Does anyone remember which Hu video has the self-aware bit about waking up to a digital clock?-- the real life of people playing at looking like Mongol warriors.
Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
I seem to recall it was a Mongol moral principle that an adult male was obliged to justify his place in the World, or literally make room for himself, by removing at least one other person from it!
> Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
Genghis Khan gave a great speech once when the issue was brought before him that a bunch of Muslims and Jews were complaining about being fed pork. The primary thrust of it was "I think you're forgetting who conquered and enslaved who".
"Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons."
There's a way in which this sounds silly ("what, so actual serial killers are fine people now?!?"), but in another way, it makes sense. No one's realistically entertaining Mongol Hordeism as a foreign policy. The only plausible argument for Mongol Hordes is We're the Strongest, which has a clear counterargument ("No, *We* Are"), and no one's claiming any moral heft to this.
OTOH, Naziism has arguments behind it that look scientific (in the similar way that any modern ideological argument will appear if we just observe the stack of papers with the nice formatting and five-dollar words), and if you think, like many modern people, that morality ought to be supported by what's scientifically correct, then there comes this niggling fear that too many people will sit and listen for the sake of openmindedness and convince themselves that there's something to it.
Part of the point I'm driving here is not that I think there's something to Naziism, but rather that it can be depressingly hard to resolve multiple scientific-looking but contradictory arguments, and the arguments one goes along with could too often depend merely on which arguments one saw just as they happened to be in an intellectually curious mood.
Or, given his early life experiences, think of Genghis Khan as the Mongolian Scarlett O'Hara:
"I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
And he never was - Tasting History with Mongolian meatballs:
> [Boris Johnson] a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing ...
Wait, what? What kind of non-sequitur is that? Why do you assume that Johnson isn't actually highly intelligent and – yes! - clear-thinking in matters unrelated to politics? The effective practice of politics might just rely on difficult skills largely unrelated to intelligence and clarity of thought, as we judge the those things in other areas of life.
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia:
...
- An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
His mention of Scott there links to the old SSC blog.
Cummings comes across as someone who is a fan of rationalism but not very good at it. I think he probably did help the British response to Covid be less of a disaster than it could have been - here he is explaining to Boris the difference between a fatality rate of 0.04 and a fatality rate of 0.04%: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
- but his big achievement was winning the referendum to bring about Brexit which has done a lot of economic damage for little or no benefit. There is a lot of talk about how that was done with amazing cutting edge Facebook data analysis, but it really came down to shameless lying and scaremongering. He talks a big game about streamlining government, having a British version of DARPA etc. but none of that has happened, instead British science is cut off from European collaboration and funding and British business is bogged down in red tape and lack of investment caused by not being part of the EU.
Boris plays the role of an erudite, witty, brilliant leader but is actually not very bright and incapable of making decisions. Cummings plays the role of a hard-minded rationalist but he ends up with terrible outcomes.
He's made good points before, his blog makes him seem like he's got his head on straight, and most of what he's said that I've checked has been confirmed by other sources.
AFAIKT, both of them lie whenever they perceive it to give the the slightest advantage in any way. Admittedly, I got my impression from the US version of British news, and wasn't concerned enough to remember the details.
I once read that his claimed hobby of making model buses out of wine boxes was some SEO tactics, so that if you google "boris johnson bus" you'll get this instead of the brexit bus with the 350 million pounds lie. At the time he talked about Peppa Pig World, lots of pigs in Britain had to be culled because of brexit. Could it be...?
Not the only bus-related story I've read about Boris; he pledged to get rid of 'bendy buses' and re-introduce a modern version of the classic red bus when he was mayor of London:
I also heard this claim, from multiple sources. So I did a search for "boris johnson bus" (and have repeated it just now, as a check), and found that the top couple of results were neither about Johnson's hobby nor about Brexit campaigning, but unrelated stories about UK bus policy (or, when I checked previously, about London bus policy, from Johnson's time as Mayor). So I'm confident that this claim is false.
Moreover: the £350m figure (advertised on the side of a bus, as the UK's weekly contribution to the EU budget) was correct. It is true that about a third of that was spent within the UK, and about another third was returned to the UK in the form of a rebate. But, under UK (and EU?) law, advertised prices must be the price before any form of rebate, so it was nicely and technically correct to list the full value.
So, I suspect the claim you've cited above - that Johnson talking about his hobby was an attempt to smother discussion of the supposed "lie" - was invented as an attempt to imply that not only was the figure on the bus incorrect, but that Johnson was aware of this and wished to conceal it.
Strongly agree about style over substance and the fact that he is playing a character - he reportedly used to pretend to be improvising a speech, having failed to prepare for whatever event, but he did it repeatedly and always gave the same 'off the cuff' performance. I wrote this about how he is like a hack comic: https://www.sorryisaidthat.biz/p/boris-johnson-reconsidered-as-a-hack
But isn't Cummings mostly focused on the practice of politics? That is, Cummings, worked in Johnson's political shop, saw a train wreck, and talks a great deal about that. We could agree that's all true, and it wouldn't preclude Johnson be excellent at, idk, classical music, French literature, and writing on particular drugs.
Cummings is often portrayed as a weirdo in Britain. I'd say his writings are generally regarded in that light. Very academic stuff that has little relevance to the real problems faced by the country. Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so, and has largely fallen back on blaming Johnson for that. I don't think Johnson is entirely to blame, there's a lot to be said for Cummings picking the wrong horse to ride on and competely failing to sell his ideas to the media and the public. Very much felt like he was a terminally online guy who was very good at Twitter but less good outside that bubble. Plus the whole nonsense about going for a drive to "test his eyes" basically made him a laughing stock...
Why do you think Cummings’ ideas have very little relevance to the real issues in the UK? The big one, massive bureaucratic overhaul, seems pretty central to the entire country, especially considering we have such a big state.
>Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so
He succeeded in the creation of ARIA and the data science in No. 10, plus some procurement reform. Couldn’t do the bureaucratic overhaul but it doesn’t seem like he “utterly failed” to me. It’s not like he was given free reign either.
Cummings is portrayed as a weirdo because he’s 1. Despised by the media as he doesn’t talk to them, and 2. Because he largely focuses on actual issues and gets to root causes, unlike most political figures who mostly blather. This indeed makes him weird in British politics!
Here in the UK I think most people would say: Johnson is a brilliant writer (it's how he made his name), very likeable, and beneath some bluster actually extremely intelligent and with capacity for clear thinking and communication: unfortunately with the dual flaw of (a) not believing the rules that apply to everyone else apply to him (including any sense of consequences to his actions), and (b) being obsessed with his own greatness.
Meanwhile most people would say of Dominic Cummings: very insightful guy, clear and radical thinker, unfortunately also obsessed with Johnson in a massive grudge match. Most people in the UK would therefore laugh at the suggestion his inside view should be trusted, even as most people would find the chaotic picture he paints of Johnson's administration completely plausible.
TLDR: Johnson & Cumming reputation is 2 brilliant men, both impossibly biased beyond the point of trustworthiness.
I find a little of Johnson goes a long way - whether that's the more recent newspaper columns, or the speeches I heard at the Oxford Union in the mid-1980s.
Politically, he is a chameleon. At Oxford, he presented as a rather Woosterish let's-not-be-ideological old-fashioned Tory, in an environment where the few Tories around felt quite hard right. As mayor of London he was seen as generally moderate and inoffensive, if prone to vanity projects: but it's not a role in which you can do much harm. As PM, it was incoherent. Probably in substance the most left wing Tory PM since the early 60s, but in a terribly unfocused way, and seasoned with some tiresome (but substance free) stuff about "wokeness".
I can testify from my two encounters with him, both from 1985, that he was a deeply unpleasant person then, and is reputed to be so now.
I wouldn't in general trust a word that Cummings says: he is one of the most appalling people in UK public life of my lifetime, but some of his anecdotes about Johnson ring true. Anthony Seldon's book is one I would trust, and is damning.
I can't answer for Andrew B, but speaking personally: "Appalling" exists on a spectrum. I find torture of cute puppies "appalling", but I also find sour cream rangoons "appalling".
Dominic Cummings hasn't personally orchestrated any genocides that I know of, so he's not "Hitler-appalling". But Dominic Cummings famously pushed for tough COVID lockdowns, then within weeks defied those lockdowns (twice! Once while sick with COVID! And once just to go have a birthday picnic with his wife!) and then, when caught out, after a month of denial, offered a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse. This isn't a premium Open Thread, this isn't about whether the British lockdown was good/bad, but if you, personally, agitate for Policy X, then you, personally, defy Policy X... well, I find that hypocrisy and spinelessness appalling.
Now, whether or not he's appalling is tangential to his opinion on Boris Johnson - but, that having been said, I still think it's still pretty ridiculous to trust his characterization of Johnson, considering Johnson basically fired him. We don't generally consider ex-spouses to be particularly reliable transcribers of character, despite having lived under a roof with the individual for a healthy period of time. Just because this particular ex-spouse uses the same Berkeley blogosphere shibboleths as us doesn't make them any more reliable a witness as to the number of times their ex-wife ever did the dishes.
I agree that you can't take Cummings as a trustworthy source about Johnson because he has a grudge, but there is quite a bit of corroborating evidence that Johnson was really bad at making decisions, was confused about basic points (ie mistaking a fatality rate of 0.04 for 0.04%, thinking that a 6% death rate for older people was no big deal) -and this wasn't in the early days, it was months into the pandemic when he should have been on top of this stuff: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
Yeah, the lockdown stuff was the icing on the cake for me of my disdain for him. The bullshit excuse he offered with a smirk and an air of "yes, you know it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit, but you're only the little people and I can get away with imposing rules on you that I break casually because I can do that, because I'm so Brilliant And Wonderful And Great And In Power*, and you're not".
*It was more "I have powerful friends" and when it was expedient, they sacrificed him.
No rationalist should have pushed for lockdowns. They were not rational at all. Cummings may have had a personal weakness that he failed to stay in lockdowns and while it is not good thing, it doesn't discredit him. His insistence on lockdowns does.
Boris Johnson initially resisted lockdowns and that makes him smarter than Cummings. He yielded under pressure and lukewarmly supported them later but at least initially he was on the right track.
> a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse
That sounded plausible to me. If I'm recovering from an illness in which my eyesight was affected, and I have a long drive coming up, I might well choose to take a short drive, to see if my eyesight deteriorates when I spend half an hour focusing on the road. In case it does, I should bring my wife along, to drive us back - and if we're both going, we have to take our child, too.
That doesn't explain choosing to have a picnic. But he and his wife had just survived an illness which had a real chance of killing them, it was her birthday, and a picnic out in the open, away from other people, wasn't any sort of infection risk ... so I'm not going to get too worked up about that.
Boris is a lot cleverer than his cultivated image of "Tim Nice But Dim" lets on, and I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit. If you're a woman and in any way in danger of being within a 100 mile radius of emotional intimacy with the guy, you *will* come off the worse for it.
Cummings just annoys the hell out of me, and his downfall made me smile. He's still, as you say, very much holding a grudge over it all.
Oooh, I wouldn't, because Dommie has a lot of axes to grind and is very unhappy that his super brilliant genius was squandered by Boris because Carrie threw a strop about him.
It was a bad breakup and he's still eating pints of ice cream and sobbing down the phone to his pals about that bastard 😁
I read Dominic's Substack, and I've read his previous blog and watched videos of his speeches. I've also read a lot of stuff Boris has written, listened to many of his speeches, and read a lot of stuff other people have written about him, including two biographies.
I believe both Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are highly intelligent and knowledgeable but both have somewhat flawed personalities, for politicians. Dominic has a very high opinion of himself, believing himself to always be right about everything, and also has a tendency to become fixated on certain things. It wouldn't surprise me if he was on the autistic spectrum. Boris is somewhat lazy, unreliable and unfocused. He has a desire to be liked and an optimistic disposition that leads him to make commitments that he then can't or won't follow through with.
Dominic's intense criticism of Boris (and Carrie) since being sacked honestly makes him sound just like a jilted girlfriend to me - I don't think his assessment of Boris's character is entirely unbiased.
Yes, he was a successful journalist before entering politics, so the whole “I’m confused, he can write” thing just doesn’t make sense. People are too easily caught by stereotypes.
He wasn't really a successful journalist in the sense of analysis or finding things out (he got fired for making things up), he was more a successful humour columnist who often made things up (for example inventing absurd EU policies that didn't actually exist).
Oh yeah, I agree he can write well and turn an amusing phrase - I don't think that necessarily correlates with the kind of intelligence you need to make good decisions when you're running a country.
Right. The distinction between the practice of politics and other forms of intelligence (such as that involved in good writing, which is what got Scott's attention) is the point I've been making all along.
>16: The Confederate States of America needed a navy, but they didn’t have much of an ironworking or shipbuilding industry. And if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Thus was born the cottonclad warship.
Strangely, the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship was built by the CSA!
There's also a vague pop culture trend in fiction where the Confederacy is associated with weird futuristic contraptions (The Great War series by Harry Turtledove, that crappy Wild Wild West movie starring Will Smith). Any reason for this, or is it just that they're usually the villains and thus enjoy a technological edge (as per TVTropes' "Technologically Advanced Foe" trope)?
There's also the convenient "they lost the war, so the advanced tech got destroyed or stolen and hidden" part.
Rather like the tomb raider tropes where the lost tombs have perfectly working advanced traps - they've been hidden, and the raider isn't going to publish an article about what he found and how he got around them.
And the Hunley's successful outing turned out to be a suicide mission for its crew, which seems to have been bottom line for the cottonclads as well -- the last line of their wikipedia article is, "However, in the end, every single one of the once proud cottonclad warships were either sunk, burned, or captured by Union forces."
Which is a suitable metaphor for the Confederacy as a whole.
The Nazis seem to have this association as well (e.g. that movie about the moon base, the first Captain America movie and the comics it's based on). A technological edge would help them seem more threatening, but why are they all so silly? Is it because a legitimate technological edge (like the Nazis not kicking out all the good scientists and developing the A-bomb, or the South not hanging on to 1700s way of life through the industrial revolution and having actual manufacturing) is too close to reality and therefore scary? Maybe those are the groups that you can mock and make look buffoonish? Perhaps it's because they did actually try some weird things (like the CSA submarine, and l believe the Nazis tried to make a raiding force with gliders) in their desperation?
(Also Wild Wild West is amazing, I will not stand for this slander).
Nazis make more sense in that role to me because people were freaked out by V1/V2 rockets, and their rivals wound up imitating other tech they pioneered like assault rifles & "jerry cans".
