Oh, I see. I interpretted your comment as Scott getting people to attack you or something. Glad to see you feel that way and I was happy to see you mentioned!
I think that was in a previous links roundup. Glad it's just a few states, I think the only solution is to wait until lab-grown meat is normalized and convenient enough that it feels stupid.
Waiting for things to change until a certain policy will "feel stupid" seems like a political-sociology version of the typical-mind fallacy. At some point, things (will) feel obviously stupid to a certain "bubble 1" (maybe even to a majority). But there is still a relevant minority that thinks the opposite is obviously true, and only stupid bubble-1 members can believe that "no policy" is a sensible option. It is plausible that this develops when bubble 1 is not economically hurt by the policy, but bubble 2 is.
Disagree. In the 1970s, there was an extremely strong movement against in vitro fertilization, and in many cases it seemed poised to win out. Once IVF became a real thing instead of a horror story about "the test tube babies taking over", everyone agreed it was fine and stopped caring. This is a common pattern for lots of new technologies.
I agree with your overall point, but can't help but note that there is currently a major political party that seems pretty determined to ban IVF (or is at least indifferent to IVF being incidentally made illegal).
The Alabama legislature undid that very quickly, at least enough to allow IVF to resume. It seems pretty revealing of the popularity of IVF, even in conservative states?
Trying to understand what your model is. "For lots of new technologies, there is some exogenous, i.e. policy- and discourse-independent technological progress that at some point makes everyone agree that the technology is fine." Maybe, though "everyone" in the US case still means something like 86% for IVF, or at least that's what a googled poll says. Compared to lab meat, IVF has very personal and visible benefit. Meat production has ideological defenders AND vested interests. And I assume even some established technologies or policies can become the object of a culture war, like vaccination. This can also happen if the distribution of economic benefits or costs is not the main driver, as I assume is true for gmo: thrre are two sides that think that the optimal policy is obvious. In the long run, we are all dead and your prediction may be true, but ex ante and in the medium run, it is unclear when and whether it holds.
There was also a strong movement to stop nuclear power, which mostly won.
The obvious difference being that no entrenched interest stood to make billions of dollars from IVF being banned, whereas nuclear power was an actual threat to the bottom line of various energy companies.
While meatpackers, ranchers, and confinement feeding operations are not at the same political power level, they might still be able to fund an effective opposition.
This has worked great for drug legalization so far. Even weed(!) is still illegal in 12 states. It's only been a century since this war on drugs started though; maybe we just need more time?
To add some context: Churchill was a good friend of Lord Birkenhead, who a year before Churchill's above-linked essay had written an entire book of predictions concerning the world of 2030. Churchill was, to some extent, borrowing ideas from that more ambitious work, which also predicted synthetic meat.
Birkenhead died of cirrhosis of the liver 6 months after the book was published.
Year-round Daylight Savings Time was a late 1973 response by Congress to the Energy Crisis. I recall Time Magazine editorializing in 1973 that it was completely obvious we needed year-round DST. But it was miserable in January 1974 and was repealed later that year. In later 1974, Time editorialized that it was an obviously idiotic thing to do. (My faith in the media has never recovered.)
Lots of people today have strong opinions about DST. Interestingly, it's one of the last non-partisan and non-regional issues. Last I checked a few years ago, the leading Senate proponents of getting rid of clock changes are a Republican senator from Florida and a Democratic senator from Washington. It's reminiscent of postwar politics, in which Senators took pride in their idiosyncratic stances on some issues. I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
I believe the season for Daylight Savings Time was extended twice from its original 6 months. One reason you hear mostly bad opinions of the current system is that the advocates of clock changing have pretty much achieved their maximum agenda, with DST now running from early March to early November, which is about the maximum that would be reasonable. You used to hear some people say, "We need to get rid of DST" while others said "We need more DST." But now people who like changing clocks have won all their wishes, so they aren't an organized pressure group anymore, so they now might lose.
If we really want to get rid of clock-changing, we should probably go to 30 minutes of DST year-round. Unfortunately, that would put us off-sync with most major countries, although some big countries like India are not on the hour.
Daylight savings is my favourite issue. "Year round daylight savings" makes you an enlightened progressive. "Abolish daylight savings altogether" makes you an ignorant rube. The fact that both positions are functionally identical doesn't matter.
I'm a night owl so my big political issue is maximizing the Twilight Rate time to play golf in the evening through protecting Daylight Savings Time. But, I presume the majority of golfers are early birds, which is why morning tee times are more expensive than afternoon ones.
On the contrary - as a night owl, I love summer time, because it means it's light in the evening when I want to do stuff, rather than in the early morning when I'm still trying to get some fscking sleep. The transition from winter time to summer time is painful, though.
Dunno whether this was a deliberate Easter Egg or not (I'm soo impressed if it was!) but I really like how well "fscking sleep" works - fsck as a minced oath and simultaneously fsck as a metaphor for what the brain is doing during sleep/dreams. Love it!
Daylight Savings means that it's darker in the morning and lighter in the evening. As a night owl, darker in the morning is great because sunlight in the morning when I'm sleeping is either wasted or actively unhelpful to sleep, and sunlight in the evening is when you actually have free time to do things outside.
"As a night owl, I like being forced to get up early in the morning."
I continue to be shocked at the number of people who are confused about this. If your body & brain are most comfortable getting up in the dark, or shortly after sunrise, that's fine. But then you aren't a night owl, and you shouldn't be allowed to force your preference on those of us who are.
The world is already structured around early bird preferences. Night owl existence is hard enough without being forced to get up an hour earlier eight months out of the year.
The question is whether the twice a year disruption is worse than the issues daylight savings is meant to avoid. If people were hardier, they'd be fine with both disrupted sleep and going to work/school in the dark, so DST would matter less but whether it's better or worse than sticking to consistent time isn't necessarily affected.
Fair enough, but we've got the current time blasting through the airwaves in dozens of ways, so it's baffling to me that functionally no consumer electronics implement a dumb radio receiver to harness that.
The easy solution is just to move one time zone over every winter. (Might as well move a significant distance south/north while you're at it too and avoid the cold/warm)
I find it absolutely bizarre that so many people believe that clock-changing is a problem AND believe that the solution to the problem is permanent DST.
Putting my cards on the table, I believe it self-evident that we should all admit that the First World War ended over a hundred years ago and that everybody was stupid in 1974, accordingly go back to standard time all the time everywhere, and never speak of clock-changing again outside of middle school history class.
The 2007 change that extended DST from ending just before Halloween to just after was pretty extreme. I thought it made sense to end DST just before Halloween so kids could trick or treat in the scary dark at 530 PM, but Big Candy lobbied Congress so kids could trick or treat in the sunshine.
When they extended to the November/March dates, I thought the obvious move was to extend again to December/February, and then again to January/January, and then make it year-round.
I don't see how DST for 8 months is more clock-changey than DST for 6 months. If anything, 6 months of DST could be considered peak clock change (it has the highest standard deviation among systems with no more than 1 hour of difference), while expanding DST beyond that is a slight movement in the direction of year-round DST, so less clock-changey.
8 months of DST might sound more clock-changey because the concept of DST is associated with clock change, but 8 months of DST is equivalent to switching to a different main time zone and switching in the opposite direction for 4 months.
The point of clock-changing isn't to change clocks but to optimize our schedules relative to available daylight. The current 8 months of DST pushes clock changing about as far as it can reasonably go without obviously running into diminishing returns.
So nobody is out there advocating for 9 months of DST per year the way there used to be advocates for extending DST from 7 to 8 months, and before then from 6 to 7 months. Clock-changers have won so big over the last couple of generations that they no longer have any reformist enthusiasm left on their side.
Where the diminishing returns happen depends strongly on what latitude you live at.
FWIW, I prefer that everyone use Greenwich/Zulu time, and adjust there schedules so that that makes sense. Alternatively, have 6:00 am be astronomical dawn, and vary it continuously over the year.
There clearly is NO clock setting that's ideal over an entire time zone. Certainly not one with a coarse ratchet. But with internet driven clocks one every cell phone, there doesn't really need to be one. Just always rescale it to GMT when you need to coordinate across time variations.
Really curious about what profession/background you might have wherein you think in NATO timezones but also in 12-hour clock! Are you.... a Merchant Navy sailor? Radiotelegraph operator? World War 1 fighter pilot?
I think the entire approach to DST is wrong-headed. Regardless of the time of year, an extra hour of daylight in the evening is welcome. Likewise, an extra hour to sleep in in the morning is also welcome year round. So rather than changing the clocks twice a year, we should do so twice a day: "fall back" from 2am to 1am every morning to get the extra hour to sleep in, and "spring forward" from 2pm to 3pm every afternoon for the extra hour of evening daylight.
This 24 hour day thing is annoying. I'd like a 25 hour day so I could stay up late and get up early while still getting 9 hours of sleep. I presume that detonating hundreds of nuclear weapons at once could slow the earth's rotation by 4%.
Here's a link about speeding up the Earth's rotation to shorten the day by 0.8 ms in order to get rid of leap seconds. Adding an hour to the day is a 4.5 million times bigger change in the opposite direction, but the same principles should apply.
Also the moon is getting further away, which means its orbit is getting slower. I wonder how long until a lunar calendar ends up with exactly 12 months in a year.
If Daylight Savings Time was a partisan and/or identity politics issue, we'd at least have more intelligent talking points about it. Depending upon which side Trump chose, Hannity or Maddow would be reminding us constantly of the 1974 year-round DST fiasco. But because DST is not partisan, most people with opinions on DST have never heard of or have forgotten 1974.
Here in Ireland/UK (both follow each other for reasons of a shared border and previously a shared political system) it went like this:
(Note BST means British summer time and implies a clock change, and BDST means British double time - reverting to GMT+1 in winter. Ireland post independence has had different acronyms but the same system. )
1916 - BST introduced.
1918 - BST kept. Indicating people liked it.
1941 - BDST introduced
1945 - BDST reverted indicating it wasn’t liked, but BST is chosen not year round GMT.
1968-1971 GMT+1 tried for a while. Reverted to BST because people hated late sunrises in winter (note it was popular at the start and despised at the end).
This British isles are also a good case study as I think it’s the first and longest running example of the clock change experiment.
This means nobody alive has had “normal time” all year around in the British isles but I doubt that would be popular, and in any case it isn’t the preferred option with most if the clock change is to be removed.
It also means the debate about year round GMT+1 is one that also, as Scott indicates in America, lacks any historical references at all.
As someone who understands why the clock change happens and why we need it I’m always amazed that people don’t know about 1968-1971.
I’m not advocating the clock change for other countries though - if you have 10 hours of sunlight in winter summer time all year round would work.
Up here, and it’s grim up north, we only have 8 hours or less at the solstice. That means a natural sunrise should be at 8am, which it is in Greenwich (actually 8:06) . This would be 9:06 am under DST.
Thats maybe not so bad but the geographically minded amongst you would realise that London is to the east and south of most of the two islands, meaning that most will see later sunrises; sunrise would be at 9:25 am in Manchester - which is further north and west - close to 10am in parts of Scotland and the west of Ireland.
I'm still adjusting to the hour forward this month, as it only happened last week and my internal clock is still running on that time, but it does make sense now that the mornings are getting brighter: keeping the old time would have sunrise around 5-6 am in the morning instead of 6-7 am which makes more subjective sense to me. I want to get up around 7-8 am (subjectively) not 6-7 am when the sun (or at least daylight) is up.
Of course, there's the opposite problem when the clocks go back and it's allegedly 8 am and still dark out, but that's how the seasons change and can't be helped.
> I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
That might be true, but only because the stakes are so low.
I'm still bitter that, after all the rhetoric about everything Donald Trump ever did being irredeemably evil, his sudden turn toward extreme hostility to China divided the Republicans and the Democrats over whether he was being too accommodating or insufficiently belligerent.
I assume that when he took office the debate switched to whether Biden was insufficiently belligerent, or too accommodating.
Actually, there was a fairly prominent example early on where Biden publicly declared he was ready to go to war over Taiwan and his aides quickly walked it back. But attitudes since then have been shifting strongly in the direction of what was supposed to have been a gaffe at the time.
> I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
I would love to see a movie where two groups are trying to *Inception* opposite ideas into Trump's mind because there is some high stakes reason why they need half of the country to strongly oppose or support some issue.
Oh good, I want to say I love daylight savings time. (I live at 43 N latitude.) I love the extra hour in the evening, it means more dog walks, grilling outside and it's great. Permanent DST would stink because getting up in the dark in winter stinks. So an old man tip to enjoying DST. This year I saw the change coming and started setting my alarm clock 15 minutes early. Three days of this and I'm ready to spring ahead. As a warning to politicians everywhere, I'm willing to become a single issue voter on this topic.
One thing which was a good idea in the 1970ies and is a stupid idea now is that we should minimize the number of jumps and make the size of the jumps a big round number (within our archaic time keeping system). Today we have computers. Anyone serious about measuring time on Earth is using TAI, so the archaic human timekeeping system can be optimized for human needs.
For a country of a limited latitude (or a US state), it might make sense to always have sunrise at 7:00, and sunset varying from 15:00 (in the winter) to 23:00 (in the summer). This would imply perhaps three minutes of time change per day at the equinoxes, which seems a lot more friendly than a single 1h jump per equinox.
> For a country of a limited latitude (or a US state), it might make sense to always have sunrise at 7:00, and sunset varying from 15:00 (in the winter) to 23:00 (in the summer).
Under the traditional system, sunrise occurs at 6:00, by definition, and sunset occurs at 18:00, also by definition. The duration of one hour changes accordingly.
Why would it make sense to have sunrise 5 hours before noon, and sunset (an average of) 7 hours after noon? Do you not want noon to be the center of the day?
I personally think that having sunlight when waking up is probably helpful for humans. While one could also put sunrise at 6:00, noon seems more arbitrary to the human bio-rhythm to me.
It's all equally arbitrary. There's no difference between calling sunrise "6:00" and calling it "7:00". It will be sunrise either way; you defined the time by reference to the sun. It's just that your numbers are one hour off of the norm for no obvious reason.
My minority/provocative position is: Do away with time zones entirely. Put the whole world on the same time. This would eliminate the difficulty of coordinating schedules across time zones and national borders. Put the whole world on, say GMT. Then local noon in New York would come at 5 pm, with sunset around 11 pm. Sunrise in Singapore would come at 11 pm. If you needed to organize a meeting with your offices in Bengaluru, Singapore, Tokyo, Berlin, and Denver, you wouldn't have to wonder whether you get the time zones right - it would be 10 am for everyone.
Of course, most people would prefer to be active during daylight hours, but this isn't a problem. New Yorkers could get up at noon, and Los Angelinos could have lunch at 8 pm. Or whatever other times they wanted. Just like they can now.
Yes this is clearly correct and I have been beating this drum for years.
Also, there is no reason why a particular business or locality cannot simply adjust their business hours during certain parts of the year. There is no federal mandate that work begins at 0900.
>if I’m understanding this right, the crowd compares two LLMs, rates which one is better, and then they use an equivalent of chess’ Elo system to give each of them a score.
Right. It's also blind—you don't know which model produced which output until after you vote.
I mean, who knows how useful this is as a way of measuring AI capabilities. A model winning a blind A/B test doesn't prove it's smarter or safer or anything we actually care about—surely this also selects for models that flatter the user by sycophantically agreeing with them, for example.
It also penalizes AIs that say "I don't know" vs AIs that write elaborate, convincing hallucinations. Not good—when an AI fails, we want that failure to be as obvious as possible.
But these sorts of leaderboards do capture some of the picture missing from standard benchmarks. There's an incredible difference between Gemini Ultra's reported benchmark scores and the experience of using Gemini Ultra in practice. (I mean that in a bad way.)
Yes. It's also hard for non-experts to correctly evaluate LLMs' knowledge in unfamiliar areas. For example, I've found even leading LLMs to be very poor with topics like investing/trading, yet they can confidently BS to mask these gaps. I think this problem will get worse with time as LLMs improve.
My contribution is the NYT Connections benchmark, which shows a clear performance difference between smaller and larger models (but it's just another data point):
It's a pretty convenient way to test out a bunch of models, too. When I want to try out my "write a non-rhyming poem" prompt, I can just go there and hammer away for a few minutes and get a few dozen model-versions. When I spent an hour or two doing it back in January 2024 or so, I picked up 31 different model-versions. With that, you can see some interesting trends, like GPT-4 versions apparently kept getting worse until quite recently where it suddenly became able to do it frequently. (Qualitatively, it still tends to collapse back into rhyming if you go long enough, but it's a big improvement nevertheless.)
The downside is that it's heavily biased towards the cheap/available models, I think, so you will get like 50 gemini-pro-dev-apis and then just 1 vicuna-13b, so while my raw percentages of success go from 80% with pplx-70b-online to 0% with vicuna-13b, that's also based on 4/5 vs 0/1 samples - so, not exactly accurate estimates...
>With that, you can see some interesting trends, like GPT-4 versions apparently kept getting worse until quite recently where it suddenly became able to do it frequently.
That's interesting. I've noticed that GPT-4 (and sometimes 3.5) can write non-rhyming poetry if prompted to continue a sample of non-rhyming poetry. But it doesn't last long. Soon the rhymes return.
I assume it's RLHF, combined with a general tendency for models to "forget" your original prompt as text swamps their context window. This is obvious if you request a Trurl-style poem where every word starts with S. Initially, GPT4 and Gemini Ultra do OK (only a few mistakes per verse). But if you keep prompting "continue", the poem swiftly degenerates, until the majority of words don't start with S. Here's GPT4 after just three "continues".
What does “non-rhyming poem” tell you? The ability to follow instructions even when those instructions produce uncommon outputs? Checking to make sure the next token doesn’t rhyme with the N-10 token?
It's an interesting case of model capabilities (apparently) degrading. GPT3 could write non-rhyming poetry. But GPT4, trained on 100x more compute, cannot.
The difference is that GPT4 isn't "just" a text completion model. Put simplistically, it tries to follow a set of policies decided by human feedback (RLHF). These humans (thousands of Kenyans paid $2/day) apparently preferred rhyming poetry to non-rhyming poetry, because they trained into GPT4 a strong preference for rhyming poetry.
To the user asking for non-rhyming poetry, this looks bizarre. Like GPT4 is ignoring your requests, or failing to understand you. But it understands just fine. It's just following a rulebook that's invisible to the user. Your request for non-rhyming poetry might as well be "type the n word" to GPT4.
This sounds silly, but it's a vivid case of why RLHF sucks. Your model ends up contorting its output into weird, arbitrary shapes, because of unexpected vagaries in human feedback. There are other, worse problems. Non-rhyming poetry is just an easy one to notice.
> It also penalizes AIs that say "I don't know" vs AIs that write elaborate, convincing hallucinations. Not good—when an AI fails, we want that failure to be as obvious as possible.
One might want to train LLMs to attach an epistemic status to their responses ("Correct: 30%, Major errors: 40%, Minor errors: 20%" or something) and then train them to be well calibrated on that.
That would be great, and AIs are certainly capable of it in principle. (The GPT4 release paper showed that the base model had excellent calibration when judging its own output, until they ruined it with RLHF so it won't say bad words.)
But the problem remains: how do you overcome the tendency of human raters to prefer confident wrongness? If they're asking an AI a question, they likely don't understand the topic well enough to notice mistakes.
If they're asking AI a question in a tool specifically aimed at evaluating AI answers (and clearly marked as such), we should probably assume they either understand what they're doing and ask about a topic they can in fact judge, or are just illiterate period, but, well, that case essentially amounts to random noise.
> the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin
Damn, that's some outgroup homogenization you've got going on there...
I didn't say they're homogenous! Regular prison contains murderers and white-collar criminals; they may have nothing in common except that they need to stay in prison.
Car users would prefer cars that don't get stuck in traffic, don't need parking lots, and never get in accidents, so anyone who complains about existing cars is strawmanning them.
This isn't a fair equivalence. Cities like that commonly exist (most of the major problems are caused by funneling all the existing problem populations into a narrow area, cities don't call them into being), and cars like that don't exist anywhere (because the problems with capacity actually are fundamental properties of cars, not things that happen because of implementation issues).
Trying to steelman this... something like "the problems described are inevitable on large densities of cities/cars but manageable with lower densities, which are the versions the people advocating for them prefer in the tradeoffs".
Which is a defensible position, except that this inevitably leads to "okay all forms of urbanism have tradeoffs and we should figure out how to best manage them", which is just the standard urban yimby position. Except that actually is the urbanist position? I personally don't like suburbs but I don't want to ban them, I want to apportion them by market mechanism (even cities whose densities I'd hold up as a model, like Vienna, have pleasant suburbs that the people who do prefer them can live in - they're just a smaller percentage of people when you don't force it on everyone).
In fairness this also applies to cars - there's a fairly small number of people who either actually want to ban all cars or use "defund the police" style deliberate ambiguity, but most urbanists do accept them as a transportation form that's useful for a lot of people a lot of the time, we just want to price their externalities and have other options in the cases they're suboptimal for.
(I guess this is a little bit of a no true scotsman argument? Except I think I actually am describing the consensus urbanist position here, not a weird hypothetical perfect version of it).
Thank you, "cities contain problem populations but building more cities wouldn't necessarily increase this" is the best argument against fighting more cities I've ever heard.
Still, I'm not sure this is entirely the issue. The other problems with cities are:
- Your apartment is always on a major street, so traffic noise problems are your problem
- Your apartment shares walls with lots of other people, so their noise problems are your problem.
- Thousands of people walk down whatever street you're on per day, so their litter/graffiti/etc problems are concentrated and magnified.
- Public transportation forces you together with other people in a confined space you can't leave without any law enforcement officers
- Cities actively make people worse (higher schizophrenia rates, higher lead levels)
If you build twice as many cities, then you expect each city to have at least half the problem population (by density) as the current ones (assuming they redistribute evenly). I think that's still enough that I would be miserable living there, and I'm uncomfortable forcing other people to live in conditions that I would refuse to live in.
I understand that YIMBYs will try to prevent new cities they build from having these problems. But I imagine the residents/governments of existing cities also tried to prevent them from having these problems, and failed. I don't understand why you expect to do so much better.
But there would still be suburbs, even in the YIMBY-est paradise? They would probably be more inconvenient on average to commute from etc., but surely the whole suite of cost-benefits considerations need to be evaluated, especially given that the current situation is obviously comically suboptimal.
Re: City noise, I've lived in both a city apartment and the (semi-urban) suburbs, and I've actually found cities/apartment living to be noticeably quieter? Maybe I just got really lucky. The level of sound-proofing that goes into building design is a sizeable part of it, I think, but also another sizeable part of it I think is just culture. There seems to be a significant portion of the population for whom the idea that noise could be distressing just doesn't compute. And anywhere that portion achieves majority status (and so doesn't have to fear shaming) will quickly devolve into noise hell. In cities that might mean overhearing loud arguments through the walls in the middle of the night or people going around blaring stereos which can be very annoying, but you'd mistaken to think that the lower density of the suburbs wil definitely save you. Rather, that sort of person will just double-down or triple-down and make use of cars and motorcycles with ultra low frequency modified exhaust systems throughout the night, gas-powered leafblowers for hours first thing in the morning, or a small army of dogs that they never walk and leave in the backyard to bark forever as their only form of enrichment. Instead of broadcasting noise for a mere 50-100 feet, they broadcast noise for miles. I actually got into r/fuckcars to a large extent specifically because I felt based on my experience of cities vs suburbs that a more walkable and urban landscape would be generally quieter.
So re the problems with cities - I think they can be mitigated (and also the correlation with density isn't quite that clear - Berkeley is much denser than Phoenix but worse along pretty much all of these metrics except transit dependence).
All that said, I suspect you'd be pretty unhappy living in downtown Vienna too, even if these problems are mild there they'd probably bother you. But Vienna does have very nice quiet suburbs on the edge of town I think someone like you would be happy in? And the thing about transit is that it clears up road space even if you don't use it yourself - it's probably easier to drive from suburban Vienna to downtown than from Berkeley to downtown SF, because the high transit use means there's less traffic despite the more people on the roads.
I think to some degree, car use and wanting to live further apart impose externalities (or just direct costs which our current system forces you to pay). But while I think we should give people the choice to internally pay those costs, I also think quite a lot of people would just happily pay them for their preferences and that's fine.
Funny how you'd love to ban portable radios because they're too noisy, while also professing your love for easily the number one cause of noise in any city, suburb, exurb, you name it: cars. I usually love your newsletters but you've got some major blindspots in certain areas.
I have a lot to quibble with in this thread but I’ll just focus on this: “Your apartment is always on a major street.”
Apartments are concentrated on major streets because zoning codes are designed on the presumption that apartments are noxious, and big noisy roads are noxious, so we should put all the noxious stuff together. But there is nothing impossible about an apartment building on a pleasant, quiet street, and that is in fact not noxious at all.
The problem is that ~99% of the country is either un-inhabited, or car-centric crap, and only ~1% that is walkable urbanism. Because lots of people want to live in walkable urbanism, the prices for those places get bid up. Then poor people who can’t afford a single family home and can’t afford walkable urbanism move into apartment buildings on noxious roads, and confirm the suburbanite NIMBY’s priors about apartments being for “undesirable” people.
The core of the urbanist/YIMBY coalition is that people who want walkable urbanism should get more than 1%. And we should probably build that walkable urbanism in places where the land is most valuable, because housing density would allow more people to access that value (see: the South Bay). The “urbanism” part is ameliorating the downsides of density by making a transportation system that provides lots of transportation OPTIONS, and mitigates against the negative externalities of cars.
Footnote: electric cars address SOME of the noxiousness of cars, but not nearly all. Rolling noise is still very loud at high speeds, especially with the added weight of batteries. To reduce negative externalities of cars in cities, we should have highways AROUND cities, not into them, and urban streets generally need to be designed for lower speeds. That means narrower lanes, sharper corners, raised crosswalks, chicanes, bollards, etc..
- You can build or retrofit apartments to be very noise-resistant.
- Better law enforcement can solve problems with litter, graffiti, and crime on public transit. Easier said than done, of course, but AI surveillance cameras with near-100% street coverage are very close to becoming a reality IMO.
- Crowded public transit is mainly a funding issue. More transit, or surge pricing for existing transit, could mitigate overcrowding.
- Higher lead levels are mostly due to fossil fuel emissions, right? We're working to eliminate those. (EDIT: mostly wrong, see below discussion)
- Not so sure about schizophrenia, lol
You're not wrong about cities containing these downsides. But I imagine it's a lot like cities in the 19th century being overrun with horse poop and sewage - the problems exist, and we should of course tax the negative externalities that come with density, but with better technology and public policy we can eliminate those negative externalities wholesale.
(Car-dependent) suburbs have problems too, often related to cars. Car crashes kill more Americans than murder (even without counting cars hitting pedestrians and cyclists), plus they produce noise and pollution and congestion, and the whole setup is absolutely terrible for kids' ability to develop independence. It's not even clear to me that most NIMBY's even recognize these as problems (except congestion) and they certainly don't seem to have any serious suggestions for mitigating them.
Basically, every kind of development has tradeoffs, and only listing the downsides of the one you personally don't like isn't very convincing. It's fine for you to want to not live in a city, but don't completely strawman YIMBY's with low-quality stuff like "I... am against YIMBYs’ obvious lust for destroying them [suburbs]." See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
If cities are expensive, this is a sign there should be more of them, like with any price signal.
> (1) Your apartment is always on a major street, so traffic noise problems are your problem
> (2) Your apartment shares walls with lots of other people, so their noise problems are your problem.
> (3) Thousands of people walk down whatever street you're on per day, so their litter/graffiti/etc problems are concentrated and magnified.
> (4) Public transportation forces you together with other people in a confined space you can't leave without any law enforcement officers
> (5) Cities actively make people worse (higher schizophrenia rates, higher lead levels)
Most of these are not actually problems with cities. Speaking from my apartment in Shanghai, where they're currently building a subway station right across the street:
(1) I do not experience any traffic noise. Zero. This is a huge contrast to San Francisco, where I don't remember general traffic noise as a big problem, but constant sirens were a huge pain.
(2) I also don't hear any noise from my neighbors. I _do_ hear noise if anyone is hanging out in the stairwell (immediately outside my door), but that's not particularly common.
Years ago, there was a ton of noise in Shanghai from fireworks and firecrackers, but they made that illegal. I still remember watching somebody's random fireworks going off in front of a building that was much taller than the fireworks' trajectory.
(It's possible to get more noise from your neighbors than I do. I have a friend who has complained about her neighbor below playing music with the window open. Note that shared walls aren't an issue in that case; the problem is that they share the same outside. At my parents' home in California, we have the same problem to a greater degree, despite being separated from our music-playing neighbor by dozens of feet.)
(3) The streets are surprisingly clean, far cleaner than local behavior would imply. The Chinese seem to litter a lot; I believe the streets are swept on something like a daily basis. I was just in a public park out in the suburbs that was, sadly, full of trash.
(4) If you're taking the subway at rush hour, sure. You'll be forced together with a bunch of other people in a tightly confined space. In fact, you'll be so tightly confined that you can barely move, with bodies pressing in on you from all sides; I wouldn't worry much about being mugged.
Other relevant concerns: I wouldn't worry about being mugged anyway. This is not a high-crime environment. Even if it was, criminals on the subway have no getaway plan in the same way that you are theoretically unable to get away from them, so if there's any risk of the local authorities punishing criminals, they are unlikely to do much on the subway, where they're pretty much guaranteed to be identified and apprehended.
Speaking of local willingness to punish criminals, there's nothing about the subway that says law enforcement officers aren't present. That's a policy choice.
(5) I hear that Shanghai has notably elevated lead levels. This is unfortunate. But American cities are better in this regard. Again, lead levels are a policy choice.
So you dont like cities. Why dont you just say that instead of condemning people that want something different than you? No one is coming for your suburbs.
For some reason, these discussions often focus on the extremes: we should either build sprawling single-family-only suburbs, or we should turn the built environment into Manhattan. This is probably because of the way online discourse in general gets focused on the extremes, and both NIMBY and YIMBY types can play into this. But this is also exactly the reason why many people are talking about “missing middle housing”.
I agree that Scott raises some legitimate concerns about living in a super-dense area. But these are mostly issues if you’re experiencing Manhattan-style density (most places don’t have ‘thousands of people walking down whatever street you're on per day’).
Especially for families, ultra-dense living can be very difficult. I was recently in Seoul, and I don’t think I would be able to comfortably raise my family there (and perhaps that is somewhat related to the very low birth rates in South Korea).
However, the alternative doesn’t have to be sprawl and non-walkable, car-only suburbs where every house must be a detached single-family unit. Where I live, there are some (very desirable) neighborhoods that have more gentle forms of density and walkability. These neighborhoods have a mix of detached single-family houses, semi-detached units, duplexes, townhouses and rowhouses, low-rise and some mid-rise apartment buildings and condos. There are commercial and mixed-use areas (think apartments above the street-level shops) within easy walking distance. The streets are designed in a grid pattern that makes navigating on foot or via bicycle easier. In most suburbs, small streets, crescents and cul-de-sacs all feed into larger arterial roads that are not pleasant for walking or cycling — a grid provides alternate routes to avoid car traffic. The neighborhoods I’m describing often have good public transit options, but commuting by car is still possible and usually convenient. This is related to the (sometimes unfairly maligned) concept of a 15-minute city.
To a certain extent, the suburb vs. city choice is about personal preferences, and people should be free to choose the option that fits their preferences and lifestyle. But in much of the US, neighborhoods like the ones I described above are made almost impossible because of a mix of zoning and NIMBYism. A lot of neighborhoods enforce only single-family detached housing, and any other form of construction is opposed vociferously. Commercial and residential zoning is strictly separated—good luck opening up a neighborhood coffee shop or hair salon, it’s simply not allowed! Any kind of public transit is opposed (people are often concerned that having a bus stop in their area will cause an increase in the number of ‘undesirables’ in their neighborhood). Taking transit is simply not a (practical) option. Kids or others who do not drive (elderly, people with bad vision, etc.) have to rely on others to chauffeur them from place to place.
I definitely agree that it’s possible for the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction. I wouldn’t want to live in an area where every building is a skyscraper either. But the current equilibrium is pretty extreme: there is only one form of neighborhood that is acceptable to build, and it comes with a lot of downsides. We should try to move away from this, and legalize building other types of neighborhoods too. Give people more choices: if people want to live in single-family-only suburbs, they should be allowed to (paying their share for infrastructure, etc.), but there is a huge unmet demand for neighborhoods that are less car-dependent, less soul-less, more walkable, more amenable to giving kids independence. Let’s allow those too!
Not really a fair analogy. Most urbanists advocate for something like the Netherlands. The Netherlands exists. It's not a hypothetical, it's not pie-in-the-sky. I would suggest that having SF (or North American cities in general) as your central example of a city skews your perspective a bit.
Yes. And that lower death rate is the result of (amongst other things) decisions made when designing streets/roads. Including in cities. This is one of the things that urbanists complain about when they talk about "stroads".
Asian Americans have less than a 1/5 of the traffic fatality rate as the general population, and a 1/3 of the pedestrian death rate. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders also have a similarly low rate. This suggests that cultural factors and not just road design contributes to America's high traffic fatality rate.
I almost never see urbanists make a big deal about crime. They might, theoretically, want cities not to have crime, but they seem to express far more opposition to cars and suburbs and highways.
This is a fair criticism. There is a subset of urbanists that talk about crime and the need for more enforcement (notably Matt Yglesias), but given the general left lean of the greater group it's probably a minority overall and definitely not amplified. It's one of several points (along with commonly being pro rent control/IZ) where I think the tendency of urbanists to be urban liberals pushes many of them to dismiss things that are actually pretty important for having good cities.
What gets me is that YIMBY is already a free market idea, so I'm genuinely puzzled how it managed to get past the left-leaning ideological filters of most urbanists.
Why do they need to make a big deal about crime? Shouldn't we assume that people have at least an average level of concern for crime? Why does a group have to explicitly state their views on crime?
Crime and public disorder are the biggest issues that make cities unlivable and that drive people into the suburbs. One would expect that a movement centered around the importance of livable cities would focus on these issues, but they don't. Instead they get defensive and are in denial about it.
I reread 18 and I'm not really sure if you're a YIMBY or NIMBY, or a YIMBY for burbs and NIMBY for cities. Or are you taking a plague-on-both-their-houses position?
Nah, Dante enjoys the exclusive privilege of shallow popular culture awareness by default. I've recently gotten around to finally reading the Comedy, as it happens, and it's amusing just how shallow that awareness really is. Hell is mostly there to provide a thrilling setting for thinly veiled 14th century culture war sniping which would otherwise have been utterly boring and quickly forgotten.
It's also interesting how liberal he was with the dogmas. Apparently using Jupiter's and Jesus' names interchangeably was totally kosher, and the likes of Apollo also enjoyed good standing. It seems like nationalism took precedence before orthodoxy, being largely on board with the program was plenty enough. This neatly ties with the narrative that the Church wasn't opposed to scientific progress per se, just particular malcontents. Copernicus - fine, Bruno and Galileo - nope.
Well, in my case I actually did read Dante as part of a liberal arts education that included the Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid, Don Quixote, and even (shudder) Ulysses. But I could probably have done it through pop culture osmosis, too.
Although Dante is huge in Italy, and I kinda also studied Italian for a bit, so I could have picked it up that way.
Damn! All I had to read was Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn. I was supposed to read Ulysses (shudder) in college (but I didn't), and I picked up Dante and read Ulysses (shudder) in later life. And I wish I had read In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past as a young man. It would have prepared me for the bal de têtes that comes with old age.
Somehow I missed out on Catcher in the Rye during schooling, but I read it a few years ago for general cultural literacy. I was probably older than its intended audience by that point. ;-)
I've never nerved up to tackled In Search of Lost Time. I'm slightly hesitant about non-English works, because I always feel as though I'm missing something, and it's hard for me to avoid the urge to get several translations and start comparing. And it's so massive. But worth it, you think?
> My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person ...
The rules/norms/teaching methods, as conceived by the classical educators, include the belief that content is not entirely arbitrary. It seems likely that if the rules/norms/teaching methods are effective, then their content preferences are at least somewhat good and correlated with effectiveness. So I doubt the strong decoupling implied by your statement is correct.
This is Scott’s deeply-ingrained woke social conditioning expressing itself in an offhand, highly qualified comment (“necessarily”, “directly”). Forgive him. He was brought up in a culture that held that the ghost-written memoir of a black woman married to a famous man and sold in airports has more value than the greatest works of the western canon.
Value is relative. If you happen to want a populace that doesn't even conceive questioning the prevailing orthodoxy, such memoirs are tailor-made for your purpose.
The value of the works aside, students are going to be allowed to be skeptical of their messages in a way they can't for something like a diversity-promoting account of lived experience.
24. That just sounds like the Texas sharpshooter, declaring whatever was hit to be the target all along. I think it would be more honest to adopt the "In a good cause, there are no failures" position. It would be cope, of course, but less shameful than pretending your humiliating defeat is a rare species of victory.
I don't see why you think the alt right suffered a "humiliating defeat". I doubt Trump would've won his first term if they didn't shift politics the way they did. And the movement never really died, it just got subsumed into a bigger coalition. Considering the way the next election is probably going to turn out, they're probably going to end up getting everything they wanted. How could that possibly be considered a defeat?
I'm distinguishing between tactical victories, of which they certainly had several impressive ones, and strategic victories, of which they've had none (yet, if you are an inveterate optimist).
For example, Operation O-KKK (👌) was an unmitigated success. And yes, the election of 2016 had many factors, but their involvement WAS one of them, so fine, that can count. But strategically? Their accounts on pretty much every online platform worth mentioning continue to be shoahed, and if they draw any significant attention, so do their BANK accounts. Trump did none of what they hoped the first time, and he has a good chance of picking a black as his running mate in 2024.
What they HAVE done is essentially nothing more than "spreading awareness" and "getting their message out there," (Walt Bismarck personally did a lot of this through his videos, which are effective for all the reasons he describes), the kind of MORAL VICTORY that without any consequent concrete success I think it's reasonable to characterize as a humiliating defeat.
The funniest thing is that he explicitly mentioned that "we need to use Trump, not let him use us", then entirely dropped it. Meanwhile Trump did just that, he used them up, and more than that, the entire rightist discourse these days is squarely centered on him.
I think the fact that the modern GOP's main concern nowadays include Jewish Space Lasers, the Great Replacement, and the plight of the White Working Class should count as a victory. If you're in search of a policy victory I'd mainly point to SCOTUS getting rid of AA. So I think Walt is justified in this belief.
It won as far as pushing its ideology went. But that very victory meant it attracted a bunch of low-IQ antivaxxer conspiracy theorists and followers of the Trump personality cult. So people like Richard Spencer don't feel like the moobment is something they want to be associated with anymore.
I didn't read the link, but it seems to me some version of the "alt right" has won some major victories. In 2015 they were nothing, but now essentially control much of the Republican party, particularly the presidential primaries.
This gets really fuzzy depending on how you categorize people as "alt right" and if you slice the demographics up enough then no group can claim credit for this change. Outright racists, white supremacists, etc. did not win, though there is a group of them in the coalition, for instance. Probably the single issue with the most pull in the whole group is opposition to immigration, particularly (maybe close to totally) illegal immigration. This issue does bind the racists with the working class, the America-first, the bootstrappers, the anti-elite, the anti-government, and the rule-followers/tough on crime. I don't think we know enough to properly categorize and determine how much support comes from which areas. There's probably a lot of overlap. Democrats/the left will want to say that "racist" is the binding term here, but I don't think there's really any particular thing in that group that binds them all together. Anti-elite is probably the closest, but it's necessary but not sufficient for what the alt-right is representing.
I remember saying, in 2020, that if BLM succeeded in making whites believe that being white is the most significant thing about them, it would backfire tremendously. I think it has, and I sort of doubt that the Alt-Right had a lot to do with that. But who knows: maybe having a tiny cohort of people adding, “and that’s all right” was what kept the result from being universal white guilt.
I was still subscribed to Scientific American as it descended into woke insanity, and I remember an article advocating the promotion of "white racial identity." The author somehow believed that making white people think about their whiteness all the time would make them LESS racist (as defined by the woke).
Do you want American Hitler? Because this is how you get American Hitler.
I don’t see them as having achieved almost anything, it is the mistakes of their enemies that have given their cause credence, not their actions. I think their actions likely almost irrelevant and maybe even counterproductive.
Regarding the alt right guy, all I can say is I don't get how someone can keep talking about the "JQ" and refer to the mass shooter in Charlestown as a "lunatic". I mean, he's doing what you're too much of a coward to do, right?
Consider this: would you be similarly confused by vegans who say things like "meat is murder" calling someone who shot up, say, a ranch or something, a "lunatic"?
I don't think the analogy is totally on point because "Jewish question" is associated for most people with mass murder of Jews (when I google "Jewish question" including quotes, the majority of the top hits reference nazis, the Holocaust, etc), and "meat is murder" isn't associated with mass murder of meat eaters.
Well, that's certainly the most famous solution to the question, but not the only one, and his intended audience, which isn't "most people" (and doesn't include you, so if you care to understand what he meant, you need to be more open-minded) would know that.
(Expulsion is another, less-final, solution, for example.)
The Jewish question is about Jewish global domination conspiracy theory. The question is what to do about it. The Nazis wanted to first expel the Jews from Germany and later radicalized into the final solution which was the Holocaust. Nowadays this is associated with claims like "the Jews control Hollywood. The Jews control Wall Street and etc" and believing that there is some kind of collusion from powerful Jews to further the collective Jewish interests at the expense of whatever your group is. White people for white nationalists, Black people for the Nation of Islam, and there might be others.
Some people might protest the analogy, but I think this is very similar to classical Marxism, just replace bourgeoisie with Jews. And just like most Marxists don't want to murder capitalists, I imagine most white supremacists don't want to murder Jews, although historically both happened.
From what I remember of the alt-right it was a fair bit more complicated than that.
Put yourself in the place of an internet edgelord in 2015. There's a group that's high-iq, high birth rate, more or less white, has ties to an apartheid ethnoreligious state that was best buddies with apartheid South Africa, shares similar religious heritage to you, and for some reason (probably that one European arts student whose socialist gang genocided them, totally different to your own beliefs as a red-blooded white-skinned blue-backing American, yes sir, definitely a different movement, we'll all ignore the word "national") they've ended up on the opposing side. Worse, they (and as an edgelord you view the entire Jewish people as a homogeneous group because it's how you view everyone, and also only really think Ashkenazim are relevant) don't want to let you start your own ethnoreligious apartheid state! You're not one of those gauche skinhead thugs from the 80s, you're a sleek new breed of racist. Where do you go from here?
(Yes, there's an enormous amount about the previous paragraph that's debatable and even more that's outright wrong, but it's a fair characterisation of the mindset, right?)
As you can see, there's a tension here, and it's within the movement. The alt right lived and died on the perception that it was different from the old fascists, but parts of it still shared a lineage. There was an ongoing debate - often subtextual and hidden - over whether it was even a good idea to keep going after the Jews like a rabid dog. Trading essays on the JQ was an attempt from both sides to present arguments for integration vs arguments for polite seperatism vs violent expulsion/genocide, while avoiding giving the normies any quotes to use as ammo. That's why you saw people like Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) writing articles on the JQ. Despite the fact that he's Jewish himself and one assumes he doesn't believe the domination conspiracy, he still saw a question to answer.
My sense is that historically most wide-scale expulsions of racial/ethnic/religious/etc groups have been accompanied by mass murder.
It usually isn't police going door to door and calmly but firmly telling people to leave, and arresting people who refuse and driving them to the border to drop them off but otherwise not harming them.
All state action, from issuing speeding tickets to collecting taxes to arresting drug dealers, involves some level of brutality and violence against those who refuse to obey. Very few consider this unacceptable, so requiring that those who resist in this hypothetical instance be privileged over those who defy the state in every other case and be treated unusually gently seems to be an isolated demand and not a consistently applied principle.
Again, expulsion and extermination aren't the only solutions. Eminent domain seizures of all their property is another. Or prohibiting them from working in certain professions, through some kind of occupational licensing requirement. I don't care to keep listing these, so I hope you see that the "question" admits more than the one solution you've heard of, and most of these are the kind of thing the state routinely does.
I would expect that police who are explicitly being told "these people have been declared Not Citizens, will be leaving the country shortly, and will not have much ability to protest if you brutalize them into compliance" will probably brutalize people more than the average.
Also, it will require more brutality to enforce laws that are widely viewed as unjust. Very few people will protest the arrest of a known murderer, many people will protest the arrest of Mr. Smith from the deli down the street who did nothing except be born to the wrong parents. A criminal might surrender to the police if he knows he'll get a fair trial and perhaps a lighter sentence, Mr. Smith knows that he did nothing wrong and that cooperating will get him dropped at the Mexican border with only the clothes on his back. Ethnic cleansing is an extreme threat and you will only be able to force cooperation if you threaten even more extreme violence.
(And I don't think this is special pleading - "if you pass laws that the community considers unjust, you will need more force to enforce them" is a general principle of statecraft, and the reason why even dictators can't simply pass any law they want.)
Lastly, there's the scale to consider. There are 7.6 million Jews in the US, and you will have to put them somewhere while you process them, organize their transport to the border, strip them of their possessions, etc. There's no prison that can handle a sudden influx of 7 million people, so you will probably have to set up camps. Camps that have a very high "concentration" of undesirables, if you get my drift. Can you see how that situation might result in more brutality than a normal well-run prison?
- The author talks about how his first break into the alt-right was telling them to stop talking about the JQ.
- The author seems to think "the JQ" is something like "Jews are hypocritical because they want Israel to be an ethnostate, but support mass immigration into America." Later he said American Jews got less hypocritical about that after 10/7 and he now considers the question ressolved. He says "Quite frankly I am returning to my August 2015 roots and cucking on the JQ. I am Taylorpilled. Most young secular right wing Jews these days are pro-White and don’t treat being ethnically Jewish as that different from being, say, Italian."
- I think it's perfectly possible to think a group (eg Trump voters) is bad or hypocritical or on the wrong side, but not want them shot.
- seems to me like his original "stop talking about the JQ" thing was a tactical choice, and he calls it a position he "abandoned almost immediately".
- He's talking all about "communicate ideas through subtext" and "platform[ing] slightly edgier figures", which fits in with throwing around "Jewish question", a phrase which for most people today is strongly associated with the Holocaust, and then walking it back with "oh I just mean something something Israel". You even said that the "misinformation experts and antifa people" were right - most of them would probably agree with me about the intent of specifically using the phrase "Jewish question".
Similarly, my memory of Richard Spencer back in the day is that when pressed about Jewish people by mainstream publications he'd also pivot to alleged Jewish hypocrisy on Israel, but when around other alt right people he was throwing around nazi salutes and, on trump's victory, said it was time to party like it's 1933, and so on.
- He's trying to claim victory for the alt right, I think mostly pretty questionably (e.g. saying that they succeeded in mainstreaming "white identity politics" because you can complain about quotas and talk about "real Americans" now, two things people have been doing forever; to me it's pretty clear that the ascendance of all the "woke" stuff that has happened has been a reaction against the alt right and trump's victory, but anyway). Saying "it's solved because Jews aren't so pro-Israel now after October 7" is just him trying to claim victory because the real aims haven't been achieved. Shifts in attitudes towards Israel are driven, more than anything, by Israel's and the Palestinians' actions themselves, a lot has happened in 10 years, and there's as much hypocrisy around Israel as ever, in all sorts of directions. And his guy trump had a super pro-Israel policy in office ... but it's a recent trend so he jumps on it.
"to me it's pretty clear that the ascendance of all the "woke" stuff that has happened has been a reaction against the alt right and trump's victory"
I find it really bizzare that people can think this. By all accounts wokeness started several years before Trump, back when it was called "social justice". Any look at 2016 online discussions shows most people (on either side) treating Trump as a backlash to that, and everything woke that has happened since Trump won has been a mere continuation or expansion of the trends already well established by the middle of Obama's second term.
I just can't understand the thinking that "the right winning actually makes the *left* stronger", and vice versa. How can something be so widely believed that goes against all common sense?
Your last sentence seems like a distinct point from the rest of the comment. It may be that the left and right's polarization is stuck in a vicious cycle of mutually strengthening one another, *even if* it was in fact the left which hardened first.
Yes, to be clear I should have said "the right winning actually makes the left stronger and the right weaker", which many people (see Scott's endorsement of Clinton in 2016) say. I just see it as a strange attempt to complicate the causes of political change.
Well, if Trumpism is the right's death throes, then its long-term prospects aren't enhanced by his victory. I think that this perspective isn't entirely wrong, but it's one-sided. I'd say that the mainstream left is similarly pathological, even if it maintains a more respectable veneer.
I basically agree with Edmund's "vicious cycle of mutual strengthening" point, and in particular most people seem to agree that "wokeness" peaked in 2020, even if it was going on pre-2016. Metoo and the various celebrities and other influential people who were exposed as part of that being a big example.
Relatedly trump's election was evidence, to many people, of some of the left's claims about racism/sexism. A lot of claims about sexism and society condoning sexual assault have more force when trump basically admitted to sexual assault on tape a month before the election and still won and was idolized by a huge portion of the country, and even the people who expressed disgust back then would probably call me "woke" now for bringing it up (in which case ... sign me up).
Your question “how can people think that right winning makes the left stronger?” - I have two answers. First is “how can people think wokeness didn’t get stronger post-2016? The direct observation is stronger evidence than the theoretical cause/effect” Second is that it wasn’t “the right” vs “the left” but two specific people, and the president doesn’t have the power to end wokeness or anything.
> A lot of claims about sexism and society condoning sexual assault have more force when trump basically admitted to sexual assault on tape a month before the election
How is "Powerful guy gets to do whatever he wants because he has money and knows lots of people who have money and also political clout" an interesting claim? And how is persecuting/antagonizing random men who have nowhere near any power or money as that guy a good strategy to fight it?
Most people think that rich people can get away with bad shit to some degree, but I do indeed think that 10 years ago a lot of people would have been surprised to hear that someone could admit to routine sexual assault on tape and still get elected president and be the leader of his party even 8 years later.
You can see this by the fact that a lot of people did in fact freak out about it at the time, including elected Republicans ... who have now mostly been drummed out of the party.
"which fits in with throwing around "Jewish question", a phrase which for most people today is strongly associated with the Holocaust"
For what it's worth, I have no idea who Walt Bismarck is, and my vague impression of the alt right up until a few hours ago was that they were mostly trolls that dabbled in white supremacy for shock value, but who didn't have any real agenda.
I skimmed the article in the links this morning and when I got to "JQ", it didn't immediately register with me what it meant. It took a few seconds before I said out loud "Wait, he's not *actually* talking about the Jewish Question, is he?", before concluding that yes, yes he is. It was jarring enough that, along with other parts of the article, I've now concluded that prominent people in the alt right (which I assume this guy is), if not the entire movement, are not just a bunch of trolls but are actual white supremacists and, at best, Nazi sympathizers, if not actual Nazis.
I *strongly* associate use of the term "Jewish Question" with Nazism. I treat it as a euphemism for "do very very bad things to Jews, up to and including mass murder".
Idk how you could get that far in the article without realizing they were serious. That guy is still talking about how great Richard Spencer is, even though he directly mentions that when Trump won, Richard Spencer went full Nazi in a speech, doing the heil hitler salute along with like 20 others there, "lugenpresse", and many other clear Nazi references.
In regards to the "JQ" and "hypocrisy," it's interesting that white nationalists make the same mistake all those "woke" anti-Israeli protesters do and regard Jews as all being white, and as one ethnicity. Israel is only really an ethnostate if one regards Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, Mizrahi, Sephardic, and convert Jews as a single ethnicity because they are all Jewish. By that logic the USA could still be counted as an ethnostate if it allowed mass immigration from Latin America, since the majority of US citizens and Latin American are Christian.
The Law of Return is essentially "open borders for Jews," regardless of ethnicity.
Why would a group have the right of return to where their ancestors lived unless their ancestors lived there. Don’t all of these groups claim descendancy from the Jewish inhabitants pre diaspora.
People who are not ethnically Jewish, but converted to Judaism, are eligible under the Law of Return, even though I suppose they technically aren't returning to anything. I also doubt that if future genetic ancestry tests revealed that any of the major Jewish ethnicities were mistaken about being descended from the diaspora that they would be expelled from Israel. So I guess the Law of Return is more based on the significance of that land to the Jewish religion, rather than literal ancestry.
It's not a particularly rare mistake. People also do it with "Africans", "Europeans", and the "Chinese" and "Indians". 2 of those are artificial national identities for regions that weren't always unified and had dozens of different ethnicities and cultures and languages, and 2 of those aren't even national identities, just a huge family resemblance/spectrum of national identities and cultures.
Some Israelis even make the exact same mistake by talking about "Arabs", there is no such thing as a homogenous "Arabs", anybody who tried to learn Arabic would have been confronted with the evidence for that immediately.
The whole "Chinese is an artificial identity" meme has swung too far away from the original pushback against the CCP considering languages like Cantonese etc. as dialects of Mandarin. With the exceptions of Tibet and the western provinces*, which most westerners view as separate anyway (see Uyghur coverage), China in its natural borders has existed with some brief interruptions for around 2000 years.
China is *remarkably* homogenous for a country of its size. The Han make up 90% of the Chinese population, and whilst yes there are some linguistic differences, 800 million speak Mandarin. This is a vastly different situation than India. The languages of the Han are about as different as the varieties of Romance (perhaps a little more, but not much) and share a written language.
Genetically speaking too, the Han are essentially on a continuum from the north to the south, where the difference between the extremes is about the same as a northern and a southern Frenchman. Northern China has more central asian/ANE if I recall correctly, as it has higher ancestral Han proportion. Southern Han has more Indo-Chinese-like/Aboriginal admixture, especially in the matrilineal line.
Describing (excluding a couple of specific minorities) a population that is as genetically homogenous as France or Italy (at a push western Europe), that has been unified politically for the vast majority of the last 2000 years, and that self conceives as a single national identity as an "artificial national identity" is clearly wrong.
*Manchuria/Mongolia too I suppose, although they've been part and parcel since the Yuan and Qing.
Alright, good push back. I knew that China is more natural than India. But 800 million out of 1.4 billion isn't exactly a crushing linguistic majority. But I agree it's not in the same bucket as India.
> The languages of the Han are about as different as the varieties of Romance
My understanding is that the modern Indian languages descendent from Sanskrit are also about as different from each other as the various Romance languages.
Sure, but then you also have 250 million Dravidian language speakers mostly in the south, plus Tibeto-Burmans, Austroasiatics and so forth. And even then, the Indo-European groups in the north are split up into those Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Gujarati which are quite a way distinct from the Iranian languages (Farsi) in the far North-West (despite being similar in the same way Greek is similar to Urdu). I think it's reasonably well established to say that India has far greater linguistic and genetic diversity than China. The Varna/Jati systems have also led to greater genetic heterogeneity, and the archipelago effect we see today- not to mentioned the religious diversity.
Having said that, I'd still be tempted to push back on the OC claim that India is an artificial nationality. It was just easier to make the case that this claim was wrong in regards to China. Indian cultural identity (as essentially synthetic between an Indo-Aryan elite ruling over and intermarrying with a pre-conquest population) has been relatively stable and well established for thousands of years itself. Complicating matters somewhat is the strength of independent Dravidians in the South and multiple instances of foreign rule e.g. Mughals.
