mongolia (or more usually the glories of Chinggis Khan in particular-see the eponymous song from the HU for an example. There is also a general idea that old Temujin will return and they will restore the great Mongol empire, with the all the attendant rape and murder that implies; they are not apologetic about this.
Although there is one interesting difference between the Roman and Mongol empire, from my readings: the former subjects of the Mongol empire who were not ethnic Mongols do not look back at it fondly, and indeed Genghis Khan is viewed in large chunks of the world as roughly similar to how we view Hitler (amusingly, in the West he gives the title to two different pop songs). Probably lots of reasons for this (the Mongols conquered peoples that already had strong national/ethnic identities, whereas the Romans' greatest contribution-Christianity-largely subsumed that), but it's a pattern that's there.
Forgot to add I'd be curious how, say, the Chinese view the Yuan empire as a legacy of Mongol conquest. Vague impression is that views are generally complicated.
My impression is roughly, "Just another one of those dynasties where the Empire was ruled by barbarian steppe nomads, and not even the worst one of those. For you, the Mongols were the doom of your fledgling civilization, but for us they were Tuesday."
Interesting that the Mongols celebrate the Great Khan's career but DO NOT whitewash his atrocities. If true, this could be the most "evil" nation on Earth. (Evil in intent, if not consequentially)
I think about the British empire a lot, but I live in a Commonwealth country so that makes sense. Greece, too, but only because I am currently taking a political philosophy course. I think the last time I thought about the Mongols was a few months ago when I was reading Scott's joke about sn-risks.
I’d guess the only empire (using that term very loosely here) that would actually beat Rome in a “how often it’s thought about” contest would be Nazi Germany. Between the endless political comparisons, their role as the villain in a lot of media and the abundance of WW2 history, the nazis are still very much remembered. Though unlike Rome, the way they’re remembered is almost entirely negative.
As a side note, I’d also guess that Hitler is the third most thought about dead person, after Christ and Mohammed. Again, that’s mostly due to political comparisons, the popularity of WW2 history and being the villain in a countless number of movies, games, TV shows, books, etc.
By Greece, you likely mean Alexander of Macedonia.
I think that the cultural impact of him is much lessened by the fact that his empire broke up pretty soon after his death, while the Roman empire lasted much longer.
I would argue that most of the Western interest in Greece is in fact a consequence of the Romans being very interested in Greek culture. (Christianity also played a role, though.) Also, much of the interest seems to be focused on the decidedly-not-empires city states like Athens.
The impact of Alexander's conquests was more far-ranging than you realize. He is largely the reason for Greek becoming the lingua franca of the East, the dissolution of the Persian Empire, and the rise of centres of learning like Alexandria in Egypt - all of which dramatically changed the political and cultural landscape of the time.
In fact, Athens did have an empire: The Delian League, which was a de facto Athenian empire. Much of Athens' contributions to art and culture (and, arguably, history via Thucydides), including Greek tragedy, occurred when Athenian imperial power was at its height. To study Athens is to study an empire.
I see Alexander kinda like Napoleon, who also had a huge effect on Europe long after he was gone. (Politically, Alexander's long term effect seems larger: the rulers he installed hung onto power for generations.)
I have learned neither Latin nor Greek, so I am not qualified to really speak on that subject (but when has that ever stopped anyone), but my feeling is that in the various canons, the fraction of works directly related to the politics of running an empire is much higher for Rome than for Athens or England. Sure, I can skip Julius Caesar and exclusively read Roman love poetry, and I am certain that for understanding Shakespeare or Plato, 'this was a elite-adjacent guy who wrote in the capital of a (de-facto) empire' is an helpful insight, but with Roman authors it might be a bit more on-the-nose.
A comparison with Napoleon is apt, although I'd say French thought and language wasn't as widely employed afterwards as Greek ones came to be.
Actually, I have had a fair training in both languages, and I can say that most of what we know about the running the Roman empire also comes to us tangentially through sources like Pliny the Younger and inscriptions. The orators of Rome spoke about as much about law and politics as the Greek ones. One can argue, however (and it has been so argued), that the whole of the Peloponnesian War is a history on the (largely failed) workings of the Athenian Empire. Some good scholars to look at for how Athens was run would be P. J. Rhodes on Athenian diplomacy and political history, and Josiah Ober on Athenian government.
Come on, Imperial China you got ahead by doing well on standardized tests, had no athletic expectations, could have a few concubines (if you were a man--like 90% of the people on this blog), and got lots of really good Chinese food.
Probably when they came here. Fortune cookies are entirely Chinese-American. 'Ethnic food' is always adapted to the local palate--go read about Italian food in Japan (octopus on spaghetti! mayo and black pepper sauce!) sometime.
"Rice with stuff" seems like the core idea of Chinese food, and I assume the Chinese have been eating this since they first cultivated rice in ~7000 BC.
While researching to try to put a date on that, I also learned that 4000 year old noodles have been found in China.
> "Rice with stuff" seems like the core idea of Chinese food
The Chinese would hate to hear you say that. Rice with stuff is a common form, 盖浇饭 (literally, "covered rice", stuff served on a bed of rice), but rice is viewed as cheap filler. It's an expected part of meals, but it's not the good part.
Breakfasts and snacks generally aren't supposed to involve rice.
Back in the 90s when I lived in Hong Kong, I and some of my American compatriots went looking for restaurants that served American-style Chinese food. You won't find dishes like Lemon Chicken or Beef and Broccoli in most Hong Kong restaurants. OTOH, most American Chinese food — until recently — was primarily served in restaurants run by Cantonese who — I had assumed — adapted their cooking styles to the American palate.
But the story gets a bit more interesting because we were able to find a couple of skanky restaurants in Tuen Mun that served American-style Chinese food! They were initially shocked when dozens of Americans descended on their humble establishments on Friday and Saturday nights (we'd stoke up on calories before we went out bar hopping). One of the owners' English was good enough to ask why we were so enthusiastic about his little restaurant. I explained that this is the style of Chinese food that is served in Chinese restaurants in America — but it was hard to find that style of food in Hong Kong. He explained that these were old-style Cantonese dishes. Working-class Cantonese used to eat it — but it was going out of fashion.
So, I think American-style Chinese food is the working-class Cantonese cuisine that the Chinese immigrants brought with them to America in the 19th century and early 20th century. Cantonese cuisine has evolved to become much more fancy. But Chinese-American foodways have stayed in a sort of time warp. At least in my area, most of the original Cantonese restaurant owners have sold out to northerners. I don't hear Cantonese being spoken by the kitchen staff anymore. And the northerners don't really know how to cook this style of food. The quality of the food has deteriorated. OTOH, we now have a lot of restaurants serving non-Cantonese regional cuisines.
I've heard/read (but not recently so don't know if it's more than an urban legend) that empires typically create colonies and the empire moves on in its dialect while the colony stays frozen. Does this mean that the British in the 1600's spoke like Americans do now, and in the 1700's spoke like the Aussies do now? I forget what the linguist had to say to that question but it was sort-of in the affirmative.
The idea that this extended to food never occurred to me.
Stirfry is a luxury food, requiring a lot of heavily processed oil. (Not to say that the oil involved is processed more heavily than other oil, but all oil is heavily processed, compared to olives or seeds.)
I am given to understand that traditional peasant fare was steamed, because that's cheap. They still eat a lot of steamed food today, most notably baozi. They also eat a lot of soup. Stirfry with sauce is extremely common in restaurants (in Shanghai), but restaurants are supposed to have good food.
I'm not sure what the balance of modern home cooking is like. Walk through an apartment building at dinnertime and you'll smell some incredible stirfry. But there's plenty of more pedestrian stuff too.
> Yes, I've also heard that American Chinese food has a lot more meat.
A normal restaurant order, assuming you're several people, would be multiple dishes that are entirely meat (with flavorings), and a bit of rice to go with it. One of my favorite things to order for lunch this past year was just a box of chicken-fried-with-garlic-chiles-scallions-and-spices.
Baozi is a little more expensive in Philadelphia than stirfry. My first thought is that it involves more done by hand, but I'm not sure if that's true.
Until Covid, we had an excellent Japanese Italian restaurant around here (Raleigh NC). It was tiny, called Papa Shogun, and served delicious dishes like Linguini Tanuki Jiru (Pancetta, daikon, shiitakes, mushroom dashi, sesame) and Kombu Gnocchi (Mushroom dashi, charred oyster mushrooms, ricotta salata). It is missed.
NYC had the Cuban-Chinese restaurant; someone pointed out to me they both use a lot of rice. I wonder if Japanese and Italians are both working from a noodle base in the same way.
Lots of Chinese emigrated to Cuba (and Jamaica) in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. I'd be curious what sort of dishes they served at this restaurant. Was it standard Cuban dishes alongside standard Chinese dishes, or was the cuisine a hybrid of the two?
No they aren't. They're entirely Japanese-American. They're served in Chinese restaurants, but they come from a Japanese tradition adapted by Japanese people. China and Chinese-Americans had nothing to do with it.
There's an episode of Lois and Clark where Clark Kent visits China to buy Chinese takeout for Lois and she complains about the fortune being in Chinese.
It shows about the same level of awareness as the episode focused on "Son Kwan Industries" in which different props spell "Son Kwan" in completely different ways, and the large sign over the main building is upside down.
Fortune cookies appear in American Chinese restaurants because that's the kind of restaurant that Japanese-Americans used to run. In the modern day, the situation has reversed, and Chinese-Americans run Japanese restaurants because the prices are higher.
Chinese food is a complicated topic because China is big. What you probably think of as Chinese food is a mix of Cantonese/Fujian (classic american chinese) and Szechuan/Bejing ("authentic" chinese from the past 20 years). I haven't read it but http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/books/invitation-to-a-banquet-the-story-of-chinese-food/ would probably do a good job covering this. Obviously a lot of Chinese food changed after the introduction of plants from the new world but there are many dishes that would be recognizable 1000 years ago or more.
Most of what we think of as Chinese food in the west (at least if you live on a coast and have good Chinese food), is similar to French food in that it involves exceptionally complex sauces and preparation. It is not peasant food but the food of one or another of the great dynasties. Wikipedia has a lot of discussion of it. It looks like the majority are from the two most recent dynasties, Yuan and Qing (1300 and 1700).
If thinking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms/Journey to the West/Tales of the Water Margin counts then I probably think about China more than I think about Rome. Not a lot of people made video games out of the Aeneid, but hoo boy have they made a bunch out of Rot3K.
(but since Rot3K is about states warring after the collapse of empire/before the rise of a new one, is it really thinking about /Imperial/ China?)
Yah, the ROTK and Dynasty Warriors series--I think they're on ROTK 14 now. And the Suikoden series was based on Water Margin (it's just the name for Water Margin in Japanese after all.)
(I always thought Imperial China was Qin to Qing. But anyway, it's the cultural equivalent--a historic period there are lots of stories about. I can totally see Chinese nerds memorizing all the minor characters and arguing over who could beat who like it's a comic book.)
Why do all the "imperial China"s count as *one* empire and referred to in the singular, as opposed to twelve (or however many there were), broken up by periods when there wasn't one? Why isn't there a "Twelfth Chinese Empire" or whatever?
On the one hand, you have the example of France. On the other hand there's the Catholic church, which has had periods when there was more than one claimant to be Pope.
I think it comes down to what the people refer to it.
"Not a lot of people made video games out of the Aeneid"
No they just made video games that include bits from all of Greek/Roman mythology.
For China are there any video games that have anything from any titles other than Rot3K or JttW? And do they mix and match? My experience with Journey to the West is that video games that use that story tend to use pretty much all of it: Sun Wu Kong, Tripitaka, the headband, the journey itself, etc. They don't use one incident, unlike say the bit in the Odyssey where Ulysses comes home and deals with the suitors.
- China went through long periods of isolation from the rest of the world
- it has a writing system that is deliberately hard to learn, so reading about China if you're not Chinese was often done and translating to other languages was rare
- they weren't generally anxious to go out conquering the rest of the planet militarily. Possibly because the surrounding areas weren't all that worth it, but also attitudes about the rest (see the first point)
Possibly it was not designed to be hard as a whole from the start - I don't think any writing system (apart from fictional ones) has been designed to that extent.
But one reason the mandarin system had such a grip on China for so long was that it was difficult to become competently literate, taking years of study. You see this even today in the "years to become able to read a newspaper" statistics.
The group that did become literate generally ended up controlling things, either officially, or unofficially. And they basically said "In here is all that is civilized, and out there is nothing but wasteland and barbarians." And nobody else got any say in the matter - except the barbarians in the end.
Judaism/Christianity would not exist without the Archaemenids. Also a substantial portion of what is considered Greek comes from them. People should study them more because then they would understand how much of the world is BC vs AC.
"More seriously, outside of Persia, did they leave much of an identifiable legacy?"
they left a very important legacy in terms of writing systems. A big swath of Asia today uses scripts that ultimately derive from Aramaic, the Achaemenid lingua franca. Even bigger if you consider the scripts of the Indian subcontinent (and through them, Southeast Asia) to be ultimately derived from the Aramaic script (though I think that's somewhat controversial, certainly they don't *look* similar).
I don't know, but yes, I did mean the official / court lingua franca, not necessrily the vernacular one. Either way, if the Indic scripts are in fact derived from the Aramaic script, then that's a *huge* and lasting influence over South, Central, Northeast and Southeast Asia.
I have difficulty seeing that as a "huge influence", just because the counterfactual world looks so identical to the factual one. You can say that one script is derived from another script, but unless something about the Indian region changes, how much influence has occurred?