With the Nazis, it's partially earned - they did create a lot of odd and/or advanced designs. Military rocketry, the first useful jet fighter, a revolutionary new submarine... they just didn't have the time and industry to get any good use out of them at that point.
The one from the revolution was not successful. From the article you linked:
"Several attempts were made using Turtle to affix explosives to the undersides of British warships in New York Harbor in 1776. All failed, and her transport ship was sunk later that year by the British with the submarine aboard."
It survived several attempts to plant explosives, and when it was sunk, it was because the ship carrying it was sunk. It may not have been a successful attack mechanism, but it was a successful submarine.
That seems especially weird to me, since the CSA was so much less industrialized & more low-tech than the Union. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Yankee!
Nit: There were no weird futuristic contraptions in Turtledove's "Great War" series; that was period-appropriate technology throughout, and just a bit of lucky spycraft to make the difference. "Guns of the South", with the time-travelling Afrikaaners, was a one-off with no connection to the other series.
I do vaguely recall a story, possibly published in "Analog", where the CSA managed to build a steampunk ballistic missile to target DC, but Stuff Happened to interrupt their plans; secret history rather than alternate history.
Of course he did. He was writing columns like that thirty years ago, and basically has been doing ever since. It’s his profession and he made his name doing it. His career as Prime Minister was basically a bizarre interruption.
Oh, more likely than not. He was making money writing columns for different newspapers in between bouts of politics. He was perfectly capable of writing a column about "X is the greatest threat to our nation!" for the Daily Blah and one about "X is a marvellous opportunity we should seize immediately" for the National Caller.
> the government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies into getting what they want.
This is hardly limited to social media companies. The government has great power to strong-arm all sorts of companies to do what it wants, regardless of the law. This power is much greater if the target company is large - there are more pressure points the government can threaten, and there are fewer competitors to refuse to do what the government wants. Most people seem to assume that the government tries to keep companies from becoming "too large", but it seems the government generally prefers large companies that are more subject to government influence.
Government is generally biased in favor of large companies for a number of reasons. There's more visibility into an industry with a few large companies than a thousand small ones, large companies can pay lobbyists more (so politicians get more money), and as a result the large companies can do regulatory capture and fence off their industry.
About item 4, IQ and positive life outcomes: I read only the abstract of the cited article, but it sounds like when they calculated correlation between IQ and positive life outcomes they did not consider the problem of IQ being correlated with a bunch of other things that probably also predict each other, and predict IQ.
"We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life."
Don't you think that if they had treated IQ as one of their dependent variables instead of the independentone they would have found that parental education [or income] has a positive association with child's IQ later in life and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
Or that child's health, measured in youth, has a positive association with childhood IQ and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
The point is, there are all these good things that stick together: IQ, parental education (no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual education level, parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth), occupational outcomes, health, social outcomes. No doubt there is causality operating both ways for many of them. If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents, travel, great toys, great preschools, etc. That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items. Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income. If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is regarding how so many of the good things are glommed together, but ignoring the glomming surely isn't it. And I don't see how you can make inferences about causality in a situation like this.
Many other studies have established that IQ is causal here, for example, some studies use the genes for IQ rather than IQ itself; others look at siblings with different IQs from the same family. I had a "how much does IQ vs. parental income matter?" study in the last links post.
This study was just refuting the other (equally uncontrolled) studies saying it reversed effect at a certain point.
Possibly, or it could be that since intelligence is so complex and our brains grow for so long, it take a long time for genetic influences to fully exert themselves.
But of course, if the heritability of IQ *decreased* with age, this would ALSO be taken as evidence that environment matters more than genes. So what would support the causality of IQ by your standards?
The study does mention marital status, but doesn't measure sexual activity. There is (a well known?) study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex.
"Ever having sex" and "ever having had sex" are different things.
That is, going through your entire life as a virgin is probably bad, but losing your virginity earlier is not necessarily better, at least not past a certain point.
"study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex."
I would imagine that if you can redirect those energies in some other creative & useful way to society - i.e. without stoppering them - would contribute to the success and personal satisfaction[defined relationally] mentioned in #4!
I'd add that being optionally able to do what I've described seems godlike. : )
I know you understand about the the intertwined correlations, Scott. Not everybody does, and I thought it was important to just have that info laid out early on. I get that your point is to rebut the Swedish study.
No study can establish that IQ is causal. Studies do not establish causality. At best they can eliminate individual specific confounders. It seems plausible to me that higher IQ leads to better life outcomes but I also don't see how using genetic IQ markers in any way eliminates parental wealth as a possible mechanism. I would think you would need twin studies to do that. (genetic IQ markers are correlated to IQ which is correlated to parental wealth, after all)
IQ predicts outcomes better than parental wealth though. And adoption studies show biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ more strongly than adopted parent's wealth or IQ.
Perhaps an RCT where half the victims er participants are dosed with lead (as infants? in early childhood?) and are followed throughout their lifetimes, measuring all the usual life outcomes along with the IQ damage from the lead? (with Dr. Mengele or one of the Unit 731 people as PI)
Granted, lead can have other toxic effects. Perhaps a diabolical PI might try a bunch of different IQ reducers on different victims - lead for some, mercury for others, oxygen deprivation for a third, some blunt force trauma for a fourth, and look for common "life outcomes" effects which track well with IQ damage, but are robust to other flavors of damage which differ amongst the causative agents (ab)used. We do have a reasonable idea of how to damage intelligence, and the direction of causality would be clear in this experiment. (and, as you said, double blinding would be necessary)
That's irrelevant, because you are already conceding the correlations exist and are positive in fact, but that's exactly what many critics - particularly the Karpinski paper - are claiming does *not* exist, and that higher IQ correlates with worse outcomes.
Yeah I get it. Not everybody understands that studies like the one Scott cites here are not proof that IQ causes everything to be better. I just wanted to lay out here the reasons that studies like this do not show that higher IQ causes better health, income, etc.
Cool, the problem is it doesn't seem like you apply this level of skepticism to correlations equally. Do you have "proof" that being poor *causes* you to eat worse?
It's mostly beside the point, which is that people claim that there is a cut-off point above which IQ stops being positively associated with life outcomes. This study demonstrates this to be false.
>IQ, parental education
For adopted children, biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ better than adopted parent IQ
>parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth)
Parental IQ predicts offspring IQ better than parental wealth.
>occupational outcomes
Low IQ people are worse at their jobs, so it's pretty obvious why IQ would be directly having a causal impact on occupational outcomes.
> If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents,
Poor women are more likely to not work than middle class women, meaning they should have more time to spend with their kids.
>travel
No evidence of any causal relationship between childhood travel and intelligence or work ability
>great toys
There's no evidence that 'greatness' of toys explains any of the variance in intelligence or work ability in the US. There IS evidence that too many toys are actually bad for children, so if anything we should expect a disadvantage for wealthier kids.
>great preschools
There's no evidence that preschool quality explains any of the variance in IQ or work ability in the US. Additionally, controlling for the increase in the heritability with age, most intelligence differences between people exist by age 3, leaving little school for education, preschool or otherwise, to explain intelligence differences between people.
>That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items.
This is an extremely speculative statement, and it also forces you to defend the claim implied by it that Asian American children on average spend more time with parents, travel more, have "better" toys, and go to better preschools than non-asians including whites. It's also unclear why poor whites would have better access to all this stuff than rich blacks, as poor whites get higher SATs on average than rich blacks.
>Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income.
And it's pretty clear why intelligence would be casually related to educational achievement and job performance. If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all.
>If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc
This is all extremely speculative. Anyone with an internet connection can find health information for free. What nobody who simply *assumes* that poor people are less healthy due to their wealth does is consider the possibility that low IQ people simply don't care as much about their health as high IQ people and prefer to eat unhealthy foods because they taste better. Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable.
And in any case, there's little evidence that variance in health explains any meaningful proportion of the variance in IQ. Obviously if you're literally malnourished as a child your IQ is likely to suffer, but serious malnutrition is extremely rare in American kids and so it cannot possibly explain even a fraction of the observed variance in intelligence in the US.
You know, I really don't disagree with a lot of what you say about the likely causes and effects of variations in intelligence. (Pretty sure you're wrong about predictive value of age 3 IQ, though. IQ doesn't stabilize that young.) My main point in posting what I did was to point out that you cannot conclude much of anything about the the causes or effects of variations in intelligence from the kind of data the study Scott mentions. Not everybody understands that when a bunch of things are glommed together and all correlated with each other you can't figure out anything about what causes what. I agree that this present study certainly weighs against another study that also does not use regression to separate out the contribution of different variables to good life outcomes, but reaches an opposite conclusion about whether at high IQ levels the beneficial effect is reversed.
" Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable." What makes you think I'm unwilling to consider that possibility? Actually, the major determinant of what I'm willing to consider talking about is your hectoring manner. It's so unpleasant that I have no interest in talking further to you. If you dialed back the vehemence you'd get a better hearing. Also you would probably say the opposite of what you mean less often.
" If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all."
Yes, I read the article. Did you? He claims a handful of things were actually more developed in America. Not “all Italian cuisine.”
He also says absurdly ignorant things like “before the war, pizza was only found in Southern Italy.” Yeah, no duh, because it was a southern Italian dish. The other half are just random anecdotes about his grandparents. Note how the article doesn’t mention things like pesto (not once!) which conveniently doesn’t fit into the London neoliberal Financial Times narrative of “Italian cuisine isn’t actually that authentic and your old traditions are stupid.”
For someone who claims to be rational, your offhand dismissal of an entire country’s cuisine is really shortsighted. But hey, you’ve “been to Italy three or four times” so maybe you’re an expert now?
Americans really seem to think that visiting Rome a couple times and reading a newspaper article about a country somehow equals understanding the place. As an American living abroad, it makes me embarrassed, frankly.
I don't think this excuse can be applied here, because Scott wrote
> Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
which doesn't sound tongue-in-cheek or ironic to me – at least not obviously so, and Scott's other comments seem to indicate that he was actually serious about this.
It's hard to communicate to everyone all the time, but Scott has the choice between saying something literally accurate, e.g., "The idea that Italian popular Italian food originated solely in Italy by people who are genetically pure Italians is partially incorrect." Vs the more hyperbolic "all the best Italian food came from America."
Whether the latter statement is inappropriate is largely a function of whether you take it literally, and how important of a topic it is.
E.g., I tell my friends all the time that X is "the world's greatest restaurant" et cetera. Hopefully my friends find this endearing, and I think most readers find Scott's playfulness here endearing. But most readers don't moralize food origin, and have no particular loyalty to Italy.
Also, it's worth noting, just to point out some deeper accuracy to the hyperbole, that Tomatoes are a new world plant. So it must be true that "many" of the most iconic Italian dishes rely on the "London neoliberal Financial Times narrative."
Or, to go full culture war, Italians are appropriating Indigenous Native culture and should stop.
Panettone: the article said it was inveted by Angelo Motta in 1920 (italian brand based in italy)
Tiramisu: article is not clear about it, but all sources I can find clearly point to Italian origin
Parmisan: ok, this appear to have American origin - but honestly I had no opinion about this, I doubt any Italian had any idea whether Parmisan had Italian origins or not. [EDIT: Wrong. I misread this part in the article. The Wisconsin parmesan is the one that nowadays mostly resemble ancient parmesan which was invented by, you guess whom, Italians].
Pizza: "pizza was only found in a few southern Italian cities, where it was made and eaten in the streets by the lower classes. His research suggests that the first fully fledged restaurant exclusively serving pizza opened not in Italy but in New York in 1911. " Who cares where was the first "fully-fledged" pizza restaurant? We are talking about the food origin, not about who capitalized it first. The article itself, and many sources on the web, point to pizza's Italian origins.
Mozzarella: according to the article (and other online sources), comes from the south of Italy
Carbonara: "The story that most experts agree on is that an Italian chef, Renato Gualandi, first made it in 1944 at a dinner in Riccione for the US army with guests including Harold Macmillan" Made in Italy by an Italian chef. I count this as Italian origin.
There is not one food mentioned in the article that "was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." So either you used a wrong link, or your statement is quite misleading. The only exceptions I can think of are dishes that we Italians don't actually ever eat, and Americans believe are italians, such as spaghetti with meatballs.
Having said that, if you ever wanna travel the South of Italy (around Naples), I would be honored to show you around :)
I think there's a reasonable case that most pizza is more American than Italian, mostly because the kind of pizza you get in Italy is very different to the kind you get elsewhere.
Is it? I have travelled across the whole Europe and SE Asia and always got a pretty decent Italian pizza. The only exception was the awful pizza slice I got in NY. Feel free to call _that_ an American invention!
Fair enough! If I can add to that, there are many pizza styles even within Italy. Major differences just from a region to another. Beware the homogeneous outgroup fallacy.
American style Pizza is it's own distinct thing in europe, but not what anyone would call a normal Pizza. If you got one from a normal Pizzeria you would be angry. Most Pizza is absolutely not more american than Italien, Italien Pizza is the Norm, it's crazy to me that even here (wrong) americacentric worldviews are that prevalent.
I am probably biased by living in the UK, I think most pizza here is American-style. That said, you definitely can get more Italian style pizza (which I associate with a thinner crust and less cheese) at restaurants with a proper pizza oven, it's generally considered to be the higher quality product.
I don't think I've travelled enough to really comment on the relative popularity of American vs Italian pizza, I guess I was just claiming that a lot of pizza is very Americanized.
I have never seen anybody say that “Italian pizza is the norm.” Can you clarify, what do you mean by “Italian pizza”? If you mean Neapolitan, certainly that is not the norm internationally.
outside Europe American style pizza (specifically, American fast food style pizza) is much more common than Italian style, and thus the norm. most of the planet lives outside Europe. your (wrong) eurocentric worldview is showing.
I think this is a case of the American versions of foreign cuisines, which got adjusted for mass market American popular tastes not familiar with the exotic ingredients, became established as *the* version of the dish due to the enormous influence of American culture globally. So the American version of pizza is what we know here in Ireland, not the Italian version (until we got sophisticated enough that restaurants doing the Italian version could make a living, and still the version of pizza most people here know is Dominos etc.)
Look at green beer and corned beef and cabbage for St Patty's Day. It's not St Patty, green beer is American-only version, and the Irish version of the dish is bacon and cabbage, not corned beer, and Irish bacon is not the same cuts as American bacon.