Eh, at every level you can always go broader or narrower. If you regard "Ashkenazi Jews" as a single identity, you'll miss out on the German Jews hating the Russian Jews and vice versa. And even within those categories, I bet there are some spicy fights between Russian Hasidim and Russian misnagim.
Or you can just say "all humans who aren't !Kung are basically the same."
These people regard themselves as the same nation, which is why they are. A national identity exists because people believe it does: it's a lie that people tell each other over and over until they forget it's a lie.
"Jews are hypocritical because they want Israel to be an ethnostate, but support mass immigration into America"
FWIW, I have never strongly associated "mass immigration into America" with Jews. I associate mass immigration with the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and while I think American Jews skew significantly towards the Democrats (I don't know the actual statistics), I don't associate them with the far-left (even prior to 10/7).
Full disclosure: I think the current immigration system is a wreck, and I think that, as a practical matter, immigration policy has to be responsive to political realities. But personally, I'm very much in favor of mass immigration to America. I am neither Jewish, progressive, or particularly left wing on most issues.
It's one of those slippery correlation-syllogism things that most people, likely especially conspiratorial types, are bad at analyzing. Most American Jews aren't radical progressive academics, but academics including radical progressive ones are disproportionately Jewish (though I assume most, particularly the radicals, aren't practicing) (see also: Hollywood, Nobel prize winners, etc).
Also at least partially a feedback loop where Jewishness attracts conspiratorial theories but is also used as a semi-defense. Nobody thinks complaining about Koch brothers makes you anti-white or anti-Kansan or whatever, but you often get the stink eye for being anti-Semitic if you complain about Soros; I consider them to be pretty similar as phenomenon (and indeed, they do have a lot of policy overlap, though "Soros DAs" are more notorious).
"but academics including radical progressive ones are disproportionately Jewish"
Is this true? Again, just going off my vague perceptions, but I would guess that most radical academic progressives are BIPOC, LGBTQ+, extreme feminists, and outright communists. *Maybe* the last group positively correlates with being Jewish, but I'd be surprised if the others do (and I expect the first group to be negatively correlated with being Jewish).
Also, my impression is that communists use to be the standard bearers for radical progressive academics, but then extreme feminists kind of took up the standard, and now it's BIPOC and LGBTQ+.
I'm not extremely confident of any of these things, but I don't think I'm *that* far off.
I can't find many surveys on the current rate, though I think it's fair to say it was more true historically than it is these days. And I said proportions, not absolutes- Jewish people are about 2% of the population, so even if they're, say, 10% of radical academics they're a minority of the total but still disproportionate to genpop (likewise, straight white guys are going to be wildly underrepresented compared to genpop among radical academics). That said, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC activists are largely operating out of critical theory, developed by the Frankfurt school and those theorists were primarily Jewish.
For context of the following numbers, Jewish people would've been around 3-4% of the US population at the time, around 2% today. To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with overrepresentation unless there's evidence of deliberate discrimination, I don't think there's evidence for that here (generally speaking), and I think that disproportionate statistics often have reasonable explanations.
>“[Fifty] percent of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities … 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26 percent of the reporters, editors and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982 and 58 percent of directors, writers and producers in two or more primetime television series.”
This is an old paper (1971, https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/72ac/72academics.pdf) but at that time Jewish academics were surveyed to be the most left and liberal, compared to Catholic and Protestant (of which today, conservative academics are practically a rounding error outside of a few small strongholds).
Edit: Ugh when will this site implement proper comment formatting.
Those are all fair points. When I said I don't think of mass immigration or radical left politics as being particularly Jewish, I should have made clear that it's in the current (i.e. post-2016) political climate and the groups that are currently spearheading those issues. Historically the situation would have been different (though see my comment below about fairly broad support for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act).
What about the racial egalitarianism that undergirds mass immigration? 'I don't give a good damn about the so-called "browning of America."' - Ben Shapiro
You don't associate mass immigration (without racial distinctions) with Jews, nor the far-left (Marxists) with Jews. What about zionism/"greatest ally" talk? After all the most prominent of those people are not Jews but Christians like Joe Biden, George Bush etc. Must be an organic Christian thing I suppose, nothing to do with Jewish influence.
"I don't associate the subversive position I hold with the subversive people who made it mainstream", yeah, that just means they succeeded.
"What about the racial egalitarianism that undergirds mass immigration?"
What about it? I'm honestly not sure how this is germane to my statement.
"You don't associate...the far-left (Marxists) with Jews."
Oh, I definitely associate traditional economic Marxism with Jews, especially in it's early days. But 1) it has grown beyond that (though it wouldn't surprise me if Jews were still over-represented among communists), and 2) I no longer think traditional Marxists are the driving force behind the far left. It has shifted towards racial justice, LGBTQ+ and especially trans rights, and anti-colonialism. That doesn't mean those groups aren't *also* in favor of Marxist economic policies, but I don't think that is what really motivates them. And I don't think Jews are over-represented among those groups (in some cases I suspect they are under-represented).
"Must be an organic Christian thing I suppose"
Yes, I think it is. This isn't 16th century Spain. American Christians have positive views of Israel for a complex set of religious, political, historical, and cultural reasons.
"that just means they succeeded"
Who is "they"? The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was *co-sponsored* by a Jewish congressperson, but also an Irish-American Catholic Senator. It was supported by LBJ and Ted Kennedy (neither was Jewish). It had the support of lots of ethnic groups, including southern and eastern Europeans and Asians (since those groups were discriminated against under the old system). It passed both Houses of Congress with more than 80% support, and it actually had more support among Republicans. A prominent Jewish Congressperson spearheaded the effort but that doesn't mean it was a narrow, "Jewish" issue.
"What about it? I'm honestly not sure how this is germane to my statement."
You associate mass immigration with progressives but it's a much more widespread problem. Even opposing nationalism in the west means there's no real limiting principle to immigration, hence mass immigration.
"I don't think Jews are over-represented among those groups"
"American Christians have positive views of Israel for a complex set of religious, political, historical, and cultural reasons."
Sure, and Jews creating neoconservatism and AIPAC?
"A prominent Jewish Congressperson spearheaded the effort but that doesn't mean it was a narrow, "Jewish" issue."
And the life of MLK doesn't mean blacks should be associated with getting the civil rights act passed, since the guys who actually voted for it weren't very black. How do issues get that support in the first place? Maybe something to do with guys like this fighting for it for four decades?
I used to support immigration but now I think that people who support mass immigration are prey to a cultural version of the humility fallacy ("Shucks, everyone is as smart as I am.")
Progress is a delicate flower. We don't want to perturb its environment too much.
Surely they're just smart enough to care about optics. Which automatically makes them more pragmatic than Effective Altruists, funnily enough. Even neo-nazis aren't stupid enough to buy a castle.
Well, sometimes it's good to have a moat ... But more seriously, this makes me wonder, has the readership of this blog been polled about their living circumstances (1 br; 3 lbk; ranch + 10000 acres; castle; mule + 40 acres, etc)? If so, what was the outcome?
...You know, as soon as I wrote that, I knew someone was going to prove me wrong. Now I can confidently say that EA has objectively better PR than Neo-Nazis, congratulations.
Contrary to their reputation, Effective Altruism is a deeply deontological movement- they know perfectly well that focusing on optics is effective in a utilitarian sense, but have such a strong moral commitment to not polluting the epistemic commons that they refuse to do so. When the public's potential reaction to something is unreasonable or uninformed, they see backing down as a moral failure. This led to a ridiculous problem with the lavish-sounding cheap real estate debacle, but it's a very good commitment to have directing charity that will determine who lives and who dies.
Re: #2 yes, there's also a pretty strong consensus among scientists and physicians who study sleep and circadian rhythms that DST is trash. We should just do permanent standard time.
Or just deregulate time, and let people decide how they want to mess with their clocks (or not).
Of course, there are giant network effects that reward people for synchronizing their time with a big network of other people.
But there's no reason the Gahmen needs to be involved. Especially no reason to have federal or state governments involved. At most counties or municipalities could make some rules.
If you're still adjudicating contracts as though there were an official time, then you have de facto regulated time, and pretending you haven't doesn't seem useful.
But what I meant was the more extreme case of manipulating the CALENDAR, as the ancient Romans did. No one did it in the past because it's the kind of thing that causes revolutions, but in principle, if elections are to be held on "the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November," who says October has only 31 days? (I call it the Endless October Exploit.)
Contracts are adjudicated based on the meaning of the words in them, but that doesn't make English a regulated language.
Similarly, a contract you and me might have in eg California might specify something given explicitly in London time, and I imagine this will generally be held up in court, even if the Brits abolish DST next year. But that doesn't mean that Californian or US courts regulate British time.
Courts also used to already adjudicate contracts before anyone made any laws about clocks.
A reasonable court would strike down your calendar redefinition example.
Just like reasonable courts don't let you redefine arbitrary words like 'not' or 'liable' either. Who's to say that 'one million dollars' doesn't mean one lollipop either?
When Republicans talk about "deregulation," they often mean "… by the federal government." (This is reasonable in the modern era since most regulations they find intrusive ARE federal.) And in that sense, it IS illegal for states to choose their own time: they have a choice of whether or not to adopt daylight saving, but have no other control.
And people managed to coordinate their activities just fine before anyone passed any laws about clocks.
People who transact internationally (or even just across time zone boundaries) also manage just fine, even though there's no special official time to guide them.
Even without laws about time, your laws and contracts etc can mention time just as they always did, and a reasonable judge will interpret your law (or your contract etc) reasonably.
Compare how the French have their lawmakers mess (indirectly) in their spelling, but English speakers do just fine without that interference.
Americans used to use local sun time, so each town's official time was a minute or two different from the next town down the road. But that threatened to cause head-on railroad crashes, so the railroads got together in the transportation hub of Chicago in 1883 and invented standard time zones. (There's a fancy plaque at LaSalle and Jackson in the Loop commemorating the railroad time convention.) Detroit was the last big city to give up sun time in 1915 and Congress made railroad time national during WWI.
Chicago was also among the most enthusiastic proponents of Daylight Saving Time. Chicago is at the eastern edge of Central Time Zone, so it benefits a lot from DST. "Without DST, sunrise this June 19 would be at 4:15 a.m. in Chicago and sunset at 7:29 p.m. With DST, sunrise will be at the more reasonable hour of 5:15 a.m., sunset at 8:29 p.m., and kids can play outside well into the evening."
Does federal law regulate when state government offices and such need to be open, or what numbers a state administration has to write?
Time zone laws are a weird thing because in many spheres, their effects don't involve legal coercion at all. Instead, government decisions serve as a Schelling point. I doubt any law, by any level of government, prohibits you and your pals from agreeing to describe time in a different time zone than the official one. In contracts between private entities, I guess the official time zone of your jurisdiction determines what times mean if no time zone is specified, but nothing prohibits you from explicitly specifying a different time zone, which then applies. The only direct, coercive legal effect time zone laws have is on interactions between people and the government: deadlines, opening hours of government offices etc.
So, in theory, if a state really insisted on going against the federal decision, perhaps it could decide that a different time zone applies to times specified without time zone for the purposes of state law. So opening hours of state offices would be specified in a different time zone than those of federal government offices; a different time zone would apply as a default if a contract is involved in a state lawsuit vs. in a federal lawsuit. People would then decide which one they use as a Schelling point for private matters. Needless to say, it would be a royal mess.
There's not much of a positive justification for having the government involved in time.
(People can coordinate privately just fine, and do so in the vast majority of cases.)
And in addition to the lack of positive justification, we also have messes like DST, that only came to be and came to persists thanks to government action or inaction.
You are mostly right, and I alluded to that already.
But being 'just a Schelling point' is still incredibly strong. And i don't see much positive justification for why the Gahmen needs to be in the business of setting this particular Schelling point.
Why would private Schelling points be a mess? Most Schelling points are set privately. Eg have a look at bond market conventions or any other number of examples.
IMO government coercion requires a strong justification, but the government coordinating and setting a default doesn't require much justification beyond "I think this option is better than the alternative".
It's hard to coordinate this privately, without some single organization setting the standard. It would be hard for something like DST arise organically, even if DST is actually good. I expect that if the government stopped coordinating time, whatever was the status quo the last time the government coordinated it would remain the status quo forever.
But also, the government needs to regulate how government agencies should specify time in their communication with each other and with the public, and how courts should interpret time specifications in private contracts if they don't include a time zone.
I didn't say private Schelling points would be a mess. I said the federal government and the state government setting different standards—each applied by federal and state agencies, courts etc. respectively—would be a mess.
Why does the government coordinating things and setting defaults need much less justification than coercion? The former does not reduce the freedom of the individual. Not just because the individual can, in theory, depart from the default, but also because, to the extent one is subject to the default used by a society, one would be subject to a default whether it's set organically or by the government.
It's not broadly speaking illegal to use non-standard spelling in France. But it's just not something that needs to be touched by the Gahmen, either.
I want people to enjoy the same freedom in their clocks, as English speakers enjoy in their spelling.
Honest and competent government officials are already the rarest and most precious of commodities for any country. Let's economise on what we burden them with.
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It's regulated in the sense that there is an official time and there are laws. And you mention that elected politicians are involved.
If you just abolished the laws, the campaigns would be about trying to convince people directly to change how they set their times. Instead of trying to appeal to elected officials to change laws.
Pick any time you want and stick to that system. Nobody cares. However you are going to have to coordinate your time with everybody else if you intend to be timely - so if somebody suggests a meeting at 11am you are going to have to convert that to your time (oh that’s 27 chrontons past 5 Giberty for me) and turn up at the same time.
I believe a state can opt out of Daylight Savings Time altogether (as does Arizona, which has more than enough daylight, thank you very much), but a state can't pick a different starting or ending date or a different amount of daylight than the federal norm.
> but a state can't pick a different starting or ending date or a different amount of daylight than the federal norm.
Those are not like concepts. Picking a different starting or ending date is illegal; those dates are set by the government. Choosing a different amount of daylight is impossible; the amount of daylight is set by the Earth.
The whole idea of Daylight Savings Time appears to be that it's desirable to confuse the time that it reads on a clock, such as "4:30 pm", with the amount of daylight that occurs during one day, such as "six hours". We can change the first, but not the second.
I think many states require you to send kids to school, with the school using a fixed schedule. While you might be able to negotiate with your employer, state run schools are famously not open to negotiation, it's kind of their shtick, so a time zone is kind of enforced on kids and parents.
Less importantly, municipal regulations with regard to noise might mention times. "No officer, we are still allowed to party because for us, it is only 20:00" is not going to fly.
That sounds like the idea of Celsius being better than Fahrenheit. Why is UTC, basically the time in England without daylight saving, preferable as a reference to the time in THEIR location, also without daylight saving?
Well, I want somebody to maintain _something_ as a reference in the sense of actually offering a service like NTP that's tied to a reliable clock. Once you have that precise time, exactly as you say, you're welcome to localize it or convert it however you like.
(Though if we ever develop relativistic-speed travel, it's going to play havok with all our time libraries.)
The trouble with the Unix epoch is that it is not seconds since Unix, because someone had a brain fart and decided that having a system which can be converted into meatbag format easily is more important than having a clock which runs at precisely one second(counted) per second(real).
This makes the standard epoch unusable for measuring time differences, and everybody should use a TAI-based epoch instead which counts leap seconds.
(It would actually be fine as a reference for humans, because the conversion is well understood, even if the code is a bit ugly because of how leap seconds are handled.)
I know these aren't actually about what you're talking about (which is switching from standardization via regulation to standardization via convention), but people discussing this might get a kick out of reading these:
Everything formal has to be done in Beijing time (GMT+8) but (non-Han) locals often use GMT+6. I saw clocks with both times back when I was there in 2013, but I've heard they've since cracked down on local time in a similar way to "unnatural beard growth" and "not watching national news" as evidence of separatist/Islamist tendencies.
It's pretty embarrassing when the US claims to be hyper-politicised, but people haven't even started a timezone-based culture war yet. I want to be able to know somebody's position on gender-neutral toilets and Joe Biden's cognitive function just by looking at their watch.
You might be interested to read up about railroad watches, and why standardisation of time zones became a thing. There used to be a free-for-all about what time was when where, with even small distances having differences between the town and a few miles down the road. The world has now become so interconnected that it's no longer workable to have George on 'its ten o'clock' and Bill thirty miles away 'no, it's nine" and Jim "sorry, it's eleven by the clock in the town square'.
"A railroad chronometer or railroad standard watch is a specialized timepiece that once was crucial for safe and correct operation of trains in many countries. A system of timetable and train order, which relied on highly accurate timekeeping, was used to ensure that two trains could not be on the same stretch of track at the same time.
...One notable watch inspector was Webb C. Ball. His first job as a time inspector was when he was brought in by the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railways in 1891 after a crash and was tasked with bringing their time inspection standards up to industry normals. Ball's career eventually led to his being the time inspector on more than half the United States' railways, leading to a far more uniform set of standards in the U.S."
"Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local mean times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. The key goals behind introducing railway time were to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased.
Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following seven years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the time station clocks displayed were brought in line with the local mean time for London or "London Time", the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The development of railway networks in North America in the 1850s, India in around 1860, and in Europe, prompted the introduction of standard time influenced by geography, industrial development, and political governance."
Yes, coordination is great. Voluntary standardisation is great, too.
I knew about railroad time before.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with making laws. You are describing the very process of how people solved the problems of everyone using a slightly different time. No laws about clocks were required to ensure railway safety.
(The Wikipedia article you linked mentions how they made some laws in Great Britain after the railways had already solved the problem, and those laws were apparently mostly there to force some towns to give up the additional minute hand on their town clocks?)
Anybody who has tried to get a child to go to bed in the summer time knows that DST is trash.
I like nighttime. I especially love summer nights. If you're anywhere even a little bit north, you can't do a summertime outside movie unless you're willing to stay up until midnight. It's all bullshit.
I'm always surprised to hear how much DST seems to affect some people.
Changing the clocks by one hour, twice a year, has never had any discernible impact on my sleep, mood, or overall well-being, except for *maybe* the day-of the change (and even then the impact is pretty minor).
Statistically the two big things are the day of the change, and the effect of waking up in darkness in the spring/fall when the clock is advanced. It turns out making people get up and go to work in the dark is really bad for them.
Chronotypes vary, and so it does suit some people, but at the population level it’s quite bad for public health. The Save Standard Time site has links to various studies, as well as the statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. (Or whatever their exact name was; I’m mobile at the moment, not checking.)
I do think that the change happens too early in the spring and too late in the fall these days. But getting up when it's dark doesn't bother me in any perceptible way. In fact, I rather like it. It's very peaceful. I guess I'm the exception.
What are the magnitudes of these affects at the population level?
I'm in SF right now its great. By temperament (let freedom ring) I am inclined to be incredibly YIMBY. But Scott's arguments over the years have more or less convinced me that, sans truly insane amounts of building, more housing wont lower local rent. SF is great. So maybe it makes sense to preserve it?
I'm not sure I'd go as strong as "more housing won't lower local rent", just that there are lots of counteracting pressures and it might not do so very much. I still think it would lower national rents, or at least slow their rise.
Sorry to simplify your arguments. I did read your posts and understand it isn't simple.
Lower national rents is obviously important. But if the local rent decrease is going to be small or very small then the argument for 'why cant we build somewhere else' gets a lot stronger. Lots of people love SF though its obviously not for everyone. If I was housing czar I would now be pretty sympathetic to 'dont ruin the places people really love, build a fuckton of housing in places where we dont need to be as concerned about ruining the beloved culture'. SF really is a quite beautiful place to walk around and it has a great culture (for some people, which is the important thing. People with a different neurotype can love other places)
"But if the local rent decrease is going to be small or very small then the argument for 'why cant we build somewhere else' gets a lot stronger. "
This is literally why it's called Not In My BackYard. SF thinks it's already done it's share and the suburbs and smaller cities should build instead ("don't Manhattan my SF"). The suburbs and smaller cities think they should remain like they are too ("if you want to build skyscrapers, do it in SF where it's normal"). Everyone wants the other people to do it, so it doesn't get done. Need coordination so everyone bears building equally. Moloch strikes again.
I've spent a lot of time living in Columbus Ohio. My partner of eleven years lives there and I sepnd a lot of time with her. Very few people particularly love Columbus even though I think its a perfectly nice place to live. Very good quality of live for the cost. But I promise you the 'ratio of people in Columbus who adore the local Columbus culture' is much lower than the 'ratio of people in SF who love the local SF culture'. Build in Columbus. In some very real sense Columbus is my back yard and id be thrilled to see massive development in Columbus.
Everybody loves their place, that’s why they moved there. We need to overcome status quo bias. If people love San Francisco, we should build more places at the density/walkability of SF. But lots of people ALSO love Manhattan, and prices there are way the fuck out of control, so we should build more places like Manhattan.
San Francisco is the most sensible place in the country to build another Manhattan, because it already has already-existing transit and walkable streets, the climate is great, and there are lots of good jobs.
I live here, I love it, and I want it to change. When rents go down too, even better. Maybe as SF densifies, at some point rents will go down in Manhattan as it gets a release valve of sorts.
I disagreed with your original post about housing not lowering rents, but I would agree with this stance. I think there are enough pressures getting people into SF that any small amounts of housing will not change the trend enough to measure. To reduce housing costs by a meaningful amount, it would need to be such a substantial amount of building that it overwhelms the countervailing forces encouraging people to move there, which is a big ask. Building more housing is still very important to help stem the increases, but "smaller increase" is very hard to quantify because we'll never know what the alternative would have been.
Those same arguments imply that if rents don't decrease, or even increase, that's because it becomes an even better place to live as a result (probably in the sense of even higher salaries), to the point where it's more than worth paying the same or even higher rents for it.
I wouldn't want to replace my friends with new people even if the new people were somewhat more popular. The people who like current SF dont want some new thing. If the gains to everyone else are sufficiently large id feel they were being selfish by perserving the thing they love. At some point 'love' turns into something ugly, we have to let go. But if the gains are small I see no reason to fault people for preserving the beloved culture of the city they adore.
If more housing doesn't lower local rent that's actually (from the outside view) an even stronger reason to allow it, since it implies it's generating even more surplus value.
(If building 20% more housing reduces rent 10%, we've created a net gain of 10% total housing value. If it doesn't lower rent at all, we've created a net gain of 20%, and can just keep going and become infinitly rich)
One way SF can change is that a sufficient amount of housing gets built so that prices don't continue to increase in the way they have over the past couple decades of very little housing being built.
Another way SF can change is that housing doesn't get built, and so either prices continue to increase -- and demographics and culture change as a result -- or else something happens to reduce demand - i.e., a change in what makes SF desirable - so that prices don't continue to increase.
I quickly did a quick Ctrl+F of "Gamergate" on the Alt-Right post, thinking it'd be a quick way to suss out if he really knew what he was talking about and this quote is absolutely hilarious.
>The Gamergate movement of 2014 had spawned a series of Disney parodies called “/v/ the musical”, which were basically Walt Bismarck videos but about how video games shouldn’t have lesbians or fat women in them. I saw that this format had a ton of potential but was being criminally underutilized, so I stole the idea and made parodies about white nationalism instead. I was Elvis and Gamergate was black people.
It's appropriate considering that Gamergate faded into obscurity mostly because the Alt-Right and the Q conspiracies stole it's thunder and even took over their site.
Anyways, that musical was really fun and while it's mostly in-jokes of decade old gamer culture, There's a couple songs I recommend as a curious glimpse into the community that first conceptualized the at the time still nascent "twitter SJW" movement.
I'd say that neither Gamergate nor the alt-right caused the other. Instead, they tapped into the same source of cultural energy.
Remember that the alt right had an intellectual wing of sorts ("dissident right" bloggers like Mencius Moldbug, Michael Anissimov, plus HBD types like Cochran, Sailer, and Razib) who preceded Gamergate and had little to do with it.
...I'm pretty terminally online, and the only reason I know any of their names is because of this blog. Most of them are just fringe reactionaries. What the alt-right accomplished (partially through Gamergate) was pushing their ideology into the mainstream, something that the intellectual wing completely failed to do.
I disagree that Gamergate is somehow "mainstream" rather than just another dumb internet phenomenon.
It started out as an argument about a review nobody read of a game nobody played on a website most people haven't heard of, and it rapidly became an even dumber and more obscure shitfight about which side had done mean things to the other side.
Unsurprisingly a right-wing ideologue has no knowledge of 4chan culture. /v/ the musical predates Gamergate, the Gamergate album they did in 2014 is now pretty much universally considered an embarrassment, and /v/ the musical is still a yearly tradition taking place every September/October.
Even though I was there from day zero, given the nature of the whole thing a lot of people came out with wildly different perspectives, so I'd love to hear your recollection of events. If you're interested, email me at rodrigousqui@hotmail.com
>It's appropriate considering that Gamergate faded into obscurity mostly because the Alt-Right and the Q conspiracies stole it's thunder and even took over their site.
Gamergate was always doomed. It was optically embarrassing: a cultural movement centered around videogames, which (to the public) are toys for children.
Also, the specific events that kicked off Gamergate (the Zoepost, and so on) were tedious small-scene drama that required significant mental energy to understand, and yet were a storm in a teacup, of no larger significance to anyone.
Don't get me wrong. In 2014, I was *spiritually* on the side of Gamergate. I was repulsed by the militant brand of social activism I saw sweeping social media, and felt like the left had hijacked culture to an unhealthy degree. Someone needed to push back. But whenever I tried to understand Gamergate, my gut-level reaction was always "who cares about this stuff? These people don't matter to me. These issues don't matter to me. This is he-said-she-said breakup drama of no concern to anyone outside the indie game dev scene."
Gamergaters soon realized this, and tried to rebrand the movement as something else ("ethics in game journalism")...but is game journalism a viable wedge issue? Does the proverbial Rust Belt Trump Voter of myth and song care about Kotaku or Anita Sarkeesian?
(Another problem was that the personalities behind Gamergate were fundamentally not much different to the SJWs they opposed. Sarkeesian was obsessed with the cultural content of videogames. So were GamerGaters, just in a different direction. In Vox Day's "SJWs Always Lie", he recommends that bosses fire their SJW employees (p197). How's that any different than what happened to, say, James Damore? Some actually switched their grift from one side to the other, like Candace Owens.)
The alt-right had longer legs, because it made itself about big, unifying issues. The downfall of America. The fate of western civilization. It faltered for a different set of reasons (it pinned its hopes on a false messiah, and had no Plan B for when he failed). But at least it had a veneer of respectability for a time.
> who cares about this stuff? These people don't matter to me.
It's the pattern. They come for the Xs, and I'm not an X, so I can't bring myself to care. But when I realize that it would only take one tiny little lie to transform me into an X, then suddenly it starts to matter on a personal level.
Nah, mate, it actually, genuinely was about "ethics in game journalism" (Though that particular phrase is an outside spin - a particularly poor one, you just know you have no ground to stand on when your attempts at mockery can just be answered with https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yes-chad (which I can't believe didn't yet exist in 2015), but still.)
Long story short - media jobs became high-status just as elite overproduction was ballooning, and this means the fight for them became a status competition. This, in turn, meant that a) rich kids were more likely to succeed in getting them and b) the whole community became increasingly conformist, since straying from mob consensus killed your prospects. This in turn meant they got increasingly detached from reality, including increasingly convinced they're capable of shaping reality the way they could shape social mores of their own community, also including belief in their own moral supremacy over everyone else. So when people started complaining about their incestuous self-congratulatory bullshit (in this case, the "incestuous" part was only partially figurative, since the sleeping with each other part happened to be real), they reacted the only way they knew at that point - by shouting how everyone opposed to them is both evil and socially undesirable. To their consternation, the people they shat upon didn't back away, which led to several waves of mutually reinforcing feedback of "Stop lying, FFS!" and "Pathetic reactionaries are harassing us and we fear for our lives!". (Which led Scott to write one of the most important essays in recent history, describing this very dynamic. That, or its last sentence is a cosmic-level coincidence.) Eventually, everyone got exhausted, but not until they reached the highest echelons of mainstream media (and other places, infamously including the UN).
But the thing is, none of what I said above about the media class is particularly controversial nowadays, which can only serve as a testament to what a huge lasting success Gamergate was, since a decade ago the public at large, especially the kids at 4chan, genuinely didn't know. See also: The online media ecosystem has been essentially dead just a few years after its 2014 heyday (and the fact that we can now locate the heyday in 2014 is not a coincidence). Trust in media overall keeps reaching new lows. Media people who a decade ago would defend their peers from "online harassment" are quietly adopting the "Gamergate" mindset wholesale. (I'm looking at you, Jessie, Freddie.)
It's not even a testament to the movement (and yeah, it could never succeed as a lasting movement, I can see how you came away disappointed if movement is what you were looking for, but I'm pretty sure most people never particularly cared). The whole media community was already filled with explosive toxic fumes, all that was needed was a spark, and it essentially destroyed itself on its own. But someone had to make that spark, and it just happened to be gamers.
Alt-right? They got a short boost of respectability simply for daring to speak up against the bullshit above at the time the general public was turning against it, then everyone realized they're actually, genuinely awful and quickly distanced themselves from them.
2) In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen.
In general people don’t like the clock change, despite it being much easier these days as it’s mostly automatic; but we are an unhardy generation. However there’s no consensus on whether to choose permanent summer time or winter time.
It’s grim up north but DST makes sense in Northern Europe. Moving sunrise at 3:30am to an hour later gaining a day that’s only fully dark by 10 pm is clearly beneficial - however permanent summer time all year would see a 10am sunrise in Scotland and Ireland near the solstice, while sunset moves from about 4pm to 5pm benefitting few.
This is what was tried before and failed before (although I think it was +2 GMT in the summer, and +1 in the winter).
Keep the clock change but make winter time shorter.
> In general people don’t like the clock change, despite it being much easier these days as it’s mostly automatic;
Not for your biological clock. The problem with daylight savings time isn't having to change clocks. It's suddenly changing time zones twice a year. That's not good for sleep.
If we're using automatically updating electronic clocks, maybe we should just make it change daily so sunrise happens at roughly the same time every day.
I think the argument was that DST isn't at all sensible.
It doesn't matter what the clocks say. Resetting clocks doesn't add or subtract the number of hours of daylight from a given day.
All it does is interrupt everyone's established daily patterns twice a year.
I live in Seattle, far enough north to have extremes in short and long days. There's no meaningful difference in how people would live their lives in June with the sun rising at 5:12 AM and setting at 9:21 PM vs rising at 6:12 AM and setting at 10:21 PM. Most people who have a regular business day work schedule are going to be waking up when it's already meaningfully bright out and winding down for bedtime before it's meaningfully dark either way. And the day is so long they're going to need shades or curtains to achieve enough darkness in their bedroom to either fall asleep or prevent premature rising.
So I say this as gently as possible:
Who gives a fuck about when the sun rises and sets?
I grew up in Arizona, which very sensibly doesn't have DST at all. No time changes.
Never in my almost 20 years of living there did anyone every say, "Oh geez, I wish *we* were all having our daily routines interrupted twice a year to avoid the horror of not changing our lives at all except to use a little more artificial lighting part of the year!"
On the contrary, Arizonans have roughly the same attitude about DST that Scandinavians have about US healthcare: Smug pity for the poor fools who haven't adopted an obviously superior way of life.
Well I wouldn’t recommend it for every state or nation but the EU was talking about removing the clock change the overwhelming support was for a later subset all year around. Myself I would stick with the clock change.
Yeah the biggest benefit to DST is this time of year where the extra hour in the evening is much appreciated. I get home from work and there is still enough daylight to; putter around the yard, work on the car, walk the dog, grill some sausage, walk over and have a beer with the neighbors. I understand this lifestyle is not everyone, but please understand that it is cherished by many.
Yes, and the clock change is loathed by many, many more, including those who are victims of the increased car accidents, lost productivity, disrupted schedules, and so on.
An hour of enjoyment for *some* people is not worth the hassle and sometimes trauma it causes others. Pick standard or DST and stay on it forever. Not that hard.
One reason to give at least a mild fuck about when the sun rises and sets: Birds. I don't know about you, but I can't go back to sleep if birds are chirping without first getting up, closing the window, and then lying back down. There's a longer story here I won't bore you with why an hour's change makes any difference at all here (which has to do with that it takes me about an hour to get back to sleep after being vertical even briefly, and that I'm fiercely nocturnal), but I mostly wanted to leave this comment here as a data point.
But, to be clear, the emphasis is very much on "mild".
(I would like DST to stop, please. I don't care which timezone we settle on. Sunrise no earlier than 04:00, ever, is nice (=> permanent summer time is better; this is Hamburg, Germany, if you're wondering), but I also prefer dark(!) evenings (=> permanent winter time is better), so either way it's a compromise. I'm willing to compromise if the switching stops.)
I'm mostly nocturnal and work full time overnight, so I've learned to mitigate daytime sounds and have little sympathy for folk who complain about them.
But if you want the switch to stop, you're okay in my book! ;)
Eh, I get it. "Window closed" mostly works for me (good sound insulation) and a white noise generator helps mask the rest, but closing the window becomes a problem if I need to open it while I sleep because it was too hot during the daytime, which... has mysteriously been pretty much all of summer lately.
("But what about air-conditioning?!" Well, I don't live in a place where air-conditioning is common. That honestly wouldn't stop me from getting some anyway, but this also mostly affects a place where I don't get to make the decisions.)
If you don't mind my curiousity, when do you go to bed, given you don't need to align to something approach a 9-5 schedule during the week? (I insta-drift to around 04:00-05:00 each weekend, and settle around sleeping from 06:00 to 15:00 during longer vacations, but try to get up around 09:30-ish during the week.) And what's the earliest dawn time for you?
The permanent summer time thing bothers me because it's the same inelegant hack as daylight savings time (adjusting people's schedules by changing what we call the times of day), but for even less reason. If people want to permanently get up an hour earlier, they should just change the nominal time when things are scheduled to happen rather than moving 12 o'clock away from actual noon and midnight. Admittedly this doesn't work as well if it's twice a year rather than once ever. Even that is evidently possible though, as I've been to two different regular events which were scheduled based on solar time rather than civil time despite following daylight savings being the default in my country because them happening in daylight actually mattered (one was aligned with dawn, the other with mean time).
Regarding 20, one could also point to Aquinas's quotation: "nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu" -- "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in sense". (And this was attributed to the Aristotelian tradition, though Aristotle himself did not have a quote quite like this.)
> "nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu" -- "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in sense"
This looks funny to me. You've translated "first" in a temporal way, and to that end you put "was" in the past tense, with being-in-the-senses happening before being-in-the-intellect.
But the Latin says something different; 𝘴𝘪𝘵 is set in the present, just like 𝘦𝘴𝘵.
In this case, I have no idea whether the translation is accurate or not. I can't even explain why 𝘴𝘪𝘵 is subjunctive. (Though https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/latin1000/chapters/38ch.htm includes a remark that seems relevant: "That is, by the Classical Age the Latin subjunctive had begun to lose its association with specific functions (prohibition, volition, potentiality, etc.)—the job of relating the particular connotation of a clause had devolved onto specific adverbs like cum, dum, ut, etc.—and this mood ended up serving as little more than a way of signalling that a clause is dependent. In other words, the subjunctive had become the mood of 'general subordination.'")
There are three broad possibilities:
1. This is just a gross mistranslation, like when people say that 𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 means "on the word of no one".
2. This is perfectly normal Latin and the verb in the relative clause appears in the present subjunctive for good reasons that I don't know.
3. This is bad Latin, but perfectly normal medieval church Latin.
The first seems unlikely, but either of the latter two options is totally plausible. Does anyone know what's happening in the sentence?
I should note that you can translate the sentence into English, preserving the original tenses, without changing the meaning: "There is nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses." This is hardly idiomatic, but we can salvage it by changing the wording while keeping the tense equivalence: "There is nothing in the intellect which does not arrive there through the senses."
I am not at all knowledgeable about medieval latin, but an argument for hypothesis 3 would be that the subjunctive used here matches modern French usage (and perhaps other romance languages too). I am a native French speaker with some latin knowledge, and this "sit" sounded instinctively right to me ("rien ne se trouve dans l'intellect qui ne soit d'abord dans les sens" - the indicative "est" would simply be a horrible grammar mistake in French.)
You need the subjunctive mood in French not to signal the clause is dependent in general, but because the main clause is negative and therefore the meaning of the dependent clause is negated, not affirmed. ("il y a quelque chose qui est..." VS "il n'y a rien qui soit...") Perhaps something like that is also going on here?
"On the word of no one" isn't exactly the _usual_ translation of "nullius in verba" but if it's a _gross mistranslation_ rather than just somewhat clumsy then I think the Royal Society itself is wrong about the meaning of the phrase. They render it as "take no one's word for it"; it seems to me that "on the word of no one" is just a more literal version of that.
Why do you describe "on the word of no one" as a gross mistranslation? What would you consider a good translation?
I think he mistyped, the standard translation is often "of nothing in words", which is a clunky literal translation that misses the broader context of the quote. "Take no one's word for it" or "On the word of no one" are better at getting the message (particularly the latter, since the original Latin isn't in the imperative).
> I think he mistyped, the standard translation is often "of nothing in words"
I didn't mistype, and that's not plausible as a translation, though since I'm complaining that the phrase is nothing but a painful mistake I guess I can't really expect a plausible one. It raises all kinds of obvious problems, though; if you realize that "words" is plural, you should immediately realize that you're dealing with "into", not "in". It doesn't say 𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘪𝘴.
There isn't a good translation; it's not a coherent phrase in Latin. It is a selection of words from a line of an original Latin poem that are, in the poem, 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁 of an idiomatic expression which requires additional words (they are present in the original) to have meaning. (They also do not relate directly to each other, but that's fairly insignificant.)
𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪
𝘲𝘶𝘰 𝘮𝘦 𝘤𝘶𝘮𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵 𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘴, 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘴
(I'm providing two lines because the line of interest is not a complete sentence. You can see that 𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴 describes the author by the fact that, when the verb finally arrives at the end of the following line, it is in the first person.)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106015310409&seq=5 has an interlinear translation from 1894; these lines appear on page 360. They are translated "bound to swear obedience to no master, I am borne along as a stranger, whithersoever the tempest carries me". [I've made a couple minor edits.]
The problem here is that 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 does not have independent existence in the sentence. It is part of the idiom 𝘪𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢, literally "to swear [oneself] into the words [of someone else]". Quoting it without the 𝘪𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘦 makes as much sense as line-item vetoing several paragraphs into one unrelated sentence.
There is no sense of believing or relying in the original; it is about allegiance.
The "on the word of no one" translation is tempting, to English speakers, because it matches well with an English idiom and 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 looks like it could mean "on [the] word" if 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 was a first declension noun. But it isn't; it's a second declension noun, and when you realize that you wonder what "into the words of no one" is supposed to mean. And the answer is, nothing.
> [Accept/believe] nothing [asserted] by words [alone].
I don't think this is compatible with 𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 being genitive. You're stuck using "the words of no one".
In a broader sense... once the Royal Society has admitted that their slogan is a hack job performed on a known line of poetry, and the meaning they assign to it is unrelated to the meaning of the line of poetry, what's left to salvage?
"the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism" -- um, did they happen to provide a citation for that claim about Prof. Gould?
Well, I don’t know about Gould, but as we know, On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 – famously the low-water mark of racism.
It is comforting to see that they have such a solid grasp of the ideas of evolution though, as in “implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others”. WTF!
>31: List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals. It’s most fun to read this as a grimoire of minor information demons, eg “Wikinger: Adds false information related to the Greek alphabet and to its related minor characters”, “Zhoban: Adds unreliable sources to Islamic terrorism articles, while acting in an uncivil manner”.
My favorites are the "Chipmunks vandal" (who is known for "Adding trivial details about covers by fictional bands, especially Alvin and the Chipmunks"), and "Catcreekcitycouncil" ("Prolific sockpuppeter with over 500 socks which inserts hoaxes about lions existing in Montana"), and "Caidin-Johnson" ("Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects.").
I wonder why so many of them relate to childrens' TV shows?
"I wonder why so many of them relate to childrens' TV shows?"
A pretty large chunk of LTAs (long-term abusers) are autistic children. I mean they're fairly "severely" autistic, as traditionally conceptualized, and often "children" as in "prepubertal when they started LTA-ing". Wikipedia's always had a subset of editors who are juuuuust barely capable of navigating a theoretically-communal project where in practice you can just noncommunicatively engage in your special interest for years. Many LTAs of the Caidin stream seem to just be people who want to tile the world in their special interest, who aren't quite capable of engaging in the project itself.
I want to end daylight savings time, but that doesn't mean setting the clocks ahead and leaving them there; that would make it worse! I want to end it by setting the clocks back and leaving them set back. Why doesn't that get tried, and why isn't it listed as an option when people discuss it?
Permanent DST is the populist option bc people complain about it getting dark too early in the winter. Permanent standard time is the technocrat option because of later morning light in the winter having worse impacts on sleep quality and public health.
Permanent standard time is the populist option because the kind of physical essentialism implied by wanting noon to actually occur when the sun is at its highest point in the sky and midnight to actually occur at the middle of the night is tantamount to claiming that words have actual meanings connected to physical reality and hence next door to "trans women are actually men" and stuff like that.
Permanent daylight savings time is the opposite of that and hence the enlightened technocratic option.
What's the difference? The time of day you do stuff at is arbitrary. It's a problem if you try to make everyone use UTC and sometimes the day changes while the sun is up, but shifting an hour from midnight doesn't matter.
The only thing I care about is stopping the sudden one-hour changes in sleeping schedule.
Well, in the first place, I have an aesthetic preference for having the clocks bear an approximate relationship to astronomical time. But in the second place, setting the clocks ahead increases the fraction of the year I spend getting up while it's still dark out, which I would rather not do. And I've read somewhere that having to go to work or school in the darkness increases the risk of accidents. That's not an issue for me personally, as my workplace is two rooms from my bedroom, but it seems as if it lowers those people's utility. (We are living organisms and the time of day when we do things is not arbitrary, not for us.) And in the third place, if year-round DST was tried years ago, and repealed because so many people hated it, it seems as if you aren't going to get that one, whereas you might get year-round standard time if that were tried.
If you actually don't have any preference between the two options, then it doesn't seem as if you have any personal reason to oppose doing things the way I would prefer; your logical vote would be Abstain.
> But in the second place, setting the clocks ahead increases the fraction of the year I spend getting up while it's still dark out, which I would rather not do.
Then don't. What does the clock have to do with that? There's no universal law that you have to get up when there's a certain number on the clock, and the only way to shift our schedule is to change when the clock shows that number.
You are correct and any argument for clock-changing is madness.
I grew up in Arizona, which sensibly doesn't have DST.
Nobody missed it. Not once during the other states' DST changes did I ever hear anyone lament, "Oh, I wish my daily routine had been abruptly interrupted!"
What gets me in when people talk as if changing the clocks is the only possible way to make more use of the light, and as if people simply doing stuff earlier in summer weren’t an option. But for all the talk of a coordination problem, I know plenty of businesses and organisations that keep different hours seasonally (think ‘winter opening hours’ and ‘summer opening hours’), and people already choose to stay out socialising or taking part in activities later on summer evenings. Plenty of office jobs seem to offer a choice of working hours, off-setting up to one or two hours, as long as you do the same in total, and there’s no reason that can’t be extended if it works for people.
So the only thing left would be maybe schools. Maybe we just need to give schools ‘summer hours’ and ‘winter hours’, and then everything else can sort itself out without changing clocks.
19: Related: Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise (eg people carrying around loud stereos with them in public places).
There’s been an increase in people not using headphones for their phones recently - some of this may be due to Apple (and I assume other manufacturers) not shipping with default pluggable headphones. You need to spend big on AirPods to be social on public transport.
This is common in coffee shops around here, too. Some guy will just start playing a video with sound on loud and everyone around him gets to enjoy the soundtrack with him.
"Despite the decline of the visibility of the alt right after Charlottesville, many alt right ideas are now largely established in the mainstream/boomer/MAGA right, therefore mission accomplished. Also Jews aren't so bad anymore."
The article strikes me as broadly correct though maybe putting too vain and rosy a spin on things.
Anti-elite (this one covers a lot of different ground).
Populism and the shifts of the working class away from Democrats towards Republicans.
There are others and maybe some that are happening but may be too early to say they are gaining or have gained mainstream status (such as the reduction in woke power).
Another main point he argues is that the Ds have had a certain “moral authority” ever since the civil rights movement that the Rs are no longer letting constrain their rhetoric/behavior. He’s claiming credit for the alt-right for the fact that the right can now just openly scoff and keep doing what they were doing whenever the left calls out racism.
"How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working."
Could you please elaborate on this? Which paranoid-sounding bits that the misinformation experts and antifa people pointed out are in fact how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working?
The alt-right seemed to think that lots of people (including Trump) were "dog whistling" at them, and this was a useful communication modality for them. Doesn't necessarily prove that's what Trump intended, but if it takes two to dog whistle (one to intend, one to hear), then it at least half-proves it.
"There are no dog-whistles" always seemed like one of your weaker takes (it's utterly obvious to me that "family values" and "tough on crime" are, for instance).
Huh? How are those two dog whistles? Literally everyone knows Family Values means "social/religious conservatism", just like everyone knows Inclusion means "militant identity politics". I can't even think of what the dog whistle that *only some people hear* is supposed to be for that.
I'm assuming you're saying Tough on Crime is dog whistle for something like "lock blacks up". So, does that mean its proponents *don't* want to lock whites who commit crimes up? Or that they want to lock innocent blacks up? How would they even attempt that?
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept of a dog whistle?
They are anti-gay (and to a weaker extent, anti-feminist) and anti-black, respectively. And the whole *point* of a dog-whistle is wrapping it up in a different meaning while making it perfectly clear what you really mean. "International bankers" is another example - everyone knows it means "the Jews".
If by "anti-gay" you mean things like anti-gay-marriage and anti-gay-adoption, the people talking about family values have usually been absolutely explicitly clear that they oppose those things, and have typically made them the centrepieces of their campaigns. If that's what you mean by a dog-whistle, I don't think you're using it according to its standard definition. You would be applying it to any example of positive-sounding buzzwords to refer to a clear and honest policy (that some people think is very bad).
Would you say that "affordable health care", "racial justice", and "immigration reform" are all dog whistles?
"International bankers" IS what I would call a dog whistle. If you ask a politician what they mean by "family values" they'll probably say things like "well, for one thing we're against redefining marriage". If you ask a politician what they mean by "international bankers", they will almost certainly NOT say "well, for one thing we're against the Jews running our economy".
I see what you intend, but I disagree - "tough on crime" isn't merely "tough on (black) crime" - it's "keep the n— in their place". And that's something that _isn't_ said.
Similarly, "family values" means you're opposed to gays, _period_. You just wrap it in talk about traditional marriage.
No, dogwhistles are still a (mostly) bullshit concept primarily used to blame others for whatever one wants to imagine they're saying through the barest insinuations and complete lack of charity.
A lot of "Tough on Crime" politics involve doing things to black people that would be unacceptable to do to the proponents (e.g. stop and frisk, no knock raids, etc). This is not to say that the alternative to "Tough on Crime" has to be the defund the police/criminal apologia but there is room for a large sensible middle of more enforcement against crimes but the messaging you send when you have that position is different than what we are calling dog whistles.
If "tough on crime" is a dog whistle, do you believe that the only position someone can legitimately hold on crime is to be softer on criminals? That no matter what the current policy is, the correct position is always to be softer than that? If you think that at least in some instances being tougher on crime is reasonable, what term would you use to describe that policy, if not "tough on crime"?
You can absolutely and perfectly reasonably want to improve and strengthen law enforcement in general. If that's what you want to do, don't use the phrase "tough on crime", as it's laden with connotations you might then not intend but a lot of people are going to assume you do.
Of course, if it just so happens that all your efforts do indeed disproportionately target blacks and black areas, maybe you really were "tough on crime" instead all along.
Since black people commit a disproportionate amount of crime, any reasonable effort to improve law enforcement would disproportionately target blacks and black areas. Of course, since black people are also disproportionately victims of crime, such efforts would also disproportionately benefit black people--but that's a point "soft on crime" liberals never seem to acknowledge.
> If that's what you want to do, don't use the phrase "tough on crime", as it's laden with connotations you might then not intend but a lot of people are going to assume you do.
But then you'll just declare whatever new phrase is used to be an even more evil dogwhistle, won't you? And you'll have evidence too: approximately all the people who were previously using the old phrase have switched to using the new phrase. Since you *know* that 99% of them were dog whistling, then the new phrase must also be a dog whistle for the original bad position, QED. People only switched to using it because they felt everyone caught on to the old phrase.
The whole thing is unfalsifiable conspiracy theory nonsense. The above scenario isn't a thought experiment, it's what has actually happened over and over again over the past few years since the dogwhistle conspiracy theory became popular.
The local DA has a policy of never prosecuting trespassing offenses, or theft below $200. When I say "tough on crime" I mean I want the laws to MEAN something.
"Dog whistle" is a meaningless and/or misleading phrase if every possible shorthand for expressing an idea is labeled a "dog whistle".
So, what's the approved non-dog-whistle shorthand for "we should incentivize people to form stable domestic partnerships to raise healthy children to adulthood" or "we need to severely disincentivize crime even though that will involve the police treating lots of people very harshly"?
Because those are fairly common positions for people to hold, and to want to express openly rather than in some secret code. Which they typically do by using terms like "family values" and "tough on crime".
If you mean something different than what people usually mean with a phrase, even if it describes your position if taken literally, you're setting yourself up for misunderstanding.
So basically, just find another phrasing.
Let's put it like this: The literal meaning of "white lives matter" is perfectly sensible. But since only racists actually use the phrase (indeed, as a dog whistle), you paint yourself as one if you do, no matter what's in your brain at that moment.
society and norms decide this. In 10 years it may different and to some extent if you are influential you can try to change it but if you do try to change it, you have to live with the blowback you will receive.
Lots of responses here, so I'll collect an answer.
First, when a phrase has a historical usage, it might no longer mean merely what the words seem to mean. Let's say you actually honestly only want to talk about the banking system internationally without any ethnic connotations - then talking about "international bankers" will be a poor idea, as most everyone will simply understand you to mean "the Jews" regardless - and for good reason, as this is the default usage! Similarly, if you campaign on "tough on crime", no-one in their right mind will think you're going to make an effort against tax evasion and insider trading - they know what the phrase means in practice, that you will crack down mostly on blacks. This historical usage is one of the best ways to identify a dog whistle.
Second, it's not like this is anything of a big secret. Quoting that Lee Atwater interview:
'Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."'
This is _explicitly_ how you signal to racists that you're with them without saying so explicitly.
Third, is this anti-conservative? Yes. Yes it is. "Family values" means something like "Let's go back to the 50's, before all this feminism and gay rights!". This is A Bad Thing.
Huh? Maybe I've been living under a rock (or maybe I'm just a lot younger than you) but if I heard someone talking about `international bankers' I would assume they meant people who worked at Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank or HSBC, and if I heard someone talking about being `tough on crime' I would absolutely assume they were also going to be tough on insider trading. Your interpretations would never even have occurred to me.
Also, what term should we use for `lets go back to the 1990s'? The 1950s are ancient history. Not only was I not alive then, not even my parents were!
By the 1990s gay marriage was on the brink of becoming legal (first state was Massachusetts in 2004), feminism was well established, and Roe v Wade was the law of the land, so if I saw a politician talking about "1990s family values" I would be genuinely confused what hot-button issue he thinks was at its peak in 1990 but has declined today. Does he think that it's best for gay people to be in the closet but not unknown?
(I would also be saying "dang, you're pretty young for a politician" because most people form their ideas of "family values" in childhood and if this guy was a child in the 90s then he's barely in his 30s now. Part of the reason a "family values" connotes the 50s is that some of the politicians saying it were alive back then.)
There are two separate issues here - whether the sender and intended receivers still get it, and whether the rest do.
Age is very likely a part of it - a couple of generations ago (let's say Reagan era), *no-one* would have been uncertain about who the "international bankers" were, and who's the target of "tough on crime"
Speaking of Reagan (and confirmed by Atwater in my quote), "welfare reform" and "welfare queens" were similarly about blacks, which everyone understood at the time.
There are an infinite number of dogwhistles, so many that everyone who speaks in public can be shown to be signaling absolutely any evil thing you want them to be signaling.
There is only one "dog whistle", and it is the use of the term "dog whistle" to covertly refer to establishing a 1984-esque totalitarian state using Newspeak.
The motte/bailey of liberal critiques of alt right ideas was particularly masterfully executed by the alt right, which I found infuriating (added to the infuriation driven by people denying that's what was happening). Walt Bismarck comes out and says it that that was the strategy.
Just make sure to do your research if you're considering wearing hearing protection a lot, some audiologists, and some anecdotes I've heard of people wearing hearing protection constantly, said long term frequent use can make hyperacusis/noise sensitivity worse.
> with evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to
That's true; there is no theoretical ceiling and we have plenty of evidence demonstrating that price growth beyond your wildest dreams is quite possible. I think you can still buy Zimbabwe currency as memorabilia.
I wasn't thinking of it as psychoactive, but rather physiologically active. By chance, I happen to be working on a topical drug that's a nitric oxide donor. Our biggest concerns are that, as a mild vasodilator, it can cause a little redness where it's topically applied, and that it might result in some orthostatic hypotension due to its effects on vasodilation. NO has a lot of physiological/signaling effects beyond its viral activity.
The reddit thread about community is fascinating. My partner and I both have professionally worked in "community building" efforts and can confirm most of these issues: zoning/architecture barriers, divergent gendered interests, better online individuated entertainment at home, and people's inability to commit/compromise/show up on time/behave in a reasonable manner, etc.
But after many years of failure, I recently had an epiphany: I don't think there is actually a "lack of community." I think what's happened to communal life is exactly what's happened to everything, which is that the middle has fallen out. Communities have polarized into either a) exclusive spaces for well-connected and high-functioning people, or b) spaces with no barrier to entry for very dysfunctional people. It's the "median" spaces for average people that have really disappeared, not community in general.
My partner had a breakthrough success using Partiful, the app that essentially allows people to invite each other to events, but you have to "know someone who knows someone." If you invite a couple cool, connected people to a community event, then they and everyone else will show up. If you open the gates and say "everyone is invited!" then either no one will show up or only dysfunctional people will show up.
I can't believe the types of events that can attract a crowd if you have a tiny core group of cool people. I've seen hugely successful events thrown with less than 24 hours notice, with no food, in dirty public parks, in cold warehouses with literally no furniture, in random apartments where everyone had a cold and could barely talk.
All of that is to say, realizing that some amount of exclusivity is essential to forming healthy communities has been very depressing for us after spending the last decade in egalitarian movements. But now whenever I think to myself, "I'm lonely, there's no community here," I know to shut up and look for what the cool and interesting people are doing and talking about.
Anyway, that's (partly) how I found this substack.
This is an excellent point—“the middle has fallen out.”
The bottom quintile will always throw a wrench in our loftiest ideals about an egalitarian society. But the problem is that addiction to social media and videogames are turning the median person much lower-functioning/more awkward, and therefore into less desirable community-members.
The famous book on the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone) was named for the disappearance of bowling leagues, but also civic organizations like Lions Club, Rotary, Elks, etc. Also, yes, mainline churches (or non-conservative and non-immigrant churches more broadly).