How much Southeast Asian influence would you say has flowed through Americans' use of the word "ketchup"? The condiment is a mixture of tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar, and of those ingredients only one (the vinegar) is even present in traditional Asian cuisine. The word still exists over there, referring to a variety of sauces, none of which are similar to ketchup. No one in America knows or cares where the word came from or what it might have meant before.
If Americans had never learned this word, would we still have the condiment? Would anything be different at all?
China seems like the most obvious Rome comparison to me. Like Rome, it started out as one small state annexing a bunch of others that had never been put under the same government (unless Zhou was way more legitimately an empire than I think it was). This happened only a couple hundred years a dizzying number of different philosophical schools popping up, but the empire took one or two and made them dominant. This was also only a couple hundred years after the invention of proper record-keeping, so anything that happened much earlier was lost to the mists of time. The empire came up with all kinds of advances that still influence our lives today. Then, in the early centuries A.D., it broke apart.
The difference is that when Westerners look back at Rome, they see a precursor that fell. When the Chinese look back at Ancient China, they see China.
Your sample is 90% male and 10% female. It's obvious that apart from your sample generally being quite specific, woman are even more strongly pre-selected than man. And, while this is obviously unprovable at this point, if you had asked me beforehand "does the average ACX reader think about rome or less than the average population?" I'd have answered "significantly more". So this is not really moving the needle much for me tbh.
Scott posts a number of things that are semi-joking. The data is real, but he seems to recognize that it's extremely unscientific and can't be used to prove much. A lot of people around here seem to enjoy seeing data about themselves as a group (and probably data in general) so it's an easy filler post between headier topics.
Your average ACX gal (based on the 2024 public data) has 0.6 children (the guys are 0.7), is atheist or agnostic, makes about $100K a year (versus about $130K for the guys), and claims to have an IQ of 136 (same for the guys). Their modal occupation is actually "Computers: practical". (Same for the guys!) On a scale from 1-5, her worry about AI X-risk is a 3 (like the men). I think most people, male or female, if you asked them about AI X-risk, would ask you if that was the website Elon Musk bought.
Forget 'pick mes', this is the sort of woman who sympathizes with men because she has more in common with them...
Yes, it certainly seems that the selection bias for women who read ACX are significantly less like average women than the men are. Otherwise, we'd expect to see ~50/50 male/female breakdown, right?
1 in 200 here! I think it's because most people's interests stay fairly similar before and after transition, so those who were born female tend to have more female-typical interests and vice versa. I think some of this is inherent personality stuff, but a lot of it is that men and women with the same general categories of interest get slotted into different specific things. As a stereotypical example, men with creative/artistic tendencies may be more likely to be directed towards woodworking/carving, vs women more towards drawing and painting. Not sure what the "female rationalism equivalent" would be, though.
I think I ended up here because I transitioned fairly young, when a lot of my personality was still in flux, so my interests are more mixed. I found SSC around age 18, when I was trying to develop some sort of coherent system of beliefs about the world after becoming disillusioned with far-left ideology. Probably initially linked to SSC through Reddit, which I used heavily from age 13 on. I think the essay was "All Debates are Bravery Debates," and from there, "Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?".
Well, welcome either way! Hope I'm not scaring you off with this discussion.
So if you're going with 'ACX interests are heavily male-skewed' (any hypothesis has to start with explaining the 9:1 male:female skew), you should get more LGBT women and fewer LGBT men. Check. If you further assume trans people will have interests that track their gender assumed at birth, we should see more transwomen than transmen...check as well.
I think the female rationalism equivalent actually is identitarian social justice, communism, and similar left ideologies; they're big abstract ideologies that appeal to feminine people (female or male) because of their interest in caring for the underprivileged.
Communism, seems to me, to appeal to intelligent people as an interesting idea but clearly a particularly problematic form of government. It seems like this should have been predicted even before we had as many failed attempts at it as we've had. I suspect that anyone who claims to find it appealing as a form of government is either too lazy to become better informed, not bright enough to understand, or just doing it to get under other peoples skin.
I doubt LW style rationalism is more male-coded than historical communism.
Of course, this is a bit of an apples-vs-oranges comparison, because in the days of Marx and Lenin, societies were very much male-dominated. And I will grant you that there were some women who rose to prominence in communist circles, such as Rosa Luxemburg.
If you simply measure what fraction of influence is held by people carrying the Y chromosome, then you will find that both LW and Commies are dominantly male.
However, you could also measure maleness on a sliding scale from 'gender does not matter' to stereotypical male behavior like martial virtues and having a lot of sex.
Fascism would be extremely male-coded under such a classification. Fight for the Reich and father children so that another generation of pure-blooded soldiers may fight for it later. If you are a woman, the best you can do in fascism is to give birth to a lot of Aryan kids and teach the ideology to other women, which is a pretty limited role.
By contrast, both communism and LW lean heavily "gender does not matter". Communist typically feel that racism and sexism are bad but ultimately what matters is the struggle of the working class, and once we take care of that they will solve themselves. LW rationalism would strongly reject the claim that empiricism is a colonialist, chauvinist ideology. Instead, they would claim that the Sequences contain valuable insights to any intelligent being who is not yet fully rational, be they man, woman or an intelligent fungus on some exoplanet. The days when men claimed that rationalism is a male thing and women were limited by their uterus making them behave irrationally are long gone.
Communism contains both female-coded and male-coded virtues, like compassion for the working class and a willingness to fight for them.
I will totally grant you that communist-adjacent intellectual groups in Western societies in 1968 were much more female than LW is. (Funnily enough, this might in turn attract high-T men looking for sex, subconsciously or otherwise. 'Join a commune to get a lot of free love' is a lot more plausible than 'post on LW to become part of a polycule'.)
Being a nerd seems a much better predictor for being into LW rationality than being male. Nerd culture is generally leaning male, but not very pursuant of traditional male behaviors. It is the difference of joining the marines and painting Warhammer 40k space marines figures.
Communism historically has appealed more to men than to women- it was a very commonly observed pattern through the 20th century (and to a large extent even today) that communist parties did better among male voters than female ones.
I’m one of those readers and this got me curious so I checked the survey results at 2% of respondents are trans women / trans fems versus approximately 10% cis women. Which is definitely higher than the base rate! Fully 1 in 6 female respondents being trans is remarkable, but maybe not surprising given the other self-selection we know about for ACX readers.
The YouGov poll asked "How often do you think about..." which, I suspect, is extremely unlikely to give good results on this kind of question. Memory of the past day is decent; memory of patterns of which things are incidentally done on many days is minimal.
It would be nice to compare these survey results to how much time men vs. women consume period fiction, both in terms of TV dramas (i.e., Bridgerton, Gilded Age) and books
“A majority of American women (53%) say that they never think about the Roman Empire, compared to only 30% of men who say the same.”
Much more believable. In general women seem much less interested in history, especially ancient history. I would be surprised if the average Feminist was literate with anything older than the late 20th century.
I'm guessing here, but I know Latin had a distinction between long and short vowels, and that's sometimes hard for new learners to learn. For Romance languages in general, the vowels usually tend to be "tighter" and less prone to slippage (dipthongization) than English vowels are., which makes it hard for native English speakers to learn pronunciation At least, that seems to be true of French, Spanish, and (with some exceptions) Italian, or at least their "official" versions. I understand some local dialects dipthongize what in the official language are non-dipthongs.
I'm not sure why that would make the vowels "stupid." (Also: I'm not a linguist, and while I have studied all four of those languages, I'm nowhere close to being fluent in any of them. So take my comments on the languages with several large grains of salt.)
But English speakers have that problem with almost all foreign languages (because English vowels are abnormal). It doesn't really have anything to do with Romance languages in particular.
Unsurprising when you mix several languages with very different sounds together.
If all you know is English, then everything else sounds "stupid", because you're expecting irregularity and generally there isn't nearly as much. So you're surprised by regularity, then you learn it, and then you're surprised by any irregularity all over again.
It doesn't help that a number of languages have an "official" form, complete with an official Institute to tell the people what's a word and what isn't and how to pronounce it. But English doesn't, except it does unofficially.
So you learn English from someone, and then you find out that you sound like a hick or a damnyankee because it's not the "correct" pronunciation of the local overclass.
It doesn't even represent a "formal" pronunciation. Nobody speaks like that, at any level of formality. If you speak like that you won't sound formal, you'll sound like a robot, or a foreigner, or someone who's speaking to the hard of hearing.
The norm in Italian as it is actually spoken is that, whenever two theoretical vowel sounds directly follow each other, they MUST be dipthongized, unless two conditions are both satisfied: (1) the first of the two is not an "i" or "u" (2) the second of the two is stressed. If those are both satisfied it's a hiatus. This applies even between words, where vowel succession are frequently formed due to all words ending in vowels.
Although if the succession comes right at the end of a sentence the distinction between diphthong and hiatus becomes unclear.
At least this is my understanding of my own language as my lying ears tell me.
Alternatively you can pronounce every vowel succession as a hiatus but then you'll sound like you are speaking to the hard of hearing. But this applies even to the "official" dipthongs. For example, even the word "mai" can be pronounced as two syllables if you're talking to the hard of hearing.
In my experience if there is a problem foreigners tend to have is the opposite, they may find it hard to pronounce distinctly the variety of possible diphthongs that exist in Italian. Every possible combination of two vowels can form a distinct monosyllabic diphthong. Foreigners split them which makes them sound like foreigners.
The general problem is that, when Italians are asked to pronounce a word clearly, they tend to adopt the pronunciation for the hard of hearing.
So, if you ask an Italian "how do you say the name Paolo?" they may answer "Pa-o-lo", because they think you're a foreigner therefore it's like you can't hear well.
Then you repeat "Pa-o-lo" back to them, and they'll say "Perfect!"
But of course the actual pronunciation has only two syllables, "Pao-lo". Everyone says it that way, and if you say "Pa-o-lo" all the time it will sound off. The first syllable of "Pao-lo" is a diphthong that in theory doesn't even exist in the sound inventory.
But don't let that intimidate you if you want to learn Italian. It's perfectly acceptable to sound like a robot.
Another thing, the distinction between hiatus and diphthong is clearer than one may think, because Italian is largely syllable timed, so the number of syllables affects timing.
> Alternatively you can pronounce every vowel succession as a hiatus but then you'll sound like you are speaking to the hard of hearing.
It was a point of emphasis (in the beginning Italian class that I took at an American community college) that all vowels in an Italian word are pronounced coequally. I don't doubt that that's a lie and your description is accurate. But I'm curious about the example the Italian class presented, of Via Calzaiuoli, which has a lot more than two vowels in sequence.
In the case of Calzaiuoli, the official pronunciation (as seen in dictionaries, I'm not even fighting against the dictionary in this case) is that it's a word of 4 syllables.
Cal-za-iuo-li
"iuo" is pronounced as a single gliding syllable, a triphthong.
I don't know how to share it, but here in Italy if I google "calzaiuolo" (in the singular), at the top of the page there is a dictionary entry with syllables and it lets you hear how it's pronounced.
Maybe your teacher meant that no vowel is ever reduced to a schwa?
The official pronunciation of Italian has a weird split personality.
In some cases, such as Paolo, it denies the existence of diphthongs, and mandates that each written vowel be pronounced as its own syllable.
In other cases, such as mai or calzaiuoli, it forbids the pronunciation of each written vowel as its own syllable.
But in reality, there is no difference between "mai" or "calzaiuoli" and "Paolo".
In reality, both have a normal version where diphthongs are used, and a citation form where each vowel is its own syllable. The double standard is arbitrary.
This depends on which diphthongs or triphthongs are used. Some are present in the official inventory, and words with those are in the first group. For example, "ai" and "iuo". Others don't exist officially, even if everyone uses them all the time, and words with those are in the second group. For example, "ao".
Pedantic point: it's actually u they had, <V> being the way it is written on inscriptions on stone and wax (which are the majority of surviving Roman writings; most of the books only survive in medieval or modern copies).
They also had i but no j (or the bunch at the end of the alphabet, w, y or z). X and q seem to be later additions to Latin script but they were around during the Empire.
What do you mean, they (Romans) didn't have Y or Z? Yes, they had dropped the latter from Etruscan because they didn't need it (and the former was already used as U) but they reintroduced both in their alphabet by the 1st century BC.
The letters J and W were created in the Middle Ages, I agree.
Q was present in Etruscan and AFAIK used continuously thereafter by the Romans.
X, I'm less sure, but it was also present in the Etruscan alphabet.
They took <y> from Greek to represent a Greek vowel not found in Latin, and as far as I can see it occurs in Vulgar Latin to some extent (and thus in the modern Latin languages). I'm not sure it was ever integrated into Classical Latin though e.g. the English writers of the eighth century, probably the only 'classical' Latin authors outside of Ireland at the time, didn't use <y> for the phoneme /y/ even though they deliberately cultivated a style of writing that relied heavily on Greek loan words etc (it's hell to read), but <y> was used in writings in English of the same period (Irish, and the other Celtic languages, didn't have /y/ so don't tell us anything). Q and x were variant phonemes, although I am happy that they may be in archaic Latin they're not present in proto-Italic, and note the oldest Latin texts generally show e.g. cui for quis. Although the Romans adapted the Etruscan alphabet the Etruscan language is not ancestral to Latin (it's not Italic for a start) and I'd take the line that we have in q another, earlier, case of a letter representing a borrowed sound, but here actually adopted into Latin by the first century BC to represent a different but related sound to <c>. It's on brand for the Romans, whose language was named for their neighbours and alphabet was from other neighbour.