I don't understand this comment. I regularly listen to Alberto Grandi's podcast series the FT article mentions and read this article. Neither implies in any way that "all good "Italian" food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." Grandi's focus is on Italian cuisine being more recent and less rigid than some people think, as well as being regional (with Neapolitan food - until recently - more foreign in Milan than New York). The "American" contribution mainly relates to the international popularity of (a type of) Italian cuisine.
I applaud your attack on Italy's endemic rejection of modernity and innovation, but clearly, you have not read Alberto Grandi's book, nor followed his podcast, nor did you do any cursory research on the English wikipedia entries of the foods or dishes he cites.
Grandi's main idea is that most italian food has been invented from skratch, and then marketed as a tradition which lasted centuries: that some characheristics of a few famous dishes were originally invented in the USA is a side note that Grandi uses as a provocation whenever useful, but it does not reflect any general pattern.
The readers (and you) can do their own research and figure out the foods that were not invented in America. The list is too long. And if you do not care, which is understandable, then refrain from using Alberto Grandi's snippets on FT as a useful guide.
It is inevitable to be frustrated by how backward italian culture is, but frustration does not produce understanding.
P.S.: Not knowing whether you were in Italy three rathern than four times suggests you did not pay much attention. Again, I appreciate the criticism of Italy, but yours really does seem like a raw gut feeling.
Just taking a moment to note: The Italian American Table by Simone Cinotto is a lovely book on immigrant culture through the prism of food that tracks the development of the Italian-American food that is usually thought of as "Italian food." And it is focused on New York, so East Coast Americans this time!
The annoying thing for an Italian is that maybe what Americans/Italian Americans call Italian food is not always Italian in origin. You might have invented *your own version*, but you have not invented most of what Italians call Italian food which. So the problem is that American mislabel what is/is not Italian, not that Italian are mistaken about the origin of their food. (there can be some misconceptions of course, but please bring some better proofs, not the irrelevant article cited in the post)
Besides the inflammatory (and rather inaccurate) remark introducing the paywalled FT article, I believe the main point of the discussion around synthetic meat versus animal meat in Italy risks to be missed.
It's a class (as in class struggle) thing and as such it does not translate well between old world and new world cultural spheres. Americans are pretty used to having food for the poor (cheap, industrially manufactured) and food for the rich (gourmet restaurants and the like).
Invariably any discussion regarding food misses this point. For instance, pasta Alfredo was invented by a chef, Alfredo di Lelio. I bet that his version must have tasted good because a) he was a chef b) he likely used quality ingredients. What the median American is likely to eat though, looks something like this https://www.costcuisine.com/post/costco-kirkland-signature-chicken-penne-alfredo-review or this https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/Attachment/677592-Alfredo_NUT.pdf. Just look at the length of the ingredient list. This is the real pasta Alfredo and it is shit -I mean, clearly optimized for shelf stability over taste. In Italy the median income household -but probably even the bottom decile- would never stoop so low as to be forced to consume this. And even if they wanted to, they probably would not be able to buy any such thing. The market equilibrium -either due to regulations or consumer preferences or a combination of both- simply does not produce this.
Now one could speculate as to the reasons why several products, most notably Hershey’s chocolate which is notoriously made with spoiled milk, have emerged historically in the US: long distances in a mostly empty country demand shelf stability, “inclusive” institutions (a la Acemoglu) do not support an elite that leverages refined tastes as a distinction as opposed to wealth, etc. But certainly the US market mass produces objectively inferior food and the US customer buys it. By definition of market, everyone is getting what they want given the amount they are willing an able to spend on it; locally, at least, since market equilibria do not need to be globally optimal nor unique. The Italian situation is at present quite different, with lower income disparity as a possible explanation. But, as mentioned above, regulation is likely to play a major role as well.
Understandably, the average Italian does not want quality food to become a luxury and fears that inferior -but cheaper- industrially processed food may shift the equilibrium to a situation similar to the US one. The extremely poor might benefit, but the middle classes definitely would not. Once the masses start buying, say, Chorleywood process bread to save a euro or two, who will keep the artisanal bakeries in business? They will have to charge higher prices, cater to higher income segments of the population, and ultimately generate a dichotomous market like in the US. The diatribe regarding synthetic meat can be better understood in this light. Eventually synthetic meat must become an item of mass consumption, otherwise it would fail at its main selling point, that of making the meat industry sustainable. Therefore it will have to be low in price. Synthetic meat will never be gourmet: rich people will always choose to eat the sustainably farmed free range organic grass fed <insert class marker du jour> meat, especially after signalling their superior status through environmentally responsible food choices will no longer be an option -namely as soon as synthetic meat becomes cheap enough.
The parties opposing synthetic meat are often regarded as ‘populist’. They are in fact representing the interests of the middle class. The lower classes who may stand to gain from cheap low quality food are mostly made up of immigrants at present, and notably these parties oppose immigration. As consumers, middle class Italians stand to lose if a dichotomous market is established in the US fashion. Many producers are also middle class, as small and medium enterprises are well represented in the food production business: they would have everything to lose from innovation in the meat market, which will likely concentrate power and economic resources among the few -likely foreign- actors who can afford to manufacture high tech synthetic meat. This should make it abundantly clear what the motivations for resisting this kind of innovation are.
Although, that article is using it in a more restrictive way, whereas the sense given in the linked Wikipedia article includes things that are more legitimate.
Re: the Belgian genocide-inciter - 8 years in prison seems really light for inciting genocide! According to Wikipedia he was sentenced to 12 years because he agreed to testify against other suspects who incited genocide, and then went to serve his sentence in Italy (where he was a citizen because his dad was Italian) and was released early against international law.
I would like to hear more about what his arguments in favour of it actually were.
My understanding is that the Tutsis were a classic privileged minority versus the Hutus' poorer majority... and that a lot of Belgians found themselves identifying with one side or the other depending on whether they were French or Walloon.
Just so weird to get sucked so far into ethnic hatred when you’re not from either group. The War Nerd article implies that he just happened to randomly make a Hutu friend (or possibly lover) and it all started from there.
Israeli and Palestinian flags got used as substitute symbols in Northern Ireland for Unionist and Republican movements when were are bans on them using their own flags. The identification of Israel with Unionists and Palestine with Republicans is pretty strong at this point.
I get how that sort of symbolic identification with a group could be how he got started, but he took it way further - this is like if an Irishman made some Israeli/Palestinian friends and then travelled to Israel/Palestine to do a radio show inciting one side to greater violence! I bet there aren't many Northern Irish people with an Israel/Palestine flag in their window who have actually been there and got involved in local politics.
I'm a bit late to this but can you share the argument? Looks the other way to me - reactionary oppressive status quo vs radical terrorists (I know it's a lot more complicated than that in both situations but...)
My reaction was that is unlikely his inciting was 'material'. Doesn't take much to get one group to want to murder an outgroup. And, even if it was, if all he did was talk, how much would you want to punish him? In the US , wouldn't his speech be protected?
Yeah, this is very important. In the key case before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the appellate court reversed convictions for statements made before the genocide began. As stated in the decision at paragraph 940: "The Appeals Chamber has already found that, while the pre-6 April 1994 RTLM broadcasts incited ethnic hatred, it has not been established that they substantially contributed to the killing of Tutsi. Consequently, it cannot be concluded that these broadcasts
substantially contributed to the extermination of Tutsi civilians." But the convictions were sustained re statements made while the genocide was ongoing, which as you note included names and locations of victimes.
I think the radio broadcasts were considered to be pretty influential because there wasn't a lot of other mass media available. And he wasn't just being a shock jock, but calling for extermination, inciting more attacks as the genocide took place etc. According to Wikipedia there is some evidence that there were more attacks in areas covered by the radio station.... Actual mass genocides are pretty rare so I disagree that it 'doesn't take much' for that to happen, you need a campaign of dehumanisation and justification first...
I don't think US freedom of speech protections cover you if you commit crimes against humanity - although I don't think the US recognises the ICC so maybe if he'd been a US citizen he would have got away with it.
Not a lawyer, but I think it depends on what precisely he was saying. If he was saying "*outgroup* is really bad and you should hate them" then probably yes. If he was saying "I want you to go to your neighbor's house and kill them right now", then probably no. Fortunately US case law doesn't really have any comparable precedent.
Incite means to encourage. Should everyone who literally encourages people to carry out a genocide be automatically sent to prison for a decade or more?
Or do you actually have to demonstrate that this incitement had a material impact on the genocide being carried out? If so, do you have evidence that the genocide would not have happened, or would not have happened to the same extent, if it weren't for his incitation? I mean, he didn't even speak the same language as the vast majority of those who carried out the genocide.
As the other thread mentions, he was providing names and locations of people to kill. Presumably without him, they would be harder to find and some of them would not be killed (at least at the same time they were). This may not be a _large_ material impact, but I think it is one.
The most conclusive studies re: polyamory will (or might) be if it continues as a high-status orientation long enough for researchers to identify if lifestyle-desistance rates correlate with age, having children, home purchase, career advancement, etc. Anecdotally, there are couples who continue to identify as poly even after ceasing to be “active,” as it were. To what degree does it mimic the 60s counterculture “free love” movement? And/or to what degree is it a convenient political-seeming identifier in a sexual marketplace that was already trending toward acceptance of dating multiple partners simultaneously before you “committed” to someone?
>Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts.
Bigelow Aerospace no longer exists in any sense but on paper. Their IP and assets, including the BEAM module on the ISS, were bought by NASA and competitors (I've heard Lockheed and Sierra).
Re #28: Boris Johnson started his career as a journalist and was primarily known for that before he went into politics, so him writing well should be no surprise because that was literally his job. Incidentally, this is something he shares in common with Winston Churchill, who was known for his articles and books even before his first stint of political prominence in WWI.
Wow I'm in a linkpost! But I must correct: I did NOT help decorate the Inn, and furthermore I have never worked for Lightcone! I don't know why everyone always thinks this... (Oli, next to me: "You don't work for Lightcone, you are just married to Lightcone.")
Hi, mingyuan! I enjoyed your informative guide. But I wanted to register a caution against locating a wall tapestry adjacent to a gas wall heater, as shown in one of the photos.
I love this type of appliance; there's nothing better than standing in front of one on a cold day, until your clothes smell ironed. But they can present a potential fire hazard. (And, I believe, are no longer code-compliant for new installations here in Texas.) A friend of mine had one start a fire in his house, causing enough damage that he had to move out. Whether it was a fault internal to the heater, or nearby materials catching fire, I'm not sure.
Ha, thanks — I no longer live in that place and never turned the heater on when I was there (otherwise I wouldn't have put furniture in front of it!), but I appreciate the well-meant warning :)
#1 - Holiday World is actually pretty legit - (been there a few times, including just over a year ago). Free parking, free drinks (soda/water/etc), free sunscreen, food isn't horribly overpriced.
Not a ton of rides, by theme park standards, but the ones they do have (including 4 full sized roller coasters) are pretty good.
It's no Cedar Point, but it's genuinely a pretty nice park.
The Ars Longa, Vita Brevis movie is really nice work, but I kept noticing things that looked anachronistic to me and realizing that various objects in the environment were clearly modern machine-made items (which should probably not have been available in this setting). ROT13 examples: gur nypurzvfg'f pybguvat frrzf gb or znqr bs cynfgvp, yvxr n cynfgvp enva cbapub, juvyr gur fbyqvre'f pybguvat unf n mvccre. And also gur wnef naq furyirf ybbx fb erthyne naq flzzrgevpny gung gurl frrz gb unir orra pyrneyl znqr ol n znpuvar. And also gur nypurzvfg'f zrqnyyvba vf pyrneyl ynfre-cevagrq. And other things...
Maybe this is one of those examples about how having higher resolution videos makes things look unrealistic that would have been totally fine at a lower resolution. Maybe with a lower-quality video, we just would not have been able to see these details, so there would be no apparent conflict with the setting.
In the interest of empiricism, I just tried re-watching a few scenes at the lowest video quality available on YouTube, and I actually found that it did look much more convincing! Maybe I should suggest this to people who want to watch it, and you can just try to convince yourself that something about difficult relations between Russia and other countries led to this fine movie somehow only being available in low resolution. (Or, it was recorded by the alchemist's magic security camera hundreds of years ago...)
This is really not meant as a slight against the film-makers' efforts. I agree with Scott that this is impressive and I thought the acting and cinematography were great. The set and costumes are kind of great too, it's just that, when you look at them closely enough, they're not convincingly "period".
Forget about Culture Wars this here is the most controversial thing Scott ever said. I hope he has an anti-fork vest because italians are going to be mad.
That's not a claim from the article though. It's Scott's.
It's a weird article hat tbuilds an obvious strawman. It claims to expose the harsh truth but everybody in Italy knows that pizza is a 19th century neapolitan cheap street food made famous by americans and that tiramisu is a modern dish created in a Treviso restaurant.
But there's also lots of continuity. Tasting History on youtube has an episode on Renaissance pizza which was a sort of cake with rose water. There's another on medieval pasta. Sure the recipes are not like the modern ones and every one interested in food history knows that because we actually have cookbooks from various parts of Europe since the Late Middle Ages.
The same goes for all culinary traditions and everywhere poor people ate what they had which was grains and vegetables.
In re pizza, I think the argument is that while pizza has its misty origins in Italy, the family of variants originated and developed in America, mostly by Americans and Italian-Americans, is what America popularized. Italians would very much like to claim pizza as it is known across the world, but I think that’s a lot like the Chinese claiming spaghetti. The food “pizza” that comes to most of the world’s mind, and the food most people love, is American.
The ironic part about that article is that it is evidence for Italy actually having a strong traditional culinary heritage; if particular dishes are only eaten in the South and the North eats something different, or if something is a Roman speciality, then that is indeed a real tradition. It's different from "everyone from the East coast to the West coast and in the middle eats Kelloggs' cornflakes".
'We never ate pizza because it was a Neapolitan thing' is not the same as 'we never ate pizza until Dominos opened a branch here'.
Reading the article makes me suspect the Marxism is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. Plainly he has carved out a niche as the guy who explodes local myths around food, and that will get enough people enraged to listen to the podcast so they can write angry replies afterwards.
But I think he also is engaging in social manipulation, of a sort; break the consensus and destroy authority kind of thing. I mean, he's an Italian Marxist academic, what else is he gonna do except fight about politics with the Fascists (genuine article) in power?
"“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says."
"Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. As part of her election campaign in 2022, prime minister Giorgia Meloni posted a TikTok video in which an old lady taught her how to seal tortellini parcels by hand. This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)"
This bit just makes me roll my eyes, having seen black pudding get its fifteen minutes of fame as 'reinvented for restaurant high cuisine consumption'. Yeah, this is what manufacturers *do*, Alberto. Do you not know that Christmas itself is pretty much a 19th century invention, and that the celebration as we know it has been exported globally to cultures that are not Christian and have no tradition of the same but are copying/adopting the Western version because this is all a symbol of being a modern, economically developed, democratic society?
"Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention. In the 1920s, Angelo Motta of the Motta food brand introduced a new dough recipe and started the “tradition” of a dome-shaped panettone. Then in the 1970s, faced with growing competition from supermarkets, independent bakeries began making dome-shaped panettone themselves. As Grandi writes in his book, “After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.”
But whether Scott was speaking tongue-in-cheek or not, the point remains: pannetone *is* an Italian food item (even if it was rejigged to be a commercial product complete with fake tradition attached).
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are not real people either. Companies invent, or find in their past (or rather the past of the business they acquired that had bought out the factory making the original product), a representative figure as a mascot. I have no idea if Aunt Bessie exists outside the imagination of the marketing department, but the Yorkshire puddings really are good (unsolicited testimonial)
Look at the "ploughman's lunch": while bread and cheese has been eaten for generations, especially the less well-off, the modern iteration of the "tradtional" meal was a marketing campaign in the 50s to get people to eat cheese (which was now no longer rationed) and permitted pubs to offer a simple meal along with beer:
"The film The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present". The title alludes to the debatable claim that the supposedly "traditional" meal was the result of a marketing campaign of the 1960s devised to encourage people to eat meals in pubs."
I remember a reference in a horror short story I read years back, and presumably based on personal experience, of an American stoping off in a small village on his way to meet someone, going in to the pub, and wanting a meal. He was offered a "ploughman's lunch" which he, in his innocence, imagined would be some traditional hearty rustic stew and since he was hungry and cold he welcomed the idea. He was very surprised to get a hunk of cheese, a slice of bread, and some pickled onions as a cold collation instead 😁
“After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.” Oh, that's funny. Thank you for the history!
Perhaps someday we will see "Ye olde Aspertamery" :-)
8. Genghis Khan, like Alexander the Great, is mainly so well liked because generations of succeeding rulers legitimized their rule through descent from him. This lasted into the 20th century. So you have centuries of propaganda about how great he is. In contrast, Hitler lost and even fascist movements aren't eager to claim descent from his ideas.
The more interesting case is Attila who went from being a similar figure in medieval Europe (he shows up in a lot of sagas and stories) to being forgotten as his use as a tool of legitimacy disappeared. And then when historians turned back to the Classics he became the widely loathed figure he is today.
Atilla was lionized by hungarians who long claimed descent from the huns. This theory is far less popular these days but Atilla is still a popular name in Hungary and some people identify as huns.
Genghis Khan is still very popular in Mongolia where he is seen as the founder of the nation. In 2008 they built a 40 m tall statue of his which is the world's tallest equestrian statue.
Attila was lionized by the Hungarians during their national revival in the 19th century. But long before that, before the Hungarians even arrived, there are tales of Atil or Etzel, King of the Huns, from the Germans and to some extent Slavs. Most famously King Etzel in the original Nibelungenlied.
Alexander didn't have many descendants either. But he had successors eager to claim his mantle. I don't think Hitler has any of those (or at least no big/important ones).
Yeah, I, Claudius did weird things to my priors. There's all this cultural reverence for ancient dictators, I originally inherited a lot of the admiration for these folks, even though military coups, totalitarian dynasties, and steamrolling neighbors are not generally something I associate with healthy polities in the modern era.
The first time I went to Rome I went to see the spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated. The spot is covered in flowers and flower vendors stand outside for people who want to put one there. I was naive in my own way but I found it deeply uncomfortable. And I still can't say I feel all that warm about such things.
23. The idea this was a display of power is a bit reaching. There's no reason to believe that this isn't simply some local government diverting part of the fireworks budget to a more modern show. East Asians love fireworks at festivals and I'm sure the people who watched this loved it too. But the idea it's some kind of military display is... weird.
The drone light show was invented in the EU by a bunch of artists, the industry is still concentrated in the west, and the technology is widespread, common, and can be openly purchased. And it's never used cutting edge drones or anything that would be all that useful militarily. Which is how, for example, the Gulf States got them. It's also being pushed in a lot of big cities worldwide as being more environmentally friendly.
Unless I'm missing something this is a bit like saying, "Cities all over China are stockpiling large amounts of gunpowder devices near Lunar New Year. What could they be planning!?" I guess fireworks or drone shows might have some incidental application to military power. But I have a hard time seeing it.
I don't know if it's just you, but I think this is the first drone show from China I've seen. I've seen videos of some from America and one from Israel.
Several cities near me did 4th of July drone shows this year instead of fireworks this year, mostly due to fire concerns I think. You can find videos of them on YouTube. I think they are just starting to become popular and we will see more of them in the next few years.
Yeah, the city next to mine is doing a drone light show for their post-4th festival this year because of exactly those concerns. I was pretty skeptical, but that video actually made them look neat. Probably the one close-by wouldn't be as impressive, but I no longer think drone light shows are inherently just cheap knock-offs of real fireworks.
I think it's just you. Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech. I saw drones last 4th of July. Etc. Though East Asians really like fireworks and light displays at their festivals. And in China such public events are both a way to entertain the public and for local party officials to show off to their superiors.
> Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech.
Yes, this is the first thing that comes to mind when I see the phrase "drone light show" as it was the first one I had ever seen (on TV). And as others pointed out, a few US cities did drone shows this Fourth of July instead of fireworks. On the coast, there is not just fire to think of but the fallout from fireworks falling into the ocean--or at least that was the rationale I saw being given.
I spoke to a drone show producer about this at an amusement park industry expo last year. Drone shows in Europe and Asia can be more complex because the promoters have more flexibility in the venues they can put them on. In the US, a drone show will not get an FAA permit if any portion of the show programming goes over people, regardless of duration or weight of drone.
This constrains the types of venues that can display drone shows pretty dramatically, and for practical purposes, eliminates venues that may be able to recuperate the cost of the development of the show by having multiple shows such as theme parks or outdoor stadiums.
FAA regulation is probably not the whole story. I would imagine the costs are higher and a drone show probably gets lower guest satisfaction scores than a good fireworks show. But as the technology gets better and drone shows get more impressive, the costs will go down and the entertainment value will go up. So there will probably be more in the future.
I think scott was trying to make a joke related to some people in the US always assuming that anything that Chinese people or the government do must have some ulterior motive related to geopolitics.
27. It gets better. The German Black Bee was a pure invention. In reality it's the same species they have in Poland and the surrounding nations. But they invented a new breed to say it was totally different. However, they also carved out an exemption for the Catholics to keep their Carniolans. And as a result post-pandemic the repopulation was done partly through crossbreeding and partly through Carniolans propagating north. There's probably some metaphor in there.
As you might expect, this was a way for the Party to insert itself into this industry. The racial purity laws as applied to agriculture served as a form of control for Nazi Party members in the countryside as well as giving opportunities for control and to reward favored constituents through breeding licenses and other favors. The Nazis wanted to assert Party control over every aspect of the economy.
I had never heard of those bees before, and I'm tickled by the notion of little Catholic bees buzzing around devoutly 😁🐝
"It is favored among beekeepers for several reasons, not the least being its ability to defend itself successfully against insect pests while at the same time being extremely gentle in its behavior toward beekeepers."
Yeah, Carniolans are great. The main reason to use darks is they're more resistant to cold.
The association with Catholics wasn't as strong outside the German/Dutch/Scandinavian world. However, the 19th century Kulturkampf created significant polarization in Germany between Catholics and Protestants including among agricultural practices.
Which reminds me - there's a local saint (or at least, there's a church dedicated to her in the area, even though her cultus arose in Cork) who is patron saint of bees and beekeeping, St. Gobnait:
28. Boris Johnson is a somewhat well known Classicist and literary figure. Nothing huge. But enough that before he was a Brexiteer or much more than a minor politician he was participating in debates and exchanges about those subjects. It doesn't surprise me he's good at it. It's a skill like any other.
One of the things I am grateful for early on is the degree to which all the art teachers I knew always hammered in: Yes, gifted people exist, but at the end of the day it's mostly a skill. And even gifted people need a lot of training. There's this weird myth (and a very old one) that art springs naturally from the soul rather than being a craft and, to put it even more prosaically, a job.
31. I do sometimes feel like we're living after the gold rush. There's a few stars getting made out there but it seems like the height of Scott Alexander style blogging fame was about a decade ago when places like Vox or content creators like Channel Awesome really seemed (for all their flaws) like they were doing something that could succeed more traditional media. Now it seems like all the long form content producers have been around for a decade and the rising stars are the short formers doing TikToks etc.
I have no direct evidence any of that's true. Just a feeling. But it is worth noting that one thing Vine, TikTok, etc have is discoverability and the ability to go viral. And it seems like Twitter, FB, even Instagram are just less discoverability platforms. I'm not sure if there's a good method for longform to go that route outside of Youtube/TikTok clipping.
This is why I'm interested in a simple story that blames it on an algorithm change.
This is a little arrogant for me to say, but I don't notice too many amazing bloggers who really deserve to make it big but haven't (there might be a handful, and of course there are many who don't deserve to make it big but have). But partly this could be because blogging talent is a feedback loop - you're somewhat good, people pay attention to you, and then you work harder and become better.
> Twitter owner Elon Musk continues to be surprised by how Twitter works. Last week he learned that their code ‘shadowbanned’ any account with low reputation score, preventing them from trending, and the calculation was based on ‘how many times were you reported’ so every big account got shadowbanned.
There is a massive gap in scale here. Even "success" in long-form blogging involves a small audience.
Both Freddie DeBoer and Brad Delong recently mentioned having around 40 thousand subscribers, and this blog was at 80 thousand in January. Meanwhile, Shaq has 31 *million* Instagram followers. (I will refrain from repeating the word "thousand" a thousand times to emphasize the gap in size between a thousand and a million.)
The facts are clear: outside of our niche community of feldspar-enthusiasts ( https://xkcd.com/2501/ ), approximately nobody wants to read long-form content.
LOLOL!
this is the comment of the week for me.
I don't suppose you remember what it was?
Sadly, no.
> the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat
Hmmm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM8dCGIm6yc
Does anyone remember which Hu video has the self-aware bit about waking up to a digital clock?-- the real life of people playing at looking like Mongol warriors.
That would be the music video for ‘Yuve Yuve Yu’
Thank you.
What? I suspect spam.
It is. It's been copy-pasted several times here. Report it.
Now they're putting MRNA vax in Spam, too? Those animals!
Also note that one of the featured instruments (which I think is a "morin khuur") has swastikas as frets.
Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
I seem to recall it was a Mongol moral principle that an adult male was obliged to justify his place in the World, or literally make room for himself, by removing at least one other person from it!
> Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons.
Genghis Khan gave a great speech once when the issue was brought before him that a bunch of Muslims and Jews were complaining about being fed pork. The primary thrust of it was "I think you're forgetting who conquered and enslaved who".
"Also, unlike the Nazis, they were equal opportunity slaughterers as far as I know and didn't pick on certain groups for ideological reasons."
There's a way in which this sounds silly ("what, so actual serial killers are fine people now?!?"), but in another way, it makes sense. No one's realistically entertaining Mongol Hordeism as a foreign policy. The only plausible argument for Mongol Hordes is We're the Strongest, which has a clear counterargument ("No, *We* Are"), and no one's claiming any moral heft to this.
OTOH, Naziism has arguments behind it that look scientific (in the similar way that any modern ideological argument will appear if we just observe the stack of papers with the nice formatting and five-dollar words), and if you think, like many modern people, that morality ought to be supported by what's scientifically correct, then there comes this niggling fear that too many people will sit and listen for the sake of openmindedness and convince themselves that there's something to it.
Part of the point I'm driving here is not that I think there's something to Naziism, but rather that it can be depressingly hard to resolve multiple scientific-looking but contradictory arguments, and the arguments one goes along with could too often depend merely on which arguments one saw just as they happened to be in an intellectually curious mood.
We must not neglect SN-risks!
Or, given his early life experiences, think of Genghis Khan as the Mongolian Scarlett O'Hara:
"I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again."
And he never was - Tasting History with Mongolian meatballs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2tY_qqTk-E&list=UULFsaGKqPZnGp_7N80hcHySGQ&index=98
Motorcycles are cool, but he true latter-day Mongol rides a Hilux: https://www.mercenary.ie/2021/03/technical.html
Thanks so much for that link. I just read Razib Kahn's Steppelandia series, and this really resonates.
> [Boris Johnson] a shockingly good writer. I’d long since absorbed that bad people can be good-looking, or charismatic speakers. But I guess I implicitly thought of good writing as some sort of protected sphere only available to people with unusual clarity of thought. Nope, seems like skilled politicians can come across as hyper-likeable in their writing ...
Wait, what? What kind of non-sequitur is that? Why do you assume that Johnson isn't actually highly intelligent and – yes! - clear-thinking in matters unrelated to politics? The effective practice of politics might just rely on difficult skills largely unrelated to intelligence and clarity of thought, as we judge the those things in other areas of life.
Because I read Dominic Cummings' Substack and I trust him to have an inside view of the guy.
I'm confused -- why wouldn't you, vs other high-profile politicians? He's written very favorably about rationalists for years, e.g. https://dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-performance-government-cognitive-technologies-michael-nielsen-bret-victor-seeing-rooms/ where he wrote
"We could create systems for those making decisions about m/billions of lives and b/trillions of dollars, such as Downing Street or The White House, that integrate inter alia:
...
- An alpha data science/AI operation — tapping into the world’s best minds including having someone like David Deutsch or Tim Gowers as a sort of ‘chief rationalist’ in the Cabinet (with Scott Alexander as deputy!) — to support rational decision-making where this is possible and explain when it is not possible (just as useful)"
His mention of Scott there links to the old SSC blog.
You're right, it doesn't. I stand corrected.
Cummings comes across as someone who is a fan of rationalism but not very good at it. I think he probably did help the British response to Covid be less of a disaster than it could have been - here he is explaining to Boris the difference between a fatality rate of 0.04 and a fatality rate of 0.04%: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
- but his big achievement was winning the referendum to bring about Brexit which has done a lot of economic damage for little or no benefit. There is a lot of talk about how that was done with amazing cutting edge Facebook data analysis, but it really came down to shameless lying and scaremongering. He talks a big game about streamlining government, having a British version of DARPA etc. but none of that has happened, instead British science is cut off from European collaboration and funding and British business is bogged down in red tape and lack of investment caused by not being part of the EU.