I would say "neighborhood third spaces." When I was growing up, I lived in what was considered by outsiders to be a "bad neighborhood," yet if you lived there, there were restaurants and cafes and public places where you could find lots of different types of people coexisting peacefully. Cafe culture was big, everyone went to the same panaderia every morning, whether they were a lawyer, teacher, janitor, plumber, whatever. For instance, there was a meth addict down the street who did odd jobs for people and there was a tacit agreement that the neighbors would look out for him as long as he kept the crazier parts of his life under control, because he didn't want to ruin the relationships with his neighbors. We regularly left our doors and cars unlocked and never got robbed.
Now, those third spaces in middle/working class neighborhoods where you could find lots of different types of moderately functional people don't seem to exist in my city anymore. My old neighborhood now consists of either rich people in mansions with private security systems and really dysfunctional people living in tents and squatting outside. People say the neighborhood "gentrified" as if it got better, but actually there is so much more crime and antisocial behavior and lack of accountability for the average person than I remember from when it was a "bad" neighborhood.
I also used to be very involved in trying to build community and also really lost my love for the egalitarian approach (just an invitation for endless meetings). I’ve found the most transformative thing in my life was just to go for drinks every Friday with a smallish group of people. Research shows that repeated contact is the most important factor for building strong friendships. I’ve established some really close friends this way and totally eliminated the sense I once had that I had acquaintances but no friends.
My wife did her PhD in a sub-topic of a sub-topic of community. After reading some of the seminal texts, I came to the conclusion that a community is where you have to get along with people with whom you disagree and whom you dislike, and who have different aims and interests.
What people call "community" on the internet is just hobby groups and cliques.
I tend to have more the definition that you mention in your first paragraph - although I wouldn't go as far as 'dislike'. Coming to Germany after having grown up in South Africa, I've been lamenting the lack of community, which feels to me like a layer of connectedness that lies between "strangers" and "friends", where you don't (necessarily) share any interests or goals, but you're (perhaps grudgingly, but on average quite happy to) willing to help each other out of a pickle if push comes to shove, this is reciprocal, known, and exercised often enough as not to simply be forgotten. In Germany you can usually ask the exact same things of your neighbour (e.g. maybe you want to borrow a ladder) and there's honestly a decent chance you'll get help, but it's not clear (not "known") and not exercised often enough to maintain itself as a meme, so it's deeply awkward and anxiety-inducing to try, which is its own self-reinforcing meme.
One striking example from my childhood is that I was just dragged to church by a friend's mother regularly on Sundays, even though it was perfectly clear to everyone involved that I wasn't going to convert, that I was staying an atheist, and that I was "just" there for the gospel singing and hanging out with my friend afterwards. I had a blast, felt accepted, never spoke ill of anyone I met at the church (nor had any reason to), and for a while it was just a staple of my life.
To be clear, I actually have no idea if my categorisation reflects something true about the world, but it's how I've tried to make sense of the disparity I observed between the cultures, looking back on my experiences.
Is it fair to define community as "the thing that you can spend time with if you don't have good friends to spend time with with"? Or, maybe: "the place that you go to meet people who can become your friends"?
It sort of feels that way to me but my experiences may be unusual.
Re: (31). I had a gay friend who would post false facts on Conservapedia, e.g., on the list of "statements equivalent to the Axiom of Choice", he would add, you know, statements not equivalent to the Axiom of Choice.
Do you know why Conservapedia even has an article on that topic? It could be described as somewhat controversial I guess, but not in a way related to the left/right political axis.
I have this site saved on my phone so I can pull it up any time Daylight Saving Time comes up in conversation: "Living on the Western Edge of a Time Zone Poses a Higher Health Risk"
I think if we re-framed this issue as "let's force everyone to be at work/school an hour earlier so we can all be done sooner and enjoy the rest of the day" very few people would be in favor of it. The clock changes have a lot of people confused, but DST is early bird tyranny, and it's having a measurable impact on our physical & mental health.
19. In center city and south Philadelphia, the worst offenders for noise tend to be vehicles-- loud motors/lack of mufflers, and sometimes amplified music as well. Do you get more people carrying loud stereos?
I think when you're on a major road, traffic is worse, and when you're in various public places (parks, public transits, etc) music is worse. I agree that car stereos with the windows down are a subspecies of "stereos are bad because public noise". I agree that loud vehicles (especially motorcycles) are a big problem. I think I get angrier at people who are obviously being inconsiderate (which includes stereo-carriers and people on motorcycles that seem modded to make maximum noise) than people who are just trying to get where they need to go. Also, traffic noise not in specific categories of inconsiderateness tends to blend together into a general hum, which bothers me less.
I don't think I was clear. The typical vehicle makes some noise. However, there are people driving or riding *much* louder vehicles. Nothing in between that I've noticed.
Even on major 4 or 6 lane streets they're loud enough to be painful.
Sometimes it's cars, sometimes it's a group of half a dozen or more motorcycles.
I find the most abhorrent noise violators to be those who blare music while hiking in the woods. Not to say that city noise doesn’t matter, but some level will always be there and it isn’t a space where people expect peace and quiet.
I take loud noise by streets for granted, I don't think an expectation of silence on a busy road is realistic. People who carry speakers carrying music on hikes in the woods are beyond redemption.
I've seen a couple of 2 year estimates until AI images become undetectable. I'm not sure whether it's undetectable by unaided humans or undetectable by computers, but that sounds pretty early to me.
Undetectable by computers seems pretty unlikely, though a lot of that is because no one is going to bother. (Though you also need someone to bother training a detection tool, but that is more likely to occur)
Text is harder to detect, just less room for slight weird variations.
Unaided humans: I'd say we can already do that for ~all of population.
The problem is that most AI art has the problems for detection
- Don't bother fixing up slight defects in character pose, hands, eyes, etc.
- Don't bother fixing up background
- Uses some common model or styling that people who see a decent amount of AI art just pick up on.
- Sometimes just looking too good. There's a lot of common art that has more artistic issues (and is popular because of what the artist depicts) and so seeing someone post a flawlessly stroked character can be surprisingly indicative.
- Intentionality of scenes. There's a lot of artists who draw poses. However, most AI stuff is poses and the like. This is getting better through Loras and also people putting stuff on Patreon (and thus having more incentive to try for more complex scenes)
So the question is possibly more importantly "what will be the common default state of AI art". Which is harder to answer. There's been less development in SD-area for advancing on certain features which would help (like better guiding of intentionality of scenes).
I'd suggest that it's unlikely that computers will be able to detect better than humans whether an image is fake. They're really bad at it right now, and the human brain is *really* good at visual processing and determining when something doesn't "look right". Image recognition is actually a computationally harder problem than generation (SOTA image recognition MM-LLMs are 100s of times bigger than diffusion models of analogous capability). We're just miscalibrated on the relative difficulty because we have tons of dedicated hardware (wetware?) for the latter and almost none for the former.
By the time AI art gets good enough to fool all humans, there's no reason to believe that there will be any artifacts left for an AI to pick up that a human can't - no rule says generated images can't be pixel-by-pixel indistinguishable from ones that come out of cameras.
Sure it is possible, but I think it is unlikely that they are made to be or already are pixel perfect enough to not have detectable low-level features (pixel placement, weird strokes).
I agree that we have an easier time than computers at picking up some large-scale features of the image, but I think there's probably enough information to do detection without even needing something with stronger understanding like a multimodal LLM.
(Though I think that MM-LLMs aren't efficiently made if you just wanted pure smart image recognition, imo all the mm-llms feel bolted on)
Depends entirely on the image being generated. If it's something with few recognizable details, like a photo of a man's face silhouetted against a soft-focus sunset at 500x500px, than it's been possible to generate undetectable images for a while now. If, however, it's something like a high-resolution photo of a large crowd of protestors with lots of different slogans on their placards, then I'd put the odds of something like that becoming undetectable in two years at maybe 50%.
I want AI generated Michelin star quality level food. Although, taste and smell sensors may be much farther out than a smart enough AI. Perhaps that would be an eventual AI detection mechanism, ask them to cook you a meal.
This test is poorly calibrated itself, potentially to the point of being deliberately deceptive. Unless they have access to a much more advanced/successful model than any of the current ones I've seen, their AI images have been put through a professional-level degree of manual cleanup. And many of their real images are deliberately chosen to be "synthetic looking" (one example of this is using a photo from the ISS, where objects floating in zero-G create a similar effect to one commonly seen in previous-generation AI composites).
Note that Mr Gunn (the source of the linked x/twitter post) lists his occupation as "Communications consultant for AI safety and AI risk", the sort of person companies are much more likely to hire if most people cannot distinguish AI-generated from non-AI-generated images.
I disagree - most of the fake images I saw had the usual telltales - deformed hands, unreadable text, slightly melted or blurred objects, and the overall "style" of the composition. I got 26/30 before I got bored, and never felt like I was blind guessing.
A few of the real photos were hard to distinguish and I'd wouldn't be surprised if they selected them on purpose, but there were also several that were very, very easy to tell were real (photos with clear shots of text, clear views of people's hands, old news photos that had proper film grain, etc.
#26: Considering that Western intellectual progress in the 2nd millennium largely took the shape of gradually escaping Aristotle's shadow, I don't know what teaching Aristotle in high school could mean as a rallying flag other than "Let's go back to the shadow, it's too sunny outside".
Western intellectual progress over the past few centuries has also taken the shape of escaping Christianity's shadow, but I would feel like my kids were uneducated if they didn't know anything about Christianity and never read a Bible.
The Bible is important because a large chunk of humanity today and in the last few centuries has been seeing it as central to their belief system. I don't think the same can be said about Aristotle. The main function of learning Aristotle, so it seems, is to understand the context in which later, less obsolete philosophers and scientists operated, which puts him in a strictly secondary order of importance compared to them.
If we're looking for pure cultural/intellectual significance, The Koran and Marx's writings seem to be more valuable in terms of understanding the zeitgeist than ancient Greek philosophers. And if the goal is to give students the tools to teach themselves, surely more modern rationalist materials would be more efficient.
Either way, the article gives a surprisingly good impression of those schools compared to how they seem at first glance.
It was my impression that Christianity is a weird crossover fusion project between Judaism and Greek philosophy.
I think most of the European philosophical tradition is somewhat founded on the Greeks.
> The Bible is important because a large chunk of humanity today and in the last few centuries has been seeing it as central to their belief system. I don't think the same can be said about Aristotle.
I would argue that the bible has not been central to most Europeans epistemology since the Enlightenment. (It is more debatable if it was more central to their moral beliefs.) On the other hand, before that, I would argue that the world model people had was more influenced by Aristotle than Jesus.
I do not think it is terribly useful to study Marx to understand the PRC, it would be like trying to understand the GOP by reading the bible.
The idea that religion and intellectual progress are at odds is relatively recent. Look into the activities of Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell. His works weren't all that popular with the public, but they caught on among academics.
He's also notable for popularizing ideas like Columbus was trying to prove the world was round (he wasn't), that Galileo was prosecuted for heliocentrism (he wasn't, others who were promoting heliocentrism went un-prosecuted), the Salem witch trials were a religious attack on science (they weren't), and that the middle ages were a period of great academic stagnation.
That last one is probably the most ahistoric, the one that casts the church in the worst light, and the one that is most sticky. The middle ages weren't stagnant, they produced many inventions. A few of them: the university, Gothic architecture, mechanical clocks, windmills, the astrolabe, optics, the spinning wheel, the trebuchet, the blast furnace. The printing press was a middle ages invention.
He also engaged in what today we'd call nutpicking, focusing on the weirdest, smallest minorities. For example, people who opposed lightning rods as thwarting the will of God.
While I agree that learning some things about Christianity is important in a society that has been and still is so influenced by it, and I'd include some of the more important Bible stories in this to some extent, I'm surprised you include actually reading the Bible in this. Its effect on the culture is mostly pretty indirect, through many layers of interpretation, and even for picking up on more specific references, I feel like more modern less dull summaries are generally sufficient.
But then how would you know how many people were in each tribe, and who was son of who, and how do you properly set up an altar, and what was in each man's offering?
I disagree about escaping Christianity's shadow. Certain Christian ideas, perhaps, but not others (disapproval of cousin marriage, formal impersonal argument) . And Christian organisational technologies (literacy, bureaucracy, merit-based appointment) are pretty foundational. Yes these are not unique to Christianity, but they showed up in that context in our culture.
I don't really think of bureaucracy/merit-based as christian, specifically, I think of them as Things That Emerge When You Have A Big Org Under Certain Social Situation. China for example, had plenty of very modern sounding bureaucracy prior to any Christianity, as I understand it. Literacy maybe, in that now you can read the bible, but also wasn't there a lot of church resistance to peasants having access to the bible? Sure, Christians used those technologies, but they didn't invent them and you don't need Jesus to get there. "escaping Christianities shadow" is I think more about getting away from the religious/metaphysical/moral aspects, the things that are specific to, or somehow implied by Christianity.
Yes in abstract bureaucracy is not tied to any religion or philosophy. It's just a way of administering an organisation or region that works less badly than every other way we've tried.
But in Europe it became fully elaborated as a property of the Church, influenced by the Church-state of Byzantium perhaps. The church is where these things happened, so we're living in its shadow. In counterfactual world, a different path was taken. But not in this timeline.
I'm curious to know how your thinking on this develops as your children get older.
Prior to having my own children, I think I would have agreed with you. Jewish religious and historical studies were a significant part of my own upbringing.
However, my own children know almost nothing about Christianity and have only minimal exposure to Bible stories/have never read directly from a bible. They are top students, especially in STEM, but also strong in their history and english lit/composition classes. In fact, the only purpose I've ever come up with where reading the bible would be uniquely useful for their development was for instilling anti-religious ideas (the book of Job and most of the exodus story, for example, make God seem pretty terrible.)
My conclusions have been:
(1) Knowing that religion was an animating force behind a lot of historical action doesn't seem to depend on knowing any doctrinal details.
(2) It is pretty easy to get higher level messages (character and values, instructive stories) from other literary/mythological sources.
(3) A lot of great literature doesn't depend on knowing bible references.
If Aristotle cast a millennial shadow over the West, that seems like a pretty good reason to teach him - *especially* if you want to escape that shadow.
> Rav Kahana says: I heard that it is also forbidden to ask people out on dates at parties. Rabbi Abba said: I heard in a baraita: in the days of the Second Temple, someone asked a woman out on a date at a party. A journalist heard this and told the Romans, and they massacred 70,000 Torah scholars in retaliation. Therefore Rabbi Akiva decreed that it is forbidden to ask people out at parties.
15) I recently ran across James Clavell's "The Children's Story" in a bookstore. It was short and had a fair bit of depth.
17) I've run into this, in a couple of conversations with young "queer-coded" people. From what I can piece together, they view "man" and "woman" as tiny little restricted categories, and if they don't 100% agree with all stereotypes of that category, they reject the label. It seems bizarre on one level, but on another level it's refreshing, in that once the word games are put aside, it's a recognizable example of how roles are constantly being redefined as the generations shift. Since we're all good lefties, and think being cis and het is bad, what do we do if we realize we aren't trans and like the opposite sex? We redefine the all the words so that we're just like the cool queer kids! Now no one has to be cis and het! Or so I gather, anyway.
> the people who want to ban everything except crime
What a brilliant turn of phrase.
24) The main thing I got from that is that "shapeshift" might be a term used in the alt-right. I ran across it a while back in the comments here, and thought the person was just making up weird terminology on the fly to try to sound intellectually fecund. But maybe they were coming from a community that had developed their own lingo.
I'd also like to see a counterpoint from someone else from the alt-right. This piece sets off some of my "narcissistic self-promotion" alarm bells.
Re 17) - Which makes perfect sense if you think about someone who may be 15-20 right now. Growing up in a society where mainstream sources and many popular (Tiktok, Youtube) celebrities make it clear that being cis or het is uncool or worse makes it obvious that people who may be labeled as such would choose different terminology that doesn't condemn themselves. It's like calling someone a Square in previous generations. Some random boo-word that people don't want to be called because they know it's bad/uncool.
That's why there's so much interest in the massive proliferation of Bi-identifying people, when there's also a significant increase in the number of Bi people who only sleep with people of the alternate sex. Are they really Bi and we're learning something about how people operate, or are they claiming Bi because it's easy to do with no costs associated and allows them to dodge being considered uncool? This also works with "non-binary," "gender-fluid," "queer," etc. None of those titles actually require you to make any life changes, but clearly puts you outside of the cis/het problematic zone.
The bit that strikes me as the most perfect are people who list their pronouns as "he/them" and "she/them". It successfully blurs the difference between "I carefully position myself with creative but respectful use of the latest terminology" and "I don't actually give a shit what you call me".
I also like Aubrey Tang's self-description as "post-gender", which is a rare example of a trans person espousing this view.
27) you seem to have overlooked the claim (made in passing therein) that HUMMING might fight colds/COVID in the same manner as spraying that stuff in your nose. Which seems like something that in a saner world somebody would have an incentive to run studies on. And yet.
> then it’s a question of which law-abiding people should take the pain, and I think the least unfair option is banning portable stereos.
If no one is enforcing a law, it becomes harder for it to become common knowledge. (Ex: how many times have you really heard of a law that may affect you from TV or reading a news report compared to talking with people, or hearing stories about someone getting punished for breaking it...)
> How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician.
Obvious question is how far to trust this as an accurate retelling.
(And then there's that even if this is true, did people being paranoid about it actually have sufficient reason to be paranoid)
> The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).
This seemed like common knowledge to me as a failure point of a lot of modern politics, definitely not surprising.
If you think of "alt-right" as further to the right and less acceptable to mainstream society than regular right, then conflating groups of people with the alt-right definitely increases their interests. It may be against the interests of the regular right that's being grouped with less acceptable groups, but for the alt-right it does seem like a win-win.
As with most such terms, it appears that everyone has a slightly different definition and they're fuzzy around the edges.
I personally would not say that Trump is part of the alt right, but he's either the leader of them or they're his followers, even if he's not himself a member of the group. That sounds weird, but I think it's closer to Democrats generally being the leaders of unionized workers despite not being a member of the group.
Charles Murray is definitely not a member of the alt right, in any classical sense. He's one of many people, especially in Journalism and Academia, who have been pushed out of every other category and so the only group that will fully accept them is what's remaining - the alt right. Even people who would absolutely disavow the tag are pushed into the group, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
I don't know what people are finding so appalling about that article, most of it lines up with what I observed during that time. This is just what playing politics seriously looks like. Liberals were far too complacent, and now they're going to suffer for that.
Sadly, the term "Shadow Lord" does not really make sense, although there is a Shadow Lord Chancellor. "Shadow Minister" makes sense, as the category of opposition spokesmen who shadow government ministers, eg Shadow minister of defence, Shadow Minister of Education, etc . But "Shadow Lord" doesn't work as a category because the Lords are members of the upper house, including the opposition, so the opposition lords are real lords not shadow lords.
I was wondering why my comment on Lesbians Who Only Date Men was getting even more likes! Basically -- some chunk of this is true, but some chunk of it is mischievous responding, i.e. a decent subset of teenagers, when given a public health survey, will pick meme answers to troll the researchers. See findings like "gay kids are more likely to be teen parents" and "99% of teenagers who say on a public health survey that they're missing a limb actually have all of their limbs". It ties in with the lizardman phenomenon, but is less of a constant.
Wikipedia LTAs (long-term abusers) are...interesting. Some of them are very disturbed and tragic figures. I spent a while getting many-thousands-of-words rants emailed to me on a regular basis before turning off the ability of new users to email me through Wikipedia. Many of them are trapped in vicious cycles with overzealous antivandals (overzealous antivandals are a noticeable minority of editors, as I discuss in https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/what-does-a-wikipedia-edit-represent). The aforementioned email guy mostly chases after people who chase after him, and if you decide you're the Defender of the Wiki going to banish him, you're on his shitlist forever. And he's been to prison before, so you probably don't want that.
I discovered this first-hand on a survey administered to us in high school. One of the questions asked which kinds of recreational drugs we used. Being an edgy teen libertarian opposed to all drug prohibition, I decided to check all the boxes.
One of them was one I'd never heard of before that went by street names such as "wagon wheel" or "poke." Whatever, I checked it anyway to spite the survey that I was sure was being conducted to strengthen drug prohibition.
Later on I learned that surveys like this would include such questions to let them throw out responses from mischievous respondents.
Two decades on from that survey, searching for references to "wagon wheel" as a drug reveals one page where someeone asks in 2012 if "wagon wheel and xanax are the same" and a psychologists affirms that they are "street name for 2 mg pills of alprazolam (Xanax)": https://www.justanswer.com/mental-health/6liyh-wagonwheel-xanax.html.
Nothing else shows up in the web search. But if you ask ChatGPT or Bing Copilot what wagon wheel drugs are, they repeat this definition.
I'm almost certain this question came from someone who just took the survey. And now according to the most powerful AI models we have, it's real drug slang.
Thanks for no 17: "Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men." The twists and turns of identity theory & identity theoriticians are fascinating from a social science point of view.
To the extent that these identity processes do not only take place in the minds of identity theory people, but also out there where people live and interact, the situation reminds me of a poem by the Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold. It can serve as a leitmotif-poem for Gen Z, in their quest for an "identity". Tentative translation:
In the room between mirrors and mirrors/ things hurl against things/ the reverse are of what the first things were / and again in the next layer of mirrors/ and was and is and was/ things forever hasten split into the depths/ of the mirror's corridor and opposite/ corridor where no door is the final door / and everything happens at the same time/ in the room between mirrors and mirrors
Why? "God made the various races of humanity equal" sounds less implausible to me than "random mutations and natural selection made the various races of humanity equal".
Oh, I'm not commenting on the actual reasoning, that's no more stupid than most invocations of "my opponent is racist". But creationism is a right-coded belief, and "my opponent is racist" was up until now a left-coded rhetorical move, but apparently accusing your opponent of racism is now a viable move across the political spectrum.
"Beating the Nazis" is pretty much the creational myth of the post-war western world. Against progressive cliches, genuine racism has not only not been accepted in most conservative spaces for more than half a century by now, but in fact racists are among their favorite villains. Of course, their conceptualization of racism is different; Conservatives favor strict colorblindness/equal opportunity, while progressives favor affirmative action/equity of outcomes. Unsurprisingly "progressives are the real racists", "racism of low expectations", etc. have been mainstays of conservative thought pretty much since modern style affirmative actions was first proposed.
This poll didn't break down the results by political affiliation. Back in the 50s and 60s it was the Democrats who were the white southerner demographic and pushing Jim Crow, segregation, and were against interracial marriage the most (though 96% were against in the US, so everyone was essentially against it). The fact that the breakdown is by age in the poll says that it's a holdover from previous generations instead of something that's actually changed politically.
That said, it's most likely the holdover Democrats who were the reason it took so long to change, at least moreso than Republicans/conservatives.
Do you want to register your beliefs about what the relative numbers of Republican vs Democrat numbers for approval of interracial marriage were like 50 years ago (so 1974)?
The relative numbers or details of Republicans vs Democrats aren't that relevant here, basic packing arguments make the claims above implausible.
"genuine racism has not only not been accepted in most conservative spaces for more than half a century by now" is an *extraordinary claim*. given that only 24% of whites were okay with interracial marriages in 1974.
To believe that this belief is not accepted in "most conservative spaces" you need to believe something like that belief being held by ~100% of liberals and <50% of conservatives, an implausibly large correlation. You further need to believe that ~almost everybody who is okay with interracial marriage do not have other forms of genuine racism, again a suspicious claim.
I don't understand why people insist on digging themself into such an obvious and unambiguous epistemic hole.
One might argue that a Republican-controlled White House would be considered a conservative space.
The story does have a happy ending:
> When Reagan did eventually become president, the issue of South African apartheid rose to the front of American consciousness. Instead of confronting the regime, Reagan chose to emphasize engagement, trade, and a history of "friendly" relations. It became one of the few times Republicans broke with the president, as Congress overrode his veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986. "I think he is wrong," said Senator Mitch McConnell, "We have waited long enough for him to come on board."
So we see that by 1986 (38 years ago, not 50+) at least some conservatives managed to clear the very low bar of being against apartheid, though notably Reagan was not among them and he is still heliographed as a conservative hero, not a favorite villain.
"You're a racist" has been rapidly losing value against conservative targets for at least 5-10 years. Some combination of overuse and stretched meaning leaves most conservatives wary of the accusation. All conservatives get painted with a broad brush as racists on a regular basis and most specific conservatives have been called racists for, essentially, disagreeing with progressive orthodoxy. Accepting the accusation is a lose-lose for conservatives, so they are learning to just ignore it. They would be bothered by a genuine accusation of racism based on specific things they said, did, or thought (such as using a racist slur against a black person), but not by the various redefinitions of the term meant to keep it's negative social connotations while expanding the list who can be accused of it. (As an aside, this has had the effect of making actual racism more acceptable because the terminology used to declaim it has become tainted).
On the other hand, it still has a lot of value against progressive targets. Progressives changed the term into something their opponents don't actually care about, but they do. They've essentially created a superweapon to use against themselves. It makes sense to me that conservatives will employ this superweapon, since it exists. By any measure of fairness, progressives should definitely be accused of things that fall within their own definition of racism, since they are the side that wanted the new definition to be as expansive as it is.
Creationists do not necessarily believe this. For example, from Henry Morris's The Beginning of the World (1991):
> The descendants of Ham were marked especially for secular service to mankind. Indeed, they were to be “servants of servants,” that is “servants extraordinary!” Although only Canaan is mentioned specifically (possibly because the branch of Ham’s family through Canaan would later come into most direct contact with Israel), the whole family of Ham is in view. The prophecy is worldwide in scope and, since Shem and Japheth are covered, all Ham’s descendants must be also. These include all nations which are neither Semitic nor Japhetic. Thus, all of the earth’s “colored” races — yellow, red, brown, and black; essentially the Afro-Asian group of peoples, including the American Indians — are possibly Hamitic in origin and included within the scope of the Canaanitic prophecy, as well as the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, and Phoenicians of antiquity.
> The Hamites have been the great “servants” of mankind in the following ways, among many others: (1) they were the original explorers and settlers of practically all parts of the world, following the dispersion at Babel; (2) they were the first cultivators of most of the basic food staples of the world, such as potatoes, corn, beans, cereals, and others, as well as the first ones to domesticate most animals; (3) they developed most of the basic types of structural forms and building tools and materials; (4) they were the first to develop fabrics for clothing and various sewing and weaving devices; (5) they were the discoverers and inventors of an amazingly wide variety of medicines and surgical practices and instruments; (6) most of the concepts of basic mathematics, including algebra, geometry, and trigonometry were developed by Hamites; (7) the machinery of commerce and trade — money, banks, postal systems, etc. — were invented by them; (8) they developed paper, ink, block printing, movable type, and other accoutrements of writing and communication. It seems that almost no matter what the particular device or principle or system may be, if one traces back far enough, he will find that it originated with the Sumerians or Egyptians or early Chinese or some other Hamitic people. Truly, they have been the “servants” of mankind in a most amazing way.
> Yet the prophecy again has its obverse side. Somehow. they have only gone so far and no farther. The Japhethites and Semites have, sooner or later, taken over their territories and their inventions, and then developed them and utilized them for their own enlargement. Often the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have become actual personal servants or even slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane matters, they were eventually displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites.
> The Japhethites have been “enlarged,” taking over lands originally settled by Hamites, and developing the Hamitic technology into science and philosophy. Japhethites have provided the intellectual aspect to humanity’s life, Hamites the physical, and Semites the spiritual. Japheth has, even in the present age, largely taken over the religious function from Shem — “he shall dwell in the tents of Shem” (Gen. 9:27).
> These very general and broad national and racial characteristics obviously admit of many exceptions on an individual genetic basis. It is also obvious that the prophecy is a divine description of future facts, in no way needing the deliberate assistance of man for its accomplishment. Neither Negroes nor any other Hamitic people were intended to be forcibly subjugated on the basis of this Noahic declaration. The prophecy would be inevitably fulfilled because of the innate natures of the three genetic stocks, not by virtue of any artificial constraints imposed by man.
I would say that this description of racial differences as predestined due to different genetic stocks is pretty much quintessential bio-essentialist racism.
Yes, of course, with creationism anything goes, because "God wanted humanity to be equal" and "God wanted humanity to be diverse" are equally plausible, an arbitrary question of God's aesthetic preferences. With evolution, one's thinking ought to be more constrained, with priors imposed by what is evolutionarily plausible.
Yes, but this *is* the rationalist community. So I have the expectation that taking ideas to their logical conclusion and then discussing the results is something that will be done here.
I would view calling such an argument "trolling" simply a way to avoid having to engage with uncomfortable hypotheticals.
I think it seems that way to you because of a common misunderstanding. Gender-critical arguments tend to assume that those who believe that gender is flexible/based on identity think that biological sex "isn't real" and that one's feelings trump biological reality, period. Instead, what is happening is that "gender identity" is posited as a new dimension along which to categorize people, statistically highly correlated with but linearly independent from sex. Another assertion is that in many contexts, gender identity is more relevant than biological sex (sex mostly comes up at the doctor's office). You might not believe that! But almost no one is denying that sex is real.
If you think that gender comes from denying the reality of sex, you might think that also denying the biological reality of sexuality is a logical conclusion. But that would be a misunderstanding. There is no such thing as a "sexual identity" - categories of sexuality are based on your actual desires and behaviors, and nobody is trying to deny that.
And yet having a "sex change" is something that is considered a mundane occurrence in those circles. They consider both sex and gender to be vague socially constructed categories, very much amenable to change if so desired.
It's true that sex could be considered mutable through gender-affirming care, a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, it's the only effective treatment; we haven't been successful with trying to do the reverse and change a person's gender to match their body ("conversion therapy"). This was tried for a long time, albeit oftentimes with a religious conflict of interest, but the conclusion was that it is ineffective and can cause lasting psychological harm.
I'm going to "no true Scotsman" this and say that if the trans person we're talking about has never experienced gender dysphoria, I am not talking about them and probably would not defend their choice of gender identity. I realize this is seen as an old-fashioned position these days. But I think it's a useful perspective, because our current official policies (e.g. who insurance will cover for gender-affirming care) are based on dysphoria, because we actually have evidence for treating dysphoria.
I'm not exactly opposed to the majority of younger queer folk who subscribe to a narrative that is less focused on dysphoria as the basis for trans-ness; I support their individual liberties (but I do draw the line at paying for medically unnecessary operations, and indeed they would have to cheat the system to access them through insurance). I do think that narrative has muddied the waters for the trans-skeptical, though, and ought to be considered as a totally separate and new thing from dysphoria-based trans-ness, if at all.
Bringing it back to sexuality, sexual dysphoria isn't a thing as far as I know. So I wouldn't support someone claiming a sexual identity that differs from their continued behavior; that just sounds like being in denial.
Well, this whole cluster of issues would be an epistemic quagmire even without its unfortunate status as the hottest-button culture war issue, but what annoys me the most is the endless tower of motte-and-baileys. Sure, the word "dysphoria" likely refers to something real, but then what is the connection to stuff like genderfluid and all those bizarre neo-genders?
Thanks for the link, that was a really interesting read! I do not have this kind of first-hand experience. That being said, my understanding is that "transsexual" is used there to denote a more extreme subset of "transgender," namely having dysphoria to the extent that one wants to change one's body; and not as an independent category. And while the terminology is confusing, "transsexual" refers only to sex, not sexuality. The reason why they say talking about it could get them "cancelled" is that there has been a movement to retire the word transsexual and to consider all forms of transgender Identity as fundamentally equivalent. Make of that what you will.
Neo-genders I am not a good authority on. I can see why you call the issue a motte and bailey. What I was trying to convey in the previous comment is, I don't fully endorse the bailey of infinitely flexible neo-genders (although at a certain point this becomes a strawman that is only used to discredit genderfluidity), but also one's position on this is mostly irrelevant to whether one accepts the basics of gender dysphoria and transgender/"transsexual" Identity. And in my opinion, it's a mistake to think of it as a motte and bailey, because the people who established this basic theory of transsexuality are not the same people who now advocate radical genderfluidity.
> I do draw the line at paying for medically unnecessary operations
In the case of male -> female conversion, removing the testicles takes two minutes, an alcohol swab, a razor, and a sharp knife. Happens to millions of lambs every year, without the alcohol swab or razor. Should be done as soon as the claim is made.
I think that if these are 2 separate dimensions, it's a mistake that people ended up trying to use the same terminology (e.g. the word "woman") for both of them.
especially when written in the same hebrew / Aramaic lanuage and overly concise style of the real talmud.
since talmud is hard to read, your mind has to switch to "studying talmud mode" to read it and then every time you encounter a joke it's funnier since it feels more unexpected when your mind is in that mode.
I made that one, thank you! Spent over an hour trying to get it to sound like the experience of LSD, but that didn't really work so I settled on this. Fortunately the post was basically written in rhyme so very easy lyrics to work with.
Regarding the alt-right article, the surprising thing is that it's surprising. I mean, some of the tactics are quite advanced, like the idea of creating a chain of respectability where everyone is free to invite those with one more level of radicalism and ignore those above, but otherwise, this just reminds me of being a junior leftist and participating in countless chats, forums and other meetings where people, essentially, talked strategy; how should we spread our ideas, what sort of memes to create? A particular point was how to replicate the Finnish right's successful internet strategy, which at times seemed like it worked because it was spontaneous and individual-driven, but in hindsight probably involved similar planning by someone behind the scenes.
Like the Margaret Mead quote says: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." The problem with conspiracy theories isn't that conspiracies exist, conspiracy is almost the standard form of organization - it's the idea that conspiracies are always successful (they usually aren't), that their successes won't create unexpected backlash or aftereffects (consider, for instance the German Empire's plot to bring a minor radical called Lenin to Russian Empire to sow discord - successful beyond expectations, but ultimately surely not in ways leading to the German liking), or that the conspiracies are, by themselves, *bad*, though of course this alt-right organizatory effort was from my perspective; the world is full of cases where the malign conspiracy of traitors of one era becomes the "time when our brave patriots had to organize in secret to avoid the gaze of the oppressor" of the other.
Yes, in this way it was successful beyond expectations - but Soviet Union regained most of the Russian Empire lands soon enough, and it gave a huge boost to the revolutionary ideology that eventually led to a series of Communist revolution attempts in Germany itself.
It might surprise a lot of Americans or Europeans, but before yesterday, I never fully got what's wrong with gentrification. I mean, isn't it great when old slums get demolished and new, modern houses spring in their place? Since the REAL issue with this is well-known to pretty much anyone who is talking about it, nobody ever bother to explain it, which means outsides like me are left slightly baffled (but not enough to actually ask questions and find the truth). Well, I've been reading a "cozy fantasy" novel called "Cuppe Tea", which finally explained it to me, and made me realize WHY didn't I get it before.
Thing is, I live in Russia, and a lot of people actually own their apartment and homes here - post-Soviet privatization legacy. Which means if government decides your old commie block is going to get demolished to be replaced by a pricey high-rise, you're entitled to a compensation - a new apartment. In Soviet times, and in 90's, your new house could be located anywhere in your city, which often meant people got moved to the farthest outskirts, but these days there is a rule that you have to have an option to get a new home in the same district. Which means that even a poor person almost never gets left without a place to live! There is a growing number of people who rent apartments, who are more vulnerable, but this is still a small enough percentage that gentrification is simply not an issue in Russia (and we have less homeless, because laws do a lot to prevent you from losing the last place to live, even if you're destitute - I guess this policy is a result of climate where you simply freeze to death if you don't have a home).
But I guess there are a lot more renters in the West (it seems so from media, at least), which is why "landlord sells the house from under you to make space for a new high-rise, and you can't afford anything else in this city" is much more of a danger.
To be pedantic, while I'm thankful to this book for explaining the problem to me, I think it uses it as a plot device badly - gentrification requires a surplus of people willing to pay higher rent, which seems HIGHLY unlikely in a city on the farthest boundary of an empire, bordering on a magic disaster zone and flooded with refugees. So the main antagonist's evil plan to drive out refugees by buying up all property in the city and making it impossible for them to pay the rent should, by all logic, end with him losing lots of money without any hope to recover the costs, because he has no chance of finding a better class of renters.
Just guessing here, but I think increasing rent is one possible form of the problem, and "everything in the walking distance from your home becomes too expensive for you to afford" is another form.
You can sell your old apartment and move to a new one, and probably even make some money doing so, but it will be inconvenient, and will break your existing social networks.
Gentrification doesn't always require demolition of structures, i could just be housing being rented to new residents who can afford higher rents.
Either way, there is significant new evidence showing that the cultural concept of gentrification doesn't actually happen. In neighborhoods that are "gentrified", new residents move in but many old residents stay and often benefit from the rise in property values in the area.
I always intuitively thought so, reading discussions on-line (perhaps because I have central district of Moscow as a kind of example - it's a place where oligarchs still share streets with babushkas). A mass momentary eviction might trigger negative outcomes, but in reality this probably almost never happens, as houses are renovated one by one, and residents have time to adjust and e.g. find better jobs in the new businesses. But I haven't seen any hard data either way (not that I sought it).
So in the US, the idea of gentrification is highly tied with race more so than class or economic differences. It almost always refers to rich white people moving to traditionally black neighborhoods. That likely creates a big difference between the US and russia on this topic.
Maybe, though race and economic status must be hard to separate here - I imagine "black neighbourhood" implies "poor". And also I think the term "gentrification" is also used in Europe, where race is less important for now.
I agree with you on both points. I think "gentrification" is such an amorphous, slippery concept that its hard to define it outside of the cultural context in which its used.
#9 Last week in Turkiye a mayoral candidate whose party was considering withdrawing to support the best polling opposition candidate was offered 5 million dollars by the ruling party to stay in the race personally. He got 2.02% and the opposition candidate lost by 0.43%. See election results of that province here: https://secim.ntv.com.tr/hatay-secim-sonuclari
Not sure why others are skeptical, but I have fairly high priors on the IQ thing being valid (I bet most of my mana on it, but didn't have much mana to begin with).
If you asked me "if an dedicated, rational person tried all the proven / suggested techniques to improve IQ over two weeks how much increase would he get", I'd guess high single digits. George3d6's 13 points over two weeks feels at the high end of those margins. If he'd got an increase of 8 IQ points, this would feel barely news-worthy.
My thinking is, get someone under "average" conditions and put them in good conditions for an IQ test (better sleep, in a "relaxed but alert" state) and you'll probably get an instant 3-4 point boost. I'd be surprised if there were nothing on top of that to reliably push you up another 3-4 points.
I often think there's a bigger question here: is academic science bad at throwing a bunch of stuff together and seeing how it turns out? You see people criticising Brian Johnson's anti-aging approach as "unscientific", but what kind of controlled experiment is going to combine 100s of different interventions to achieve an ambitious goal?
I think at least George thinks of this as a permanent IQ boost, though I admit I don't remember the article well enough to remember if he asserted or tested that. If it's not, I agree it's less surprising.
He's frustratingly ambiguous. But my understanding is that it's persistant but not permanent - like improving your cardio-vascular health/ lung capacity or something.
I wonder if it is possible to control for people simply wanting to be smarter, and then trying to do it. Also, what works for one person may not work for everyone. But if you have 100 options for becoming smarter and try five of them, might it not work because you chose ones you like, and want to be smarter?
If IQ 100 is, by definition, average, then your increase is self-limiting, anyway. If everyone did it, you would have the same IQ.
Intelligence is a bunch of intellectual skills. Apart from the whole "getting in good shape with plenty of sleep etc." approach, PRACTICING mental processes which at first seem difficult is, over time, going increase facility at them. So an education in which people are sufficiently motivated to tackle things that seem difficult is going to improve one's facility at a collection of useful mental skills
For at least one concrete example, see "Coping with Disagreement and Being Wrong ".
There's one super easy way to increase your IQ (as measured), and that's to practice doing IQ tests. IQ tests claim to be resistant to practice, but let's face it, the fiftieth time you fold up a cube in your head is easier than the first time you do it.
If you do an IQ test, then you stick blueberries up your nose for five minutes, and then you do another IQ test, then of course it's going to look like sticking blueberries up your nose has increased your IQ.
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender...So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
Are not thought experiments often hypothetical, yet still useful in examining ideas' implications?
Yes but it's tough to get people to challenge their entire political edifice that millions of people base their identity around, based on a thought experiment with no real-world examples.
...How is that surprising? There's 8 billion people on Earth. Even if we were super conservative and said it was 0.1% of the population and only counted developed countries, you would still have a number in the millions. Of course, recent studies in the US and UK seem to indicate that 0.5%-0.6% of the population is transgender, which would imply that there's over a million in the US alone.
Because even 0.1% feels too high even in developed countries. And you can't count every human on Earth; there is no way that 0.1% of Eritreans are running around playing this privileged make-believe game. Of course I could be mistaken about this and often am, but hopefully that answers your condescending first sentence.
It's tough to estimate because of the lizardman constant. I might be considered transgeder because at one point I had my gender identity recorded as "Cisleithanian."
If you have high-school aged kids/brothers/etc ask them how many trans kids there are there. If the true rate was less than .1% and the high school had 500 students, there should statistically not be a single one. If there are more than one, it's probably higher than .1%.
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco - the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin, - from bothering everyone else."
I did not write this, I swear, but I'm strongly inclined to go "I am the female Irish version of Oscar the Grouch and I endorse this message" 😊
"contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles"
Makes your IQ go up anywhere from 7 to 11 points. Uh-huh. Oh, look:
"The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work"
So maybe you are not, in fact, increasing your IQ and the results are fudged, irreproducible, or otherwise dodgy. A less honest person would be packaging this up into Dr Prof PhD's Infallible IQ Boost Method, maybe a side-line of supplements to take as you practice The Method for best results, slap some ChatGPT-generated marketing babble on it, have your 'testimonials' about "I tried The Method and boosted my IQ by ten points! Now I've gotten two promotions, five pay raises, and have four supermodel girlfriends on the go at once! Thanks, Dr Prof PhD!"
Free business model there for you, gents.
Oh, look part deux: "specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars"
Yeah, looks like the, um, "business model" is on!
"My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person"
Well, I'm not so hot on the Aristotle but the Dante? Yes, while it didn't make me a better person (which is not Dante's fault and besides I'm an auto-didact on this, and furthermore the Divine Comedy taught me more about the fundamentals of my faith than the post-Vatican II 70s/80s weaksauce 'Christian doctrine' classes I got in school), I am fully committed to slamming my fists on the desk and demanding "Vita Nuova now!" for all secondary school students. A course of the dolce stil novo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolce_Stil_Novo won't do the little brats any harm and who knows, it may give pleasure and joy to some of 'em.
EDIT: Though I do agree about the snobbery angle to some of the enthusiasm for the Classics Curriculum. And stick some greats of world culture in there besides the Europeans, that's no harm either.
>For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”.
In seriousness, the ACLU has undergone a radical shift over the decades, that greatly sped up in recent years and its primary characterization hasn't been "become more thin-skinned." Instead, this incident is a symptom of their actual shift which has been away from civil libertarianism towards Progressive advocacy which often has a different perspective, and sometimes has different conclusions, as it often promotes limiting individauls' liberties in the name of the Greater (usually racial) good.
Although there's an inherent tension between employers' rights (the right to demand particular behaviors from employees and / or fire them at will) and employees' rights (the right to avoid certain demands and / or keep your job even if your employer wants to fire you), this isn't the operative issue here in light of the the ACLU's decades long shift away from focus on individual liberties for the sake of Progressive racial goals, the relevant factor probably isn't "ACLU no longer tolerates criticism of ACLU," but "ACLU is ready to once again make any individual rights (in this case what they'd generally see as workers' rights) secondary to "Concerns of Racism."
In the late 1960s they condemnded "the exclusive recruitment of members of a minority group" as "no less evil than any other kind of discrimination, and is certainly just as contrary to the spirit of civil liberties." But by the early 1970s, they already supported racial quotas.
#10: and Eisenhower's daughter married Soviet physicist Roald Sagdeev, the former head of Russian Space Research Institute, and college roommate of Mikhail Gorbachev.
I had the pleasure of taking a 6 person seminar with him, he is very enthusiastic about physics and had a lot of stories.
Funnily enough, this was one of the concrete examples that deverted me from my Christianity of a couple of decades. There wasn't anything new under the sun when that holy text was written, but there sure as hell is now.
You have to take in Ecclesiastes with a little bit of ironic distance, given that it's the first written record we have of the hipster ethos in ancient Judea. ("Aqueducts are so mainstream, I still carry water from the river to my house in an earthen jug balanced on my head, it's more authentic. Anyway, you probably haven't heard this yet, but all is vanity.")
Makes me wonder if you could use an LLM to model the ancient world with fewer dimensions. Or if the set of dimensions needed for the same fidelity is the same as we need for the concepts we work with, and us moderns have just done a better job of compounding the same base concepts the ancients were working with.
A fundamental part of an LLM is mapping of tokens (basically words) to vectors with thousands of different dimensions (far more than x,yz), which are kind of like concepts. Similar words will wind up in a similar vector space. And then you can do wild things like start with Joe Biden, subtract America, add France, and end up in the vector space closest to Emmanuel Macron.
> A fundamentalist Christian theme park in Kentucky plans to build a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel.
From Genesis Ch 11
"And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."
#17. Of course the status can be non biological, which is why there are intersex people with more biology in common with their identified gender than their non identified gender who still identify as transgender. Furthermore, nobody in the transgender community would deny someone or question why you identify as such. But here is the thing, being transgender is in great part about the experience of not feeling congruent in your body, and in great part about the transitioning itself. That's why a person may decide not to transition and yet still identify with their opposing biological gender, and it will be up to them to decided if they are trans or not. I believe that to be transgender is to experience the transition part. And yes, anyone could claim that without the experience. This is not unlike people who infiltrate grief groups, in spite not having experienced the type of grief the group is about. Or people who go to AA meetings in spite not having had that specific struggle. What you propose is akin to this, and like with those groups, nobody would kick you out our keep you from doing that, but it would be wrong because simply you don't belong, for you lack the experience.
> George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that Increasing IQ Is Trivial . . .
"Increasing IQ is trivial, also I can't share the method, because people might mess it up". Interesting definition of "trivial".
> Remember how a few years ago people talked about a “short squeeze” on Gamestop stock, Gamestop became a “meme stock” and went up a lot, and then later it went back down?
Gamestop stock, today, is still higher than it's been at any point outside two brief 3-month-long peaks in 2007 and 2014, and 10x higher than it was in August 2020. So I don't know if this is a fully accurate characterization. There has definitely been a decrease since 2021 - a sharp, drastic decrease, at that! - but "back down" implies a return to baseline that hasn't happened yet.
Re: #18: as someone who would 100% live in San Francisco if I could afford it and is spiritually, if not literally, an r/fuckcars poster, I will say that I have made this exact YIMBY argument, albeit with a different ideological valence - I try to convince my city-loving left/liberal friends that we need to build luxury high-rises as a way of warehousing and containing the rich so they don't contaminate other parts of the city. This argument never works. (Not because they're against the idea of this sort of warehousing; it's just that none of them ever accept any argument that ends in the conclusion that it's okay to build expensive housing.)
"everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes"
I love daylight savings time changes and want to keep them. I'd like to go back to the original schedule.
I really like seasonal change. It makes me feel connected to world around me in a way that is difficult to put into words. A Siberian fur trapper probably said it best: "It gives you a sense that a job is being done, even if you aren't the one doing it."
Daylight savings is part of that seasonal variation.
This reply made me realize I’m thinking of adulthood only. Ballparking 20 to 85, if I were forced to quantify what my head is doing in round numbers. (My dad is 86 and going strong. Life expectancy is higher in most comparable countries than in the U.S. and American figures are depressed mostly by car and gun deaths in younger people.) But, imo “middle-aged” isn’t really an arithmetical determination, it’s a subjective cultural vibe that’s shifted later over time — you know how every year or so there’s another twitter thread marveling at how all the middle-aged-looking actors on Cheers were only like 37? I don’t think it makes much sense, in 2024, to hear “middle age” and imagine a 39-year-old, as if that were the central case of a middle-aged person.
(Obviously this way of thinking is still very much a hazard for people around 39 whose brains are looking for a way to beat them up. Which is perhaps many or most such people. 50 sounded inconceivably old to me when I was 40ish. What I can tell 39-year-olds, fwiw, is that it’s not all that different up here, certainly nothing like what I was led to expect in my 20s and 30s; your runway is much longer than you think.)
On George boosting his IQ and then saying "He says a replication attempt will take $300 worth of tech, specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars, and “3-4 hours of effort a day for two weeks”."
Why is he doing an experiment with 13 simultaneous treatments?
How is this "trivial"?
Is he profiting from this $300 worth or tech/thousands from specialist trainers? Is this a scam?
Somewhat against the thrust of Hume quoted in 20, I offer St. Augustine on memory, from Confessions, Book Ten, Chapter VIII:
Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?
A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.
Regarding #22, when I see people say things like "just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things," I know that they don't really understand the system.
Many scientists are mad keen to study interesting things, but there are large and powerful organisations whose sole job is to make it extremely awkward for them to do so.
The AI Pop sounds no worse or more nonsensical than most of what humans play on the radio these days.
In The Interests Of Science, I shall try playing these selections to some teenage humans and report back my findings. To be fair, I think you need an attractive, "quirky but relatable" singer if you really want to make it big, especially since for humans, music seems mostly to be a lifestyle accessory.
>So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
I don't think it's a troll argument at all, even if few people actually did it and it was just something that people could potentially do.
There needs to be a decentralised Wikipedia. I don't like the idea of a single decision-making body making those decisions on behalf of everyone who uses Wikipedia (I.e. basically everyone).
Ian Clarke (the guy behind Freenet) had an idea for one based on his new project (which is confusingly now called "Freenet" while the old Freenet is now called "Hyphanet"). It was based on X's community notes.
#30 - "evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to" - After witnessing two bubbles, Iowa farmland in the 1980s and the stock market bubble of 1987, I formulated the rule that if people in the market said "There is no fundamental limit to how high prices can go." then there's a bubble going on and you should be prepared to exit the market quickly. It predicted the Boston housing bubble of 1990 perfectly and has done well since then.
In this case there isn’t a bubble though. It’s more that they’re all collectively talking about how big this (non-existent) bubble must be as the price continues slowly going down.
This seems related to the stock market concept of "capitulation", which I've seen described as "you can tell you're at the bottom of the market when everyone finally agrees that the market has no bottom". I may well be wrong in memory and/or understanding.
Isn't this the body that just had a bunch of seats replaced in an election, that led to the Chronicle decrying that SF was no longer a progressive city? I was under the impression (admittedly I don't follow this very closely) that many of these new members were pretty YIMBY. Was I wrong about their politics or wrong about it being the Board of Supervisors?
# 7 - This was a good discussion. I mostly sum my takeaway as "it's the remote work and isolated activity, stupid". Community manifests organically around shared activity in shared space. Interest in this topic has spiked since COVID, that's no coincidence. Contriving a community for community's sake is a non-starter.
I expect some overlap in terms of interest with a demographic that has failed to capitalize on prime relationship-building years in school, with extra-curriculars, and early career. I did as well, and incidentally, I was also spending leisure time mindlessly consuming things at the computer and being avoidant before it was cool. If I were now to think to myself "oh shit, I want a community", while working from home and having family obligations, I'd have an uphill battle. Hence the appeal of a fantasy non-committal "I want people to hang with nearby but only when I feel like it, and without the overhead of maintaining friendship, and I don't actually want to do anything taxing, and and..."
I have been a member of a local community for many years - its been around for > 60 years, is thriving, and looks like it will continue for a long while. And yes it is built "around shared activity in shared space". It would be impossible for me to start it up from nothing.
On #7, community: at a recent gathering at my house, a new guest turned to me and asked, “Do people…do this?”
Of course, we do, but much less often than we used to, for several reasons.
Most social life in the past among women and mixed-sex groups was driven by unemployed women, with servants, in their houses. Now, we have many fewer unemployed women, and women who don’t work generally have kids and feel they need to center their lives around the kids. There’s even an attitude out there that’s it’s wrong for mother to have too active a social life, because she shouldn’t drink or she shouldn’t take time and attention away from the kids.
Almost no one has household staff, which makes it a lot harder to clean and prepare and serve food. (I deal with this by serving snacks rather than dinner and relying on convenience foods instead of making my own hors d’oeuvres, but it’s still exhausting.) No servants also means that it’s harder to corral the kids in another room and have an adult-centered gathering.
Housing…is a problem for reasons you’re all familiar with. Either you have an apartment in the city that’s too small for hosting or you have a house in the suburbs and people have to travel 30-60 minutes to get to you.
People also really do not know the etiquette of socializing that was familiar to previous generations. Not RSVPing is the norm. And of the people on my invite list, maybe 1/6 have ever reciprocated. I’m not mad, I get it, but it adds to the burden on the host.
Not knowing the rules contributes to high levels of anxiety for both guests or hosts. You don’t know what to wear or when to show up or if you’re really welcome. Or you invite 20 people and get 4 responses. I think these factors push towards inviting only a few people you’re already close to, instead of taking the initiative to reach out to acquaintances or work friends and injecting new energy into the group.
So…it’s still worth having a social life if you can. I’m glad I overcame the social anxiety to start hosting, but I understand why people don’t.
> Most social life in the past among women and mixed-sex groups was driven by unemployed women, with servants, in their houses.
I don't think women with servants represented a large fraction of the Western demographic at any point. Pre industrial revolution 80% of people worked the land and popped out lots of kids. In the late 20th century I think women did tend to organize gatherings among the middle class, and single-income households were still common.
A lot more women worked than is realised. Obviously the servants were workers, and more often female. And there were more servants than employers. Women also worked in farms, and sometimes as sole proprietors, in service industries, and in some factories - weaving and fashion and so on.
"People also really do not know the etiquette of socializing that was familiar to previous generations. Not RSVPing is the norm."
It may have been part of the past, too. I've seen this around and I have no idea if it's genuine, but check out the invitation to Christopher Tolkien's 21st birthday party:
One way apartment complexes deal with this is they have communal spaces you can reserve where you can entertain.
Some people just do it in their yard, but then you need a yard.
It's interesting the norms from the former USSR countries, where people had to socialize in tiny apartments. O don't know if it's related, but they will often bring an item like a candy box.
I've seen a lot of online complaints of people RSVPing to kids' birthdays and not showing up. I bet that sucks!!
#20 is just a tweet saying - "scientific materialism is true guys! Hume said so!"
Is there anyone at AI labs, or who has done serious thinking on the topic, about the implications for AI assuming non-materialist explanations for consciousness?
If there are, they'd also probably argue that the non-materialist element has nothing to do with most of what we consider "intelligence," seeing as AI still works pretty well without anything resembling consciousness.
Scott wrote, with regard to Robert Whitaker's "Mad in America" organization: "I find MiA really deceptive...". I hope that Scott finds the time to write a full-blown post about MiA and why he thinks it's deceptive. I've been following Whitaker's work for years, and I find that it's consistent with my experience from having worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and it's also consistent with what I've observed of conventional psychiatric practices (two members of my family were harmed by their psychiatric care).
Tangentially, in my discussions with @Eremolalos about @Dan Elton's comment in Open Thread 323 — given that influenza and (especially) measles in addition to COVID have longer-term effects on cognitive health — I'm wondering if the Flynn Effect isn't just due to overall better health in human populations? Fewer viral infections = better cognitive health (and possibly the lowering of our body temps that we've been seeing. Just a wildass hypothesis. I'll leave it up to the student to analyze the data for correlations. ;-)
I thought it was one of the most common explanation for the Flyyn effect. A strong argument was that the increase in height and IQ are correlated, suggesting that an overall "health" has increased over time.