X could be Greek or Etruscan apparently. But you still find <KS> in early classical inscriptions so it was not fully integrated into Latin then.
I don't think what you say is inaccurate, in that the letters were available at those time (and not alone; e.g. Greek theta was used sometimes). I think though that their full adoption into the conservative, grammarian-dictated Classical Latin was later than you're saying; Vulgar Latin is hard to trace, but I am happy to agree with you there.
Was Y "integrated" into Classical Latin? Obviously not, since that phone ([y], French u, German ü) doesn't exist in Latin. It was merely used to transliterate Greek words and in particular Greek names (e.g. Psyche).
I can't understand this: "Q and x were variant phonemes, [...] they're not present in proto-Italic". Q and x are not variants, as X is [ks] in Western Greek, not [kh], and how would we know if they were present in proto-italic, since proto-anything is by definition not attested? And in any case it is irrelevant to the discussion about whether Latin had Q or not.
Likewise I'm a bit puzzled by your comment about cui and quis. The form with "qu" came first.
Also "Etruscan language is not ancestral to Latin (it's not Italic for a start)". Well, obviously, it's not even Indo-European. But so what? We are talking about the alphabet, not the language. It's as if you had said "Vietnamese doesn't have the Roman letters A B C D because Vietnamese doesn't come from Latin".
Overall, I don't think we disagree very strongly. Your original statement that the Romans didn't have Y and Z seemed off to me, that's all.
[-Edit to add: I forgot the letter X which you claim "was not fully integrated into Latin then" but can be found in e.g. S. C. de Bacchanilibus (along with QV, by the way) in 186 BC:
I think that was a comparison between current Italian food, which is widely regarded as the most popular food in the world and often contains tomatoes, and recreations of ancient Roman food, which the individual saw as awful and tomato-less.
What a fantastic series. I don’t understand why it hasn’t won a ton of awards. I’m generally happy to read lots of feminist sci-fi too, but I wonder if the modern Hugo voter is now allergic to this style of sci-fi?
Also Sun Eater was my reason for thinking about Rome, as it happens (although I wasn’t reading it, I was saying it’s the best pseudo-scientific explanation for having light sabers confined to a certain class: they cost more than a giant spaceship, and thus are out of the reach of the hoi poloi, and this had me thinking about Roman influence on Star Wars).
I just finished the second book (plus associated short stories). The first book was fantastic. The second one had some really good parts (especially kharn Sagara) but got a bit slow at times (and also suffered by bassander lin just being kind of an unclear character who was unsatisfactory as both a nemesis and a former ally).
Still, the series as a whole is great (although I think it's at its best when it focuses on non-cielcin stuff).
PSA: As of Jan 2024, the Hugo awards are not a thing anyone should take serious any more. No more need to debate their wokeness or nomination process. Preemptively removing works from the ballots because the CCP might not like them is so much beyond the pale that any credibility they have built up over 70 years evaporated in an instant.
Personally, I think the concept of 'fans pay 45 pounds for voting rights' is fundamentally not robust in the face of adversaries with any kind of serious money and a political or commercial interest. Basically, if Kim Jong Un decides that he wants to win a Hugo in every category, he can just invest a few millions in voting rights and it will take a lot of hand-waving about illegitimate slate votes to not grant them to him.
On the contrary. This is like saying because a scientific team reported negative results, we should disqualify their future work. I think the exact opposite is true!
I think the WorldCon reaction to the debacle in China speaks well of the anarchist ideal of WorldCon actually potentially being a viable ongoing process.
It is true that "I paid to attend WorldCon, or paid a little less to just vote" is quite obviously prone to gaming by various factions, but that's always been true, and yet I enjoyed 95% of the Hugo nominations up through about 2018. Lately I find there's a lot of stuff I don't consider sci-fi and don't much like, which I think is more about this generation's tastes than about weaknesses of the buy-a-ticket-and-you-can-vote process.
The Hugo awards haven't been worth paying attention to since Racefail '08, because they're now handed out by actual unrepentant bigots. But the Chengdu fiasco is, if not a nothingburger, probably an isolated incident.
It was foolish of Worldcon to allow one of their conventions to be essentially bought by shadowy Chinese buyers(*) and meta-foolish of them to not have had rules that would have allowed them to say "no" and make it stick. But the Chinese don't seem to be interested in buying any future Worldcons, nor does anyone else really look to be following their lead in that. So, yeah, the one time when Worldcon was physically in China and its on-site leadership was vulnerable to anything up to "disappearing", even the offshore leadership preemptively wimped out in the face of possible draconian censorship.
If and when Kim Jong-Un actually *does* buy his very own Worldcon, it would be reasonable to expect a repeat performance. Until then, the institution deserves as much respect as it did in 2022.
* Who might possibly have been just five thousand sincere Chinese fans who each had $50 or so to burn on a virtual membership in a basically Anglospheric fan club, but I don't think that's the way to bet.
I'm interested in Roman history (among other historical topics to which I've "branched out"), and know quite a lot of it, especially the earlier Republican period. But curiously, I rarely think about it, perhaps because there's so much else to consider. Most times my attention is drawn to it by seeing references in news items, such as the forthcoming Gladiator sequel, or the remains of some former Roman villa being discovered in a field.
Re emperor Elagabalus, who one or two people in your survey mentioned, my impression was that he wasn't evil, and I can't think of any really malicious act he was recorded as committing. But he was a prankster, and his practical jokes tended to be way over the top. For example scattering rose petals on his dinner guests was a charming idea, which might have occurred to anyone and been a pleasing diversion, but tipping ten tons of petals over them so they all suffocated was overdoing it, literally overkill! His downfall was due more to his humble and foreign origins, religious reforms, and his very unconventional (for the time) sexual proclivities.
The Heliogabalus thing is really interesting! I have just read Antonin Artaud's Heliogabalus: the Crowned Anarchist, and it's pretty good. Artaud goes into the Emesa sun cult, and the Julia's (Domna, Moesa, et al), and their machinations...but he also reflects on cosmic matters. A bit reminiscent of Flaubert's Salammbo too. Personally, I think about Rome many times daily... usually when reading Seneca or Marcus Aurelius.
> Usually in a negative light. Whenever I see cruelty or misery, I think about visiting the Coliseum and wonder if I am participating in a social convention that will later be viewed as grossly inhumane
Well this era sees the games as being inhumane, but not the visits. I can’t imagine that tourism to the Coliseum will die out, and any tourist is free to despise the games.
I think they were referring to wondering what inhumane social conventions they are participating in generally, not that specifically visiting the coliseum would later be considered inhumane
Every time you think about the state execution of the central figure of the most popular religion in the world (and women are more religious than men), you are thinking about Rome.
Yes, but you’re supposed to. You’re supposed to think about all the prayers (which it isn’t, exactly, but same context). At least, as I understand it. I always assumed part of the point of having it repeated every week was so that people occasionally would think about it. And it probably doesn’t take that many occasionally across all church-growing Christians to get an effect, especially combined with readings like Render Unto Caesar. (It occurs to me Holy Week would skew those numbers significantly.)
(That said, when I answered the survey religion didn’t come to mind. I think I’d been talking history with my brother or something. Rome was huge, there are lots of ways to think about it. Even for a woman.)
This is the main reason why I 100% don't get why it's supposedly a big deal that men think a lot about Rome.
Going by the latest data I've seen on this, most Americans are Christians. The entire origin of Christianity is tightly bound up in Rome. It originated in Rome, Christ was crucified by Roman authorities, there is even a book in The Bible called Romans. The Catholic church is sometimes called the Roman Catholic church.
There's plenty of good secular reasons for Rome's prominence in the mind of many - the fact it dominated a huge swath of land for a long period of time, the fact that many of our most powerful modern nations were clearly inspired to a great degree by Rome and Greece, the fact that loads of video games heavily feature Rome.
But even without these secular reasons, Rome being very tightly tied to the world's most popular religion should be reason enough to understand why men think a lot about it.
Jewish people would have a history with Rome as well. Muslims called the Byzantine empire Rome, and ISIS and other Islamic groups sometimes use Romans for all westerners, harking back to the conflict with the eastern Byzantine empire.
Why is Asclepius relevant? Asklepios was a Greek god, the son of Apollo; the Romans borrowed Greek mythology, as they borrowed all kinds of things, but that doesn't make the Latin transliteration of his name significantly Roman.
Presumably the person who looked up the mythology looked up both Greek and Roman mythology, and didn’t on principle rule out the Roman mythology as irrelevant.
I like this idea, but I also suspect that there's a smidgen of social desirability bias in these responses.
I confess I probably thought: I like to think of myself as one of those cultured people who thinks about the Roman Empire a lot, so I thought: "there are definitely times in the last 24 hours where I could have very briefly thought about the Roman Empire, and I'm 100% sure it came up a couple of days ago, so I'll 'round up' and put "Yes"".
I wonder if you asked a less desirable question: "Did you think about Harry Potter/ The Avengers/ Ru Paul's Drag Race in the last 24 hours?", would people 'round down' their responses?
It's possible, because people are people, but it's pretty dumb to adjust your anonymous answers around social desirability. But then, some people lie to their doctors so as to appear healthier, to the one person who might actually be able to FIX what they're lying about.
We want to appear socially desirable not only to others, but to ourselves. E.g., the parent commenter saying "I like to think of myself as one of those cultured people."
When I was a kid, there was a meme (pre-internet, just the kind of urban legend idea) that men think about sex multiple times per hour.
I think the surveys about the Roman Empire actually just show that we all think about a lot more things a lot more frequently than we realize. How many thoughts do we have in an hour? A lot more than we actively remember!
Maybe? I actually felt a little embarrassed realizing how often I do. Maybe because the memes seem to have a tinge of mocking men for thinking about it, or maybe because I associate Rome with pop-history and very surface-level analysis (which frankly describes my level of historical knowledge)? I don't know why I felt this embarrassment, but I definitely did.
Haha, yes, that’s probably true - the history-hobbyist cliche of thinking constantly about the only two historical topics you have any knowledge of—the Fall of Rome and Germany in the 1930s.
Heh. I remember the question and answering yes, I had thought of the Roman Empire. I don't remember if I explained why or if so, what I said. That said, I was, around that time, reading Ken Follett novels.* And I also usually make my way over to ACOUP a couple times a month. But I doubt I mentioned either of those.
This always makes me feel like I'm some kind of lizard. I must have thought about the Roman Empire only a few times in the past decade, and most of those were only because of people bringing up this specific meme.
I'm with you Vim. History is just a bunch of stuff that could have happened otherwise. What percentage of simulated earth-runs would even have a Roman Empire?
What proportion of simulated earth-runs that end in humans simulating earth-runs, perhaps (tangentially--Scott, I'd love to hear you elaborate on your hatred of anthropics).
It feels like I'm reiterating the physics-or-stamp-collecting jibe (https://shorturl.at/r7fVU), but since I think I'd be more interested in the little quirks of sea slug physiology than I would be in the nuances of the Senate (they had a Senate, right?) something else might be going on. I'm not sure sea slugs are actually more abstracted than Roman society.
Now I'm even more ashamed that I don't think about Rome sufficiently frequently 😁
Does thinking about the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" count, if I say it's the ROMAN Catholic church? Or the Church as inheritor of Roman civil structures?
It’s both the Church and the History of Rome podcast for me…
… oh of course THAT’S why the Church is so bureaucratic (which my husband and I were just discussing this morning. I can’t believe I didn’t notice that on my own. Perhaps I’m a fake fan as they say.)
I was reading about Hataira [0] earlier this week. Basically upper class escorts that also provide entertainment and stimulating conversation. It's fun to imagine some well known or upper class Romans having their views shifted or nudged after discussion with an escort. If this ever happened we probably wouldn't have found out.
There's this meme of Roman women keeping one breast out, which I found out is mostly based on fiction and artistic depictions. But I think such an outfit choice would be a great for certain galas, mixing a bit of the old with the new.
That's because they are so familiar and yet so utterly alien. Cicero and Seneca still seem relevant, and the whole story of how republics collapse. Or the importance of infrastructure. So many things. But what the fuck to do with Cato's Agricultura, that you should not whip oxen very hard, because if their skin is undamaged, you can sell the skin, but with human slaves no such restraint is necessary?
If you look at it in a positive frame of mind, the Romans respected slaves as fellow humans to the point that they wouldn't butcher them and sell their skin.
This poll was live as the British Museum had its heavily advertised Roman Legions exhibit on, which I had visited the day before! That may tilt the London contingent, at least.
This poll was live as the British Museum had its heavily advertised Roman Legions exhibit on, which I had visited the day before! That may tilt the London contingent, at least.
It's possible the more educated folks think less about the roman empire because there are only so many "ancient empire fitting thought slots" during a day, and there are so many other interesting and relevant empires to think about. The Achaemenid empire, Yamnaya culture, and Mohenjo-daro need to be pondered!
I was going to say that I', mostly shocked that people have any memory of what they thought about in the past 24 hours. Most of what I think about more than a minute ago is lost to the ages unless some strong association brings it up, and even then I couldn't tell when I had a particular thought.
But as it turned out most of these examples are not fleeting thoughts or undirected association but actual exposure to the Roman empire. That means the meme is misleading - the impressive thing is how prevasive the Roman empire is in modern life rather than how present it is in our thoughts. In which case we wouldn't expect a large gender gap in Roman-empire-thoughts.
Roman slavery was very much about economics though, as was most slavery in most times/places. The only explicitly sexual slavery I can think of is related to Sunni Islam. Something like the Ottoman Harem or ISIS sex slaves (not very romantic imo).