Boris plays the role of an erudite, witty, brilliant leader but is actually not very bright and incapable of making decisions. Cummings plays the role of a hard-minded rationalist but he ends up with terrible outcomes.
We do have a British version of DARPA.
https://www.aria.org.uk/
Ah OK, I didn't know it had actually been set up, I thought it was just a proposal.
He's made good points before, his blog makes him seem like he's got his head on straight, and most of what he's said that I've checked has been confirmed by other sources.
AFAIKT, both of them lie whenever they perceive it to give the the slightest advantage in any way. Admittedly, I got my impression from the US version of British news, and wasn't concerned enough to remember the details.
Do we need the reference to Bayes here?
I once read that his claimed hobby of making model buses out of wine boxes was some SEO tactics, so that if you google "boris johnson bus" you'll get this instead of the brexit bus with the 350 million pounds lie. At the time he talked about Peppa Pig World, lots of pigs in Britain had to be culled because of brexit. Could it be...?
Not the only bus-related story I've read about Boris; he pledged to get rid of 'bendy buses' and re-introduce a modern version of the classic red bus when he was mayor of London:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buses_in_London#New_Routemaster_and_bendy_bus_withdrawal
I thought that was quite good, for once. The wobbly garden bridge thing was just bonkers, though.
I also heard this claim, from multiple sources. So I did a search for "boris johnson bus" (and have repeated it just now, as a check), and found that the top couple of results were neither about Johnson's hobby nor about Brexit campaigning, but unrelated stories about UK bus policy (or, when I checked previously, about London bus policy, from Johnson's time as Mayor). So I'm confident that this claim is false.
Moreover: the £350m figure (advertised on the side of a bus, as the UK's weekly contribution to the EU budget) was correct. It is true that about a third of that was spent within the UK, and about another third was returned to the UK in the form of a rebate. But, under UK (and EU?) law, advertised prices must be the price before any form of rebate, so it was nicely and technically correct to list the full value.
So, I suspect the claim you've cited above - that Johnson talking about his hobby was an attempt to smother discussion of the supposed "lie" - was invented as an attempt to imply that not only was the figure on the bus incorrect, but that Johnson was aware of this and wished to conceal it.
Strongly agree about style over substance and the fact that he is playing a character - he reportedly used to pretend to be improvising a speech, having failed to prepare for whatever event, but he did it repeatedly and always gave the same 'off the cuff' performance. I wrote this about how he is like a hack comic: https://www.sorryisaidthat.biz/p/boris-johnson-reconsidered-as-a-hack
But isn't Cummings mostly focused on the practice of politics? That is, Cummings, worked in Johnson's political shop, saw a train wreck, and talks a great deal about that. We could agree that's all true, and it wouldn't preclude Johnson be excellent at, idk, classical music, French literature, and writing on particular drugs.
Cummings is often portrayed as a weirdo in Britain. I'd say his writings are generally regarded in that light. Very academic stuff that has little relevance to the real problems faced by the country. Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so, and has largely fallen back on blaming Johnson for that. I don't think Johnson is entirely to blame, there's a lot to be said for Cummings picking the wrong horse to ride on and competely failing to sell his ideas to the media and the public. Very much felt like he was a terminally online guy who was very good at Twitter but less good outside that bubble. Plus the whole nonsense about going for a drive to "test his eyes" basically made him a laughing stock...
Have a hard time believing Dominic Cummings would blame someone unfairly. Too good of a writer.
I can't tell if this is in jest or earnestly repeating the original error. I want to believe, but Poe's Law, you know?
Why do you think Cummings’ ideas have very little relevance to the real issues in the UK? The big one, massive bureaucratic overhaul, seems pretty central to the entire country, especially considering we have such a big state.
>Certainly he utterly failed when he tried to implement his ideas when given free reign to do so
He succeeded in the creation of ARIA and the data science in No. 10, plus some procurement reform. Couldn’t do the bureaucratic overhaul but it doesn’t seem like he “utterly failed” to me. It’s not like he was given free reign either.
Cummings is portrayed as a weirdo because he’s 1. Despised by the media as he doesn’t talk to them, and 2. Because he largely focuses on actual issues and gets to root causes, unlike most political figures who mostly blather. This indeed makes him weird in British politics!
Now that I've seen two of you do it: it's free rein, not free reign.
Hahahaha duly noted
Yes, I also think your surprise is way off here.
Here in the UK I think most people would say: Johnson is a brilliant writer (it's how he made his name), very likeable, and beneath some bluster actually extremely intelligent and with capacity for clear thinking and communication: unfortunately with the dual flaw of (a) not believing the rules that apply to everyone else apply to him (including any sense of consequences to his actions), and (b) being obsessed with his own greatness.
Meanwhile most people would say of Dominic Cummings: very insightful guy, clear and radical thinker, unfortunately also obsessed with Johnson in a massive grudge match. Most people in the UK would therefore laugh at the suggestion his inside view should be trusted, even as most people would find the chaotic picture he paints of Johnson's administration completely plausible.
TLDR: Johnson & Cumming reputation is 2 brilliant men, both impossibly biased beyond the point of trustworthiness.
I find a little of Johnson goes a long way - whether that's the more recent newspaper columns, or the speeches I heard at the Oxford Union in the mid-1980s.
Politically, he is a chameleon. At Oxford, he presented as a rather Woosterish let's-not-be-ideological old-fashioned Tory, in an environment where the few Tories around felt quite hard right. As mayor of London he was seen as generally moderate and inoffensive, if prone to vanity projects: but it's not a role in which you can do much harm. As PM, it was incoherent. Probably in substance the most left wing Tory PM since the early 60s, but in a terribly unfocused way, and seasoned with some tiresome (but substance free) stuff about "wokeness".
I can testify from my two encounters with him, both from 1985, that he was a deeply unpleasant person then, and is reputed to be so now.
I wouldn't in general trust a word that Cummings says: he is one of the most appalling people in UK public life of my lifetime, but some of his anecdotes about Johnson ring true. Anthony Seldon's book is one I would trust, and is damning.
I can't answer for Andrew B, but speaking personally: "Appalling" exists on a spectrum. I find torture of cute puppies "appalling", but I also find sour cream rangoons "appalling".
Dominic Cummings hasn't personally orchestrated any genocides that I know of, so he's not "Hitler-appalling". But Dominic Cummings famously pushed for tough COVID lockdowns, then within weeks defied those lockdowns (twice! Once while sick with COVID! And once just to go have a birthday picnic with his wife!) and then, when caught out, after a month of denial, offered a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse. This isn't a premium Open Thread, this isn't about whether the British lockdown was good/bad, but if you, personally, agitate for Policy X, then you, personally, defy Policy X... well, I find that hypocrisy and spinelessness appalling.
Now, whether or not he's appalling is tangential to his opinion on Boris Johnson - but, that having been said, I still think it's still pretty ridiculous to trust his characterization of Johnson, considering Johnson basically fired him. We don't generally consider ex-spouses to be particularly reliable transcribers of character, despite having lived under a roof with the individual for a healthy period of time. Just because this particular ex-spouse uses the same Berkeley blogosphere shibboleths as us doesn't make them any more reliable a witness as to the number of times their ex-wife ever did the dishes.
I agree that you can't take Cummings as a trustworthy source about Johnson because he has a grudge, but there is quite a bit of corroborating evidence that Johnson was really bad at making decisions, was confused about basic points (ie mistaking a fatality rate of 0.04 for 0.04%, thinking that a 6% death rate for older people was no big deal) -and this wasn't in the early days, it was months into the pandemic when he should have been on top of this stuff: https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1630960569585999874?s=20
Yeah, the lockdown stuff was the icing on the cake for me of my disdain for him. The bullshit excuse he offered with a smirk and an air of "yes, you know it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit, but you're only the little people and I can get away with imposing rules on you that I break casually because I can do that, because I'm so Brilliant And Wonderful And Great And In Power*, and you're not".
*It was more "I have powerful friends" and when it was expedient, they sacrificed him.
No rationalist should have pushed for lockdowns. They were not rational at all. Cummings may have had a personal weakness that he failed to stay in lockdowns and while it is not good thing, it doesn't discredit him. His insistence on lockdowns does.
Boris Johnson initially resisted lockdowns and that makes him smarter than Cummings. He yielded under pressure and lukewarmly supported them later but at least initially he was on the right track.
> a ridiculous "ooo err I was testing my eyesight" excuse
That sounded plausible to me. If I'm recovering from an illness in which my eyesight was affected, and I have a long drive coming up, I might well choose to take a short drive, to see if my eyesight deteriorates when I spend half an hour focusing on the road. In case it does, I should bring my wife along, to drive us back - and if we're both going, we have to take our child, too.
That doesn't explain choosing to have a picnic. But he and his wife had just survived an illness which had a real chance of killing them, it was her birthday, and a picnic out in the open, away from other people, wasn't any sort of infection risk ... so I'm not going to get too worked up about that.
I broadly agree with all this; and I also think it would ring true to most people in the UK.
Boris is a lot cleverer than his cultivated image of "Tim Nice But Dim" lets on, and I wouldn't trust him as far as I could spit. If you're a woman and in any way in danger of being within a 100 mile radius of emotional intimacy with the guy, you *will* come off the worse for it.
Cummings just annoys the hell out of me, and his downfall made me smile. He's still, as you say, very much holding a grudge over it all.
But why would you call him a 'bad person'? Seems kind of strong.
Ah that’s cool you read Cummings’ stuff! What do you think of his writing style and/or general views?
Oooh, I wouldn't, because Dommie has a lot of axes to grind and is very unhappy that his super brilliant genius was squandered by Boris because Carrie threw a strop about him.
It was a bad breakup and he's still eating pints of ice cream and sobbing down the phone to his pals about that bastard 😁
I read Dominic's Substack, and I've read his previous blog and watched videos of his speeches. I've also read a lot of stuff Boris has written, listened to many of his speeches, and read a lot of stuff other people have written about him, including two biographies.
I believe both Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are highly intelligent and knowledgeable but both have somewhat flawed personalities, for politicians. Dominic has a very high opinion of himself, believing himself to always be right about everything, and also has a tendency to become fixated on certain things. It wouldn't surprise me if he was on the autistic spectrum. Boris is somewhat lazy, unreliable and unfocused. He has a desire to be liked and an optimistic disposition that leads him to make commitments that he then can't or won't follow through with.
Dominic's intense criticism of Boris (and Carrie) since being sacked honestly makes him sound just like a jilted girlfriend to me - I don't think his assessment of Boris's character is entirely unbiased.
Cummings went from thinking Boris is great to thinking he is terrible.
It's also weird because I thought it was common knowledge that BoJo's first public gig was as a newspaper columnist.
Yes, he was a successful journalist before entering politics, so the whole “I’m confused, he can write” thing just doesn’t make sense. People are too easily caught by stereotypes.
He wasn't really a successful journalist in the sense of analysis or finding things out (he got fired for making things up), he was more a successful humour columnist who often made things up (for example inventing absurd EU policies that didn't actually exist).
Go back to the original context in the post. The issue is not whether Johnson is honest; it's whether he's genuinely intelligent and can write well.
Oh yeah, I agree he can write well and turn an amusing phrase - I don't think that necessarily correlates with the kind of intelligence you need to make good decisions when you're running a country.
Right. The distinction between the practice of politics and other forms of intelligence (such as that involved in good writing, which is what got Scott's attention) is the point I've been making all along.
Boris has successfully created the image of the "flannelled fool" and even Scott got caught out by it.
Exactly right. He's far smarter than his public persona suggests.
>21 seems so opposed to the Supreme Court ruling its hard to believe they occurred at about the same time
I'm a bit confused, why is it hard to believe a different country might do something that is opposed to a US court decision?
I guess just like the coverage comparing the titan and boat migrants, it's a way to compare similar events
>16: The Confederate States of America needed a navy, but they didn’t have much of an ironworking or shipbuilding industry. And if all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail. Thus was born the cottonclad warship.
Strangely, the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy ship was built by the CSA!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunley_(submarine)
There's also a vague pop culture trend in fiction where the Confederacy is associated with weird futuristic contraptions (The Great War series by Harry Turtledove, that crappy Wild Wild West movie starring Will Smith). Any reason for this, or is it just that they're usually the villains and thus enjoy a technological edge (as per TVTropes' "Technologically Advanced Foe" trope)?
There's also the convenient "they lost the war, so the advanced tech got destroyed or stolen and hidden" part.
Rather like the tomb raider tropes where the lost tombs have perfectly working advanced traps - they've been hidden, and the raider isn't going to publish an article about what he found and how he got around them.
And the Hunley's successful outing turned out to be a suicide mission for its crew, which seems to have been bottom line for the cottonclads as well -- the last line of their wikipedia article is, "However, in the end, every single one of the once proud cottonclad warships were either sunk, burned, or captured by Union forces."
Which is a suitable metaphor for the Confederacy as a whole.
The Nazis seem to have this association as well (e.g. that movie about the moon base, the first Captain America movie and the comics it's based on). A technological edge would help them seem more threatening, but why are they all so silly? Is it because a legitimate technological edge (like the Nazis not kicking out all the good scientists and developing the A-bomb, or the South not hanging on to 1700s way of life through the industrial revolution and having actual manufacturing) is too close to reality and therefore scary? Maybe those are the groups that you can mock and make look buffoonish? Perhaps it's because they did actually try some weird things (like the CSA submarine, and l believe the Nazis tried to make a raiding force with gliders) in their desperation?
(Also Wild Wild West is amazing, I will not stand for this slander).
Nazis make more sense in that role to me because people were freaked out by V1/V2 rockets, and their rivals wound up imitating other tech they pioneered like assault rifles & "jerry cans".
With the Nazis, it's partially earned - they did create a lot of odd and/or advanced designs. Military rocketry, the first useful jet fighter, a revolutionary new submarine... they just didn't have the time and industry to get any good use out of them at that point.
I thought the first successful submarine was during the revolutionary war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible)
I wouldn't be surprised, though, if someone could find an earlier one.
The one from the revolution was not successful. From the article you linked:
"Several attempts were made using Turtle to affix explosives to the undersides of British warships in New York Harbor in 1776. All failed, and her transport ship was sunk later that year by the British with the submarine aboard."