(1) Andrew Sullivan asks "When did we decide we didn’t give a fuck about anyone else in public anymore?"
(2) The sub-head from The New Yorker answers:
"The classical-education movement seeks to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Its emphasis on morality and civics has also primed it for partisan takeover."
Morality and civics (like "don't blast your music in public") are very nice, but the problem is that, well, you know. Partisans. It's too much in the wheelhouse of Christians and conservatives. It would be racist and anti-LGBT to teach kids those kinds of things, and it would be anti-public schooling as well (we can't teach *that* in public schools, even if we can fight for the right of school libraries to have all kinds of works on their shelves, so it's these elite private schools and kooky Christian brainwashing centres who would teach it).
And that's why, Andy, nobody under the age of us old farts was taught to behave in public because the streets are not our living rooms.
It won't just be the young fartlets who will wake me in predawn hours on garbage day with the beeping and the clatter of the garbage trucks. And it will be older farts who will wake me at full light Saturdays and Sundays with the sounds of their leaf blowers and lawn mowers (CURSE THEM!).
But haven't the young fartlets always been pissing off the old farts? — as long as there's been civilization at least. Ahhhh, the eternal cycle of life!
#19, I think a bigger issue than big stereos is loud cars! I see it way more often, and it’ll wake you in the middle of the night. Mufflers should be required.
As an aside, my city (Philly) just elected a mayor who seems really serious about cracking down on these kinds of quality of life crimes.
#26, I don’t think reading the classics makes you a better person directly, but reading old shit and learning history generally make you realize that humans really haven’t changed that much. I think this makes you less neurotic, because you have a point of comparison for the problems of the modern world.
I don't think you're taking your argument far enough. "Ancient bit of primate brain"? Nah, that brain is just a bunch of eukaryotic cells working together to perpetuate their DNA. It's just a fresh coat of paint on the same old stuff the slime molds have been doing for hundreds of millions of years.
(And eukarotic cells are themselves just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other, which has been happening for even longer. But that probably doesn't count as "under the sun," so I'll give the preacher a pass on that one.)
Yes, but individually Eukaryotic cells are not responsible for the racket of leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and, yes, sometimes even chain saws that will start a little before seven tomorrow morning (Saturday).
So the preacher was wrong? There is something new under the sun, even if only on Saturdays? (I knew the idea of the Sabbath had to come from somewhere!)
Is this a cultural difference thing (US vs EU)? Very rarely I see people going around blasting music, and bast majority of people around me think they're assholes. The only time they're semi-acceptable is on a bike where people won't hear you for long.
"Our culture has been inundated by false views of our origins, teaching that we evolved from ape-like ancestors. While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others. For example, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism . . . Our goal in building a Babel attraction at the Ark Encounter is to proclaim mankind’s true history as described in God’s Word. In doing so, we will boldly confront racist and ethnocentric philosophies and practices."
This is a great opportunity for Christian apologists to remind me that I should look the other way at the irrationality of religion because it provides a bulwark against wokeness.
It is admittedly difficult to hold both the dignity of man (as made in the Image of God, regardless of one's demographic background, IQ, or wealth) and the fallenness of man (due to original sin, this again applies across all demographics) in one's philosophy simultaneously. But those who do so avoid falling into lots of dangerous extremes, both wokeness-related and otherwise.
I think this all depends on how you define “religion.” If you limit the scope to, “people with a book they take literally,” you’re taking an implicitly Protestant stance and ignoring, among other things, Catholics telling you that this is crazy.
I think any good definition of religion includes any thinking that includes an explicit value system, which of course includes wokism.
Hey, after God smites mankind with a gazillion new languages for trying to build the tower of Babel again, wokeness will die out for lack of a common word for "intersectionality.". Problem solved!
26. I liked Dante (in translation), not so much for Aristotle. Teaching Latin (or really any foreign language for that matter) strikes me as a massive waste of time. Yes, I know French literature is much better in the original language than in translation, but even in "good" schools the bulk of students haven't read a great deal of English literature and won't be reading French literature once they (don't) master the language. I suspect that much of the motivation is a reluctance to say too explicitly what they're against.
I'm guessing you don't think learning a foreign language is a waste of time, just ineffectively teaching one when most students aren't actually learning. Agreed. What do you mean by your last sentence? Motivation for teaching Latin? What are they (classical educators/Latin teachers) against?
I'mma give that IQ thing a try - don't have Scott's email so consider this a pre-registration, happy to share the details once I confirm them with my group and George.
Funding isn't the only variable in the equation, not is staffing. Political will is important, and there's a chain of governmental agencies that have to work in concert to allow policing to work. If everything is functioning, except that, say, a city prosecutor refuses to prosecute noise violations, it won't work.
I don't live there. I live somewhere else with a similar problem. Fortunately I'm not in the worst part, and it's gotten better, but I now have a crude ability to distinguish gunshots from fireworks. I did not have that ability in 2019.
This is not one of the aspects of my life which I obsessively collect data about. Is it one of yours? If not, how can you tell that things haven't gotten worse and you simply don't notice?
"Invasion Literature was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe."
Not just the early 1900s. In the 1970s, there was "The Third World War" by John Hackett, and 1980 had "Silent Night: The Defeat of NATO." Both were written by former British Army officers who were worried that NATO was vulnerable to Soviet attack. In Hackett's book, the Soviets were stopped after a limited strategic nuclear exchange (but only because NATO had increased spending and readiness in the years before his near-future war). In Joly's book, the Soviets won within a day thanks to complete surprise.
And there were a bunch in the 1980s - Tom Clancy and Harold Coyle come to mind.
Heinlein had one in 1941 where China conquered the United States, and then the United States overthrew them with the power of a omnipowerful magical staff and a guy building an entire religion around it.
Good point. And, if we're not restricting the discussion to books, we could also include Red Dawn. Although I hesitate to admit that I watched it. Honestly, it was only because I had Staff Duty, and my NCO brought a TV and VCR.
Does anyone know a good way of getting stats such as "countries by number of CCTV cameras per area"? (I want to know how many the UK has; I've heard it's bad)
I suspect that what people really want is a community that aggressively screens out people who don’t belong on the same wavelength. If it’s a gym community you need someone to aggressively kick out anyone who skips 2 gym sessions in a row. If it’s a party community you want to immediately kick out anyone who does too many or too few lines of coke on a given night, etc.
"Classical education" is realistically just for filthy-rich members of the aristocracy whose children couldn't fail at life even if they tried, right? Like, this can't possibly be a useful way to structure education in the 21st century. Even when this sort of thing was contemporary, it was primarily for members of the aristocracy.
I went to Hillsdale College (which I do not claim is representative of educational trends in general) and had several classmates there who had gone to classical schools. They generally came from decently well off, but not super-rich, families. Classical education doesn't have to be for everyone to be valuable, but in any event, it's accessible to a lot more families than, say, the top 1%, if they prioritize it.
Classical education is for everyone who has a soul to feed with the timelessly true, good, and beautiful.
Yes, the liberal arts were seen as liberating arts for people who didn't have to work for a living and didn't need pragmatic job training. Nowadays, even if we have to work for a living, many of us have leisure time in which to live like aristocrats and pursue our interests, and want to be educated as more than cogs for a machine.
> Like, this can't possibly be a useful way to structure education in the 21st century.
Why not? As I understand it, the main reasons it doesn't work for mass public schooling are that it tended to require a lower student-teacher ration (approaching 1:1), personal attention from teachers, and coordination with parents. But it seems like a small private school might be able to pull off those things.
The schools I have encountered do have lower ratios then public schools in early elementary. A class of 15-20 has a teacher and an assistant. But this is also the case for other private schools on general, eg Montessori and mature schools.
In retrospect, I think I was focusing on the "aristocratic" aspect, in a way that doesn't apply to the type of school that's actually being discussed. Sorry.
My only commentary on this is a comparison between general state of culture Back Then to Now.
From their 1971 Christmas Special on the BBC, the comedians Morecambe and Wise (who had moved from ITV, the commercial channel). This was broadcasting watched by millions as mass entertainment, and while it may not be the highest of high brow, it's not the lowest either. For the sketch to work, the expectation is that the general audience is sufficiently familiar with who André Previn is and won't turn off in disgust at "ugh, boring old Classical music, what's on the other channels?" (There are also in-jokes and general culture gags e.g. about Edward Heath*):
*"Sir Edward Richard George Heath KG MBE (9 July 1916 – 17 July 2005), commonly known as Ted Heath, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975.
...Heath maintained an interest in classical music as a pianist, organist and orchestral conductor, famously installing a Steinway grand in 10 Downing Street – bought with his £450 Charlemagne Prize money, awarded for his unsuccessful efforts to bring Britain into the EEC in 1963, and chosen on the advice of his friend, the pianist Moura Lympany – and conducting Christmas carol concerts in Broadstairs every year from his teens until old age.
Heath conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, notably at a gala concert at the Royal Festival Hall in November 1971, at which he conducted Sir Edward Elgar's overture Cockaigne (In London Town). He also conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the English Chamber Orchestra, as well as orchestras in Germany and the United States. During his premiership, Heath invited musician friends, such as Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Clifford Curzon and the Amadeus Quartet, to perform either at Chequers or 10 Downing Street."
Respectfully, you're talking out of ignorance. As far as "21st century education", the local public school provides precious little of any kind of education, 21st-century or otherwise, which is not the case for the Classical schools in our area. Nor are the bulk of attendees "artistocarcy' or "filthy rich elites".
My husband and I made the choice to send to a Classical school; a friend sends her kids to another one. There are at least three in my area. All have tuition comparable to similar non-Classical schools: the Catholic ones charge comparable to area Catholic schools, the Protestant one is more expensive but comparable to the local "nature" schools, "self-directed learning" schools, Jewish day school, and cheaper than the really high-end (and largely progressive) private schools the actual "filthy-rich" send their kids to.
My kids' school is small, and I don't know how many, if any, are low-income, but we are not "filthy-rich", and neither are most of the other parents. There is a good mix of military, white collar, blue collar, local business owner parents, one- and two-income families, and a wide range of cars at pickup (from fancy SUVs to well-loved minivans). Many families are stretching their budget to pay for multiple children. And significant financial aid is offered.
Whoever designed our particular school put a lot of thought into it. The religious component gives much more context to the Latin and Greek. But there's a solid phonics-based reading, good math, music, and arts program, a decent science program for early elementary. My child's class knows about ancient civilizations at a level most middle schoolers will never get.
Also whoever designed the classroom was informed by Montessori and modern positive discipline principles. The education is not too rigid, they give the kids more outside time than the public school gets, there's a lot of positive reinforcement. No computers, true, but that's something I can fill in at home.
It's not perfect, here and there are things I'd change, but ultimately I am very, very happy with our choice of school.
Thank you for all the detailed background. And yes, I am very ignorant on the topic, that's why I was asking. Sorry if it came across as blunt.
Superficially it sounded like these schools were prioritizing e.g. latin over math, or Voltaire over physics. But if this is more about cutting out the ham-fisted modern indoctrination in favor of higher-quality traditional indoctrination, that sounds like a good trade.
The movement is broad. It's very easy to be a half-heated homeschooler and do "classical" by just buying some materials and not really doing them at home.
And Classical by itself doesn't really have much to say in terms of modern STEM, so I'm sure the experiences can vary. However, in an environment where the value proposition of the mainstream has deteriorated since I went to school; and given what I've seen of such schools (especially compared to academic offerings of public and even some other private schools), they acquit themselves very well.
I should also say that a lot of "Classical" homeschoolers participate and teach in coops/tutorials then can be pretty good hybrid teaching models as well.
I was email bombed in 2021 after I wrote a piece about my bipolar medications, just a sudden avalanche of really nasty emails about how I'm a sheep letting Big Pharma wreck my body, and I'm about 90% sure it was organized on Mad in America's forums
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
I'm using every brain cell in my body to try and interpret this statement charitably, but I really cannot come up with any explanation other than, "Whoever wrote this does not understand the theory of evolution."
You don't even have to understand evolution to see the problem with this claim. Saying that some races are more closely related to apes than others is like saying some of your grandchildren are more closely related to you than others.
"some of your grandchildren are more closely related to you than others."
Genetically that's actually true! Grandchildren inherit 20-30% of their genetics from each grandparent.
In the same way it might be true that some races are slightly more genetically similar to some species of ape even if they're genealogically related the same way.
My understanding of why there's a genetic spread like that at the grandparent level is that it has to do with the combinatorics of choosing the chromosomes. I have 23 chromosome pairs, each containing a chromosome from mom and a chromosome from dad. One chromosome from each pair is chosen randomly and placed in a new genome when I produce a daughter, so the fraction of those chromosomes that come from my mother will follow a binomial distribution rather than a fixed 50% (in fact, since 23 is odd, it will never be exactly 50%).
But the compounding genetic differences between humans and their ape descendants stems from mutations in the genome, and the null hypothesis would be that those mutations occur uniformly between each base pair over evolutionary time scales.
I think the steelman take would go something like this: the least common ancestor of all humans will be more similar to other modern apes than current living humans. When human populations began to spread out, some populations of humans mutated more of those genes than others, and thus some races carry less genetic similarity to modern apes than other races. Which probably is technically correct, but my guess would be that Homo sapiens have existed for long enough that each population will have mutated basically the same fraction of those genes.
It is true that some races have more Neanderthal genes than others, though, and that's not all that far off.
I would still find the original statement wrong, but it's not that hard to take it somewhat charitably and certainly not the most difficult and bizarre accusation of racism.
Eh, while I suppose technically Neanderthals are a different ape species from Homo sapiens (insofar as you can tell objectively what is a "different species"), in comparison with living non-human apes they are basically just humans.
That's literally true on a global level, single-celled organisms are objectively closer to the way of life of their forefathers (foremothers? fore-ancestors-of-undefined-gender?) than multi-cellular life. Life that doesn't breath Oxygen (Anaerobic) is objectively more "authentic" and closer to the origin of life than Aerobic life.
They are still not more closely related, though. If Joe lives on Earth, and his elder son Mark stays on Earth while his younger son Frank moves to the new colony on Venus, Mark certainly shares more of his lifestyle with Joe than Frank does, but the degree of relation is exactly the same, 50%. Besides, the theory of evolution certainly does not predict that some human populations should retain the same lifestyle as Miocene apes.
Let's take "more closely related to" non-literally and simply let it mean "more similar to". If evolution is capable of producing two groups as intellectual unequal as chimps and humans over the course of a few million years after diverging from their last common ancestor, it would be very surprising if all human groups (who diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago) were themselves intellectually equal.
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco [...] from bothering everyone else."
Huh, I once made exactly the same point about Los Angeles. I propose walling off California entirely.
The New Yorker article was surprisingly complimentary of Classical learning, given its lens.
(EDIT: the article itself is not very critical, but the New Yorker in general u expect to have a progressive lens.)
But having interacted with schools like this - they teach at a high level and offer a very interdisciplinary humanities education, rather than being stupid rote learning.
I'm really upset Diane Ravitch, whose book "Language Police" is brilliant , thinks it's so evil.
Well like for example the article has to make a dig at the largely Christian homeschoolers and "classical" private schools who use the curriculum as"weaponizing" the model.
I edited my post. I reread the article and it itself doesn't seem that critical, but rather quotes different experts for a balanced view.
I do stand by my pleasant surprise that in a publication like the New Yorker, which is generally left-wing, the Classical Model is getting such a positive coverage.
"The Tunnel Thru the Air, Or, Looking Back from 1940 is a science fiction novel written by market forecaster William Delbert Gann in 1927. In the Foreword, Gann hinted that this book is more than just a novel because it "contains a valuable secret, clothed in veiled language. Some will find it the first time they read it, others will see it in the second reading, but the greatest number will find the hidden secret when they read it the third time." Some traders believe Gann has encoded some techniques of financial astrology into this book."
Did anyone ever discover the valuable secret? Could we be the first to do it? How sure are we that there isn't a hidden society of expert traders who have all read the same obscure 1920s science fiction novel three times?
> Re #18: "...and growing consensus that building more houses has to be part of the solution..."
Where is this consensus that we need more housing coming from? San Francisco ranks among the top 10 major metro areas in the number of *surplus* housing units (per DeedClaim). Comparing the median price of 2 bdr condos (per Redfin), it doesn't look like the per capita availability of housing units affects pricing. The problem with SF is that there's a shortage of cheap housing. The only way you get that is if you build subsidized housing like the UK's council flats.
And if you think that building more units will significantly reduce prices... According to DeedClaim, SF has eighteen thousand surplus units. How many more surplus units would SF have to build to bring prices down to Chicago's levels? Twenty thousand more? Forty thousand more?
Rank, City - Population - surplus units - surplus per capita - median price
#1 New Yor - 8,336,000 - 66,755 - 0.008 - $1,650,000
#3 Los Angeles - ,822,000 - 18,514 - 0.005 - $1,190,000
#2 Chicago - 2,665,000 - 20,812 - 0.008 - $365,000
#8 San Francisco - 808,437 - 18,514 - 0.007 - $1,280,000
1. Your link mentions North Carolina. Raleigh and Charlotte are in the top five cities with the *lowest* housing inventory. Why aren't 2 bdr condos in the those cities selling at prices higher than San Francisco? The median price for 2 bdr condo in Charlotte is $324K (roughly in the ballpark with Chicago, which has the 3rd *largest* housing surplus) and $459K in Raleigh. And if we look at units available per population, Charlotte has half the available housing inventory that Raleigh has (Charlotte is 0.0014 vs Raleigh 0.0028). Why are the prices in Raleigh higher?
2. Unlike North Carolina's metro areas we have a *surplus* of housing in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Per capita, Los Angeles has 2x the available housing units that Raleigh does. And SF has almost 3x more than Raleigh! How much more housing would we need to build to move the needle so prices drop significantly?
3. Moreover, the population of SF has been dropping, and SF now has the population it had in 1990. In today's dollars, the median price of a home in SF in 1990 would be $665K. But it's almost 2x that now ($1.25 million). Why aren't housing prices dropping with fewer people and more housing available?
It looks to me like (a) housing prices are sticky, and (b) housing prices are regionally sticky. And the truisms of Econ 101 are proved wrong by these facts (at least when it comes to housing prices).
I look forward to a detailed and reasoned rebuttal from you. ;-)
That’s good workings out. It has to be related to wages then. IT workers on $200k a year entry level per person (double per couple) is going to push up prices.
Yes. Vert true. But I think it's also related to two other things — the stickiness of locality (since we don't have teleporters we can't live, work, and play at distant localities without the investment of travel time). And the high-value industries which generate a lot of capital — and which tend to cluster in urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (or Tokyo, London, etc.) — command higher salaries than areas with less economic activity. So there are clusters of buyers and sellers involved in local markets which restricts the overall size of the market space. Likewise, the rules of the housing market restrict the fluidity of transactions. For instance, my selling agent will use comps to set the price of my property, and the buying agent will look also look at the comps when they make their offer. So, pricing is dependent on the prices of the housing units used for comps. That will tend to move prices upward, and it would tend to inhibit a downward drift in prices unless there's a strong economic shock. Also, at least in the US, house sales are functionally a blind auction where the buyers don't have much insight into the offers from other buyers. To win a bid they have to offer more than they think other buyers will offer. The lack of complete information on the part of buyers would also tend to move prices upward.
Ummm. That $665K is what a house cost in 1990 in today's dollars (taking into account inflation). In 1990 dollars it would be approx $250K. So the price of housing has grown at twice the rate of inflation even though there are more housing units available now than there were in 1990.
But everyone knows the solution is to build more houses! If we build the price will go down!
It reduces price, all other things held equal. But if the supply increase is a result of a trend that increases prices by more than the additional supply reduces them, then what we would see on the ground is an increase in supply coupled with an increase in price, right?
For example, neighborhood gentrification seems to follow this pattern. A neighborhood becomes more desirable, so more people want to move there, so prices go up. Developers see this, and react by building housing that sells for what they think the price will be when it's complete. The result is that people in the neighborhood see housing prices rising, and new housing being built, which sells at higher prices and not lower prices. (Meanwhile, some other neighborhood or city is becoming blighted and emptying out, with lots of cheap housing that no one wants to live in because the only people living there are the ones who can't afford anything better.)
Econ 101 is no more useful for understanding complex socioeconomic systems than Electronics 101 for designing, for example, a battery management system.
They kind of do. Initially, charging a battery results in a linear increase in the amount of energy you can usefully extract from the battery later. But that does eventually taper off and reach a maximum, and trying to charge it past the maximum results in a precipitous decline in the useful energy content of the battery.
The Econ 101 version is much worse in that it tries to tell you that there's a smooth decline in tax revenue beyond the peak, such that you can notice the trend and dial back the tax rate. In reality, it's a Laffer Cliff, and if you aren't careful you can see your tax revenues decline as precipitously and irreversibly as a lithium battery overcharge anomaly.
It seems like there can be places where the decline isn't a cliff. Clearly, at some point, you've basically banned making money, and that's going to just end with everyone starving in the dark. But long before that, I think you can have situations where raising taxes by X% causes a drop in total taxable income of more than X%. Where I'd expect this to happen is when there is a lot of economic activity going on that's just barely worth doing, and raising the taxes a little bit makes it just barely not worth doing.
Good question. It seems to be a real estate legal service. But this data is evidently available from the US Census Bureau. Kevin Drum did a nice graph on California housing inventory over time...
> conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes
Genuinely thought it was just Congressman Jonah Ryan who wanted it. And then he was removed from the ballot to be replaced by Ezra Kane and that was the end of that.
30. So I had a look at the Gamestop stock price chart (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME) and it shows that the price rose rapidly from $1 to $80 in 2021 January, and then slowly ramped down to around $10 today. What's the deal with that? It doesn't seem to make sense under the short squeeze hypothesis, but also not under the hypothesis that the original $1 price was rational.
There are two reasons the stock didn't immediately crash.
First, the company legitimately became more valuable around the time of the squeeze. Before the squeeze, the company got authorization to do a share offering. That offering happened at the inflated share prices, meaning Gamestop was able get ~$1 billion. When the stock was trading for ~$1, there was legitimate belief the company was on the path to bankruptcy. Gamestop was effectively handed $1 billion out of thin air to clear their debts and invest. Overnight the company was given a second chance. Additionally, the founder of Chewy became Gamestop's Chairman. Gamestop starting spending a lot of time/money/effort on pivoting the business, first to ecommerce, then to NFTs. Neither of these ventures worked out, but for a time it looked like there was a chance Gamestop had a future.
Second, "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine". Right now, you have many retail investors who believe the stock is going to infinity (literally - there are entire "Due Diligences" about an "Infinity Squeeze"). On the other hand, you have a ton of institutional investors who believe the stock isn't worth much more than the company's cash on hand (~$3 per share). The price is meeting somewhere in the middle. As retail loses interest/confidence, the stock is slowly sliding towards the institutional valuations.
The more conservative of my circle send their kids to one of them there classical academies; 3 boys and 2 girls.
Over a couple years, they failed to teach any of them to read at an age appropriate level (remediated by giving them books they were interested in reading) and catastrophically failed to teach them math ( can't multiply fractions / rely on memorizing tables for multiplication/ don't know what an exponent is, etc.)
They all stayed with the school for culture war reasons, of course.
I imagine the bad type of this school mainly exists as a kinda of liminal statue avatar 'don't want my kids corrupted by woke concepts like the differential'; and if there is a good type it is run by autists for autists.
But if you are sending your kids to a 'classical academy' and you give a shit about them learning anything, you better hope it's run by people with a weirdly intense interest in Sophocles rather than a culture warrior that wants to retvrn.
The classical academies in my area appear to be at a high level. My own child goes to one and I am quite pleased, certainly as compared to the local public schools, and my friend, who sends hers to another one of a different denomination.
There is always room for improvement but our particular school does a thorough study of phonics, focuses on ancient civilisations from K, cursive, has a solid math program picked out out, and good arts program.
Eta : Kids coming from public school to either often have to repeat a grade to catch up.
Obviously this quality level is not inherently to the Classical Model, and most of the credit goes to the school administration and teachers.... But I've been very pleased with the education so far.
A miserable gaping wound in existence where it's too built up to be the country and not built up enough to be a city; full of people who will take the final exist the very instant they run out of their off prescription opiates. A giant spiritual Chipotle(tm), completely devoid of anything of value which suckles on the tax money teat of the urb while crying and moaning about services.
tldr: Pick one! Live in the human ant hive or the woods; and quit trying to turn MY patch of woods into fucking tract homes so you can destroy anything worthwhile and then commute to the place you 'left' from.
The superstonk people are fascinating. They are hilariously wrong about almost everything. And I still don't get their weird hate boner for short sellers. If anything they generally will find frauds and if the company is not a fraud it provides a termporary chance to get in cheaper for long term investors. Oh and most hedge funds are long only, or mostly long only. Hating the shorts with this much passion or thinking they are some kind of proxy for the elites is completely irrational.
Keith Gill really played it perfectly too. Went long, stuck up for the longs, made a shit ton of money, then dissappeared of the scene completely probably cashing out near the top for multi million $. Accidently starting a cult/religion in the process.
If he would have stuck around, people would probably have turned on him.
#7 the sad thing about communities is that if they happen organically, we usually accept what we get and appreciate stoically that it could have been much worse, but if we try to create them on purpose, nothing feels good enough and the perfect becomes the enemy of good.
I notice it myself: when I interact with our neighbors or with parents of my kids' classmates, I am very happy that they are all generally highly intelligent and nice people. But when I imagine a "community" that I would like to have around me, my criteria become much stronger, I basically imagine a LW/ACX meetup, which unfortunately is unrealistic without moving to a different country. Even if, realistically, I would probably be much happier if I had more social interactions with the people who currently are around me.
Another thing is that community that exists explicitly for the purpose of being a generic community, is weird, and easily becomes a magnet for people with lower social skills. (It is not necessarily a problem with having a few of those; the problem is when they become a majority.) Basically, look at Mensa. There needs to be at least a pretext of "we meet in order to do X together", where X could perhaps be improving the neighborhood, or preparing some fun for the kids. And then it can evolve to 1 hour of doing X together followed by 3 hours of just relaxing and talking.
Huh, that almost feels like the "Schrödinger theory of morality". As long as we don't try to intentionally alter it, imperfections are fine, but once we start acting on it, we feel a desire to make it perfect. I've seen this dynamic before, but never really brought it up to conscious notice.
People sometimes ask if gay men can become Buddhist monks. My understanding is that the Vinaya, the monastic code, refers to actual behavior and not metaphysical inner essences when saying that monks are not allowed to have sex.
On the other hand, we have a western idea that a gay man is still gay even if they dont have sex with anyone.
And then the sociologists gave us "men who havre sex with men" .. without, necessarily, being gay.
it would seem only a short step from that to lesbians who only have sex with men,
Re. "How The Alt-Right Won", it sounds like the far "right" and the far "left" have identical strategies. Which of course we all should have known since about 1917, when the term "right wing" politics was first used. At that time it meant the moderate wing of the communist party, which wanted to make peace with Germany, and evolved into Leninism and Nazism. (The left wing was the communists who wanted to keep fighting WW1 but turn it into revolutionary war like Napoleon's.)
The left and right have always been basically the same thing IMHO. Both right and left want to unmake the Enlightenment changes that ended feudalism, which is why both always create feudalist states. Until lately I could distinguish between them by saying the right was based on racial hate and the left on class hate, but now both are based on racial hatred. Now I suppose the original distinction applies again: the left is that branch of radical revolutionaries who want to export the revolution internationally and build a world government, while the right is that branch which wants revolution only nationally.
How do any of you distinguish theoretically between left and right?
The left promotes the idea of equality, with the only accepted forms of inequality being those that promote leftism.
The right promotes the idea of value realism, that things like human nature and hierarchies are not socially constructed, but inevitable.
This distinction was first mentioned, as far as I understand, during the French Revolution, so it predates and informs communism.
I agree that both oppose the status quo, but I think this is for very different reasons. The best analogy for our status quo is, I think, the constitution of 1791 in the French Revolution. It was opposed by both the left and the right for different reasons. I think Zhou Enlai was right and the end result of the French Revolution is still “too soon to tell”, as, IMO, it’s still playing out today in the west.
That's commonly claimed, and it's true that the Jacobins sat on the left side in the National Assembly. But that isn't where our use of "right wing" came from. The phrase never appeared in English before the 1920s, except when used to describe the movements of armies or the wings of birds. I discovered that last December when I checked Google Books for all occurrences in their data of those terms, and traced the use of the terms from their origins in the Russian communist party during WW1 (I didn't see those directly, since they were in Russian, but later works referred back to them), thru the British labor unions in the 1920s (who got the term from their association with Russian & then Soviet communists), and to America. The phrase "right wing socialist" was still more common than "right wing conservative" until 1976. Funny how quickly that history has been erased.
Interesting, if true. It seems odd that it appears in the French Revolution and then not in English for more than 100 years. Probably liberal and conservative was enough in Britain to convey the idea.
It's likely that the Russians took the term from the French Revolution, so I shouldn't have said it was unrelated. In the French National Assembly, the royalists were on the right, so the right wing was the conservative wing. So that is probably farther back in the etymology.
But also, I checked just now, and the first legit use of "left Hegelian" I found was in 1853, in /Infidelity: its aspects, causes, and agencies: being the Prize Essay of the British Organization of the Evangelical Alliance/ by Thomas PEARSON (of Eyemouth, N.B.), p. 378: "Feuerbach and Gruen, who are of the extreme left Hegelian party , are the great teachers of humanism- a system which finds every thing in man , which ignores all motive power but the human will , and which is as intolerant of the existence of religion as of private property."
Pearson assumes that the term needs no explanation, so it must have been in common usage by 1853. Here the distinction is between the religious right Hegelians (which will later include Nazis) and the "atheist" left Hegelians (including Marx). That lines up more with the French Revolutionary usage, and maybe with apxhard's comments about left = social constructivist, right = philosophical "realist". (I say "maybe" because the Nazis had a realist doctrine about the Essential Nature of the German race, but their final arbiter of true and false wasn't the external world, but their own inner convictions. That is in practice social constructivism, because its practitioners assume the world would conform to their desires, not to empirical data.)
The first use I found of "right Hegelian" was, surprisingly, in 1880, in Boston Monday lectures, Volume 3, p. 9, by Joseph Cook: "philosophy in our age appears to be dividing itself between theists and anti-theists ; between those who yet believe in a personal God and those who drop down into materialism and pessimism and intellectual despair. Here, for instance, is pantheism, which a few years ago in Germany was like the waterspout, surrounded with vapour. We knew not whether there was any spout at all there ; nor whether there was anything firm in the cloud. The vapour has cleared away, and philosophy of the right Hegelian wing has lifted itself out of the clutches of mere airy speculations . There is a system of thought now in Germany called concrete theism ; and there is another system , called pessimism , which has dropped down into pure materialism. The doctrine of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann is that this is the worst of all worlds ; or, if it is not the worsst, then it is so bad that it would have been better if it had never been created, and that the supreme aspiration of the human race must be for extinction."
I can't tell from that passage which he's calling the right Hegelians: the theists, or the materialists. If it's the same usage, he must mean the right Hegelians are the theists.
I checked Google's German book database for the terms Linkshegelianer & Rechtshegelianer, which its first instances of are in 1877 and 1893. So I think Google's database isn't very complete for the 19th century, and is less-complete in German than in English. Maybe a database of newspapers could date these terms earlier.
You have researched this more thoroughly than my whimsical observation that seems super-obvious but no leftists ever want to accept: What does the "zi" in "Nazi" stand for?
"the common name in English for National Socialism." The Nazis were Socialists.
You can even find amusing videos of guys reading quotes from Mein Kampf to college students who nod vigorously at the righteousness of it all.
> 2. In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen. So I was surprised to learn that ...
> 24: How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. ... I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working.
@Scott: In cases like these, where you realize that what you believed was incorrect, do you update your epistemology (ie: how you go about forming your beliefs)? If so, how? If not, why not? Perhaps your prior on the truthfulness of conventional wisdom within your circles might be too high...
Hume’s tweet lines up with both Catholic and Hindu theological arguments for a soul that goes beyond the material world. Catholics argued we have souls because we can perceive “universals” such as, the idea of a triangle, which applies to _all_ triangles rather than particular ones. Sadghuru (I’m guessing based on the Vedas) argues that our minds are just an accumulation of sense data, but that we can do things by means of our energy body that cannot be explained by mere accumulation of data. So both Catholics and Hindus independently came to the conclusion that humans do things which cannot be accomplished merely by accumulating a bunch of impressions.
Given LLM’s, these now seem to be testable claims! Try asking an LLM to refactor two code bases to extract our common methods, and you’ll see they are terrible at even very simple cases. I’ve also found ways to ask the LLM questions about situations which clearly involve triangles, but so long as I don’t use language line “points” and “lines”, the LLM’s whiff and make absurd claims about the geometry of right triangles.
A LLM is processing text data only, maybe if the model was also processing other sensory data related to triangles it would be able to make correct inferences about geometry?
There's a bit of a stretch from "LLMs cannot handle the idea of triangles well" to "handing abstract ideas requires an immaterial soul".
FWIW, ancient Hindus and Buddhists were positively obsessed with universals too, and it has carried on to current-day monastic Tibetan Buddhism. A guy called Georges Dreyfus wrote whole books about that.
You’re making the stretch backwards. The prediction that accumulated impressions (e.g LLM’s) could not handle the idea of triangles was made hundreds of years ago, in different cultures. It simply took a millennium or so for the engineering technology to give us evidence either way.
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
No, human generations are approximately thirty years long whether you're Amish or an excessively stuffy secular atheist. Being that Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve both lived around 100-300kya, well after the hominids split off from the other apes, all groups are ~equally related to apes.
If your argument against permanent DST is about danger to kids walking to school, I have some news for you about how the 2020s differ from the 1970s.
Also: My high school started at 7:30, so for much of the year it was dark anyway when I got on the bus, and most days I had after school things that ran until 4 or 5, so in winter it was dark when I went home too.
Carbondale, Illinois looks like the best bet if you're driving from Georgia. Indianapolis is probably best if you're flying, but I have no idea if flights are still available.
I increased my IQ once, by 28 points, without too much effort. IQ is, by definition, ability to do IQ tests, and I did one from a book of IQ tests (Check Your Own IQ, by Hans Eysenck, to be precise). Two days later I did another test from the same book and, because i was familiar with the questions and had worked out strategies for getting the right answers, got a score 28 points higher.
I suspect most people could increase their IQs by doing lots of IQ tests.
GWAS will be consigned to the dustbin of science in the next few years, and we’ll all be slightly embarrassed we spent so much time talked about them.
GWAS are like trying to categorize books (genomes) based on statistics about word (SNP) usage. Makes sense if you can’t read, but we CAN read DNA. With the AI solution of protein folding, we have all the tools now to sequence whole genomes, identify impactful differences in DNA that result in altered protein expression/function, and predict consequences for enzyme pathways.
This kind of personalized genome “reading” will reveal the actual causes of diseases like schizophrenia. Instead of arguing about useless GWAS r-value correlations, we will have clinically-meaningful understanding about what is going wrong - and maybe how to treat it.
Protein only represent a very small part of physiological function and regulation. Human has ca. 20000 protein coding genes, just as much as C.elegans do. The difference lies in the genomic part. Plus, for the > 30% of intrinsically disordered region in proteome, there's no good and easy way to do function study yet, because it supposed to not have any stable structure.
>I don’t know how else to make public places livable for people with noise sensitivity.
>I rarely go out any more without earplugs and headphones on,
Seems like you know one method?
I also have sensory sensitivities that make it hard to do a lot of things in public, and I would be happy to find people making reasonable accommodations of their own accord and am happy to publicize the need for them, but I wouldn't want the government forcing people to cater to me to such an extent.
> When our descendants ask why they’re stuck speaking 4,900 fractal hyper-languages, we’re going to have the most embarrassing possible explanation.
Maybe we should be more worried about the massive project to build a machine god by bringing together all human language in a nuclear powered datacenter.
Regarding 19, complaints about noise have unfortunately been subsumed into a larger culture war. The more likely criticism of Sullivan isn't that he's old, but that he's racist or bigoted. This 2022 Atlantic article is a great example of what I mean:
It's paywalled, but the author characterizes her neighborhood noise as part of the culture. In her framing, it's Andrew Sullivan is asking to gentrify her community by drastically changing the culture, which doesn't view loud noises as disrespectful. It'd be like a Finn going to Italy and complaining that no one respects his personal space. Sullivan quotes a few people saying that they believe others won't mind listening to a tinny bluetooth, but he doesn't seem to believe them. I don't think this is necessarily self-centeredness, but just two mutually-exclusive norms clashing.
Also, I don't think Sullivan really appreciates how racialized this conflict is in American discourse. A conflict over a boom box was a major plot point in Do The Right Thing. That Atlantic author would read Sullivan's complaint and accuse him of wanting to kill Radio Raheem.
For number 17, I think you’re missing what the “annoying troll argument” is actually about. The “so why can’t I (a woman) identify as a transwoman?” line isn’t an argument “against transgender”: it’s an argument against the people who have gone so far as to claim that *sex* (not gender) is socially constructed, that sex doesn’t actually matter *for anything*, that male people who identify as women are in fact female, that there are no differences between “trans women” and any other women (“just like there’s no difference between black women and women” is the standard line), that male people who ‘transitition’ become female and start getting periods, and that sex (not gender) is a meaningless thing that is “assigned at birth” for everyone.
If you haven’t tried to reason with such people, or at least provide some response so that the normies making actual decisions about policy can see how ridiculous this is, and if you haven’t ever had to explain to a child that someone writing a jokey line about “actually humans have four sexes” once in a scientific article doesn’t mean ‘science’ doesn’t agree that humans have two sexes nor does the existence of clownfish mean that the technology exists for humans to actually change sex, and you haven’t tried to explain who should get invites for cervical smears and who should get invites for prostate exams (and that our medical records should have some way of spotting which group you’re in), then you are missing the context of why someone would want to prompt people to acknowledge that there are differences between male and female bodies which remain (and we need to be able to refer to) despite how people identify.
Basically, it’s more to do with the mess around people identifying as intersex (while fewer and fewer people with disorders of sex development identify as intersex) than it is about trying to argue “against transgender”.
One of the Candidates for the upcoming London Mayoral election, one Count Binface, has included in his manifesto that he will replace the Night Czar with a Night Mayor and put their head quarters on Elm Street.
1. There's no such thing as a "Shadow Lord" in British politics. As the text at the link shows, it's Shadow Lord Chancellor, that is, the opposition spokesperson who shadows (speaks in response to) the Lord Chancellor. In any case Lord Chancellor is now an obsolete term; the person holding that formal title is now normally referred to as the Justice Secretary.
10. You didn't know that? I thought it was well-known. Nixon's daughter is called Julie Nixon EIsenhower; how do you think she got the Eisenhower part?
19. My minimal recent experience with public transit is that the playing of loud music has, if anything, gone down over the years.
Re the piece by Katherine Dee, people are getting quite explicit about it. From The Cut:
Waiting for a baby here mostly entails talking. “When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” says Lily later as we curl up on the couch in their Brownstone Brooklyn living room
I would think hanging out with the kind of student who wants to focus on the classics makes you a worse person, not better. The classics held the role that they did for so long because we had zero to very minor progression in human knowledge during that time--they were the peak of knowledge! Now they no longer are. The kind of person who enjoyed studying Aristotle in 1300 would prefer advanced linear algebra and Derek Parfit today.
Speaking of Wikipedia vandalisation, I am surprised that this one was not enclosed in the list:
A Chinese housewife, has neither advanced degree, nor fluent in English or Russian, created >200 interconnected articles with intricate details about falsified aspects of medieval Russian history and was considered a domain expert in the community until busted.
The adverse selection of 'open communities' from the subreddit rings especially true. A single bad apple can genuinely ruin a social gathering. Like I think the ratio might be 20 'good apples' to 1 'bad apple' in terms of canceling them out.
Even a slightly higher prevalence of bad apples in open communities (and I bet it could be much higher) can be totally debilitating.
What happened
Oh I was just like “cool! I got a s/o”- a piece of mine is there!
Oh, I see. I interpretted your comment as Scott getting people to attack you or something. Glad to see you feel that way and I was happy to see you mentioned!
Enjoyed the latest pod with Gio too
Oh not at all!!! I wrote it in my sleep and I realized I mangled the phrasing once you commented 😭
Thank u btw
😂
#26 link appears to be broken
Sorry, fixed.
Another recent/imminent thing in the news you might find interesting: Republicans trying to ban lab-grown meat.
I think that was in a previous links roundup. Glad it's just a few states, I think the only solution is to wait until lab-grown meat is normalized and convenient enough that it feels stupid.
Waiting for things to change until a certain policy will "feel stupid" seems like a political-sociology version of the typical-mind fallacy. At some point, things (will) feel obviously stupid to a certain "bubble 1" (maybe even to a majority). But there is still a relevant minority that thinks the opposite is obviously true, and only stupid bubble-1 members can believe that "no policy" is a sensible option. It is plausible that this develops when bubble 1 is not economically hurt by the policy, but bubble 2 is.
Disagree. In the 1970s, there was an extremely strong movement against in vitro fertilization, and in many cases it seemed poised to win out. Once IVF became a real thing instead of a horror story about "the test tube babies taking over", everyone agreed it was fine and stopped caring. This is a common pattern for lots of new technologies.
I agree with your overall point, but can't help but note that there is currently a major political party that seems pretty determined to ban IVF (or is at least indifferent to IVF being incidentally made illegal).
The Alabama legislature undid that very quickly, at least enough to allow IVF to resume. It seems pretty revealing of the popularity of IVF, even in conservative states?
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1235907160/alabama-lawmakers-pass-ivf-immunity-legislation
>everyone agreed it was fine and stopped caring
Uh....
Trying to understand what your model is. "For lots of new technologies, there is some exogenous, i.e. policy- and discourse-independent technological progress that at some point makes everyone agree that the technology is fine." Maybe, though "everyone" in the US case still means something like 86% for IVF, or at least that's what a googled poll says. Compared to lab meat, IVF has very personal and visible benefit. Meat production has ideological defenders AND vested interests. And I assume even some established technologies or policies can become the object of a culture war, like vaccination. This can also happen if the distribution of economic benefits or costs is not the main driver, as I assume is true for gmo: thrre are two sides that think that the optimal policy is obvious. In the long run, we are all dead and your prediction may be true, but ex ante and in the medium run, it is unclear when and whether it holds.
There was also a strong movement to stop nuclear power, which mostly won.
The obvious difference being that no entrenched interest stood to make billions of dollars from IVF being banned, whereas nuclear power was an actual threat to the bottom line of various energy companies.
While meatpackers, ranchers, and confinement feeding operations are not at the same political power level, they might still be able to fund an effective opposition.
This has worked great for drug legalization so far. Even weed(!) is still illegal in 12 states. It's only been a century since this war on drugs started though; maybe we just need more time?
See comment above. Also, weed has gone from illegal in all 50 states to illegal in only 12 within my lifetime.
Do Republicans like Winston Churchill? He was an early lab-grown meat fan.
I'd love to hear a source for that
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/churchill-bulletin/bulletin-115-jan-2018/no-bull/
To add some context: Churchill was a good friend of Lord Birkenhead, who a year before Churchill's above-linked essay had written an entire book of predictions concerning the world of 2030. Churchill was, to some extent, borrowing ideas from that more ambitious work, which also predicted synthetic meat.
Birkenhead died of cirrhosis of the liver 6 months after the book was published.
https://londonhistorians.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/f-e-smiths-world-in-2030/
For the Manifolders, I have a market for that here: https://manifold.markets/TimothyJohnson5c16/will-at-least-five-us-states-have-a
Recent? https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1617591264819679232.html was over a year ago.
There was certainly strident criticism for a while, but unless I missed the news, they only proposed actual legislation last month.
Year-round Daylight Savings Time was a late 1973 response by Congress to the Energy Crisis. I recall Time Magazine editorializing in 1973 that it was completely obvious we needed year-round DST. But it was miserable in January 1974 and was repealed later that year. In later 1974, Time editorialized that it was an obviously idiotic thing to do. (My faith in the media has never recovered.)
Lots of people today have strong opinions about DST. Interestingly, it's one of the last non-partisan and non-regional issues. Last I checked a few years ago, the leading Senate proponents of getting rid of clock changes are a Republican senator from Florida and a Democratic senator from Washington. It's reminiscent of postwar politics, in which Senators took pride in their idiosyncratic stances on some issues. I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
I believe the season for Daylight Savings Time was extended twice from its original 6 months. One reason you hear mostly bad opinions of the current system is that the advocates of clock changing have pretty much achieved their maximum agenda, with DST now running from early March to early November, which is about the maximum that would be reasonable. You used to hear some people say, "We need to get rid of DST" while others said "We need more DST." But now people who like changing clocks have won all their wishes, so they aren't an organized pressure group anymore, so they now might lose.
If we really want to get rid of clock-changing, we should probably go to 30 minutes of DST year-round. Unfortunately, that would put us off-sync with most major countries, although some big countries like India are not on the hour.
Daylight savings is my favourite issue. "Year round daylight savings" makes you an enlightened progressive. "Abolish daylight savings altogether" makes you an ignorant rube. The fact that both positions are functionally identical doesn't matter.
Wouldn't that just track with the Earlybird/Nightowl divide?
I'm a night owl so my big political issue is maximizing the Twilight Rate time to play golf in the evening through protecting Daylight Savings Time. But, I presume the majority of golfers are early birds, which is why morning tee times are more expensive than afternoon ones.
You have this backwards. Daylight saving == everyone has to get up an hour earlier. DST is for early birds
On the contrary - as a night owl, I love summer time, because it means it's light in the evening when I want to do stuff, rather than in the early morning when I'm still trying to get some fscking sleep. The transition from winter time to summer time is painful, though.
Dunno whether this was a deliberate Easter Egg or not (I'm soo impressed if it was!) but I really like how well "fscking sleep" works - fsck as a minced oath and simultaneously fsck as a metaphor for what the brain is doing during sleep/dreams. Love it!
I'm a night owl in that I want to do things after the sun has set; DST makes me wait an extra hour for the scarce good hours in the summer.
Daylight Savings means that it's darker in the morning and lighter in the evening. As a night owl, darker in the morning is great because sunlight in the morning when I'm sleeping is either wasted or actively unhelpful to sleep, and sunlight in the evening is when you actually have free time to do things outside.
"As a night owl, I like being forced to get up early in the morning."
I continue to be shocked at the number of people who are confused about this. If your body & brain are most comfortable getting up in the dark, or shortly after sunrise, that's fine. But then you aren't a night owl, and you shouldn't be allowed to force your preference on those of us who are.
The world is already structured around early bird preferences. Night owl existence is hard enough without being forced to get up an hour earlier eight months out of the year.
I don't have a political horse in the race. I just want to not have to change my clock ever again.
Ah, that’s where you need an automatic clock. Phones do it for you as well.
I've never owned a watch that changed automatically
Fitbits, Apple Watches, etc do, for obvious reasons.
Unfortunately nobody has thought to update the human circadian cycle to receive time zone updates over the internet.
We are an unhardy generation for sure.
The question is whether the twice a year disruption is worse than the issues daylight savings is meant to avoid. If people were hardier, they'd be fine with both disrupted sleep and going to work/school in the dark, so DST would matter less but whether it's better or worse than sticking to consistent time isn't necessarily affected.
I do not want my microwave or stovetop to be connected to the internet.
Fair enough, but we've got the current time blasting through the airwaves in dozens of ways, so it's baffling to me that functionally no consumer electronics implement a dumb radio receiver to harness that.
https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/33866/cheapest-way-to-synchronise-date-and-time-for-standalone-system
The easy solution is just to move one time zone over every winter. (Might as well move a significant distance south/north while you're at it too and avoid the cold/warm)
I find it absolutely bizarre that so many people believe that clock-changing is a problem AND believe that the solution to the problem is permanent DST.
Putting my cards on the table, I believe it self-evident that we should all admit that the First World War ended over a hundred years ago and that everybody was stupid in 1974, accordingly go back to standard time all the time everywhere, and never speak of clock-changing again outside of middle school history class.
As a clock change advocate I’d end winter time earlier - early November is about equal to early February in terms of daylight.
The 2007 change that extended DST from ending just before Halloween to just after was pretty extreme. I thought it made sense to end DST just before Halloween so kids could trick or treat in the scary dark at 530 PM, but Big Candy lobbied Congress so kids could trick or treat in the sunshine.
When they extended to the November/March dates, I thought the obvious move was to extend again to December/February, and then again to January/January, and then make it year-round.
I don't see how DST for 8 months is more clock-changey than DST for 6 months. If anything, 6 months of DST could be considered peak clock change (it has the highest standard deviation among systems with no more than 1 hour of difference), while expanding DST beyond that is a slight movement in the direction of year-round DST, so less clock-changey.
8 months of DST might sound more clock-changey because the concept of DST is associated with clock change, but 8 months of DST is equivalent to switching to a different main time zone and switching in the opposite direction for 4 months.
The point of clock-changing isn't to change clocks but to optimize our schedules relative to available daylight. The current 8 months of DST pushes clock changing about as far as it can reasonably go without obviously running into diminishing returns.
So nobody is out there advocating for 9 months of DST per year the way there used to be advocates for extending DST from 7 to 8 months, and before then from 6 to 7 months. Clock-changers have won so big over the last couple of generations that they no longer have any reformist enthusiasm left on their side.
Where the diminishing returns happen depends strongly on what latitude you live at.
FWIW, I prefer that everyone use Greenwich/Zulu time, and adjust there schedules so that that makes sense. Alternatively, have 6:00 am be astronomical dawn, and vary it continuously over the year.
There clearly is NO clock setting that's ideal over an entire time zone. Certainly not one with a coarse ratchet. But with internet driven clocks one every cell phone, there doesn't really need to be one. Just always rescale it to GMT when you need to coordinate across time variations.
Really curious about what profession/background you might have wherein you think in NATO timezones but also in 12-hour clock! Are you.... a Merchant Navy sailor? Radiotelegraph operator? World War 1 fighter pilot?
I, personally, use a 24 hour clock (on local time). But when talking to others I generally convert it into AM/PM format.
FWIW, my father was career US Navy, and I program(med) computers. But none of my sibs prefer the 24 hour clock.
I think the entire approach to DST is wrong-headed. Regardless of the time of year, an extra hour of daylight in the evening is welcome. Likewise, an extra hour to sleep in in the morning is also welcome year round. So rather than changing the clocks twice a year, we should do so twice a day: "fall back" from 2am to 1am every morning to get the extra hour to sleep in, and "spring forward" from 2pm to 3pm every afternoon for the extra hour of evening daylight.
Good thinking.
This 24 hour day thing is annoying. I'd like a 25 hour day so I could stay up late and get up early while still getting 9 hours of sleep. I presume that detonating hundreds of nuclear weapons at once could slow the earth's rotation by 4%.
Here's a link about speeding up the Earth's rotation to shorten the day by 0.8 ms in order to get rid of leap seconds. Adding an hour to the day is a 4.5 million times bigger change in the opposite direction, but the same principles should apply.
https://what-if.xkcd.com/26/
No bombs necessary, just live on a ship sailing west.
Tidal braking will do that for us eventually... A nearer(2 million years IIRC) goal is eliminating leap days, with just a 0.068% slowing...
Also the moon is getting further away, which means its orbit is getting slower. I wonder how long until a lunar calendar ends up with exactly 12 months in a year.
Many Thanks! Hmm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_acceleration
gives the slowing of the Moon's orbit as
−25.97 ± 0.05 arcsecond/century^2
(which I think converts to 1.27x10^-23 radians/sec^2)
and we currently have about 12.4 (synodic) months per year.
If I'm getting this right, it would need to slow by about 3%,
from 2.47x10^-6 radians/sec by 3% or 7.4x10^-8 radians/sec
which should take 5.8x10^15 sec or 1.8x10^7 years.
Brilliant!
Just don’t fall back from 4 AM to three. Hard on insomniacs who’ve been watching the clock.
If Daylight Savings Time was a partisan and/or identity politics issue, we'd at least have more intelligent talking points about it. Depending upon which side Trump chose, Hannity or Maddow would be reminding us constantly of the 1974 year-round DST fiasco. But because DST is not partisan, most people with opinions on DST have never heard of or have forgotten 1974.
Here in Ireland/UK (both follow each other for reasons of a shared border and previously a shared political system) it went like this:
(Note BST means British summer time and implies a clock change, and BDST means British double time - reverting to GMT+1 in winter. Ireland post independence has had different acronyms but the same system. )
1916 - BST introduced.
1918 - BST kept. Indicating people liked it.
1941 - BDST introduced
1945 - BDST reverted indicating it wasn’t liked, but BST is chosen not year round GMT.
1968-1971 GMT+1 tried for a while. Reverted to BST because people hated late sunrises in winter (note it was popular at the start and despised at the end).
This British isles are also a good case study as I think it’s the first and longest running example of the clock change experiment.
This means nobody alive has had “normal time” all year around in the British isles but I doubt that would be popular, and in any case it isn’t the preferred option with most if the clock change is to be removed.
It also means the debate about year round GMT+1 is one that also, as Scott indicates in America, lacks any historical references at all.
As someone who understands why the clock change happens and why we need it I’m always amazed that people don’t know about 1968-1971.
I’m not advocating the clock change for other countries though - if you have 10 hours of sunlight in winter summer time all year round would work.
Up here, and it’s grim up north, we only have 8 hours or less at the solstice. That means a natural sunrise should be at 8am, which it is in Greenwich (actually 8:06) . This would be 9:06 am under DST.
Thats maybe not so bad but the geographically minded amongst you would realise that London is to the east and south of most of the two islands, meaning that most will see later sunrises; sunrise would be at 9:25 am in Manchester - which is further north and west - close to 10am in parts of Scotland and the west of Ireland.
So if we do this again, we’re reverting again.
I'm still adjusting to the hour forward this month, as it only happened last week and my internal clock is still running on that time, but it does make sense now that the mornings are getting brighter: keeping the old time would have sunrise around 5-6 am in the morning instead of 6-7 am which makes more subjective sense to me. I want to get up around 7-8 am (subjectively) not 6-7 am when the sun (or at least daylight) is up.
Of course, there's the opposite problem when the clocks go back and it's allegedly 8 am and still dark out, but that's how the seasons change and can't be helped.
The clock going back lightens the morning. For a while. There’s not much we can do with 8 hours in winter though. Something has gotta give.
>Up here, and it’s grim up north, we only have 8 hours or less at the solstice.
Up here in Norway, we only have about 4. And yet even here the Permanent DST Movement is gaining momentum.
> I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
That might be true, but only because the stakes are so low.
I'm still bitter that, after all the rhetoric about everything Donald Trump ever did being irredeemably evil, his sudden turn toward extreme hostility to China divided the Republicans and the Democrats over whether he was being too accommodating or insufficiently belligerent.
Now now, I've definitely seen a couple of grudging acknowledgments from MSM that Biden largely continued Trump's China policies.
I assume that when he took office the debate switched to whether Biden was insufficiently belligerent, or too accommodating.
Actually, there was a fairly prominent example early on where Biden publicly declared he was ready to go to war over Taiwan and his aides quickly walked it back. But attitudes since then have been shifting strongly in the direction of what was supposed to have been a gaffe at the time.
> I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet.