Uhh, sure but that didn't mean that Roman men weren't able to use slaves for their sexual gratification. The reason they are enslaved isn't that important when you have the right to crucify them at your whim. Yes there were some laws limiting sexual relations with slaves but those were primarily applied against women.
But the reason it's likely the go to for some sexual fantasies isn't because people care deeply about the historical accuracy but because chattel slavery and the stuff you mention are too depressing and close in time for people to feel comfortable.
I was thinking "40% in the last 24hr is absurd, there's no way people think about Rome that much"... before remembering that my wife and I had a long discussion over dinner about the Greek vs Roman names of various gods and titans.
People think about an astonishing number of things every day, given that there are about 86,400 seconds per day and we think about possibly more than one thing per second. Of course, many are thought about more than once, which reduces the distinct count by an unknown amount which may be large. But I bet one could find a surprising number, perhaps a couple dozen, of things unexpectedly common among people to think about each day.
Expected things probably include family and friends, food, sleep, sex, weather, transportation, and (nowadays) politics. All of these categories include sub-categories, and I'm not sure how people might classify them.
Unexpected things might include things like the Roman empire. Speculating, some might be entertainment that doesn't yet exist (movies, television shows, concerts), or gasoline production, or economic upturns or downturns. If they're unexpected I can't really predict them.
Well, let's see: within the last week I saw a meme about the pacific ocean, diamonds came up in the context of Pathfinder (the RPG) yesterday, I solved a puzzle at some point in the last week that mentioned the Eiffel Tower, I have definitely read discussion of how to cook rice in the last 24 hours, I've definitely thought about the sun recently but I don't recall the context, and I was on an airplane four days ago (and I think discussing airmiles more recently even.) I don't think I've thought about blue jeans or North Carolina very recently, although I do not own or wear blue jeans so I probably think about them less than average.
I have thought about the ocean, blue jeans, Paris, rice, the sun, and Air travel in the last 24 hours. Diamonds and North Carolina in the last week, but not last 24. (And NC is cheating, given that it's election season around here, which makes random slightly purple states get mentioned far more frequently than normal.)
I was just boarding a plane to North Carolina at the time I commented (while wearing blue jeans) so that’s how I came up with part of my “random” list.
AI presumably has been fed the original art of the Roman Empire, plus reference photos of historical clothing in museums, encyclopedias, etc, and *that's* what it thinks men wore?
Could be. The man's outfit looks far more like historical-accuracy-what's-that-our-female-characters-wear-cone-bras!-in-50.A.D. 1960s Hollywood sword and sandals costuming, cheaply copied by Spirit Halloween for frat bros who want to go as "slutty Roman man."
Like I said, it's embarrassing. I can kinda, sorta model someone not being able to perceive how fake and wrong this kind of art looks by contemplating how little I care about what a car looks like as long as it reliably goes, but still.
I figured out what was irking me! The clothing is presumably meant to refer to Rome, though I don't know if Scott prompted the AI art to be specifically Roman rather than Ancient/Classical.
The man is wearing the exomis (Greek) rather than the tunica (Roman) with some odd details such as the large belt.
"In its simplest form, the tunic was a single rectangle of woven fabric, originally woolen, but from the mid-republic onward, increasingly made from linen. It was sewn into a wide, sleeveless tubular shape and pinned around the shoulders like a Greek chiton, to form openings for the neck and arms. In some examples from the eastern part of the empire, neck openings were created in the weaving. Sleeves could be added, or formed in situ from the excess width. Most working men wore knee-length, short-sleeved tunics, secured at the waist with a belt. Some traditionalists considered long sleeved tunics appropriate only for women, very long tunics on men as a sign of effeminacy, and short or unbelted tunics as marks of servility; nevertheless, very long-sleeved, loosely belted tunics were also fashionably unconventional and were adopted by some Roman men; for example, by Julius Caesar."
"The exomis was a tunic which left the right arm and shoulder bare. It was worn by slaves and the working classes. In addition, it was worn by some units of light infantry."
"The exomis (Ancient Greek: ἐξωμίς from exo "outside", and omos "shoulder") was a Greek tunic used by the workers and the light infantry. The tunic largely replaced the older chitoniskos (or short chiton) as the main tunic of the hoplites during the later 5th century BC. It was made of two rectangles of linen (other materials were also used), which were stitched together from the sides to form a cylinder, leaving enough space at the top for the arms. An opening at the top was also left for the head. The cylinder was gathered up at the waist with a cloth belt using a reef knot, which made the cloth fall down over the belt, hiding it from view. To allow freedom of movement to the right arm, the seam at the right shoulder was taken apart, and the right hand was passed through the head opening."
So if he's wearing this garment, he's likely Greek and either a soldier or a manual labourer/slave.
The woman seems to be wearing a peplos, though I suppose it could be a chiton:
"The peplos was a rectangular piece of woolen garment that was pinned at both shoulders leaving the cloth open down one side which fell down around the body. The top third of the cloth was folded over to create an over-fold. A girdle or belt was used to fasten the folds at the waist and could be worn over or under the over-fold."
A peplos (Greek: ὁ πέπλος) is a body-length garment established as typical attire for women in ancient Greece by c. 500 BC, during the late Archaic and Classical period. It was a long, rectangular cloth with the top edge folded down about halfway, so that what was the top of the rectangle was now draped below the waist, and the bottom of the rectangle was at the ankle. One side of the peplos could be left open, or pinned or sewn together, with a type of brooch later called "fibula".
...It should not be confused with the Ionic chiton, which was a piece of fabric folded over and sewn together along the longer side to form a tube.
...Spartan women continued to wear the peplos much later in history than other Greek cultures. It was also shorter and with slits on the side causing other Greeks to call them phainomērídes (φαινομηρίδες), the "thigh-showers"."
So either the AI drew Greek instead of Roman, or if this is meant to be Rome, this couple is probably Greek (and lower-class).
I suspect something like that is true. When I was a kid, people used to say that men think about sex multiple times per hour, but I think there are lots and lots of things that we think about.
I don't think I answered the why in the survey, but it was because I was wearing this t-shirt at the time:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Julius-Caesar-World-Tour-Legionary/dp/B0B4KQNK9G?source=ps-sl-shoppingads-lpcontext&ref_=fplfs&psc=1&smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE
That's amazing. Unavailable here, sadly.
What's missing here is a comparison to other ancient and less ancient states - Egypt, Greece, China, Japan etc. Maybe a large part of the stuff ACX readers commonly think about is related to history in some way.
I think other major empires would be the best comparison: the British, Mongols, Greece. I'm not sure any would come close, despite the British empire having an even greater cultural impact and being more recent.
This would be a great comparison. The British empire in particular.As you said, much more recent and more direct impact on the world today, but I bet it’s thought of less than half as much as the Roman Empire, probably more like a quarter.
But that's because you conceive of thinking about the British empire much more narrowly than thinking about Rome. Thinking about Latin, Roman Emperors, the wars Rome fought, Roman engineering, Roman literature and Roman religion all count as thinking about Rome. But thinking about the English language, British Kings and prime ministers, the second world war and all the others, the industrial revolution, English literature, and the Anglican, Baptist and Methodist churches together with the Quakers somehow doesn't count as thinking about the British empire.
Can you even think in English without thinking about the British Empire? Maybe, if you're doing it in England. But not for the rest of us.
I wonder how many people were thinking about the Roman republic when they thought about "the Roman Empire"
Yeh I feel you can make that distinction. To think of Rome is to think of the Empire. That’s the criteria. Thinking of Spanish culture, including South American culture (literally called Latin) isn’t to think about Rome. Same with English and the British Empire.
Also, Britain is in some way a Roman descended state, so some of the impact they had was actually spreading Roman-derived stuff around.
Not very much, actually. The Church arguably had more of a 'Roman' cultural impact on Britain than any Roman soldiers and baths did.
If you want to stretch the idea of "Roman-derived" to mean "anything related to the Church," then I suppose the Romans had a large impact. But that would be a stretch. I'd say feudalism and the Normans had a much bigger influence.
Of course, the Normans themselves were just Christianized Norsemen, but that only makes them a derivative of a derivative of a derivative of ancient Rome, whereas their true architectural genius, social organization, leadership, etc., were all quite Germanic in expression.
"Their true architectural genius, social organization, leadership, etc., were all quite Germanic in expression." Like the Anglo-Saxons before them, they copied Roman institutions a lot once their conquests demanded a more sophisticated form of administration. Granted, they mixed in their own ideas, but they ideas that there was some wholesale replacement is just flat out wrong. As often happens in history when a militarily superior people conquer a people with a legacy and ideas of more sophisticated cultural, legal, and political institutions; those institutions are often adopted rather than destroyed.
In architecture the Romanesque style (a direct descendant of Roman architecture) continued for a century after the Battle of Hastings. It was replaced by Gothic Architecture, which was (as far as can be told), purely French in origin rather than Norman.
A great deal of the political culture and legal of most Western states still is somewhat Roman inspired, Britain included. The proclamation of the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 was, "Elizabeth II, Dei Gratia Britanniarum Regnorumque Suorum Ceterorum Regina, Consortionis Populorum Princeps, Fidei Defensor." A good deal of all the political symbolism is Roman-derived i.e the scepter and orb. The Mace, which must be present, to this day, in the House of Commons when it is in session, is actually something adopted from the practices of the Byzantine Empire, which still counts. The personification of Lady Justice, which adorns court houses, is also Roman derived.
One could easily argue that the entire attempt to establish a unified monarchy in the Island from Alfred onward was an attempt to bring back the unified order that had prevailed during the Roman period. Even British common law, had a lot of origins in the writings of clerics who had studied the Code of Justinian. Lady Justice is also Roman derived, of course and common law uses Roman concepts and vocabulary significantly (written legal records were in Latin and/or "Law French" until the 1730s). Before Common Law came into its own, Roman Law and Canon Law were studied at Oxford and Cambridge.
All the concepts of "British liberty" that were argued about during the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution were heavily inspired by the ideas of Roman Republican politicians as read almost universally by educated people in Britain. The bicameral system of Lords and Commons echoes the Roman Senate and Popular assemblies. I could go one, but the point is that Roman influence was not entirely extirpated by either Saxon or Norman conquest.
Only very marginally. Do you consider, like, Iraq or Libya to be a Roman-descended state?
Yes. Id say thinking about the roman empire should also be defined more narrowly than thinking about any event or idea originating in the roman empires space-time. It should only mean thinking about the empire as a political entity. Thinking about jesus should not count unless you are considering the constraints and motivations of pontius pilate.
Still, I suspect thinking about events in rome space-time is more likely to trigger thoughts of the empire itself, than is the case with the British empire probably overall due to more proximity and points of contact to those events.
To be fair a reasonable sunset of respondents will think about Britain regularly, either because they live there or because it's the great villain of several narratives of global history (anti-colonialism, Russian foreign policy etc).
A reasonable amount, yes. As Geoff says half or a quarter of the Roman figures, which would be 10-25% of respondents. The former figure if you only count non-UK residents.
This raises the question of whether the Roman number grows for Italians. I assume ACX doesn't have a significant enough number of Italian readers to calculate. Greece and Mongolia surely have huge numbers that reflect on the glories of their past empires.
It's worth remembering that the population of every former empire probably reflects on its existence. Sometimes to unhealthy extremes (see Russia at present). Sometimes with much more considered judgement (the Germans on the Prussian-German empire for example). It is a good question as to how many who live in Europe reflect on the Ming Empire or how many who live in East Asia regularly thinks of the Aztecs. Although the question of how to justify the effort to establish this is of course relevant.
We British almost never reflect on the empire. We were mostly disinterested in it, to be fair, as it happened. Unlike Rome which changed the built environment of most of Europe, the Empire’s obvious achievements are overseas where indigenous opinion is hostile regardless of what beneficial technology or culture was exported.
Where money from the empire was used to build out the great houses and some public structures, it’s not really emphasised, and in any case the great mass of people didn’t benefit.
Some historians say that as a whole Britain itself didn’t benefit from the Empire, the growth in income and wealth being primarily driven by the Industrial Revolution, which financed the empire rather than the reverse. I’m inclined to agree.
There’s also a feeling here that these things are better off not being looked into, in case we find creepy crawlies under the rocks.
Podcasts, TV shows and books on British history tend to stick to the country itself, and there’s a lot of that for a large island.
After all, the history of Canada, the early American colonies pre the formation of the US, Australia and New Zealand are their own history and no doubt well taught there, but a Londoner probably doesn’t care either way unless he has a particular interest in history.
The existence of the empire and especially British maritime supremacy between 1814 and 1914 greatly facilitated global trade for everyone involved. And since Britain had the largest share of global trade this was of immense value. But the empire itself was a bit of an albatross. If someone else had had a global empire and maritime supremacy that benefitted global trade in the same way, Britain would have had the same economic benefit without the expense.
Probably worth flagging I'm British too. Actually I agree with you on this; it's very much another age to modern discourse (other than the idiots who want to try and guilt me out about the actions of someone else's great-grandfather). However it also still exists: the UK and it's dependencies are still the much smaller British Empire, so my reasoning was that most British people probably think of the UK pretty regularly.
"Mongolia surely ha[s] huge numbers that reflect on the glories of their past empires"
Somewhat limited by the relatively small number of ethnic Mongols (approx 10M per Wiki), but from some limited interactions with them, they *do* in fact think of the glories of Mongolia (or more usually the glories of Chinggis Khan in particular-see the eponymous song from the HU for an example. There is also a general idea that old Temujin will return and they will restore the great Mongol empire, with the all the attendant rape and murder that implies; they are not apologetic about this.