It survived several attempts to plant explosives, and when it was sunk, it was because the ship carrying it was sunk. It may not have been a successful attack mechanism, but it was a successful submarine.
That seems especially weird to me, since the CSA was so much less industrialized & more low-tech than the Union. Even the cotton gin was invented by a Yankee!
Necessity is the mother of invention - the CSA did a few wacky things out of desperation, and a few of them sorta kinda worked.
Nit: There were no weird futuristic contraptions in Turtledove's "Great War" series; that was period-appropriate technology throughout, and just a bit of lucky spycraft to make the difference. "Guns of the South", with the time-travelling Afrikaaners, was a one-off with no connection to the other series.
I do vaguely recall a story, possibly published in "Analog", where the CSA managed to build a steampunk ballistic missile to target DC, but Stuff Happened to interrupt their plans; secret history rather than alternate history.
I wonder if Boris Johnson really wrote all of that.
Of course he did. He was writing columns like that thirty years ago, and basically has been doing ever since. It’s his profession and he made his name doing it. His career as Prime Minister was basically a bizarre interruption.
Oh, more likely than not. He was making money writing columns for different newspapers in between bouts of politics. He was perfectly capable of writing a column about "X is the greatest threat to our nation!" for the Daily Blah and one about "X is a marvellous opportunity we should seize immediately" for the National Caller.
Do you have any reason for asking this at all besides the fact that you disagree with his political views/leadership?
Like Scott, I was surprised at the skill and style, given that he is a politician. I know very little about his political views and actions.
> the government has lots of techniques for strong-arming companies into getting what they want.
This is hardly limited to social media companies. The government has great power to strong-arm all sorts of companies to do what it wants, regardless of the law. This power is much greater if the target company is large - there are more pressure points the government can threaten, and there are fewer competitors to refuse to do what the government wants. Most people seem to assume that the government tries to keep companies from becoming "too large", but it seems the government generally prefers large companies that are more subject to government influence.
Government is generally biased in favor of large companies for a number of reasons. There's more visibility into an industry with a few large companies than a thousand small ones, large companies can pay lobbyists more (so politicians get more money), and as a result the large companies can do regulatory capture and fence off their industry.
Gibson Guitar says "hi!"
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation/
And there was that little Operation Chokepoint thingy which I was assured did not actually exist.
About item 4, IQ and positive life outcomes: I read only the abstract of the cited article, but it sounds like when they calculated correlation between IQ and positive life outcomes they did not consider the problem of IQ being correlated with a bunch of other things that probably also predict each other, and predict IQ.
"We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life."
Don't you think that if they had treated IQ as one of their dependent variables instead of the independentone they would have found that parental education [or income] has a positive association with child's IQ later in life and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
Or that child's health, measured in youth, has a positive association with childhood IQ and with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life?
The point is, there are all these good things that stick together: IQ, parental education (no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual education level, parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth), occupational outcomes, health, social outcomes. No doubt there is causality operating both ways for many of them. If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents, travel, great toys, great preschools, etc. That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items. Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income. If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc.
I'm not sure what the solution is regarding how so many of the good things are glommed together, but ignoring the glomming surely isn't it. And I don't see how you can make inferences about causality in a situation like this.
Many other studies have established that IQ is causal here, for example, some studies use the genes for IQ rather than IQ itself; others look at siblings with different IQs from the same family. I had a "how much does IQ vs. parental income matter?" study in the last links post.
This study was just refuting the other (equally uncontrolled) studies saying it reversed effect at a certain point.
Possibly, or it could be that since intelligence is so complex and our brains grow for so long, it take a long time for genetic influences to fully exert themselves.
But of course, if the heritability of IQ *decreased* with age, this would ALSO be taken as evidence that environment matters more than genes. So what would support the causality of IQ by your standards?
The study does mention marital status, but doesn't measure sexual activity. There is (a well known?) study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1016/S1054-139X(99)00061-0
Do you think that is simply not an positive outcome, or is this an exception? Or a bad study?
"Ever having sex" and "ever having had sex" are different things.
That is, going through your entire life as a virgin is probably bad, but losing your virginity earlier is not necessarily better, at least not past a certain point.
"study claiming that people with higher IQ have lower odds of ever having had sex."
I would imagine that if you can redirect those energies in some other creative & useful way to society - i.e. without stoppering them - would contribute to the success and personal satisfaction[defined relationally] mentioned in #4!
I'd add that being optionally able to do what I've described seems godlike. : )
Meaning the reduced risk of compromised objectivity and will:
“It was ridiculous the power she had over him. The difference between misery and happiness was the right word from her.”
― Joe Abercrombie, The Blade Itself
[Disclaimer: works similarly and differently for women in a compromised situation, I'd expect.]
I know you understand about the the intertwined correlations, Scott. Not everybody does, and I thought it was important to just have that info laid out early on. I get that your point is to rebut the Swedish study.
No study can establish that IQ is causal. Studies do not establish causality. At best they can eliminate individual specific confounders. It seems plausible to me that higher IQ leads to better life outcomes but I also don't see how using genetic IQ markers in any way eliminates parental wealth as a possible mechanism. I would think you would need twin studies to do that. (genetic IQ markers are correlated to IQ which is correlated to parental wealth, after all)
IQ predicts outcomes better than parental wealth though. And adoption studies show biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ more strongly than adopted parent's wealth or IQ.
"No study can establish that IQ is causal."
<mild snark>
Perhaps an RCT where half the victims er participants are dosed with lead (as infants? in early childhood?) and are followed throughout their lifetimes, measuring all the usual life outcomes along with the IQ damage from the lead? (with Dr. Mengele or one of the Unit 731 people as PI)
</mild snark>
Replace "lead" with "magic IQ reducer lacking any secondary effects." Then double blind the administer-ers and you just might have something there.
Granted, lead can have other toxic effects. Perhaps a diabolical PI might try a bunch of different IQ reducers on different victims - lead for some, mercury for others, oxygen deprivation for a third, some blunt force trauma for a fourth, and look for common "life outcomes" effects which track well with IQ damage, but are robust to other flavors of damage which differ amongst the causative agents (ab)used. We do have a reasonable idea of how to damage intelligence, and the direction of causality would be clear in this experiment. (and, as you said, double blinding would be necessary)
That's irrelevant, because you are already conceding the correlations exist and are positive in fact, but that's exactly what many critics - particularly the Karpinski paper - are claiming does *not* exist, and that higher IQ correlates with worse outcomes.
Yeah I get it. Not everybody understands that studies like the one Scott cites here are not proof that IQ causes everything to be better. I just wanted to lay out here the reasons that studies like this do not show that higher IQ causes better health, income, etc.
Cool, the problem is it doesn't seem like you apply this level of skepticism to correlations equally. Do you have "proof" that being poor *causes* you to eat worse?
It's mostly beside the point, which is that people claim that there is a cut-off point above which IQ stops being positively associated with life outcomes. This study demonstrates this to be false.
>IQ, parental education
For adopted children, biological parent IQ predicts offspring IQ better than adopted parent IQ
>parental wealth ( no doubt pretty highly correlated with kid's eventual wealth)
Parental IQ predicts offspring IQ better than parental wealth.
>occupational outcomes
Low IQ people are worse at their jobs, so it's pretty obvious why IQ would be directly having a causal impact on occupational outcomes.
> If your parents are poor you are less likely to get various kinds of enrichment activities, such as time with parents,
Poor women are more likely to not work than middle class women, meaning they should have more time to spend with their kids.
>travel
No evidence of any causal relationship between childhood travel and intelligence or work ability
>great toys
There's no evidence that 'greatness' of toys explains any of the variance in intelligence or work ability in the US. There IS evidence that too many toys are actually bad for children, so if anything we should expect a disadvantage for wealthier kids.
>great preschools
There's no evidence that preschool quality explains any of the variance in IQ or work ability in the US. Additionally, controlling for the increase in the heritability with age, most intelligence differences between people exist by age 3, leaving little school for education, preschool or otherwise, to explain intelligence differences between people.
>That alone probably makes you less likely to be able to give the correct answer on various IQ test items.
This is an extremely speculative statement, and it also forces you to defend the claim implied by it that Asian American children on average spend more time with parents, travel more, have "better" toys, and go to better preschools than non-asians including whites. It's also unclear why poor whites would have better access to all this stuff than rich blacks, as poor whites get higher SATs on average than rich blacks.
>Lower IQ means on average lower education level and income.
And it's pretty clear why intelligence would be casually related to educational achievement and job performance. If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all.
>If you're poor, you're likely to be less likely to be healthy as a kid, and probably later as a grown-up as well. If you have a low IQ you're less likely to be healthy when you grow up, because you will probably also be poorer, and less able to find and understand good info about measures that preserve health. Etc. Etc
This is all extremely speculative. Anyone with an internet connection can find health information for free. What nobody who simply *assumes* that poor people are less healthy due to their wealth does is consider the possibility that low IQ people simply don't care as much about their health as high IQ people and prefer to eat unhealthy foods because they taste better. Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable.
And in any case, there's little evidence that variance in health explains any meaningful proportion of the variance in IQ. Obviously if you're literally malnourished as a child your IQ is likely to suffer, but serious malnutrition is extremely rare in American kids and so it cannot possibly explain even a fraction of the observed variance in intelligence in the US.
You know, I really don't disagree with a lot of what you say about the likely causes and effects of variations in intelligence. (Pretty sure you're wrong about predictive value of age 3 IQ, though. IQ doesn't stabilize that young.) My main point in posting what I did was to point out that you cannot conclude much of anything about the the causes or effects of variations in intelligence from the kind of data the study Scott mentions. Not everybody understands that when a bunch of things are glommed together and all correlated with each other you can't figure out anything about what causes what. I agree that this present study certainly weighs against another study that also does not use regression to separate out the contribution of different variables to good life outcomes, but reaches an opposite conclusion about whether at high IQ levels the beneficial effect is reversed.
" Being unwilling to even consider this possibility is not reasonable." What makes you think I'm unwilling to consider that possibility? Actually, the major determinant of what I'm willing to consider talking about is your hectoring manner. It's so unpleasant that I have no interest in talking further to you. If you dialed back the vehemence you'd get a better hearing. Also you would probably say the opposite of what you mean less often.
" If we're at the point where you can't even agree that schooling performance isn't related to how smart you are then I don't see any point in your talking about this at all."
All good Italian food was made in America? And I thought the delusional West Coast Americans couldn’t get any more delusional.
How much time have you spent out of the United States?
To be fair, a ton: for years Scott used to blog about his travel/foreign land experiences before he got into rationality. That was a lot of fun.
Seethe
I've been to Italy three or four times. Did you read the article?
Yes, I read the article. Did you? He claims a handful of things were actually more developed in America. Not “all Italian cuisine.”
He also says absurdly ignorant things like “before the war, pizza was only found in Southern Italy.” Yeah, no duh, because it was a southern Italian dish. The other half are just random anecdotes about his grandparents. Note how the article doesn’t mention things like pesto (not once!) which conveniently doesn’t fit into the London neoliberal Financial Times narrative of “Italian cuisine isn’t actually that authentic and your old traditions are stupid.”
For someone who claims to be rational, your offhand dismissal of an entire country’s cuisine is really shortsighted. But hey, you’ve “been to Italy three or four times” so maybe you’re an expert now?
Americans really seem to think that visiting Rome a couple times and reading a newspaper article about a country somehow equals understanding the place. As an American living abroad, it makes me embarrassed, frankly.
To be fair to scott, he is not necessarily endorsing the links here. He’s not even read them all
I don't think this excuse can be applied here, because Scott wrote
> Seems like a good time to remind everyone that all good “Italian” food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters.
which doesn't sound tongue-in-cheek or ironic to me – at least not obviously so, and Scott's other comments seem to indicate that he was actually serious about this.
It's hard to communicate to everyone all the time, but Scott has the choice between saying something literally accurate, e.g., "The idea that Italian popular Italian food originated solely in Italy by people who are genetically pure Italians is partially incorrect." Vs the more hyperbolic "all the best Italian food came from America."
Whether the latter statement is inappropriate is largely a function of whether you take it literally, and how important of a topic it is.
E.g., I tell my friends all the time that X is "the world's greatest restaurant" et cetera. Hopefully my friends find this endearing, and I think most readers find Scott's playfulness here endearing. But most readers don't moralize food origin, and have no particular loyalty to Italy.
Also, it's worth noting, just to point out some deeper accuracy to the hyperbole, that Tomatoes are a new world plant. So it must be true that "many" of the most iconic Italian dishes rely on the "London neoliberal Financial Times narrative."
Or, to go full culture war, Italians are appropriating Indigenous Native culture and should stop.
Nice!
Did _you_ read it?
These are the food that it discusses:
Panettone: the article said it was inveted by Angelo Motta in 1920 (italian brand based in italy)
Tiramisu: article is not clear about it, but all sources I can find clearly point to Italian origin
Parmisan: ok, this appear to have American origin - but honestly I had no opinion about this, I doubt any Italian had any idea whether Parmisan had Italian origins or not. [EDIT: Wrong. I misread this part in the article. The Wisconsin parmesan is the one that nowadays mostly resemble ancient parmesan which was invented by, you guess whom, Italians].
Pizza: "pizza was only found in a few southern Italian cities, where it was made and eaten in the streets by the lower classes. His research suggests that the first fully fledged restaurant exclusively serving pizza opened not in Italy but in New York in 1911. " Who cares where was the first "fully-fledged" pizza restaurant? We are talking about the food origin, not about who capitalized it first. The article itself, and many sources on the web, point to pizza's Italian origins.
Mozzarella: according to the article (and other online sources), comes from the south of Italy
Carbonara: "The story that most experts agree on is that an Italian chef, Renato Gualandi, first made it in 1944 at a dinner in Riccione for the US army with guests including Harold Macmillan" Made in Italy by an Italian chef. I count this as Italian origin.
There is not one food mentioned in the article that "was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." So either you used a wrong link, or your statement is quite misleading. The only exceptions I can think of are dishes that we Italians don't actually ever eat, and Americans believe are italians, such as spaghetti with meatballs.
Having said that, if you ever wanna travel the South of Italy (around Naples), I would be honored to show you around :)
I think there's a reasonable case that most pizza is more American than Italian, mostly because the kind of pizza you get in Italy is very different to the kind you get elsewhere.