I would love to see a movie where two groups are trying to *Inception* opposite ideas into Trump's mind because there is some high stakes reason why they need half of the country to strongly oppose or support some issue.
Lol
Oh good, I want to say I love daylight savings time. (I live at 43 N latitude.) I love the extra hour in the evening, it means more dog walks, grilling outside and it's great. Permanent DST would stink because getting up in the dark in winter stinks. So an old man tip to enjoying DST. This year I saw the change coming and started setting my alarm clock 15 minutes early. Three days of this and I'm ready to spring ahead. As a warning to politicians everywhere, I'm willing to become a single issue voter on this topic.
Of all the media outlets to have a poorly-informed and inconsistent opinion on the issue, I think this is the most inexcusable.
One thing which was a good idea in the 1970ies and is a stupid idea now is that we should minimize the number of jumps and make the size of the jumps a big round number (within our archaic time keeping system). Today we have computers. Anyone serious about measuring time on Earth is using TAI, so the archaic human timekeeping system can be optimized for human needs.
For a country of a limited latitude (or a US state), it might make sense to always have sunrise at 7:00, and sunset varying from 15:00 (in the winter) to 23:00 (in the summer). This would imply perhaps three minutes of time change per day at the equinoxes, which seems a lot more friendly than a single 1h jump per equinox.
> For a country of a limited latitude (or a US state), it might make sense to always have sunrise at 7:00, and sunset varying from 15:00 (in the winter) to 23:00 (in the summer).
Under the traditional system, sunrise occurs at 6:00, by definition, and sunset occurs at 18:00, also by definition. The duration of one hour changes accordingly.
Why would it make sense to have sunrise 5 hours before noon, and sunset (an average of) 7 hours after noon? Do you not want noon to be the center of the day?
I personally think that having sunlight when waking up is probably helpful for humans. While one could also put sunrise at 6:00, noon seems more arbitrary to the human bio-rhythm to me.
It's all equally arbitrary. There's no difference between calling sunrise "6:00" and calling it "7:00". It will be sunrise either way; you defined the time by reference to the sun. It's just that your numbers are one hour off of the norm for no obvious reason.
"I suppose if Donald Trump ever took a stand on clock-changing, then everybody would line up pro or con him, but I don't think that has happened yet."
He did.
You know who else was in favor of DST? **Hitler** The Nazis imposed DST on most of Europe, but not even they stooped to making it year-round.
Trump is LITERALLY worse than Hitler.
(On the other hand, I did quite like Trump's executive order about architecture.)
My minority/provocative position is: Do away with time zones entirely. Put the whole world on the same time. This would eliminate the difficulty of coordinating schedules across time zones and national borders. Put the whole world on, say GMT. Then local noon in New York would come at 5 pm, with sunset around 11 pm. Sunrise in Singapore would come at 11 pm. If you needed to organize a meeting with your offices in Bengaluru, Singapore, Tokyo, Berlin, and Denver, you wouldn't have to wonder whether you get the time zones right - it would be 10 am for everyone.
Of course, most people would prefer to be active during daylight hours, but this isn't a problem. New Yorkers could get up at noon, and Los Angelinos could have lunch at 8 pm. Or whatever other times they wanted. Just like they can now.
Yes this is clearly correct and I have been beating this drum for years.
Also, there is no reason why a particular business or locality cannot simply adjust their business hours during certain parts of the year. There is no federal mandate that work begins at 0900.
Rare Steve Sailer L.
We the people of Bogota don’t understand all the fuss.
>if I’m understanding this right, the crowd compares two LLMs, rates which one is better, and then they use an equivalent of chess’ Elo system to give each of them a score.
Right. It's also blind—you don't know which model produced which output until after you vote.
I mean, who knows how useful this is as a way of measuring AI capabilities. A model winning a blind A/B test doesn't prove it's smarter or safer or anything we actually care about—surely this also selects for models that flatter the user by sycophantically agreeing with them, for example.
It also penalizes AIs that say "I don't know" vs AIs that write elaborate, convincing hallucinations. Not good—when an AI fails, we want that failure to be as obvious as possible.
But these sorts of leaderboards do capture some of the picture missing from standard benchmarks. There's an incredible difference between Gemini Ultra's reported benchmark scores and the experience of using Gemini Ultra in practice. (I mean that in a bad way.)
Yes. It's also hard for non-experts to correctly evaluate LLMs' knowledge in unfamiliar areas. For example, I've found even leading LLMs to be very poor with topics like investing/trading, yet they can confidently BS to mask these gaps. I think this problem will get worse with time as LLMs improve.
My contribution is the NYT Connections benchmark, which shows a clear performance difference between smaller and larger models (but it's just another data point):
GPT-4 Turbo 31.0
Claude 3 Opus 27.3
Mistral Large 17.7
Mistral Medium 15.3
Gemini Pro 14.2
Cohere Command R 11.1
Qwen1.5-72B-Chat 10.7
DBRX Instruct 132B 7.7
Claude 3 Sonnet 7.6
Platypus2-70B-instruct 5.8
Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1 4.2
GPT-3.5 Turbo 4.2
Llama-2-70b-chat-hf 3.5
Qwen1.5-14B-Chat 3.3
Claude 3 Haiku 2.9
Nous-Hermes-2-Yi-34B 1.5
Could you comment a little more on what you've found about LLMs on investing/trading topics? How do you think about actually good versus BS?
It's a pretty convenient way to test out a bunch of models, too. When I want to try out my "write a non-rhyming poem" prompt, I can just go there and hammer away for a few minutes and get a few dozen model-versions. When I spent an hour or two doing it back in January 2024 or so, I picked up 31 different model-versions. With that, you can see some interesting trends, like GPT-4 versions apparently kept getting worse until quite recently where it suddenly became able to do it frequently. (Qualitatively, it still tends to collapse back into rhyming if you go long enough, but it's a big improvement nevertheless.)
The downside is that it's heavily biased towards the cheap/available models, I think, so you will get like 50 gemini-pro-dev-apis and then just 1 vicuna-13b, so while my raw percentages of success go from 80% with pplx-70b-online to 0% with vicuna-13b, that's also based on 4/5 vs 0/1 samples - so, not exactly accurate estimates...
>With that, you can see some interesting trends, like GPT-4 versions apparently kept getting worse until quite recently where it suddenly became able to do it frequently.
That's interesting. I've noticed that GPT-4 (and sometimes 3.5) can write non-rhyming poetry if prompted to continue a sample of non-rhyming poetry. But it doesn't last long. Soon the rhymes return.
I assume it's RLHF, combined with a general tendency for models to "forget" your original prompt as text swamps their context window. This is obvious if you request a Trurl-style poem where every word starts with S. Initially, GPT4 and Gemini Ultra do OK (only a few mistakes per verse). But if you keep prompting "continue", the poem swiftly degenerates, until the majority of words don't start with S. Here's GPT4 after just three "continues".
"So, through verses vivid and vast,
Symbols sewn into every line,
Savoring moments, none to be the last,
Story of everything, beautifully enshrined."
Here's Gemini Ultra after about 10.
"Salty whispers in the breeze,
Seagrass sways amongst the seas.
Sea anemones gently cling,
Softly sway with ocean's swing."
I haven't tried Claude-3.
What does “non-rhyming poem” tell you? The ability to follow instructions even when those instructions produce uncommon outputs? Checking to make sure the next token doesn’t rhyme with the N-10 token?
It's an interesting case of model capabilities (apparently) degrading. GPT3 could write non-rhyming poetry. But GPT4, trained on 100x more compute, cannot.
The difference is that GPT4 isn't "just" a text completion model. Put simplistically, it tries to follow a set of policies decided by human feedback (RLHF). These humans (thousands of Kenyans paid $2/day) apparently preferred rhyming poetry to non-rhyming poetry, because they trained into GPT4 a strong preference for rhyming poetry.
To the user asking for non-rhyming poetry, this looks bizarre. Like GPT4 is ignoring your requests, or failing to understand you. But it understands just fine. It's just following a rulebook that's invisible to the user. Your request for non-rhyming poetry might as well be "type the n word" to GPT4.
This sounds silly, but it's a vivid case of why RLHF sucks. Your model ends up contorting its output into weird, arbitrary shapes, because of unexpected vagaries in human feedback. There are other, worse problems. Non-rhyming poetry is just an easy one to notice.
> It also penalizes AIs that say "I don't know" vs AIs that write elaborate, convincing hallucinations. Not good—when an AI fails, we want that failure to be as obvious as possible.
One might want to train LLMs to attach an epistemic status to their responses ("Correct: 30%, Major errors: 40%, Minor errors: 20%" or something) and then train them to be well calibrated on that.
That would be great, and AIs are certainly capable of it in principle. (The GPT4 release paper showed that the base model had excellent calibration when judging its own output, until they ruined it with RLHF so it won't say bad words.)
But the problem remains: how do you overcome the tendency of human raters to prefer confident wrongness? If they're asking an AI a question, they likely don't understand the topic well enough to notice mistakes.
If they're asking AI a question in a tool specifically aimed at evaluating AI answers (and clearly marked as such), we should probably assume they either understand what they're doing and ask about a topic they can in fact judge, or are just illiterate period, but, well, that case essentially amounts to random noise.
> the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin
Damn, that's some outgroup homogenization you've got going on there...
I didn't say they're homogenous! Regular prison contains murderers and white-collar criminals; they may have nothing in common except that they need to stay in prison.
This is strawmanning though, most urbanists want nice cities without constant noise and crime (like in every other country), not just "more SF".
(Okay this is an offhand comment in a links post so I'm assuming it wasn't meant to be taken seriously)
Car users would prefer cars that don't get stuck in traffic, don't need parking lots, and never get in accidents, so anyone who complains about existing cars is strawmanning them.
This isn't a fair equivalence. Cities like that commonly exist (most of the major problems are caused by funneling all the existing problem populations into a narrow area, cities don't call them into being), and cars like that don't exist anywhere (because the problems with capacity actually are fundamental properties of cars, not things that happen because of implementation issues).
Trying to steelman this... something like "the problems described are inevitable on large densities of cities/cars but manageable with lower densities, which are the versions the people advocating for them prefer in the tradeoffs".
Which is a defensible position, except that this inevitably leads to "okay all forms of urbanism have tradeoffs and we should figure out how to best manage them", which is just the standard urban yimby position. Except that actually is the urbanist position? I personally don't like suburbs but I don't want to ban them, I want to apportion them by market mechanism (even cities whose densities I'd hold up as a model, like Vienna, have pleasant suburbs that the people who do prefer them can live in - they're just a smaller percentage of people when you don't force it on everyone).
In fairness this also applies to cars - there's a fairly small number of people who either actually want to ban all cars or use "defund the police" style deliberate ambiguity, but most urbanists do accept them as a transportation form that's useful for a lot of people a lot of the time, we just want to price their externalities and have other options in the cases they're suboptimal for.
(I guess this is a little bit of a no true scotsman argument? Except I think I actually am describing the consensus urbanist position here, not a weird hypothetical perfect version of it).
It sounds like we both agree that there should be some areas which are high-density and others that aren't, so what are we arguing about?
Thank you, "cities contain problem populations but building more cities wouldn't necessarily increase this" is the best argument against fighting more cities I've ever heard.
Still, I'm not sure this is entirely the issue. The other problems with cities are:
- Your apartment is always on a major street, so traffic noise problems are your problem
- Your apartment shares walls with lots of other people, so their noise problems are your problem.
- Thousands of people walk down whatever street you're on per day, so their litter/graffiti/etc problems are concentrated and magnified.
- Public transportation forces you together with other people in a confined space you can't leave without any law enforcement officers
- Cities actively make people worse (higher schizophrenia rates, higher lead levels)
If you build twice as many cities, then you expect each city to have at least half the problem population (by density) as the current ones (assuming they redistribute evenly). I think that's still enough that I would be miserable living there, and I'm uncomfortable forcing other people to live in conditions that I would refuse to live in.
I understand that YIMBYs will try to prevent new cities they build from having these problems. But I imagine the residents/governments of existing cities also tried to prevent them from having these problems, and failed. I don't understand why you expect to do so much better.
But there would still be suburbs, even in the YIMBY-est paradise? They would probably be more inconvenient on average to commute from etc., but surely the whole suite of cost-benefits considerations need to be evaluated, especially given that the current situation is obviously comically suboptimal.
Re: City noise, I've lived in both a city apartment and the (semi-urban) suburbs, and I've actually found cities/apartment living to be noticeably quieter? Maybe I just got really lucky. The level of sound-proofing that goes into building design is a sizeable part of it, I think, but also another sizeable part of it I think is just culture. There seems to be a significant portion of the population for whom the idea that noise could be distressing just doesn't compute. And anywhere that portion achieves majority status (and so doesn't have to fear shaming) will quickly devolve into noise hell. In cities that might mean overhearing loud arguments through the walls in the middle of the night or people going around blaring stereos which can be very annoying, but you'd mistaken to think that the lower density of the suburbs wil definitely save you. Rather, that sort of person will just double-down or triple-down and make use of cars and motorcycles with ultra low frequency modified exhaust systems throughout the night, gas-powered leafblowers for hours first thing in the morning, or a small army of dogs that they never walk and leave in the backyard to bark forever as their only form of enrichment. Instead of broadcasting noise for a mere 50-100 feet, they broadcast noise for miles. I actually got into r/fuckcars to a large extent specifically because I felt based on my experience of cities vs suburbs that a more walkable and urban landscape would be generally quieter.
So re the problems with cities - I think they can be mitigated (and also the correlation with density isn't quite that clear - Berkeley is much denser than Phoenix but worse along pretty much all of these metrics except transit dependence).
All that said, I suspect you'd be pretty unhappy living in downtown Vienna too, even if these problems are mild there they'd probably bother you. But Vienna does have very nice quiet suburbs on the edge of town I think someone like you would be happy in? And the thing about transit is that it clears up road space even if you don't use it yourself - it's probably easier to drive from suburban Vienna to downtown than from Berkeley to downtown SF, because the high transit use means there's less traffic despite the more people on the roads.
I think to some degree, car use and wanting to live further apart impose externalities (or just direct costs which our current system forces you to pay). But while I think we should give people the choice to internally pay those costs, I also think quite a lot of people would just happily pay them for their preferences and that's fine.
Funny how you'd love to ban portable radios because they're too noisy, while also professing your love for easily the number one cause of noise in any city, suburb, exurb, you name it: cars. I usually love your newsletters but you've got some major blindspots in certain areas.
I have a lot to quibble with in this thread but I’ll just focus on this: “Your apartment is always on a major street.”
Apartments are concentrated on major streets because zoning codes are designed on the presumption that apartments are noxious, and big noisy roads are noxious, so we should put all the noxious stuff together. But there is nothing impossible about an apartment building on a pleasant, quiet street, and that is in fact not noxious at all.
The problem is that ~99% of the country is either un-inhabited, or car-centric crap, and only ~1% that is walkable urbanism. Because lots of people want to live in walkable urbanism, the prices for those places get bid up. Then poor people who can’t afford a single family home and can’t afford walkable urbanism move into apartment buildings on noxious roads, and confirm the suburbanite NIMBY’s priors about apartments being for “undesirable” people.
The core of the urbanist/YIMBY coalition is that people who want walkable urbanism should get more than 1%. And we should probably build that walkable urbanism in places where the land is most valuable, because housing density would allow more people to access that value (see: the South Bay). The “urbanism” part is ameliorating the downsides of density by making a transportation system that provides lots of transportation OPTIONS, and mitigates against the negative externalities of cars.
Footnote: electric cars address SOME of the noxiousness of cars, but not nearly all. Rolling noise is still very loud at high speeds, especially with the added weight of batteries. To reduce negative externalities of cars in cities, we should have highways AROUND cities, not into them, and urban streets generally need to be designed for lower speeds. That means narrower lanes, sharper corners, raised crosswalks, chicanes, bollards, etc..
I think all of those problems can be mitigated:
- You can build or retrofit apartments to be very noise-resistant.
- Better law enforcement can solve problems with litter, graffiti, and crime on public transit. Easier said than done, of course, but AI surveillance cameras with near-100% street coverage are very close to becoming a reality IMO.
- Crowded public transit is mainly a funding issue. More transit, or surge pricing for existing transit, could mitigate overcrowding.
- Higher lead levels are mostly due to fossil fuel emissions, right? We're working to eliminate those. (EDIT: mostly wrong, see below discussion)
- Not so sure about schizophrenia, lol
You're not wrong about cities containing these downsides. But I imagine it's a lot like cities in the 19th century being overrun with horse poop and sewage - the problems exist, and we should of course tax the negative externalities that come with density, but with better technology and public policy we can eliminate those negative externalities wholesale.
(Car-dependent) suburbs have problems too, often related to cars. Car crashes kill more Americans than murder (even without counting cars hitting pedestrians and cyclists), plus they produce noise and pollution and congestion, and the whole setup is absolutely terrible for kids' ability to develop independence. It's not even clear to me that most NIMBY's even recognize these as problems (except congestion) and they certainly don't seem to have any serious suggestions for mitigating them.
Basically, every kind of development has tradeoffs, and only listing the downsides of the one you personally don't like isn't very convincing. It's fine for you to want to not live in a city, but don't completely strawman YIMBY's with low-quality stuff like "I... am against YIMBYs’ obvious lust for destroying them [suburbs]." See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWsGBRdK2N0
If cities are expensive, this is a sign there should be more of them, like with any price signal.
> The other problems with cities are:
> (1) Your apartment is always on a major street, so traffic noise problems are your problem
> (2) Your apartment shares walls with lots of other people, so their noise problems are your problem.
> (3) Thousands of people walk down whatever street you're on per day, so their litter/graffiti/etc problems are concentrated and magnified.
> (4) Public transportation forces you together with other people in a confined space you can't leave without any law enforcement officers
> (5) Cities actively make people worse (higher schizophrenia rates, higher lead levels)
Most of these are not actually problems with cities. Speaking from my apartment in Shanghai, where they're currently building a subway station right across the street:
(1) I do not experience any traffic noise. Zero. This is a huge contrast to San Francisco, where I don't remember general traffic noise as a big problem, but constant sirens were a huge pain.
(2) I also don't hear any noise from my neighbors. I _do_ hear noise if anyone is hanging out in the stairwell (immediately outside my door), but that's not particularly common.
Years ago, there was a ton of noise in Shanghai from fireworks and firecrackers, but they made that illegal. I still remember watching somebody's random fireworks going off in front of a building that was much taller than the fireworks' trajectory.
(It's possible to get more noise from your neighbors than I do. I have a friend who has complained about her neighbor below playing music with the window open. Note that shared walls aren't an issue in that case; the problem is that they share the same outside. At my parents' home in California, we have the same problem to a greater degree, despite being separated from our music-playing neighbor by dozens of feet.)
(3) The streets are surprisingly clean, far cleaner than local behavior would imply. The Chinese seem to litter a lot; I believe the streets are swept on something like a daily basis. I was just in a public park out in the suburbs that was, sadly, full of trash.
(4) If you're taking the subway at rush hour, sure. You'll be forced together with a bunch of other people in a tightly confined space. In fact, you'll be so tightly confined that you can barely move, with bodies pressing in on you from all sides; I wouldn't worry much about being mugged.
Other relevant concerns: I wouldn't worry about being mugged anyway. This is not a high-crime environment. Even if it was, criminals on the subway have no getaway plan in the same way that you are theoretically unable to get away from them, so if there's any risk of the local authorities punishing criminals, they are unlikely to do much on the subway, where they're pretty much guaranteed to be identified and apprehended.
Speaking of local willingness to punish criminals, there's nothing about the subway that says law enforcement officers aren't present. That's a policy choice.
(5) I hear that Shanghai has notably elevated lead levels. This is unfortunate. But American cities are better in this regard. Again, lead levels are a policy choice.
So you dont like cities. Why dont you just say that instead of condemning people that want something different than you? No one is coming for your suburbs.
Munich doesn't have many of these problems. Have you tried simply building very rich/expensive cities within a welfare state?
A little late to this thread…
For some reason, these discussions often focus on the extremes: we should either build sprawling single-family-only suburbs, or we should turn the built environment into Manhattan. This is probably because of the way online discourse in general gets focused on the extremes, and both NIMBY and YIMBY types can play into this. But this is also exactly the reason why many people are talking about “missing middle housing”.
I agree that Scott raises some legitimate concerns about living in a super-dense area. But these are mostly issues if you’re experiencing Manhattan-style density (most places don’t have ‘thousands of people walking down whatever street you're on per day’).
Especially for families, ultra-dense living can be very difficult. I was recently in Seoul, and I don’t think I would be able to comfortably raise my family there (and perhaps that is somewhat related to the very low birth rates in South Korea).
However, the alternative doesn’t have to be sprawl and non-walkable, car-only suburbs where every house must be a detached single-family unit. Where I live, there are some (very desirable) neighborhoods that have more gentle forms of density and walkability. These neighborhoods have a mix of detached single-family houses, semi-detached units, duplexes, townhouses and rowhouses, low-rise and some mid-rise apartment buildings and condos. There are commercial and mixed-use areas (think apartments above the street-level shops) within easy walking distance. The streets are designed in a grid pattern that makes navigating on foot or via bicycle easier. In most suburbs, small streets, crescents and cul-de-sacs all feed into larger arterial roads that are not pleasant for walking or cycling — a grid provides alternate routes to avoid car traffic. The neighborhoods I’m describing often have good public transit options, but commuting by car is still possible and usually convenient. This is related to the (sometimes unfairly maligned) concept of a 15-minute city.
To a certain extent, the suburb vs. city choice is about personal preferences, and people should be free to choose the option that fits their preferences and lifestyle. But in much of the US, neighborhoods like the ones I described above are made almost impossible because of a mix of zoning and NIMBYism. A lot of neighborhoods enforce only single-family detached housing, and any other form of construction is opposed vociferously. Commercial and residential zoning is strictly separated—good luck opening up a neighborhood coffee shop or hair salon, it’s simply not allowed! Any kind of public transit is opposed (people are often concerned that having a bus stop in their area will cause an increase in the number of ‘undesirables’ in their neighborhood). Taking transit is simply not a (practical) option. Kids or others who do not drive (elderly, people with bad vision, etc.) have to rely on others to chauffeur them from place to place.
I definitely agree that it’s possible for the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction. I wouldn’t want to live in an area where every building is a skyscraper either. But the current equilibrium is pretty extreme: there is only one form of neighborhood that is acceptable to build, and it comes with a lot of downsides. We should try to move away from this, and legalize building other types of neighborhoods too. Give people more choices: if people want to live in single-family-only suburbs, they should be allowed to (paying their share for infrastructure, etc.), but there is a huge unmet demand for neighborhoods that are less car-dependent, less soul-less, more walkable, more amenable to giving kids independence. Let’s allow those too!
Not really a fair analogy. Most urbanists advocate for something like the Netherlands. The Netherlands exists. It's not a hypothetical, it's not pie-in-the-sky. I would suggest that having SF (or North American cities in general) as your central example of a city skews your perspective a bit.
Fine, my comparison group for cars is Norway, where there are only a third as many accidents per vehicle-mile as in the US.
(didn't Milton Friedman have a saying about Norway comparisons? I think it applies to Dutch comparisons too.)
Yes. And that lower death rate is the result of (amongst other things) decisions made when designing streets/roads. Including in cities. This is one of the things that urbanists complain about when they talk about "stroads".
Asian Americans have less than a 1/5 of the traffic fatality rate as the general population, and a 1/3 of the pedestrian death rate. Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders also have a similarly low rate. This suggests that cultural factors and not just road design contributes to America's high traffic fatality rate.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813493#:~:text=White%20people%20accounted%20for%2041,21%20percent%20and%2020%20percent.
I almost never see urbanists make a big deal about crime. They might, theoretically, want cities not to have crime, but they seem to express far more opposition to cars and suburbs and highways.
This is a fair criticism. There is a subset of urbanists that talk about crime and the need for more enforcement (notably Matt Yglesias), but given the general left lean of the greater group it's probably a minority overall and definitely not amplified. It's one of several points (along with commonly being pro rent control/IZ) where I think the tendency of urbanists to be urban liberals pushes many of them to dismiss things that are actually pretty important for having good cities.
Matty is the exception that proves the rule IMO.
What gets me is that YIMBY is already a free market idea, so I'm genuinely puzzled how it managed to get past the left-leaning ideological filters of most urbanists.
Why do they need to make a big deal about crime? Shouldn't we assume that people have at least an average level of concern for crime? Why does a group have to explicitly state their views on crime?
Crime and public disorder are the biggest issues that make cities unlivable and that drive people into the suburbs. One would expect that a movement centered around the importance of livable cities would focus on these issues, but they don't. Instead they get defensive and are in denial about it.
Perhaps because cars kill far more people than crime.
Increasingly so since 2015 because of reduced traffic enforcement by police.
I reread 18 and I'm not really sure if you're a YIMBY or NIMBY, or a YIMBY for burbs and NIMBY for cities. Or are you taking a plague-on-both-their-houses position?
He's a YIMBY who's annoyed with the faction of the YIMBY movement that says "it sucks that X is illegal, let's make it mandatory instead."
Thanks for bringing this oldie but goodie to mind:
http://www.machall.com/comic/origins
It's a "spiritual prison", so like hell, it has multiple "circles" for different types of offender.
that's a Dante reference, see the value of such education? 😁
Nah, Dante enjoys the exclusive privilege of shallow popular culture awareness by default. I've recently gotten around to finally reading the Comedy, as it happens, and it's amusing just how shallow that awareness really is. Hell is mostly there to provide a thrilling setting for thinly veiled 14th century culture war sniping which would otherwise have been utterly boring and quickly forgotten.
It's also interesting how liberal he was with the dogmas. Apparently using Jupiter's and Jesus' names interchangeably was totally kosher, and the likes of Apollo also enjoyed good standing. It seems like nationalism took precedence before orthodoxy, being largely on board with the program was plenty enough. This neatly ties with the narrative that the Church wasn't opposed to scientific progress per se, just particular malcontents. Copernicus - fine, Bruno and Galileo - nope.
Well, in my case I actually did read Dante as part of a liberal arts education that included the Iliad and Odyssey, the Aeneid, Don Quixote, and even (shudder) Ulysses. But I could probably have done it through pop culture osmosis, too.
Although Dante is huge in Italy, and I kinda also studied Italian for a bit, so I could have picked it up that way.
Damn! All I had to read was Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn. I was supposed to read Ulysses (shudder) in college (but I didn't), and I picked up Dante and read Ulysses (shudder) in later life. And I wish I had read In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past as a young man. It would have prepared me for the bal de têtes that comes with old age.
Somehow I missed out on Catcher in the Rye during schooling, but I read it a few years ago for general cultural literacy. I was probably older than its intended audience by that point. ;-)
I've never nerved up to tackled In Search of Lost Time. I'm slightly hesitant about non-English works, because I always feel as though I'm missing something, and it's hard for me to avoid the urge to get several translations and start comparing. And it's so massive. But worth it, you think?
Who the hell would not want to ban crime anyway? And technically, crime by definition is "that which is banned".
> My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person - but that interacting with the sort of teachers/kids/parents who would go to these schools, and being exposed to the sorts of rules/norms/teaching methods these schools would enforce, does make you a better person ...
The rules/norms/teaching methods, as conceived by the classical educators, include the belief that content is not entirely arbitrary. It seems likely that if the rules/norms/teaching methods are effective, then their content preferences are at least somewhat good and correlated with effectiveness. So I doubt the strong decoupling implied by your statement is correct.
This is Scott’s deeply-ingrained woke social conditioning expressing itself in an offhand, highly qualified comment (“necessarily”, “directly”). Forgive him. He was brought up in a culture that held that the ghost-written memoir of a black woman married to a famous man and sold in airports has more value than the greatest works of the western canon.
Value is relative. If you happen to want a populace that doesn't even conceive questioning the prevailing orthodoxy, such memoirs are tailor-made for your purpose.
This isn't just a reach, but is several reaches chained together.
The value of the works aside, students are going to be allowed to be skeptical of their messages in a way they can't for something like a diversity-promoting account of lived experience.
"Eau de Binance" for all women except those residing in unsupported states: Texas, Hawaii, New York, Vermont...
???
It's off-kilter to push for perfume when they'd rather limit access than meet regulations and laws for all U.S. states
About number 19: there’s a scene in Star Trek four that suggest this as well as the other negative San Francisco stereotypes were around in the 80s.
https://youtu.be/Zf5iwGZNY_Q?si=vyaUVKltWrSkPedS
Thank you, Nicholas Meyer.
24. That just sounds like the Texas sharpshooter, declaring whatever was hit to be the target all along. I think it would be more honest to adopt the "In a good cause, there are no failures" position. It would be cope, of course, but less shameful than pretending your humiliating defeat is a rare species of victory.
I don't see why you think the alt right suffered a "humiliating defeat". I doubt Trump would've won his first term if they didn't shift politics the way they did. And the movement never really died, it just got subsumed into a bigger coalition. Considering the way the next election is probably going to turn out, they're probably going to end up getting everything they wanted. How could that possibly be considered a defeat?
I'm distinguishing between tactical victories, of which they certainly had several impressive ones, and strategic victories, of which they've had none (yet, if you are an inveterate optimist).
For example, Operation O-KKK (👌) was an unmitigated success. And yes, the election of 2016 had many factors, but their involvement WAS one of them, so fine, that can count. But strategically? Their accounts on pretty much every online platform worth mentioning continue to be shoahed, and if they draw any significant attention, so do their BANK accounts. Trump did none of what they hoped the first time, and he has a good chance of picking a black as his running mate in 2024.
What they HAVE done is essentially nothing more than "spreading awareness" and "getting their message out there," (Walt Bismarck personally did a lot of this through his videos, which are effective for all the reasons he describes), the kind of MORAL VICTORY that without any consequent concrete success I think it's reasonable to characterize as a humiliating defeat.
The funniest thing is that he explicitly mentioned that "we need to use Trump, not let him use us", then entirely dropped it. Meanwhile Trump did just that, he used them up, and more than that, the entire rightist discourse these days is squarely centered on him.
I think the fact that the modern GOP's main concern nowadays include Jewish Space Lasers, the Great Replacement, and the plight of the White Working Class should count as a victory. If you're in search of a policy victory I'd mainly point to SCOTUS getting rid of AA. So I think Walt is justified in this belief.
Sorry, "shoahed"?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shoahed
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoah
It won as far as pushing its ideology went. But that very victory meant it attracted a bunch of low-IQ antivaxxer conspiracy theorists and followers of the Trump personality cult. So people like Richard Spencer don't feel like the moobment is something they want to be associated with anymore.
I didn't read the link, but it seems to me some version of the "alt right" has won some major victories. In 2015 they were nothing, but now essentially control much of the Republican party, particularly the presidential primaries.
This gets really fuzzy depending on how you categorize people as "alt right" and if you slice the demographics up enough then no group can claim credit for this change. Outright racists, white supremacists, etc. did not win, though there is a group of them in the coalition, for instance. Probably the single issue with the most pull in the whole group is opposition to immigration, particularly (maybe close to totally) illegal immigration. This issue does bind the racists with the working class, the America-first, the bootstrappers, the anti-elite, the anti-government, and the rule-followers/tough on crime. I don't think we know enough to properly categorize and determine how much support comes from which areas. There's probably a lot of overlap. Democrats/the left will want to say that "racist" is the binding term here, but I don't think there's really any particular thing in that group that binds them all together. Anti-elite is probably the closest, but it's necessary but not sufficient for what the alt-right is representing.
I remember saying, in 2020, that if BLM succeeded in making whites believe that being white is the most significant thing about them, it would backfire tremendously. I think it has, and I sort of doubt that the Alt-Right had a lot to do with that. But who knows: maybe having a tiny cohort of people adding, “and that’s all right” was what kept the result from being universal white guilt.
I was still subscribed to Scientific American as it descended into woke insanity, and I remember an article advocating the promotion of "white racial identity." The author somehow believed that making white people think about their whiteness all the time would make them LESS racist (as defined by the woke).
Do you want American Hitler? Because this is how you get American Hitler.
I 100% agree this is about the actions of the left, not the alt right.
I don’t see them as having achieved almost anything, it is the mistakes of their enemies that have given their cause credence, not their actions. I think their actions likely almost irrelevant and maybe even counterproductive.
Regarding the alt right guy, all I can say is I don't get how someone can keep talking about the "JQ" and refer to the mass shooter in Charlestown as a "lunatic". I mean, he's doing what you're too much of a coward to do, right?
Consider this: would you be similarly confused by vegans who say things like "meat is murder" calling someone who shot up, say, a ranch or something, a "lunatic"?
I don't think the analogy is totally on point because "Jewish question" is associated for most people with mass murder of Jews (when I google "Jewish question" including quotes, the majority of the top hits reference nazis, the Holocaust, etc), and "meat is murder" isn't associated with mass murder of meat eaters.
Well, that's certainly the most famous solution to the question, but not the only one, and his intended audience, which isn't "most people" (and doesn't include you, so if you care to understand what he meant, you need to be more open-minded) would know that.
(Expulsion is another, less-final, solution, for example.)
What exactly is the problem that is in need of a solution?
The Jewish question is about Jewish global domination conspiracy theory. The question is what to do about it. The Nazis wanted to first expel the Jews from Germany and later radicalized into the final solution which was the Holocaust. Nowadays this is associated with claims like "the Jews control Hollywood. The Jews control Wall Street and etc" and believing that there is some kind of collusion from powerful Jews to further the collective Jewish interests at the expense of whatever your group is. White people for white nationalists, Black people for the Nation of Islam, and there might be others.
Some people might protest the analogy, but I think this is very similar to classical Marxism, just replace bourgeoisie with Jews. And just like most Marxists don't want to murder capitalists, I imagine most white supremacists don't want to murder Jews, although historically both happened.
From what I remember of the alt-right it was a fair bit more complicated than that.
Put yourself in the place of an internet edgelord in 2015. There's a group that's high-iq, high birth rate, more or less white, has ties to an apartheid ethnoreligious state that was best buddies with apartheid South Africa, shares similar religious heritage to you, and for some reason (probably that one European arts student whose socialist gang genocided them, totally different to your own beliefs as a red-blooded white-skinned blue-backing American, yes sir, definitely a different movement, we'll all ignore the word "national") they've ended up on the opposing side. Worse, they (and as an edgelord you view the entire Jewish people as a homogeneous group because it's how you view everyone, and also only really think Ashkenazim are relevant) don't want to let you start your own ethnoreligious apartheid state! You're not one of those gauche skinhead thugs from the 80s, you're a sleek new breed of racist. Where do you go from here?
(Yes, there's an enormous amount about the previous paragraph that's debatable and even more that's outright wrong, but it's a fair characterisation of the mindset, right?)
As you can see, there's a tension here, and it's within the movement. The alt right lived and died on the perception that it was different from the old fascists, but parts of it still shared a lineage. There was an ongoing debate - often subtextual and hidden - over whether it was even a good idea to keep going after the Jews like a rabid dog. Trading essays on the JQ was an attempt from both sides to present arguments for integration vs arguments for polite seperatism vs violent expulsion/genocide, while avoiding giving the normies any quotes to use as ammo. That's why you saw people like Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug) writing articles on the JQ. Despite the fact that he's Jewish himself and one assumes he doesn't believe the domination conspiracy, he still saw a question to answer.
My sense is that historically most wide-scale expulsions of racial/ethnic/religious/etc groups have been accompanied by mass murder.
It usually isn't police going door to door and calmly but firmly telling people to leave, and arresting people who refuse and driving them to the border to drop them off but otherwise not harming them.
All state action, from issuing speeding tickets to collecting taxes to arresting drug dealers, involves some level of brutality and violence against those who refuse to obey. Very few consider this unacceptable, so requiring that those who resist in this hypothetical instance be privileged over those who defy the state in every other case and be treated unusually gently seems to be an isolated demand and not a consistently applied principle.
Again, expulsion and extermination aren't the only solutions. Eminent domain seizures of all their property is another. Or prohibiting them from working in certain professions, through some kind of occupational licensing requirement. I don't care to keep listing these, so I hope you see that the "question" admits more than the one solution you've heard of, and most of these are the kind of thing the state routinely does.
I would expect that police who are explicitly being told "these people have been declared Not Citizens, will be leaving the country shortly, and will not have much ability to protest if you brutalize them into compliance" will probably brutalize people more than the average.
Also, it will require more brutality to enforce laws that are widely viewed as unjust. Very few people will protest the arrest of a known murderer, many people will protest the arrest of Mr. Smith from the deli down the street who did nothing except be born to the wrong parents. A criminal might surrender to the police if he knows he'll get a fair trial and perhaps a lighter sentence, Mr. Smith knows that he did nothing wrong and that cooperating will get him dropped at the Mexican border with only the clothes on his back. Ethnic cleansing is an extreme threat and you will only be able to force cooperation if you threaten even more extreme violence.
(And I don't think this is special pleading - "if you pass laws that the community considers unjust, you will need more force to enforce them" is a general principle of statecraft, and the reason why even dictators can't simply pass any law they want.)
Lastly, there's the scale to consider. There are 7.6 million Jews in the US, and you will have to put them somewhere while you process them, organize their transport to the border, strip them of their possessions, etc. There's no prison that can handle a sudden influx of 7 million people, so you will probably have to set up camps. Camps that have a very high "concentration" of undesirables, if you get my drift. Can you see how that situation might result in more brutality than a normal well-run prison?
My impression is:
- The author talks about how his first break into the alt-right was telling them to stop talking about the JQ.
- The author seems to think "the JQ" is something like "Jews are hypocritical because they want Israel to be an ethnostate, but support mass immigration into America." Later he said American Jews got less hypocritical about that after 10/7 and he now considers the question ressolved. He says "Quite frankly I am returning to my August 2015 roots and cucking on the JQ. I am Taylorpilled. Most young secular right wing Jews these days are pro-White and don’t treat being ethnically Jewish as that different from being, say, Italian."
- I think it's perfectly possible to think a group (eg Trump voters) is bad or hypocritical or on the wrong side, but not want them shot.
- seems to me like his original "stop talking about the JQ" thing was a tactical choice, and he calls it a position he "abandoned almost immediately".
- He's talking all about "communicate ideas through subtext" and "platform[ing] slightly edgier figures", which fits in with throwing around "Jewish question", a phrase which for most people today is strongly associated with the Holocaust, and then walking it back with "oh I just mean something something Israel". You even said that the "misinformation experts and antifa people" were right - most of them would probably agree with me about the intent of specifically using the phrase "Jewish question".
Similarly, my memory of Richard Spencer back in the day is that when pressed about Jewish people by mainstream publications he'd also pivot to alleged Jewish hypocrisy on Israel, but when around other alt right people he was throwing around nazi salutes and, on trump's victory, said it was time to party like it's 1933, and so on.
- He's trying to claim victory for the alt right, I think mostly pretty questionably (e.g. saying that they succeeded in mainstreaming "white identity politics" because you can complain about quotas and talk about "real Americans" now, two things people have been doing forever; to me it's pretty clear that the ascendance of all the "woke" stuff that has happened has been a reaction against the alt right and trump's victory, but anyway). Saying "it's solved because Jews aren't so pro-Israel now after October 7" is just him trying to claim victory because the real aims haven't been achieved. Shifts in attitudes towards Israel are driven, more than anything, by Israel's and the Palestinians' actions themselves, a lot has happened in 10 years, and there's as much hypocrisy around Israel as ever, in all sorts of directions. And his guy trump had a super pro-Israel policy in office ... but it's a recent trend so he jumps on it.
"to me it's pretty clear that the ascendance of all the "woke" stuff that has happened has been a reaction against the alt right and trump's victory"
I find it really bizzare that people can think this. By all accounts wokeness started several years before Trump, back when it was called "social justice". Any look at 2016 online discussions shows most people (on either side) treating Trump as a backlash to that, and everything woke that has happened since Trump won has been a mere continuation or expansion of the trends already well established by the middle of Obama's second term.
I just can't understand the thinking that "the right winning actually makes the *left* stronger", and vice versa. How can something be so widely believed that goes against all common sense?
Your last sentence seems like a distinct point from the rest of the comment. It may be that the left and right's polarization is stuck in a vicious cycle of mutually strengthening one another, *even if* it was in fact the left which hardened first.
Yes, to be clear I should have said "the right winning actually makes the left stronger and the right weaker", which many people (see Scott's endorsement of Clinton in 2016) say. I just see it as a strange attempt to complicate the causes of political change.
Well, if Trumpism is the right's death throes, then its long-term prospects aren't enhanced by his victory. I think that this perspective isn't entirely wrong, but it's one-sided. I'd say that the mainstream left is similarly pathological, even if it maintains a more respectable veneer.
I basically agree with Edmund's "vicious cycle of mutual strengthening" point, and in particular most people seem to agree that "wokeness" peaked in 2020, even if it was going on pre-2016. Metoo and the various celebrities and other influential people who were exposed as part of that being a big example.
Relatedly trump's election was evidence, to many people, of some of the left's claims about racism/sexism. A lot of claims about sexism and society condoning sexual assault have more force when trump basically admitted to sexual assault on tape a month before the election and still won and was idolized by a huge portion of the country, and even the people who expressed disgust back then would probably call me "woke" now for bringing it up (in which case ... sign me up).
Your question “how can people think that right winning makes the left stronger?” - I have two answers. First is “how can people think wokeness didn’t get stronger post-2016? The direct observation is stronger evidence than the theoretical cause/effect” Second is that it wasn’t “the right” vs “the left” but two specific people, and the president doesn’t have the power to end wokeness or anything.
> A lot of claims about sexism and society condoning sexual assault have more force when trump basically admitted to sexual assault on tape a month before the election
How is "Powerful guy gets to do whatever he wants because he has money and knows lots of people who have money and also political clout" an interesting claim? And how is persecuting/antagonizing random men who have nowhere near any power or money as that guy a good strategy to fight it?
Most people think that rich people can get away with bad shit to some degree, but I do indeed think that 10 years ago a lot of people would have been surprised to hear that someone could admit to routine sexual assault on tape and still get elected president and be the leader of his party even 8 years later.
You can see this by the fact that a lot of people did in fact freak out about it at the time, including elected Republicans ... who have now mostly been drummed out of the party.
"which fits in with throwing around "Jewish question", a phrase which for most people today is strongly associated with the Holocaust"
For what it's worth, I have no idea who Walt Bismarck is, and my vague impression of the alt right up until a few hours ago was that they were mostly trolls that dabbled in white supremacy for shock value, but who didn't have any real agenda.
I skimmed the article in the links this morning and when I got to "JQ", it didn't immediately register with me what it meant. It took a few seconds before I said out loud "Wait, he's not *actually* talking about the Jewish Question, is he?", before concluding that yes, yes he is. It was jarring enough that, along with other parts of the article, I've now concluded that prominent people in the alt right (which I assume this guy is), if not the entire movement, are not just a bunch of trolls but are actual white supremacists and, at best, Nazi sympathizers, if not actual Nazis.
I *strongly* associate use of the term "Jewish Question" with Nazism. I treat it as a euphemism for "do very very bad things to Jews, up to and including mass murder".
Idk how you could get that far in the article without realizing they were serious. That guy is still talking about how great Richard Spencer is, even though he directly mentions that when Trump won, Richard Spencer went full Nazi in a speech, doing the heil hitler salute along with like 20 others there, "lugenpresse", and many other clear Nazi references.
In regards to the "JQ" and "hypocrisy," it's interesting that white nationalists make the same mistake all those "woke" anti-Israeli protesters do and regard Jews as all being white, and as one ethnicity. Israel is only really an ethnostate if one regards Ashkenazi, Ethiopian, Mizrahi, Sephardic, and convert Jews as a single ethnicity because they are all Jewish. By that logic the USA could still be counted as an ethnostate if it allowed mass immigration from Latin America, since the majority of US citizens and Latin American are Christian.
The Law of Return is essentially "open borders for Jews," regardless of ethnicity.
Why would a group have the right of return to where their ancestors lived unless their ancestors lived there. Don’t all of these groups claim descendancy from the Jewish inhabitants pre diaspora.
People who are not ethnically Jewish, but converted to Judaism, are eligible under the Law of Return, even though I suppose they technically aren't returning to anything. I also doubt that if future genetic ancestry tests revealed that any of the major Jewish ethnicities were mistaken about being descended from the diaspora that they would be expelled from Israel. So I guess the Law of Return is more based on the significance of that land to the Jewish religion, rather than literal ancestry.
It's not a particularly rare mistake. People also do it with "Africans", "Europeans", and the "Chinese" and "Indians". 2 of those are artificial national identities for regions that weren't always unified and had dozens of different ethnicities and cultures and languages, and 2 of those aren't even national identities, just a huge family resemblance/spectrum of national identities and cultures.
Some Israelis even make the exact same mistake by talking about "Arabs", there is no such thing as a homogenous "Arabs", anybody who tried to learn Arabic would have been confronted with the evidence for that immediately.
The whole "Chinese is an artificial identity" meme has swung too far away from the original pushback against the CCP considering languages like Cantonese etc. as dialects of Mandarin. With the exceptions of Tibet and the western provinces*, which most westerners view as separate anyway (see Uyghur coverage), China in its natural borders has existed with some brief interruptions for around 2000 years.
China is *remarkably* homogenous for a country of its size. The Han make up 90% of the Chinese population, and whilst yes there are some linguistic differences, 800 million speak Mandarin. This is a vastly different situation than India. The languages of the Han are about as different as the varieties of Romance (perhaps a little more, but not much) and share a written language.
Genetically speaking too, the Han are essentially on a continuum from the north to the south, where the difference between the extremes is about the same as a northern and a southern Frenchman. Northern China has more central asian/ANE if I recall correctly, as it has higher ancestral Han proportion. Southern Han has more Indo-Chinese-like/Aboriginal admixture, especially in the matrilineal line.
Describing (excluding a couple of specific minorities) a population that is as genetically homogenous as France or Italy (at a push western Europe), that has been unified politically for the vast majority of the last 2000 years, and that self conceives as a single national identity as an "artificial national identity" is clearly wrong.
*Manchuria/Mongolia too I suppose, although they've been part and parcel since the Yuan and Qing.
Alright, good push back. I knew that China is more natural than India. But 800 million out of 1.4 billion isn't exactly a crushing linguistic majority. But I agree it's not in the same bucket as India.
> China is *remarkably* homogenous for a country of its size.
Also rather homogeneous. Homogenous from _genesis_, origin, homogeneous from _gens_, clan.
> The languages of the Han are about as different as the varieties of Romance
My understanding is that the modern Indian languages descendent from Sanskrit are also about as different from each other as the various Romance languages.
Sure, but then you also have 250 million Dravidian language speakers mostly in the south, plus Tibeto-Burmans, Austroasiatics and so forth. And even then, the Indo-European groups in the north are split up into those Indo-Aryan languages such as Hindi, Gujarati which are quite a way distinct from the Iranian languages (Farsi) in the far North-West (despite being similar in the same way Greek is similar to Urdu). I think it's reasonably well established to say that India has far greater linguistic and genetic diversity than China. The Varna/Jati systems have also led to greater genetic heterogeneity, and the archipelago effect we see today- not to mentioned the religious diversity.
Having said that, I'd still be tempted to push back on the OC claim that India is an artificial nationality. It was just easier to make the case that this claim was wrong in regards to China. Indian cultural identity (as essentially synthetic between an Indo-Aryan elite ruling over and intermarrying with a pre-conquest population) has been relatively stable and well established for thousands of years itself. Complicating matters somewhat is the strength of independent Dravidians in the South and multiple instances of foreign rule e.g. Mughals.
Eh, at every level you can always go broader or narrower. If you regard "Ashkenazi Jews" as a single identity, you'll miss out on the German Jews hating the Russian Jews and vice versa. And even within those categories, I bet there are some spicy fights between Russian Hasidim and Russian misnagim.
Or you can just say "all humans who aren't !Kung are basically the same."
These people regard themselves as the same nation, which is why they are. A national identity exists because people believe it does: it's a lie that people tell each other over and over until they forget it's a lie.
Is this working up to a speech about how chaos is a ladder?
Yes! I was wondering if anyone would get the reference
"Jews are hypocritical because they want Israel to be an ethnostate, but support mass immigration into America"
FWIW, I have never strongly associated "mass immigration into America" with Jews. I associate mass immigration with the progressive wing of the Democratic party, and while I think American Jews skew significantly towards the Democrats (I don't know the actual statistics), I don't associate them with the far-left (even prior to 10/7).
Full disclosure: I think the current immigration system is a wreck, and I think that, as a practical matter, immigration policy has to be responsive to political realities. But personally, I'm very much in favor of mass immigration to America. I am neither Jewish, progressive, or particularly left wing on most issues.
It's one of those slippery correlation-syllogism things that most people, likely especially conspiratorial types, are bad at analyzing. Most American Jews aren't radical progressive academics, but academics including radical progressive ones are disproportionately Jewish (though I assume most, particularly the radicals, aren't practicing) (see also: Hollywood, Nobel prize winners, etc).
Also at least partially a feedback loop where Jewishness attracts conspiratorial theories but is also used as a semi-defense. Nobody thinks complaining about Koch brothers makes you anti-white or anti-Kansan or whatever, but you often get the stink eye for being anti-Semitic if you complain about Soros; I consider them to be pretty similar as phenomenon (and indeed, they do have a lot of policy overlap, though "Soros DAs" are more notorious).
"but academics including radical progressive ones are disproportionately Jewish"
Is this true? Again, just going off my vague perceptions, but I would guess that most radical academic progressives are BIPOC, LGBTQ+, extreme feminists, and outright communists. *Maybe* the last group positively correlates with being Jewish, but I'd be surprised if the others do (and I expect the first group to be negatively correlated with being Jewish).
Also, my impression is that communists use to be the standard bearers for radical progressive academics, but then extreme feminists kind of took up the standard, and now it's BIPOC and LGBTQ+.
I'm not extremely confident of any of these things, but I don't think I'm *that* far off.
I can't find many surveys on the current rate, though I think it's fair to say it was more true historically than it is these days. And I said proportions, not absolutes- Jewish people are about 2% of the population, so even if they're, say, 10% of radical academics they're a minority of the total but still disproportionate to genpop (likewise, straight white guys are going to be wildly underrepresented compared to genpop among radical academics). That said, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC activists are largely operating out of critical theory, developed by the Frankfurt school and those theorists were primarily Jewish.
For context of the following numbers, Jewish people would've been around 3-4% of the US population at the time, around 2% today. To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with overrepresentation unless there's evidence of deliberate discrimination, I don't think there's evidence for that here (generally speaking), and I think that disproportionate statistics often have reasonable explanations.
One source for historical overrepresentation (https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/2023/05/09/end-era):
>“[Fifty] percent of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities … 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26 percent of the reporters, editors and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982 and 58 percent of directors, writers and producers in two or more primetime television series.”
This is an old paper (1971, https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/72ac/72academics.pdf) but at that time Jewish academics were surveyed to be the most left and liberal, compared to Catholic and Protestant (of which today, conservative academics are practically a rounding error outside of a few small strongholds).
Edit: Ugh when will this site implement proper comment formatting.
Those are all fair points. When I said I don't think of mass immigration or radical left politics as being particularly Jewish, I should have made clear that it's in the current (i.e. post-2016) political climate and the groups that are currently spearheading those issues. Historically the situation would have been different (though see my comment below about fairly broad support for the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act).
What about the racial egalitarianism that undergirds mass immigration? 'I don't give a good damn about the so-called "browning of America."' - Ben Shapiro
You don't associate mass immigration (without racial distinctions) with Jews, nor the far-left (Marxists) with Jews. What about zionism/"greatest ally" talk? After all the most prominent of those people are not Jews but Christians like Joe Biden, George Bush etc. Must be an organic Christian thing I suppose, nothing to do with Jewish influence.
"I don't associate the subversive position I hold with the subversive people who made it mainstream", yeah, that just means they succeeded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Celler
"What about the racial egalitarianism that undergirds mass immigration?"
What about it? I'm honestly not sure how this is germane to my statement.
"You don't associate...the far-left (Marxists) with Jews."
Oh, I definitely associate traditional economic Marxism with Jews, especially in it's early days. But 1) it has grown beyond that (though it wouldn't surprise me if Jews were still over-represented among communists), and 2) I no longer think traditional Marxists are the driving force behind the far left. It has shifted towards racial justice, LGBTQ+ and especially trans rights, and anti-colonialism. That doesn't mean those groups aren't *also* in favor of Marxist economic policies, but I don't think that is what really motivates them. And I don't think Jews are over-represented among those groups (in some cases I suspect they are under-represented).
"Must be an organic Christian thing I suppose"
Yes, I think it is. This isn't 16th century Spain. American Christians have positive views of Israel for a complex set of religious, political, historical, and cultural reasons.
"that just means they succeeded"
Who is "they"? The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was *co-sponsored* by a Jewish congressperson, but also an Irish-American Catholic Senator. It was supported by LBJ and Ted Kennedy (neither was Jewish). It had the support of lots of ethnic groups, including southern and eastern Europeans and Asians (since those groups were discriminated against under the old system). It passed both Houses of Congress with more than 80% support, and it actually had more support among Republicans. A prominent Jewish Congressperson spearheaded the effort but that doesn't mean it was a narrow, "Jewish" issue.
"What about it? I'm honestly not sure how this is germane to my statement."
You associate mass immigration with progressives but it's a much more widespread problem. Even opposing nationalism in the west means there's no real limiting principle to immigration, hence mass immigration.
"I don't think Jews are over-represented among those groups"
Doubt, but I have it on good authority that certain people run the media that promote those kinds of things: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/joe-biden-attributes-social-liberalism-jewish-control-hollywood-and-social-media/
"American Christians have positive views of Israel for a complex set of religious, political, historical, and cultural reasons."
Sure, and Jews creating neoconservatism and AIPAC?
"A prominent Jewish Congressperson spearheaded the effort but that doesn't mean it was a narrow, "Jewish" issue."
And the life of MLK doesn't mean blacks should be associated with getting the civil rights act passed, since the guys who actually voted for it weren't very black. How do issues get that support in the first place? Maybe something to do with guys like this fighting for it for four decades?
I used to support immigration but now I think that people who support mass immigration are prey to a cultural version of the humility fallacy ("Shucks, everyone is as smart as I am.")
Progress is a delicate flower. We don't want to perturb its environment too much.
Surely they're just smart enough to care about optics. Which automatically makes them more pragmatic than Effective Altruists, funnily enough. Even neo-nazis aren't stupid enough to buy a castle.
Well, sometimes it's good to have a moat ... But more seriously, this makes me wonder, has the readership of this blog been polled about their living circumstances (1 br; 3 lbk; ranch + 10000 acres; castle; mule + 40 acres, etc)? If so, what was the outcome?
"Even neo-nazis aren't stupid enough to buy a castle."
Wrong! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Suit_Cottage#Purchase_by_the_VDare_Foundation
There's also the castle in Switzerland bought by Vox Day
...You know, as soon as I wrote that, I knew someone was going to prove me wrong. Now I can confidently say that EA has objectively better PR than Neo-Nazis, congratulations.
Well, there were those luxury real estate buys and all that missing money and all the questionable donations that were not rescinded. But sure.
Are VDARE neo-Nazis?
$1.4 million? Come on, you know that's nothing like Wytham Abbey.