Although there is one interesting difference between the Roman and Mongol empire, from my readings: the former subjects of the Mongol empire who were not ethnic Mongols do not look back at it fondly, and indeed Genghis Khan is viewed in large chunks of the world as roughly similar to how we view Hitler (amusingly, in the West he gives the title to two different pop songs). Probably lots of reasons for this (the Mongols conquered peoples that already had strong national/ethnic identities, whereas the Romans' greatest contribution-Christianity-largely subsumed that), but it's a pattern that's there.
Forgot to add I'd be curious how, say, the Chinese view the Yuan empire as a legacy of Mongol conquest. Vague impression is that views are generally complicated.
My impression is roughly, "Just another one of those dynasties where the Empire was ruled by barbarian steppe nomads, and not even the worst one of those. For you, the Mongols were the doom of your fledgling civilization, but for us they were Tuesday."
Interesting that the Mongols celebrate the Great Khan's career but DO NOT whitewash his atrocities. If true, this could be the most "evil" nation on Earth. (Evil in intent, if not consequentially)
I think about the British empire a lot, but I live in a Commonwealth country so that makes sense. Greece, too, but only because I am currently taking a political philosophy course. I think the last time I thought about the Mongols was a few months ago when I was reading Scott's joke about sn-risks.
I’d guess the only empire (using that term very loosely here) that would actually beat Rome in a “how often it’s thought about” contest would be Nazi Germany. Between the endless political comparisons, their role as the villain in a lot of media and the abundance of WW2 history, the nazis are still very much remembered. Though unlike Rome, the way they’re remembered is almost entirely negative.
As a side note, I’d also guess that Hitler is the third most thought about dead person, after Christ and Mohammed. Again, that’s mostly due to political comparisons, the popularity of WW2 history and being the villain in a countless number of movies, games, TV shows, books, etc.
Good call.
Well, if he’s in, then we have to think of Napoleon as well don’t we?
JFK for #4? Or is it just my Dad and his friends with assassination conspiracies?
By Greece, you likely mean Alexander of Macedonia.
I think that the cultural impact of him is much lessened by the fact that his empire broke up pretty soon after his death, while the Roman empire lasted much longer.
I would argue that most of the Western interest in Greece is in fact a consequence of the Romans being very interested in Greek culture. (Christianity also played a role, though.) Also, much of the interest seems to be focused on the decidedly-not-empires city states like Athens.
> By Greece, you likely mean Alexander of Macedonia.
Macedon, not Macedonia. They're barely even related regions.
The impact of Alexander's conquests was more far-ranging than you realize. He is largely the reason for Greek becoming the lingua franca of the East, the dissolution of the Persian Empire, and the rise of centres of learning like Alexandria in Egypt - all of which dramatically changed the political and cultural landscape of the time.
In fact, Athens did have an empire: The Delian League, which was a de facto Athenian empire. Much of Athens' contributions to art and culture (and, arguably, history via Thucydides), including Greek tragedy, occurred when Athenian imperial power was at its height. To study Athens is to study an empire.
I see Alexander kinda like Napoleon, who also had a huge effect on Europe long after he was gone. (Politically, Alexander's long term effect seems larger: the rulers he installed hung onto power for generations.)
I have learned neither Latin nor Greek, so I am not qualified to really speak on that subject (but when has that ever stopped anyone), but my feeling is that in the various canons, the fraction of works directly related to the politics of running an empire is much higher for Rome than for Athens or England. Sure, I can skip Julius Caesar and exclusively read Roman love poetry, and I am certain that for understanding Shakespeare or Plato, 'this was a elite-adjacent guy who wrote in the capital of a (de-facto) empire' is an helpful insight, but with Roman authors it might be a bit more on-the-nose.
A comparison with Napoleon is apt, although I'd say French thought and language wasn't as widely employed afterwards as Greek ones came to be.
Actually, I have had a fair training in both languages, and I can say that most of what we know about the running the Roman empire also comes to us tangentially through sources like Pliny the Younger and inscriptions. The orators of Rome spoke about as much about law and politics as the Greek ones. One can argue, however (and it has been so argued), that the whole of the Peloponnesian War is a history on the (largely failed) workings of the Athenian Empire. Some good scholars to look at for how Athens was run would be P. J. Rhodes on Athenian diplomacy and political history, and Josiah Ober on Athenian government.
Come on, Imperial China you got ahead by doing well on standardized tests, had no athletic expectations, could have a few concubines (if you were a man--like 90% of the people on this blog), and got lots of really good Chinese food.
Damn, now you've got me thinking about the history of Chinese food. How far back does what we think of as typical Chinese food go?
Probably when they came here. Fortune cookies are entirely Chinese-American. 'Ethnic food' is always adapted to the local palate--go read about Italian food in Japan (octopus on spaghetti! mayo and black pepper sauce!) sometime.
Yes, I've also heard that American Chinese food has a lot more meat.
Still, how far back does stirfry with sauce go?
"Rice with stuff" seems like the core idea of Chinese food, and I assume the Chinese have been eating this since they first cultivated rice in ~7000 BC.
While researching to try to put a date on that, I also learned that 4000 year old noodles have been found in China.
Big deal, if you go into my pantry you'll probably also find some ancient noodles.
> "Rice with stuff" seems like the core idea of Chinese food
The Chinese would hate to hear you say that. Rice with stuff is a common form, 盖浇饭 (literally, "covered rice", stuff served on a bed of rice), but rice is viewed as cheap filler. It's an expected part of meals, but it's not the good part.
Breakfasts and snacks generally aren't supposed to involve rice.
Back in the 90s when I lived in Hong Kong, I and some of my American compatriots went looking for restaurants that served American-style Chinese food. You won't find dishes like Lemon Chicken or Beef and Broccoli in most Hong Kong restaurants. OTOH, most American Chinese food — until recently — was primarily served in restaurants run by Cantonese who — I had assumed — adapted their cooking styles to the American palate.
But the story gets a bit more interesting because we were able to find a couple of skanky restaurants in Tuen Mun that served American-style Chinese food! They were initially shocked when dozens of Americans descended on their humble establishments on Friday and Saturday nights (we'd stoke up on calories before we went out bar hopping). One of the owners' English was good enough to ask why we were so enthusiastic about his little restaurant. I explained that this is the style of Chinese food that is served in Chinese restaurants in America — but it was hard to find that style of food in Hong Kong. He explained that these were old-style Cantonese dishes. Working-class Cantonese used to eat it — but it was going out of fashion.
So, I think American-style Chinese food is the working-class Cantonese cuisine that the Chinese immigrants brought with them to America in the 19th century and early 20th century. Cantonese cuisine has evolved to become much more fancy. But Chinese-American foodways have stayed in a sort of time warp. At least in my area, most of the original Cantonese restaurant owners have sold out to northerners. I don't hear Cantonese being spoken by the kitchen staff anymore. And the northerners don't really know how to cook this style of food. The quality of the food has deteriorated. OTOH, we now have a lot of restaurants serving non-Cantonese regional cuisines.
Very interesting!
How interesting.
I've heard/read (but not recently so don't know if it's more than an urban legend) that empires typically create colonies and the empire moves on in its dialect while the colony stays frozen. Does this mean that the British in the 1600's spoke like Americans do now, and in the 1700's spoke like the Aussies do now? I forget what the linguist had to say to that question but it was sort-of in the affirmative.
The idea that this extended to food never occurred to me.
That happens to languages, too. The exported version might change less.
Stirfry is a luxury food, requiring a lot of heavily processed oil. (Not to say that the oil involved is processed more heavily than other oil, but all oil is heavily processed, compared to olives or seeds.)
I am given to understand that traditional peasant fare was steamed, because that's cheap. They still eat a lot of steamed food today, most notably baozi. They also eat a lot of soup. Stirfry with sauce is extremely common in restaurants (in Shanghai), but restaurants are supposed to have good food.
I'm not sure what the balance of modern home cooking is like. Walk through an apartment building at dinnertime and you'll smell some incredible stirfry. But there's plenty of more pedestrian stuff too.
> Yes, I've also heard that American Chinese food has a lot more meat.
A normal restaurant order, assuming you're several people, would be multiple dishes that are entirely meat (with flavorings), and a bit of rice to go with it. One of my favorite things to order for lunch this past year was just a box of chicken-fried-with-garlic-chiles-scallions-and-spices.
Baozi is a little more expensive in Philadelphia than stirfry. My first thought is that it involves more done by hand, but I'm not sure if that's true.
Until Covid, we had an excellent Japanese Italian restaurant around here (Raleigh NC). It was tiny, called Papa Shogun, and served delicious dishes like Linguini Tanuki Jiru (Pancetta, daikon, shiitakes, mushroom dashi, sesame) and Kombu Gnocchi (Mushroom dashi, charred oyster mushrooms, ricotta salata). It is missed.
LOL. That sounds awesome! Sorry it's gone.
NYC had the Cuban-Chinese restaurant; someone pointed out to me they both use a lot of rice. I wonder if Japanese and Italians are both working from a noodle base in the same way.
Lots of Chinese emigrated to Cuba (and Jamaica) in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. I'd be curious what sort of dishes they served at this restaurant. Was it standard Cuban dishes alongside standard Chinese dishes, or was the cuisine a hybrid of the two?
> Fortune cookies are entirely Chinese-American.
No they aren't. They're entirely Japanese-American. They're served in Chinese restaurants, but they come from a Japanese tradition adapted by Japanese people. China and Chinese-Americans had nothing to do with it.
Arguably, they're Chinese-American now, or at least I've never seen them in Japanese restaurants.
Language is too narrow-band to do reality justice.
There's an episode of Lois and Clark where Clark Kent visits China to buy Chinese takeout for Lois and she complains about the fortune being in Chinese.
It shows about the same level of awareness as the episode focused on "Son Kwan Industries" in which different props spell "Son Kwan" in completely different ways, and the large sign over the main building is upside down.
Fortune cookies appear in American Chinese restaurants because that's the kind of restaurant that Japanese-Americans used to run. In the modern day, the situation has reversed, and Chinese-Americans run Japanese restaurants because the prices are higher.
Chinese food is a complicated topic because China is big. What you probably think of as Chinese food is a mix of Cantonese/Fujian (classic american chinese) and Szechuan/Bejing ("authentic" chinese from the past 20 years). I haven't read it but http://www.fuchsiadunlop.com/books/invitation-to-a-banquet-the-story-of-chinese-food/ would probably do a good job covering this. Obviously a lot of Chinese food changed after the introduction of plants from the new world but there are many dishes that would be recognizable 1000 years ago or more.
I also recommend the Psmiths review if you don't want to read the book (although I've read it and found it interesting):
https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-invitation-to-a-banquet-by
Excellent book about Chinese food in US
https://www.amazon.com/Chop-Suey-Andrew-Coe-audiobook/dp/B07FMZKQWG/?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=Pi0hg&content-id=amzn1.sym.f76d456a-cb0d-44de-b7b0-670c26ce80ba&pf_rd_p=f76d456a-cb0d-44de-b7b0-670c26ce80ba&pf_rd_r=145-6106742-2045331&pd_rd_wg=KGUSM&pd_rd_r=c00ee345-1563-4bd2-a648-865b240313be&ref_=aufs_ap_sc_dsk
What are you responding to?
The comment slightly above about getting really good Chinese food in ancient China.
Most of what we think of as Chinese food in the west (at least if you live on a coast and have good Chinese food), is similar to French food in that it involves exceptionally complex sauces and preparation. It is not peasant food but the food of one or another of the great dynasties. Wikipedia has a lot of discussion of it. It looks like the majority are from the two most recent dynasties, Yuan and Qing (1300 and 1700).
The Yuan dynasty flamed out after just 100 years. The two most recent dynasties are Ming and Qing.
If thinking about Romance of the Three Kingdoms/Journey to the West/Tales of the Water Margin counts then I probably think about China more than I think about Rome. Not a lot of people made video games out of the Aeneid, but hoo boy have they made a bunch out of Rot3K.
(but since Rot3K is about states warring after the collapse of empire/before the rise of a new one, is it really thinking about /Imperial/ China?)
Yah, the ROTK and Dynasty Warriors series--I think they're on ROTK 14 now. And the Suikoden series was based on Water Margin (it's just the name for Water Margin in Japanese after all.)
(I always thought Imperial China was Qin to Qing. But anyway, it's the cultural equivalent--a historic period there are lots of stories about. I can totally see Chinese nerds memorizing all the minor characters and arguing over who could beat who like it's a comic book.)
I do wonder why Imperial China is advertised as lasting from Qin to Qing. They had several periods where it broke up, for decades at a time.
The French are on their fifth Republic now, yet their periods of unrest and invasion were far shorter.
Probably it's because the Chinese themselves refer to it as such.
> I do wonder why Imperial China is advertised as lasting from Qin to Qing.
Simple; that's the period during which the top position was "emperor". That's what makes it "imperial" China.
I failed to be clear on that.
Why do all the "imperial China"s count as *one* empire and referred to in the singular, as opposed to twelve (or however many there were), broken up by periods when there wasn't one? Why isn't there a "Twelfth Chinese Empire" or whatever?
On the one hand, you have the example of France. On the other hand there's the Catholic church, which has had periods when there was more than one claimant to be Pope.
I think it comes down to what the people refer to it.
"Not a lot of people made video games out of the Aeneid"
No they just made video games that include bits from all of Greek/Roman mythology.