Is it? I have travelled across the whole Europe and SE Asia and always got a pretty decent Italian pizza. The only exception was the awful pizza slice I got in NY. Feel free to call _that_ an American invention!
if we are swapping anecdotes, the worst pizza of my life was in Naples, and I have eaten Pizza on every continent except Antarctica.
the best was in New Haven
Fair enough! If I can add to that, there are many pizza styles even within Italy. Major differences just from a region to another. Beware the homogeneous outgroup fallacy.
American style Pizza is it's own distinct thing in europe, but not what anyone would call a normal Pizza. If you got one from a normal Pizzeria you would be angry. Most Pizza is absolutely not more american than Italien, Italien Pizza is the Norm, it's crazy to me that even here (wrong) americacentric worldviews are that prevalent.
I am probably biased by living in the UK, I think most pizza here is American-style. That said, you definitely can get more Italian style pizza (which I associate with a thinner crust and less cheese) at restaurants with a proper pizza oven, it's generally considered to be the higher quality product.
I don't think I've travelled enough to really comment on the relative popularity of American vs Italian pizza, I guess I was just claiming that a lot of pizza is very Americanized.
I have never seen anybody say that “Italian pizza is the norm.” Can you clarify, what do you mean by “Italian pizza”? If you mean Neapolitan, certainly that is not the norm internationally.
outside Europe American style pizza (specifically, American fast food style pizza) is much more common than Italian style, and thus the norm. most of the planet lives outside Europe. your (wrong) eurocentric worldview is showing.
I think this is a case of the American versions of foreign cuisines, which got adjusted for mass market American popular tastes not familiar with the exotic ingredients, became established as *the* version of the dish due to the enormous influence of American culture globally. So the American version of pizza is what we know here in Ireland, not the Italian version (until we got sophisticated enough that restaurants doing the Italian version could make a living, and still the version of pizza most people here know is Dominos etc.)
Look at green beer and corned beef and cabbage for St Patty's Day. It's not St Patty, green beer is American-only version, and the Irish version of the dish is bacon and cabbage, not corned beer, and Irish bacon is not the same cuts as American bacon.
https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/types-of-bacon-you-should-know/
> Did you read the article?
For me, the FT article is paywalled.
I don't understand this comment. I regularly listen to Alberto Grandi's podcast series the FT article mentions and read this article. Neither implies in any way that "all good "Italian" food was invented in America, with Italians as clueless late adapters." Grandi's focus is on Italian cuisine being more recent and less rigid than some people think, as well as being regional (with Neapolitan food - until recently - more foreign in Milan than New York). The "American" contribution mainly relates to the international popularity of (a type of) Italian cuisine.
I applaud your attack on Italy's endemic rejection of modernity and innovation, but clearly, you have not read Alberto Grandi's book, nor followed his podcast, nor did you do any cursory research on the English wikipedia entries of the foods or dishes he cites.
Grandi's main idea is that most italian food has been invented from skratch, and then marketed as a tradition which lasted centuries: that some characheristics of a few famous dishes were originally invented in the USA is a side note that Grandi uses as a provocation whenever useful, but it does not reflect any general pattern.
The readers (and you) can do their own research and figure out the foods that were not invented in America. The list is too long. And if you do not care, which is understandable, then refrain from using Alberto Grandi's snippets on FT as a useful guide.
It is inevitable to be frustrated by how backward italian culture is, but frustration does not produce understanding.
P.S.: Not knowing whether you were in Italy three rathern than four times suggests you did not pay much attention. Again, I appreciate the criticism of Italy, but yours really does seem like a raw gut feeling.
Just taking a moment to note: The Italian American Table by Simone Cinotto is a lovely book on immigrant culture through the prism of food that tracks the development of the Italian-American food that is usually thought of as "Italian food." And it is focused on New York, so East Coast Americans this time!
The annoying thing for an Italian is that maybe what Americans/Italian Americans call Italian food is not always Italian in origin. You might have invented *your own version*, but you have not invented most of what Italians call Italian food which. So the problem is that American mislabel what is/is not Italian, not that Italian are mistaken about the origin of their food. (there can be some misconceptions of course, but please bring some better proofs, not the irrelevant article cited in the post)
Italian-Americans make the best Italian-American food!
Amazing! And all Italian-American food was invented in America! Incredible!
Besides the inflammatory (and rather inaccurate) remark introducing the paywalled FT article, I believe the main point of the discussion around synthetic meat versus animal meat in Italy risks to be missed.
It's a class (as in class struggle) thing and as such it does not translate well between old world and new world cultural spheres. Americans are pretty used to having food for the poor (cheap, industrially manufactured) and food for the rich (gourmet restaurants and the like).
Invariably any discussion regarding food misses this point. For instance, pasta Alfredo was invented by a chef, Alfredo di Lelio. I bet that his version must have tasted good because a) he was a chef b) he likely used quality ingredients. What the median American is likely to eat though, looks something like this https://www.costcuisine.com/post/costco-kirkland-signature-chicken-penne-alfredo-review or this https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/Attachment/677592-Alfredo_NUT.pdf. Just look at the length of the ingredient list. This is the real pasta Alfredo and it is shit -I mean, clearly optimized for shelf stability over taste. In Italy the median income household -but probably even the bottom decile- would never stoop so low as to be forced to consume this. And even if they wanted to, they probably would not be able to buy any such thing. The market equilibrium -either due to regulations or consumer preferences or a combination of both- simply does not produce this.
Now one could speculate as to the reasons why several products, most notably Hershey’s chocolate which is notoriously made with spoiled milk, have emerged historically in the US: long distances in a mostly empty country demand shelf stability, “inclusive” institutions (a la Acemoglu) do not support an elite that leverages refined tastes as a distinction as opposed to wealth, etc. But certainly the US market mass produces objectively inferior food and the US customer buys it. By definition of market, everyone is getting what they want given the amount they are willing an able to spend on it; locally, at least, since market equilibria do not need to be globally optimal nor unique. The Italian situation is at present quite different, with lower income disparity as a possible explanation. But, as mentioned above, regulation is likely to play a major role as well.
Understandably, the average Italian does not want quality food to become a luxury and fears that inferior -but cheaper- industrially processed food may shift the equilibrium to a situation similar to the US one. The extremely poor might benefit, but the middle classes definitely would not. Once the masses start buying, say, Chorleywood process bread to save a euro or two, who will keep the artisanal bakeries in business? They will have to charge higher prices, cater to higher income segments of the population, and ultimately generate a dichotomous market like in the US. The diatribe regarding synthetic meat can be better understood in this light. Eventually synthetic meat must become an item of mass consumption, otherwise it would fail at its main selling point, that of making the meat industry sustainable. Therefore it will have to be low in price. Synthetic meat will never be gourmet: rich people will always choose to eat the sustainably farmed free range organic grass fed <insert class marker du jour> meat, especially after signalling their superior status through environmentally responsible food choices will no longer be an option -namely as soon as synthetic meat becomes cheap enough.
The parties opposing synthetic meat are often regarded as ‘populist’. They are in fact representing the interests of the middle class. The lower classes who may stand to gain from cheap low quality food are mostly made up of immigrants at present, and notably these parties oppose immigration. As consumers, middle class Italians stand to lose if a dichotomous market is established in the US fashion. Many producers are also middle class, as small and medium enterprises are well represented in the food production business: they would have everything to lose from innovation in the meat market, which will likely concentrate power and economic resources among the few -likely foreign- actors who can afford to manufacture high tech synthetic meat. This should make it abundantly clear what the motivations for resisting this kind of innovation are.
Quite the underrated comment
Yeah, usually exaggerated claims made, presumably, for comedic effect have some kernel of truth, but I really don't see this one.
Note that "jawboning" is an existing term, that article didn't invent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_suasion#Jawboning
Although, that article is using it in a more restrictive way, whereas the sense given in the linked Wikipedia article includes things that are more legitimate.
Re: the Belgian genocide-inciter - 8 years in prison seems really light for inciting genocide! According to Wikipedia he was sentenced to 12 years because he agreed to testify against other suspects who incited genocide, and then went to serve his sentence in Italy (where he was a citizen because his dad was Italian) and was released early against international law.
I would like to hear more about what his arguments in favour of it actually were.
My understanding is that the Tutsis were a classic privileged minority versus the Hutus' poorer majority... and that a lot of Belgians found themselves identifying with one side or the other depending on whether they were French or Walloon.
Just so weird to get sucked so far into ethnic hatred when you’re not from either group. The War Nerd article implies that he just happened to randomly make a Hutu friend (or possibly lover) and it all started from there.
Israeli and Palestinian flags got used as substitute symbols in Northern Ireland for Unionist and Republican movements when were are bans on them using their own flags. The identification of Israel with Unionists and Palestine with Republicans is pretty strong at this point.
I get how that sort of symbolic identification with a group could be how he got started, but he took it way further - this is like if an Irishman made some Israeli/Palestinian friends and then travelled to Israel/Palestine to do a radio show inciting one side to greater violence! I bet there aren't many Northern Irish people with an Israel/Palestine flag in their window who have actually been there and got involved in local politics.
The funny thing is that the analogy would arguably work better the other way around
I'm a bit late to this but can you share the argument? Looks the other way to me - reactionary oppressive status quo vs radical terrorists (I know it's a lot more complicated than that in both situations but...)
That's some Heart of Darkness stuff right there.
My reaction was that is unlikely his inciting was 'material'. Doesn't take much to get one group to want to murder an outgroup. And, even if it was, if all he did was talk, how much would you want to punish him? In the US , wouldn't his speech be protected?
Yeah, this is very important. In the key case before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the appellate court reversed convictions for statements made before the genocide began. As stated in the decision at paragraph 940: "The Appeals Chamber has already found that, while the pre-6 April 1994 RTLM broadcasts incited ethnic hatred, it has not been established that they substantially contributed to the killing of Tutsi. Consequently, it cannot be concluded that these broadcasts
substantially contributed to the extermination of Tutsi civilians." But the convictions were sustained re statements made while the genocide was ongoing, which as you note included names and locations of victimes.
I think the radio broadcasts were considered to be pretty influential because there wasn't a lot of other mass media available. And he wasn't just being a shock jock, but calling for extermination, inciting more attacks as the genocide took place etc. According to Wikipedia there is some evidence that there were more attacks in areas covered by the radio station.... Actual mass genocides are pretty rare so I disagree that it 'doesn't take much' for that to happen, you need a campaign of dehumanisation and justification first...
I don't think US freedom of speech protections cover you if you commit crimes against humanity - although I don't think the US recognises the ICC so maybe if he'd been a US citizen he would have got away with it.
>In the US , wouldn't his speech be protected?
Not a lawyer, but I think it depends on what precisely he was saying. If he was saying "*outgroup* is really bad and you should hate them" then probably yes. If he was saying "I want you to go to your neighbor's house and kill them right now", then probably no. Fortunately US case law doesn't really have any comparable precedent.
No.
Incite means to encourage. Should everyone who literally encourages people to carry out a genocide be automatically sent to prison for a decade or more?
Or do you actually have to demonstrate that this incitement had a material impact on the genocide being carried out? If so, do you have evidence that the genocide would not have happened, or would not have happened to the same extent, if it weren't for his incitation? I mean, he didn't even speak the same language as the vast majority of those who carried out the genocide.
Presumably these issues were explored during his trial.
As the other thread mentions, he was providing names and locations of people to kill. Presumably without him, they would be harder to find and some of them would not be killed (at least at the same time they were). This may not be a _large_ material impact, but I think it is one.
Man, how can you mention AARO and not mention what it stands for -- the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office. What a cool name.
If you want to read more about this, J.B. Crawford over at Computers are Bad wrote three recent articles about it:
https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html
https://computer.rip/2023-02-17-something-up-there-pt-II.html
https://computer.rip/2023-06-07-something-up-there---nasa-and-uaps.html
This comment brought to you by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Society for Cosmic Protection.
The most conclusive studies re: polyamory will (or might) be if it continues as a high-status orientation long enough for researchers to identify if lifestyle-desistance rates correlate with age, having children, home purchase, career advancement, etc. Anecdotally, there are couples who continue to identify as poly even after ceasing to be “active,” as it were. To what degree does it mimic the 60s counterculture “free love” movement? And/or to what degree is it a convenient political-seeming identifier in a sexual marketplace that was already trending toward acceptance of dating multiple partners simultaneously before you “committed” to someone?
>Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts.
Bigelow Aerospace no longer exists in any sense but on paper. Their IP and assets, including the BEAM module on the ISS, were bought by NASA and competitors (I've heard Lockheed and Sierra).
Re #28: Boris Johnson started his career as a journalist and was primarily known for that before he went into politics, so him writing well should be no surprise because that was literally his job. Incidentally, this is something he shares in common with Winston Churchill, who was known for his articles and books even before his first stint of political prominence in WWI.
Wow I'm in a linkpost! But I must correct: I did NOT help decorate the Inn, and furthermore I have never worked for Lightcone! I don't know why everyone always thinks this... (Oli, next to me: "You don't work for Lightcone, you are just married to Lightcone.")
Hi, mingyuan! I enjoyed your informative guide. But I wanted to register a caution against locating a wall tapestry adjacent to a gas wall heater, as shown in one of the photos.
I love this type of appliance; there's nothing better than standing in front of one on a cold day, until your clothes smell ironed. But they can present a potential fire hazard. (And, I believe, are no longer code-compliant for new installations here in Texas.) A friend of mine had one start a fire in his house, causing enough damage that he had to move out. Whether it was a fault internal to the heater, or nearby materials catching fire, I'm not sure.
(Posting here, where I have an account.)
Ha, thanks — I no longer live in that place and never turned the heater on when I was there (otherwise I wouldn't have put furniture in front of it!), but I appreciate the well-meant warning :)
#1 - Holiday World is actually pretty legit - (been there a few times, including just over a year ago). Free parking, free drinks (soda/water/etc), free sunscreen, food isn't horribly overpriced.
Not a ton of rides, by theme park standards, but the ones they do have (including 4 full sized roller coasters) are pretty good.
It's no Cedar Point, but it's genuinely a pretty nice park.
The Ars Longa, Vita Brevis movie is really nice work, but I kept noticing things that looked anachronistic to me and realizing that various objects in the environment were clearly modern machine-made items (which should probably not have been available in this setting). ROT13 examples: gur nypurzvfg'f pybguvat frrzf gb or znqr bs cynfgvp, yvxr n cynfgvp enva cbapub, juvyr gur fbyqvre'f pybguvat unf n mvccre. And also gur wnef naq furyirf ybbx fb erthyne naq flzzrgevpny gung gurl frrz gb unir orra pyrneyl znqr ol n znpuvar. And also gur nypurzvfg'f zrqnyyvba vf pyrneyl ynfre-cevagrq. And other things...