Contrary to their reputation, Effective Altruism is a deeply deontological movement- they know perfectly well that focusing on optics is effective in a utilitarian sense, but have such a strong moral commitment to not polluting the epistemic commons that they refuse to do so. When the public's potential reaction to something is unreasonable or uninformed, they see backing down as a moral failure. This led to a ridiculous problem with the lavish-sounding cheap real estate debacle, but it's a very good commitment to have directing charity that will determine who lives and who dies.
Frankly, I respect them a great deal for it.
Well, they recently decided to sell it off, officially claiming that it turned out to be unprofitable, but that's not really fooling anybody.
Re: #2 yes, there's also a pretty strong consensus among scientists and physicians who study sleep and circadian rhythms that DST is trash. We should just do permanent standard time.
https://savestandardtime.com/
Or just deregulate time, and let people decide how they want to mess with their clocks (or not).
Of course, there are giant network effects that reward people for synchronizing their time with a big network of other people.
But there's no reason the Gahmen needs to be involved. Especially no reason to have federal or state governments involved. At most counties or municipalities could make some rules.
Unfortunately, you can't deregulate it TOO much if you still want elections at roughly the same (real) frequency.
Huh, why?
They managed to hold elections just fine, even before anyone was passing any laws about clocks.
Your laws can mention time just as they always did, and a reasonable judge will interpret your law (or your contract etc) reasonably.
If you're still adjudicating contracts as though there were an official time, then you have de facto regulated time, and pretending you haven't doesn't seem useful.
But what I meant was the more extreme case of manipulating the CALENDAR, as the ancient Romans did. No one did it in the past because it's the kind of thing that causes revolutions, but in principle, if elections are to be held on "the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November," who says October has only 31 days? (I call it the Endless October Exploit.)
You are proving too much:
Contracts are adjudicated based on the meaning of the words in them, but that doesn't make English a regulated language.
Similarly, a contract you and me might have in eg California might specify something given explicitly in London time, and I imagine this will generally be held up in court, even if the Brits abolish DST next year. But that doesn't mean that Californian or US courts regulate British time.
Courts also used to already adjudicate contracts before anyone made any laws about clocks.
A reasonable court would strike down your calendar redefinition example.
Just like reasonable courts don't let you redefine arbitrary words like 'not' or 'liable' either. Who's to say that 'one million dollars' doesn't mean one lollipop either?
Is time regulated? I don't think it's illegal to use a different time from the rest of the country.
When Republicans talk about "deregulation," they often mean "… by the federal government." (This is reasonable in the modern era since most regulations they find intrusive ARE federal.) And in that sense, it IS illegal for states to choose their own time: they have a choice of whether or not to adopt daylight saving, but have no other control.
I don't even live in the US. I just like subsidiarity. I'm not sure where you take the 'Republicans' from? I don't mind monarchy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
And people managed to coordinate their activities just fine before anyone passed any laws about clocks.
People who transact internationally (or even just across time zone boundaries) also manage just fine, even though there's no special official time to guide them.
Even without laws about time, your laws and contracts etc can mention time just as they always did, and a reasonable judge will interpret your law (or your contract etc) reasonably.
Compare how the French have their lawmakers mess (indirectly) in their spelling, but English speakers do just fine without that interference.
Note I capitalized the "R" in "Republican."
Americans used to use local sun time, so each town's official time was a minute or two different from the next town down the road. But that threatened to cause head-on railroad crashes, so the railroads got together in the transportation hub of Chicago in 1883 and invented standard time zones. (There's a fancy plaque at LaSalle and Jackson in the Loop commemorating the railroad time convention.) Detroit was the last big city to give up sun time in 1915 and Congress made railroad time national during WWI.
Chicago was also among the most enthusiastic proponents of Daylight Saving Time. Chicago is at the eastern edge of Central Time Zone, so it benefits a lot from DST. "Without DST, sunrise this June 19 would be at 4:15 a.m. in Chicago and sunset at 7:29 p.m. With DST, sunrise will be at the more reasonable hour of 5:15 a.m., sunset at 8:29 p.m., and kids can play outside well into the evening."
Yes, the railroads getting together is one of the examples of voluntary coordination I had in mind.
Does federal law regulate when state government offices and such need to be open, or what numbers a state administration has to write?
Time zone laws are a weird thing because in many spheres, their effects don't involve legal coercion at all. Instead, government decisions serve as a Schelling point. I doubt any law, by any level of government, prohibits you and your pals from agreeing to describe time in a different time zone than the official one. In contracts between private entities, I guess the official time zone of your jurisdiction determines what times mean if no time zone is specified, but nothing prohibits you from explicitly specifying a different time zone, which then applies. The only direct, coercive legal effect time zone laws have is on interactions between people and the government: deadlines, opening hours of government offices etc.
So, in theory, if a state really insisted on going against the federal decision, perhaps it could decide that a different time zone applies to times specified without time zone for the purposes of state law. So opening hours of state offices would be specified in a different time zone than those of federal government offices; a different time zone would apply as a default if a contract is involved in a state lawsuit vs. in a federal lawsuit. People would then decide which one they use as a Schelling point for private matters. Needless to say, it would be a royal mess.
Yeah, I don't consider the government's time centralization coercive against individuals, and don't know anyone who does.
Well, it being coercive is a pretty low bar.
There's not much of a positive justification for having the government involved in time.
(People can coordinate privately just fine, and do so in the vast majority of cases.)
And in addition to the lack of positive justification, we also have messes like DST, that only came to be and came to persists thanks to government action or inaction.
You are mostly right, and I alluded to that already.
But being 'just a Schelling point' is still incredibly strong. And i don't see much positive justification for why the Gahmen needs to be in the business of setting this particular Schelling point.
Why would private Schelling points be a mess? Most Schelling points are set privately. Eg have a look at bond market conventions or any other number of examples.
IMO government coercion requires a strong justification, but the government coordinating and setting a default doesn't require much justification beyond "I think this option is better than the alternative".
It's hard to coordinate this privately, without some single organization setting the standard. It would be hard for something like DST arise organically, even if DST is actually good. I expect that if the government stopped coordinating time, whatever was the status quo the last time the government coordinated it would remain the status quo forever.
But also, the government needs to regulate how government agencies should specify time in their communication with each other and with the public, and how courts should interpret time specifications in private contracts if they don't include a time zone.
I didn't say private Schelling points would be a mess. I said the federal government and the state government setting different standards—each applied by federal and state agencies, courts etc. respectively—would be a mess.
Why does the government coordinating things and setting defaults need much less justification than coercion? The former does not reduce the freedom of the individual. Not just because the individual can, in theory, depart from the default, but also because, to the extent one is subject to the default used by a society, one would be subject to a default whether it's set organically or by the government.
Compare how the French have their lawmakers mess (indirectly) in their spelling, but English speakers do just fine without that interference. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
It's not broadly speaking illegal to use non-standard spelling in France. But it's just not something that needs to be touched by the Gahmen, either.
I want people to enjoy the same freedom in their clocks, as English speakers enjoy in their spelling.
Honest and competent government officials are already the rarest and most precious of commodities for any country. Let's economise on what we burden them with.
---
It's regulated in the sense that there is an official time and there are laws. And you mention that elected politicians are involved.
If you just abolished the laws, the campaigns would be about trying to convince people directly to change how they set their times. Instead of trying to appeal to elected officials to change laws.
Pick any time you want and stick to that system. Nobody cares. However you are going to have to coordinate your time with everybody else if you intend to be timely - so if somebody suggests a meeting at 11am you are going to have to convert that to your time (oh that’s 27 chrontons past 5 Giberty for me) and turn up at the same time.
Yes, private coordination is good.
I believe a state can opt out of Daylight Savings Time altogether (as does Arizona, which has more than enough daylight, thank you very much), but a state can't pick a different starting or ending date or a different amount of daylight than the federal norm.
> but a state can't pick a different starting or ending date or a different amount of daylight than the federal norm.
Those are not like concepts. Picking a different starting or ending date is illegal; those dates are set by the government. Choosing a different amount of daylight is impossible; the amount of daylight is set by the Earth.
The whole idea of Daylight Savings Time appears to be that it's desirable to confuse the time that it reads on a clock, such as "4:30 pm", with the amount of daylight that occurs during one day, such as "six hours". We can change the first, but not the second.
I'm pretty sure "different amount of daylight" in this context means a different offset, like springing forward two hours instead of one.
What's the interpretation where that would change the amount of daylight?
I think many states require you to send kids to school, with the school using a fixed schedule. While you might be able to negotiate with your employer, state run schools are famously not open to negotiation, it's kind of their shtick, so a time zone is kind of enforced on kids and parents.
Less importantly, municipal regulations with regard to noise might mention times. "No officer, we are still allowed to party because for us, it is only 20:00" is not going to fly.
Yeah, just having UTC available as a reference and letting people decide when they want their business to be open would definitely work for me.
That sounds like the idea of Celsius being better than Fahrenheit. Why is UTC, basically the time in England without daylight saving, preferable as a reference to the time in THEIR location, also without daylight saving?
You could can use whatever you want as a reference, as long as the other guy can understand you.
Just like you can use whatever you want to eg describe to people how to get to your place.
Of course, UTC is one of the possible references. As it Swatch Internet Time, or seconds since the Unix epoch, or whatever you want.
You don't need a law to have a reference.
Well, I want somebody to maintain _something_ as a reference in the sense of actually offering a service like NTP that's tied to a reliable clock. Once you have that precise time, exactly as you say, you're welcome to localize it or convert it however you like.
(Though if we ever develop relativistic-speed travel, it's going to play havok with all our time libraries.)
Private parties are offering time services already.
The trouble with the Unix epoch is that it is not seconds since Unix, because someone had a brain fart and decided that having a system which can be converted into meatbag format easily is more important than having a clock which runs at precisely one second(counted) per second(real).
This makes the standard epoch unusable for measuring time differences, and everybody should use a TAI-based epoch instead which counts leap seconds.
Good point. The Unix epoch was just an example.
(It would actually be fine as a reference for humans, because the conversion is well understood, even if the code is a bit ugly because of how leap seconds are handled.)
UTC is without DST. It’s 5:56am UTC now but 6:56am on my clock. Which is why I’m awake.
Yeah, I knew that. My bad. Fixed, thanks.
Fahrenheit is objectively better than Celsius in the context of day-to-day living (i.e., outside of a laboratory setting). I will die on this hill.
Yes, I agree. That was my point.
I also favor the light-nanosecond over the "metre." (Coincidentally, it's almost exactly a foot).
I know these aren't actually about what you're talking about (which is switching from standardization via regulation to standardization via convention), but people discussing this might get a kick out of reading these:
https://qntm.org/abolish
https://qntm.org/continuous
Interesting!
But yes, I'm not against timezones.
Obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/2846/
Somewhat related obligatory xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/2897/
In Xinjiang they have two politicised conflicting timezones - local time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_Time) and Beijing time.
Everything formal has to be done in Beijing time (GMT+8) but (non-Han) locals often use GMT+6. I saw clocks with both times back when I was there in 2013, but I've heard they've since cracked down on local time in a similar way to "unnatural beard growth" and "not watching national news" as evidence of separatist/Islamist tendencies.
It's pretty embarrassing when the US claims to be hyper-politicised, but people haven't even started a timezone-based culture war yet. I want to be able to know somebody's position on gender-neutral toilets and Joe Biden's cognitive function just by looking at their watch.
You might be interested to read up about railroad watches, and why standardisation of time zones became a thing. There used to be a free-for-all about what time was when where, with even small distances having differences between the town and a few miles down the road. The world has now become so interconnected that it's no longer workable to have George on 'its ten o'clock' and Bill thirty miles away 'no, it's nine" and Jim "sorry, it's eleven by the clock in the town square'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_chronometer
"A railroad chronometer or railroad standard watch is a specialized timepiece that once was crucial for safe and correct operation of trains in many countries. A system of timetable and train order, which relied on highly accurate timekeeping, was used to ensure that two trains could not be on the same stretch of track at the same time.
...One notable watch inspector was Webb C. Ball. His first job as a time inspector was when he was brought in by the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railways in 1891 after a crash and was tasked with bringing their time inspection standards up to industry normals. Ball's career eventually led to his being the time inspector on more than half the United States' railways, leading to a far more uniform set of standards in the U.S."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time
"Railway time was the standardised time arrangement first applied by the Great Western Railway in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local mean times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. The key goals behind introducing railway time were to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased.
Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following seven years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the time station clocks displayed were brought in line with the local mean time for London or "London Time", the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
The development of railway networks in North America in the 1850s, India in around 1860, and in Europe, prompted the introduction of standard time influenced by geography, industrial development, and political governance."
Yes, coordination is great. Voluntary standardisation is great, too.
I knew about railroad time before.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with making laws. You are describing the very process of how people solved the problems of everyone using a slightly different time. No laws about clocks were required to ensure railway safety.
(The Wikipedia article you linked mentions how they made some laws in Great Britain after the railways had already solved the problem, and those laws were apparently mostly there to force some towns to give up the additional minute hand on their town clocks?)
Solar clocks for everybody.
Anybody who has tried to get a child to go to bed in the summer time knows that DST is trash.
I like nighttime. I especially love summer nights. If you're anywhere even a little bit north, you can't do a summertime outside movie unless you're willing to stay up until midnight. It's all bullshit.
I'm always surprised to hear how much DST seems to affect some people.
Changing the clocks by one hour, twice a year, has never had any discernible impact on my sleep, mood, or overall well-being, except for *maybe* the day-of the change (and even then the impact is pretty minor).
Am I really that much of an outlier?
Statistically the two big things are the day of the change, and the effect of waking up in darkness in the spring/fall when the clock is advanced. It turns out making people get up and go to work in the dark is really bad for them.
Chronotypes vary, and so it does suit some people, but at the population level it’s quite bad for public health. The Save Standard Time site has links to various studies, as well as the statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. (Or whatever their exact name was; I’m mobile at the moment, not checking.)
I do think that the change happens too early in the spring and too late in the fall these days. But getting up when it's dark doesn't bother me in any perceptible way. In fact, I rather like it. It's very peaceful. I guess I'm the exception.
What are the magnitudes of these affects at the population level?
I'm in SF right now its great. By temperament (let freedom ring) I am inclined to be incredibly YIMBY. But Scott's arguments over the years have more or less convinced me that, sans truly insane amounts of building, more housing wont lower local rent. SF is great. So maybe it makes sense to preserve it?
I'm not sure I'd go as strong as "more housing won't lower local rent", just that there are lots of counteracting pressures and it might not do so very much. I still think it would lower national rents, or at least slow their rise.
Sorry to simplify your arguments. I did read your posts and understand it isn't simple.
Lower national rents is obviously important. But if the local rent decrease is going to be small or very small then the argument for 'why cant we build somewhere else' gets a lot stronger. Lots of people love SF though its obviously not for everyone. If I was housing czar I would now be pretty sympathetic to 'dont ruin the places people really love, build a fuckton of housing in places where we dont need to be as concerned about ruining the beloved culture'. SF really is a quite beautiful place to walk around and it has a great culture (for some people, which is the important thing. People with a different neurotype can love other places)
"But if the local rent decrease is going to be small or very small then the argument for 'why cant we build somewhere else' gets a lot stronger. "
This is literally why it's called Not In My BackYard. SF thinks it's already done it's share and the suburbs and smaller cities should build instead ("don't Manhattan my SF"). The suburbs and smaller cities think they should remain like they are too ("if you want to build skyscrapers, do it in SF where it's normal"). Everyone wants the other people to do it, so it doesn't get done. Need coordination so everyone bears building equally. Moloch strikes again.
I've spent a lot of time living in Columbus Ohio. My partner of eleven years lives there and I sepnd a lot of time with her. Very few people particularly love Columbus even though I think its a perfectly nice place to live. Very good quality of live for the cost. But I promise you the 'ratio of people in Columbus who adore the local Columbus culture' is much lower than the 'ratio of people in SF who love the local SF culture'. Build in Columbus. In some very real sense Columbus is my back yard and id be thrilled to see massive development in Columbus.
But people don't want to live in Columbus, they want to live in SF.
And building more means more people can live in SF.
Build in Columbus, sell nothing.
Everybody loves their place, that’s why they moved there. We need to overcome status quo bias. If people love San Francisco, we should build more places at the density/walkability of SF. But lots of people ALSO love Manhattan, and prices there are way the fuck out of control, so we should build more places like Manhattan.
San Francisco is the most sensible place in the country to build another Manhattan, because it already has already-existing transit and walkable streets, the climate is great, and there are lots of good jobs.
I live here, I love it, and I want it to change. When rents go down too, even better. Maybe as SF densifies, at some point rents will go down in Manhattan as it gets a release valve of sorts.
I disagreed with your original post about housing not lowering rents, but I would agree with this stance. I think there are enough pressures getting people into SF that any small amounts of housing will not change the trend enough to measure. To reduce housing costs by a meaningful amount, it would need to be such a substantial amount of building that it overwhelms the countervailing forces encouraging people to move there, which is a big ask. Building more housing is still very important to help stem the increases, but "smaller increase" is very hard to quantify because we'll never know what the alternative would have been.
Those same arguments imply that if rents don't decrease, or even increase, that's because it becomes an even better place to live as a result (probably in the sense of even higher salaries), to the point where it's more than worth paying the same or even higher rents for it.
I wouldn't want to replace my friends with new people even if the new people were somewhat more popular. The people who like current SF dont want some new thing. If the gains to everyone else are sufficiently large id feel they were being selfish by perserving the thing they love. At some point 'love' turns into something ugly, we have to let go. But if the gains are small I see no reason to fault people for preserving the beloved culture of the city they adore.
Ironic how it's essentially a conservative worldview where they are afraid of new people moving in and a potential change the culture.
If more housing doesn't lower local rent that's actually (from the outside view) an even stronger reason to allow it, since it implies it's generating even more surplus value.
(If building 20% more housing reduces rent 10%, we've created a net gain of 10% total housing value. If it doesn't lower rent at all, we've created a net gain of 20%, and can just keep going and become infinitly rich)
Yes. And it's great for developers, too.
This reminds me of the popular arguement in the 2010s that printing money wouldn't help raise inflation.
That would mean that eg the Bank of Japan could buy up all the assets in the world for all the expanse of some ink and paper.
If more building doesn't decrease local rents, that's great!
That means you can keep building and building, and don't have to worry about market dropping from too much supply.
What do you like about SF?
You cannot preserve it. SF will change.
One way SF can change is that a sufficient amount of housing gets built so that prices don't continue to increase in the way they have over the past couple decades of very little housing being built.
Another way SF can change is that housing doesn't get built, and so either prices continue to increase -- and demographics and culture change as a result -- or else something happens to reduce demand - i.e., a change in what makes SF desirable - so that prices don't continue to increase.
I quickly did a quick Ctrl+F of "Gamergate" on the Alt-Right post, thinking it'd be a quick way to suss out if he really knew what he was talking about and this quote is absolutely hilarious.
>The Gamergate movement of 2014 had spawned a series of Disney parodies called “/v/ the musical”, which were basically Walt Bismarck videos but about how video games shouldn’t have lesbians or fat women in them. I saw that this format had a ton of potential but was being criminally underutilized, so I stole the idea and made parodies about white nationalism instead. I was Elvis and Gamergate was black people.
It's appropriate considering that Gamergate faded into obscurity mostly because the Alt-Right and the Q conspiracies stole it's thunder and even took over their site.
Anyways, that musical was really fun and while it's mostly in-jokes of decade old gamer culture, There's a couple songs I recommend as a curious glimpse into the community that first conceptualized the at the time still nascent "twitter SJW" movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heIH9vfwKBM
It's more accurate to say that GamerGate was directly responsible for the rise in influence of the alt right, at least among the younger generations. Hell, Steve Bannon admitted so himself: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/07/18/steve-bannon-learned-harness-troll-army-world-warcraft/489713001/
I'd say that neither Gamergate nor the alt-right caused the other. Instead, they tapped into the same source of cultural energy.
Remember that the alt right had an intellectual wing of sorts ("dissident right" bloggers like Mencius Moldbug, Michael Anissimov, plus HBD types like Cochran, Sailer, and Razib) who preceded Gamergate and had little to do with it.
...I'm pretty terminally online, and the only reason I know any of their names is because of this blog. Most of them are just fringe reactionaries. What the alt-right accomplished (partially through Gamergate) was pushing their ideology into the mainstream, something that the intellectual wing completely failed to do.
I disagree that Gamergate is somehow "mainstream" rather than just another dumb internet phenomenon.
It started out as an argument about a review nobody read of a game nobody played on a website most people haven't heard of, and it rapidly became an even dumber and more obscure shitfight about which side had done mean things to the other side.
Unsurprisingly a right-wing ideologue has no knowledge of 4chan culture. /v/ the musical predates Gamergate, the Gamergate album they did in 2014 is now pretty much universally considered an embarrassment, and /v/ the musical is still a yearly tradition taking place every September/October.
Even though I was there from day zero, given the nature of the whole thing a lot of people came out with wildly different perspectives, so I'd love to hear your recollection of events. If you're interested, email me at rodrigousqui@hotmail.com
>It's appropriate considering that Gamergate faded into obscurity mostly because the Alt-Right and the Q conspiracies stole it's thunder and even took over their site.
Gamergate was always doomed. It was optically embarrassing: a cultural movement centered around videogames, which (to the public) are toys for children.
Also, the specific events that kicked off Gamergate (the Zoepost, and so on) were tedious small-scene drama that required significant mental energy to understand, and yet were a storm in a teacup, of no larger significance to anyone.
Don't get me wrong. In 2014, I was *spiritually* on the side of Gamergate. I was repulsed by the militant brand of social activism I saw sweeping social media, and felt like the left had hijacked culture to an unhealthy degree. Someone needed to push back. But whenever I tried to understand Gamergate, my gut-level reaction was always "who cares about this stuff? These people don't matter to me. These issues don't matter to me. This is he-said-she-said breakup drama of no concern to anyone outside the indie game dev scene."
Gamergaters soon realized this, and tried to rebrand the movement as something else ("ethics in game journalism")...but is game journalism a viable wedge issue? Does the proverbial Rust Belt Trump Voter of myth and song care about Kotaku or Anita Sarkeesian?
(Another problem was that the personalities behind Gamergate were fundamentally not much different to the SJWs they opposed. Sarkeesian was obsessed with the cultural content of videogames. So were GamerGaters, just in a different direction. In Vox Day's "SJWs Always Lie", he recommends that bosses fire their SJW employees (p197). How's that any different than what happened to, say, James Damore? Some actually switched their grift from one side to the other, like Candace Owens.)
The alt-right had longer legs, because it made itself about big, unifying issues. The downfall of America. The fate of western civilization. It faltered for a different set of reasons (it pinned its hopes on a false messiah, and had no Plan B for when he failed). But at least it had a veneer of respectability for a time.
> who cares about this stuff? These people don't matter to me.
It's the pattern. They come for the Xs, and I'm not an X, so I can't bring myself to care. But when I realize that it would only take one tiny little lie to transform me into an X, then suddenly it starts to matter on a personal level.
Nah, mate, it actually, genuinely was about "ethics in game journalism" (Though that particular phrase is an outside spin - a particularly poor one, you just know you have no ground to stand on when your attempts at mockery can just be answered with https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yes-chad (which I can't believe didn't yet exist in 2015), but still.)
Long story short - media jobs became high-status just as elite overproduction was ballooning, and this means the fight for them became a status competition. This, in turn, meant that a) rich kids were more likely to succeed in getting them and b) the whole community became increasingly conformist, since straying from mob consensus killed your prospects. This in turn meant they got increasingly detached from reality, including increasingly convinced they're capable of shaping reality the way they could shape social mores of their own community, also including belief in their own moral supremacy over everyone else. So when people started complaining about their incestuous self-congratulatory bullshit (in this case, the "incestuous" part was only partially figurative, since the sleeping with each other part happened to be real), they reacted the only way they knew at that point - by shouting how everyone opposed to them is both evil and socially undesirable. To their consternation, the people they shat upon didn't back away, which led to several waves of mutually reinforcing feedback of "Stop lying, FFS!" and "Pathetic reactionaries are harassing us and we fear for our lives!". (Which led Scott to write one of the most important essays in recent history, describing this very dynamic. That, or its last sentence is a cosmic-level coincidence.) Eventually, everyone got exhausted, but not until they reached the highest echelons of mainstream media (and other places, infamously including the UN).
But the thing is, none of what I said above about the media class is particularly controversial nowadays, which can only serve as a testament to what a huge lasting success Gamergate was, since a decade ago the public at large, especially the kids at 4chan, genuinely didn't know. See also: The online media ecosystem has been essentially dead just a few years after its 2014 heyday (and the fact that we can now locate the heyday in 2014 is not a coincidence). Trust in media overall keeps reaching new lows. Media people who a decade ago would defend their peers from "online harassment" are quietly adopting the "Gamergate" mindset wholesale. (I'm looking at you, Jessie, Freddie.)
It's not even a testament to the movement (and yeah, it could never succeed as a lasting movement, I can see how you came away disappointed if movement is what you were looking for, but I'm pretty sure most people never particularly cared). The whole media community was already filled with explosive toxic fumes, all that was needed was a spark, and it essentially destroyed itself on its own. But someone had to make that spark, and it just happened to be gamers.
Alt-right? They got a short boost of respectability simply for daring to speak up against the bullshit above at the time the general public was turning against it, then everyone realized they're actually, genuinely awful and quickly distanced themselves from them.
2) In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen.
In general people don’t like the clock change, despite it being much easier these days as it’s mostly automatic; but we are an unhardy generation. However there’s no consensus on whether to choose permanent summer time or winter time.
It’s grim up north but DST makes sense in Northern Europe. Moving sunrise at 3:30am to an hour later gaining a day that’s only fully dark by 10 pm is clearly beneficial - however permanent summer time all year would see a 10am sunrise in Scotland and Ireland near the solstice, while sunset moves from about 4pm to 5pm benefitting few.
This is what was tried before and failed before (although I think it was +2 GMT in the summer, and +1 in the winter).
Keep the clock change but make winter time shorter.
> In general people don’t like the clock change, despite it being much easier these days as it’s mostly automatic;
Not for your biological clock. The problem with daylight savings time isn't having to change clocks. It's suddenly changing time zones twice a year. That's not good for sleep.
If we're using automatically updating electronic clocks, maybe we should just make it change daily so sunrise happens at roughly the same time every day.
That’s an argument to absurdity. If we do this relatively sensible thing A, then why not do this bat shit crazy thing B which is only vaguely related.
I think the argument was that DST isn't at all sensible.
It doesn't matter what the clocks say. Resetting clocks doesn't add or subtract the number of hours of daylight from a given day.
All it does is interrupt everyone's established daily patterns twice a year.
I live in Seattle, far enough north to have extremes in short and long days. There's no meaningful difference in how people would live their lives in June with the sun rising at 5:12 AM and setting at 9:21 PM vs rising at 6:12 AM and setting at 10:21 PM. Most people who have a regular business day work schedule are going to be waking up when it's already meaningfully bright out and winding down for bedtime before it's meaningfully dark either way. And the day is so long they're going to need shades or curtains to achieve enough darkness in their bedroom to either fall asleep or prevent premature rising.
So I say this as gently as possible:
Who gives a fuck about when the sun rises and sets?
Artificial lighting was invented for a reason.
9:21 is the extreme there. I’m inclined to agree that 10:21 is a bit too late but longer evenings are better than shorter evenings in summer.
Says who?
I grew up in Arizona, which very sensibly doesn't have DST at all. No time changes.
Never in my almost 20 years of living there did anyone every say, "Oh geez, I wish *we* were all having our daily routines interrupted twice a year to avoid the horror of not changing our lives at all except to use a little more artificial lighting part of the year!"
On the contrary, Arizonans have roughly the same attitude about DST that Scandinavians have about US healthcare: Smug pity for the poor fools who haven't adopted an obviously superior way of life.
Well I wouldn’t recommend it for every state or nation but the EU was talking about removing the clock change the overwhelming support was for a later subset all year around. Myself I would stick with the clock change.
Yeah the biggest benefit to DST is this time of year where the extra hour in the evening is much appreciated. I get home from work and there is still enough daylight to; putter around the yard, work on the car, walk the dog, grill some sausage, walk over and have a beer with the neighbors. I understand this lifestyle is not everyone, but please understand that it is cherished by many.
Yes, and the clock change is loathed by many, many more, including those who are victims of the increased car accidents, lost productivity, disrupted schedules, and so on.
An hour of enjoyment for *some* people is not worth the hassle and sometimes trauma it causes others. Pick standard or DST and stay on it forever. Not that hard.
It's also horrible for people who like going stargazing. :-(
One reason to give at least a mild fuck about when the sun rises and sets: Birds. I don't know about you, but I can't go back to sleep if birds are chirping without first getting up, closing the window, and then lying back down. There's a longer story here I won't bore you with why an hour's change makes any difference at all here (which has to do with that it takes me about an hour to get back to sleep after being vertical even briefly, and that I'm fiercely nocturnal), but I mostly wanted to leave this comment here as a data point.
But, to be clear, the emphasis is very much on "mild".
(I would like DST to stop, please. I don't care which timezone we settle on. Sunrise no earlier than 04:00, ever, is nice (=> permanent summer time is better; this is Hamburg, Germany, if you're wondering), but I also prefer dark(!) evenings (=> permanent winter time is better), so either way it's a compromise. I'm willing to compromise if the switching stops.)
I'm mostly nocturnal and work full time overnight, so I've learned to mitigate daytime sounds and have little sympathy for folk who complain about them.
But if you want the switch to stop, you're okay in my book! ;)
Eh, I get it. "Window closed" mostly works for me (good sound insulation) and a white noise generator helps mask the rest, but closing the window becomes a problem if I need to open it while I sleep because it was too hot during the daytime, which... has mysteriously been pretty much all of summer lately.
("But what about air-conditioning?!" Well, I don't live in a place where air-conditioning is common. That honestly wouldn't stop me from getting some anyway, but this also mostly affects a place where I don't get to make the decisions.)
If you don't mind my curiousity, when do you go to bed, given you don't need to align to something approach a 9-5 schedule during the week? (I insta-drift to around 04:00-05:00 each weekend, and settle around sleeping from 06:00 to 15:00 during longer vacations, but try to get up around 09:30-ish during the week.) And what's the earliest dawn time for you?
The permanent summer time thing bothers me because it's the same inelegant hack as daylight savings time (adjusting people's schedules by changing what we call the times of day), but for even less reason. If people want to permanently get up an hour earlier, they should just change the nominal time when things are scheduled to happen rather than moving 12 o'clock away from actual noon and midnight. Admittedly this doesn't work as well if it's twice a year rather than once ever. Even that is evidently possible though, as I've been to two different regular events which were scheduled based on solar time rather than civil time despite following daylight savings being the default in my country because them happening in daylight actually mattered (one was aligned with dawn, the other with mean time).
Regarding 20, one could also point to Aquinas's quotation: "nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu" -- "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in sense". (And this was attributed to the Aristotelian tradition, though Aristotle himself did not have a quote quite like this.)
> "nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu" -- "There is nothing in the intellect which was not first in sense"
This looks funny to me. You've translated "first" in a temporal way, and to that end you put "was" in the past tense, with being-in-the-senses happening before being-in-the-intellect.
But the Latin says something different; 𝘴𝘪𝘵 is set in the present, just like 𝘦𝘴𝘵.
In this case, I have no idea whether the translation is accurate or not. I can't even explain why 𝘴𝘪𝘵 is subjunctive. (Though https://www.usu.edu/markdamen/latin1000/chapters/38ch.htm includes a remark that seems relevant: "That is, by the Classical Age the Latin subjunctive had begun to lose its association with specific functions (prohibition, volition, potentiality, etc.)—the job of relating the particular connotation of a clause had devolved onto specific adverbs like cum, dum, ut, etc.—and this mood ended up serving as little more than a way of signalling that a clause is dependent. In other words, the subjunctive had become the mood of 'general subordination.'")
There are three broad possibilities:
1. This is just a gross mistranslation, like when people say that 𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 means "on the word of no one".
2. This is perfectly normal Latin and the verb in the relative clause appears in the present subjunctive for good reasons that I don't know.
3. This is bad Latin, but perfectly normal medieval church Latin.
The first seems unlikely, but either of the latter two options is totally plausible. Does anyone know what's happening in the sentence?
I should note that you can translate the sentence into English, preserving the original tenses, without changing the meaning: "There is nothing in the intellect which is not first in the senses." This is hardly idiomatic, but we can salvage it by changing the wording while keeping the tense equivalence: "There is nothing in the intellect which does not arrive there through the senses."
I am not at all knowledgeable about medieval latin, but an argument for hypothesis 3 would be that the subjunctive used here matches modern French usage (and perhaps other romance languages too). I am a native French speaker with some latin knowledge, and this "sit" sounded instinctively right to me ("rien ne se trouve dans l'intellect qui ne soit d'abord dans les sens" - the indicative "est" would simply be a horrible grammar mistake in French.)
You need the subjunctive mood in French not to signal the clause is dependent in general, but because the main clause is negative and therefore the meaning of the dependent clause is negated, not affirmed. ("il y a quelque chose qui est..." VS "il n'y a rien qui soit...") Perhaps something like that is also going on here?
"On the word of no one" isn't exactly the _usual_ translation of "nullius in verba" but if it's a _gross mistranslation_ rather than just somewhat clumsy then I think the Royal Society itself is wrong about the meaning of the phrase. They render it as "take no one's word for it"; it seems to me that "on the word of no one" is just a more literal version of that.
Why do you describe "on the word of no one" as a gross mistranslation? What would you consider a good translation?
I think he mistyped, the standard translation is often "of nothing in words", which is a clunky literal translation that misses the broader context of the quote. "Take no one's word for it" or "On the word of no one" are better at getting the message (particularly the latter, since the original Latin isn't in the imperative).
> I think he mistyped, the standard translation is often "of nothing in words"
I didn't mistype, and that's not plausible as a translation, though since I'm complaining that the phrase is nothing but a painful mistake I guess I can't really expect a plausible one. It raises all kinds of obvious problems, though; if you realize that "words" is plural, you should immediately realize that you're dealing with "into", not "in". It doesn't say 𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘪𝘴.
There isn't a good translation; it's not a coherent phrase in Latin. It is a selection of words from a line of an original Latin poem that are, in the poem, 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁 of an idiomatic expression which requires additional words (they are present in the original) to have meaning. (They also do not relate directly to each other, but that's fairly insignificant.)
𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴 𝘪𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘪
𝘲𝘶𝘰 𝘮𝘦 𝘤𝘶𝘮𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘵 𝘵𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘴, 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘴
(I'm providing two lines because the line of interest is not a complete sentence. You can see that 𝘢𝘥𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘴 describes the author by the fact that, when the verb finally arrives at the end of the following line, it is in the first person.)
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.32106015310409&seq=5 has an interlinear translation from 1894; these lines appear on page 360. They are translated "bound to swear obedience to no master, I am borne along as a stranger, whithersoever the tempest carries me". [I've made a couple minor edits.]
The problem here is that 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 does not have independent existence in the sentence. It is part of the idiom 𝘪𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢, literally "to swear [oneself] into the words [of someone else]". Quoting it without the 𝘪𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘳𝘦 makes as much sense as line-item vetoing several paragraphs into one unrelated sentence.
There is no sense of believing or relying in the original; it is about allegiance.
The "on the word of no one" translation is tempting, to English speakers, because it matches well with an English idiom and 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 looks like it could mean "on [the] word" if 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘣𝘢 was a first declension noun. But it isn't; it's a second declension noun, and when you realize that you wonder what "into the words of no one" is supposed to mean. And the answer is, nothing.
Latin "in" can also mean by, by means of. [Accept/believe] nothing [asserted] by words [alone].
> [Accept/believe] nothing [asserted] by words [alone].
I don't think this is compatible with 𝘯𝘶𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘶𝘴 being genitive. You're stuck using "the words of no one".
In a broader sense... once the Royal Society has admitted that their slogan is a hack job performed on a known line of poetry, and the meaning they assign to it is unrelated to the meaning of the line of poetry, what's left to salvage?
I can't find a "by means of" sense in the Lewis & Short entry for 𝘪𝘯 ( http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0060%3Aentry%3Din ). I would usually expect that to be expressed by a bare noun in the ablative case. Can you point me to some discussion of the use you refer to?
I would guess that it is subjunctive because it is a relative clause of characteristic.
"the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism" -- um, did they happen to provide a citation for that claim about Prof. Gould?
Well, I don’t know about Gould, but as we know, On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 – famously the low-water mark of racism.
It is comforting to see that they have such a solid grasp of the ideas of evolution though, as in “implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others”. WTF!
It’s pretty much what The Mismeasure of Man is about.
>31: List Of Long-Term Wikipedia Vandals. It’s most fun to read this as a grimoire of minor information demons, eg “Wikinger: Adds false information related to the Greek alphabet and to its related minor characters”, “Zhoban: Adds unreliable sources to Islamic terrorism articles, while acting in an uncivil manner”.
My favorites are the "Chipmunks vandal" (who is known for "Adding trivial details about covers by fictional bands, especially Alvin and the Chipmunks"), and "Catcreekcitycouncil" ("Prolific sockpuppeter with over 500 socks which inserts hoaxes about lions existing in Montana"), and "Caidin-Johnson" ("Obsessed with inflatable, bursting, popping, and bouncing objects.").
I wonder why so many of them relate to childrens' TV shows?
"I wonder why so many of them relate to childrens' TV shows?"
A pretty large chunk of LTAs (long-term abusers) are autistic children. I mean they're fairly "severely" autistic, as traditionally conceptualized, and often "children" as in "prepubertal when they started LTA-ing". Wikipedia's always had a subset of editors who are juuuuust barely capable of navigating a theoretically-communal project where in practice you can just noncommunicatively engage in your special interest for years. Many LTAs of the Caidin stream seem to just be people who want to tile the world in their special interest, who aren't quite capable of engaging in the project itself.
I want to end daylight savings time, but that doesn't mean setting the clocks ahead and leaving them there; that would make it worse! I want to end it by setting the clocks back and leaving them set back. Why doesn't that get tried, and why isn't it listed as an option when people discuss it?
It IS a widely considered option, and predictably, that's the partisan divide.
Which party wants to set them ahead permanently? I'm finding it hard to imagine such lunacy, and how anyone gets there.
Permanent DST is the populist option bc people complain about it getting dark too early in the winter. Permanent standard time is the technocrat option because of later morning light in the winter having worse impacts on sleep quality and public health.
I thought it was the other way around.
Permanent standard time is the populist option because the kind of physical essentialism implied by wanting noon to actually occur when the sun is at its highest point in the sky and midnight to actually occur at the middle of the night is tantamount to claiming that words have actual meanings connected to physical reality and hence next door to "trans women are actually men" and stuff like that.
Permanent daylight savings time is the opposite of that and hence the enlightened technocratic option.
I don't think most people are even aware when True Noon is and which time tracks it.
In the Netherlands DST is also populist because it's called "Summer Time", which has a more positive connotation than "Winter Time"
What's the difference? The time of day you do stuff at is arbitrary. It's a problem if you try to make everyone use UTC and sometimes the day changes while the sun is up, but shifting an hour from midnight doesn't matter.
The only thing I care about is stopping the sudden one-hour changes in sleeping schedule.
Well, in the first place, I have an aesthetic preference for having the clocks bear an approximate relationship to astronomical time. But in the second place, setting the clocks ahead increases the fraction of the year I spend getting up while it's still dark out, which I would rather not do. And I've read somewhere that having to go to work or school in the darkness increases the risk of accidents. That's not an issue for me personally, as my workplace is two rooms from my bedroom, but it seems as if it lowers those people's utility. (We are living organisms and the time of day when we do things is not arbitrary, not for us.) And in the third place, if year-round DST was tried years ago, and repealed because so many people hated it, it seems as if you aren't going to get that one, whereas you might get year-round standard time if that were tried.
If you actually don't have any preference between the two options, then it doesn't seem as if you have any personal reason to oppose doing things the way I would prefer; your logical vote would be Abstain.
I read somewhere the abrupt interruption to people's daily sleep/wake routine does causes far more accidents than mere darkness.
> But in the second place, setting the clocks ahead increases the fraction of the year I spend getting up while it's still dark out, which I would rather not do.
Then don't. What does the clock have to do with that? There's no universal law that you have to get up when there's a certain number on the clock, and the only way to shift our schedule is to change when the clock shows that number.
That's not the case for people who have to go to work, or to school, and aren't free just to set their own schedules in everything.
Why are we free to change what the clocks say, but not what numeric hour people have to go to school at?
I don't know, but obviously it was found to be easier back when DST was invented in the first place.
You are correct and any argument for clock-changing is madness.
I grew up in Arizona, which sensibly doesn't have DST.
Nobody missed it. Not once during the other states' DST changes did I ever hear anyone lament, "Oh, I wish my daily routine had been abruptly interrupted!"
What gets me in when people talk as if changing the clocks is the only possible way to make more use of the light, and as if people simply doing stuff earlier in summer weren’t an option. But for all the talk of a coordination problem, I know plenty of businesses and organisations that keep different hours seasonally (think ‘winter opening hours’ and ‘summer opening hours’), and people already choose to stay out socialising or taking part in activities later on summer evenings. Plenty of office jobs seem to offer a choice of working hours, off-setting up to one or two hours, as long as you do the same in total, and there’s no reason that can’t be extended if it works for people.
So the only thing left would be maybe schools. Maybe we just need to give schools ‘summer hours’ and ‘winter hours’, and then everything else can sort itself out without changing clocks.
"Techno Genre Warrior from Greece" is my favorite name in the Wikipedia vandals list
19: Related: Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise (eg people carrying around loud stereos with them in public places).
There’s been an increase in people not using headphones for their phones recently - some of this may be due to Apple (and I assume other manufacturers) not shipping with default pluggable headphones. You need to spend big on AirPods to be social on public transport.
You can also spend $10 on off-brand headphones with a lightning plug and be social instead.
Yes, but Apple users like their brand. I’m not supporting noisy public travel - btw. I’d like in fact to kick them off.
Yes. It is enraging.
This is common in coffee shops around here, too. Some guy will just start playing a video with sound on loud and everyone around him gets to enjoy the soundtrack with him.
Could someone summarize the alt-right thing? I tried reading it and my brain started to leak out of my ears.
"Despite the decline of the visibility of the alt right after Charlottesville, many alt right ideas are now largely established in the mainstream/boomer/MAGA right, therefore mission accomplished. Also Jews aren't so bad anymore."
The article strikes me as broadly correct though maybe putting too vain and rosy a spin on things.
Thank you! I am curious, what are like the big three or five alt-right ideas that have gained mainstream status?
Anti-immigration, especially illegal immigration.
Anti-elite (this one covers a lot of different ground).
Populism and the shifts of the working class away from Democrats towards Republicans.
There are others and maybe some that are happening but may be too early to say they are gaining or have gained mainstream status (such as the reduction in woke power).
Another main point he argues is that the Ds have had a certain “moral authority” ever since the civil rights movement that the Rs are no longer letting constrain their rhetoric/behavior. He’s claiming credit for the alt-right for the fact that the right can now just openly scoff and keep doing what they were doing whenever the left calls out racism.
This might be because the left calls out racism whenever someone breathes
Holding your breath is racist too!
This was hard to imagine from the 2012 Republican Party:
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/01/trump-reverse-racism-civil-rights
I am in favour of this - a big part of why I have decided to vote for Trump despite being previously Democratic
"How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. Useful as a look into what strategies the alt-right thought they were using. I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working."
Could you please elaborate on this? Which paranoid-sounding bits that the misinformation experts and antifa people pointed out are in fact how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working?
The alt-right seemed to think that lots of people (including Trump) were "dog whistling" at them, and this was a useful communication modality for them. Doesn't necessarily prove that's what Trump intended, but if it takes two to dog whistle (one to intend, one to hear), then it at least half-proves it.
Wait, really? That part? Like, obviously he's going to pander to his base. Trump and his staff aren't blind.
"There are no dog-whistles" always seemed like one of your weaker takes (it's utterly obvious to me that "family values" and "tough on crime" are, for instance).
Glad to hear you changed your mind!
Huh? How are those two dog whistles? Literally everyone knows Family Values means "social/religious conservatism", just like everyone knows Inclusion means "militant identity politics". I can't even think of what the dog whistle that *only some people hear* is supposed to be for that.
I'm assuming you're saying Tough on Crime is dog whistle for something like "lock blacks up". So, does that mean its proponents *don't* want to lock whites who commit crimes up? Or that they want to lock innocent blacks up? How would they even attempt that?
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept of a dog whistle?
They are anti-gay (and to a weaker extent, anti-feminist) and anti-black, respectively. And the whole *point* of a dog-whistle is wrapping it up in a different meaning while making it perfectly clear what you really mean. "International bankers" is another example - everyone knows it means "the Jews".
If by "anti-gay" you mean things like anti-gay-marriage and anti-gay-adoption, the people talking about family values have usually been absolutely explicitly clear that they oppose those things, and have typically made them the centrepieces of their campaigns. If that's what you mean by a dog-whistle, I don't think you're using it according to its standard definition. You would be applying it to any example of positive-sounding buzzwords to refer to a clear and honest policy (that some people think is very bad).
Would you say that "affordable health care", "racial justice", and "immigration reform" are all dog whistles?
"International bankers" IS what I would call a dog whistle. If you ask a politician what they mean by "family values" they'll probably say things like "well, for one thing we're against redefining marriage". If you ask a politician what they mean by "international bankers", they will almost certainly NOT say "well, for one thing we're against the Jews running our economy".
Do you see an important difference there? Or not?
I see what you intend, but I disagree - "tough on crime" isn't merely "tough on (black) crime" - it's "keep the n— in their place". And that's something that _isn't_ said.
Similarly, "family values" means you're opposed to gays, _period_. You just wrap it in talk about traditional marriage.
No, dogwhistles are still a (mostly) bullshit concept primarily used to blame others for whatever one wants to imagine they're saying through the barest insinuations and complete lack of charity.
A lot of "Tough on Crime" politics involve doing things to black people that would be unacceptable to do to the proponents (e.g. stop and frisk, no knock raids, etc). This is not to say that the alternative to "Tough on Crime" has to be the defund the police/criminal apologia but there is room for a large sensible middle of more enforcement against crimes but the messaging you send when you have that position is different than what we are calling dog whistles.
If "tough on crime" is a dog whistle, do you believe that the only position someone can legitimately hold on crime is to be softer on criminals? That no matter what the current policy is, the correct position is always to be softer than that? If you think that at least in some instances being tougher on crime is reasonable, what term would you use to describe that policy, if not "tough on crime"?
You can absolutely and perfectly reasonably want to improve and strengthen law enforcement in general. If that's what you want to do, don't use the phrase "tough on crime", as it's laden with connotations you might then not intend but a lot of people are going to assume you do.
Of course, if it just so happens that all your efforts do indeed disproportionately target blacks and black areas, maybe you really were "tough on crime" instead all along.
Since black people commit a disproportionate amount of crime, any reasonable effort to improve law enforcement would disproportionately target blacks and black areas. Of course, since black people are also disproportionately victims of crime, such efforts would also disproportionately benefit black people--but that's a point "soft on crime" liberals never seem to acknowledge.
> If that's what you want to do, don't use the phrase "tough on crime", as it's laden with connotations you might then not intend but a lot of people are going to assume you do.
But then you'll just declare whatever new phrase is used to be an even more evil dogwhistle, won't you? And you'll have evidence too: approximately all the people who were previously using the old phrase have switched to using the new phrase. Since you *know* that 99% of them were dog whistling, then the new phrase must also be a dog whistle for the original bad position, QED. People only switched to using it because they felt everyone caught on to the old phrase.
The whole thing is unfalsifiable conspiracy theory nonsense. The above scenario isn't a thought experiment, it's what has actually happened over and over again over the past few years since the dogwhistle conspiracy theory became popular.
The local DA has a policy of never prosecuting trespassing offenses, or theft below $200. When I say "tough on crime" I mean I want the laws to MEAN something.
"Dog whistle" is a meaningless and/or misleading phrase if every possible shorthand for expressing an idea is labeled a "dog whistle".
So, what's the approved non-dog-whistle shorthand for "we should incentivize people to form stable domestic partnerships to raise healthy children to adulthood" or "we need to severely disincentivize crime even though that will involve the police treating lots of people very harshly"?
Because those are fairly common positions for people to hold, and to want to express openly rather than in some secret code. Which they typically do by using terms like "family values" and "tough on crime".
If you mean something different than what people usually mean with a phrase, even if it describes your position if taken literally, you're setting yourself up for misunderstanding.
So basically, just find another phrasing.
Let's put it like this: The literal meaning of "white lives matter" is perfectly sensible. But since only racists actually use the phrase (indeed, as a dog whistle), you paint yourself as one if you do, no matter what's in your brain at that moment.
So who gets to decide that "black lives matter" is something you're allowed to say and that "white lives matter" isn't?
society and norms decide this. In 10 years it may different and to some extent if you are influential you can try to change it but if you do try to change it, you have to live with the blowback you will receive.
I think you are in a bubble,and that the median American will understand those phrases in about the way John Schilling described them.
Lots of responses here, so I'll collect an answer.
First, when a phrase has a historical usage, it might no longer mean merely what the words seem to mean. Let's say you actually honestly only want to talk about the banking system internationally without any ethnic connotations - then talking about "international bankers" will be a poor idea, as most everyone will simply understand you to mean "the Jews" regardless - and for good reason, as this is the default usage! Similarly, if you campaign on "tough on crime", no-one in their right mind will think you're going to make an effort against tax evasion and insider trading - they know what the phrase means in practice, that you will crack down mostly on blacks. This historical usage is one of the best ways to identify a dog whistle.
Second, it's not like this is anything of a big secret. Quoting that Lee Atwater interview:
'Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."'
This is _explicitly_ how you signal to racists that you're with them without saying so explicitly.
Third, is this anti-conservative? Yes. Yes it is. "Family values" means something like "Let's go back to the 50's, before all this feminism and gay rights!". This is A Bad Thing.
Huh? Maybe I've been living under a rock (or maybe I'm just a lot younger than you) but if I heard someone talking about `international bankers' I would assume they meant people who worked at Goldman Sachs or Deutsche Bank or HSBC, and if I heard someone talking about being `tough on crime' I would absolutely assume they were also going to be tough on insider trading. Your interpretations would never even have occurred to me.
Also, what term should we use for `lets go back to the 1990s'? The 1950s are ancient history. Not only was I not alive then, not even my parents were!
By the 1990s gay marriage was on the brink of becoming legal (first state was Massachusetts in 2004), feminism was well established, and Roe v Wade was the law of the land, so if I saw a politician talking about "1990s family values" I would be genuinely confused what hot-button issue he thinks was at its peak in 1990 but has declined today. Does he think that it's best for gay people to be in the closet but not unknown?
(I would also be saying "dang, you're pretty young for a politician" because most people form their ideas of "family values" in childhood and if this guy was a child in the 90s then he's barely in his 30s now. Part of the reason a "family values" connotes the 50s is that some of the politicians saying it were alive back then.)
There are two separate issues here - whether the sender and intended receivers still get it, and whether the rest do.
Age is very likely a part of it - a couple of generations ago (let's say Reagan era), *no-one* would have been uncertain about who the "international bankers" were, and who's the target of "tough on crime"
Speaking of Reagan (and confirmed by Atwater in my quote), "welfare reform" and "welfare queens" were similarly about blacks, which everyone understood at the time.
Presumably meaning can drift over time? Reagan left office before I was born.
There are an infinite number of dogwhistles, so many that everyone who speaks in public can be shown to be signaling absolutely any evil thing you want them to be signaling.
There is only one "dog whistle", and it is the use of the term "dog whistle" to covertly refer to establishing a 1984-esque totalitarian state using Newspeak.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it. ;-)
So when you got blamed for people 'harrassing' Cade, it was half-proven that you saying "don't bother him" was actually a dogwhistle to bother him?
The motte/bailey of liberal critiques of alt right ideas was particularly masterfully executed by the alt right, which I found infuriating (added to the infuriation driven by people denying that's what was happening). Walt Bismarck comes out and says it that that was the strategy.
Just make sure to do your research if you're considering wearing hearing protection a lot, some audiologists, and some anecdotes I've heard of people wearing hearing protection constantly, said long term frequent use can make hyperacusis/noise sensitivity worse.
> with evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to
That's true; there is no theoretical ceiling and we have plenty of evidence demonstrating that price growth beyond your wildest dreams is quite possible. I think you can still buy Zimbabwe currency as memorabilia.
Curious about what side effects you see from inhaling NO. Isn't it a mild vasodilator? How big of a dose are you using?
For whatever reason, the spray isn't psychoactive at all. It just feels like squirting water into your nose.
I wasn't thinking of it as psychoactive, but rather physiologically active. By chance, I happen to be working on a topical drug that's a nitric oxide donor. Our biggest concerns are that, as a mild vasodilator, it can cause a little redness where it's topically applied, and that it might result in some orthostatic hypotension due to its effects on vasodilation. NO has a lot of physiological/signaling effects beyond its viral activity.
>not psychoactive
Wake up Scott. The nasal spray has you.
The reddit thread about community is fascinating. My partner and I both have professionally worked in "community building" efforts and can confirm most of these issues: zoning/architecture barriers, divergent gendered interests, better online individuated entertainment at home, and people's inability to commit/compromise/show up on time/behave in a reasonable manner, etc.
But after many years of failure, I recently had an epiphany: I don't think there is actually a "lack of community." I think what's happened to communal life is exactly what's happened to everything, which is that the middle has fallen out. Communities have polarized into either a) exclusive spaces for well-connected and high-functioning people, or b) spaces with no barrier to entry for very dysfunctional people. It's the "median" spaces for average people that have really disappeared, not community in general.
My partner had a breakthrough success using Partiful, the app that essentially allows people to invite each other to events, but you have to "know someone who knows someone." If you invite a couple cool, connected people to a community event, then they and everyone else will show up. If you open the gates and say "everyone is invited!" then either no one will show up or only dysfunctional people will show up.
I can't believe the types of events that can attract a crowd if you have a tiny core group of cool people. I've seen hugely successful events thrown with less than 24 hours notice, with no food, in dirty public parks, in cold warehouses with literally no furniture, in random apartments where everyone had a cold and could barely talk.
All of that is to say, realizing that some amount of exclusivity is essential to forming healthy communities has been very depressing for us after spending the last decade in egalitarian movements. But now whenever I think to myself, "I'm lonely, there's no community here," I know to shut up and look for what the cool and interesting people are doing and talking about.
Anyway, that's (partly) how I found this substack.
This is an excellent point—“the middle has fallen out.”
The bottom quintile will always throw a wrench in our loftiest ideals about an egalitarian society. But the problem is that addiction to social media and videogames are turning the median person much lower-functioning/more awkward, and therefore into less desirable community-members.
This is fascinating, can you tell me more? What’s an example of a “median” community that the bottom has fallen out of? Mainline Protestant church?
City clubs for one. Used to be fairly common for American men. Now it's Bohemian Grove status or nothing.
The famous book on the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone) was named for the disappearance of bowling leagues, but also civic organizations like Lions Club, Rotary, Elks, etc. Also, yes, mainline churches (or non-conservative and non-immigrant churches more broadly).
I would say "neighborhood third spaces." When I was growing up, I lived in what was considered by outsiders to be a "bad neighborhood," yet if you lived there, there were restaurants and cafes and public places where you could find lots of different types of people coexisting peacefully. Cafe culture was big, everyone went to the same panaderia every morning, whether they were a lawyer, teacher, janitor, plumber, whatever. For instance, there was a meth addict down the street who did odd jobs for people and there was a tacit agreement that the neighbors would look out for him as long as he kept the crazier parts of his life under control, because he didn't want to ruin the relationships with his neighbors. We regularly left our doors and cars unlocked and never got robbed.