For China are there any video games that have anything from any titles other than Rot3K or JttW? And do they mix and match? My experience with Journey to the West is that video games that use that story tend to use pretty much all of it: Sun Wu Kong, Tripitaka, the headband, the journey itself, etc. They don't use one incident, unlike say the bit in the Odyssey where Ulysses comes home and deals with the suitors.
On the other side of the equation
- China went through long periods of isolation from the rest of the world
- it has a writing system that is deliberately hard to learn, so reading about China if you're not Chinese was often done and translating to other languages was rare
- they weren't generally anxious to go out conquering the rest of the planet militarily. Possibly because the surrounding areas weren't all that worth it, but also attitudes about the rest (see the first point)
Deliberately hard to learn?
Possibly it was not designed to be hard as a whole from the start - I don't think any writing system (apart from fictional ones) has been designed to that extent.
But one reason the mandarin system had such a grip on China for so long was that it was difficult to become competently literate, taking years of study. You see this even today in the "years to become able to read a newspaper" statistics.
The group that did become literate generally ended up controlling things, either officially, or unofficially. And they basically said "In here is all that is civilized, and out there is nothing but wasteland and barbarians." And nobody else got any say in the matter - except the barbarians in the end.
any fans of the Archaemenids?
It's tempting to ask weren't they the enemy in Starship Troopers?
More seriously, outside of Persia, did they leave much of an identifiable legacy? At least that isn't just considered generically Persian?
> At least that isn't just considered generically Persian?
Did the Han leave a legacy that isn't considered generically Chinese?
Judaism/Christianity would not exist without the Archaemenids. Also a substantial portion of what is considered Greek comes from them. People should study them more because then they would understand how much of the world is BC vs AC.
AD. Anno Domini.
AC After Cyrus
"More seriously, outside of Persia, did they leave much of an identifiable legacy?"
they left a very important legacy in terms of writing systems. A big swath of Asia today uses scripts that ultimately derive from Aramaic, the Achaemenid lingua franca. Even bigger if you consider the scripts of the Indian subcontinent (and through them, Southeast Asia) to be ultimately derived from the Aramaic script (though I think that's somewhat controversial, certainly they don't *look* similar).
> Aramaic, the Achaemenid lingua franca
Aramaic was the language of all imperial documents. I was not aware that it saw much spoken use. Did it?
If you write a personal letter from Susa to your family in Babylon, are you going to use Aramaic?
I don't know, but yes, I did mean the official / court lingua franca, not necessrily the vernacular one. Either way, if the Indic scripts are in fact derived from the Aramaic script, then that's a *huge* and lasting influence over South, Central, Northeast and Southeast Asia.
I have difficulty seeing that as a "huge influence", just because the counterfactual world looks so identical to the factual one. You can say that one script is derived from another script, but unless something about the Indian region changes, how much influence has occurred?
How much Southeast Asian influence would you say has flowed through Americans' use of the word "ketchup"? The condiment is a mixture of tomatoes, sugar, and vinegar, and of those ingredients only one (the vinegar) is even present in traditional Asian cuisine. The word still exists over there, referring to a variety of sauces, none of which are similar to ketchup. No one in America knows or cares where the word came from or what it might have meant before.
If Americans had never learned this word, would we still have the condiment? Would anything be different at all?
China seems like the most obvious Rome comparison to me. Like Rome, it started out as one small state annexing a bunch of others that had never been put under the same government (unless Zhou was way more legitimately an empire than I think it was). This happened only a couple hundred years a dizzying number of different philosophical schools popping up, but the empire took one or two and made them dominant. This was also only a couple hundred years after the invention of proper record-keeping, so anything that happened much earlier was lost to the mists of time. The empire came up with all kinds of advances that still influence our lives today. Then, in the early centuries A.D., it broke apart.
The difference is that when Westerners look back at Rome, they see a precursor that fell. When the Chinese look back at Ancient China, they see China.
Your sample is 90% male and 10% female. It's obvious that apart from your sample generally being quite specific, woman are even more strongly pre-selected than man. And, while this is obviously unprovable at this point, if you had asked me beforehand "does the average ACX reader think about rome or less than the average population?" I'd have answered "significantly more". So this is not really moving the needle much for me tbh.
Quick googling shows this yougov poll for example having an opposite result (ignore the framing and just look at the numbers): https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/47481-men-women-thinking-about-the-roman-empire-poll
Agreed on all points. Is this blog post a joke? Because otherwise it seems so flimsy.
Scott posts a number of things that are semi-joking. The data is real, but he seems to recognize that it's extremely unscientific and can't be used to prove much. A lot of people around here seem to enjoy seeing data about themselves as a group (and probably data in general) so it's an easy filler post between headier topics.
Your average ACX gal (based on the 2024 public data) has 0.6 children (the guys are 0.7), is atheist or agnostic, makes about $100K a year (versus about $130K for the guys), and claims to have an IQ of 136 (same for the guys). Their modal occupation is actually "Computers: practical". (Same for the guys!) On a scale from 1-5, her worry about AI X-risk is a 3 (like the men). I think most people, male or female, if you asked them about AI X-risk, would ask you if that was the website Elon Musk bought.
Forget 'pick mes', this is the sort of woman who sympathizes with men because she has more in common with them...
Yes, it certainly seems that the selection bias for women who read ACX are significantly less like average women than the men are. Otherwise, we'd expect to see ~50/50 male/female breakdown, right?
I'm guessing a majority of female ACX readers are trans, which is not too uncommon on the internet
About 1 in 6, as of 2024. Way more than the general population, nowhere near a majority. (Versus about 1 in 200 for the guys.)
About 1 in 4 is bi, 1 in 20 is gay, and 1 in 10 is poly. (Versus 1 in 16, 1 in 30, and 1 in 20 for the guys.)
Same pattern I've seen with a lot of nerd groups, for reasons I never quite gathered; lots of bi and trans women, mostly straight cis men.
1 in 200 here! I think it's because most people's interests stay fairly similar before and after transition, so those who were born female tend to have more female-typical interests and vice versa. I think some of this is inherent personality stuff, but a lot of it is that men and women with the same general categories of interest get slotted into different specific things. As a stereotypical example, men with creative/artistic tendencies may be more likely to be directed towards woodworking/carving, vs women more towards drawing and painting. Not sure what the "female rationalism equivalent" would be, though.
I think I ended up here because I transitioned fairly young, when a lot of my personality was still in flux, so my interests are more mixed. I found SSC around age 18, when I was trying to develop some sort of coherent system of beliefs about the world after becoming disillusioned with far-left ideology. Probably initially linked to SSC through Reddit, which I used heavily from age 13 on. I think the essay was "All Debates are Bravery Debates," and from there, "Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear?".
Well, welcome either way! Hope I'm not scaring you off with this discussion.
So if you're going with 'ACX interests are heavily male-skewed' (any hypothesis has to start with explaining the 9:1 male:female skew), you should get more LGBT women and fewer LGBT men. Check. If you further assume trans people will have interests that track their gender assumed at birth, we should see more transwomen than transmen...check as well.
I think the female rationalism equivalent actually is identitarian social justice, communism, and similar left ideologies; they're big abstract ideologies that appeal to feminine people (female or male) because of their interest in caring for the underprivileged.
Communism, seems to me, to appeal to intelligent people as an interesting idea but clearly a particularly problematic form of government. It seems like this should have been predicted even before we had as many failed attempts at it as we've had. I suspect that anyone who claims to find it appealing as a form of government is either too lazy to become better informed, not bright enough to understand, or just doing it to get under other peoples skin.
I doubt LW style rationalism is more male-coded than historical communism.
Of course, this is a bit of an apples-vs-oranges comparison, because in the days of Marx and Lenin, societies were very much male-dominated. And I will grant you that there were some women who rose to prominence in communist circles, such as Rosa Luxemburg.
If you simply measure what fraction of influence is held by people carrying the Y chromosome, then you will find that both LW and Commies are dominantly male.
However, you could also measure maleness on a sliding scale from 'gender does not matter' to stereotypical male behavior like martial virtues and having a lot of sex.
Fascism would be extremely male-coded under such a classification. Fight for the Reich and father children so that another generation of pure-blooded soldiers may fight for it later. If you are a woman, the best you can do in fascism is to give birth to a lot of Aryan kids and teach the ideology to other women, which is a pretty limited role.
By contrast, both communism and LW lean heavily "gender does not matter". Communist typically feel that racism and sexism are bad but ultimately what matters is the struggle of the working class, and once we take care of that they will solve themselves. LW rationalism would strongly reject the claim that empiricism is a colonialist, chauvinist ideology. Instead, they would claim that the Sequences contain valuable insights to any intelligent being who is not yet fully rational, be they man, woman or an intelligent fungus on some exoplanet. The days when men claimed that rationalism is a male thing and women were limited by their uterus making them behave irrationally are long gone.
Communism contains both female-coded and male-coded virtues, like compassion for the working class and a willingness to fight for them.
I will totally grant you that communist-adjacent intellectual groups in Western societies in 1968 were much more female than LW is. (Funnily enough, this might in turn attract high-T men looking for sex, subconsciously or otherwise. 'Join a commune to get a lot of free love' is a lot more plausible than 'post on LW to become part of a polycule'.)
Being a nerd seems a much better predictor for being into LW rationality than being male. Nerd culture is generally leaning male, but not very pursuant of traditional male behaviors. It is the difference of joining the marines and painting Warhammer 40k space marines figures.
Communism historically has appealed more to men than to women- it was a very commonly observed pattern through the 20th century (and to a large extent even today) that communist parties did better among male voters than female ones.
I’m one of those readers and this got me curious so I checked the survey results at 2% of respondents are trans women / trans fems versus approximately 10% cis women. Which is definitely higher than the base rate! Fully 1 in 6 female respondents being trans is remarkable, but maybe not surprising given the other self-selection we know about for ACX readers.
Scott specifies that he only looked at cis men and cis women for the core figures in this article.
The YouGov poll asked "How often do you think about..." which, I suspect, is extremely unlikely to give good results on this kind of question. Memory of the past day is decent; memory of patterns of which things are incidentally done on many days is minimal.
It would be nice to compare these survey results to how much time men vs. women consume period fiction, both in terms of TV dramas (i.e., Bridgerton, Gilded Age) and books
“A majority of American women (53%) say that they never think about the Roman Empire, compared to only 30% of men who say the same.”
Much more believable. In general women seem much less interested in history, especially ancient history. I would be surprised if the average Feminist was literate with anything older than the late 20th century.
”I think about all the stupid vowels and pointless letters like "u" and "v" in Romance languages and how much I hate them.”
Can someone explain?
I'm not sure, but I will note it would be kind of awkward for IX to be preceded by IIIIIIII.
I don’t think she (I’m fairly sure) is talking about the numerical system.
It's a joke. Romans didn't have a different letter for "u", they just used "v" for both.
Ok, but that is a completely pointless joke.
And what are the stupid vowels? I guess what they meant is how words in Spanish and Italian often end in vowels?
I'm guessing here, but I know Latin had a distinction between long and short vowels, and that's sometimes hard for new learners to learn. For Romance languages in general, the vowels usually tend to be "tighter" and less prone to slippage (dipthongization) than English vowels are., which makes it hard for native English speakers to learn pronunciation At least, that seems to be true of French, Spanish, and (with some exceptions) Italian, or at least their "official" versions. I understand some local dialects dipthongize what in the official language are non-dipthongs.
I'm not sure why that would make the vowels "stupid." (Also: I'm not a linguist, and while I have studied all four of those languages, I'm nowhere close to being fluent in any of them. So take my comments on the languages with several large grains of salt.)
But English speakers have that problem with almost all foreign languages (because English vowels are abnormal). It doesn't really have anything to do with Romance languages in particular.
Unsurprising when you mix several languages with very different sounds together.
If all you know is English, then everything else sounds "stupid", because you're expecting irregularity and generally there isn't nearly as much. So you're surprised by regularity, then you learn it, and then you're surprised by any irregularity all over again.
It doesn't help that a number of languages have an "official" form, complete with an official Institute to tell the people what's a word and what isn't and how to pronounce it. But English doesn't, except it does unofficially.
So you learn English from someone, and then you find out that you sound like a hick or a damnyankee because it's not the "correct" pronunciation of the local overclass.
The "official" version of Italian is complete BS.
It doesn't even represent a "formal" pronunciation. Nobody speaks like that, at any level of formality. If you speak like that you won't sound formal, you'll sound like a robot, or a foreigner, or someone who's speaking to the hard of hearing.
The norm in Italian as it is actually spoken is that, whenever two theoretical vowel sounds directly follow each other, they MUST be dipthongized, unless two conditions are both satisfied: (1) the first of the two is not an "i" or "u" (2) the second of the two is stressed. If those are both satisfied it's a hiatus. This applies even between words, where vowel succession are frequently formed due to all words ending in vowels.
Although if the succession comes right at the end of a sentence the distinction between diphthong and hiatus becomes unclear.
At least this is my understanding of my own language as my lying ears tell me.
Alternatively you can pronounce every vowel succession as a hiatus but then you'll sound like you are speaking to the hard of hearing. But this applies even to the "official" dipthongs. For example, even the word "mai" can be pronounced as two syllables if you're talking to the hard of hearing.
In my experience if there is a problem foreigners tend to have is the opposite, they may find it hard to pronounce distinctly the variety of possible diphthongs that exist in Italian. Every possible combination of two vowels can form a distinct monosyllabic diphthong. Foreigners split them which makes them sound like foreigners.
Good to know!
I must add that condition (1) only applies within words not between words.