Maybe this is one of those examples about how having higher resolution videos makes things look unrealistic that would have been totally fine at a lower resolution. Maybe with a lower-quality video, we just would not have been able to see these details, so there would be no apparent conflict with the setting.
In the interest of empiricism, I just tried re-watching a few scenes at the lowest video quality available on YouTube, and I actually found that it did look much more convincing! Maybe I should suggest this to people who want to watch it, and you can just try to convince yourself that something about difficult relations between Russia and other countries led to this fine movie somehow only being available in low resolution. (Or, it was recorded by the alchemist's magic security camera hundreds of years ago...)
This is really not meant as a slight against the film-makers' efforts. I agree with Scott that this is impressive and I thought the acting and cinematography were great. The set and costumes are kind of great too, it's just that, when you look at them closely enough, they're not convincingly "period".
"all good “Italian” food was invented in America"
Forget about Culture Wars this here is the most controversial thing Scott ever said. I hope he has an anti-fork vest because italians are going to be mad.
What makes it worse is that the article is paywalled so almost no one will realize it's an Italian making the claim
That's not a claim from the article though. It's Scott's.
It's a weird article hat tbuilds an obvious strawman. It claims to expose the harsh truth but everybody in Italy knows that pizza is a 19th century neapolitan cheap street food made famous by americans and that tiramisu is a modern dish created in a Treviso restaurant.
But there's also lots of continuity. Tasting History on youtube has an episode on Renaissance pizza which was a sort of cake with rose water. There's another on medieval pasta. Sure the recipes are not like the modern ones and every one interested in food history knows that because we actually have cookbooks from various parts of Europe since the Late Middle Ages.
The same goes for all culinary traditions and everywhere poor people ate what they had which was grains and vegetables.
In re pizza, I think the argument is that while pizza has its misty origins in Italy, the family of variants originated and developed in America, mostly by Americans and Italian-Americans, is what America popularized. Italians would very much like to claim pizza as it is known across the world, but I think that’s a lot like the Chinese claiming spaghetti. The food “pizza” that comes to most of the world’s mind, and the food most people love, is American.
The ironic part about that article is that it is evidence for Italy actually having a strong traditional culinary heritage; if particular dishes are only eaten in the South and the North eats something different, or if something is a Roman speciality, then that is indeed a real tradition. It's different from "everyone from the East coast to the West coast and in the middle eats Kelloggs' cornflakes".
'We never ate pizza because it was a Neapolitan thing' is not the same as 'we never ate pizza until Dominos opened a branch here'.
Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/jAHlc
Reading the article makes me suspect the Marxism is doing a lot of the heavy lifting there. Plainly he has carved out a niche as the guy who explodes local myths around food, and that will get enough people enraged to listen to the podcast so they can write angry replies afterwards.
But I think he also is engaging in social manipulation, of a sort; break the consensus and destroy authority kind of thing. I mean, he's an Italian Marxist academic, what else is he gonna do except fight about politics with the Fascists (genuine article) in power?
"“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says."
"Today, Italian food is as much a leitmotif for rightwing politicians as beautiful young women and football were in the Berlusconi era. As part of her election campaign in 2022, prime minister Giorgia Meloni posted a TikTok video in which an old lady taught her how to seal tortellini parcels by hand. This month, Meloni’s minister of agriculture, Francesco Lollobrigida, suggested establishing a task force to monitor quality standards in Italian restaurants around the world. He fears that chefs may get recipes wrong, or use ingredients that aren’t Italian. (Officially listed “traditional food products” now number a staggering 4,820.)"
This bit just makes me roll my eyes, having seen black pudding get its fifteen minutes of fame as 'reinvented for restaurant high cuisine consumption'. Yeah, this is what manufacturers *do*, Alberto. Do you not know that Christmas itself is pretty much a 19th century invention, and that the celebration as we know it has been exported globally to cultures that are not Christian and have no tradition of the same but are copying/adopting the Western version because this is all a symbol of being a modern, economically developed, democratic society?
"Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention. In the 1920s, Angelo Motta of the Motta food brand introduced a new dough recipe and started the “tradition” of a dome-shaped panettone. Then in the 1970s, faced with growing competition from supermarkets, independent bakeries began making dome-shaped panettone themselves. As Grandi writes in his book, “After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.”
But whether Scott was speaking tongue-in-cheek or not, the point remains: pannetone *is* an Italian food item (even if it was rejigged to be a commercial product complete with fake tradition attached).
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are not real people either. Companies invent, or find in their past (or rather the past of the business they acquired that had bought out the factory making the original product), a representative figure as a mascot. I have no idea if Aunt Bessie exists outside the imagination of the marketing department, but the Yorkshire puddings really are good (unsolicited testimonial)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunt_Bessie's
https://www.auntbessies.co.uk/
Look at the "ploughman's lunch": while bread and cheese has been eaten for generations, especially the less well-off, the modern iteration of the "tradtional" meal was a marketing campaign in the 50s to get people to eat cheese (which was now no longer rationed) and permitted pubs to offer a simple meal along with beer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ploughman's_lunch
"The film The Ploughman's Lunch (1983), from a screenplay by Ian McEwan, has a subtext that is "the way countries and people re-write their own history to suit the needs of the present". The title alludes to the debatable claim that the supposedly "traditional" meal was the result of a marketing campaign of the 1960s devised to encourage people to eat meals in pubs."
I remember a reference in a horror short story I read years back, and presumably based on personal experience, of an American stoping off in a small village on his way to meet someone, going in to the pub, and wanting a meal. He was offered a "ploughman's lunch" which he, in his innocence, imagined would be some traditional hearty rustic stew and since he was hungry and cold he welcomed the idea. He was very surprised to get a hunk of cheese, a slice of bread, and some pickled onions as a cold collation instead 😁
“After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.” Oh, that's funny. Thank you for the history!
Perhaps someday we will see "Ye olde Aspertamery" :-)
8. Genghis Khan, like Alexander the Great, is mainly so well liked because generations of succeeding rulers legitimized their rule through descent from him. This lasted into the 20th century. So you have centuries of propaganda about how great he is. In contrast, Hitler lost and even fascist movements aren't eager to claim descent from his ideas.
The more interesting case is Attila who went from being a similar figure in medieval Europe (he shows up in a lot of sagas and stories) to being forgotten as his use as a tool of legitimacy disappeared. And then when historians turned back to the Classics he became the widely loathed figure he is today.
Atilla was lionized by hungarians who long claimed descent from the huns. This theory is far less popular these days but Atilla is still a popular name in Hungary and some people identify as huns.
Genghis Khan is still very popular in Mongolia where he is seen as the founder of the nation. In 2008 they built a 40 m tall statue of his which is the world's tallest equestrian statue.
Attila was lionized by the Hungarians during their national revival in the 19th century. But long before that, before the Hungarians even arrived, there are tales of Atil or Etzel, King of the Huns, from the Germans and to some extent Slavs. Most famously King Etzel in the original Nibelungenlied.
I suppose it also helps that Genghis had lots of descendants while as far as I know, Hitler had none.
Alexander didn't have many descendants either. But he had successors eager to claim his mantle. I don't think Hitler has any of those (or at least no big/important ones).
Yeah, I, Claudius did weird things to my priors. There's all this cultural reverence for ancient dictators, I originally inherited a lot of the admiration for these folks, even though military coups, totalitarian dynasties, and steamrolling neighbors are not generally something I associate with healthy polities in the modern era.
Probably all of them were awful.
The first time I went to Rome I went to see the spot where Julius Caesar was assassinated. The spot is covered in flowers and flower vendors stand outside for people who want to put one there. I was naive in my own way but I found it deeply uncomfortable. And I still can't say I feel all that warm about such things.
23. The idea this was a display of power is a bit reaching. There's no reason to believe that this isn't simply some local government diverting part of the fireworks budget to a more modern show. East Asians love fireworks at festivals and I'm sure the people who watched this loved it too. But the idea it's some kind of military display is... weird.
The drone light show was invented in the EU by a bunch of artists, the industry is still concentrated in the west, and the technology is widespread, common, and can be openly purchased. And it's never used cutting edge drones or anything that would be all that useful militarily. Which is how, for example, the Gulf States got them. It's also being pushed in a lot of big cities worldwide as being more environmentally friendly.
Unless I'm missing something this is a bit like saying, "Cities all over China are stockpiling large amounts of gunpowder devices near Lunar New Year. What could they be planning!?" I guess fireworks or drone shows might have some incidental application to military power. But I have a hard time seeing it.
I don't know if it's just you, but I think this is the first drone show from China I've seen. I've seen videos of some from America and one from Israel.
My uneducated opinion is that Chinese people are more willing to put next level effort into things like this (like the 2008 Olympics opening ceremony)
Several cities near me did 4th of July drone shows this year instead of fireworks this year, mostly due to fire concerns I think. You can find videos of them on YouTube. I think they are just starting to become popular and we will see more of them in the next few years.
Yeah, the city next to mine is doing a drone light show for their post-4th festival this year because of exactly those concerns. I was pretty skeptical, but that video actually made them look neat. Probably the one close-by wouldn't be as impressive, but I no longer think drone light shows are inherently just cheap knock-offs of real fireworks.
I think it's just you. Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech. I saw drones last 4th of July. Etc. Though East Asians really like fireworks and light displays at their festivals. And in China such public events are both a way to entertain the public and for local party officials to show off to their superiors.
> Biden had a small drone show at his victory speech.
Yes, this is the first thing that comes to mind when I see the phrase "drone light show" as it was the first one I had ever seen (on TV). And as others pointed out, a few US cities did drone shows this Fourth of July instead of fireworks. On the coast, there is not just fire to think of but the fallout from fireworks falling into the ocean--or at least that was the rationale I saw being given.
I spoke to a drone show producer about this at an amusement park industry expo last year. Drone shows in Europe and Asia can be more complex because the promoters have more flexibility in the venues they can put them on. In the US, a drone show will not get an FAA permit if any portion of the show programming goes over people, regardless of duration or weight of drone.
This constrains the types of venues that can display drone shows pretty dramatically, and for practical purposes, eliminates venues that may be able to recuperate the cost of the development of the show by having multiple shows such as theme parks or outdoor stadiums.
FAA regulation is probably not the whole story. I would imagine the costs are higher and a drone show probably gets lower guest satisfaction scores than a good fireworks show. But as the technology gets better and drone shows get more impressive, the costs will go down and the entertainment value will go up. So there will probably be more in the future.
London's new year show has excellent drone works alongside the fireworks
I think scott was trying to make a joke related to some people in the US always assuming that anything that Chinese people or the government do must have some ulterior motive related to geopolitics.
27. It gets better. The German Black Bee was a pure invention. In reality it's the same species they have in Poland and the surrounding nations. But they invented a new breed to say it was totally different. However, they also carved out an exemption for the Catholics to keep their Carniolans. And as a result post-pandemic the repopulation was done partly through crossbreeding and partly through Carniolans propagating north. There's probably some metaphor in there.
As you might expect, this was a way for the Party to insert itself into this industry. The racial purity laws as applied to agriculture served as a form of control for Nazi Party members in the countryside as well as giving opportunities for control and to reward favored constituents through breeding licenses and other favors. The Nazis wanted to assert Party control over every aspect of the economy.
I had never heard of those bees before, and I'm tickled by the notion of little Catholic bees buzzing around devoutly 😁🐝
"It is favored among beekeepers for several reasons, not the least being its ability to defend itself successfully against insect pests while at the same time being extremely gentle in its behavior toward beekeepers."
Yeah, Carniolans are great. The main reason to use darks is they're more resistant to cold.
The association with Catholics wasn't as strong outside the German/Dutch/Scandinavian world. However, the 19th century Kulturkampf created significant polarization in Germany between Catholics and Protestants including among agricultural practices.
Which reminds me - there's a local saint (or at least, there's a church dedicated to her in the area, even though her cultus arose in Cork) who is patron saint of bees and beekeeping, St. Gobnait:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gobnait
So the little Catholic German bees have their own saint looking after them! 😁
Thanks for introducing me to a new rather interesting saint.
28. Boris Johnson is a somewhat well known Classicist and literary figure. Nothing huge. But enough that before he was a Brexiteer or much more than a minor politician he was participating in debates and exchanges about those subjects. It doesn't surprise me he's good at it. It's a skill like any other.
One of the things I am grateful for early on is the degree to which all the art teachers I knew always hammered in: Yes, gifted people exist, but at the end of the day it's mostly a skill. And even gifted people need a lot of training. There's this weird myth (and a very old one) that art springs naturally from the soul rather than being a craft and, to put it even more prosaically, a job.
31. I do sometimes feel like we're living after the gold rush. There's a few stars getting made out there but it seems like the height of Scott Alexander style blogging fame was about a decade ago when places like Vox or content creators like Channel Awesome really seemed (for all their flaws) like they were doing something that could succeed more traditional media. Now it seems like all the long form content producers have been around for a decade and the rising stars are the short formers doing TikToks etc.
I have no direct evidence any of that's true. Just a feeling. But it is worth noting that one thing Vine, TikTok, etc have is discoverability and the ability to go viral. And it seems like Twitter, FB, even Instagram are just less discoverability platforms. I'm not sure if there's a good method for longform to go that route outside of Youtube/TikTok clipping.
This is why I'm interested in a simple story that blames it on an algorithm change.
This is a little arrogant for me to say, but I don't notice too many amazing bloggers who really deserve to make it big but haven't (there might be a handful, and of course there are many who don't deserve to make it big but have). But partly this could be because blogging talent is a feedback loop - you're somewhat good, people pay attention to you, and then you work harder and become better.
How about this, from Zvi's latest article on twitter (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/twitter-twitches):
> Twitter owner Elon Musk continues to be surprised by how Twitter works. Last week he learned that their code ‘shadowbanned’ any account with low reputation score, preventing them from trending, and the calculation was based on ‘how many times were you reported’ so every big account got shadowbanned.
There is a massive gap in scale here. Even "success" in long-form blogging involves a small audience.
Both Freddie DeBoer and Brad Delong recently mentioned having around 40 thousand subscribers, and this blog was at 80 thousand in January. Meanwhile, Shaq has 31 *million* Instagram followers. (I will refrain from repeating the word "thousand" a thousand times to emphasize the gap in size between a thousand and a million.)
The facts are clear: outside of our niche community of feldspar-enthusiasts ( https://xkcd.com/2501/ ), approximately nobody wants to read long-form content.