Now, those third spaces in middle/working class neighborhoods where you could find lots of different types of moderately functional people don't seem to exist in my city anymore. My old neighborhood now consists of either rich people in mansions with private security systems and really dysfunctional people living in tents and squatting outside. People say the neighborhood "gentrified" as if it got better, but actually there is so much more crime and antisocial behavior and lack of accountability for the average person than I remember from when it was a "bad" neighborhood.
I also used to be very involved in trying to build community and also really lost my love for the egalitarian approach (just an invitation for endless meetings). I’ve found the most transformative thing in my life was just to go for drinks every Friday with a smallish group of people. Research shows that repeated contact is the most important factor for building strong friendships. I’ve established some really close friends this way and totally eliminated the sense I once had that I had acquaintances but no friends.
My wife did her PhD in a sub-topic of a sub-topic of community. After reading some of the seminal texts, I came to the conclusion that a community is where you have to get along with people with whom you disagree and whom you dislike, and who have different aims and interests.
What people call "community" on the internet is just hobby groups and cliques.
I tend to have more the definition that you mention in your first paragraph - although I wouldn't go as far as 'dislike'. Coming to Germany after having grown up in South Africa, I've been lamenting the lack of community, which feels to me like a layer of connectedness that lies between "strangers" and "friends", where you don't (necessarily) share any interests or goals, but you're (perhaps grudgingly, but on average quite happy to) willing to help each other out of a pickle if push comes to shove, this is reciprocal, known, and exercised often enough as not to simply be forgotten. In Germany you can usually ask the exact same things of your neighbour (e.g. maybe you want to borrow a ladder) and there's honestly a decent chance you'll get help, but it's not clear (not "known") and not exercised often enough to maintain itself as a meme, so it's deeply awkward and anxiety-inducing to try, which is its own self-reinforcing meme.
One striking example from my childhood is that I was just dragged to church by a friend's mother regularly on Sundays, even though it was perfectly clear to everyone involved that I wasn't going to convert, that I was staying an atheist, and that I was "just" there for the gospel singing and hanging out with my friend afterwards. I had a blast, felt accepted, never spoke ill of anyone I met at the church (nor had any reason to), and for a while it was just a staple of my life.
To be clear, I actually have no idea if my categorisation reflects something true about the world, but it's how I've tried to make sense of the disparity I observed between the cultures, looking back on my experiences.
Is it fair to define community as "the thing that you can spend time with if you don't have good friends to spend time with with"? Or, maybe: "the place that you go to meet people who can become your friends"?
It sort of feels that way to me but my experiences may be unusual.
There's a conflation of "friend group" and "community" that is a problem for that whole reddit thread
#30 wasn't the Gamestop short squeeze 3 years ago?
Yup! But why would that stop anyone? The Mother of All Short Squeezes is coming any day now. Aaaaany day now.
Sorry, fixed.
Re: (31). I had a gay friend who would post false facts on Conservapedia, e.g., on the list of "statements equivalent to the Axiom of Choice", he would add, you know, statements not equivalent to the Axiom of Choice.
Do you know why Conservapedia even has an article on that topic? It could be described as somewhat controversial I guess, but not in a way related to the left/right political axis.
I have this site saved on my phone so I can pull it up any time Daylight Saving Time comes up in conversation: "Living on the Western Edge of a Time Zone Poses a Higher Health Risk"
https://www.inverse.com/article/55596-time-zone-boundaries-two-groups-eastern-western-daylight-saving-time-health-problems
I think if we re-framed this issue as "let's force everyone to be at work/school an hour earlier so we can all be done sooner and enjoy the rest of the day" very few people would be in favor of it. The clock changes have a lot of people confused, but DST is early bird tyranny, and it's having a measurable impact on our physical & mental health.
19. In center city and south Philadelphia, the worst offenders for noise tend to be vehicles-- loud motors/lack of mufflers, and sometimes amplified music as well. Do you get more people carrying loud stereos?
I think when you're on a major road, traffic is worse, and when you're in various public places (parks, public transits, etc) music is worse. I agree that car stereos with the windows down are a subspecies of "stereos are bad because public noise". I agree that loud vehicles (especially motorcycles) are a big problem. I think I get angrier at people who are obviously being inconsiderate (which includes stereo-carriers and people on motorcycles that seem modded to make maximum noise) than people who are just trying to get where they need to go. Also, traffic noise not in specific categories of inconsiderateness tends to blend together into a general hum, which bothers me less.
I don't think I was clear. The typical vehicle makes some noise. However, there are people driving or riding *much* louder vehicles. Nothing in between that I've noticed.
Even on major 4 or 6 lane streets they're loud enough to be painful.
Sometimes it's cars, sometimes it's a group of half a dozen or more motorcycles.
I find the most abhorrent noise violators to be those who blare music while hiking in the woods. Not to say that city noise doesn’t matter, but some level will always be there and it isn’t a space where people expect peace and quiet.
Fully agreed, and they should be thrown back into the cities where such noise belongs.
I take loud noise by streets for granted, I don't think an expectation of silence on a busy road is realistic. People who carry speakers carrying music on hikes in the woods are beyond redemption.
I've seen a couple of 2 year estimates until AI images become undetectable. I'm not sure whether it's undetectable by unaided humans or undetectable by computers, but that sounds pretty early to me.
Thoughts?
Undetectable by computers seems pretty unlikely, though a lot of that is because no one is going to bother. (Though you also need someone to bother training a detection tool, but that is more likely to occur)
Text is harder to detect, just less room for slight weird variations.
Unaided humans: I'd say we can already do that for ~all of population.
The problem is that most AI art has the problems for detection
- Don't bother fixing up slight defects in character pose, hands, eyes, etc.
- Don't bother fixing up background
- Uses some common model or styling that people who see a decent amount of AI art just pick up on.
- Sometimes just looking too good. There's a lot of common art that has more artistic issues (and is popular because of what the artist depicts) and so seeing someone post a flawlessly stroked character can be surprisingly indicative.
- Intentionality of scenes. There's a lot of artists who draw poses. However, most AI stuff is poses and the like. This is getting better through Loras and also people putting stuff on Patreon (and thus having more incentive to try for more complex scenes)
So the question is possibly more importantly "what will be the common default state of AI art". Which is harder to answer. There's been less development in SD-area for advancing on certain features which would help (like better guiding of intentionality of scenes).
I'd suggest that it's unlikely that computers will be able to detect better than humans whether an image is fake. They're really bad at it right now, and the human brain is *really* good at visual processing and determining when something doesn't "look right". Image recognition is actually a computationally harder problem than generation (SOTA image recognition MM-LLMs are 100s of times bigger than diffusion models of analogous capability). We're just miscalibrated on the relative difficulty because we have tons of dedicated hardware (wetware?) for the latter and almost none for the former.
By the time AI art gets good enough to fool all humans, there's no reason to believe that there will be any artifacts left for an AI to pick up that a human can't - no rule says generated images can't be pixel-by-pixel indistinguishable from ones that come out of cameras.
Sure it is possible, but I think it is unlikely that they are made to be or already are pixel perfect enough to not have detectable low-level features (pixel placement, weird strokes).
I agree that we have an easier time than computers at picking up some large-scale features of the image, but I think there's probably enough information to do detection without even needing something with stronger understanding like a multimodal LLM.
(Though I think that MM-LLMs aren't efficiently made if you just wanted pure smart image recognition, imo all the mm-llms feel bolted on)
Depends entirely on the image being generated. If it's something with few recognizable details, like a photo of a man's face silhouetted against a soft-focus sunset at 500x500px, than it's been possible to generate undetectable images for a while now. If, however, it's something like a high-resolution photo of a large crowd of protestors with lots of different slogans on their placards, then I'd put the odds of something like that becoming undetectable in two years at maybe 50%.
I want AI generated Michelin star quality level food. Although, taste and smell sensors may be much farther out than a smart enough AI. Perhaps that would be an eventual AI detection mechanism, ask them to cook you a meal.
Related: Calibrate on how good *you* are at spot-checking whether a given image is AI generated: https://detectfakes.kellogg.northwestern.edu/
(h/t https://x.com/mrgunn/status/1772497716586664413)
This test is poorly calibrated itself, potentially to the point of being deliberately deceptive. Unless they have access to a much more advanced/successful model than any of the current ones I've seen, their AI images have been put through a professional-level degree of manual cleanup. And many of their real images are deliberately chosen to be "synthetic looking" (one example of this is using a photo from the ISS, where objects floating in zero-G create a similar effect to one commonly seen in previous-generation AI composites).
Note that Mr Gunn (the source of the linked x/twitter post) lists his occupation as "Communications consultant for AI safety and AI risk", the sort of person companies are much more likely to hire if most people cannot distinguish AI-generated from non-AI-generated images.
I disagree - most of the fake images I saw had the usual telltales - deformed hands, unreadable text, slightly melted or blurred objects, and the overall "style" of the composition. I got 26/30 before I got bored, and never felt like I was blind guessing.
A few of the real photos were hard to distinguish and I'd wouldn't be surprised if they selected them on purpose, but there were also several that were very, very easy to tell were real (photos with clear shots of text, clear views of people's hands, old news photos that had proper film grain, etc.
#26: Considering that Western intellectual progress in the 2nd millennium largely took the shape of gradually escaping Aristotle's shadow, I don't know what teaching Aristotle in high school could mean as a rallying flag other than "Let's go back to the shadow, it's too sunny outside".
Western intellectual progress over the past few centuries has also taken the shape of escaping Christianity's shadow, but I would feel like my kids were uneducated if they didn't know anything about Christianity and never read a Bible.
The Bible is important because a large chunk of humanity today and in the last few centuries has been seeing it as central to their belief system. I don't think the same can be said about Aristotle. The main function of learning Aristotle, so it seems, is to understand the context in which later, less obsolete philosophers and scientists operated, which puts him in a strictly secondary order of importance compared to them.
If we're looking for pure cultural/intellectual significance, The Koran and Marx's writings seem to be more valuable in terms of understanding the zeitgeist than ancient Greek philosophers. And if the goal is to give students the tools to teach themselves, surely more modern rationalist materials would be more efficient.
Either way, the article gives a surprisingly good impression of those schools compared to how they seem at first glance.
It was my impression that Christianity is a weird crossover fusion project between Judaism and Greek philosophy.
I think most of the European philosophical tradition is somewhat founded on the Greeks.
> The Bible is important because a large chunk of humanity today and in the last few centuries has been seeing it as central to their belief system. I don't think the same can be said about Aristotle.
I would argue that the bible has not been central to most Europeans epistemology since the Enlightenment. (It is more debatable if it was more central to their moral beliefs.) On the other hand, before that, I would argue that the world model people had was more influenced by Aristotle than Jesus.
I do not think it is terribly useful to study Marx to understand the PRC, it would be like trying to understand the GOP by reading the bible.
The idea that religion and intellectual progress are at odds is relatively recent. Look into the activities of Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell. His works weren't all that popular with the public, but they caught on among academics.
He's also notable for popularizing ideas like Columbus was trying to prove the world was round (he wasn't), that Galileo was prosecuted for heliocentrism (he wasn't, others who were promoting heliocentrism went un-prosecuted), the Salem witch trials were a religious attack on science (they weren't), and that the middle ages were a period of great academic stagnation.
That last one is probably the most ahistoric, the one that casts the church in the worst light, and the one that is most sticky. The middle ages weren't stagnant, they produced many inventions. A few of them: the university, Gothic architecture, mechanical clocks, windmills, the astrolabe, optics, the spinning wheel, the trebuchet, the blast furnace. The printing press was a middle ages invention.
He also engaged in what today we'd call nutpicking, focusing on the weirdest, smallest minorities. For example, people who opposed lightning rods as thwarting the will of God.
While I agree that learning some things about Christianity is important in a society that has been and still is so influenced by it, and I'd include some of the more important Bible stories in this to some extent, I'm surprised you include actually reading the Bible in this. Its effect on the culture is mostly pretty indirect, through many layers of interpretation, and even for picking up on more specific references, I feel like more modern less dull summaries are generally sufficient.
But then how would you know how many people were in each tribe, and who was son of who, and how do you properly set up an altar, and what was in each man's offering?
I disagree about escaping Christianity's shadow. Certain Christian ideas, perhaps, but not others (disapproval of cousin marriage, formal impersonal argument) . And Christian organisational technologies (literacy, bureaucracy, merit-based appointment) are pretty foundational. Yes these are not unique to Christianity, but they showed up in that context in our culture.
I don't really think of bureaucracy/merit-based as christian, specifically, I think of them as Things That Emerge When You Have A Big Org Under Certain Social Situation. China for example, had plenty of very modern sounding bureaucracy prior to any Christianity, as I understand it. Literacy maybe, in that now you can read the bible, but also wasn't there a lot of church resistance to peasants having access to the bible? Sure, Christians used those technologies, but they didn't invent them and you don't need Jesus to get there. "escaping Christianities shadow" is I think more about getting away from the religious/metaphysical/moral aspects, the things that are specific to, or somehow implied by Christianity.
Yes in abstract bureaucracy is not tied to any religion or philosophy. It's just a way of administering an organisation or region that works less badly than every other way we've tried.
But in Europe it became fully elaborated as a property of the Church, influenced by the Church-state of Byzantium perhaps. The church is where these things happened, so we're living in its shadow. In counterfactual world, a different path was taken. But not in this timeline.
I'm curious to know how your thinking on this develops as your children get older.
Prior to having my own children, I think I would have agreed with you. Jewish religious and historical studies were a significant part of my own upbringing.
However, my own children know almost nothing about Christianity and have only minimal exposure to Bible stories/have never read directly from a bible. They are top students, especially in STEM, but also strong in their history and english lit/composition classes. In fact, the only purpose I've ever come up with where reading the bible would be uniquely useful for their development was for instilling anti-religious ideas (the book of Job and most of the exodus story, for example, make God seem pretty terrible.)
My conclusions have been:
(1) Knowing that religion was an animating force behind a lot of historical action doesn't seem to depend on knowing any doctrinal details.
(2) It is pretty easy to get higher level messages (character and values, instructive stories) from other literary/mythological sources.
(3) A lot of great literature doesn't depend on knowing bible references.
If Aristotle cast a millennial shadow over the West, that seems like a pretty good reason to teach him - *especially* if you want to escape that shadow.
The metaphor doesn't result in, "Let's go back to the shadow," it's, "holy shit look at that huge shadow, we should learn more about that."
Wrong premise, extremely wrong conclusion.
14) This is hilarious:
> Rav Kahana says: I heard that it is also forbidden to ask people out on dates at parties. Rabbi Abba said: I heard in a baraita: in the days of the Second Temple, someone asked a woman out on a date at a party. A journalist heard this and told the Romans, and they massacred 70,000 Torah scholars in retaliation. Therefore Rabbi Akiva decreed that it is forbidden to ask people out at parties.
15) I recently ran across James Clavell's "The Children's Story" in a bookstore. It was short and had a fair bit of depth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Children%27s_Story
17) I've run into this, in a couple of conversations with young "queer-coded" people. From what I can piece together, they view "man" and "woman" as tiny little restricted categories, and if they don't 100% agree with all stereotypes of that category, they reject the label. It seems bizarre on one level, but on another level it's refreshing, in that once the word games are put aside, it's a recognizable example of how roles are constantly being redefined as the generations shift. Since we're all good lefties, and think being cis and het is bad, what do we do if we realize we aren't trans and like the opposite sex? We redefine the all the words so that we're just like the cool queer kids! Now no one has to be cis and het! Or so I gather, anyway.
> the people who want to ban everything except crime
What a brilliant turn of phrase.
24) The main thing I got from that is that "shapeshift" might be a term used in the alt-right. I ran across it a while back in the comments here, and thought the person was just making up weird terminology on the fly to try to sound intellectually fecund. But maybe they were coming from a community that had developed their own lingo.
I'd also like to see a counterpoint from someone else from the alt-right. This piece sets off some of my "narcissistic self-promotion" alarm bells.
Re 17) - Which makes perfect sense if you think about someone who may be 15-20 right now. Growing up in a society where mainstream sources and many popular (Tiktok, Youtube) celebrities make it clear that being cis or het is uncool or worse makes it obvious that people who may be labeled as such would choose different terminology that doesn't condemn themselves. It's like calling someone a Square in previous generations. Some random boo-word that people don't want to be called because they know it's bad/uncool.
That's why there's so much interest in the massive proliferation of Bi-identifying people, when there's also a significant increase in the number of Bi people who only sleep with people of the alternate sex. Are they really Bi and we're learning something about how people operate, or are they claiming Bi because it's easy to do with no costs associated and allows them to dodge being considered uncool? This also works with "non-binary," "gender-fluid," "queer," etc. None of those titles actually require you to make any life changes, but clearly puts you outside of the cis/het problematic zone.
The bit that strikes me as the most perfect are people who list their pronouns as "he/them" and "she/them". It successfully blurs the difference between "I carefully position myself with creative but respectful use of the latest terminology" and "I don't actually give a shit what you call me".
I also like Aubrey Tang's self-description as "post-gender", which is a rare example of a trans person espousing this view.
27) you seem to have overlooked the claim (made in passing therein) that HUMMING might fight colds/COVID in the same manner as spraying that stuff in your nose. Which seems like something that in a saner world somebody would have an incentive to run studies on. And yet.
> then it’s a question of which law-abiding people should take the pain, and I think the least unfair option is banning portable stereos.
If no one is enforcing a law, it becomes harder for it to become common knowledge. (Ex: how many times have you really heard of a law that may affect you from TV or reading a news report compared to talking with people, or hearing stories about someone getting punished for breaking it...)
> How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician.
Obvious question is how far to trust this as an accurate retelling.
(And then there's that even if this is true, did people being paranoid about it actually have sufficient reason to be paranoid)
> The only exception is that this guy thought progressives who conflated ordinary Trumpists with the alt-right were serving alt-right interests (ie it was counterproductive for the progressives doing it).
This seemed like common knowledge to me as a failure point of a lot of modern politics, definitely not surprising.
If you think of "alt-right" as further to the right and less acceptable to mainstream society than regular right, then conflating groups of people with the alt-right definitely increases their interests. It may be against the interests of the regular right that's being grouped with less acceptable groups, but for the alt-right it does seem like a win-win.
I still don't know quite what "alt-right" means. Is Trump part of the alt right? How about Charles Murray?
As with most such terms, it appears that everyone has a slightly different definition and they're fuzzy around the edges.
I personally would not say that Trump is part of the alt right, but he's either the leader of them or they're his followers, even if he's not himself a member of the group. That sounds weird, but I think it's closer to Democrats generally being the leaders of unionized workers despite not being a member of the group.
Charles Murray is definitely not a member of the alt right, in any classical sense. He's one of many people, especially in Journalism and Academia, who have been pushed out of every other category and so the only group that will fully accept them is what's remaining - the alt right. Even people who would absolutely disavow the tag are pushed into the group, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
I don't know what people are finding so appalling about that article, most of it lines up with what I observed during that time. This is just what playing politics seriously looks like. Liberals were far too complacent, and now they're going to suffer for that.
Sadly, the term "Shadow Lord" does not really make sense, although there is a Shadow Lord Chancellor. "Shadow Minister" makes sense, as the category of opposition spokesmen who shadow government ministers, eg Shadow minister of defence, Shadow Minister of Education, etc . But "Shadow Lord" doesn't work as a category because the Lords are members of the upper house, including the opposition, so the opposition lords are real lords not shadow lords.
Yes, it's "Shadow (Lord Chancellor)", not "(Shadow Lord) Chancellor". Still sounds badass, though.
The Gamestop thing was in 2021, not last year.
This may spoil the fun, but while you can be a "Shadow Lord Chancellor" or "Shadow Lord Privy Seal" or whatever, you cannot simply be a "Shadow Lord".
You may inform the Shadow Lord Privy Seal that I am sealed in a shadowy privy!
I am the Seal, and I hereby serve notice that the Shadow Lord requires you to vacate his Privy immediately. Arp arp arp arp.
I was wondering why my comment on Lesbians Who Only Date Men was getting even more likes! Basically -- some chunk of this is true, but some chunk of it is mischievous responding, i.e. a decent subset of teenagers, when given a public health survey, will pick meme answers to troll the researchers. See findings like "gay kids are more likely to be teen parents" and "99% of teenagers who say on a public health survey that they're missing a limb actually have all of their limbs". It ties in with the lizardman phenomenon, but is less of a constant.
Wikipedia LTAs (long-term abusers) are...interesting. Some of them are very disturbed and tragic figures. I spent a while getting many-thousands-of-words rants emailed to me on a regular basis before turning off the ability of new users to email me through Wikipedia. Many of them are trapped in vicious cycles with overzealous antivandals (overzealous antivandals are a noticeable minority of editors, as I discuss in https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/what-does-a-wikipedia-edit-represent). The aforementioned email guy mostly chases after people who chase after him, and if you decide you're the Defender of the Wiki going to banish him, you're on his shitlist forever. And he's been to prison before, so you probably don't want that.
I discovered this first-hand on a survey administered to us in high school. One of the questions asked which kinds of recreational drugs we used. Being an edgy teen libertarian opposed to all drug prohibition, I decided to check all the boxes.
One of them was one I'd never heard of before that went by street names such as "wagon wheel" or "poke." Whatever, I checked it anyway to spite the survey that I was sure was being conducted to strengthen drug prohibition.
Later on I learned that surveys like this would include such questions to let them throw out responses from mischievous respondents.
Two decades on from that survey, searching for references to "wagon wheel" as a drug reveals one page where someeone asks in 2012 if "wagon wheel and xanax are the same" and a psychologists affirms that they are "street name for 2 mg pills of alprazolam (Xanax)": https://www.justanswer.com/mental-health/6liyh-wagonwheel-xanax.html.
Nothing else shows up in the web search. But if you ask ChatGPT or Bing Copilot what wagon wheel drugs are, they repeat this definition.
I'm almost certain this question came from someone who just took the survey. And now according to the most powerful AI models we have, it's real drug slang.
Thanks for no 17: "Default Friend: Lesbians Who Only Date Men." The twists and turns of identity theory & identity theoriticians are fascinating from a social science point of view.
To the extent that these identity processes do not only take place in the minds of identity theory people, but also out there where people live and interact, the situation reminds me of a poem by the Norwegian poet Jan Erik Vold. It can serve as a leitmotif-poem for Gen Z, in their quest for an "identity". Tentative translation:
In the room between mirrors and mirrors/ things hurl against things/ the reverse are of what the first things were / and again in the next layer of mirrors/ and was and is and was/ things forever hasten split into the depths/ of the mirror's corridor and opposite/ corridor where no door is the final door / and everything happens at the same time/ in the room between mirrors and mirrors
Having *creationists* pull the "my opponents are racists" move is frickin' hilarious.
Why? "God made the various races of humanity equal" sounds less implausible to me than "random mutations and natural selection made the various races of humanity equal".
Oh, I'm not commenting on the actual reasoning, that's no more stupid than most invocations of "my opponent is racist". But creationism is a right-coded belief, and "my opponent is racist" was up until now a left-coded rhetorical move, but apparently accusing your opponent of racism is now a viable move across the political spectrum.
"Beating the Nazis" is pretty much the creational myth of the post-war western world. Against progressive cliches, genuine racism has not only not been accepted in most conservative spaces for more than half a century by now, but in fact racists are among their favorite villains. Of course, their conceptualization of racism is different; Conservatives favor strict colorblindness/equal opportunity, while progressives favor affirmative action/equity of outcomes. Unsurprisingly "progressives are the real racists", "racism of low expectations", etc. have been mainstays of conservative thought pretty much since modern style affirmative actions was first proposed.
"genuine racism has not only not been accepted in most conservative spaces for more than half a century by now"
Approval of white-black interracial marriage did not exceed 50% until the 1990s:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx
This poll didn't break down the results by political affiliation. Back in the 50s and 60s it was the Democrats who were the white southerner demographic and pushing Jim Crow, segregation, and were against interracial marriage the most (though 96% were against in the US, so everyone was essentially against it). The fact that the breakdown is by age in the poll says that it's a holdover from previous generations instead of something that's actually changed politically.
That said, it's most likely the holdover Democrats who were the reason it took so long to change, at least moreso than Republicans/conservatives.
Do you want to register your beliefs about what the relative numbers of Republican vs Democrat numbers for approval of interracial marriage were like 50 years ago (so 1974)?
The relative numbers or details of Republicans vs Democrats aren't that relevant here, basic packing arguments make the claims above implausible.
"genuine racism has not only not been accepted in most conservative spaces for more than half a century by now" is an *extraordinary claim*. given that only 24% of whites were okay with interracial marriages in 1974.
To believe that this belief is not accepted in "most conservative spaces" you need to believe something like that belief being held by ~100% of liberals and <50% of conservatives, an implausibly large correlation. You further need to believe that ~almost everybody who is okay with interracial marriage do not have other forms of genuine racism, again a suspicious claim.
I don't understand why people insist on digging themself into such an obvious and unambiguous epistemic hole.
Also Nixon and Reagan seemed quite racist, at least by today's standards.
". . . to see those—those monkeys from those African countries [President Nixon laughs], damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!"
Ronald Reagan
from https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/reagan-nixon-and-race
One might argue that a Republican-controlled White House would be considered a conservative space.
The story does have a happy ending:
> When Reagan did eventually become president, the issue of South African apartheid rose to the front of American consciousness. Instead of confronting the regime, Reagan chose to emphasize engagement, trade, and a history of "friendly" relations. It became one of the few times Republicans broke with the president, as Congress overrode his veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986. "I think he is wrong," said Senator Mitch McConnell, "We have waited long enough for him to come on board."
So we see that by 1986 (38 years ago, not 50+) at least some conservatives managed to clear the very low bar of being against apartheid, though notably Reagan was not among them and he is still heliographed as a conservative hero, not a favorite villain.
"You're a racist" has been rapidly losing value against conservative targets for at least 5-10 years. Some combination of overuse and stretched meaning leaves most conservatives wary of the accusation. All conservatives get painted with a broad brush as racists on a regular basis and most specific conservatives have been called racists for, essentially, disagreeing with progressive orthodoxy. Accepting the accusation is a lose-lose for conservatives, so they are learning to just ignore it. They would be bothered by a genuine accusation of racism based on specific things they said, did, or thought (such as using a racist slur against a black person), but not by the various redefinitions of the term meant to keep it's negative social connotations while expanding the list who can be accused of it. (As an aside, this has had the effect of making actual racism more acceptable because the terminology used to declaim it has become tainted).
On the other hand, it still has a lot of value against progressive targets. Progressives changed the term into something their opponents don't actually care about, but they do. They've essentially created a superweapon to use against themselves. It makes sense to me that conservatives will employ this superweapon, since it exists. By any measure of fairness, progressives should definitely be accused of things that fall within their own definition of racism, since they are the side that wanted the new definition to be as expansive as it is.
Creationists do not necessarily believe this. For example, from Henry Morris's The Beginning of the World (1991):
> The descendants of Ham were marked especially for secular service to mankind. Indeed, they were to be “servants of servants,” that is “servants extraordinary!” Although only Canaan is mentioned specifically (possibly because the branch of Ham’s family through Canaan would later come into most direct contact with Israel), the whole family of Ham is in view. The prophecy is worldwide in scope and, since Shem and Japheth are covered, all Ham’s descendants must be also. These include all nations which are neither Semitic nor Japhetic. Thus, all of the earth’s “colored” races — yellow, red, brown, and black; essentially the Afro-Asian group of peoples, including the American Indians — are possibly Hamitic in origin and included within the scope of the Canaanitic prophecy, as well as the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, and Phoenicians of antiquity.
> The Hamites have been the great “servants” of mankind in the following ways, among many others: (1) they were the original explorers and settlers of practically all parts of the world, following the dispersion at Babel; (2) they were the first cultivators of most of the basic food staples of the world, such as potatoes, corn, beans, cereals, and others, as well as the first ones to domesticate most animals; (3) they developed most of the basic types of structural forms and building tools and materials; (4) they were the first to develop fabrics for clothing and various sewing and weaving devices; (5) they were the discoverers and inventors of an amazingly wide variety of medicines and surgical practices and instruments; (6) most of the concepts of basic mathematics, including algebra, geometry, and trigonometry were developed by Hamites; (7) the machinery of commerce and trade — money, banks, postal systems, etc. — were invented by them; (8) they developed paper, ink, block printing, movable type, and other accoutrements of writing and communication. It seems that almost no matter what the particular device or principle or system may be, if one traces back far enough, he will find that it originated with the Sumerians or Egyptians or early Chinese or some other Hamitic people. Truly, they have been the “servants” of mankind in a most amazing way.
> Yet the prophecy again has its obverse side. Somehow. they have only gone so far and no farther. The Japhethites and Semites have, sooner or later, taken over their territories and their inventions, and then developed them and utilized them for their own enlargement. Often the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have become actual personal servants or even slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane matters, they were eventually displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites.
> The Japhethites have been “enlarged,” taking over lands originally settled by Hamites, and developing the Hamitic technology into science and philosophy. Japhethites have provided the intellectual aspect to humanity’s life, Hamites the physical, and Semites the spiritual. Japheth has, even in the present age, largely taken over the religious function from Shem — “he shall dwell in the tents of Shem” (Gen. 9:27).
> These very general and broad national and racial characteristics obviously admit of many exceptions on an individual genetic basis. It is also obvious that the prophecy is a divine description of future facts, in no way needing the deliberate assistance of man for its accomplishment. Neither Negroes nor any other Hamitic people were intended to be forcibly subjugated on the basis of this Noahic declaration. The prophecy would be inevitably fulfilled because of the innate natures of the three genetic stocks, not by virtue of any artificial constraints imposed by man.
I would say that this description of racial differences as predestined due to different genetic stocks is pretty much quintessential bio-essentialist racism.
Yes, of course, with creationism anything goes, because "God wanted humanity to be equal" and "God wanted humanity to be diverse" are equally plausible, an arbitrary question of God's aesthetic preferences. With evolution, one's thinking ought to be more constrained, with priors imposed by what is evolutionarily plausible.
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender
Doesn't strike me as a troll argument at all.
Yeah I was gonna ask why this is supposed to be a troll argument. It strikes me instead as taking the ideas to their logical conclusion.
You may be spoiled by the rationalist community, but in general, most people take ideas to their logical conclusion only when they are trolling.
Yes, but this *is* the rationalist community. So I have the expectation that taking ideas to their logical conclusion and then discussing the results is something that will be done here.
I would view calling such an argument "trolling" simply a way to avoid having to engage with uncomfortable hypotheticals.
I think it seems that way to you because of a common misunderstanding. Gender-critical arguments tend to assume that those who believe that gender is flexible/based on identity think that biological sex "isn't real" and that one's feelings trump biological reality, period. Instead, what is happening is that "gender identity" is posited as a new dimension along which to categorize people, statistically highly correlated with but linearly independent from sex. Another assertion is that in many contexts, gender identity is more relevant than biological sex (sex mostly comes up at the doctor's office). You might not believe that! But almost no one is denying that sex is real.
If you think that gender comes from denying the reality of sex, you might think that also denying the biological reality of sexuality is a logical conclusion. But that would be a misunderstanding. There is no such thing as a "sexual identity" - categories of sexuality are based on your actual desires and behaviors, and nobody is trying to deny that.
And yet having a "sex change" is something that is considered a mundane occurrence in those circles. They consider both sex and gender to be vague socially constructed categories, very much amenable to change if so desired.
It's true that sex could be considered mutable through gender-affirming care, a treatment for gender dysphoria. In fact, it's the only effective treatment; we haven't been successful with trying to do the reverse and change a person's gender to match their body ("conversion therapy"). This was tried for a long time, albeit oftentimes with a religious conflict of interest, but the conclusion was that it is ineffective and can cause lasting psychological harm.
I'm going to "no true Scotsman" this and say that if the trans person we're talking about has never experienced gender dysphoria, I am not talking about them and probably would not defend their choice of gender identity. I realize this is seen as an old-fashioned position these days. But I think it's a useful perspective, because our current official policies (e.g. who insurance will cover for gender-affirming care) are based on dysphoria, because we actually have evidence for treating dysphoria.
I'm not exactly opposed to the majority of younger queer folk who subscribe to a narrative that is less focused on dysphoria as the basis for trans-ness; I support their individual liberties (but I do draw the line at paying for medically unnecessary operations, and indeed they would have to cheat the system to access them through insurance). I do think that narrative has muddied the waters for the trans-skeptical, though, and ought to be considered as a totally separate and new thing from dysphoria-based trans-ness, if at all.
Bringing it back to sexuality, sexual dysphoria isn't a thing as far as I know. So I wouldn't support someone claiming a sexual identity that differs from their continued behavior; that just sounds like being in denial.
Well, this whole cluster of issues would be an epistemic quagmire even without its unfortunate status as the hottest-button culture war issue, but what annoys me the most is the endless tower of motte-and-baileys. Sure, the word "dysphoria" likely refers to something real, but then what is the connection to stuff like genderfluid and all those bizarre neo-genders?
As for sexual/gender dysphoria distinction, the most comprehensible elaboration of this stuff that I've seen suggests that there indeed can be both, meaningfully different: https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uBjKXbTwumJ3ruR5b/what-boston-can-teach-us-about-what-a-woman-is#comment-bkuXuWoxp34msxWZ5
Thanks for the link, that was a really interesting read! I do not have this kind of first-hand experience. That being said, my understanding is that "transsexual" is used there to denote a more extreme subset of "transgender," namely having dysphoria to the extent that one wants to change one's body; and not as an independent category. And while the terminology is confusing, "transsexual" refers only to sex, not sexuality. The reason why they say talking about it could get them "cancelled" is that there has been a movement to retire the word transsexual and to consider all forms of transgender Identity as fundamentally equivalent. Make of that what you will.
Neo-genders I am not a good authority on. I can see why you call the issue a motte and bailey. What I was trying to convey in the previous comment is, I don't fully endorse the bailey of infinitely flexible neo-genders (although at a certain point this becomes a strawman that is only used to discredit genderfluidity), but also one's position on this is mostly irrelevant to whether one accepts the basics of gender dysphoria and transgender/"transsexual" Identity. And in my opinion, it's a mistake to think of it as a motte and bailey, because the people who established this basic theory of transsexuality are not the same people who now advocate radical genderfluidity.
That was a great link, thank you!
> I do draw the line at paying for medically unnecessary operations
In the case of male -> female conversion, removing the testicles takes two minutes, an alcohol swab, a razor, and a sharp knife. Happens to millions of lambs every year, without the alcohol swab or razor. Should be done as soon as the claim is made.
I think that if these are 2 separate dimensions, it's a mistake that people ended up trying to use the same terminology (e.g. the word "woman") for both of them.
Like poly and EA, this is not a topic that Scott approaches with neutrality, nor does he give their critics charity.
Very nice Talmud excerpts.
I couldn't resist the urge to try my best to translate some of them into Babylonian aramaic, and add some rashi and tosfos:
(putting in a link since substack won't let me post an image)
https://substack.com/profile/53122660-stronghand14/note/c-53155946
I can't read that but I bet if I could it would be great.
fake talmuds are a great genre of humor.
especially when written in the same hebrew / Aramaic lanuage and overly concise style of the real talmud.
since talmud is hard to read, your mind has to switch to "studying talmud mode" to read it and then every time you encounter a joke it's funnier since it feels more unexpected when your mind is in that mode.
This is weak evidence that Scott is an angel.
The song with the cactus person actually fucking slaps.
I made that one, thank you! Spent over an hour trying to get it to sound like the experience of LSD, but that didn't really work so I settled on this. Fortunately the post was basically written in rhyme so very easy lyrics to work with.
Who did Nihil Supernum and how was it done?
The full, amazing insanity of Gamestop conspiracy theories investigated here (Folding Ideas, you may have seen his NFT takedown as well):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA
Regarding the alt-right article, the surprising thing is that it's surprising. I mean, some of the tactics are quite advanced, like the idea of creating a chain of respectability where everyone is free to invite those with one more level of radicalism and ignore those above, but otherwise, this just reminds me of being a junior leftist and participating in countless chats, forums and other meetings where people, essentially, talked strategy; how should we spread our ideas, what sort of memes to create? A particular point was how to replicate the Finnish right's successful internet strategy, which at times seemed like it worked because it was spontaneous and individual-driven, but in hindsight probably involved similar planning by someone behind the scenes.
Like the Margaret Mead quote says: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." The problem with conspiracy theories isn't that conspiracies exist, conspiracy is almost the standard form of organization - it's the idea that conspiracies are always successful (they usually aren't), that their successes won't create unexpected backlash or aftereffects (consider, for instance the German Empire's plot to bring a minor radical called Lenin to Russian Empire to sow discord - successful beyond expectations, but ultimately surely not in ways leading to the German liking), or that the conspiracies are, by themselves, *bad*, though of course this alt-right organizatory effort was from my perspective; the world is full of cases where the malign conspiracy of traitors of one era becomes the "time when our brave patriots had to organize in secret to avoid the gaze of the oppressor" of the other.
>successful beyond expectations, but ultimately surely not in ways leading to the German liking
Didn't Russia withdraw from World War 1 because of Lenin? And then they joined World War 2 because Hitler picked a fight.
Yes, in this way it was successful beyond expectations - but Soviet Union regained most of the Russian Empire lands soon enough, and it gave a huge boost to the revolutionary ideology that eventually led to a series of Communist revolution attempts in Germany itself.
It might surprise a lot of Americans or Europeans, but before yesterday, I never fully got what's wrong with gentrification. I mean, isn't it great when old slums get demolished and new, modern houses spring in their place? Since the REAL issue with this is well-known to pretty much anyone who is talking about it, nobody ever bother to explain it, which means outsides like me are left slightly baffled (but not enough to actually ask questions and find the truth). Well, I've been reading a "cozy fantasy" novel called "Cuppe Tea", which finally explained it to me, and made me realize WHY didn't I get it before.
Thing is, I live in Russia, and a lot of people actually own their apartment and homes here - post-Soviet privatization legacy. Which means if government decides your old commie block is going to get demolished to be replaced by a pricey high-rise, you're entitled to a compensation - a new apartment. In Soviet times, and in 90's, your new house could be located anywhere in your city, which often meant people got moved to the farthest outskirts, but these days there is a rule that you have to have an option to get a new home in the same district. Which means that even a poor person almost never gets left without a place to live! There is a growing number of people who rent apartments, who are more vulnerable, but this is still a small enough percentage that gentrification is simply not an issue in Russia (and we have less homeless, because laws do a lot to prevent you from losing the last place to live, even if you're destitute - I guess this policy is a result of climate where you simply freeze to death if you don't have a home).
But I guess there are a lot more renters in the West (it seems so from media, at least), which is why "landlord sells the house from under you to make space for a new high-rise, and you can't afford anything else in this city" is much more of a danger.
To be pedantic, while I'm thankful to this book for explaining the problem to me, I think it uses it as a plot device badly - gentrification requires a surplus of people willing to pay higher rent, which seems HIGHLY unlikely in a city on the farthest boundary of an empire, bordering on a magic disaster zone and flooded with refugees. So the main antagonist's evil plan to drive out refugees by buying up all property in the city and making it impossible for them to pay the rent should, by all logic, end with him losing lots of money without any hope to recover the costs, because he has no chance of finding a better class of renters.
Just guessing here, but I think increasing rent is one possible form of the problem, and "everything in the walking distance from your home becomes too expensive for you to afford" is another form.
You can sell your old apartment and move to a new one, and probably even make some money doing so, but it will be inconvenient, and will break your existing social networks.
Gentrification doesn't always require demolition of structures, i could just be housing being rented to new residents who can afford higher rents.
Either way, there is significant new evidence showing that the cultural concept of gentrification doesn't actually happen. In neighborhoods that are "gentrified", new residents move in but many old residents stay and often benefit from the rise in property values in the area.
I always intuitively thought so, reading discussions on-line (perhaps because I have central district of Moscow as a kind of example - it's a place where oligarchs still share streets with babushkas). A mass momentary eviction might trigger negative outcomes, but in reality this probably almost never happens, as houses are renovated one by one, and residents have time to adjust and e.g. find better jobs in the new businesses. But I haven't seen any hard data either way (not that I sought it).
So in the US, the idea of gentrification is highly tied with race more so than class or economic differences. It almost always refers to rich white people moving to traditionally black neighborhoods. That likely creates a big difference between the US and russia on this topic.
Maybe, though race and economic status must be hard to separate here - I imagine "black neighbourhood" implies "poor". And also I think the term "gentrification" is also used in Europe, where race is less important for now.
I agree with you on both points. I think "gentrification" is such an amorphous, slippery concept that its hard to define it outside of the cultural context in which its used.
#9 Last week in Turkiye a mayoral candidate whose party was considering withdrawing to support the best polling opposition candidate was offered 5 million dollars by the ruling party to stay in the race personally. He got 2.02% and the opposition candidate lost by 0.43%. See election results of that province here: https://secim.ntv.com.tr/hatay-secim-sonuclari
This is the opposite of #9, but still curious.
Not sure why others are skeptical, but I have fairly high priors on the IQ thing being valid (I bet most of my mana on it, but didn't have much mana to begin with).
If you asked me "if an dedicated, rational person tried all the proven / suggested techniques to improve IQ over two weeks how much increase would he get", I'd guess high single digits. George3d6's 13 points over two weeks feels at the high end of those margins. If he'd got an increase of 8 IQ points, this would feel barely news-worthy.
My thinking is, get someone under "average" conditions and put them in good conditions for an IQ test (better sleep, in a "relaxed but alert" state) and you'll probably get an instant 3-4 point boost. I'd be surprised if there were nothing on top of that to reliably push you up another 3-4 points.
I often think there's a bigger question here: is academic science bad at throwing a bunch of stuff together and seeing how it turns out? You see people criticising Brian Johnson's anti-aging approach as "unscientific", but what kind of controlled experiment is going to combine 100s of different interventions to achieve an ambitious goal?
I think at least George thinks of this as a permanent IQ boost, though I admit I don't remember the article well enough to remember if he asserted or tested that. If it's not, I agree it's less surprising.
He's frustratingly ambiguous. But my understanding is that it's persistant but not permanent - like improving your cardio-vascular health/ lung capacity or something.
I wonder if it is possible to control for people simply wanting to be smarter, and then trying to do it. Also, what works for one person may not work for everyone. But if you have 100 options for becoming smarter and try five of them, might it not work because you chose ones you like, and want to be smarter?
If IQ 100 is, by definition, average, then your increase is self-limiting, anyway. If everyone did it, you would have the same IQ.
Intelligence is a bunch of intellectual skills. Apart from the whole "getting in good shape with plenty of sleep etc." approach, PRACTICING mental processes which at first seem difficult is, over time, going increase facility at them. So an education in which people are sufficiently motivated to tackle things that seem difficult is going to improve one's facility at a collection of useful mental skills
For at least one concrete example, see "Coping with Disagreement and Being Wrong ".
https://whatdoino.substack.com/p/copy-coping-with-disagreement-and
An easily understood example could be discriminating between similar but different concepts.
There's one super easy way to increase your IQ (as measured), and that's to practice doing IQ tests. IQ tests claim to be resistant to practice, but let's face it, the fiftieth time you fold up a cube in your head is easier than the first time you do it.
If you do an IQ test, then you stick blueberries up your nose for five minutes, and then you do another IQ test, then of course it's going to look like sticking blueberries up your nose has increased your IQ.
#1 And one of them seems to have been the "The Lord Falconer of Thoroton" (that's his real name).
#17
>There’s an annoying troll argument against transgender...So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
Are not thought experiments often hypothetical, yet still useful in examining ideas' implications?
Yes but it's tough to get people to challenge their entire political edifice that millions of people base their identity around, based on a thought experiment with no real-world examples.
Millions? Is it really that serious?
...How is that surprising? There's 8 billion people on Earth. Even if we were super conservative and said it was 0.1% of the population and only counted developed countries, you would still have a number in the millions. Of course, recent studies in the US and UK seem to indicate that 0.5%-0.6% of the population is transgender, which would imply that there's over a million in the US alone.
Because even 0.1% feels too high even in developed countries. And you can't count every human on Earth; there is no way that 0.1% of Eritreans are running around playing this privileged make-believe game. Of course I could be mistaken about this and often am, but hopefully that answers your condescending first sentence.
It's tough to estimate because of the lizardman constant. I might be considered transgeder because at one point I had my gender identity recorded as "Cisleithanian."
If you have high-school aged kids/brothers/etc ask them how many trans kids there are there. If the true rate was less than .1% and the high school had 500 students, there should statistically not be a single one. If there are more than one, it's probably higher than .1%.
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco - the LinkedIn types, the school-renamers and statue-puller-downers, the e/accs, the r/fuckcars posters, the street-blocking-protest-havers, the people who want to ban everything except crime, the people who think there need to be five nightclubs per city block, Aaron Peskin, - from bothering everyone else."
I did not write this, I swear, but I'm strongly inclined to go "I am the female Irish version of Oscar the Grouch and I endorse this message" 😊
"contracting/relaxing neck and face muscles"
Makes your IQ go up anywhere from 7 to 11 points. Uh-huh. Oh, look:
"The main point is that “the method” doesn’t matter so much, you can just google “intervention to increase IQ”, find 50 things, dig through the evidence, select 20, combine them, and assume 5 work"
So maybe you are not, in fact, increasing your IQ and the results are fudged, irreproducible, or otherwise dodgy. A less honest person would be packaging this up into Dr Prof PhD's Infallible IQ Boost Method, maybe a side-line of supplements to take as you practice The Method for best results, slap some ChatGPT-generated marketing babble on it, have your 'testimonials' about "I tried The Method and boosted my IQ by ten points! Now I've gotten two promotions, five pay raises, and have four supermodel girlfriends on the go at once! Thanks, Dr Prof PhD!"
Free business model there for you, gents.
Oh, look part deux: "specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars"
Yeah, looks like the, um, "business model" is on!
"My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person"
Well, I'm not so hot on the Aristotle but the Dante? Yes, while it didn't make me a better person (which is not Dante's fault and besides I'm an auto-didact on this, and furthermore the Divine Comedy taught me more about the fundamentals of my faith than the post-Vatican II 70s/80s weaksauce 'Christian doctrine' classes I got in school), I am fully committed to slamming my fists on the desk and demanding "Vita Nuova now!" for all secondary school students. A course of the dolce stil novo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolce_Stil_Novo won't do the little brats any harm and who knows, it may give pleasure and joy to some of 'em.
EDIT: Though I do agree about the snobbery angle to some of the enthusiasm for the Classics Curriculum. And stick some greats of world culture in there besides the Europeans, that's no harm either.
#8
>For me the funniest part of this is that in twenty years, we've gone from ACLU Defends Nazis' Right To Burn Down ACLU Headquarters to “ACLU Employee Who Complained About How ACLU Punishes Employees For Speaking Out Gets Punished For Speaking Out”.
In seriousness, the ACLU has undergone a radical shift over the decades, that greatly sped up in recent years and its primary characterization hasn't been "become more thin-skinned." Instead, this incident is a symptom of their actual shift which has been away from civil libertarianism towards Progressive advocacy which often has a different perspective, and sometimes has different conclusions, as it often promotes limiting individauls' liberties in the name of the Greater (usually racial) good.
Although there's an inherent tension between employers' rights (the right to demand particular behaviors from employees and / or fire them at will) and employees' rights (the right to avoid certain demands and / or keep your job even if your employer wants to fire you), this isn't the operative issue here in light of the the ACLU's decades long shift away from focus on individual liberties for the sake of Progressive racial goals, the relevant factor probably isn't "ACLU no longer tolerates criticism of ACLU," but "ACLU is ready to once again make any individual rights (in this case what they'd generally see as workers' rights) secondary to "Concerns of Racism."
In the late 1960s they condemnded "the exclusive recruitment of members of a minority group" as "no less evil than any other kind of discrimination, and is certainly just as contrary to the spirit of civil liberties." But by the early 1970s, they already supported racial quotas.
In recent years, they've moved towards weak support of or even opposition towards offensive speech, backtracking on defendants' rights, when the defendants are unpopular, and reversed themselves on other issues, where their prior stances are no longer popular among Progressives. See e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html, https://reason.com/2020/12/20/would-the-aclu-still-defend-nazis-right-to-march-in-skokie/, https://www.city-journal.org/article/progressives-against-transparency.
I really enjoyed the LW album, and I want a plushie of the album cover.
Fortunate Son by CCR is about that marriage btwn Nixon and Ike’s kid right
#10: and Eisenhower's daughter married Soviet physicist Roald Sagdeev, the former head of Russian Space Research Institute, and college roommate of Mikhail Gorbachev.
I had the pleasure of taking a 6 person seminar with him, he is very enthusiastic about physics and had a lot of stories.
#20 I would say that the author of Ecclesiastes nailed it somewhat earlier, about 450-180 BC (although the sentiment is somewhat more expansive):
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
Funnily enough, this was one of the concrete examples that deverted me from my Christianity of a couple of decades. There wasn't anything new under the sun when that holy text was written, but there sure as hell is now.
You have to take in Ecclesiastes with a little bit of ironic distance, given that it's the first written record we have of the hipster ethos in ancient Judea. ("Aqueducts are so mainstream, I still carry water from the river to my house in an earthen jug balanced on my head, it's more authentic. Anyway, you probably haven't heard this yet, but all is vanity.")
Makes me wonder if you could use an LLM to model the ancient world with fewer dimensions. Or if the set of dimensions needed for the same fidelity is the same as we need for the concepts we work with, and us moderns have just done a better job of compounding the same base concepts the ancients were working with.
A fundamental part of an LLM is mapping of tokens (basically words) to vectors with thousands of different dimensions (far more than x,yz), which are kind of like concepts. Similar words will wind up in a similar vector space. And then you can do wild things like start with Joe Biden, subtract America, add France, and end up in the vector space closest to Emmanuel Macron.
I take the view that if it looks like there are new things, I haven't zoomed far enough out yet.
> A fundamentalist Christian theme park in Kentucky plans to build a full-scale replica of the Tower of Babel.
From Genesis Ch 11
"And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city."
I've been on IT projects like that! :-P
#26: “My guess is that learning Aristotle and Dante doesn’t necessarily directly make you a better person”
Define “better”. By my definition, I’d disagree with this claim.
#17. Of course the status can be non biological, which is why there are intersex people with more biology in common with their identified gender than their non identified gender who still identify as transgender. Furthermore, nobody in the transgender community would deny someone or question why you identify as such. But here is the thing, being transgender is in great part about the experience of not feeling congruent in your body, and in great part about the transitioning itself. That's why a person may decide not to transition and yet still identify with their opposing biological gender, and it will be up to them to decided if they are trans or not. I believe that to be transgender is to experience the transition part. And yes, anyone could claim that without the experience. This is not unlike people who infiltrate grief groups, in spite not having experienced the type of grief the group is about. Or people who go to AA meetings in spite not having had that specific struggle. What you propose is akin to this, and like with those groups, nobody would kick you out our keep you from doing that, but it would be wrong because simply you don't belong, for you lack the experience.
> George H (formerly of Cerebralab, now of Epistem.ink) claims that Increasing IQ Is Trivial . . .
"Increasing IQ is trivial, also I can't share the method, because people might mess it up". Interesting definition of "trivial".
> Remember how a few years ago people talked about a “short squeeze” on Gamestop stock, Gamestop became a “meme stock” and went up a lot, and then later it went back down?
Gamestop stock, today, is still higher than it's been at any point outside two brief 3-month-long peaks in 2007 and 2014, and 10x higher than it was in August 2020. So I don't know if this is a fully accurate characterization. There has definitely been a decrease since 2021 - a sharp, drastic decrease, at that! - but "back down" implies a return to baseline that hasn't happened yet.
Re: #18: as someone who would 100% live in San Francisco if I could afford it and is spiritually, if not literally, an r/fuckcars poster, I will say that I have made this exact YIMBY argument, albeit with a different ideological valence - I try to convince my city-loving left/liberal friends that we need to build luxury high-rises as a way of warehousing and containing the rich so they don't contaminate other parts of the city. This argument never works. (Not because they're against the idea of this sort of warehousing; it's just that none of them ever accept any argument that ends in the conclusion that it's okay to build expensive housing.)
I think we need to build more high rises because I’m middle class/aspiring upper-middle class, and I want to live in a high rise 😤
"everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes"
I love daylight savings time changes and want to keep them. I'd like to go back to the original schedule.
I really like seasonal change. It makes me feel connected to world around me in a way that is difficult to put into words. A Siberian fur trapper probably said it best: "It gives you a sense that a job is being done, even if you aren't the one doing it."
Daylight savings is part of that seasonal variation.
I thought 10 was pretty much common knowledge.
No offense, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, but are you by any chance old?
Lol! I am in fact 57, which I would have considered to be old when I was your age, but now prefer to think of as advanced middle aged.
45-65 is middle age, so you’re still comfortably middle-middle. That’s my story (at 53) and I’m sticking to it.
Maybe if you're going to live until 105. But statistically, middle age is about 39.
This reply made me realize I’m thinking of adulthood only. Ballparking 20 to 85, if I were forced to quantify what my head is doing in round numbers. (My dad is 86 and going strong. Life expectancy is higher in most comparable countries than in the U.S. and American figures are depressed mostly by car and gun deaths in younger people.) But, imo “middle-aged” isn’t really an arithmetical determination, it’s a subjective cultural vibe that’s shifted later over time — you know how every year or so there’s another twitter thread marveling at how all the middle-aged-looking actors on Cheers were only like 37? I don’t think it makes much sense, in 2024, to hear “middle age” and imagine a 39-year-old, as if that were the central case of a middle-aged person.
(Obviously this way of thinking is still very much a hazard for people around 39 whose brains are looking for a way to beat them up. Which is perhaps many or most such people. 50 sounded inconceivably old to me when I was 40ish. What I can tell 39-year-olds, fwiw, is that it’s not all that different up here, certainly nothing like what I was led to expect in my 20s and 30s; your runway is much longer than you think.)
You probably shouldn’t talk about your adventures in the Spanish Civil War here either.
Yeah, my reaction was "This is a simple test of your age."
On George boosting his IQ and then saying "He says a replication attempt will take $300 worth of tech, specialist trainers who might cost up to several thousand dollars, and “3-4 hours of effort a day for two weeks”."
Why is he doing an experiment with 13 simultaneous treatments?
How is this "trivial"?
Is he profiting from this $300 worth or tech/thousands from specialist trainers? Is this a scam?
Somewhat against the thrust of Hume quoted in 20, I offer St. Augustine on memory, from Confessions, Book Ten, Chapter VIII:
Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?
A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.
Regarding #22, when I see people say things like "just scientists being too cowardly to try interesting things," I know that they don't really understand the system.
Many scientists are mad keen to study interesting things, but there are large and powerful organisations whose sole job is to make it extremely awkward for them to do so.
See, for example : https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
The AI Pop sounds no worse or more nonsensical than most of what humans play on the radio these days.
In The Interests Of Science, I shall try playing these selections to some teenage humans and report back my findings. To be fair, I think you need an attractive, "quirky but relatable" singer if you really want to make it big, especially since for humans, music seems mostly to be a lifestyle accessory.
Any volunteers?