Also, all this stuff is just personal observation.
The general problem is that, when Italians are asked to pronounce a word clearly, they tend to adopt the pronunciation for the hard of hearing.
So, if you ask an Italian "how do you say the name Paolo?" they may answer "Pa-o-lo", because they think you're a foreigner therefore it's like you can't hear well.
Then you repeat "Pa-o-lo" back to them, and they'll say "Perfect!"
But of course the actual pronunciation has only two syllables, "Pao-lo". Everyone says it that way, and if you say "Pa-o-lo" all the time it will sound off. The first syllable of "Pao-lo" is a diphthong that in theory doesn't even exist in the sound inventory.
But don't let that intimidate you if you want to learn Italian. It's perfectly acceptable to sound like a robot.
Another thing, the distinction between hiatus and diphthong is clearer than one may think, because Italian is largely syllable timed, so the number of syllables affects timing.
> Alternatively you can pronounce every vowel succession as a hiatus but then you'll sound like you are speaking to the hard of hearing.
It was a point of emphasis (in the beginning Italian class that I took at an American community college) that all vowels in an Italian word are pronounced coequally. I don't doubt that that's a lie and your description is accurate. But I'm curious about the example the Italian class presented, of Via Calzaiuoli, which has a lot more than two vowels in sequence.
In the case of Calzaiuoli, the official pronunciation (as seen in dictionaries, I'm not even fighting against the dictionary in this case) is that it's a word of 4 syllables.
Cal-za-iuo-li
"iuo" is pronounced as a single gliding syllable, a triphthong.
I don't know how to share it, but here in Italy if I google "calzaiuolo" (in the singular), at the top of the page there is a dictionary entry with syllables and it lets you hear how it's pronounced.
Maybe your teacher meant that no vowel is ever reduced to a schwa?
The official pronunciation of Italian has a weird split personality.
In some cases, such as Paolo, it denies the existence of diphthongs, and mandates that each written vowel be pronounced as its own syllable.
In other cases, such as mai or calzaiuoli, it forbids the pronunciation of each written vowel as its own syllable.
But in reality, there is no difference between "mai" or "calzaiuoli" and "Paolo".
In reality, both have a normal version where diphthongs are used, and a citation form where each vowel is its own syllable. The double standard is arbitrary.
This depends on which diphthongs or triphthongs are used. Some are present in the official inventory, and words with those are in the first group. For example, "ai" and "iuo". Others don't exist officially, even if everyone uses them all the time, and words with those are in the second group. For example, "ao".
By the way, I promise that at some point I'll continue our discussion about meter.
How can it be a pointless joke, when "v" is a very pointy letter? Checkmate, atheists.
lol. I admit defeat.
Pedantic point: it's actually u they had, <V> being the way it is written on inscriptions on stone and wax (which are the majority of surviving Roman writings; most of the books only survive in medieval or modern copies).
They also had i but no j (or the bunch at the end of the alphabet, w, y or z). X and q seem to be later additions to Latin script but they were around during the Empire.
What do you mean, they (Romans) didn't have Y or Z? Yes, they had dropped the latter from Etruscan because they didn't need it (and the former was already used as U) but they reintroduced both in their alphabet by the 1st century BC.
The letters J and W were created in the Middle Ages, I agree.
Q was present in Etruscan and AFAIK used continuously thereafter by the Romans.
X, I'm less sure, but it was also present in the Etruscan alphabet.
They took <y> from Greek to represent a Greek vowel not found in Latin, and as far as I can see it occurs in Vulgar Latin to some extent (and thus in the modern Latin languages). I'm not sure it was ever integrated into Classical Latin though e.g. the English writers of the eighth century, probably the only 'classical' Latin authors outside of Ireland at the time, didn't use <y> for the phoneme /y/ even though they deliberately cultivated a style of writing that relied heavily on Greek loan words etc (it's hell to read), but <y> was used in writings in English of the same period (Irish, and the other Celtic languages, didn't have /y/ so don't tell us anything). Q and x were variant phonemes, although I am happy that they may be in archaic Latin they're not present in proto-Italic, and note the oldest Latin texts generally show e.g. cui for quis. Although the Romans adapted the Etruscan alphabet the Etruscan language is not ancestral to Latin (it's not Italic for a start) and I'd take the line that we have in q another, earlier, case of a letter representing a borrowed sound, but here actually adopted into Latin by the first century BC to represent a different but related sound to <c>. It's on brand for the Romans, whose language was named for their neighbours and alphabet was from other neighbour.
X could be Greek or Etruscan apparently. But you still find <KS> in early classical inscriptions so it was not fully integrated into Latin then.
I don't think what you say is inaccurate, in that the letters were available at those time (and not alone; e.g. Greek theta was used sometimes). I think though that their full adoption into the conservative, grammarian-dictated Classical Latin was later than you're saying; Vulgar Latin is hard to trace, but I am happy to agree with you there.
Was Y "integrated" into Classical Latin? Obviously not, since that phone ([y], French u, German ü) doesn't exist in Latin. It was merely used to transliterate Greek words and in particular Greek names (e.g. Psyche).
I can't understand this: "Q and x were variant phonemes, [...] they're not present in proto-Italic". Q and x are not variants, as X is [ks] in Western Greek, not [kh], and how would we know if they were present in proto-italic, since proto-anything is by definition not attested? And in any case it is irrelevant to the discussion about whether Latin had Q or not.
Likewise I'm a bit puzzled by your comment about cui and quis. The form with "qu" came first.
Also "Etruscan language is not ancestral to Latin (it's not Italic for a start)". Well, obviously, it's not even Indo-European. But so what? We are talking about the alphabet, not the language. It's as if you had said "Vietnamese doesn't have the Roman letters A B C D because Vietnamese doesn't come from Latin".
Overall, I don't think we disagree very strongly. Your original statement that the Romans didn't have Y and Z seemed off to me, that's all.
[-Edit to add: I forgot the letter X which you claim "was not fully integrated into Latin then" but can be found in e.g. S. C. de Bacchanilibus (along with QV, by the way) in 186 BC:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senatus_consultum_de_Bacchanalibus
-End edit]
> Pedantic point: it's actually u they had, <V> being the way it is written on inscriptions on stone and wax
What is this supposed to mean? The way it's written is all there is to the letter. V is what they had.
I got stuck on the idea that Romans put tomatoes in their food.
The commentator didn’t quite say that, instead they said that tomatoes reminded them of Roman food.
I think that was a comparison between current Italian food, which is widely regarded as the most popular food in the world and often contains tomatoes, and recreations of ancient Roman food, which the individual saw as awful and tomato-less.
I was reading sun eater and looking up the difference between patricians and palatines in the Roman empire
What a fantastic series. I don’t understand why it hasn’t won a ton of awards. I’m generally happy to read lots of feminist sci-fi too, but I wonder if the modern Hugo voter is now allergic to this style of sci-fi?
Also Sun Eater was my reason for thinking about Rome, as it happens (although I wasn’t reading it, I was saying it’s the best pseudo-scientific explanation for having light sabers confined to a certain class: they cost more than a giant spaceship, and thus are out of the reach of the hoi poloi, and this had me thinking about Roman influence on Star Wars).
I just finished the second book (plus associated short stories). The first book was fantastic. The second one had some really good parts (especially kharn Sagara) but got a bit slow at times (and also suffered by bassander lin just being kind of an unclear character who was unsatisfactory as both a nemesis and a former ally).
Still, the series as a whole is great (although I think it's at its best when it focuses on non-cielcin stuff).
PSA: As of Jan 2024, the Hugo awards are not a thing anyone should take serious any more. No more need to debate their wokeness or nomination process. Preemptively removing works from the ballots because the CCP might not like them is so much beyond the pale that any credibility they have built up over 70 years evaporated in an instant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#2023:_Ballot_censorship
Personally, I think the concept of 'fans pay 45 pounds for voting rights' is fundamentally not robust in the face of adversaries with any kind of serious money and a political or commercial interest. Basically, if Kim Jong Un decides that he wants to win a Hugo in every category, he can just invest a few millions in voting rights and it will take a lot of hand-waving about illegitimate slate votes to not grant them to him.
On the contrary. This is like saying because a scientific team reported negative results, we should disqualify their future work. I think the exact opposite is true!
I think the WorldCon reaction to the debacle in China speaks well of the anarchist ideal of WorldCon actually potentially being a viable ongoing process.
It is true that "I paid to attend WorldCon, or paid a little less to just vote" is quite obviously prone to gaming by various factions, but that's always been true, and yet I enjoyed 95% of the Hugo nominations up through about 2018. Lately I find there's a lot of stuff I don't consider sci-fi and don't much like, which I think is more about this generation's tastes than about weaknesses of the buy-a-ticket-and-you-can-vote process.
The Hugo awards haven't been worth paying attention to since Racefail '08, because they're now handed out by actual unrepentant bigots. But the Chengdu fiasco is, if not a nothingburger, probably an isolated incident.
It was foolish of Worldcon to allow one of their conventions to be essentially bought by shadowy Chinese buyers(*) and meta-foolish of them to not have had rules that would have allowed them to say "no" and make it stick. But the Chinese don't seem to be interested in buying any future Worldcons, nor does anyone else really look to be following their lead in that. So, yeah, the one time when Worldcon was physically in China and its on-site leadership was vulnerable to anything up to "disappearing", even the offshore leadership preemptively wimped out in the face of possible draconian censorship.
If and when Kim Jong-Un actually *does* buy his very own Worldcon, it would be reasonable to expect a repeat performance. Until then, the institution deserves as much respect as it did in 2022.
* Who might possibly have been just five thousand sincere Chinese fans who each had $50 or so to burn on a virtual membership in a basically Anglospheric fan club, but I don't think that's the way to bet.
I'm interested in Roman history (among other historical topics to which I've "branched out"), and know quite a lot of it, especially the earlier Republican period. But curiously, I rarely think about it, perhaps because there's so much else to consider. Most times my attention is drawn to it by seeing references in news items, such as the forthcoming Gladiator sequel, or the remains of some former Roman villa being discovered in a field.
Re emperor Elagabalus, who one or two people in your survey mentioned, my impression was that he wasn't evil, and I can't think of any really malicious act he was recorded as committing. But he was a prankster, and his practical jokes tended to be way over the top. For example scattering rose petals on his dinner guests was a charming idea, which might have occurred to anyone and been a pleasing diversion, but tipping ten tons of petals over them so they all suffocated was overdoing it, literally overkill! His downfall was due more to his humble and foreign origins, religious reforms, and his very unconventional (for the time) sexual proclivities.
So you're arguing Elagabalus wasn't evil, just the Joker?
I'd also argue his downfall may have been linked to the way he spent taxes (e.g. on lots of flowers rather than on the army).
Ah, another hippie flower child...
It didn't help that he was, literally, a child, reigning between the ages of 14 and 18
The Heliogabalus thing is really interesting! I have just read Antonin Artaud's Heliogabalus: the Crowned Anarchist, and it's pretty good. Artaud goes into the Emesa sun cult, and the Julia's (Domna, Moesa, et al), and their machinations...but he also reflects on cosmic matters. A bit reminiscent of Flaubert's Salammbo too. Personally, I think about Rome many times daily... usually when reading Seneca or Marcus Aurelius.
> Usually in a negative light. Whenever I see cruelty or misery, I think about visiting the Coliseum and wonder if I am participating in a social convention that will later be viewed as grossly inhumane
Well this era sees the games as being inhumane, but not the visits. I can’t imagine that tourism to the Coliseum will die out, and any tourist is free to despise the games.
I think they were referring to wondering what inhumane social conventions they are participating in generally, not that specifically visiting the coliseum would later be considered inhumane
Ah. I see.
They probably meant a visit by a contemporary watching the games, not a visit by a modern person seeing an ancient site.
There is no way so many women thinks about the Roman Empire, for sure the woman's sample here is not representative.
Every time you think about the state execution of the central figure of the most popular religion in the world (and women are more religious than men), you are thinking about Rome.
Not if you don't actually think about Rome.
In the Apostle’s Creed (included in Rosary) or Nicene Creed (once a week for most Christians), Pontius Pilate is mentioned by name.
It's very easy to recite the Nicene Creed without thinking about it.
Yes, but you’re supposed to. You’re supposed to think about all the prayers (which it isn’t, exactly, but same context). At least, as I understand it. I always assumed part of the point of having it repeated every week was so that people occasionally would think about it. And it probably doesn’t take that many occasionally across all church-growing Christians to get an effect, especially combined with readings like Render Unto Caesar. (It occurs to me Holy Week would skew those numbers significantly.)
(That said, when I answered the survey religion didn’t come to mind. I think I’d been talking history with my brother or something. Rome was huge, there are lots of ways to think about it. Even for a woman.)
This is the main reason why I 100% don't get why it's supposedly a big deal that men think a lot about Rome.
Going by the latest data I've seen on this, most Americans are Christians. The entire origin of Christianity is tightly bound up in Rome. It originated in Rome, Christ was crucified by Roman authorities, there is even a book in The Bible called Romans. The Catholic church is sometimes called the Roman Catholic church.
There's plenty of good secular reasons for Rome's prominence in the mind of many - the fact it dominated a huge swath of land for a long period of time, the fact that many of our most powerful modern nations were clearly inspired to a great degree by Rome and Greece, the fact that loads of video games heavily feature Rome.
But even without these secular reasons, Rome being very tightly tied to the world's most popular religion should be reason enough to understand why men think a lot about it.