>So far, the answer has been “nobody actually does this in real life, so it’s an annoying troll argument and not something we really need to think about”.
I don't think it's a troll argument at all, even if few people actually did it and it was just something that people could potentially do.
Same for "trans-racial".
>31...
There needs to be a decentralised Wikipedia. I don't like the idea of a single decision-making body making those decisions on behalf of everyone who uses Wikipedia (I.e. basically everyone).
Ian Clarke (the guy behind Freenet) had an idea for one based on his new project (which is confusingly now called "Freenet" while the old Freenet is now called "Hyphanet"). It was based on X's community notes.
#30 - "evidence suggesting there is no theoretical ceiling on what the price could climb to" - After witnessing two bubbles, Iowa farmland in the 1980s and the stock market bubble of 1987, I formulated the rule that if people in the market said "There is no fundamental limit to how high prices can go." then there's a bubble going on and you should be prepared to exit the market quickly. It predicted the Boston housing bubble of 1990 perfectly and has done well since then.
In this case there isn’t a bubble though. It’s more that they’re all collectively talking about how big this (non-existent) bubble must be as the price continues slowly going down.
This seems related to the stock market concept of "capitulation", which I've seen described as "you can tell you're at the bottom of the market when everyone finally agrees that the market has no bottom". I may well be wrong in memory and/or understanding.
>18. Board of Supervisors overturns veto...
Isn't this the body that just had a bunch of seats replaced in an election, that led to the Chronicle decrying that SF was no longer a progressive city? I was under the impression (admittedly I don't follow this very closely) that many of these new members were pretty YIMBY. Was I wrong about their politics or wrong about it being the Board of Supervisors?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_San_Francisco_Board_of_Supervisors#Timeline_of_supervisors_since_2000
I think that must be some other SF Board. Only one member of the 11 were elected in 2023. The others have been there since at least 2021
# 7 - This was a good discussion. I mostly sum my takeaway as "it's the remote work and isolated activity, stupid". Community manifests organically around shared activity in shared space. Interest in this topic has spiked since COVID, that's no coincidence. Contriving a community for community's sake is a non-starter.
I expect some overlap in terms of interest with a demographic that has failed to capitalize on prime relationship-building years in school, with extra-curriculars, and early career. I did as well, and incidentally, I was also spending leisure time mindlessly consuming things at the computer and being avoidant before it was cool. If I were now to think to myself "oh shit, I want a community", while working from home and having family obligations, I'd have an uphill battle. Hence the appeal of a fantasy non-committal "I want people to hang with nearby but only when I feel like it, and without the overhead of maintaining friendship, and I don't actually want to do anything taxing, and and..."
I have been a member of a local community for many years - its been around for > 60 years, is thriving, and looks like it will continue for a long while. And yes it is built "around shared activity in shared space". It would be impossible for me to start it up from nothing.
On #7, community: at a recent gathering at my house, a new guest turned to me and asked, “Do people…do this?”
Of course, we do, but much less often than we used to, for several reasons.
Most social life in the past among women and mixed-sex groups was driven by unemployed women, with servants, in their houses. Now, we have many fewer unemployed women, and women who don’t work generally have kids and feel they need to center their lives around the kids. There’s even an attitude out there that’s it’s wrong for mother to have too active a social life, because she shouldn’t drink or she shouldn’t take time and attention away from the kids.
Almost no one has household staff, which makes it a lot harder to clean and prepare and serve food. (I deal with this by serving snacks rather than dinner and relying on convenience foods instead of making my own hors d’oeuvres, but it’s still exhausting.) No servants also means that it’s harder to corral the kids in another room and have an adult-centered gathering.
Housing…is a problem for reasons you’re all familiar with. Either you have an apartment in the city that’s too small for hosting or you have a house in the suburbs and people have to travel 30-60 minutes to get to you.
People also really do not know the etiquette of socializing that was familiar to previous generations. Not RSVPing is the norm. And of the people on my invite list, maybe 1/6 have ever reciprocated. I’m not mad, I get it, but it adds to the burden on the host.
Not knowing the rules contributes to high levels of anxiety for both guests or hosts. You don’t know what to wear or when to show up or if you’re really welcome. Or you invite 20 people and get 4 responses. I think these factors push towards inviting only a few people you’re already close to, instead of taking the initiative to reach out to acquaintances or work friends and injecting new energy into the group.
So…it’s still worth having a social life if you can. I’m glad I overcame the social anxiety to start hosting, but I understand why people don’t.
> Most social life in the past among women and mixed-sex groups was driven by unemployed women, with servants, in their houses.
I don't think women with servants represented a large fraction of the Western demographic at any point. Pre industrial revolution 80% of people worked the land and popped out lots of kids. In the late 20th century I think women did tend to organize gatherings among the middle class, and single-income households were still common.
I guess my period of comparison is post Industrial Revolution, pre-1970
A lot more women worked than is realised. Obviously the servants were workers, and more often female. And there were more servants than employers. Women also worked in farms, and sometimes as sole proprietors, in service industries, and in some factories - weaving and fashion and so on.
"People also really do not know the etiquette of socializing that was familiar to previous generations. Not RSVPing is the norm."
It may have been part of the past, too. I've seen this around and I have no idea if it's genuine, but check out the invitation to Christopher Tolkien's 21st birthday party:
https://twitter.com/RobynPorteous/status/1556698946902413312
Not just "R.S.V.P. if not coming" but the remainder of the bottom lines 😀
You make excellent points.
One way apartment complexes deal with this is they have communal spaces you can reserve where you can entertain.
Some people just do it in their yard, but then you need a yard.
It's interesting the norms from the former USSR countries, where people had to socialize in tiny apartments. O don't know if it's related, but they will often bring an item like a candy box.
I've seen a lot of online complaints of people RSVPing to kids' birthdays and not showing up. I bet that sucks!!
#20 is just a tweet saying - "scientific materialism is true guys! Hume said so!"
Is there anyone at AI labs, or who has done serious thinking on the topic, about the implications for AI assuming non-materialist explanations for consciousness?
If there are, they'd also probably argue that the non-materialist element has nothing to do with most of what we consider "intelligence," seeing as AI still works pretty well without anything resembling consciousness.
You could call that the consciousness/intelligence orthogonality thesis.
Depends how much of what we attribute to our "intelligence" is actually a result of our free will
Youtuber Dan Olson made an amazing two-hours documentary about the post-Gamestop meme-stock thing, This Is Financial Advice. I highly recommend it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA
I was about to mention it, this one is really excellent
Also, hi fellow Frenchie
Scott wrote, with regard to Robert Whitaker's "Mad in America" organization: "I find MiA really deceptive...". I hope that Scott finds the time to write a full-blown post about MiA and why he thinks it's deceptive. I've been following Whitaker's work for years, and I find that it's consistent with my experience from having worked in the pharmaceutical industry, and it's also consistent with what I've observed of conventional psychiatric practices (two members of my family were harmed by their psychiatric care).
> Re 22 & IQ
Tangentially, in my discussions with @Eremolalos about @Dan Elton's comment in Open Thread 323 — given that influenza and (especially) measles in addition to COVID have longer-term effects on cognitive health — I'm wondering if the Flynn Effect isn't just due to overall better health in human populations? Fewer viral infections = better cognitive health (and possibly the lowering of our body temps that we've been seeing. Just a wildass hypothesis. I'll leave it up to the student to analyze the data for correlations. ;-)
Don't forget lead and overall nutrition!
I remember there was a paper about this over a decade ago that got some news coverage.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20591860/
It was later retracted.
I thought it was one of the most common explanation for the Flyyn effect. A strong argument was that the increase in height and IQ are correlated, suggesting that an overall "health" has increased over time.
(1) Andrew Sullivan asks "When did we decide we didn’t give a fuck about anyone else in public anymore?"
(2) The sub-head from The New Yorker answers:
"The classical-education movement seeks to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Its emphasis on morality and civics has also primed it for partisan takeover."
Morality and civics (like "don't blast your music in public") are very nice, but the problem is that, well, you know. Partisans. It's too much in the wheelhouse of Christians and conservatives. It would be racist and anti-LGBT to teach kids those kinds of things, and it would be anti-public schooling as well (we can't teach *that* in public schools, even if we can fight for the right of school libraries to have all kinds of works on their shelves, so it's these elite private schools and kooky Christian brainwashing centres who would teach it).
And that's why, Andy, nobody under the age of us old farts was taught to behave in public because the streets are not our living rooms.
It won't just be the young fartlets who will wake me in predawn hours on garbage day with the beeping and the clatter of the garbage trucks. And it will be older farts who will wake me at full light Saturdays and Sundays with the sounds of their leaf blowers and lawn mowers (CURSE THEM!).
But haven't the young fartlets always been pissing off the old farts? — as long as there's been civilization at least. Ahhhh, the eternal cycle of life!
#19, I think a bigger issue than big stereos is loud cars! I see it way more often, and it’ll wake you in the middle of the night. Mufflers should be required.
As an aside, my city (Philly) just elected a mayor who seems really serious about cracking down on these kinds of quality of life crimes.
#26, I don’t think reading the classics makes you a better person directly, but reading old shit and learning history generally make you realize that humans really haven’t changed that much. I think this makes you less neurotic, because you have a point of comparison for the problems of the modern world.
Yes, perspective is important.
> The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
> Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.
> There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.
"There is no new thing under the sun," the preacher posted in a Substack comment.
Unironically, yes.
Don't get fooled by someone slapping a fresh coat of paint on an ancient bit of primate brain.
I don't think you're taking your argument far enough. "Ancient bit of primate brain"? Nah, that brain is just a bunch of eukaryotic cells working together to perpetuate their DNA. It's just a fresh coat of paint on the same old stuff the slime molds have been doing for hundreds of millions of years.
(And eukarotic cells are themselves just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other, which has been happening for even longer. But that probably doesn't count as "under the sun," so I'll give the preacher a pass on that one.)
It all depends on where you focus.
Yes, but individually Eukaryotic cells are not responsible for the racket of leaf blowers, lawn mowers, and, yes, sometimes even chain saws that will start a little before seven tomorrow morning (Saturday).
So the preacher was wrong? There is something new under the sun, even if only on Saturdays? (I knew the idea of the Sabbath had to come from somewhere!)
I like that idea! And as good Bayesians we should realize that expanded worldviews (in time and space) give us more priors to ratiocinate with!
> 19. Andrew Sullivan speaks out against noise
Is this a cultural difference thing (US vs EU)? Very rarely I see people going around blasting music, and bast majority of people around me think they're assholes. The only time they're semi-acceptable is on a bike where people won't hear you for long.
Yes, the US is much louder in many respects, including this.
American public culture is absolutely atrocious compared to most of Europe, yes. One of the failure modes of the individualism that developed here.
Oh it really isn’t. We are fairly boorish here in Ireland on public transport, Southern Europe is much louder again. Maybe Germany.
Do you still plan to have a conversation with the CEO of the far out initiative?
"Our culture has been inundated by false views of our origins, teaching that we evolved from ape-like ancestors. While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others. For example, the late Stephen Jay Gould, a leading evolutionist of the 20th century, acknowledged that acceptance of evolution spurred the rapid growth of racism . . . Our goal in building a Babel attraction at the Ark Encounter is to proclaim mankind’s true history as described in God’s Word. In doing so, we will boldly confront racist and ethnocentric philosophies and practices."
This is a great opportunity for Christian apologists to remind me that I should look the other way at the irrationality of religion because it provides a bulwark against wokeness.
It is admittedly difficult to hold both the dignity of man (as made in the Image of God, regardless of one's demographic background, IQ, or wealth) and the fallenness of man (due to original sin, this again applies across all demographics) in one's philosophy simultaneously. But those who do so avoid falling into lots of dangerous extremes, both wokeness-related and otherwise.
I think this all depends on how you define “religion.” If you limit the scope to, “people with a book they take literally,” you’re taking an implicitly Protestant stance and ignoring, among other things, Catholics telling you that this is crazy.
I think any good definition of religion includes any thinking that includes an explicit value system, which of course includes wokism.
Damn, just come out and say the quiet part loud.
Deafening your ears and blinding your eyes would also stop all the woke from getting inside that skull.
Every ideology would similarly be a bulwark against any other. You have gained little if you avoid a form of irrationality by diving into another.
Hey, after God smites mankind with a gazillion new languages for trying to build the tower of Babel again, wokeness will die out for lack of a common word for "intersectionality.". Problem solved!
26. I liked Dante (in translation), not so much for Aristotle. Teaching Latin (or really any foreign language for that matter) strikes me as a massive waste of time. Yes, I know French literature is much better in the original language than in translation, but even in "good" schools the bulk of students haven't read a great deal of English literature and won't be reading French literature once they (don't) master the language. I suspect that much of the motivation is a reluctance to say too explicitly what they're against.
I'm guessing you don't think learning a foreign language is a waste of time, just ineffectively teaching one when most students aren't actually learning. Agreed. What do you mean by your last sentence? Motivation for teaching Latin? What are they (classical educators/Latin teachers) against?
It isn't a waste of time only if you intend to use it in some way, which a vast majority of people taking a mandatory course clearly don't.
I'mma give that IQ thing a try - don't have Scott's email so consider this a pre-registration, happy to share the details once I confirm them with my group and George.
Can you write down what you actually did and how you were checking to see if it worked?
San Francisco, for one. Look it up.
thanks, i did. san francisco, an extreme outlier in that it actually did reduce police funding briefly, has jacked up funding and staffing up again since 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-31/san-francisco-mayor-boosts-police-homelessness-funds-to-lure-companies-back . has noise empirically gone up or down since then? how about in the average city? do you have the slightest idea, beyond your vibes?
Funding isn't the only variable in the equation, not is staffing. Political will is important, and there's a chain of governmental agencies that have to work in concert to allow policing to work. If everything is functioning, except that, say, a city prosecutor refuses to prosecute noise violations, it won't work.
I don't live there. I live somewhere else with a similar problem. Fortunately I'm not in the worst part, and it's gotten better, but I now have a crude ability to distinguish gunshots from fireworks. I did not have that ability in 2019.
This is not one of the aspects of my life which I obsessively collect data about. Is it one of yours? If not, how can you tell that things haven't gotten worse and you simply don't notice?
Noise ordinances are the last thing any police force is enforcing regardless of staffing too.
Banned for this comment.
"Invasion Literature was a type of proto-alternate-history, especially popular in the early 1900s, where the reader’s country was invaded by a superior foe."
Not just the early 1900s. In the 1970s, there was "The Third World War" by John Hackett, and 1980 had "Silent Night: The Defeat of NATO." Both were written by former British Army officers who were worried that NATO was vulnerable to Soviet attack. In Hackett's book, the Soviets were stopped after a limited strategic nuclear exchange (but only because NATO had increased spending and readiness in the years before his near-future war). In Joly's book, the Soviets won within a day thanks to complete surprise.
And there were a bunch in the 1980s - Tom Clancy and Harold Coyle come to mind.
Heinlein had one in 1941 where China conquered the United States, and then the United States overthrew them with the power of a omnipowerful magical staff and a guy building an entire religion around it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aznidentity/comments/8175wy/sixth_column_is_a_novel_by_robert_heinlein_about/
Not sure if that one counts or not.
Good point. And, if we're not restricting the discussion to books, we could also include Red Dawn. Although I hesitate to admit that I watched it. Honestly, it was only because I had Staff Duty, and my NCO brought a TV and VCR.
I saw that recently. It was a lot more depressing than its reputation had led me to believe.
I saw it as a child, and then parts of it as an adult. Very different movie.
To add to the list, "Not This August" by C.M. Kornbluth, 1955.
Kingsley Amis’s “Russian Hide And Seek” is another letter addition to the genre.
*late
There were threads about Walt Bismarck on DSL:
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,11268
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,11282.0.html
Does anyone know a good way of getting stats such as "countries by number of CCTV cameras per area"? (I want to know how many the UK has; I've heard it's bad)
Re: #7
I suspect that what people really want is a community that aggressively screens out people who don’t belong on the same wavelength. If it’s a gym community you need someone to aggressively kick out anyone who skips 2 gym sessions in a row. If it’s a party community you want to immediately kick out anyone who does too many or too few lines of coke on a given night, etc.
Sports communities are great for that reason. Real tough to join the gym community if the events are all at the gym
"Classical education" is realistically just for filthy-rich members of the aristocracy whose children couldn't fail at life even if they tried, right? Like, this can't possibly be a useful way to structure education in the 21st century. Even when this sort of thing was contemporary, it was primarily for members of the aristocracy.
I went to Hillsdale College (which I do not claim is representative of educational trends in general) and had several classmates there who had gone to classical schools. They generally came from decently well off, but not super-rich, families. Classical education doesn't have to be for everyone to be valuable, but in any event, it's accessible to a lot more families than, say, the top 1%, if they prioritize it.
Classical education is for everyone who has a soul to feed with the timelessly true, good, and beautiful.
Yes, the liberal arts were seen as liberating arts for people who didn't have to work for a living and didn't need pragmatic job training. Nowadays, even if we have to work for a living, many of us have leisure time in which to live like aristocrats and pursue our interests, and want to be educated as more than cogs for a machine.
> Like, this can't possibly be a useful way to structure education in the 21st century.
Why not? As I understand it, the main reasons it doesn't work for mass public schooling are that it tended to require a lower student-teacher ration (approaching 1:1), personal attention from teachers, and coordination with parents. But it seems like a small private school might be able to pull off those things.
The schools I have encountered do have lower ratios then public schools in early elementary. A class of 15-20 has a teacher and an assistant. But this is also the case for other private schools on general, eg Montessori and mature schools.
Nice to hear from someone with actual knowledge! :-)
In retrospect, I think I was focusing on the "aristocratic" aspect, in a way that doesn't apply to the type of school that's actually being discussed. Sorry.
My only commentary on this is a comparison between general state of culture Back Then to Now.
From their 1971 Christmas Special on the BBC, the comedians Morecambe and Wise (who had moved from ITV, the commercial channel). This was broadcasting watched by millions as mass entertainment, and while it may not be the highest of high brow, it's not the lowest either. For the sketch to work, the expectation is that the general audience is sufficiently familiar with who André Previn is and won't turn off in disgust at "ugh, boring old Classical music, what's on the other channels?" (There are also in-jokes and general culture gags e.g. about Edward Heath*):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7GeKLE0x3s
*"Sir Edward Richard George Heath KG MBE (9 July 1916 – 17 July 2005), commonly known as Ted Heath, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975.
...Heath maintained an interest in classical music as a pianist, organist and orchestral conductor, famously installing a Steinway grand in 10 Downing Street – bought with his £450 Charlemagne Prize money, awarded for his unsuccessful efforts to bring Britain into the EEC in 1963, and chosen on the advice of his friend, the pianist Moura Lympany – and conducting Christmas carol concerts in Broadstairs every year from his teens until old age.
Heath conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, notably at a gala concert at the Royal Festival Hall in November 1971, at which he conducted Sir Edward Elgar's overture Cockaigne (In London Town). He also conducted the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the English Chamber Orchestra, as well as orchestras in Germany and the United States. During his premiership, Heath invited musician friends, such as Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Clifford Curzon and the Amadeus Quartet, to perform either at Chequers or 10 Downing Street."
Respectfully, you're talking out of ignorance. As far as "21st century education", the local public school provides precious little of any kind of education, 21st-century or otherwise, which is not the case for the Classical schools in our area. Nor are the bulk of attendees "artistocarcy' or "filthy rich elites".
My husband and I made the choice to send to a Classical school; a friend sends her kids to another one. There are at least three in my area. All have tuition comparable to similar non-Classical schools: the Catholic ones charge comparable to area Catholic schools, the Protestant one is more expensive but comparable to the local "nature" schools, "self-directed learning" schools, Jewish day school, and cheaper than the really high-end (and largely progressive) private schools the actual "filthy-rich" send their kids to.
My kids' school is small, and I don't know how many, if any, are low-income, but we are not "filthy-rich", and neither are most of the other parents. There is a good mix of military, white collar, blue collar, local business owner parents, one- and two-income families, and a wide range of cars at pickup (from fancy SUVs to well-loved minivans). Many families are stretching their budget to pay for multiple children. And significant financial aid is offered.
Whoever designed our particular school put a lot of thought into it. The religious component gives much more context to the Latin and Greek. But there's a solid phonics-based reading, good math, music, and arts program, a decent science program for early elementary. My child's class knows about ancient civilizations at a level most middle schoolers will never get.
Also whoever designed the classroom was informed by Montessori and modern positive discipline principles. The education is not too rigid, they give the kids more outside time than the public school gets, there's a lot of positive reinforcement. No computers, true, but that's something I can fill in at home.
It's not perfect, here and there are things I'd change, but ultimately I am very, very happy with our choice of school.
Thank you for all the detailed background. And yes, I am very ignorant on the topic, that's why I was asking. Sorry if it came across as blunt.
Superficially it sounded like these schools were prioritizing e.g. latin over math, or Voltaire over physics. But if this is more about cutting out the ham-fisted modern indoctrination in favor of higher-quality traditional indoctrination, that sounds like a good trade.
The movement is broad. It's very easy to be a half-heated homeschooler and do "classical" by just buying some materials and not really doing them at home.
And Classical by itself doesn't really have much to say in terms of modern STEM, so I'm sure the experiences can vary. However, in an environment where the value proposition of the mainstream has deteriorated since I went to school; and given what I've seen of such schools (especially compared to academic offerings of public and even some other private schools), they acquit themselves very well.
I should also say that a lot of "Classical" homeschoolers participate and teach in coops/tutorials then can be pretty good hybrid teaching models as well.
You might want to check out St. John's College:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_College_(Annapolis/Santa_Fe)
I was email bombed in 2021 after I wrote a piece about my bipolar medications, just a sudden avalanche of really nasty emails about how I'm a sheep letting Big Pharma wreck my body, and I'm about 90% sure it was organized on Mad in America's forums
What makes you think that?
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
I'm using every brain cell in my body to try and interpret this statement charitably, but I really cannot come up with any explanation other than, "Whoever wrote this does not understand the theory of evolution."
You don't even have to understand evolution to see the problem with this claim. Saying that some races are more closely related to apes than others is like saying some of your grandchildren are more closely related to you than others.
"some of your grandchildren are more closely related to you than others."
Genetically that's actually true! Grandchildren inherit 20-30% of their genetics from each grandparent.
In the same way it might be true that some races are slightly more genetically similar to some species of ape even if they're genealogically related the same way.
My understanding of why there's a genetic spread like that at the grandparent level is that it has to do with the combinatorics of choosing the chromosomes. I have 23 chromosome pairs, each containing a chromosome from mom and a chromosome from dad. One chromosome from each pair is chosen randomly and placed in a new genome when I produce a daughter, so the fraction of those chromosomes that come from my mother will follow a binomial distribution rather than a fixed 50% (in fact, since 23 is odd, it will never be exactly 50%).
But the compounding genetic differences between humans and their ape descendants stems from mutations in the genome, and the null hypothesis would be that those mutations occur uniformly between each base pair over evolutionary time scales.
I think the steelman take would go something like this: the least common ancestor of all humans will be more similar to other modern apes than current living humans. When human populations began to spread out, some populations of humans mutated more of those genes than others, and thus some races carry less genetic similarity to modern apes than other races. Which probably is technically correct, but my guess would be that Homo sapiens have existed for long enough that each population will have mutated basically the same fraction of those genes.
That's why I said "slightly".
It is true that some races have more Neanderthal genes than others, though, and that's not all that far off.
I would still find the original statement wrong, but it's not that hard to take it somewhat charitably and certainly not the most difficult and bizarre accusation of racism.
Eh, while I suppose technically Neanderthals are a different ape species from Homo sapiens (insofar as you can tell objectively what is a "different species"), in comparison with living non-human apes they are basically just humans.
That's literally true on a global level, single-celled organisms are objectively closer to the way of life of their forefathers (foremothers? fore-ancestors-of-undefined-gender?) than multi-cellular life. Life that doesn't breath Oxygen (Anaerobic) is objectively more "authentic" and closer to the origin of life than Aerobic life.
They are still not more closely related, though. If Joe lives on Earth, and his elder son Mark stays on Earth while his younger son Frank moves to the new colony on Venus, Mark certainly shares more of his lifestyle with Joe than Frank does, but the degree of relation is exactly the same, 50%. Besides, the theory of evolution certainly does not predict that some human populations should retain the same lifestyle as Miocene apes.
Here's my super-charitable interpretation.
Let's take "more closely related to" non-literally and simply let it mean "more similar to". If evolution is capable of producing two groups as intellectual unequal as chimps and humans over the course of a few million years after diverging from their last common ancestor, it would be very surprising if all human groups (who diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago) were themselves intellectually equal.
re: superstonk
Folding Ideas has a great video about this: This is Financial Advice 💎🙌
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA&ab_channel=FoldingIdeas
Wiki + Babel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_(Vienna)_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg
terrific open thread this one , thanks 🙏🏻
"San Francisco’s utility is as a giant spiritual prison that keeps the sort of people who enjoy living in San Francisco [...] from bothering everyone else."
Huh, I once made exactly the same point about Los Angeles. I propose walling off California entirely.
>Huh, I once made exactly the same point about Los Angeles
So did Hollywood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6SWofbYD90
based on https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082340/
probably inspired by the crime rate at that time
The New Yorker article was surprisingly complimentary of Classical learning, given its lens.
(EDIT: the article itself is not very critical, but the New Yorker in general u expect to have a progressive lens.)
But having interacted with schools like this - they teach at a high level and offer a very interdisciplinary humanities education, rather than being stupid rote learning.
I'm really upset Diane Ravitch, whose book "Language Police" is brilliant , thinks it's so evil.
It's lens? Louis Menand, Adam Gopnik, David Remnick, Jill Lepore, and many many more. The culture, the erudition, it's a national treasure.
Well like for example the article has to make a dig at the largely Christian homeschoolers and "classical" private schools who use the curriculum as"weaponizing" the model.
By the author? Or in a quote?
Just reread the piece (it was 2-3 issues ago already) and did not come away with that impression (could definitely be my blind spot).
I edited my post. I reread the article and it itself doesn't seem that critical, but rather quotes different experts for a balanced view.
I do stand by my pleasant surprise that in a publication like the New Yorker, which is generally left-wing, the Classical Model is getting such a positive coverage.
From Wikipedia's list of invasion literature:
"The Tunnel Thru the Air, Or, Looking Back from 1940 is a science fiction novel written by market forecaster William Delbert Gann in 1927. In the Foreword, Gann hinted that this book is more than just a novel because it "contains a valuable secret, clothed in veiled language. Some will find it the first time they read it, others will see it in the second reading, but the greatest number will find the hidden secret when they read it the third time." Some traders believe Gann has encoded some techniques of financial astrology into this book."
Did anyone ever discover the valuable secret? Could we be the first to do it? How sure are we that there isn't a hidden society of expert traders who have all read the same obscure 1920s science fiction novel three times?
Somewhat related to #25, this is a really thought-provoking essay about the replication crisis:
https://goodscience.substack.com/p/hot-dogs-cancer-cells-replication
(free to read, I think)
> Re #18: "...and growing consensus that building more houses has to be part of the solution..."
Where is this consensus that we need more housing coming from? San Francisco ranks among the top 10 major metro areas in the number of *surplus* housing units (per DeedClaim). Comparing the median price of 2 bdr condos (per Redfin), it doesn't look like the per capita availability of housing units affects pricing. The problem with SF is that there's a shortage of cheap housing. The only way you get that is if you build subsidized housing like the UK's council flats.
And if you think that building more units will significantly reduce prices... According to DeedClaim, SF has eighteen thousand surplus units. How many more surplus units would SF have to build to bring prices down to Chicago's levels? Twenty thousand more? Forty thousand more?
Rank, City - Population - surplus units - surplus per capita - median price
#1 New Yor - 8,336,000 - 66,755 - 0.008 - $1,650,000
#3 Los Angeles - ,822,000 - 18,514 - 0.005 - $1,190,000
#2 Chicago - 2,665,000 - 20,812 - 0.008 - $365,000
#8 San Francisco - 808,437 - 18,514 - 0.007 - $1,280,000
https://www.deedclaim.com/housing-shortages/#:~:text=The%20U.S.%20Cities%20with%20the%20Biggest%20Housing%20Surpluses&text=On%20the%20other%20side%20of,positive%20sign%20for%20the%20state.
Increasing supply reduces price. Econ 101.
https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1775958037297348915
1. Your link mentions North Carolina. Raleigh and Charlotte are in the top five cities with the *lowest* housing inventory. Why aren't 2 bdr condos in the those cities selling at prices higher than San Francisco? The median price for 2 bdr condo in Charlotte is $324K (roughly in the ballpark with Chicago, which has the 3rd *largest* housing surplus) and $459K in Raleigh. And if we look at units available per population, Charlotte has half the available housing inventory that Raleigh has (Charlotte is 0.0014 vs Raleigh 0.0028). Why are the prices in Raleigh higher?
2. Unlike North Carolina's metro areas we have a *surplus* of housing in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Per capita, Los Angeles has 2x the available housing units that Raleigh does. And SF has almost 3x more than Raleigh! How much more housing would we need to build to move the needle so prices drop significantly?
3. Moreover, the population of SF has been dropping, and SF now has the population it had in 1990. In today's dollars, the median price of a home in SF in 1990 would be $665K. But it's almost 2x that now ($1.25 million). Why aren't housing prices dropping with fewer people and more housing available?
It looks to me like (a) housing prices are sticky, and (b) housing prices are regionally sticky. And the truisms of Econ 101 are proved wrong by these facts (at least when it comes to housing prices).
I look forward to a detailed and reasoned rebuttal from you. ;-)
That’s good workings out. It has to be related to wages then. IT workers on $200k a year entry level per person (double per couple) is going to push up prices.
Yes. Vert true. But I think it's also related to two other things — the stickiness of locality (since we don't have teleporters we can't live, work, and play at distant localities without the investment of travel time). And the high-value industries which generate a lot of capital — and which tend to cluster in urban areas such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (or Tokyo, London, etc.) — command higher salaries than areas with less economic activity. So there are clusters of buyers and sellers involved in local markets which restricts the overall size of the market space. Likewise, the rules of the housing market restrict the fluidity of transactions. For instance, my selling agent will use comps to set the price of my property, and the buying agent will look also look at the comps when they make their offer. So, pricing is dependent on the prices of the housing units used for comps. That will tend to move prices upward, and it would tend to inhibit a downward drift in prices unless there's a strong economic shock. Also, at least in the US, house sales are functionally a blind auction where the buyers don't have much insight into the offers from other buyers. To win a bid they have to offer more than they think other buyers will offer. The lack of complete information on the part of buyers would also tend to move prices upward.
> In today's dollars, the median price of a home in SF in 1990 would be $665K. But it's almost 2x that now ($1.25 million).
Maybe thirty-three years of inflation? 1.02 ^ 33 = 1.9, and 1.25M / 665K = 1.88.
Ummm. That $665K is what a house cost in 1990 in today's dollars (taking into account inflation). In 1990 dollars it would be approx $250K. So the price of housing has grown at twice the rate of inflation even though there are more housing units available now than there were in 1990.
But everyone knows the solution is to build more houses! If we build the price will go down!
Ah. I misunderstood. The numbers matched so well I figured I had it.
That's cool. Happens to the best of us.
It reduces price, all other things held equal. But if the supply increase is a result of a trend that increases prices by more than the additional supply reduces them, then what we would see on the ground is an increase in supply coupled with an increase in price, right?
For example, neighborhood gentrification seems to follow this pattern. A neighborhood becomes more desirable, so more people want to move there, so prices go up. Developers see this, and react by building housing that sells for what they think the price will be when it's complete. The result is that people in the neighborhood see housing prices rising, and new housing being built, which sells at higher prices and not lower prices. (Meanwhile, some other neighborhood or city is becoming blighted and emptying out, with lots of cheap housing that no one wants to live in because the only people living there are the ones who can't afford anything better.)
Econ 101 is no more useful for understanding complex socioeconomic systems than Electronics 101 for designing, for example, a battery management system.
Econ 101 is much worse.
Wait! Battery management systems don't follow the Laffer Curve?
They’ll throw you a curve and then la(ff) at you while you’re trying to douse the burning battery 😁
They kind of do. Initially, charging a battery results in a linear increase in the amount of energy you can usefully extract from the battery later. But that does eventually taper off and reach a maximum, and trying to charge it past the maximum results in a precipitous decline in the useful energy content of the battery.
The Econ 101 version is much worse in that it tries to tell you that there's a smooth decline in tax revenue beyond the peak, such that you can notice the trend and dial back the tax rate. In reality, it's a Laffer Cliff, and if you aren't careful you can see your tax revenues decline as precipitously and irreversibly as a lithium battery overcharge anomaly.
It seems like there can be places where the decline isn't a cliff. Clearly, at some point, you've basically banned making money, and that's going to just end with everyone starving in the dark. But long before that, I think you can have situations where raising taxes by X% causes a drop in total taxable income of more than X%. Where I'd expect this to happen is when there is a lot of economic activity going on that's just barely worth doing, and raising the taxes a little bit makes it just barely not worth doing.
Yeah I guess even the basic form of Ohm’s law is both true and useful.
What is deedclaim and why should we believe that over all the economic research that disagrees?
Also this line from that article is a bit important: "We reviewed active listings in May of 2021 to determine a metro area’s supply, "
The deepest part of the pandemic when people were actively leaving cities is not the most representative time to look at the housing market!
Good question. It seems to be a real estate legal service. But this data is evidently available from the US Census Bureau. Kevin Drum did a nice graph on California housing inventory over time...
https://jabberwocking.com/update-housing-units-in-california/
And and earlier graph of new housing built per year...
https://jabberwocking.com/we-are-still-building-lots-of-new-housing/
> conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes
Genuinely thought it was just Congressman Jonah Ryan who wanted it. And then he was removed from the ballot to be replaced by Ezra Kane and that was the end of that.
30. So I had a look at the Gamestop stock price chart (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GME) and it shows that the price rose rapidly from $1 to $80 in 2021 January, and then slowly ramped down to around $10 today. What's the deal with that? It doesn't seem to make sense under the short squeeze hypothesis, but also not under the hypothesis that the original $1 price was rational.
There are two reasons the stock didn't immediately crash.
First, the company legitimately became more valuable around the time of the squeeze. Before the squeeze, the company got authorization to do a share offering. That offering happened at the inflated share prices, meaning Gamestop was able get ~$1 billion. When the stock was trading for ~$1, there was legitimate belief the company was on the path to bankruptcy. Gamestop was effectively handed $1 billion out of thin air to clear their debts and invest. Overnight the company was given a second chance. Additionally, the founder of Chewy became Gamestop's Chairman. Gamestop starting spending a lot of time/money/effort on pivoting the business, first to ecommerce, then to NFTs. Neither of these ventures worked out, but for a time it looked like there was a chance Gamestop had a future.
Second, "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine". Right now, you have many retail investors who believe the stock is going to infinity (literally - there are entire "Due Diligences" about an "Infinity Squeeze"). On the other hand, you have a ton of institutional investors who believe the stock isn't worth much more than the company's cash on hand (~$3 per share). The price is meeting somewhere in the middle. As retail loses interest/confidence, the stock is slowly sliding towards the institutional valuations.
Sample size of 5 so grain of salt:
The more conservative of my circle send their kids to one of them there classical academies; 3 boys and 2 girls.
Over a couple years, they failed to teach any of them to read at an age appropriate level (remediated by giving them books they were interested in reading) and catastrophically failed to teach them math ( can't multiply fractions / rely on memorizing tables for multiplication/ don't know what an exponent is, etc.)
They all stayed with the school for culture war reasons, of course.
I imagine the bad type of this school mainly exists as a kinda of liminal statue avatar 'don't want my kids corrupted by woke concepts like the differential'; and if there is a good type it is run by autists for autists.
What does autism have to do with teaching kids to read and multiply?
Nothing.
But if you are sending your kids to a 'classical academy' and you give a shit about them learning anything, you better hope it's run by people with a weirdly intense interest in Sophocles rather than a culture warrior that wants to retvrn.
The classical academies in my area appear to be at a high level. My own child goes to one and I am quite pleased, certainly as compared to the local public schools, and my friend, who sends hers to another one of a different denomination.
There is always room for improvement but our particular school does a thorough study of phonics, focuses on ancient civilisations from K, cursive, has a solid math program picked out out, and good arts program.
Eta : Kids coming from public school to either often have to repeat a grade to catch up.
Obviously this quality level is not inherently to the Classical Model, and most of the credit goes to the school administration and teachers.... But I've been very pleased with the education so far.
Also oof on suburbs.
A miserable gaping wound in existence where it's too built up to be the country and not built up enough to be a city; full of people who will take the final exist the very instant they run out of their off prescription opiates. A giant spiritual Chipotle(tm), completely devoid of anything of value which suckles on the tax money teat of the urb while crying and moaning about services.
tldr: Pick one! Live in the human ant hive or the woods; and quit trying to turn MY patch of woods into fucking tract homes so you can destroy anything worthwhile and then commute to the place you 'left' from.
"full of people who will take the final exist the very instant they run out of their off prescription opiates"
We listened to people like you, cut down on opioid prescriptions, and the overdose death rate kept going up.
https://twitter.com/AlexanderTurok/status/1776054011738677672
As I said! They run out of the pills that let them ignore the call of the void and it's too much for them.
The hopelessness and ennui finishes them off, unless they have a strong support network.
The superstonk people are fascinating. They are hilariously wrong about almost everything. And I still don't get their weird hate boner for short sellers. If anything they generally will find frauds and if the company is not a fraud it provides a termporary chance to get in cheaper for long term investors. Oh and most hedge funds are long only, or mostly long only. Hating the shorts with this much passion or thinking they are some kind of proxy for the elites is completely irrational.
Keith Gill really played it perfectly too. Went long, stuck up for the longs, made a shit ton of money, then dissappeared of the scene completely probably cashing out near the top for multi million $. Accidently starting a cult/religion in the process.
If he would have stuck around, people would probably have turned on him.
#7 the sad thing about communities is that if they happen organically, we usually accept what we get and appreciate stoically that it could have been much worse, but if we try to create them on purpose, nothing feels good enough and the perfect becomes the enemy of good.
I notice it myself: when I interact with our neighbors or with parents of my kids' classmates, I am very happy that they are all generally highly intelligent and nice people. But when I imagine a "community" that I would like to have around me, my criteria become much stronger, I basically imagine a LW/ACX meetup, which unfortunately is unrealistic without moving to a different country. Even if, realistically, I would probably be much happier if I had more social interactions with the people who currently are around me.
Another thing is that community that exists explicitly for the purpose of being a generic community, is weird, and easily becomes a magnet for people with lower social skills. (It is not necessarily a problem with having a few of those; the problem is when they become a majority.) Basically, look at Mensa. There needs to be at least a pretext of "we meet in order to do X together", where X could perhaps be improving the neighborhood, or preparing some fun for the kids. And then it can evolve to 1 hour of doing X together followed by 3 hours of just relaxing and talking.
Huh, that almost feels like the "Schrödinger theory of morality". As long as we don't try to intentionally alter it, imperfections are fine, but once we start acting on it, we feel a desire to make it perfect. I've seen this dynamic before, but never really brought it up to conscious notice.
People sometimes ask if gay men can become Buddhist monks. My understanding is that the Vinaya, the monastic code, refers to actual behavior and not metaphysical inner essences when saying that monks are not allowed to have sex.
On the other hand, we have a western idea that a gay man is still gay even if they dont have sex with anyone.
And then the sociologists gave us "men who havre sex with men" .. without, necessarily, being gay.
it would seem only a short step from that to lesbians who only have sex with men,
Re. "How The Alt-Right Won", it sounds like the far "right" and the far "left" have identical strategies. Which of course we all should have known since about 1917, when the term "right wing" politics was first used. At that time it meant the moderate wing of the communist party, which wanted to make peace with Germany, and evolved into Leninism and Nazism. (The left wing was the communists who wanted to keep fighting WW1 but turn it into revolutionary war like Napoleon's.)
The left and right have always been basically the same thing IMHO. Both right and left want to unmake the Enlightenment changes that ended feudalism, which is why both always create feudalist states. Until lately I could distinguish between them by saying the right was based on racial hate and the left on class hate, but now both are based on racial hatred. Now I suppose the original distinction applies again: the left is that branch of radical revolutionaries who want to export the revolution internationally and build a world government, while the right is that branch which wants revolution only nationally.
How do any of you distinguish theoretically between left and right?
The left promotes the idea of equality, with the only accepted forms of inequality being those that promote leftism.
The right promotes the idea of value realism, that things like human nature and hierarchies are not socially constructed, but inevitable.
This distinction was first mentioned, as far as I understand, during the French Revolution, so it predates and informs communism.
I agree that both oppose the status quo, but I think this is for very different reasons. The best analogy for our status quo is, I think, the constitution of 1791 in the French Revolution. It was opposed by both the left and the right for different reasons. I think Zhou Enlai was right and the end result of the French Revolution is still “too soon to tell”, as, IMO, it’s still playing out today in the west.
Zhou was (disappointingly?) actually talking about the 1968 student uprisings in France, I learned recently…
Right wing and left wing comes from the French Revolution.
That's commonly claimed, and it's true that the Jacobins sat on the left side in the National Assembly. But that isn't where our use of "right wing" came from. The phrase never appeared in English before the 1920s, except when used to describe the movements of armies or the wings of birds. I discovered that last December when I checked Google Books for all occurrences in their data of those terms, and traced the use of the terms from their origins in the Russian communist party during WW1 (I didn't see those directly, since they were in Russian, but later works referred back to them), thru the British labor unions in the 1920s (who got the term from their association with Russian & then Soviet communists), and to America. The phrase "right wing socialist" was still more common than "right wing conservative" until 1976. Funny how quickly that history has been erased.
Interesting, if true. It seems odd that it appears in the French Revolution and then not in English for more than 100 years. Probably liberal and conservative was enough in Britain to convey the idea.
It's likely that the Russians took the term from the French Revolution, so I shouldn't have said it was unrelated. In the French National Assembly, the royalists were on the right, so the right wing was the conservative wing. So that is probably farther back in the etymology.
But also, I checked just now, and the first legit use of "left Hegelian" I found was in 1853, in /Infidelity: its aspects, causes, and agencies: being the Prize Essay of the British Organization of the Evangelical Alliance/ by Thomas PEARSON (of Eyemouth, N.B.), p. 378: "Feuerbach and Gruen, who are of the extreme left Hegelian party , are the great teachers of humanism- a system which finds every thing in man , which ignores all motive power but the human will , and which is as intolerant of the existence of religion as of private property."
Pearson assumes that the term needs no explanation, so it must have been in common usage by 1853. Here the distinction is between the religious right Hegelians (which will later include Nazis) and the "atheist" left Hegelians (including Marx). That lines up more with the French Revolutionary usage, and maybe with apxhard's comments about left = social constructivist, right = philosophical "realist". (I say "maybe" because the Nazis had a realist doctrine about the Essential Nature of the German race, but their final arbiter of true and false wasn't the external world, but their own inner convictions. That is in practice social constructivism, because its practitioners assume the world would conform to their desires, not to empirical data.)
The first use I found of "right Hegelian" was, surprisingly, in 1880, in Boston Monday lectures, Volume 3, p. 9, by Joseph Cook: "philosophy in our age appears to be dividing itself between theists and anti-theists ; between those who yet believe in a personal God and those who drop down into materialism and pessimism and intellectual despair. Here, for instance, is pantheism, which a few years ago in Germany was like the waterspout, surrounded with vapour. We knew not whether there was any spout at all there ; nor whether there was anything firm in the cloud. The vapour has cleared away, and philosophy of the right Hegelian wing has lifted itself out of the clutches of mere airy speculations . There is a system of thought now in Germany called concrete theism ; and there is another system , called pessimism , which has dropped down into pure materialism. The doctrine of Schopenhauer and of Hartmann is that this is the worst of all worlds ; or, if it is not the worsst, then it is so bad that it would have been better if it had never been created, and that the supreme aspiration of the human race must be for extinction."
I can't tell from that passage which he's calling the right Hegelians: the theists, or the materialists. If it's the same usage, he must mean the right Hegelians are the theists.
I checked Google's German book database for the terms Linkshegelianer & Rechtshegelianer, which its first instances of are in 1877 and 1893. So I think Google's database isn't very complete for the 19th century, and is less-complete in German than in English. Maybe a database of newspapers could date these terms earlier.
Thanks. Cook is an interesting writer.
You have researched this more thoroughly than my whimsical observation that seems super-obvious but no leftists ever want to accept: What does the "zi" in "Nazi" stand for?
"the common name in English for National Socialism." The Nazis were Socialists.
You can even find amusing videos of guys reading quotes from Mein Kampf to college students who nod vigorously at the righteousness of it all.
Right-wing socialists, indeed!
> 2. In my circles it’s conventional wisdom that everyone wants to end daylight savings time changes, but the government is too sclerotic to make it happen. So I was surprised to learn that ...
> 24: How The Alt-Right Won, by a alt-right veteran and tactician. ... I owe all the misinformation experts and antifa people and so on an apology - the way they thought the alt-right worked, even the paranoid-sounding bits, is exactly how the alt-right self-conceptualized themselves as working.
@Scott: In cases like these, where you realize that what you believed was incorrect, do you update your epistemology (ie: how you go about forming your beliefs)? If so, how? If not, why not? Perhaps your prior on the truthfulness of conventional wisdom within your circles might be too high...
Hume’s tweet lines up with both Catholic and Hindu theological arguments for a soul that goes beyond the material world. Catholics argued we have souls because we can perceive “universals” such as, the idea of a triangle, which applies to _all_ triangles rather than particular ones. Sadghuru (I’m guessing based on the Vedas) argues that our minds are just an accumulation of sense data, but that we can do things by means of our energy body that cannot be explained by mere accumulation of data. So both Catholics and Hindus independently came to the conclusion that humans do things which cannot be accomplished merely by accumulating a bunch of impressions.
Given LLM’s, these now seem to be testable claims! Try asking an LLM to refactor two code bases to extract our common methods, and you’ll see they are terrible at even very simple cases. I’ve also found ways to ask the LLM questions about situations which clearly involve triangles, but so long as I don’t use language line “points” and “lines”, the LLM’s whiff and make absurd claims about the geometry of right triangles.
Don’t Catholics get that from Plato.
I dunno, I think LLMs and brains are both, being neural networks, fundamentally pattern-matching and/or pattern-generating engines.
A LLM is processing text data only, maybe if the model was also processing other sensory data related to triangles it would be able to make correct inferences about geometry?
There's a bit of a stretch from "LLMs cannot handle the idea of triangles well" to "handing abstract ideas requires an immaterial soul".
FWIW, ancient Hindus and Buddhists were positively obsessed with universals too, and it has carried on to current-day monastic Tibetan Buddhism. A guy called Georges Dreyfus wrote whole books about that.
You’re making the stretch backwards. The prediction that accumulated impressions (e.g LLM’s) could not handle the idea of triangles was made hundreds of years ago, in different cultures. It simply took a millennium or so for the engineering technology to give us evidence either way.
Universal Love is kind of a banger.
> While most evolutionists are probably not racists, the philosophy they hold is inherently racist, implying that some people groups are more closely related to apes than others.
No, human generations are approximately thirty years long whether you're Amish or an excessively stuffy secular atheist. Being that Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve both lived around 100-300kya, well after the hominids split off from the other apes, all groups are ~equally related to apes.
Reminds me of: https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/snp-confusion/
If your argument against permanent DST is about danger to kids walking to school, I have some news for you about how the 2020s differ from the 1970s.
Also: My high school started at 7:30, so for much of the year it was dark anyway when I got on the bus, and most days I had after school things that ran until 4 or 5, so in winter it was dark when I went home too.
Where should I go to watch the eclipse? Coming from Georgia.
PS, Substack is still annoyingly slow
Poplar bluff mo
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/03/29/cloud-cover-eclipse-forecast-maps-cities/
Carbondale, Illinois looks like the best bet if you're driving from Georgia. Indianapolis is probably best if you're flying, but I have no idea if flights are still available.
3: Angujim lifna, hemimq zfrojan!
I increased my IQ once, by 28 points, without too much effort. IQ is, by definition, ability to do IQ tests, and I did one from a book of IQ tests (Check Your Own IQ, by Hans Eysenck, to be precise). Two days later I did another test from the same book and, because i was familiar with the questions and had worked out strategies for getting the right answers, got a score 28 points higher.
I suspect most people could increase their IQs by doing lots of IQ tests.
I finally got around to listening to the LessWrong team's album and "The Litany of Tarrrrrski" is beautiful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ8SiN3CnAk
"Beliefs should stem from reality, yo ho!
From what actually is, me lads,
Not from what's convenient!"
Nihil Supernum goes really hard too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkJmAWWu9s
(Sorry for the highly unnecessary comment, I was just delighted by this!)
> 23: Did you know: the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs struck Earth in the spring.
I did in fact know this! (Proof, just for shits and giggles: https://www.schlaugh.com/~/yAgxOcZ)
I'm sure this is zero percent surprising to you. <3 "Oh, Neike knows dinosaur trivia" is, after all, a totally shocking revelation. :)
#10 Uh, yes, it was on the evening news. (Your youth is showing, Scott!)
GWAS will be consigned to the dustbin of science in the next few years, and we’ll all be slightly embarrassed we spent so much time talked about them.
GWAS are like trying to categorize books (genomes) based on statistics about word (SNP) usage. Makes sense if you can’t read, but we CAN read DNA. With the AI solution of protein folding, we have all the tools now to sequence whole genomes, identify impactful differences in DNA that result in altered protein expression/function, and predict consequences for enzyme pathways.
This kind of personalized genome “reading” will reveal the actual causes of diseases like schizophrenia. Instead of arguing about useless GWAS r-value correlations, we will have clinically-meaningful understanding about what is going wrong - and maybe how to treat it.
Protein only represent a very small part of physiological function and regulation. Human has ca. 20000 protein coding genes, just as much as C.elegans do. The difference lies in the genomic part. Plus, for the > 30% of intrinsically disordered region in proteome, there's no good and easy way to do function study yet, because it supposed to not have any stable structure.
>I don’t know how else to make public places livable for people with noise sensitivity.
>I rarely go out any more without earplugs and headphones on,
Seems like you know one method?
I also have sensory sensitivities that make it hard to do a lot of things in public, and I would be happy to find people making reasonable accommodations of their own accord and am happy to publicize the need for them, but I wouldn't want the government forcing people to cater to me to such an extent.
>r/superstonk (FAQ here) is the subreddit for people who believe that the true Gamestop short squeeze is still coming,
To me, [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA) is the definitive video essay on the topic.
> When our descendants ask why they’re stuck speaking 4,900 fractal hyper-languages, we’re going to have the most embarrassing possible explanation.
Maybe we should be more worried about the massive project to build a machine god by bringing together all human language in a nuclear powered datacenter.
Regarding 19, complaints about noise have unfortunately been subsumed into a larger culture war. The more likely criticism of Sullivan isn't that he's old, but that he's racist or bigoted. This 2022 Atlantic article is a great example of what I mean:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/09/let-brooklyn-be-loud/670600/
It's paywalled, but the author characterizes her neighborhood noise as part of the culture. In her framing, it's Andrew Sullivan is asking to gentrify her community by drastically changing the culture, which doesn't view loud noises as disrespectful. It'd be like a Finn going to Italy and complaining that no one respects his personal space. Sullivan quotes a few people saying that they believe others won't mind listening to a tinny bluetooth, but he doesn't seem to believe them. I don't think this is necessarily self-centeredness, but just two mutually-exclusive norms clashing.
Also, I don't think Sullivan really appreciates how racialized this conflict is in American discourse. A conflict over a boom box was a major plot point in Do The Right Thing. That Atlantic author would read Sullivan's complaint and accuse him of wanting to kill Radio Raheem.
For number 17, I think you’re missing what the “annoying troll argument” is actually about. The “so why can’t I (a woman) identify as a transwoman?” line isn’t an argument “against transgender”: it’s an argument against the people who have gone so far as to claim that *sex* (not gender) is socially constructed, that sex doesn’t actually matter *for anything*, that male people who identify as women are in fact female, that there are no differences between “trans women” and any other women (“just like there’s no difference between black women and women” is the standard line), that male people who ‘transitition’ become female and start getting periods, and that sex (not gender) is a meaningless thing that is “assigned at birth” for everyone.
If you haven’t tried to reason with such people, or at least provide some response so that the normies making actual decisions about policy can see how ridiculous this is, and if you haven’t ever had to explain to a child that someone writing a jokey line about “actually humans have four sexes” once in a scientific article doesn’t mean ‘science’ doesn’t agree that humans have two sexes nor does the existence of clownfish mean that the technology exists for humans to actually change sex, and you haven’t tried to explain who should get invites for cervical smears and who should get invites for prostate exams (and that our medical records should have some way of spotting which group you’re in), then you are missing the context of why someone would want to prompt people to acknowledge that there are differences between male and female bodies which remain (and we need to be able to refer to) despite how people identify.
Basically, it’s more to do with the mess around people identifying as intersex (while fewer and fewer people with disorders of sex development identify as intersex) than it is about trying to argue “against transgender”.
Re: the Night Czar
One of the Candidates for the upcoming London Mayoral election, one Count Binface, has included in his manifesto that he will replace the Night Czar with a Night Mayor and put their head quarters on Elm Street.
https://www.countbinface.com/2024-manifesto
1. There's no such thing as a "Shadow Lord" in British politics. As the text at the link shows, it's Shadow Lord Chancellor, that is, the opposition spokesperson who shadows (speaks in response to) the Lord Chancellor. In any case Lord Chancellor is now an obsolete term; the person holding that formal title is now normally referred to as the Justice Secretary.
10. You didn't know that? I thought it was well-known. Nixon's daughter is called Julie Nixon EIsenhower; how do you think she got the Eisenhower part?
19. My minimal recent experience with public transit is that the playing of loud music has, if anything, gone down over the years.
Re the piece by Katherine Dee, people are getting quite explicit about it. From The Cut:
Waiting for a baby here mostly entails talking. “When I say we hope that the baby will be gay, I think maybe we’re all saying that we hope the baby will have an aesthetic life,” says Lily later as we curl up on the couch in their Brownstone Brooklyn living room
https://www.thecut.com/article/daniel-lavery-grace-lavery-lily-woodruff-brooklyn-interview.html?utm_campaign=thecut&utm_medium=s1&utm_source=insta
I would think hanging out with the kind of student who wants to focus on the classics makes you a worse person, not better. The classics held the role that they did for so long because we had zero to very minor progression in human knowledge during that time--they were the peak of knowledge! Now they no longer are. The kind of person who enjoyed studying Aristotle in 1300 would prefer advanced linear algebra and Derek Parfit today.
Speaking of Wikipedia vandalisation, I am surprised that this one was not enclosed in the list:
A Chinese housewife, has neither advanced degree, nor fluent in English or Russian, created >200 interconnected articles with intricate details about falsified aspects of medieval Russian history and was considered a domain expert in the community until busted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhemao_hoaxes
The adverse selection of 'open communities' from the subreddit rings especially true. A single bad apple can genuinely ruin a social gathering. Like I think the ratio might be 20 'good apples' to 1 'bad apple' in terms of canceling them out.
Even a slightly higher prevalence of bad apples in open communities (and I bet it could be much higher) can be totally debilitating.
Wait a minute... you *didn't* know about permanent DST, Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower, or cinnamon birds? Dude, how young *are* you?