Jewish people would have a history with Rome as well. Muslims called the Byzantine empire Rome, and ISIS and other Islamic groups sometimes use Romans for all westerners, harking back to the conflict with the eastern Byzantine empire.
Good points.
My girlfriend is traditionally feminine, liberal, not involved in the ACX sphere, and thinks about it multiple times a day.
However, she and I are both classics majors, so that's even less representative than the ACX sample.
Why is Asclepius relevant? Asklepios was a Greek god, the son of Apollo; the Romans borrowed Greek mythology, as they borrowed all kinds of things, but that doesn't make the Latin transliteration of his name significantly Roman.
Presumably the person who looked up the mythology looked up both Greek and Roman mythology, and didn’t on principle rule out the Roman mythology as irrelevant.
I think about Rome often because I live in Rome.
When in Rome….
I like this idea, but I also suspect that there's a smidgen of social desirability bias in these responses.
I confess I probably thought: I like to think of myself as one of those cultured people who thinks about the Roman Empire a lot, so I thought: "there are definitely times in the last 24 hours where I could have very briefly thought about the Roman Empire, and I'm 100% sure it came up a couple of days ago, so I'll 'round up' and put "Yes"".
I wonder if you asked a less desirable question: "Did you think about Harry Potter/ The Avengers/ Ru Paul's Drag Race in the last 24 hours?", would people 'round down' their responses?
It's possible, because people are people, but it's pretty dumb to adjust your anonymous answers around social desirability. But then, some people lie to their doctors so as to appear healthier, to the one person who might actually be able to FIX what they're lying about.
We want to appear socially desirable not only to others, but to ourselves. E.g., the parent commenter saying "I like to think of myself as one of those cultured people."
So, I've got to know:
Is there a meme in China about men thinking about the Three Kingdoms period?
This would be a good question for the person who runs the Chinese Doom Scroll substack.
Xiexie!
When I was a kid, there was a meme (pre-internet, just the kind of urban legend idea) that men think about sex multiple times per hour.
I think the surveys about the Roman Empire actually just show that we all think about a lot more things a lot more frequently than we realize. How many thoughts do we have in an hour? A lot more than we actively remember!
Maybe? I actually felt a little embarrassed realizing how often I do. Maybe because the memes seem to have a tinge of mocking men for thinking about it, or maybe because I associate Rome with pop-history and very surface-level analysis (which frankly describes my level of historical knowledge)? I don't know why I felt this embarrassment, but I definitely did.
Haha, yes, that’s probably true - the history-hobbyist cliche of thinking constantly about the only two historical topics you have any knowledge of—the Fall of Rome and Germany in the 1930s.
Heh. I remember the question and answering yes, I had thought of the Roman Empire. I don't remember if I explained why or if so, what I said. That said, I was, around that time, reading Ken Follett novels.* And I also usually make my way over to ACOUP a couple times a month. But I doubt I mentioned either of those.
*No one asked, but I'm not sure I like them.
There is someone mentioning the Ken Follett novels in the highlights! If that's not you, you've found your soulmate!
This always makes me feel like I'm some kind of lizard. I must have thought about the Roman Empire only a few times in the past decade, and most of those were only because of people bringing up this specific meme.
I'm with you Vim. History is just a bunch of stuff that could have happened otherwise. What percentage of simulated earth-runs would even have a Roman Empire?
Doesn't that make it more interesting rather than less?
Most simulated earth runs probably wind up with some form of sea slug.
What proportion of simulated earth-runs that end in humans simulating earth-runs, perhaps (tangentially--Scott, I'd love to hear you elaborate on your hatred of anthropics).
It feels like I'm reiterating the physics-or-stamp-collecting jibe (https://shorturl.at/r7fVU), but since I think I'd be more interested in the little quirks of sea slug physiology than I would be in the nuances of the Senate (they had a Senate, right?) something else might be going on. I'm not sure sea slugs are actually more abstracted than Roman society.
Now I'm even more ashamed that I don't think about Rome sufficiently frequently 😁
Does thinking about the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" count, if I say it's the ROMAN Catholic church? Or the Church as inheritor of Roman civil structures?
Jesus on a cross would do it.
It’s both the Church and the History of Rome podcast for me…
… oh of course THAT’S why the Church is so bureaucratic (which my husband and I were just discussing this morning. I can’t believe I didn’t notice that on my own. Perhaps I’m a fake fan as they say.)
I was reading about Hataira [0] earlier this week. Basically upper class escorts that also provide entertainment and stimulating conversation. It's fun to imagine some well known or upper class Romans having their views shifted or nudged after discussion with an escort. If this ever happened we probably wouldn't have found out.
There's this meme of Roman women keeping one breast out, which I found out is mostly based on fiction and artistic depictions. But I think such an outfit choice would be a great for certain galas, mixing a bit of the old with the new.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetaira
That's because they are so familiar and yet so utterly alien. Cicero and Seneca still seem relevant, and the whole story of how republics collapse. Or the importance of infrastructure. So many things. But what the fuck to do with Cato's Agricultura, that you should not whip oxen very hard, because if their skin is undamaged, you can sell the skin, but with human slaves no such restraint is necessary?
Yes. I believe that. Their infrastructure was unmatched as a whole across Europe until the early modern era.
But they seemed to have little moral, technological or intellectual growth over the period of the empire. Christianity aside, I suppose.
If you look at it in a positive frame of mind, the Romans respected slaves as fellow humans to the point that they wouldn't butcher them and sell their skin.
Or maybe human skin doesn't make very good leather?
Cows are noted for their very thick skin. I'd be curious whether it's possible for a normal human to damage the skin by whipping a cow.
This poll was live as the British Museum had its heavily advertised Roman Legions exhibit on, which I had visited the day before! That may tilt the London contingent, at least.
This poll was live as the British Museum had its heavily advertised Roman Legions exhibit on, which I had visited the day before! That may tilt the London contingent, at least.
This way of controlling for selection effects via the subgroup of least-ACX-readerish respondents seems really clever and I like it a lot.
It's possible the more educated folks think less about the roman empire because there are only so many "ancient empire fitting thought slots" during a day, and there are so many other interesting and relevant empires to think about. The Achaemenid empire, Yamnaya culture, and Mohenjo-daro need to be pondered!
I was going to say that I', mostly shocked that people have any memory of what they thought about in the past 24 hours. Most of what I think about more than a minute ago is lost to the ages unless some strong association brings it up, and even then I couldn't tell when I had a particular thought.
But as it turned out most of these examples are not fleeting thoughts or undirected association but actual exposure to the Roman empire. That means the meme is misleading - the impressive thing is how prevasive the Roman empire is in modern life rather than how present it is in our thoughts. In which case we wouldn't expect a large gender gap in Roman-empire-thoughts.
I wonder if people in countries where they speak a Romance language are more likely to think about the Roman Empire?
I suspect there are also an underreported group which are thinking about Roman slavery in sexual fantasies.
Roman slavery was very much about economics though, as was most slavery in most times/places. The only explicitly sexual slavery I can think of is related to Sunni Islam. Something like the Ottoman Harem or ISIS sex slaves (not very romantic imo).
Uhh, sure but that didn't mean that Roman men weren't able to use slaves for their sexual gratification. The reason they are enslaved isn't that important when you have the right to crucify them at your whim. Yes there were some laws limiting sexual relations with slaves but those were primarily applied against women.
But the reason it's likely the go to for some sexual fantasies isn't because people care deeply about the historical accuracy but because chattel slavery and the stuff you mention are too depressing and close in time for people to feel comfortable.
Slave-soldiers were also much in demand in a lot of Islamic societies.
I was thinking "40% in the last 24hr is absurd, there's no way people think about Rome that much"... before remembering that my wife and I had a long discussion over dinner about the Greek vs Roman names of various gods and titans.
People think about an astonishing number of things every day, given that there are about 86,400 seconds per day and we think about possibly more than one thing per second. Of course, many are thought about more than once, which reduces the distinct count by an unknown amount which may be large. But I bet one could find a surprising number, perhaps a couple dozen, of things unexpectedly common among people to think about each day.
Expected things probably include family and friends, food, sleep, sex, weather, transportation, and (nowadays) politics. All of these categories include sub-categories, and I'm not sure how people might classify them.
Unexpected things might include things like the Roman empire. Speculating, some might be entertainment that doesn't yet exist (movies, television shows, concerts), or gasoline production, or economic upturns or downturns. If they're unexpected I can't really predict them.
This would definitely be interesting to have a better understanding of!
How frequently do average people think about the ocean, or blue jeans, or diamonds, or Paris, or rice, or the sun, or air travel, or North Carolina?
Not the same as thoughts, but I wonder if Google search history would approximate this?
Well, let's see: within the last week I saw a meme about the pacific ocean, diamonds came up in the context of Pathfinder (the RPG) yesterday, I solved a puzzle at some point in the last week that mentioned the Eiffel Tower, I have definitely read discussion of how to cook rice in the last 24 hours, I've definitely thought about the sun recently but I don't recall the context, and I was on an airplane four days ago (and I think discussing airmiles more recently even.) I don't think I've thought about blue jeans or North Carolina very recently, although I do not own or wear blue jeans so I probably think about them less than average.
I have thought about the ocean, blue jeans, Paris, rice, the sun, and Air travel in the last 24 hours. Diamonds and North Carolina in the last week, but not last 24. (And NC is cheating, given that it's election season around here, which makes random slightly purple states get mentioned far more frequently than normal.)
I was just boarding a plane to North Carolina at the time I commented (while wearing blue jeans) so that’s how I came up with part of my “random” list.
Me: "yeah, 40% is too high"
Also me 10 hours ago: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-348/comment/70111916
AI presumably has been fed the original art of the Roman Empire, plus reference photos of historical clothing in museums, encyclopedias, etc, and *that's* what it thinks men wore?
Embarrassing.
I wonder if it was fed original art, rather than whatever online art for free could be scrounged up. No toga for the gentleman? Tsk, tsk!
Could be. The man's outfit looks far more like historical-accuracy-what's-that-our-female-characters-wear-cone-bras!-in-50.A.D. 1960s Hollywood sword and sandals costuming, cheaply copied by Spirit Halloween for frat bros who want to go as "slutty Roman man."
Like I said, it's embarrassing. I can kinda, sorta model someone not being able to perceive how fake and wrong this kind of art looks by contemplating how little I care about what a car looks like as long as it reliably goes, but still.
I figured out what was irking me! The clothing is presumably meant to refer to Rome, though I don't know if Scott prompted the AI art to be specifically Roman rather than Ancient/Classical.
The man is wearing the exomis (Greek) rather than the tunica (Roman) with some odd details such as the large belt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunic#Roman_tunic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing_in_ancient_Rome#Tunics_and_undergarments
"In its simplest form, the tunic was a single rectangle of woven fabric, originally woolen, but from the mid-republic onward, increasingly made from linen. It was sewn into a wide, sleeveless tubular shape and pinned around the shoulders like a Greek chiton, to form openings for the neck and arms. In some examples from the eastern part of the empire, neck openings were created in the weaving. Sleeves could be added, or formed in situ from the excess width. Most working men wore knee-length, short-sleeved tunics, secured at the waist with a belt. Some traditionalists considered long sleeved tunics appropriate only for women, very long tunics on men as a sign of effeminacy, and short or unbelted tunics as marks of servility; nevertheless, very long-sleeved, loosely belted tunics were also fashionably unconventional and were adopted by some Roman men; for example, by Julius Caesar."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clothing_in_ancient_Greece
"The exomis was a tunic which left the right arm and shoulder bare. It was worn by slaves and the working classes. In addition, it was worn by some units of light infantry."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exomis
"The exomis (Ancient Greek: ἐξωμίς from exo "outside", and omos "shoulder") was a Greek tunic used by the workers and the light infantry. The tunic largely replaced the older chitoniskos (or short chiton) as the main tunic of the hoplites during the later 5th century BC. It was made of two rectangles of linen (other materials were also used), which were stitched together from the sides to form a cylinder, leaving enough space at the top for the arms. An opening at the top was also left for the head. The cylinder was gathered up at the waist with a cloth belt using a reef knot, which made the cloth fall down over the belt, hiding it from view. To allow freedom of movement to the right arm, the seam at the right shoulder was taken apart, and the right hand was passed through the head opening."
So if he's wearing this garment, he's likely Greek and either a soldier or a manual labourer/slave.
The woman seems to be wearing a peplos, though I suppose it could be a chiton:
"The peplos was a rectangular piece of woolen garment that was pinned at both shoulders leaving the cloth open down one side which fell down around the body. The top third of the cloth was folded over to create an over-fold. A girdle or belt was used to fasten the folds at the waist and could be worn over or under the over-fold."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peplos
A peplos (Greek: ὁ πέπλος) is a body-length garment established as typical attire for women in ancient Greece by c. 500 BC, during the late Archaic and Classical period. It was a long, rectangular cloth with the top edge folded down about halfway, so that what was the top of the rectangle was now draped below the waist, and the bottom of the rectangle was at the ankle. One side of the peplos could be left open, or pinned or sewn together, with a type of brooch later called "fibula".
...It should not be confused with the Ionic chiton, which was a piece of fabric folded over and sewn together along the longer side to form a tube.
...Spartan women continued to wear the peplos much later in history than other Greek cultures. It was also shorter and with slits on the side causing other Greeks to call them phainomērídes (φαινομηρίδες), the "thigh-showers"."
So either the AI drew Greek instead of Roman, or if this is meant to be Rome, this couple is probably Greek (and lower-class).
That was exceedingly satisfying.
Scratching that mental itch - "I know this doesn't look right, but *why* doesn't it look right?" 😀